{"id":629510,"date":"2026-09-27T23:30:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T23:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/629510\/"},"modified":"2026-09-27T23:30:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T23:30:13","slug":"film-execs-creators-discuss-ai-divide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/629510\/","title":{"rendered":"Film Execs & Creators Discuss AI Divide"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMusk producer Nick Shumaker<\/a>, Hollywood film financier Vania Schlogel<\/a>, directors Zack London (Gods Don\u2019t Give Gifts) and Nick Holt (AI<\/a>: Probably Nothing to Worry About) took to the stage at the Zurich Summit<\/a> this weekend to dig into the implications of AI for film.<\/p>\n

\n\tSchlogel, who is founder and managing partner of L.A.-based Atwater<\/a> Capital, also took up the baton of Chief Strategy Officer at AI creative platform Magnific, formerly known as Freepik, this summer.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe exec said that while her roots were in Hollywood film finance, she had understood it was an imperative for her to get to grips with AI during a board meeting at Magnific.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIn an interview about a year ago with the Financial Times, I\u2019d actually said very publicly, that when all this AI stuff gets really big, I\u2019m just going to go back to Idaho and disappear into the mountains, and that\u2019s always actually been the genuine kind of feeling I espouse, as I\u2019m not a technologist. I\u2019ve always been a traditional Hollywood financier,\u201d she told the panel.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOur founder showed us videos and images from our largest competitor and how they had become viral, and it was sexualized children\u2019s IP, it was horrible depictions of women, some of them famous, some of them not\u2026 some very racist things,\u201d she explained. \u201cI had this light bulb moment that this might not be something that I have necessarily been inured to historically, but I actually do need to be involved in.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSince embracing the technology, Schlogel said she had seen multiple cases where the use of AI made sense, commercially and ethically, even if there were aspects of the technology she has qualms about such as the way in which the confident tone of AI assistants can encourage \u201ccognitive surrender\u201d in human beings even when their level of expertise on a subject is higher that the LLM they are consulting.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt really is on all of us to get in front of it so that we can shape the ethical direction it goes. Because this will shape society, is shaping society, is even shaping human empathy and how we view each other. So it\u2019s so important to get in the driver\u2019s seat of it, whether you love it or hate,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n

\n\tShumaker, head of AC Independent at Anonymous Content, acknowledged the power of AI as a tool across the cinema chain but said he felt compelled to raise questions around the use of original content by generative AI programs.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe whole fair use in AI thing needs to be addressed. The lawsuits from New York Times, from every major media outlet, disregarding just stealing things from my perspective and ingesting is totally inappropriate. And I just want to put that on record,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat we can say that this is the way things are going, at the same time as there\u2019s theft with regards to intellectual property, it\u2019s not a good thing. The notion that we get clogged up in lawsuits for five or six years to address that is not good for humans, for creators, or frankly, for the future of writers or cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe clarified that while Alex Gibney\u2019s Musk, on which he is a producer, touches on the way Elon Musk is using AI to shape the future, and not necessarily for the best, the documentary used very little of the technology in its production. <\/p>\n

\n\tHe noted the Elon Musk avatar had been created in CGI by humans at a company, which has collaborated with Gibney in the past, with AI only used at the post-production stage to help lip-synching.<\/p>\n

\n\tLondon, who is also known under the YouTube pseudonym of Gossip Goblin, is currently gearing up for the theatrical release of his fully AI-generated sci-fi anthology Gods Don\u2019t Give Gifts. <\/p>\n

\n\tHe echoed Schlogel comments on needing to get ahead of the technology, suggested that the polarisation of views in the creative communities around AI was not necessarily helpful or going to change anything in the outcome..<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe the tricky thing is that people see AI as this monolithic thing. Obviously you have full end-to-end automation on one end of the spectrum, and super light AI augmentation on the other, like tweaking the voice of Adrien Brody in The Brutalist. That\u2019s a pretty vast spectrum,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s become such a polarized topic, you have kind of radical zealots on both sides of the equation. You have the burn Hollywood to the ground side and you have the fuck AI side that you know basically refuses to even accept that it\u2019s part of the equation,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe reality is that it\u2019s happening. It\u2019s coming. There\u2019s no point in human history where we\u2019ve seen incredibly advanced technology and said, \u2018No, we\u2019re not going to do it.\u2019 The luddites didn\u2019t succeed, and probably the anti-AI movement won\u2019t either.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTalking about the use of AI on his upcoming film Gods Don\u2019t Give Gifts, London said it would never have been made without the technology. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis film would never get greenlit otherwise. It\u2019s way too esoteric and niche and cerebral, and so it\u2019s not that we\u2019re replacing a story that would otherwise get told and hire more people. This story wouldn\u2019t exist otherwise; it wouldn\u2019t get made. \u201c<\/p>\n

\n\tThe trio were joined on stage by director Nick Holt, whose documentary AI: Probably Nothing to Worry About was playing at the summit\u2019s parent event the Zurich Film Festival this weekend<\/p>\n

\n\tRevolving around interviews with computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as \u201cthe godfather of AI,\u201d for his work building artificial neural networks, DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, as well as Anthropic and OpenAI engineers among others, it explores the question of whether AI will save or destroy humanity. ,<\/p>\n

\n\tTapping into questions around how AI will impact creativity, Holt said that, for now, he thought AI tools could make filmmaking more accessible.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe\u2019ve all got access to a pen and pencil, but not all of us can writer a Booker or Pulitzer award-winning novel. I think there are people with who could use AI to roll out concepts and films that otherwise might not get made. I just hope there\u2019ll be a sense that the best work will always rise to the top,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHollywood studios aren\u2019t shy of making 100 million dollar duds, and then the 14 year old in his bedroom or her bedroom using AI tools could make the next big hit. I think it\u2019s a phenomenal tool for that, but I think the interesting thing that we have to deal with is are these systems grown rather than built, and then where does it go as far as our limitations?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Musk producer Nick Shumaker, Hollywood film financier Vania Schlogel, directors Zack London (Gods Don\u2019t Give Gifts) and Nick…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629511,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,284533,85,46,284534,125,284535,284536,33145],"class_list":["post-629510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-atwater","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-nick-shumaker","tag-technology","tag-vania-schlogel","tag-zach-london","tag-zurich-summit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}