Writer-director Paul Schrader favours the utilisation of artificial intelligence in filmmaking. Speaking to Vanity Fair, Schrader recently said that he is creating a screenplay that he believes is perfectly suited for the inaugural fully AI-based film.
“I think we’re only two years away from the first AI feature,” predicted the filmmaker. He explained, “I was just on the phone with someone today about a script I had, and I said, ‘You know, this would be a perfect script to do all AI … It’s just a tool.” Schrader compared AI to an author's descriptive methods, noting that just as a writer depicts a character's facial reaction with words, AI serves as a new code. “When it comes to Artificial Intelligence, you’re a pixelator, and you can create the face, and you can create the emotion on the face, and you can sculpt it the same way an author sculpts the reaction in a novel or a story.”
The filmmaker also argued that AI is even likely to produce better film criticism than today as compared to the average user because it has no human bias. "Often, when you are doing coverage, you get a hint that the person who is paying you wants you to like this. You cannot give that information to AI."
These observations come after a recent social media post from Schrader where he suggested a complex algorithm for robotic reviews. "It should be fairly simple to program ChatGPT to review a new film in the manner of, say, [Pauline] Kael, [Andrew] Sarris or [Manny] Farber.” He also outlined the vast set of information the AI tool would process in just a matter of seconds that reviewers usually would even spend a lifetime processing.
