What happens when the film industry embraces AI?

The rapid development of artificial intelligence is making waves in the film industry worldwide. As a side event of the 26th Shanghai International in Film Festival (SIFF), professionals from the film industry and AI gathered at a forum in Shanghai on Monday, discussing how the two together create a new vision for making sci-fi films. 

Delivering a speech at the forum, AI scientist Dai Bo said AI is like an artist's brush, but it cannot really replace the artist in creating artworks. 

Dai, also an expert in digital content creation with AI-generated content (AIGC) tools, said the combination of AIGC and the film industry can provide more room for imagination in the development of science and technology, and the future of film creation lies in the cooperation of AI and filmmakers.

During a discussion panel, Wang Hongwei, associate professor of the film directing department at Beijing Film Academy, said AI can provide multiple solutions in the process of developing film projects and creating scripts. 

"It's only a matter of like time before AI is better than humans in terms of film creation, especially in the quantity of information and writing skills, but the use of AI in producing master-level pieces is still up for debate," science fiction writer Wang Jinkang said at the panel.

Japanese animation director and mechanical designer Shoji Kawamori said AI at present is usually used to generate text, image, and video content, but its application to fields of touch and vision is limited. 

Dong Runnian, a Chinese director and scriptwriter, told the press he has used AI tools to create both English and Chinese scripts and found that the quality of these scripts is affected by how the AI models were trained. He said there's still room for improvement as these tools find it hard to understand how humans really think and express themselves. 

The forum is an event of the film festival's Sci-Fi Film Week, which focuses on the theme of AI this year, and 10 selected AI-themed films will be screened during this section. 

The Sci-Fi Film Week also features events that promote and display science fiction IPs and film projects. Young science fiction writers and filmmakers will meet and communicate here and discover the opportunities and potentials in adapting science fiction literature to films. 

(Xiang Jia'ao also contributed to the reporting.)