Are story editors in Hollywood especially prone to AI disruption? What about concept illustrators? Sound mixers?
Those are some of the questions tackled in an evolving public project that will be launched Wednesday by the Creators Coalition on AI. The initiative, formally called the Standards & Definitions Project, has an industry-facing website that is likely to have people across the entertainment and creator spaces seeking info and offering inputs. CCAI is the nine-month-old group founded by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Daniel Kwan, late-night veteran Ted Tremper and more than a dozen others to try to unite around a human-led vision for creativity in the age of AI.
The web portal will launch with a glossary of some 180 terms pertaining to AI designed to bring standardization to what has been an unruly moving target. It will also include an “AI Impact Visualizer,” which will assess the likelihood of AI role replacement on a scale of 0 (“doesn’t touch the job”) to 5 (“could do the whole job”) for some 150 jobs in 11 key creative areas (directing, sound, animation, writing, acting and others). Many of the roles are themselves broken down under dozens of sub-categories.
While more than 250 people have been polled, the project aims for the response of thousands, helping to concretize AI’s impact on a whole range of creative jobs. (Right now most are listed as “recommended knowledge” — i.e., there is not yet enough info.)
“The purpose of these resources is take all the things we hear about with regard to AI and establish ground truth,” Tremper said in an interview. “This is not the terminus of what we’re trying to do. But it establishes an ongoing process for people to be able to coordinate.”
And while he acknowledged the impact study doesn’t account for all eventualities — a hairdresser role might score a 0 but still be affected if sets go virtual — founders believe it finally begins to quantify what is talked about vaguely and speculatively.
“We hope people have the tools to talk with greater clarity as opposed to nebulous fear,” said Tremper, who earlier this year produced The AI Doc. He said he hopes these tools can provide a model for other industries to understand how AI is affecting their workers.
When it was launched in December, CCAI offered what many human-centric creators said was a resource to that point badly lacking — an organized response to Big Tech incursions into Hollywood that worked with, but lived apart from, the various Guilds, who understandably fight for the concerns particular to their membership.
After two “conventions” this summer with Guild-based delegates from all eleven realms (the most recent concluded just ten days ago), CCAI on Wednesday is releasing the impact visualizer along with the glossary entries.
Human-authored content, for instance, reads in part, “Creative work in which no generative AI system contributed expressive content, irrespective of the technological tools otherwise used in its creation, capture, processing, or distribution” with “the use of cameras, instruments, editing software, or AI systems performing solely technical functions.”
An AI Digital Performance involves “the application of artificial intelligence to capture, synthesize, modify, and/or replicate a human being or animal performer’s natural person’s human individual’s performance attributes, which can include visual and physiological likeness, both still and kinetic facial expression, body movement, biometric characteristics, choreography and voice whether partially or in full.”
Those definitions were haggled and pored over at the conventions, Tremper said, and are not set in stone, many of them changeable based on member feedback. The CCAI has thousands of signatories, from Judd Apatow to Ava DuVernay to Margot Robbie to Guillermo del Toro.
The idea of common language, founders say, can help in everything from guild negotiations to individual talent deals. “AI is moving extraordinarily fast, and that speed has created fear and confusion across our industry. CCAI’s Standards & Definitions Project is designed to turn that confusion into clarity, and clarity into agency, by giving creators a shared language for understanding and shaping what comes next,” said the writer and director David Goyer, a CCAI founder who is also the group’s secretary.
Tremper offered a political use case: such terms could make a statehouse bill easier to draft and pass.
CCAI plans on updating the terms and the impact on an ongoing basis, with major updates taking place quarterly. A survey page allows users to input their experience, with the user vetted to ensure they work in Hollywood.
CCAI co-founder Gordon-Levitt also released a statement in conjunction with the launch. “To me, this is about more than Hollywood. Artists and content creators are a canary in the coal mine,” said the creative hyphenate and founder of HITRECORD. “Without proper guardrails, AI companies will destroy not only the creative industries, but so many others. Building those guardrails is ambitious, but it’s possible, and a good first step is making sure we’re all speaking the same language.”
Kwan, an AI activist who is most famous for directing Everything Everywhere All At Once, also offered a thought in a statement. “If we’re going to be fighting for transparency, we should also be modeling it,” he said. “Let’s build some solutions together — and on our terms.”
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