She may now be a few months past her role as president of Lucasfilm, and you’ll be able to read my interview with her – her final interview as Lucasfilm president – in the final issue of Star Wars Insider, and yesterday Kathleen Kennedy took to the stage at an AI summit to discuss the future usages of the technology and made it clear that while AI is undoubtedly useful in certain circumstances, art will always require human input.
“Taste is so fundamental to the process of creating things,” she said, in an onstage conversation with Runway co-funder Cristóbal Valenzuela as part of an AI summit that the New York-based startup hosted in Manhattan on Tuesday. “It’s life experiences; it’s educational. The best directors of films and photography came out of art, they studied art,” she said. She suggested that AI-driven films, by definition, couldn’t have that experience.
Kennedy, who left her role as head of Lucasfilm in January, didn’t entirely dismiss the technology, saying it could help for the kind of nuts-and-bolts tasks that nearly everyone agrees it could be useful for: “previz, planning, budgeting, scheduling.” But this was faint praise as she questioned more sweeping applications.
“Once you get into execution,” she said, a model could falter at the essence of filmmaking. “What are you trying to do? What’s the painting you’re trying to create?” Kennedy said. “There’s [beautiful] unpredictability in the creative process that’s going to be tricky to preserve because AI is so predictable.”
“I think what’s missing in the discussion right now is transparency,” she said, “I think people [in Hollywood] feel that there’s a lot they don’t know about what’s going on. When there’s conversation around how these language models are being trained, for instance. … I think if we can reach a point where there’s more transparency in those discussions — and, frankly, more transparency, consequently, in people using these tools,” she added, “then I think that will help greatly to dissipate [the distrust].”
