CHICAGO — By 2023, artificial intelligence had seeped into enough corners of a nervous film industry — buoyed by Barbenheimer, but fully aware of an imminent 2024 shortage of new titles — to become a seriously effective tool of labor unrest. Last year’s Screen Actors Guild contract, achieved after a lengthy, costly staring contest with industry producers and streamer honchos, added some guardrails designed to protect actors’ collective livelihood, noting “the importance of human performance in motion pictures and (AI’s) potential impact on employment.”

Tye Sheridan knows about that impact. He’s an actor, having made a formidable screen debut in the 2011 Terrence Malick film “The Tree of Life.” He’s best known for Steven Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” and as Cyclops in the “X-Men” movies.

Sheridan is also really into AI. He co-founded Wonder Dynamics in 2017 with his partner, visual effects supervisor and filmmaker Nikola Todorovic. They now oversee 70 employees in the U.S. and in Todorvoric’s native Serbia.

What is Wonder Dynamics, besides a name promising both wonder and dynamism?

Its founders say it’s an affordable, easy-to-use shortcut for filmmakers with projects calling for computer-generated characters. The AI platform (monthly subscriptions start at $20) offers the user a variety of characters. A robot. An alien. A bearded professor, with the slump-shouldered, underpaid air of the average adjunct.

Let’s say your screenplay calls for a shot of your alien running out of a building, stopping, looking both ways with a worried expression, and then running off again. In a real location, you film your real actor, running. You then take that raw footage and, with the Wonder Studio software, you turn your human into an alien, without any pricey motion-capture suits or lengthy postproduction effects phase.

Todorovic and Sheridan have many fans and customers, including the Russo Brothers (“Avengers: Endgame,” “The Gray Man”). Joe Russo is on the Wonder Dynamics advisory board. The Russos hired Wonder to work on their next project, “The Electric State,” due in late 2024 or early 2025.

They also have their fair share of skeptics. One LinkedIn commenter said this of the Wonder Studio AI: “Someday this will be reverse. They will film a robot and use AI to bring back a legend from the grave.” Another said: “Say hello to job loss as well.”

In the wake of a Chicago Humanities Festival event featuring them, I spoke with Todorovic and Sheridan to get my head around the implications of what they’re selling. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Consider me AI-agnostic at best, Tye. What’s your sales pitch?

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