Meta and Google woo Hollywood

Meta and Google are trying to strike multi-million deals with some of Hollywood’s biggest studios so they can access their content and train, improve, and refine their text-to-video AI models (Google just announced Veo, and Meta has been working on Emu since last year), which can generate realistic movie scenes from text prompts.

Which studios are interested (and which aren’t)?

According to reports, Warner Bros have expressed an interest in licensing some–not all–of their content, while Walt Disney and Netflix aren’t willing to license any of their material, but are interested in other types of potential collaboration.

These collaborations could perhaps involve integrating the AI video tools into processes like editing, to help save time and budget, which was something that OpenAI was in discussions about. back in February.

Why are Disney and Netflix wary about licensing their content to AI companies?

In some ways, it makes sense for these Hollywood execs to make multi-million dollar deals with these AI companies, and license their content for training and refinement of AI models, like the news industry is doing. Afterall, it would protect them from having their work stolen.

But the movie industry is wary. While no Hollywood studio has sued an AI company over copyright infringement, yet, there are serious concerns over how these companies will use (and have already used) their content–licensed or unlicensed.