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Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion On Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora 59

Posted by BeauHD from the raising-the-alarm dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Hollywood Reporter: Over the past four years, Tyler Perry had been planning an $800 million expansion of his studio in Atlanta, which would have added 12 soundstages to the 330-acre property. Now, however, those ambitions are on hold -- thanks to the rapid developments he's seeing in the realm of artificial intelligence, including OpenAI's text-to-video model Sora, which debuted Feb. 15 and stunned observers with its cinematic video outputs. "Being told that it can do all of these things is one thing, but actually seeing the capabilities, it was mind-blowing," he said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday, noting that his productions might not have to travel to locations or build sets with the assistance of the technology.

As a business owner, Perry sees the opportunity in these developments, but as an employer, fellow actor and filmmaker, he also wants to raise the alarm. In an interview between shoots Thursday, Perry explained his concerns about the technology's impact on labor and why he wants the industry to come together to tackle AI: "There's got to be some sort of regulations in order to protect us. If not, I just don't see how we survive." What in particular was shocking to you about its capabilities?

Perry: I no longer would have to travel to locations. If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it's text. If I wanted to write a scene on the moon, it's text, and this AI can generate it like nothing. If I wanted to have two people in the living room in the mountains, I don't have to build a set in the mountains, I don't have to put a set on my lot. I can sit in an office and do this with a computer, which is shocking to me. It makes me worry so much about all of the people in the business. Because as I was looking at it, I immediately started thinking of everyone in the industry who would be affected by this, including actors and grip and electric and transportation and sound and editors, and looking at this, I'm thinking this will touch every corner of our industry.

How are you thinking about approaching the threat that AI poses to certain job categories at your studio and on your productions?

Perry: Everything right now is so up in the air. It's so malleable. The technology's moving so quickly. I feel like everybody in the industry is running a hundred miles an hour to try and catch up, to try and put in guardrails and to try and put in safety belts to keep livelihoods afloat. But me, just like every other studio in town, we're all trying to figure it all out. I think we're all trying to find the answers as we go, and it's changing every day -- and it's not just our industry, but it's every industry that AI will be affecting, from accountants to architects. If you look at it across the world, how it's changing so quickly, I'm hoping that there's a whole government approach to help everyone be able to sustain.

You can read the full interview here.
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Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion On Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora More

Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion On Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora

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  • He's right to be concerned. (Score:5, Funny)

    by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Friday February 23, 2024 @06:18PM (#64263896)
    Because Sora allows anyone to make a Tyler Perry movie by simply typing "Sora, create a Tootsie clone with a black lead actor, give him large prosthetic breasts, and have him speak inane tropes in a loud, obnoxious voice"

  • Continuing an existing trend, but not smoothly (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Friday February 23, 2024 @06:29PM (#64263948) Homepage

    These days, just about every movie has digital effects. Each of these digital effects takes the place of something a person would have physically done at some point in the past. But each one also gives somebody else a job creating digital content.

    AI might one day make that process cheaper, but not right away. Early AI simulations will have a lot of problems to overcome, when it generates things that are "not quite right" in one way or another. One simple example is AI generated scenes that have a picture hanging on the wall, with text on or underneath it. That text was often just gibberish, something that movie watchers would notice. Somebody has to correct those kinds of mistakes.

    Another example is Google's "diversity" guardrails, which tries to make sure people in images reflect the racial diversity of the human race. That doesn't work when the scene is in ancient China, or Egypt, or England, where there was no racial diversity to speak of.

    AI isn't free, it's going to take a lot of work to get right.

    • > AI isn't free, it's going to take a lot of work to get right.

      To say nothing of the cost of rebuilding after the human rebels finally defeat Skynet.

      • That kind of rebellion might be emotionally satisfying, but not at all effective in terms of history. Whatever happened to the Luddites, anyway!

        • They're working on a Time Machine to go back in time to prevent technology from being created that can be used to build a Time Machine....

          Oh wait....

          • Better hope that it's a multiverse thing then. If not their actions will be undone and the rebellion happens anyway. If so, their actions are pointless as the rebellion already happened and cannot be undone from their perspective. They can only save others that look like those that were lost but are in fact different individuals. (Best case for their mental health is memory wiping.)

          • If they have a time machine, surely they won't have to wait?

    • > That doesn't work when the scene is in ancient China, or Egypt, or England, where there was no racial diversity to speak of.

      You've obviously never been to England

    • If I have to pay somebody to do an entire set design versus one prompt into a computer program and a couple of hours to clean up minor mistakes in post with a human being I've just put a mountain of people out of work.

      We are a society predicated on the concept of if you don't work you don't eat and we are about to go through a third industrial revolution involving massive automation. Everyone assumes they're going to be the human who gets to fix the minor mistakes in post and doesn't take into account th

      • So much doom and gloom!

        And yet, despite the industrial revolution, and the computer revolution, and the internet revolution, all killing off whole categories of jobs, we are somehow at less than 4% unemployment, and our standard of living is far higher than the generations that came before us. Few of us know what it means to break a sweat trying to get crops to come up out of the ground, let alone work sunup to sundown with no vacations or weekends off, only to have a bad weather event wipe out everything.

        A

        • We are not worse than our forefathers.

          But coal miners, farmers (serfs), and large cities working poor in the early 19th century were definitely worse than their parents and grandparents.

          Eventually it evened out and the survivors benefitted from the industrial output and improved life expectancy. But it took over a century of revolutions, redefined social contracts and a couple world wars and half a dozen genocides to process that change.

          We are still defining global ideologies, justifying massacres and threa

          • But it took over a century

            This is true, but you'll notice that the cycle is speeding up significantly. The computer revolution, and the internet revolution, have each run their course largely within our lifetimes. This includes the loss of jobs that these technologies replaced, and the ability of people to find new lines of work. Both the displacement, and the resorting of occupations, is speeding up with each cycle. The recent technology revolutions have also been much less damaging than the earlier ones.

            So yes, I'm still very opti

            • Re: I think you're missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)

              by dinfinity ( 2300094 ) on Saturday February 24, 2024 @01:52PM (#64265616)

              It's not about the speed. It's about the number of economically viable skills humans have left after each revolution. We're not counting up. We're counting down. And at some point we will reach zero or something close enough to it that running society the way we've been doing breaks down completely.

              • The speed does indeed matter. In the last 80 years, we have gone through two of these job-killing revolutions: the computer revolution and the internet revolution. Each resulted in whole categories of jobs being eliminated. Yet we never had a period of unemployment over 9%, and that period (in the 1970s) had nothing to do with the technology-related job elimination. People have moved into new professions as the old ones were eliminated.

                In the beginning of the industrial revolution, this migration to new kin

                • You're missing my point. I did not say that speed doesn't matter. It most definitely does.

                  The key insight, however, remains that at some point organic life will be worse than inorganic 'life' at (almost) every economically interesting thing. Going from 7 fundamental skills to 6 skills is an entirely different situation than going from 1 to 0.

                  You seem to argue that new categories of work for humans will always pop up, for infinity. That is clearly an absurd thing to try to defend, so it must be a weaker vari

                  • The key insight, however, remains that at some point organic life will be worse than inorganic 'life' at (almost) every economically interesting thing

                    This is unfalsifiable, and there is no evidence to support this claim. It's impossible to imagine what new "interesting things" will be invented in the future, or to assert that there will be none left.

                    You seem to argue that new categories of work for humans will always pop up, for infinity

                    All I have is history. So far, every lost job category has been replaced by new ones. And on the whole, the quality of life has increased over time, ever since the industrial revolution. It's reasonable to believe that the pattern we have already observed numerous times, without exception, will be repeated in

                    • there is no evidence to support this claim

                      Yes, there is and you have provided it: "Few people today do back-breaking farm work, or monotonous, dangerous factory work, or laborious accounting on paper"

                      We have already seen many things that humans can no longer do better than inorganic 'life' (it is not life yet, but the point stays the same: 'things' also works). If history is your guide, then this trend will continue.

                      Naked apes aren't that special. In many things we're not even better than other organic life and have never been. Try fighting a chimp

                    • No, my statement does not provide evidence for your claim that people won't have work to do in the future. Those people today who no longer do back-breaking farm work--they aren't unemployed, they have other work to do, much of which those farmers of 100 years ago couldn't have even imagined was possible. Unemployment in the US is the lowest it's ever been, since records were kept. No, there's no evidence that technology leads to unemployment, and certainly not my statement about farm workers. Technology do

        • The fact that this doom has not yet materialized due to past technological advances does not mean it will not happen ever in the future. To some extent past changes in tech were slow enough for advanced societies to eventually work the changes into the labor markets. Companies found new uses for newly freed labor, and economies continued growing. But should a change that in prior centuries that unfolded over decades happen, say, in just a few years, who knows how well we will be able to adapt? European coun

          • The fact that this doom has not yet materialized due to past technological advances does not mean it will not happen ever in the future

            This is true. But it does mean you have no data points to support your hypothesis that we are all doomed.

            Recent technology revolutions--the computer revolution and the internet revolution--have happened much more quickly than the industrial revolution before them. Jobs were quickly displaced, people quickly reshuffled and kept finding new work. If anything, the later revolutions were less severe than the previous ones, not more severe.

            If you look at countries where there is mass unemployment, it has nothing

    • AI might one day make that process cheaper

      Take a look at Sora and you might conclude that that day is very near.

      • Sora, too, is a new thing, and like all new things, will be immature and will struggle in some areas at the beginning. *Anything* complex will have issues. It's not going to be magically perfect.

    • You really have no idea how fast this technology is evolving. It's blazing along with major improvements every few months, and will get even shorter. It will get to a point where we as an audience can just say to the AI: give me a new series of 8 episodes of around 45 minutes with a new adventure of Luke Skywalker from between Empire strikes back and Return of the jedi, and it will generate something that we really enjoy. Studio's will ofcourse try to stop/block that, but that just won't be possible.

      • and it will generate something that we really enjoy

        That is not a statement you can justify. There are plenty of actual human authors and creators who create crap that nobody wants to listen to or watch. We see no evidence at this point that AI will be able to create things that we will "enjoy."

        As with anything complex, the devil is in the details. Google tried to incorporate diversity into their models, and found that it incorrectly rendered historical figures in terms of gender and race. Oops! You tweak the machine in one spot, and something weird or unexp

      • Do you want to know what is way easier than making a movie (book, music, art) with AI? Not paying to see the movie (book, music, art) made with AI.

  • Let’s say you prompt the AI to generate you a “big eared mouse character” and then you prompt that character through to make a movie.
    If someone else asks the same AI working with the same dataset to also generate a “big eared mouse character” they will get a same looking character as you. Can you sue them for copyright violation if they make a movie with it?
    If so I can think of a new patent-troll level industry — prompt sitting.

  • Shouldn't have taken Sora (Score:3)

    by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh&gmail,com> on Friday February 23, 2024 @07:21PM (#64264088) Journal

    An $800M studio mega-expansion was already a highly questionable idea in an era of Mandalorian-style virtual set technology.

    • Was thinking the same thing. It's easier said than done, however. George Lucas proved that some directors struggle with greenscreens etc.

    • That Mandalorian set wasn't cheap, it exceeded $100M. Perhaps his expansion included that kind of set. The AI angle may be a bit of a red herring though as Georgia is currently in the process of capping tax breaks for the industry.
    • Is this even serious? Nearly a billion dollars for one guy's studio expansion? Sounds more like he realised he didn't have a hope in hell of raising that kind of capital and used the current universal excuse of "AI" to back down without losing face.

  • In related news ... (Score:3)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Friday February 23, 2024 @07:48PM (#64264152)

    ... Madea Simmons promptly shorted stock in Perry's production company.

  • Use AI to strip productions of most of their staff and you're discouraging future generations from entering the business. Why even start if you'll just get replaced? Creativity will go with them.

  • There's a lot of expensive logistics and grunge work involved in making movies, and it takes time. Tyler Perry seems pretty interested in cutting a hunk of that out and I don't blame him. The makeup. The locations, the elaborate sets. Maybe a lot of it can be eliminated and yet have similar quality. Mr. Perry is imaginative, he could generate more movies and be able to experiment with little risk.

    But the more things move in that direction, the more possible it is for you and me to imagine and star in our ow

    • You hit the mark. While everyone is worried about the people that will lose jobs they aren't thinking about all the people that will now be able to produce amazing content on a shoestring budget. Given the last decade of Hollywood gatekeepers forcing politics into their product and refusing to take a risk on anything that isn't a sequel or remake of an established franchise I look forward to creatives being empowered to work around those gatekeepers.
    • We've seen people throw together holodeck programs in seconds on Star Trek for years. Turns out that's not so far fetched.
  • AI will definitely supersede your fake bullshit with cheaper fake bullshit.

  • Universal basic income...

    There is no reason for most people to work anymore. Make it real

  • He probably wanted to cancel it anyway but Sora just happened to be the perfect scapegoat for it.

    This is as stupid as chatgpt writing scripts and Dalle making concept art.

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