Blumhouse partners with Casey Affleck and Meta for A.I. assisted short films

Hollywood’s inevitable embrace of artificial intelligence (which was a central sticking point in last year’s writers and actors strikes) continued on Thursday with the announcement of a partnership between Blumhouse and Meta. Meta recently unveiled its A.I. model Movie Gen, which can generate video and audio, among other features. The new Blumhouse partnership is part of an ongoing effort to bring in creatives and filmmakers to test the company’s A.I. tools.

In a Meta blog post, Meta’s VP of GenAI Connor Hayes said the company wanted to have an “open and early dialogue with the creative community about how it can be the most useful tool for creativity and ensure its responsible use” before making Movie Gen to the public. The first apparent step was reaching out to Blumhouse, who brought in several filmmakers to test the tech and give feedback. “Artists are and forever will be the lifeblood of our industry,” Blum said in his own statement. “Innovation and tools that can help those artists better tell their stories is something we are always keen to explore, and we welcomed the chance for some of them to test this cutting-edge technology and give their notes on its pros and cons while it’s still in development. These are going to be powerful tools for directors, and it’s important to engage the creative industry in their development to make sure they’re best suited for the job.”

Meta’s pitch for Movie Gen is that it will democratize filmmaking by allowing anyone to create, and also to help established filmmakers create their projects faster, easier, and cheaper. With that in mind, Blumhouse recruited Aneesh Chaganty (Searching, Run), The Spurlock Sisters (The Breakline), and Casey Affleck (I’m Still Here, Light Of My Life) to test-drive Movie Gen with three Meta-assisted short films. In the first, i h8 ai, Chaganty insists he was suspicious of the technology and how it would impact Hollywood—until he used Movie Gen. “I hate A.I. But with a tool like this… I don’t know,” he narrates, “maybe I’d have just dreamed a little bigger.”

The other way to view this Blumhouse partnership with Meta is, of course, as propaganda. There are still glaring issues with A.I. in general—The Independent reports today that tech companies are making nuclear deals because A.I. uses such an extraordinary amount of energy that it is exacerbating the climate crisis—but also with Move Gen specifically. The A.I. imagery continues to improve, but it’s still not good. Even Chaganty admits that the Manhattan skyline Movie Gen inserted into his childhood movie isn’t “quite” right. The images in his video and Meta’s examples are full of too-intense colors and uncanny motion.

Meta is walking a fine line trying to sell Movie Gen as a tool to assist creators, rather than something that will take the place of creators. Yet in the words of Casey Affleck (whose own A.I.-assisted short film is forthcoming), “the thing that has surprised me the most about it, and that has been the most enjoyable, is how it’s more like a collaborator than it is like a tool.” It’s clear that the genie can’t be stuffed back in the bottle, but what form the genie takes and how it affects the future of filmmaking is still uncertain.