Talking Hollywood’s AI Future (and That Harry Potter-Balenciaga Mashup)
As part of the conversations I had for my AI in Hollywood story, I spoke with Matthew Kershaw, vice president of commercial strategy at D-ID, a technology company that uses AI to help streamline creative processes. The company recently launched chat.D-ID, a web app that lets users talk face-to-face with photorealistic AI in a natural way.
In 2021, D-ID partnered with Warner Bros. on a marketing campaign that allowed users to insert themselves into the Hugh Jackman movie “Reminiscence.” Their technology was also used in the viral Balenciaga-Harry Potter video, which featured characters of the popular fantasy franchise in an imaginary campaign for the French luxury house. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
What does D-ID do and how does it fit into the landscape of artificial intelligence in media and entertainment?
Kershaw: We’re one of the leading platforms in the generative AI space. We create digital people. Literally, we take an image that might be your photograph or something you’ve created in Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, and take words you’ve scripted or written with ChatGPT, or your own voice so you could speak — and you put those two things together so the image will come to life and speak the words that you’ve written or generated. We’re kind of that third step. There’s image generators and text generators and we sit in the middle that turns that into something live.
We’re mostly focused on marketing, learning development, internal training and corporate training and a little bit on customer experience. That said, we’ve also been used by a lot of creators. The Balenciaga-Harry Potter mashup was created — and the hundreds of versions of that — was made using our technology. As part of our DNA, our origin story was around protecting people’s privacy. We have heavy hitters on our board from Microsoft and Amazon — people that created a lot of the frameworks that we use around privacy and trying to make sure that generative AI is led for good. We do a lot of pro bono projects, so that’s also the heart of how we do what we do.
Can you talk more about how the Balenciaga-Harry Potter mashup came to be?
Kershaw: The creator took the voices using, I think, ElevenLabs. They’ve taken everything into video editing and put effects on it — all those cinematic pull and push, zoom in, zoom out, kind of moves. The heart of it is just a really clever idea. That creator, demonflyingfox, came up with a great concept and executed it really well. It’s really interesting to me that, then, there’s hundreds of these other versions of it, because it did have a diminishing return. Everyone’s seen it.
That’s interesting to me from the point of view of — at the heart of entertainment — is our ideas. New ideas and being part of this community culture. That’s something an AI just can’t do. Like, when it really boils down to it, an AI can prompt ideas and help with the process as a tool, but it’s never gonna really know what truly is interesting and what’s truly entertaining because it’s not part of our culture. It doesn’t really understand us. It is just a machine for making things that sound human or look human. But at the end of the day, it’s humans that control it, and the incredible, creative people amongst us who can spot that one eye.
Do you have concerns when it comes to AI in the media and entertainment space? What are some of the advantages of the technology?
Kershaw: I’m a bit less worried about the entertainment space because entertainment — movies, for example — since almost their inception, there’s been special effects and stuff with the camera, and people have been doing funky things with optics to make it look like there’s a ghost there. So I’m less concerned about the entertainment space. I suppose the bigger concern is in political space or the risk of fraud and imitating other people and not knowing where the truth is.
Do you see AI playing a bigger role in Hollywood in the future?
Kershaw: There are a few areas, particularly in the writing and concepting stage. There’s obviously the special effects and movie effects. The reality is that it is going to be AI-driven in the very near future. It’s just a question of time. But I don’t think anyone really has a problem with that. A lot of that work that’s currently done is just really backbreaking work, which is not very necessarily very fulfilling for the people involved. So, the fact that you can just be able to automate more of that thing won’t be an issue. I think voice is an issue. Eleven Labs, and people like them, have shown us how easy it is to clone a voice.
Now, for the rest of last week’s biggest news:
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NBCUniversal Chief Executive Jeff Shell left the Comcast Corp.-owned company after 19 years due to an “inappropriate relationship with a woman in the company,” Shell said in a statement.
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NBCUniversal’s Peacock hit 22 million streaming subscribers in the first quarter, a year-over-year increase of more than 60%, though earnings for content and experiences were down due to higher costs associated with the streaming service, per Comcast Corp.’s latest earnings report.
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Russell Wolff, who was in charge of the ESPN+ streaming service, was among those affected by layoffs at the Disney-owned sports network, according to people familiar with the situation.
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Spotify Technology SA exceeded its own forecast and ended the first quarter with 210 million premium subscribers, up from 205 million at the end of 2022, according to its latest earnings report.
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Roku Inc. gained 1.6 million active streaming accounts in the first quarter, beating Wall Street expectations to bring its total to 71.6 million, up from 70 million at the end of 2022.
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Top-rated conservative host Tucker Carlson was fired from the Fox News Channel in a surprise move that came a week after the network agreed to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems to settle a defamation lawsuit.
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CNN fired anchor Don Lemon after 17 years following sexist comments he made during broadcast and several reports of his alleged mistreatment of female colleagues at the network.
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Amazon reportedly laid off 100 employees in its Prime Video and Studios departments — including Tracey Lentz, head of creative, unscripted TV — as the wave of job cuts at Amazon continue. Amazon ended the first quarter with $127.4 billion in revenue, beating Wall Street expectations and touting “Creed III” and limited series “Daisy Jones & The Six” for contributing to the success on its entertainment front, according to the latest earnings report.
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Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube saw its ad sales revenue drop 2.6% year over year to $6.69 billion, which slightly beat Wall Street forecasts, per the company’s latest earnings report.
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British antitrust regulators blocked Microsoft Corp.’s $69 billion acquisition of video game company Activision Blizzard Inc. amid the Federal Trade Commission’s own efforts to stop the purchase. In its first-quarter earnings call, Microsoft reported that Xbox revenue declined 30% year over year due to increased supply of consoles in the market, while Xbox content and services revenue increased 3%, fueled by monetization in first- and third-party content as well as its Game Pass subscriptions.
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Imax Corp. ended the first quarter with $86.9 million in revenue, up 45% year over year, according to its latest earnings report.
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Tubi Chief Executive and founder Farhad Massoudi will step down from the company in June and will be replaced by Paul Cheesbrough, who will take over the newly created Tubi Media Group as parent company Fox Corp. reorganizes its digital business.
- New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) agreed to increase the state’s tax film incentive from $420 million to $700 million as part of its $229 billion budget, as it competes with New Jersey and Georgia to lure Hollywood film and TV productions to their states.
