Jeffrey Katzenberg, the legendary Hollywood producer and executive, thinks the entertainment industry needs to accept AI if it wants to remain relevant.
In a 2,377-word essay posted to X on Wednesday, Katzenberg leaned on his history working through the industry’s various technological changes. He implored his fellow creatives to acknowledge AI as a tool similar to those pioneered by the likes of Thomas Edison and adopted by the likes of Charlie Chaplin.
“Hollywood needs to accept that AI is not going away,” Katzenberg wrote. “The energy they are spending trying to make it disappear is energy they are not spending deciding the terms on which it will exist. And the terms are everything. The north needs something from it that they cannot build and cannot buy: creativity. The kind that takes a blank page and conjures a single right answer where there was none and has held audiences for a century. Without it, the most powerful reasoning engine ever invented will still be missing the only thing that makes a story worth telling.”
The essay follows the yearslong debate over AI’s place within the creative industry, which has further rankled people after AI company leaders acknowledged the tools may slip out of human control.
Katzenberg’s WndrCo recently invested in Reactor, a startup that says its platform can produce gen-AI video in real time. About Reactor, he told Variety, “I was incredibly impressed, if not astounded, by just how innovative their approach is to storytelling tools.” Katzenberg also has reportedly discussed creating a new AI video startup with the former head of OpenAI’s now-defunct Sora.
Katzenberg, whose career highlights include serving as the chair of Walt Disney Studios and co-founding DreamWorks, compared the wonder he’s felt from witnessing AI tools in action to how he felt when seeing computer-generated imagery appear — and the initial backlash that followed remained similar. While some CGI was used to enhance traditionally animated films like “The Little Mermaid” and “The Lion King,” he wrote, it was Pixar’s “Toy Story” that showcased how “a fully computer-animated film could carry real emotional weight, that it could make audiences laugh, cry, and believe.” When DreamWorks moved into creating fully CGI-animated films, animators who didn’t adapt to the new tools lost their jobs — but, he wrote, the industry could not simply decide whether the tools should or shouldn’t exist.
“The tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap,” he wrote. “First, we must all agree that there should be terms. Then we can have the crucial debate about what fairness requires.”
Once those terms are decided upon and agreed to by all creative stakeholders, Katzenberg thinks it could lead to a new Hollywood renaissance — though he admitted he didn’t have all the answers. “How we come through this is a choice,” he wrote.
“As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer,” he wrote. “Studios will get to take more risks. There will be more seats at the table, and very soon entirely new forms of storytelling … Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process.”
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