Cristóbal Valenzuela, the co-founder and CEO of AI Video startup Runway, now valued at $5 billion, may not be winning more hearts and minds in the creative anti-AI crowd with his recent comments about AI’s potential in Hollywood.
At Semafor World Economic Forum This week, the AI executive suggested that studios take the $100 million they spend on one movie and put it into 50 movies in order to increase their output and their chances of success.
“If you’re spending a hundred million dollars to make a feature film, which is 90 minutes, imagine taking a hundred million dollars and spending it on, say, 50 movies,” Valenzuela said. “Same quality. Same amount of output, optically. But you create a lot more content. That way you have a much better chance of hitting something. It’s a problem of quantity.”
This goes against the notion that a film represents a studio’s investment in a work of art, and that the film industry is one where studios win if they support the right creative team. With artificial intelligence, Valenzuela suggests that the entire industry can be boiled down to a numbers game — and if you produce enough content, you’ll eventually succeed.
In his interview, the founder acknowledged there there was a dispute about the introduction of artificial intelligence into a creative market such as film and television production, but stated that “things are changing rapidly.” He said he believes much of the initial skepticism around AI came more from a place of fear and misunderstanding, but now most people understand what these powerful AI tools can do.
The company is developing global AI models to help the creative class do “more work better and faster,” he said. Runway works with a large number of studios and creators, and the technology is already helping reduce production costs, the founder claimed.
This is already happening. Take, for example, the soon-to-be-released $70 million film “Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi,” which will be the first studio-grade AI feature film on the market. The use of artificial intelligence reduced production costs by approximately $300 million, reported TheWrap. Amazon has also turned to AI to reduce film and television production costs as well they have studios in India. Sony Pictures said plans to use the technology. Even James Cameron supported artificial intelligence as a way to keep blockbuster movies in production without layoffs.
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Asked which side of the business is seeing costs reduced due to AI, Valenzuela said: “It’s everywhere. It’s on the pre-production side, it’s in scripting, it’s in programming, it’s in execution, visual effects — that’s already starting to scale.”
Artificial intelligence can make it easier to produce more content. But critics question the tech industry’s belief that scaling creativity with artificial intelligence will automatically lead to greater art.
But Runway believes this is true.
“There’s a creativity crisis in the industry because of the financial incentives for how content is made,” Valenzuela said. He compared video production to something like books, where now, he said, about 25 million books are produced annually — more than anyone could read.
“Of course, I don’t read 25 million books… but the world is a much better place because there are more people who manage to tell a story or say something [to] the world,” he said.
(For what it’s worth, Valenzuela’s figure appears to be wrong. Data from UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) reports that 2.2 million new titles are published each year. But it could count self-published e-books and things like Wattpad stories, many of which are now also AI-generated and often fall outside traditional estimates.)
In any case, the idea is to flood the market with content, even if only some become hits. That’s what the film industry hopes to do now, thanks to artificial intelligence.
“We have this inside saying at Runway that the best movies haven’t been made yet because we haven’t heard from probably, like, the billions of people who haven’t had access to this…technology,” Valenzuela said.
