A dusty visual overlay partially obscures crowds of men in the desert, fighting with swords in armor and on horses. With a few wardrobe tweaks, this scene could look like something out of a movie Game of Thrones Or Dune. But David’s house showrunner Jon Erwin claims he didn’t have the budget to bring these scenes to life. Instead, he used artificial intelligence.
“The entire shot was done virtually using these tools,” Erwin tells WIRED. “And the cost of enhancing those shots is minuscule compared to the time and cost it would take to generate them using, you know, traditional visual effects methods.”
Erwin’s faith-based production company, Wonder Project, sent WIRED nearly two dozen still images of “primarily artificial intelligence-generated scenes” from David’s house Season 2, which the company says used more than four times as many AI shots compared to the show’s first season – from more than 70 in Season 1 to between 350 and 400 shots in Season 2. The second season of the series follows the story of the eventual King David of Israel in 1000 B.C.
Many photos showed crowds during battle sequences, but AI was also used to capture shots of stone fortresses, fires ravaging hillsides, and heroes standing on mountaintops, gazing out at the misty landscape. They don’t bear the strange generative AI characteristics of years gone by, but it’s not challenging to believe they were generated by AI.
“Let’s say we only have so much money in the frame,” Erwin says. “You can put a very real camera on a very real actor and direct that actor, direct the camera, and that essentially becomes the hand inside the doll. The doll itself is a digital world that you create.”
The way Erwin talks about “magical” AI-powered filmmaking is very different from the way most people in Hollywood and its audiences talk. Oscar winner Frankenstein director Guillermo del Toro recently told WIRED that he hopes to die before the art of artificial intelligence goes mainstream, comparing the “arrogance” of his tech peers to Victor Frankenstein himself. Mean star Ariana Grande liked Instagram post this meant that she would prefer to never see an AI-generated image again. And simply Coca-Cola got stronger for another round of backlash from consumers to the second annual AI-generated holiday ad that went viral type reactions“The largest company in the world proudly admits to accelerating the apocalypse and asks, ‘What are you going to do about it?'”
But Coca-Cola executives and AI enthusiasts like Erwin say the people complaining the loudest are likely a shrinking minority (the founder of the AI company that created the Coke ad said Hollywood reporter “haters” were mostly creators “fearing for their jobs” compared to “average people”), while AI companies like Runway have signed deals with studios like Lionsgate to train custom AI tools in their archives. Erwin said he used Runway’s image-to-video tools, as well as the “modification” features of Luma and products from Google and Adobe.