Why Meta and Google Are Offering Millions to Hollywood Studios for AI Content Licensing

Meta and Google are now said to be in early stages of acquisition talks with major Hollywood studios so they could get their hands on content for their advanced AI video generative model; cash is reportedly being offered in large amounts to license copyrights.

Bloomberg said that these tech firms have offered to fund projects in tens of millions of dollars to get partnerships with studios. The goal is to leverage the massive trove of high-quality data from these studios to fine-tune their AI models – thus improving their model’s capacity to generate scenes from text prompts. Microsoft funded Open AI is also involved in similar conversation.

How Hollywood’s Film Industries is Slowly Embracing the Use of Artificial Intelligence

Hollywood studios are interested in using AI to cut production costs, but at the same time, they do not want to surrender their creative control. For instance, the well-known actress Scarlett Johansson made it clear that OpenAI should stop using a voice similar to hers for their chatbot; such concerns illustrate problems with the improper use of celebrities’ personas.

Varied Responses from Studios

There are studios, for instance, Warner Bros. Discovery, which is willing to license particular programs for usage in AI training. On the other hand, there are other manufacturers such as Walt Disney and Netflix who have refused to offer contents of their production to the tech companies while at the same time desiring to engage the companies in other ways.

AI is already finding its way into more facets within Hollywood production such as de-aging the actors and realistic makeup effects. Most current and newly released tools like OpenAI’s Sora or Alphabet’s Veo could extend that even more by allowing filmmakers to create realistic clips from simple textual descriptions within a short time.

Here is a list of concerns that the industry has over the expansion of opportunities in AI techniques;

However, advancement in AI technology has been a fast pace which also caused some concern in the entertainment industry. In the previous year, actors and writers went on strike for a very long time believing that AI may one day take their jobs. Celebrities like actor and filmmaker Tyler Perry have advocated for the regulation of artificial intelligence to protect people’s talent in the future from robots.

Meta and Google’s current negotiations with Hollywood studios may be just the beginning of an upcoming shift in content production, helmed by hybrid human-AI combinations.