A24 Films succumbs to the AI darkside

Image: Free Vectors

The campaign against the creative class has rustled up a surprising new foot soldier: A24 Films. It seems that the production house, known for artsy-fartsy (God, how I love them) horror and suspense flicks, has accepted a $75 million dollar investment from Google to partner up on the creation of new film making tools. You know, for the arts

The partnership will give A24 access to DeepMind’s research and infrastructure, while DeepMind researchers will work with the studio to build out new workflows. The deal does not give Google access to A24’s content library or its data.

The deal represents the latest marriage between a Hollywood studio and AI in an era where companies have oscillated between partnerships and lawsuits.

It feels like a big risk. According to Variety, 85% of the people who saw A24’s latest production, Backrooms, were under the age of 35. Fun fact: A Pew Research poll released earlier this month showed that around half of folks under 30 years of age think that AI going to curb stomp society, making life more difficult than it already is. I’m certain that the Venn diagram of these two data points doesn’t overlap in a way that ends in a way that turns A24’s AI-assisted future into a clusterfuck.

The thing that the production house seems to miss is that the masses who know enough to loathe it, don’t hate Artificial Intelligence because it’s creating art. We hate it because it’s been trained on stolen human perspiration and gets used, far too often by the affluent as an excuse to discard their employees in the name of higher profits through lower overhead. Laying off storyboard artists and VFX creators might let them churn out movies faster and for less money, but it’s going to piss a good chunk of its audience off.