OpenAI has teamed up with production companies in London and Los Angeles to create a feature-length animated movie made largely with artificial intelligence.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, the purported goal of using AI tech on the movie is to speed up production while also saving costs — and, presumably, serving as a giant tech demo for movie execs everywhere.
The film will invite comparisons to the early days of CGI-animated movies in the mid-1990s. Funded heavily by Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, the era’s animation studio Pixar quickly turned into a powerhouse, producing a litany of critically acclaimed and commercially successful feature films including “Toy Story” and “Monsters Inc.”
But whether generative AI will represent yet another major revolution in the space — let alone save production companies time and money — remains to be seen, especially considering that plenty of technical quirks have yet to be ironed out, often requiring the intervention of human creatives to fix the flawed outputs.
The film, dubbed “Critterz,” is reportedly about forest creatures going on an adventure, and was first dreamed up by OpenAI creative specialist Chad Nelson three years ago. Nelson created a short film of the same name, which was released in 2023 with OpenAI funding.
The news comes as the adoption of generative AI — with varying degrees of success — is hitting a fever pitch in Hollywood. Major entertainment companies, including Disney and Netflix, are already experimenting with the tech.
The push could have devastating consequences for working creatives. Experts have long warned that the tech could wipe out human jobs in the animation industry, especially as tools like image and video generators are becoming increasingly capable of spitting out believable materials.
James Richardson, co-founder of London-based Vertigo Films, which is working with OpenAI on the film, told the WSJ that the goal is to cut the production time of Nelson’s vision for “Critterz” from three years to just nine months.
The budget of the feature is less than $30 million, which is substantially less than other animated films.
In light of widespread fears of human animators losing their jobs, Nelson assured the WSJ that the movie wouldn’t rely on AI entirely. Human actors will still lend the movie’s characters their voices. Human artists will also feed their sketches into OpenAI’s tools.
But whether “Critterz” will be a success is far from guaranteed. Especially considering the widespread blowback companies have already received for using AI, audiences have clearly grown wary of the tech.
Interestingly, while AI-generated content can’t technically be copyrighted, the human-created voices of characters and original artwork they were based on could still make them eligible for copyright protection, experts told the WSJ.
The subject has become a major point of contention, with rightsholders suing OpenAI and other AI companies for allowing their tools to generate images and clips of copyrighted characters.
Just last week, AI startup Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion as part of a class action settlement after being caught training its AI models on hundreds of thousands of pirated books.
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