“I just don’t see how we survive”—Tyler Perry issues Hollywood warning over AI video tech

Perry: Mind-blowing AI video generation tools "will touch every corner of our industry."

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[Aurich]

So wait.... He's very concerned about what AI could do to the industry in wiping out the need for hundreds of crew members to produce films. Yup, totally agree. And his answer is to cancel his plans to expand out his studio, thus wiping out the need for hundreds of crew members to produce films. Um, that's one way to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yeah, I get he's trying to financially protect himself from building something that might be obsolete in a few years. But damn, you don't HAVE to use AI. You can try to resist the changes to the industry to keep it from happening. In fact, vocally noting that you're going forward anyway might help other studios do the same thing. While pausing expansion sure as hell will make others ponder the exact same thing.

It's not that simple. Here's a description of the studio from Wikipedia:

In 2015, Perry acquired the 330-acre former military base Fort McPherson located in Atlanta, which he converted to studios.[60] The studios were used to film the HBO Films/OWN film version of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and is currently in ongoing use for the television series The Walking Dead.[60][61] 50,000 square feet of the site are dedicated to standing permanent sets, including a replica of a luxury hotel lobby, a White House replica, a 16,000-square-foot mansion, a mock cheap hotel, a trailer park set, and a real 1950s-style diner that was relocated from a town 100 miles away. It also hosts 12 sound stages named after highly accomplished African-Americans in the entertainment industry.[61] The blockbuster Marvel film, Black Panther, was the first to be filmed on one of the new stages at Tyler Perry Studios as announced personally by Perry on his Instagram account on February 19, 2018.[62]

The business model is you build out all that set and soundstage infrastructure, and then productions pay to use it. HBO pays to do a show there. AMC pays to do a show there. It's a resource you invest in, that generates long term revenue from studios as they use it.

Well, if AMC says "you know, we can just type 'long pan of a dilapidated city block filled with zombies' into AI and save the time and money building a set on your lot and paying all the actors and production crew" then what?

Dumping $800 million into something you're afraid will become obsolete and unused isn't exactly a great business model. It's not so much that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy as it's acknowledging that these investments are about the whole system. He's not just building a space to film his own movies.

 

[Aurich]

On thinking on this a bit more, the thing that gets me is that Tyler Perry's net worth is estimated to be around a billion dollars. He's going to be okay for the rest of his life. So the problem is that it rings just a tad hollow to see him pulling a "won't someone think of the poor production crew!!!" at the exact same time he's doing something that will royally screw over a whole bunch of people in production. The more cynical (and realistic) take on this is "Tyler Perry laments how many people AI will make obsolete, while salivating over how much money AI will save him in not having to pay a bunch of obsolete people."

I suggest reading the other posts where it's been explained why this isn't actually all about him. He's lamenting that there's no point in building out all this new studio space that people won't come and use. There's no salivating over AI saving him money.

If HBO doesn't film there, if Marvel doesn't film there, if AMC doesn't film there, then what?

Don't confuse the fact that he makes his own movies with all this space being some personal project just for his films.

 

[Aurich]

Yeah but many people do care - witness the popularity of people who point out the autotune effects and decry it, eg Rick Beato, and the popularity of Alt music for example. So I think this kind of thing is self correcting in the end.
It is the "industry" that changes.

It is weird on the one hand people saying everybody will be out of a job, and others crying doom that there won't be enough young people because of population trends turning down. I think those are contradictory.

I think it's worth pointing out that with every new tech comes new uses. Autotune for instance isn't just for pitch correction, people turn it up purposefully high to get that warbling robotic edge as a style. It's like putting distortion on your electric guitar, some people prefer a clean, more acoustic sound and decry the youth and their noisy guitars, but creativity always finds new uses.

This song for instance, just skip through it briefly if dancehall tunes aren't your thing, but he's not compensating for being out of pitch, he's purposefully amping it up for a vibe:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg3TjbN69vE


I'm sure people will find a way to twist AI too. There's always new and creative uses. But just like autotune can be boring and make everything a little bland and overly perfect AI feels best right now at making "more of what you've seen already".

 

[Aurich]

FWIW, autotune and pitch correction are two different things.

Autotune is a very stylized and obvious vocal effect where your voice’s pitch is changed to match that of a note being played on a keyboard. Think T-Pain and a lot of stuff mid/late aughts. It can be a legit effect, as much as delay or phasing or flanging.

Pitch correction isn’t supposed to be obvious, and involves “snapping” the pitch of your voice to the nearest note. So if you sing a little flat, pitch correction would bump your pitch up just enough to make it on key.

I’ve realized that most people mean “pitch correction” when they say “autotune”, or haven’t kept up with popular music in the last 15 years or so. Autotune is used much more sparingly now, and as an intentional effect, versus pitch correction which is applied to most Top 40 songs (the ones owned by big labels, at least).

I just made a similar point, so I do agree with you.

But just to be pedantic about it, that's all auto tune, or more specifically Auto-Tune, the name of the product by Antares.

It's just about how you set the dials. You can make it subtle, for gentle pitch correction. You can dial it in heavier for absolute snapping where you're dead on with every note every time. Or, you can crank it up past the human limits and get that robotic effect, like the track I just posted, which has it dialed in to "more than human, not really full robot".

Exactly as you said, but it's all the same product doing it. So you're not wrong in your point, but calling it all auto tune is technically correct. I still upvoted you.

 

[Aurich]

Pedantry alert!

Auto-tune is a type of pitch correction, but not all pitch correction is auto-tune.

They’re different in how they know what note to adjust your pitch to. Auto-tune is matching pitch alongside a MIDI track, basically. There’s an external source of intended notes. “Normal” pitch correction is not based on any external inputs beyond the singer’s voice.

Anteres makes the canonical auto-tune plugin, but there are pitch correction plugins from other companies that can’t make the auto-tune sound. Waves makes one I used to use.

It’s kind of like “TASER”… technically it refers only to the guns that shoot an electric prod made by the TASER company, but it’s used colloquially to include stunguns as well (which are not guns, but I digress).

I accept your one-upping of my pedantry.

 

[Aurich]

I think that the jobs that will get affected first are graphic artists. Why pay someone to create a logo when you can do it for free on your laptop. I used to work on a hardware based color correction system that cost approx 400 thousand dollars. The company was purchased by a graphics company who then reverse engineered the hardware to create a software system that you could purchase for 25 thousand dollars. The world of large post production companies were not ended but dropped in numbers significantly. Film labs have also mostly disappeared. The times they are a changing.

You can already get a logo on Fiver for peanuts if that's all you want. "Cheap logo" hasn't been a new thing for a long time. It's not really why you hire a competent graphic designer tbh.

I think a lot of these conversations somewhat overstate the risk to visual artists, as a whole. Which isn't to say it's not a real thing. But the ability to actually replace people wholesale implies both a lot more competency in these AI tools than they possess, but also a lot more competency in the people directing them than is probably there.

The creative process is more than "ask for thing, get result back, ship it".

Still, I think people are right to think that it's probably going to take much smaller teams to get some things done.