{"id":217642,"date":"2025-10-11T21:41:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-11T21:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/217642\/"},"modified":"2025-10-11T21:41:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T21:41:13","slug":"hollywood-has-no-idea-what-to-do-about-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/217642\/","title":{"rendered":"Hollywood has no idea what to do about AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath<\/a>, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.<\/p>\n

This week, I got an up-close look at how far apart Silicon Valley and Hollywood are on what to do about AI.<\/p>\n

First, at OpenAI DevDay, Sam Altman presented the new Sora app as a gift to content creators. If anything, he suggested, OpenAI was being too censorious by not allowing people to make even more kinds of AI videos.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the whole, creators, rights holders, people are very excited about the potential of this,\u201d Altman said during a media Q&A in San Francisco on Monday that I attended. \u201cThey believe it will deepen connection. It\u2019s kind of like a new generation of fanfiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next day, I arrived at Bloomberg\u2019s Screentime event in Los Angeles to hear how media executives, agents, and studio heads felt about the AI meteor that\u2019s heading their way. Sora had just hit 1 million downloads in the App Store and was top of mind for everyone. Altogether, I came away with the impression that Hollywood\u2019s leaders still have no idea what to do about the risk AI poses, and they\u2019re going to be steamrolled by technology that\u2019s moving faster than they can comprehend.<\/p>\n

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison called AI a \u201cnew pencil\u201d to create with<\/p>\n

I lost count of how many times a version of the phrase \u201cwe care about copyright\u201d was invoked at Screentime like a prayer. At the same time, no one at the event wanted to specifically address the fact that OpenAI clearly trained on their IP<\/a> without permission and unleashed a product that, at least initially, had no shame in making that clear<\/a>. The fact that Hollywood\u2019s leaders are unable to share a public perspective on this issue, or more importantly, what they are going to do about it, should be alarming to everyone working in the business.<\/p>\n

While onstage, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters completely dodged a question from Bloomberg\u2019s Lucas Shaw about Sora specifically, and instead waxed about the more boring ways that AI is being used throughout nearly every part of the production process. Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison also chose to tout the less controversial, tool-like aspect of AI, calling it a \u201cnew pencil\u201d to create with. The only executive I heard come close to addressing the real issue on everyone\u2019s minds was Warner Music CEO (and former YouTube exec) Robert Kyncl, who made clear that Warner\u2019s content must be licensed to train on, and that there will be repercussions for those who don\u2019t follow the rules.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not surprising that the music industry has a stronger perspective than, say, the hemming and hawing<\/a> about AI currently being done by the big talent agencies. The labels are better positioned to take on AI companies as a consolidated group of players who have navigated a version of this problem before with the rise of music streaming. Kyncl went so far as to predict that AI will benefit the music industry long-term, similar to how YouTube eventually solved its copyright problem and evolved into a major distribution platform for the entertainment industry.<\/p>\n

He may be right about music specifically<\/a>, but the lack of collective action from the rest of Hollywood means that the AI companies are poised to keep getting away with asking for forgiveness instead of permission. OpenAI\u2019s decision to train Sora in this manner was a deliberate choice, not an accident, and it showed a complete lack of regard for the implications of sucking up everyone\u2019s content to feed its AI. Altman is simply following the same playbook the tech industry has used in the past<\/a> to achieve dominance, so who can blame him this time?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217643,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,38965,1283,46210,74],"class_list":["post-217642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-column","tag-openai","tag-sources","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}