Billionaire Valve co-founder, superyacht enthusiast, and, notably, not a movie star Gabe Newell thinks film directors – and everyone else, really – should start using AI like “some 19-year-old kid in his or her bedroom,” as he recently told YouTuber Zalkar Saliev in a new interview (spotted by PC Gamer).
While I’d rather not imagine what “some 19-year-old kid” is doing in their bedroom with AI on account of the various “crazy, sexy jealous boyfriend” chatbots Instagram keeps recommending me, Newell argues that these people are just thinking, “‘Oh, you guys really don’t understand this. I actually use this tool.'” So it’s dangerous to miss out on an opportunity to be young at heart, because AI will “impact pretty much every single business.”
Including show business, baby. “If you’re a filmmaker and you don’t understand how to use AI, you’re really going to struggle in the not too distant future,” Newell says.
“I’m [picking] filmmaking because I think [AI] is going to be, like, 10 times as significant as the impact of CGI was on filmmaking, in terms of the value being accomplished with those technologies, and how it would affect your career trajectory in the filmmaking industry,” Newell continues, his mind perhaps wandering to one of his superyachts and making him forget that directors don’t necessarily create CGI themselves.
There’s another problem, too: the major movie industry is already trying to implement generative AI – and it’s failing because of how legally murky and literally hideous the tech is.
In any case, Newell says AI’s influence can be predicted if you take CGI and “multiply that by an order of magnitude.”
All I can say is no AI video has ever reproduced even a pinch of the emotional reaction I had seeing Pamela Voorhees’ severed head at the end of Friday the 13th – and it was made of latex.
