Top Hollywood talent is currently welcoming AI with a warm embrace.
That’s at least what DreamWorks cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg says he’s hearing from his network of Hollywood veterans, whom he dubbed “among the most talented showrunners [and] creators today.”
“I would say almost across the board they have all talked about how the AI tools today have been helpful to them,” Katzenberg said in an onstage discussion at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. “They have seen them as a resource and an asset that have made them more productive … They’ve been able to widen the diversity of their work, the quality of their work … They find these tools an amazing resource for them—and it’s not constraining them, it’s inspiring them.”
Katzenberg’s optimistic outlook is in contrast to some of the anxiety about AI expressed by the entertainment industry’s creative class, as new video- and music-generation tools become more capable and accessible. During the Hollywood strikes of 2023, numerous high-profile actors and writers spoke out against using AI to replace industry jobs.
The debate is likely to only grow more heated: On Monday, OpenAI released Sora, which can create professional-looking videos from text inputs.
In his current role, Katzenberg is investing in the sector alongside Sujay Jaswa, cofounder of their investment firm, WndrCo. The duo were joined onstage by one of their portfolio founders, May Habib, the CEO of Writer, a generative AI platform for enterprises that has raised more than $300 million at a most recent valuation of $1.9 billion.
Habib, for her part, was candid with her views on the changing role of humans that will be ushered in by the next wave of gen AI—autonomous AI agents—as they gain traction in the corporate world.
“Humans are tools,” she said. “And I know that sounds nuts, but we are moving to a world of autonomous actions for AI [where] we are going to be nudged when we are needed.”
But before that transformation happens—whether that sounds exciting or terrifying is fair to debate—business leaders have to move away from an obsession with the latest developments among large language models and figure out their back-end data and business flow strategies first.
“It is so confusing for the enterprise right now,” she said.
The speed of advancement in the sector is one reason why, and a source of industry debate. Are the most advanced LLMs hitting a wall or is artificial general intelligence—or AGI—just around the corner?
“We think AGI is a long way away,” WndrCo’s Jaswa said. As a result, he added, their bet is that AI tools are going to just keep improving industries, not destroying them.
“If we are wrong and AGI is just around the corner,” he noted, “all bets are off.”
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