Because the leisure trade reckons with when and tips on how to use generative AI in filmmaking, Netflix is leaning in. In its quarterly earnings report launched on Tuesday afternoon, Netflix wrote in its letter to traders that it’s “very nicely positioned to successfully leverage ongoing advances in AI.”
Netflix isn’t planning to make use of generative AI because the spine of its content material however believes the expertise has potential as a software to make creatives extra environment friendly.
“It takes an excellent artist to make one thing nice,” Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos mentioned on Tuesday’s earnings name. “AI can provide creatives higher instruments to reinforce their total TV/film expertise for our members, however it doesn’t routinely make you an excellent storyteller when you’re not.”
Earlier this 12 months, Netflix mentioned it used generative AI in last footage for the primary time within the Argentine present “The Eternaut” to create a scene of a constructing collapsing. Since then, the filmmakers behind “Pleased Gilmore 2” used generative AI to make characters look youthful within the movie’s opening scene, whereas the producers of “Billionaires’ Bunker” used the expertise as a pre-production software to check wardrobe and set design.
“We’re assured that AI goes to assist us and assist our artistic companions inform tales higher, sooner, and in new methods,” Sarandos mentioned. “We’re all in on that, however we’re not chasing novelty for novelty’s sake right here.”
AI has been a contentious matter within the leisure trade, as artists fear that LLM-powered instruments that nonconsensually used their work as coaching knowledge have the potential to negatively influence their jobs.
With Netflix as a bellwether, evidently studios are extra probably to make use of generative AI for particular results reasonably than to switch the function of actors — even when an AI actor lately triggered an uproar amongst Hollywood actors, regardless of not but reserving any gigs (that we all know of). These behind-the-scenes AI makes use of nonetheless have the potential to influence visible results jobs, nonetheless.
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These debates lately escalated when ChatGPT maker OpenAI unveiled its Sora 2 audio and video era mannequin, which was launched with out guardrails that stop customers from producing movies of some actors and historic figures. Simply this week, the Hollywood commerce group SAG-AFTRA and actor Bryan Cranston urged OpenAI to institute stronger guardrails towards deepfaking actors like Cranston himself.
When an investor requested Sarandos concerning the influence of Sora on Netflix, he mentioned that it “begins to make sense” that content material creators might be impacted, however he’s much less fearful concerning the film and TV enterprise — or so he tells traders.
“We’re not fearful about AI changing creativity,” he mentioned.
Netflix’s quarterly income grew 17% year-over-year to $11.5 billion, although this fell beneath the corporate’s forecast.
