The heart of Screenland is cozying up to artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
The open space in Culver Steps typically hosts community events and movie nights. But on Wednesday, it turned into a job fair <\/a>for companies looking to hire talent for AI studios. <\/p>\n Companies showed off their life-like AI videos, urging emerging talent \u2014 and out-of-work creatives \u2014 to join them as they worked to reinvent traditional filmmaking.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a great breeding ground for this new filmmaking,\u201d Dave Clark, cofounder of AI film production studio Promise, said about Culver City. \u201cTo the independent filmmakers here, it\u2019s time to take back power.\u201d <\/p>\n The event was part of LA Tech Week<\/a>, a citywide event organized by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. <\/p>\n Culver City is already home to big names in Hollywood and technology like Amazon MGM Studios, TikTok, Apple, and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Recently, a growing cluster of AI studios, including Promise, TrueShort, Native Foreign, and PhantomX, are expanding in the neighborhood. <\/p>\n Luma AI, a $4-billion Palo Alto startup that makes generative AI video software, opened a facility in Culver City last year. The company\u2019s Dream Lab occupies a 7,000 square feet space and employs a team of 13.<\/p>\n \u201cCulver City is the future of AI and filmmaking,\u201d Caroline Ingeborn, Luma AI\u2019s chief operating officer, said in a statement. <\/p>\n The companies said they are drawn by the legacy studios they hope to rival. The fact that space is available and affordable thanks to the general decline of the entertainment business in L.A. also helps. <\/p>\n Proponents of AI see it as an antidote to high production costs and say it allows creatives to make films that otherwise would never be made. However, many in Hollywood, its unions, and the public at large are suspicious of the surge in AI use, worried it is stealing the work of human creatives and taking people\u2019s jobs.<\/p>\n The new wave of AI filmmakers have accepted the rise of AI as inevitable, and are forging ahead, increasingly in Culver City. <\/p>\n The city is not opposed to it.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re a hub for the creative economy that is continuing to evolve,\u201d said Adam Troy, Culver City assistant city manager, in a statement. \u201cWe look forward to what\u2019s next in the space and what businesses see their future here in Culver City.\u201d <\/p>\n TrueShort moved into Culver City last month, taking over most of a 5,000-square-foot office space near Amazon\u2019s studio. The AI studio has raised $17 million and employs about 45 people. Around 75% of them are creatives: filmmakers, editors, sound designers and composers.<\/p>\n Its streaming app<\/a> hosts short-form true crime audio and video shows that are fully AI-generated. On average, a 10-minute episode costs about $10,000 to make and takes about 10 days to go from idea to release.<\/p>\n \u201cThe next Netflix or the next Disney is going to come out of AI this time,\u201d said Nate Tepper, cofounder of TrueShort. \u201cAnd, in a way, it kind of needs to be a startup because the big incumbents are not going to move as fast. They\u2019re going to be afraid of backlash.\u201d<\/p>\n The company outgrew its Santa Monica office and is now located near Culver Theater. <\/p>\n \u201cIt is cool being next to the other bigger lots like Sony and Amazon, only because it\u2019s inspiring,\u201d Tepper said. \u201cWe want the lot. We want to become the big studio.\u201d<\/p>\n Culver City-based creative studio Native Foreign makes AI commercials for brands that are more open than Hollywood about AI use. It has done ads for Virgin and Toys R Us. <\/p>\n It made one of the first AI-animated shorts, \u201cCritterz,\u201d using OpenAI\u2019s software and planned to help make a movie based on it, but OpenAI pulled out of the project and canceled its video-making AI model. <\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t have the kind of opportunities that maybe some huge huge studios and companies have, so we are able to bag above our weight with these tools,\u201d Nik Kleverov, co-founder of the company, said on a panel at LA Tech Week. <\/p>\n Google-backed Promise is another Culver City-adjacent AI studio that\u2019s a proponent of hybrid productions<\/a>, where human actors work with AI specialists. The company uses AI to generate backgrounds, visual effects, and synthetic humans for its slate of films, but a lot of the performances are shot on soundstages across L.A. using actors.<\/p>\n