Gen AI Founder: Tools Won’t Replace Live Film Production – Yet

The pace of innovation in AI tools has some ways to go before it ever replaces live action film production, Coco Mao, co-founder and CEO of OpenArt AI, said Tuesday.

The Hollywood Reporter, during a session moderated by Steven Zeitchik, the magazine’s senior editor, technology and politics.

The company is behind Director, a new tool that aims to turn prompts and scripts into video. Mao said digital creators producing content for social media platforms are early adopters of the product, which can generate videos as long as five minutes at a clip. The company’s “vibe directing” approach is also being taken up in the marketing and advertising worlds, she said, with many from that industry helping to compose the seven million average monthly users. “This is an industry people are pretty willing to pay to make revenue generating content,” Mao said of marketing agencies.

Film and TV production, by contrast, has lagged behind, she said. In adopting the tool embracing AI production tools, “We see this [film and TV] industry honestly being the slowest one, for good reason,” Mao noted.

Mao said she’s not looking to replace live on-set production any time soon, saying the tool is mainly meant for previz and postproduction purposes at the moment.

“There has been a lot of controversy and I understand this is an industry that needs more time to mature. But we do see this industry starting to adopt, especially in pre-production and post-production,” Mao said. While some first-time and homespun directors are using the tool to replace physical sets, pro filmmakers will at most take a hybrid approach when it comes to the production phase of the process.

“I don’t see moving strictly online as the right direction, because people’s acting is still very, very hard to imitate in AI, and I personally want to see a good mix of live production and AI,” she said.

But she does see an evolution in attitudes even from more traditionalist quarters.” It’s almost like when VFX came out and a lot of people were against it.” And now, she said, “there are so many VFX artists.”