Lionsgate is founded

Earlier this year, Michael Burns, vice-president of the Lionsgate cinema studio, made a daring complaint. According to Vulture, he said that thanks to a partnership with Generative AI Company Runway IA, the company that houses franchises like John Wick And Hunger games could recondition one of its signing series as an anime, entirely generated by AI in a few hours, and resell it as a new film.

This did not particularly happen. According to a report by The Wrap, it is because the partnership, announced last year as a “first of its kind” agreement between a film studio and a generative AI business, did not go as planned. The plan would have struck the clips linked to the size of the Lionsgate catalog, the limits of the Runway model and the concerns of copyright and the granting of licenses.

The agreement concluded between companies last year saw Lionsgate give access to the AI ​​track to its full film library, which Runway would use to create a personalized and exclusive model that Lionsgate could use to create videos generated by AI. But, according to The Wrap, the Lionsgate library is not enough to create an entirely functional model. In fact, says the report, the Disney library would not be sufficient for such a task. The reality of the construction of a generative AI model is that it needs a massive amount of data to be able to produce a sufficient and functional output. If the studio wanted to use the track to create a lighting effect in a film, for example, it would not be able to make this effect if it had enough reference points with which to work.

This seems to check, if you think about it. Models with access to massive amounts of data, such as Google’s VEO or OPENAI SoRA, produce videos that contain countless errors, seeds and strange valley type quirks. The possibility of creating a generative model on a much more limited training data set will produce much more limited generative capacities.

And then there are legal issues surrounding the potential use of generative AI which comes entirely from the results of Lionsgate.

Burns by a filtered version on the anime of a film? He told Vulture that he should pay the players and other rights participants to sell it. Who would that include? It is not entirely clear. Do editors need to get a check? Directors? What about the blunders for their lighting work? The report indicates that there are many unanswered legal questions which extend beyond the fact that Lionsgate has the intellectual property which is really to publish a film generated by AI.

“We are very satisfied with our partnership with Runway and our other AI initiatives, which are progressing according to the plan,” said Peter Wilkes, communications director at Lionsgate, in Gizmodo. “We consider AI as an important tool to serve our filmmakers, and we have already successfully applied it to several cinematographic and televised projects to improve quality, increase efficiency and create new exciting narrative opportunities. We also use AI to achieve significant cost savings and greater efficiency in the licenses of our cinematographic activities.

The track did not respond to a request for comments.

There are indicators that Lionsgate uses the track, but perhaps not via the exclusive model planned. In this Vulture play earlier this year, the company was working on the creation of a trailer generated by AI-AI for a film that had not yet been shot, with the hope that the leaders could sell it according to the scenes manufactured. Whether the public or creatives are served by this process is a different question.