An AI rendering of actor Morgan Freeman beat the uncanny valley to the point it fooled the head of his own production company.
Speaking on the Produced By panel today “AI: What Every Producer Needs to Know,” Lori McCreary, the CEO of Morgan Freeman’s production company Revelations Entertainment, said the industry needs to figure out a way to handle potential deepfakes that could fool anyone.
Though McCreary has often been able to spot a fake when it comes to Morgan Freeman, but one particular video fooled her to such a degree that she had to make a few phone calls to confirm its authenticity.
“She received a video of Freeman in what appeared the actor was promoting a book. McCreary called the Unforgiven star and his make-up artist to double check whether the promo was actually shot; that’s how good the footage was,” reported Deadline.
McCreary told the audience the industry needs to figure out a way to immediately confirm a fake.
“As a community we need to get ahead of it. Let’s try to build the tool and get the tools ready so when things come out, we know that they’re real. I’d like to have a bug that says this is the real Morgan,” she said.
Renard T. Jenkins, the President of I2A2 Technologies, Labs & Studios and the President of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, said during the panel that solutions to deepfakes might be an immediate watermark that will require the assistance of major studios to be effective.
“Such actions needs the assistance of the major studios in creating an infrastructure and ecosystem which will allow creators to track and ecostyem that will laow for us to track every single iteration of a piece of content from origin to distribution,” noted Deadline.
“McCreary hopes the PGA, similar to how they helped with the content protection of films’ digital files, can have a hand in setting up AI guard rails in the future, added the outlet.
The proliferation of AI has become one of the hottest topics in the entertainment industry, putting it on track to an uncertain future that could change it forever. Actor Ashton Kutcher recently said that AI could create a situation where more content exists than eyeballs on the planet to consume it.
“You’ll be able to render a whole movie. You’ll just come up with an idea for a movie, then it will write the script, then you’ll input the script into the video generator and it will generate the movie,” he said. “Instead of watching some movie that somebody else came up with, I can just generate and then watch my own movie.”
Paul Roland Bois directed the award-winning Christian tech thriller, EXEMPLUM, which can be viewed for FREE on YouTube or Tubi. “Better than Killers of the Flower Moon,” wrote Mark Judge. “You haven’t seen a story like this before,” wrote Christian Toto. A high-quality, ad-free rental can also be streamed on Google Play, Vimeo on Demand, or YouTube Movies. Follow on X @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.
