Right now, there are companies suing AI companies for scraping their copyrighted work, but those cases may as well be dropped because major media companies keep selling out to these AI companies! Another example has to do with Lionsgate Studios, which just signed a deal with AI video company Runway AI.
This news comes as no surprise, as this isn’t the first case of a major media company bowing to AI. Meta reached out to certain film companies a few months ago, and so did Alphabet. Some of the companies they reached out to were Disney, Netflix, and Warner Brothers. While the first two didn’t directly say that they were down to serve up their content, Warner Brothers seemed more open to the idea.
Lionsgate struck a deal with Runway AI
In case you don’t know what Runway AI is, it’s an AI video company. Its model has been able to create some scarily good output, and this puts filmmakers on edge for obvious reasons. We don’t know where the company got video data to train its model, but we know where its next shipment of videos is going to come from.
Lionsgate, the company behind several popular franchises like John Wick, Twilight, SAW, and The Hunger Games, has signed a deal that will serve its content over to Runway AI for training. This is basically the company helping fuel the same technology that will put countless filmmakers out of a job.
Lionsgate vice chair Michael Burns gave a statement saying that this partnership will, “help us utilize AI to develop cutting-edge, capital-efficient content creation opportunities.” We have to give Burns credit for not BS-ing us on why it’s doing this. Lionsgate sold out to AI so that the company can cut costs. It wants to spend less money on making content but capitalize on equal box office profits.
At least he didn’t say something like “AI enables our creators to better express their vision… blah blah blah blah.” At the end of the day, it’s about money.
He continued to say that, “Several of our filmmakers are already excited about its potential applications to their pre-production and post-production process.” The thing is that most of the film industry doesn’t like the technology, so we don’t know what filmmakers he’s talking about.
Details are scarce
Right now, we don’t know too much about what sort of content Lionsgate is serving up to Runway. What we know is that, just like with other AI sellouts, Lionsgate is just giving away decades of human-made content to fuel soul-less AI “creations.” It’s just like how so many news publications are taking a check from OpenAI and serving that company all of their content on a silver platter.
We want to believe that these AI tools will be used only to augment the creators’ work while keeping them employed. However, that’s hoping for too much. When money is involved, someone has to get screwed over.
2024-09-19 15:11:00