Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production of iHeart Podcasts and
Speaker 1: Kaleidoscope IMA's Veloscian, and today will bring you the headlines
Speaker 1: of the week, including a genetically edited rodent, the Wally Mouse. Then,
Speaker 1: on today's Tech Supports segment, we'll talk to four of
Speaker 1: Form Media's Jason Kebler about what the future of AI
Speaker 1: movies could look like. All of that on the weekend
Speaker 1: Tech Is Friday. It's March seventh. I'm excited to be
Speaker 1: back in the studio this week with our producer Eliza Dennis.
Speaker 2: We're glad to have you Stateside.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's felt like I was away for a long time.
Speaker 2: I'm wondering if that had something to do with this
Speaker 2: news cycle though.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot, lot lot to cover, so should
Speaker 1: we jump in.
Speaker 2: Yeah? Absolutely. So.
Speaker 1: It was a bit of a confusing week when it
Speaker 1: comes to chips and semiconductors, and I'll come back to
Speaker 1: why it was confusing. But Monday saw President Trump hold
Speaker 1: a press conference with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company aka TSMC.
Speaker 1: The clues in the name the company manufacture semiconductors and
Speaker 1: they produce ninety percent of the world's super advanced semiconductor chips.
Speaker 1: These are the chips that power AI training models, but
Speaker 1: also devices and basically are the backbone of the new
Speaker 1: global economy. However, the vast majority of the manufacturing takes
Speaker 1: place in Taiwan, and so many in Washington and beyond
Speaker 1: have worn that TSMC's dominance in the chip industry could
Speaker 1: create a national security risk, given that Taiwan is squarely
Speaker 1: in the bullseye of China's territorial ambitions. But this week,
Speaker 1: the Taiwanese company pledged to invest one hundred billion dollars
Speaker 1: in manufacturing chips on US soil.
Speaker 2: You know, this is so interesting to me because it
Speaker 2: comes after multiple announcements over the last couple of months
Speaker 2: about investments in things like data centers and AI infrastructure.
Speaker 2: And that was with Stargate, and then Apple actually recently
Speaker 2: made a pledge to make more products domestically with themestic contractors.
Speaker 1: Yes, I think they talked about five hundred billion dollars.
Speaker 1: But what was really interesting was that as soon as Tuesday,
Speaker 1: when Trump addressed Congress, he talked about his aggressive desire
Speaker 1: to dismantle the Act that actually TSMC is using in
Speaker 1: part to fund its semiconductor manufacturing in the US. The
Speaker 1: Chips Act was biden error legislation that basically created a
Speaker 1: platform for manufacturing semiconductor chips in the US. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know how to square those two things, but
Speaker 1: that actually brings us to our next headline, which is
Speaker 1: a breakthrough indirectly interpreting and reading brain waves and converting
Speaker 1: them to text.
Speaker 2: The superpower I want.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly what. You may be able to buy it
Speaker 1: if met had anything to do with it, because they
Speaker 1: announced that in partnership with the Basque Center on Cognition,
Speaker 1: Brain and Language in Spain, researchers have been able to
Speaker 1: decode unspoken language, often reconstructing full sentences directly from brainwaves
Speaker 1: and not even requiring any surgical intervention. This is all
Speaker 1: stuff which can be measured outside the head.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's really the breakthrough here, right, because other
Speaker 2: research from companies like Neurolink have been extremely invasive, you know,
Speaker 2: electrodes being implanted into the brain. Invasive.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. And this research is all about kind
Speaker 1: of putting monitors on the skull or around the head
Speaker 1: to be able to read brain waves without having to
Speaker 1: directly hook into the brain, which is obviously much less scary,
Speaker 1: and there's an amazing promise for people with cognitive impairments or
Speaker 1: brain injuries to be able to convert their thoughts into
Speaker 1: text and therefore speech. But there are also some concerns.
Speaker 1: Right the Vox headline was Meta's brain to text tech
Speaker 1: is here. We are not remotely ready, And of course
Speaker 1: the big concern here is privacy if private companies can
Speaker 1: actually read our thoughts. But there's actually a long way
Speaker 1: to go before this research leaves the lab. Nonetheless, the
Speaker 1: experiment was kind of a maze. So thirty five volunteers
Speaker 1: sat under magnetic brain imaging scanners and typed on a keyboard.
Speaker 1: Based on prior training, an AI model was able to
Speaker 1: predict what they were writing, and meture research is accurately
Speaker 1: decoded between seventy and eighty percent of what people typed.
Speaker 1: In other words, with seventy to eighty percent certainty, it
Speaker 1: could know before I clicked a T that I was
Speaker 1: about to click the T. And so the real promise
Speaker 1: here is actually a data from this research is beginning
Speaker 1: to give neuroscientists a path to understanding how abstract thoughts
Speaker 1: are converted into language by the human brain.
Speaker 2: Then I think the other part of this is that
Speaker 2: we're getting closer and closer to this idea that we
Speaker 2: can have wearables that do this kind.
Speaker 1: Of tech totally. But of course, a wearable headset that
Speaker 1: can can actually read your thoughts and translate them into
Speaker 1: language is something that you know, conceivably could change a
Speaker 1: lot of people's lives. In another kind of science fiction
Speaker 1: becomes science fact story, it's about the wooly mammoths. The
Speaker 1: headline from MPR was just irresistible hoping to revive mammoths,
Speaker 1: scientists create wooly mice. Yeah, and I think one of
Speaker 1: the scientists that we knew we could do it, but
Speaker 1: we didn't know they would be this cute and they're
Speaker 1: worth a look. But the story is about a company
Speaker 1: called Colossal Biosciences, and they are, by their own account,
Speaker 1: the first and only de extinction company.
Speaker 2: Okay, this was a concept I had never heard of
Speaker 2: until this week.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this one's been one that's I've been intrigued by
Speaker 1: for it for a long time, and I hope we'll
Speaker 1: be able to cover it on an episode of the
Speaker 1: story before too long. But Colossal's website points out that
Speaker 1: nine hundred and two species are extinct and more than
Speaker 1: nine two hundred are critically endangered, and their mission is
Speaker 1: to restore extinct species to preserve biodiversity. It's a little controversial.
Speaker 1: Some people think there are more efficient ways to do
Speaker 1: conservation than reviving extinct species, you know, But to that
Speaker 1: I would say, I mean, look at the wooly mouse.
Speaker 1: This is whether or not you think this is the
Speaker 1: most efficient investment. It is absolutely wild. So picture a
Speaker 1: mouse with fluffy, orange tan fur that looks like it
Speaker 1: got very wet and then got a blow dry at
Speaker 1: the salon. You've got the picture.
Speaker 2: They are extremely cute, and.
Speaker 1: The way Colossal made them was first studying the wooly
Speaker 1: mammoth genome and then genetically engineering mice by modifying seven
Speaker 1: key genes to make them more like wooly mammoths. You know,
Speaker 1: the wool obviously being the most visible element, but also
Speaker 1: some things that were invisible, like the way the mice
Speaker 1: store fat and their fat metabolism makes them much more
Speaker 1: able to survive in the cold. And according to Colossal,
Speaker 1: the plan is to implant wooly mammoth esque modified embryos
Speaker 1: to Asian elephants by twenty twenty eight. This week, was
Speaker 1: also the Oscars and we both saw the movie that
Speaker 1: won Best Live Action.
Speaker 2: Please tell people about it. It's wonderful.
Speaker 1: So it's a Belgian Dutch copro called I'm Not a Robot?
Speaker 1: What did you make of it?
Speaker 2: I was extremely tickled by this promise.
Speaker 1: So, for those who haven't seen it, the film was
Speaker 1: written and directed by Victoria Wamadam and it's about a
Speaker 1: music producer who fails a series of capture tests and
Speaker 1: in so doing us to question whether she's in fact human.
Speaker 2: I mean the minute I knew that we were having
Speaker 2: a capture test as part of the plot to this movie,
Speaker 2: I was all in. I don't know if you have
Speaker 2: this feeling, but I hate failing captured tests, especially when
Speaker 2: you have to click I'm not a robot and all
Speaker 2: you have to do is choose squares that show images
Speaker 2: of street lights or motorcycles or bikes. How can I
Speaker 2: get that wrong?
Speaker 1: Yeah? So she's failing the tests again and again, even
Speaker 1: though it looks like she's doing it right. And then
Speaker 1: she gets to pop up with another quiz and one
Speaker 1: of the questions is did your parents die before you
Speaker 1: met them? And she answers, she answers, yes, and I
Speaker 1: don't want to spoil the whole plot. It gets pretty eerie,
Speaker 1: but it's a fascinating film well worth a watch. You
Speaker 1: can check it out actually on the New Yorker website
Speaker 1: because they were involved in releasing the film and on YouTube,
Speaker 1: and as a tech nerd, I was rooting for them
Speaker 1: to win the Best Live Action Short and did.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 2: Congratulations team. I'm not a robot, So.
Speaker 1: Stick around as well after the break for a look
Speaker 1: at how AI was used in this year's OSCAR nominated
Speaker 1: feature films, including The Brutalist, and for a conversation with
Speaker 1: Jason Kebler about what it's like to attend an AI
Speaker 1: film festival. Stay with us, Welcome back. The Oscars were
Speaker 1: on Sunday, so we're going to stick with movies. Back
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty three, the Hollywood Writers' Strike was this
Speaker 1: fascinating early example of a very public negotiation over how
Speaker 1: AI might could, and even would disrupt and displace human labour. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: the Writers Guild of America signed an agreement with the
Speaker 1: Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that Generative AI
Speaker 1: would not reduce or eliminate writers and their pay. But
Speaker 1: this was not a commitment by the industry not to
Speaker 1: use generative AI in filmmaking, far from it. In fact,
Speaker 1: this January, the editor of the Triple Oscar winning movie
Speaker 1: The Brutalist told an industry publication that he had used
Speaker 1: generative AI a few times in post production. Some of
Speaker 1: the actors in The Brutalist, namely Felicity Jones and Adrian Brody,
Speaker 1: performed their roles with a heavy Hungarian accent, and they
Speaker 1: even had some dialogue in Hungarian. To prepare for the roles,
Speaker 1: Brody and Jones spent months with a dialect coach to
Speaker 1: perfect their accents, but as The Brutalist editor David Joncho,
Speaker 1: a native Hungarian speaker, pointed out, English speakers can have
Speaker 1: a hard time pronouncing certain sounds. In post he tried
Speaker 1: to perfect the Hungarian in dialogue, and first the team
Speaker 1: had the actor's reader of the lines in the studio.
Speaker 1: Then they tried having other actors say the lines, but
Speaker 1: that also didn't sound right, so Yoncho turned to AI.
Speaker 1: He fared Brody and Jones's voices into the program respeecher
Speaker 1: and then using his own voice, Yoncho refined certain vowels
Speaker 1: and letters for accuracy, a process that could have been
Speaker 1: done without generative AI, like in an audio editors such
Speaker 1: as pro Tools, but Respeecher made the process much more
Speaker 1: efficient and of course Adrian Brody won the Oscar for
Speaker 1: Best Actor. As us Say Today reported, not all viewers
Speaker 1: would pleased with the news. Don't think it's too reactionary
Speaker 1: to say this movie should lose the Academy buzz. It
Speaker 1: was getting one person posted on eggs. But the manipulation
Speaker 1: of vocal tracks is not uncommon in movies. Deadline noted
Speaker 1: that combinations of vocal tracks will use in performances like
Speaker 1: Romy Mallock's Oscar winning portrayal of Freddie Mercury, and Respeecher
Speaker 1: may have been used in another film nominated for Best
Speaker 1: Picture this year, Amelia Perez. The rise of generative AI
Speaker 1: has been remarkably fast in creative industries. But one big
Speaker 1: question I have is how far could this go and
Speaker 1: how soon? And to answer that, we want to turn
Speaker 1: to our friend Jason Kebler at four or four Media,
Speaker 1: who not too long ago attended a film festival of
Speaker 1: AI generated movies. Jason, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3: Hey, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Before we get into that film festival you went to
Speaker 1: could you just explain how respeech it works and how
Speaker 1: it was used in the editing process for the Brutalist.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, respeacher is an AI voice synthesizer, and so
Speaker 3: it takes training data of an actor's voice and runs
Speaker 3: it against a large language model. So in this case,
Speaker 3: it would probably be examples of the Hungarian language, et cetera.
Speaker 3: And it would take Adrian Brodie's voice and make it
Speaker 3: more closely match other examples of Hungarian language. And it's
Speaker 3: very interesting because this technology is sort of one of
Speaker 3: the first native AI technologies that was widely used commercially,
Speaker 3: not just Respeecher, but another company called eleven Labs has
Speaker 3: become really famous for like Eric Adams, the mayor of
Speaker 3: New York City, did a calling campaign to various communities
Speaker 3: in New York City where he spoke English, but then
Speaker 3: eleven Labs translated his voice into like fifteen different languages.
Speaker 3: And it's not just like a robot voice reading it
Speaker 3: sounds like Eric Adams speaking Mandarin or Eric Adams speaking Hungarian.
Speaker 3: And so increasingly this is being used in movies, not
Speaker 3: just Respeecher, but also eleven Labs and other tools like it,
Speaker 3: and it really is like one of the first big
Speaker 3: commercial uses of generative AI in movies.
Speaker 1: To me, it feels like it's not that far away
Speaker 1: from other post production tools that have been super charged
Speaker 1: by AI, like description, podcast editing, or other tools like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's really interesting because I think that
Speaker 3: music had this a long time ago, with things like autotune,
Speaker 3: and it's like many, many, many popular artists use autotune,
Speaker 3: and this is a very similar technology. I mean it's
Speaker 3: it's in the same family of technologies at least. So
Speaker 3: it just becomes a question of how much post can
Speaker 3: there be for the human performance to still be there.
Speaker 3: And I think it's a really open question at this point.
Speaker 3: I think if you asked me a while ago, I
Speaker 3: would say they're changing the performance in some fundamental way.
Speaker 3: But I think everything in a movie is so carefully edited,
Speaker 3: so carefully shot. They do hundreds of takes for certain
Speaker 3: scenes and then splice together different takes and cuts, and
Speaker 3: so I think it really is a spectrum of what
Speaker 3: you are willing to accept if you're in the Academy
Speaker 3: and need to decide whether someone is worthy of an
Speaker 3: award for this, I think audiences sort of have to
Speaker 3: accept it because it's being done, and it's been done
Speaker 3: for a long time. And I think that if you
Speaker 3: start like having purity tests about this sort of thing,
Speaker 3: I think it's going to be pretty difficult to know
Speaker 3: which movies to see and which are not to see,
Speaker 3: because ye, honestly, the only reason we know that this
Speaker 3: was used at all was because the editor talked about
Speaker 3: it to the media.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And also, I mean, to be fair to Adrian Brody,
Speaker 1: I doubt that many Academy members would have voted against
Speaker 1: him on the basis to his owncungarian accident wasn't quite perfect,
Speaker 1: So I'm not sure that this was like the key
Speaker 1: input to his victory. But what you said about like
Speaker 1: the role of post production and what that means visa
Speaker 1: v like the original product made me think about this
Speaker 1: AI generated film festival that you went to. So, first
Speaker 1: of all, what made this an AI generated film festival?
Speaker 1: How much of the films were AI generated?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it varied for each movie, but I think
Speaker 3: that if you walked in off the street, you would say, oh,
Speaker 3: these films were made with AI And what I mean
Speaker 3: by that is each movie had visuals that were clearly
Speaker 3: AI generated, like a lot of the backgrounds were constantly
Speaker 3: changed in a way that if you were using a camera,
Speaker 3: they wouldn't happen. A lot of people had like faces
Speaker 3: that were morphing from scene to scene. One thing I
Speaker 3: will say though, is that TCL was very clear that
Speaker 3: all of the scripts were written by humans, and all
Speaker 3: the voices were done by humans, and all of the
Speaker 3: music was done by humans. The artificial intelligence was limited
Speaker 3: to the visuals in different movies.
Speaker 1: Can you just take me back to kind of how
Speaker 1: you got invited and what questions you had going in?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I went to the Chinese Theater in Hollywood,
Speaker 3: which is ironically where the oscars are. It's like the
Speaker 3: same complex. And that theater is owned by TCL, which
Speaker 3: is a Chinese TV manufacturer, and like a lot of
Speaker 3: other TV manufacturers at this point, they have their own
Speaker 3: free streaming TV service if you buy a TCL TV,
Speaker 3: And TCL is the first company to put fully AI
Speaker 3: generated movies on its streaming service. And so this was
Speaker 3: a premiere of five films that were created using generative AI.
Speaker 3: And so I had been writing basically about this technology
Speaker 3: for a while and they invited me to come watch them.
Speaker 1: So, despite the fact that you'll perhaps more on the
Speaker 1: skeptical side, they welcome you into the film festival.
Speaker 3: I was pretty shocked that they invited me, because honestly,
Speaker 3: I had written about a trailer that they released for
Speaker 3: an AI generated film and I kind of dunked on it.
Speaker 3: I said, it was really terrible. It's called Last Train Paris,
Speaker 3: and it was like an AI generated rom com. And
Speaker 3: in the YouTube video, it's like the lip syncing of
Speaker 3: the audio and the lips is like really bad. The
Speaker 3: characters move incredibly robotically, and it has this very dreamlike
Speaker 3: quality to it that is very common with AI generated visuals,
Speaker 3: where it's not like a cool effect. It's like, wow,
Speaker 3: this is really distracting because the background is constantly swirling
Speaker 3: and changing and things are popping in and out. And
Speaker 3: after I wrote that article, they still decided to invite me,
Speaker 3: So I thought that was brave of them.
Speaker 1: But what did you think, I mean, what were you
Speaker 1: kind of expecting going into it?
Speaker 3: Going in? I thought that they would be pretty bad,
Speaker 3: to be totally honest with you, just because the state
Speaker 3: of the art at the time. This was back in December,
Speaker 3: which it was only three months ago, but at the time,
Speaker 3: AI video generators were pretty bad, and I didn't think
Speaker 3: that TCL had access to some proprietary system that we
Speaker 3: hadn't seen before. I figured that they would be using
Speaker 3: the state of the art that you can find on
Speaker 3: the internet, and I think that those tools are not
Speaker 3: very good, and so I thought that they would be bad,
Speaker 3: to be totally honest with you, and they were bad.
Speaker 1: Can you describe some of the highlights on the low Lights?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I thought that the films themselves were just they
Speaker 3: felt pretty rushed. So one of them was called The
Speaker 3: Slug and it's about a woman who turns into a slug.
Speaker 3: She has a disease that turns her into a slug
Speaker 3: and it feels like The Substance, which is another you know,
Speaker 3: Oscar nominated film. The visuals on it are wild. Things
Speaker 3: are just like constantly changing. Her face is changing, the
Speaker 3: you know, the food is changing. There's a lot of
Speaker 3: like weird screams that happen that are not super well
Speaker 3: timed with the dialogue. And then also there's like a
Speaker 3: scene where the woman takes a bath and there's like
Speaker 3: a close up on some bath salts and like the
Speaker 3: text on that label is like an alien language because
Speaker 3: AI has like a really bad time generating text, and
Speaker 3: I guess you can take it with a grain of
Speaker 3: salt or say like, hey, this is early technology. But
Speaker 3: when you're watching something as a viewer in a movie
Speaker 3: theater on this giant screen and the text is completely
Speaker 3: not even in English, it's like, wow, it really takes
Speaker 3: you out of the narrative.
Speaker 1: I would say, I mean it's a weird idea, right,
Speaker 1: because I mean you mentioned this is for TCL, the
Speaker 1: Chinese TV manufacturer, and the assumption be like, they don't
Speaker 1: want you to change the channel, right, they want you
Speaker 1: to have their own channel on kind of in the
Speaker 1: background so that you know your attention is with them
Speaker 1: and they can sell you ads whatever it may be.
Speaker 1: But that's very different to like putting hundreds of people
Speaker 1: in a movie theater and kind of fulcing them to
Speaker 1: watch with full attention, right, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And it's very interesting because before the movies played, two
Speaker 3: TCL executives addressed the audience, and it was very interesting
Speaker 3: the difference between what they were saying and what the
Speaker 3: filmmakers were saying, because the TCL executives were business people
Speaker 3: and they were saying our research shows that almost no
Speaker 3: one changes the channel once they're watching something like this,
Speaker 3: like they are watching it in the background usually, and
Speaker 3: so their hope is that you're just going to be
Speaker 3: too lazy to change the channel.
Speaker 1: So inspiring creative brief.
Speaker 3: Right, right, And then the other executives said, like, we're
Speaker 3: going to use this as part of our targeted advertising strategy,
Speaker 3: which was pretty dystopian. And then the actual filmmakers came
Speaker 3: on and said, you know, we put our heart and
Speaker 3: soul into this, and we think this is the future
Speaker 3: of the industry. So that was kind of like a
Speaker 3: whiplash situation for me in the audience.
Speaker 1: When we come back, more from Jason Kebler about the
Speaker 1: rapid advances in generative AI video technology and how the
Speaker 1: state of the art is evolving in real time, stay
Speaker 1: with us. Welcome back to our conversation with Jason Kebler
Speaker 1: from four or four Media, where we continue our conversation
Speaker 1: about a recent AI film festival he attended. There was
Speaker 1: one film though, which I think was like a kind
Speaker 1: of blended documentary and AI film that you thought was
Speaker 1: potentially a bit more interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I thought it was pretty cool. I mean, it
Speaker 3: still had a lot of problems, but It was called
Speaker 3: The Best Day of My Life, and it was mountaineering
Speaker 3: documentary where a mountaineer who got trapped in an avalanche
Speaker 3: is talking directly to the camera, like the actual person
Speaker 3: is talking directly to the camera recounting his story, and
Speaker 3: as he is telling his story, they flashed to generative
Speaker 3: AI depictions of what he is saying, And so I
Speaker 3: thought that was kind of interesting because this is something
Speaker 3: that happened to the guy. He obviously didn't bring a
Speaker 3: camera with him at the time, and you were able
Speaker 3: to sort of like see what he was describing.
Speaker 1: In a way that was actually viscerally compelling, or in
Speaker 1: a way that's still felt a bit uncanny and jarring.
Speaker 3: In a way that made me think that maybe this
Speaker 3: has potential in the future, but this isn't quite there yet,
Speaker 3: because it similarly like the there's various scenes in the film,
Speaker 3: and the guy who's happening to changes in each scene.
Speaker 3: It's like his face looks different in different scenes. He
Speaker 3: was under snow because it was an avalanche, and then
Speaker 3: in the next scene all of the snow had turned
Speaker 3: to mud, and then it turned back to snow, and
Speaker 3: it was like, similarly took you out of the narrative,
Speaker 3: but I thought that the idea behind it was pretty
Speaker 3: interesting and I could see that being a direction that
Speaker 3: future documentaries go.
Speaker 1: And was what was the feeling like in the room?
Speaker 1: I mean, who else was in the audience? What was
Speaker 1: the general takeaway from this experience?
Speaker 3: The mood in the theater was one of incredible optimism
Speaker 3: and excitement. It was a mix of people who had
Speaker 3: worked on these films and people who have like a
Speaker 3: lot of money invested in the idea that this is
Speaker 3: going to be the next big thing in Hollywood. And
Speaker 3: so the mood in the theater was one of incredible
Speaker 3: optimism and excitement. Meanwhile, the films like Objectively are not good.
Speaker 3: They're really They're all on YouTube now and if you
Speaker 3: go watch them, like the comments brutal, there's not a
Speaker 3: lot of views on them. I think on some of them,
Speaker 3: the comments that you even been turned off because people
Speaker 3: are like, how could you dare put this on my television.
Speaker 3: So I did think it was interesting because it reminded
Speaker 3: me of things that I had been to in the past,
Speaker 3: for like virtual reality or for cryptocurrency, things like that,
Speaker 3: And a lot of people have said like generative AI
Speaker 3: is the new crypto, it's the new metaverse, it's the
Speaker 3: new virtual reality. And I think that AI there's like
Speaker 3: a lot of snake oil out there, but undeniably companies
Speaker 3: are leaning into it in a way that's going to
Speaker 3: affect us and affect workers and affect people in the industry.
Speaker 1: It's also interesting where companies fall in terms of how
Speaker 1: vocal they want to be about how they see the
Speaker 1: AI future unfolding. Right, Like, obviously for Chinese TV manufacturer,
Speaker 1: alienating Hollywood doesn't really matter that much, right, whereas like
Speaker 1: full Hollywood studios had to behave very differently.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's super interesting, and that's a great point because,
Speaker 3: as you said, like the Writer's Guild strike was partially
Speaker 3: about generative AI in the writer's rooms, a lot of
Speaker 3: voice actors, going back to Respeecher, voice actors in both
Speaker 3: the video game world and the animation world are really
Speaker 3: worried that AI voices are going to replace their jobs
Speaker 3: or that they're going to get less work because AI
Speaker 3: is going to be used to generate voices for animation
Speaker 3: and video games. And then, of course, like you said,
Speaker 3: a lot of companies are laying off their workers in
Speaker 3: a bunch of industries and then realizing, oh wait, the
Speaker 3: AI is not good enough to do these jobs yet.
Speaker 3: And so there's a real tension about it because fundamentally,
Speaker 3: this is an automation technology. It's designed to replace human
Speaker 3: labor or do things that sometimes humans can't do. And
Speaker 3: I do think that a lot of companies are going
Speaker 3: to be able to differentiate themselves by saying we do
Speaker 3: not use AI, we respect human artists, we don't want
Speaker 3: to do that. And then some companies are going their
Speaker 3: total opposite way, like TCL, which has very little original programming,
Speaker 3: very little relationships in Hollywood. They don't care if they
Speaker 3: piss off directors and actors and things like that because
Speaker 3: they're just trying to make a name for themselves, so
Speaker 3: they're able to be more aggressive about this.
Speaker 1: So I guess, on the one hand, you have like
Speaker 1: TCL and more or less fully AI generated films. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, you have the brutalist where you know
Speaker 1: at the margins AI was used and respeech, she was
Speaker 1: used to do some accent correction. Do you see like
Speaker 1: ultimately a convergence between those two things, or do you
Speaker 1: think it will remain that like AI is either used
Speaker 1: in like premium productions for optimizing posts, shall we say.
Speaker 1: And on the other hand, you have like this kind
Speaker 1: of wild west of full AI generation, which is a
Speaker 1: long way off from being consumable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I do think it's a spectrum and
Speaker 3: slippery slope, if you will. And Special Effects have in
Speaker 3: general been incorporating a lot more AI over the last
Speaker 3: few years. I think one that was really interesting to
Speaker 3: me was when the first deep fakes were sort of invented,
Speaker 3: maybe like five or six years ago, where you can
Speaker 3: like replace someone's face with another face. Star Wars had
Speaker 3: tried to generate like Carrie Fisher after she had died
Speaker 3: for one of the Star Wars films, and apparently they
Speaker 3: spent like millions of dollars doing this. And then someone
Speaker 3: on Reddit using deep fake technology was able to do
Speaker 3: something that was almost indistinguishable from what Lucasfilms had done,
Speaker 3: like on their computer at home, for free. And so
Speaker 3: I do think that we're going to see a lot
Speaker 3: more of this stuff in films, but you may not
Speaker 3: even notice that's happening when they start replacing artists, replacing musicians,
Speaker 3: replacing actors with AI. I think that's I personally think
Speaker 3: that's a problem, and I think that that's when you
Speaker 3: end up with a lesser product. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I hope that AI is going to be used to
Speaker 3: make films better, not to create tons of low budget,
Speaker 3: poorly made films that are designed to scratch a specific
Speaker 3: itch or perform an algorithm, which we're definitely gonna see
Speaker 3: a lot.
Speaker 1: Of itist you're a humanist at HUT, Yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: I mean you mentioned that this film festival was a
Speaker 1: couple of months ago. Has the state of the art
Speaker 1: change since then? I was playing around with this Google
Speaker 1: deep Mind product called vo two. At least on like
Speaker 1: a scene by scene basis, you can make pretty good
Speaker 1: photo realistic depictions, but then like a couple of seconds each.
Speaker 1: I don't think they've figured out that any means how
Speaker 1: to stitch them together or make continuity. But how is
Speaker 1: the state of the art devolving?
Speaker 3: It's changed a lot in the last three months. There's
Speaker 3: been a lot of Chinese companies that have released video
Speaker 3: models in the last just a couple of weeks, like
Speaker 3: ten Cent, which is a massive Chinese company, released a
Speaker 3: new video model that seems to be better than most
Speaker 3: publicly released video models. You know, it was sort of
Speaker 3: immediately used by people to create non consensual pornography, which
Speaker 3: is quite upsetting and is what a lot of people
Speaker 3: are using these tools for on the internet. But basically
Speaker 3: it's like every week there's a new model and they're
Speaker 3: they're constantly leapfrogging each other. So you know, one will
Speaker 3: be able to generate hands better than another, one will
Speaker 3: be able to generate faces better than another, one will
Speaker 3: have like better movement when you try to make these
Speaker 3: people move, or they require less training data, meaning you
Speaker 3: can make videos based on one input image versus having
Speaker 3: to feed hours of footage into a model to create
Speaker 3: something else. And so you know, these are things that
Speaker 3: like AI nerds spend a lot of time caring about,
Speaker 3: and I would say that there is a big generational
Speaker 3: difference between them. But as like a consumer of these things,
Speaker 3: you might not know that this is happening behind the scenes.
Speaker 3: But the short version is basically it's getting easier to
Speaker 3: make a generated video, it's getting cheaper to do it,
Speaker 3: and the quality is getting better and it's changing on
Speaker 3: like a day to day basis. At this point, Jason,
Speaker 3: thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1: That's it for this week. For tech Stuff, I'm oz Voloshin.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Victoria Dominguez.
Speaker 1: It was executive produced by me Carrot Price and Kate
Speaker 1: Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts. The
Speaker 1: Heath Fraser is our engineer. Kyle Murdoch mixed this episode
Speaker 1: and he also wrote our theme song. Join us next
Speaker 1: Wednesday for tech stuff The Story, when we'll share an
Speaker 1: in depth conversation with the neuroscientist David Eagleman about people
Speaker 1: who develop romantic relationships with AI. Please rate, review, and
Speaker 1: reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail
Speaker 1: dot com.
Speaker 2: Eight