Just a day after Lionsgate announced its partnership with AI Runway, UTA CEO Jeremy Zimmer called the deal “about” the artists.
“The deal that was announced by Lionsgate, where they… formed this relationship with an AI company where they’re giving that company tremendous access to their entire library, that’s concerning,” Zimmer said.
Financial Times Los Angeles bureau chief Christopher Grimes at the FT’s Business of Entertainment conference on Thursday. “If I’m an artist and I made a Lionsgate film, and now all of a sudden that Lionsgate film is used to help create an LLM for an AI company, am I compensated for that?”
The partnership, signed Wednesday, will create AI models based on the studio’s archive of film and television content and is “essentially designed to help Lionsgate Studios, filmmakers, directors and other creative talent grow their work.”
Zimmer noted that his friends at Lionsgate might be “pissed off” by what he said, but he downplayed it, saying, “This is show business.” When Grimes asked what his clients’ concerns were about AI, Zimmer listed some of the “top concerns,” including: “Are they going to steal my job? Are they going to steal my image? Is my job going to be replaced? Am I going to be replaced?” replaced?
On the other hand, Zimmer referred to the “opportunities that AI offers to help us be more efficient and thoughtful about how we make shows and market shows and how we make movies and market movies,” which, he said, “would be really great for storytellers.”
“I think that’s where open-mindedness and thoughtful conversations happen,” he said. “But how do we get there? Who gets there first, and is the spirit of these conversations truly open, honest and fair? We don’t have much of a clue.”
Zimmer went on to point out the complex dynamics between conservation artists, who are now concerned with artificial intelligence, and cultivation artists, who define themselves as “AI endemic” and who use the tool in their work, saying, “If we try to stop progress, we will succeed. It happened with progress.”
“If Steven Spielberg was in high school today at the age of 14 … making his first movie, he would probably make it … using AI instructions, and we don’t want that guy to feel, ‘Oh, sorry, criminal,’” Zimmer said. “We want that guy to be rewarded for his excellence in using the tools that he has at his disposal today.”
