Interview a dead celebrity with AI.
Idea-to-Video platforms, Holoportation and new tools to bring back the deceased. What would Elvis say?
Thirty-one year old Mike Gioia studied English literature at Stanford University and went on to work in writers’ rooms making cop shows for network TV and Marvel series with big super heroes. But when he saw Dall-E and ChatGPT in 2022 he dropped everything to move into AI.
Now Gioia is working on a project that creates the ability to interview dead people. He worked with a company called Revival AI Studios. “We took biographies, transcripts of interviews and we made realistic high quality chatbots and emulated how they would answer.” Gioia, whose company is called Pickaxe, then hired an actor to respond to questions on a teleprompter. In post-production, Gioia created a deepfake of a deceased celebrity responding in their own words. The product will be part of an upcoming one hour special on TV in February. Gioia won’t share more details at this stage.
He isn’t the only one exploring how AI can bring people to life across the time and space.
Students at a university in the UK are already watching lectures from people via holoportation which enables visiting professors - perhaps even Albert Einstein - to appear in classes and deliver lectures as if they were actually there. The tool was made by an LA company called Proto which was big news at CES this year. Imagine holoporting a virtual version of yourself to work while the real you stays home to feed to dog? It’s straight out of StarTrek.
(Proto created a hologram of Captain Kirk himself at CES.)
Meanwhile Gioia thinks AI tools will have a liberating effect on anyone who wants to be a filmmaker because costs are going to go down significantly - an opportunity and a threat to Hollywood. In Gioia’s view the studios are competing with people who can film videos and share it over social for almost no expense.
People are experimenting with AI tools like ElevenLabs, a company which produces AI voices which can be used to bring to life a new pitch for an independent movie at Sundance, for instance. It has a free tier if you want to have a play around at writing text and hearing different voices read it.
Sounds dumb? ElevenLabs just achieved unicorn status, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed company was valued at a billion dollars this week. The company is TWO years-old.
“The reason I’m excited about AI, and social media is that it helps take away the Hollywood monopoly on distribution,” Gioia told me in a phone conversation last month.
The only barrier to production is how much time you want to spend on your laptop learning it all. Amateurs, “are probably generating actual visuals with AI so they can film an entire short film in their basement against the white wall and then use AI to make any sort of setting they want,” he explains.
Post production too is where AI is really going to make its mark. Countries who don’t allow swearing movies for example could sample the voice of Harrison Ford to replace a, “F-ck” with a “Heck.” Ford’s mouth would match the foreign language versions more accurately too - potentially wiping out dubbing companies.
And maybe the marketing department wouldn’t need Ford to return to read a new line for a promotion. Take a look at the film editing software on offer at Flawless AI.
“My fear will be that the technology develops in boring and oppressive ways,” he says adding that, “I think the amount of really highly paid people in Hollywood will go down, but Hollywood is one percent of the filmmaking industry. Most people who are making videos don’t live in Southern California.”
Is AI theft?
Meanwhile some sections of Hollywood view AI as a giant mechanism for theft of IP. But Gioia says the lawyers are often confused about who to sue about what. “There are communities popping up around this and people just take what they want,” said Gioia explaining that open source AI models can, for instance, train and replicate Pixar characters.
Gioia just set up a new Substack newsletter, Intelligent Jello which covers topics like the astonishing progress AI models have made over the past 18 months at replicating lifelike human features. He’s also working with AI entrepreneur Todd Terrezas on a second edition of AI on the Lot in May.
He recommends two other companies to keep an eye on: RunwayML and Pika Labs - AI companies that generate full videos from text commands. They’re new “idea to video” platforms.
For more on AI in entertainment read this piece about what the Hollywood Guilds have authorized and there’s more here on the capital flocking to AI for entertainment.
*This story has been updated to reflect the involvement of Revival AI Studios and to correct the name of the event in Los Angeles in May. It is called AI on the Lot, not AILA.
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