Loading summary
Transcript24 lines
- [00:01]
Podcast Host
How can leaders leverage technology to strengthen customer experience, build lasting relationships, and drive competitive advantage? Learn more on the third episode of Techfluential, a podcast from Deloitte and custom content from WSJ.
- [00:19]
Julie Chang
Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, November 29th. I'm Julie Chang for the Wall Street Journal. Can Hollywood Work with Artificial Intelligence Stability? AI CEO Prem Akaraju and actor Joseph Gordon Levitt went head to head last month at WSJ Tech Live discussing just that image generation Startup Stability AI is best known for its generative AI model Stable Diffusion, an open source tool that companies can use for free. Its investors include ex Facebook president Sean Parker and Prem Akaraju is no stranger to the entertainment industry. He was the CEO of Weta Digital, an Academy Award winning film production and visual effect effects company behind films like Avatar and Endgame. Joseph Gordon Levitt, known for films such as 500 Days of Summer and Inception, says that performances by him and other actors are being used by large language models to train new AI technology without permission or compensation. They were joined by WSJ Senior Personal Tech columnist Joanna Stern. Here are highlights of their conversation.
- [01:29]
Joseph Gordon Levitt
Joseph, I know you have a lot of thoughts about how these models are made, how they're trained.
- [01:34]
Prem Akaraju
Yeah, well, that's exactly right. The first thing to say is for anybody who maybe doesn't know that much about how the tech works, and I'm no engineer, but you know these models, they can't do anything without a ton of data to quote unquote, train the models so that it can then spit out these new outputs. And the sort of sleight of hand of calling something artificial intelligence is, it kind of makes you ignore the fact that these things are created by humans. Because who made all that training data that went into the AI models? Well, humans did. And so this is something that concerns me a lot as an actor who works in show business because, well, frankly, you know, my livelihood and the livelihood of the people I have worked with for my entire career are all being threatened. But I would also say Hollywood could serve as a canary in the coal mine.
- [02:32]
Joseph Gordon Levitt
And you've written some really strong editorial pieces about how you think that can be solved.
- [02:39]
Prem Akaraju
Well, so, and this is these ideas are not mine, I will say, but I've found it really inspiring to hear what some technologists and economists write about. There's a movement that gets called data dignity, which is the basic principle that if a person generates some data, the person ought to have an ownership of that data. And when I say generate data, I mean that could mean you act in a movie or it could mean you wrote something, or it could mean you took a picture, or it could mean that a camera took a picture of you, or it could mean that you hit a like button on a social media platform or any number of things that happens all day long. Human beings are now generating data all the time and the way that we currently have it set up is all those human beings don't have any ownership of that data. And it feels to me like with this new revolutionary technology coming, we maybe need to change that and that we.
- [03:42]
Joseph Gordon Levitt
Should be paid for that data.
- [03:44]
Prem Akaraju
Yeah, the idea is that a human who generates some data should have the right to consent, the right to attribution, and the right to compensation if their data is used to make money.
- [03:57]
Joseph Gordon Levitt
Prem, do you agree with Joe here? Is that something your company could support?
- [04:02]
Prem Akaraju
I like getting paid for what I do. I think everybody else should too. I think that's actually a much better, healthier ecosystem and economy as I think your point was alluding to. The fact of the matter is that it's absolutely true that AI could not exist without data. There's no doubt about it. And data would be nowhere near as valuable without AI. So what I think is, and I've made my entire career off creating IP or protecting ip, and I plan on doing that in the AI industry. And I think that's what Sean and I, and then many people might know that James Cameron invested and joined the board as well. And I could tell you we're all three very like minded in that exact fashion. I could guarantee you James Cameron wants to get paid when he works and I think that we.
- [04:50]
But that's exceptional. And I don't, not to blow smoke, but that's exceptional in the tech industry. The general philosophy in Silicon Valley for the last number of decades has been no, we have the total right to just like take all this data and we've, you know, we, meaning the biggest companies in Silicon Valley just make these unprecedentedly lucrative companies by not compensating the humans whose data we're using.
- [05:16]
I take that as a huge compliment and I appreciate it. It is, it is true. I mean, I think that that's why. Yeah, I mean the first, there's no other AI company that looks like us that came from the film industry, that came from technology and came from a highly creative place. So the three top people at the company are those things. And so I think that that's why we're important to this industry. That's why the time was right for Sean and I to do this and this was the right platform for us to do it. There's a reason that art and science go together and I think that that has to be that case from the actual inception. And that means from there's multiple layers in AI. You know, we're part of one layer, right? Like we're part of the data set and we're part of the training foundational models and then some of the applied. But then we hand it off to a lot of people. It's about responsibility throughout the entire stack. And I know that we're going to be responsible for this one and certainly that's what we're bringing to the table to actually do exactly that because I think it's hugely important. I think it's very dangerous not to do that.
- [06:18]
Julie Chang
Coming up, what does it mean to own intellectual property? And what precedent has the music industry set for film and tv? That's after the break.
- [06:35]
Podcast Host
Think scaling AI is hard? Think again. With Watson X you can deploy AI across any environment, above the clouds, helping pilots navigate flights and on lots of clouds, helping employees automate tasks on prem so designers can access proprietary data and on the edge, so remote bank tellers can assist customers. Or Watson X works anywhere. So you can scale AI everywhere. Learn more@IBM.com WatsonX IBM let's create.
- [07:10]
Joseph Gordon Levitt
So let's drill in though a little bit on that because that would mean your training data. Anything that's in there you'd have to pay to the artists that made that content, whether it be music, that, the audio, that's images, all the things that Joseph did a great job listing. That's possible.
- [07:28]
Prem Akaraju
Well, not only possible, we did it. So from day one, stableaudio was licensed. And from the image side, there's two main areas that we get data from. Number one is truly open source public domain data and images and the other is licensing. So one of in licensing libraries of content that are copyrighted, which we do and we support and what we don't in taking that even further is that since I've taken over as CEO, I've started multiple conversations across sports, across gaming, across the film studios themselves to actually work with them on licensing data.
- [08:06]
Just to take this concept a little further, with the technology being as revolutionary as I think it is, we maybe need to rethink some ideas of what it means to own IP intellectual property. And I'll use the example you use because it's closest to my life. But again, I think this applies in so many industries throughout our whole economy. You mentioned licensing Video or movies from movie studios. Right. So in my career I've performed in many movies and I've had deals with those movie studios pay me to act in the movie and then they own the IP and I don't own any of it. And now they're likely going to go license a lot of that material to AI companies that will then be used to train AI models that can now produce outputs that theoretically replace what I do and what, you know, many of my fellow brothers and sisters in the film industry do. Now, if I had known when I made those agreements, oh yeah, I'm signing this agreement with you film studio, and you'll have full ownership of the movie and you'll then go use that to replace me and I'll be out of a job forever. I probably wouldn't have done that deal, you know. So it seems to me like the whole idea of intellectual property, all these deals, they really, if we're being fair, should be renegotiated in light of this new technology.
- [09:44]
So we've seen this movie before, it's called the music business. Right. So this happened in music didn't turn.
- [09:50]
Out well for musicians.
- [09:51]
Well, no, it turned out great now. Right. So it took a while. But if you look at so technology always is going to be ahead. That's sort of almost the definition of technology is, right. Creating these novel technique, you know, novel products and services that the world's never seen before. And certainly I'm dedicated to doing that myself. So you look in the music business, is that those rights, those contracts with the artists, with the labels were outdated. They didn't contemplate a world of streaming. Now it took a very long time, but now even if you put a 10 second, whatever, 15 second clip of a song on TikTok or any of these platforms, those artists are getting paid. So that's totally changed. That's a solved problem now. There's no problem anymore. Now it took a very long time to get there. I think that we're moving at light speed in the visual media world compared to music, but it's still not done. There's still work to be done.
- [10:48]
Are the artists getting paid or are the music studios getting paid?
- [10:51]
Well, that would be an issue with the label and the artist or the artist and the studio. So when I say also that I'm talking to early stage conversation with independent film studios, there's a lot of data there that has, and no offense, nothing to do with an actor's performance. So there's so many elements to a film and When I think about what's not going to change, I think on a film set there's going to be a director, there's going to be a camera, and there's going to be an actor in front of that camera. And I think that physicality of film production is super important to the creative process. I actually don't know how you do that without that. And I think that kind of action and reaction and the direction is a human process. I think I call that the visible layer. Then there's this whole invisible layer which is rotoscoping and paint and camera match and plate reconstruction. I could go on and on and bore you guys, but that part of it is really can be largely affected significantly more than an actor's performance. I think it's just better to put an actor in front of a camera and do it than, you know, kind of mimicking those types of actions in some other avatar that maybe not Avatar the movie, but that, you know, doesn't exist. I think that deep connection between an audience and an actor is extremely human.
- [12:20]
Julie Chang
That was stability. AI CEO Prem Akaraju and actor Joseph Gordon Levitt speaking with WSJ senior personal Tech columnist Joanna Stern at WSJ Tech Live last month. Subscribers can watch the full conversation on WSJ.com we'll also link it in our show notes. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by me, Julie Chang. Additional support this week from Bell Lynn. Jessica Fenton and Michael Laval wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Catherine Millsop. Our development producer is Aisha Al Muslim. Scott Salloway and Chris Sinsley are the deputy editors, and Philana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. And a quick programming note. We won't have TNV Tech minute this afternoon, but tomorrow we'll have a new episode of our series Bold Names right here in the TNV feed. And we'll be back on Monday with a new episode of Tech News Briefing. Thanks for listening.
- [13:22]
Podcast Host
AI could be the most transformative technology since the advent of the Internet itself. So how can we start putting it? To find out in the latest episode of AI that Means Business, a new podcast from Google and custom content from WSJ.