Hollywood Is Already Using AI (and Hiding It)

Summary

An AI-generated image from the Amazon series House of David. Art: Courtesy of Prime This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. One recent evening on the Eastside of Los Angeles, a couple hundred people gathered in a cavernous old soundstage to celebrate the arrival of a new AI studio — one of the nearly 100 now operating in Hollywood. Called Asteria Film Co., it was founded by Bryn Mooser, a serial entrepreneur, and his girlfriend, the actress and writer Natasha Lyonne. Mooser, 45, is tall with a sculpted jaw and salt-and-pepper beard; he fits the role of a rumpled yet elegant pitchman so well that Cartier shot an advertorial of him titled “The Entrepreneur.” He led me through the studio: a 25,000-square-foot collection of soundstages and a workshop built in 1916 by the producer Mack Sennett, who pioneered new uses of scenic backdrops in early filmmaking. In the lobby, he paused at a glass-encased architectural model of the studio as it looked when it was first built. “There was no roof because they were just using sunlight,” he told me. “It was before electricity.” As Mooser saw it, Asteria fit into a lineage of creatives who had ushered in new eras of filmmaking. He reminded me that Walt Disney was a technologist. So was George Lucas. “The story of Hollywood is the story of technology,” he said. We met Lyonne in a corner of the studio where uncanny clips generated by Asteria’s AI model were playing on a dozen old-school televisions. The footage was unnerving. Robots with smooth, blank faces typed blindly in an old-fashioned office. Disembodied mannequin heads drifted in space. Lyonne was drinking a sugar-free Red Bull and wearing a structured black velvet jacket with a plunging neckline. She was fresh off a plane from Seattle, where she had done a talk with the science-fiction author Ted Chiang, who has written at length about why AI will never create great art. Over the past few year...