Hollywood Dreads AI’s Takeover, But This Producer Sees An Artist-Driven Future

Jonathan Yunger reveals how his new AI production company is banking on creative humans to lead AI’s takeover of Tinseltown

DailyWire.com

In 2023, actors and writers went on strike as fears over artificial intelligence’s rapid development gripped Tinseltown.

The entertainment workers picketed for weeks, demanding guardrails around AI’s use in Hollywood. They got their wish when the Writers Guild of America (WGA) agreed with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to put new rules into place.

The fears are understandable, especially for those whose jobs are centered on writing scripts or editing videos. But for Jonathan Yunger, AI can be a major boost for Hollywood — the talented people who work there just have to embrace it and learn how to master it.

“Hollywood is old school. They’re scared about being replaced, but I truly believe that, and I’ve been saying this from the beginning, AI is here and it’s not going anywhere,” Yunger told The Daily Wire. “We have to learn to work together.”

Yunger doesn’t just express that belief. He’s putting his career behind it. Yunger — who’s worked on blockbuster films such as “Expendables,” “Hellboy,” “Hitman’s Bodyguard,” and “Rambo” — co-founded Arcana Labs, a new AI production studio that he believes will help lead the way in revolutionizing the way creative content is made.

Many in Hollywood fear that if AI continues to move at the pace tech whizzes expect it to, it won’t be long before it’s capable of producing any type of creative content without the countless hours of dozens of writers and actors. Yunger has a different perspective on Hollywood’s use of AI, saying that creative content will always need “real actors” and “real storytellers.”

“You go to ChatGPT and ask it to tell a joke, it’s not going to tell you a funny joke,” he said. “If you tell it to write a story that will make you cry, it’s not going to make you cry. You still need human involvement. You still need the human element.”

“So Arcana is geared more towards artist-driven AI rather than AI-driven art,” he added.

Arcana’s capabilities were introduced to the world on February 25, when President Donald Trump posted a satirical video about the remaking of Gaza. The AI-generated video that took social media by storm that day was made by someone who was testing Arcana’s tools, according to Yunger. Now, the company based in Los Angeles has $5.5 million in funding and officially launched its production studio earlier this week with SEMCAP AI and co-CIOs Walter Buckley and Cyrus Vandrevala jumping on board.

“It was around the time I was doing ‘Hellboy’ — I wasn’t using any AI in ‘Hellboy’ — but me and my co-founder Hank Hoffman got hipped to generative AI at the time,” Yunger told The Daily Wire in his first interview since the launch of Arcana AI’s production studio. “And I was like, ‘Wow, it’s amazing.’”

Yunger said that AI’s capabilities to immediately turn words into images were “like the ultimate high” for a producer, but he added that he soon grew frustrated with the new tool because it took “hundreds of generations” to get AI to generate the image he had in his mind... Continue reading the full story here