Lion King directors Roger Allers (L) and Rob Minkoff.
Kevin Winter | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence is a “Wild West” with “very few rules” — but it has the potential to democratize the film industry in the long term, according to the director of “The Lion King.”
Rob Minkoff, who co-directed the classic 1994 animated Disney film with Roger Allers, told CNBC in an interview that AI has the potential to “democratize” filmmaking in such a way that it’ll become less costly to produce and direct motion pictures by slashing the amount of expensive equipment involved.
“I think what AI will do is potentially democratize the process of making content, because if literally anyone is given these incredibly powerful tools, then what we should see is truly an explosion of content, an explosion of new voices,” Minkoff, 62, told CNBC.
Minkoff was speaking with CNBC ahead of the Reply AI Film Festival. The event, held by Italian tech firm Reply during the Venice International Film Festival, is a competition that awards filmmakers using AI to develop short films. Minkoff is a judge on the panel that decides the winners.
‘Hyperbole’ versus ‘legitimate concerns’
The arrival of new technology has for decades been a fear among people working in the film industry, Minkoff noted. For example, when computer animation arrived in the 1990s, there were similar fears about the impact it would have on jobs.
“When computer animation came along, there were a lot of people that were very afraid about it — what it would mean, how it would impact people’s jobs,” Minkoff, who also directed 1999’s “Stuart Little” and 2003’s “The Haunted Mansion,” told CNBC.
“What became very apparent early on was that, if people wanted to maintain their own personal relevancy in the industry, it became very important for them to really learn and adapt to changes in technology,” he added. “We’re experiencing something quite similar now with AI.”
Minkoff recalls the use of computers to create the famous stampede scene in “The Lion King.” In the scene, dozens of wildebeests are seen rushing after Simba, the movie’s protagonist.
In that scene, Minkoff recalls, “we could have 1000s of wildebeests rendered, but the technique that we used made it look very seamless with the rest of the drawn animation.”
“People are naturally and understandably worried when they look at what AI can do,” Minkoff said. However, he added, he doesn’t think the technology can replace all filmmakers, and that there’s a lot of “hyperbole” at the moment surrounding AI’s capabilities.
Still, Minkoff said, there are concerns about the application of AI in film that are warranted, such as those relating to copyright and the use of intellectual property in entertainment for training AI models.
“I hope that technology ultimately will save us, in some regards, or make life better, easier or more more prosperous,” Minkoff told CNBC. “But it’s the Wild West, where it seems like anything is possible and anything can be done.”
Minkoff added that there are “legitimate concerns” with AI when it comes to issues like the protection of media IP and tackling copyright theft. “I understand why people might want to slow it down or put guardrails on it to be careful, to be safe,” he said.
But ultimately, he doesn’t think the AI positive momentum will slow. “My impression is that it probably won’t be slowed down, because these decisions are left to judges and courtrooms to decide what’s right and wrong,” Minkoff said.
On the copyright question, he suggested the creation of a dedicated body designed to protect filmmakers’ intellectual property and remunerate them, like what the American Society for Composers, Authors and Publishers and Broadcast Music, Inc. do for the music industry.
‘Always the human behind the technology’
The Reply AI Film Festival, which awarded three winners this week, started out as an internal competition among employees, with staff using AI tools to produce movie-quality videos, Filippo Rizzante, chief technology officer of Reply, told CNBC.
“There has been a lot of progress with technology for producing creative work,” Rizzante said in an interview last week. “This is impacting a lot the quantity and quality of what we are producing as humanity.”
Rizzante pushed back on fears that AI will displace people working in entertainment. The technology, he said, “will completely change how the industry is delivering content today, but not necessarily change the number of people employed in the movie industry.”
In this year’s edition of the festival, one of the runners-up, “Gia Pham,” depicts a woman looking at a takeout menu before being transported to a colorful picturesque 2D world. The narrator of the video, who begins by speaking in English, starts talking in Japanese after the shift from 3D to 2D.
Alexander de Lukowicz, co-director of “Gia Pham,” told CNBC that humans are essential to how he and his team work to generate short films. AI tools such as DALL-E and Midjourney, he said, helped the directors of his short film “enhance worlds we weren’t able to generate before.”
“It’s always the human behind the technology that has to guide the technology to gain the proper result out of it. We wanted to produce something like a film to really check the boundaries of what’s possible,” de Lukowicz told CNBC.