GoKawiilKathleen Kennedy, the Hollywood super-producer behind culture-defining megahits like Jurassic Park and the Star Wars franchise, recently put a question to the head of the American Film Institute: “How are you going to teach taste?”
As Kennedy told an audience of industry insiders who gathered in Manhattan this week for the Runway AI Summit, the venerable LA film academy has been incorporating certain artificial intelligence tools into their curriculum. Kennedy says she asked the institute’s dean how the school would continue to raise generations of not just prompt-generators but discerning filmmakers with a distinct point of view. “Taste is fundamental,” Kennedy, 72, told the crowd. “It does define the choices you’re making.”
In other words, how could the AFI ensure that these AI tools were being used to make work that is, you know, good?
It’s a great question. And the sort that was in short supply during this industry confab, which New York-based AI company Runway hosted less than a week after OpenAI killed its video app Sora, disrupting the company’s $1 billion deal with Disney. Despite that blow to early prophecies that Sora would remake Hollywood, the hype machine was working overtime Tuesday, as executives labeled AI as a technological feat on par with the harnessing discovery of fire.
“AI has become the conversation,” Runway’s cofounder and CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela told the audience at the event while an AI-generated video showed an old man on the subway reading a newspaper when the big bold headline “AI Has Become the Conversation.” In addition to offering a suite of text-to-video generation and VFX tools for “creatives,” Runway also operates an annual AI-generated film competition. It’s positioned itself at the forefront of the creative revolution in AI. As I discovered at the event, that also involves trying to make “generate” happen. As in popularizing the verb. Summit guests were offered free T-shirts exclaiming “Thank You For Generating With Us!” in the iconic Bookman font of those “Thank You For Shopping With Us!” plastic bags.
“We’re living in magic times,” Valenzuela told the crowd, in a tone-setting, 10 am keynote titled “The Normalization of Magic: AI and What’s Ahead of Us.” The title was a nod to sci-fi giant Arthur C. Clarke’s “three laws” outlined in a 1962 essay, the third and most famous of which claims that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” As if to prove the point, another AI-generated image was projected on big screens spread across an enormous high-rise ballroom, showing Apple Computer cofounder Steve Jobs striding the ancient Athenian agora with a be-toga’d sage (Socrates, I’d guess). “We are literally here!” Valenzuela beamed.
Well, not literally. But you know what he means.
By and large, Runway’s AI summit was marked by this sort of wild, declarative enthusiasm. Early in the day, Paramount’s chief technology officer, Phil Wiser, cautioned that he wanted to describe the benefits of AI without being “hypey or hyperbolic.” He then immediately went so far as to claim that generative AI ranks among the top 10–and maybe even top five–“technology trends of all time,” ranking it right alongside the printing press, and fire.
The mood at these kinds of events brings to mind one of the only funny Bluesky posts: “CEO of Oreo cookies: The Oreo cookie is as important as oxygen.” Another speaker compared AI’s revolutionary potential to that of the printing press (again), the photographic film camera, and Adobe Photoshop (she, incidentally, heads up Adobe’s new AI business ventures). An executive from video game studio Electronic Arts boasted that AI was able to “close the gap between imagination and creation.”