We have Siddhartha, who will give the next presentation. Yeah, it's up to Siddhartha. Thank you very much. Is that okay if my microphone is... Great, thank you very much. Hello everyone, thank you for being here, thank you very much for listening. I'm Siddhartha Minhas. I wanted to preface this by saying that I made these slides with AI, and this is the first time I've done it, but I figured, you know, with the keeping with the theme of AI and cinema and the creative potential of AI and visual storytelling, I thought it would be sort of suitable to to demonstrate a kind of case in point with this presentation's aesthetic style with AI. So who am I? I'm a master's student in history and literature at Columbia University in Paris. I'm a professional film and TV actor and a self-taught filmmaker. So I hope that my background can give you a sort of a hybrid perspective into the state of AI today and its impact on the cinematic world, the cinematic industry, with all the legislation, the creative potential, and everything that's going on. With the historical background I wanted to plunge into, I wanted to take you back to the French New Wave. This was a conversation I shared with Hugues.as we were brainstorming this presentation, and I figured that to look at the past, we can better sort of understand what's going on right now with the switch in the industry. So with the French New Wave, for those of you who are unfamiliar, this was a very important artistic cinematic moment in history in general, and this happened in France in the late 50s to the 60s. And this is when we started to see a more authorial sort of director-focused creative control over cinema. Before it was very quality-based, very craft, emphasis on the craft, emphasis on the literary sort of the narrative and all of this. And then the French New Wave came around with those such as France Ratrouffaut and Les Quatre Sans Coups or other films like Hiroshima Mon Amour, where we started to see much more like on the ground, you know, the mobile cameras, And just, yeah, this reclaiming of cinematic authorship from these sort of big studios. So, you know, you have this emphasis, this strange emphasis on disjointed sounds and shots moving back and forth in time. So you don't have this continuous literary narrative that you used to have. You have dynamic mobile cameras. And so the camera really became for the director his pen, right? He was writing with theSo this term we have today, auteur in English, that actually comes from this moment that we use to describe directors today like Wes Anderson or Martin Scorsese who have this very authorial, very unique, individualist sort of signature to their films. And so as we turn to our current moment with AI, we start to see how we get a similar kind of shift, but it's through this tool of AI, the production tools, the accessibility that it offers to filmmakers that would otherwise only be possible with big studios, with budgets. And a very good example is Dreams of Violets by Ash Kousha. An Iranian filmmaker based in the UK right now who created this film. And it was the first, as far as I know, the first completely AI-generated film that was selected for a big film festival as of June 10th. And in an interview, Ash Krusha talks about the budget that went into the film. So you have $2,000 rather than millions, right, to create these special effects. And the speed as well, the time that it took him to make this film, a couple of months after these very...current political events happening in Iran in January with the protests and the violence happening over there. And being able to keep up with that so quickly, just after a few months, Kusha really credits to AI and the capacity of AI, something that couldn't have been possible otherwise. I also want to give you an example. As a filmmaker myself, our own uses of AI. So this is a film I co-wrote with my friend who's in the audience right there, Maxime, a brilliant writer. Lily Flowers, a new chivalry, Fleur de Lys, une nouvelle chivalry, which is this bilingual short film that uses AI twice. So we used it in two instances for the poster here and also for a moment in the film. But both times the AI was subordinated to the story. So here, my friend who's a great graphic designer, Kurt LeClaire, he and I worked on this poster while incorporating prompts that edited footage from the film or footage from the behind the scenes we took of the film, such as, if you can see in the right there, this Ren Ito who plays this Japanese traveler, tavern goer in the film. And through these specific prompts, we could give him of historical periods in cinema, you know, the 1990s, Koji Yakusho, this famous actor,from Japan, we could enmesh the medieval chain mail that he's wearing and this beer bottle and the cigarette to create this decolage that would have only been possible with AI. And the fact that we made this film without a budget ourselves, so we didn't really have the means to hire multiple graphic designers to design a poster just for this film. And then you have this instance of slopaganda, which is what these academics are calling it these days, which is a mix of AI slop, so generated images, with political propaganda. And so there's a moment in the film when one of the characters reveals that his arch nemesis has been fooling around with their English monarch, King Charles III, and Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. And he's created these images of their romantic soiree. And spoiler alert, it ends to the protagonist being lynched. But yeah, this sort of mocking of AI that we've done in the film nonetheless incorporates it as, again, subordinated to the story and subordinated to the human storytelling. So this is a really important question when we start to look at the industry today. I'm not sure if you all heard of the, or caught wind of the writer's strikes, the actors and writers strikes that happened not too long ago in Hollywood.2023 where AI was a big question and authorship and the human aspect of this writing. So as of recently, you have the Academy Awards, the Oscars, who as of May the 1st have banned AI for writing, for writing and for acting. So for the categories of best writer, best actor, actress. It's been completely put out of the question. But for other categories, it's a bit more ambiguous. You know, you have special effects where it's sort of been left untouched. Other categories where the Academy claims that AI hasn't even developed to the point where it can overtake human artists. So they've sort of let it be. And I guess it's kind of, I was thinking about how it's a bit of a paradoxical question because if it's special effects, it's already not human made per se. So the fact that AI makes it, it's... It's up for debate. And then you have the US Copyright Office, for instance, who requires human authorship for copyright protection of a script. And the script is very important. The script, this is the foundation for a film. You can't have a film without a script. The makeup artists, everyone, this all comes from the script. So yeah, it's complex. There's been recent deals being signed with A24, this very big Hollywood, originally independent film studio that started to sign deals, a deal with Google to do more research into AI and its filmmaking opportunities. And then you have questions.of Disney and these big filmmaking studios, you know, creating synthetic actors, taking performances and meshing them together to artificially render this art. And so when you see an individual like Ash Kusha or me, who's using AI as this sort of means to create something we otherwise couldn't, and you compare that to these big studios who are finding capitalist kind of gains from the incorporation of AI, it becomes very complex. It becomes a very complex discussion. Of the way to push forward with this. But yeah, I hope to give you a bit of perspective at least with this presentation. Thank you very much for listening. So you're not done yet. Do you have questions?No, no. Well, okay. So do you think in your next movies you will use AI? It's a really good question. I don't know for sure. I don't know for sure. It's not in the plan. It's not in the cards, if I'm honest. But I think that it could be an interesting, you know, even after reflecting with UG on this and making this presentation, I think, and with how the industry is changing, it might be worthwhile to consider because... Yeah, if we... I guess there are a few phrases. It's like playing with fire, but if you can't beat it, join it, sort of, you know? Okay. It was with Romans, I think. If you can't beat the Romans, join them. I forgot. I don't know. Maybe in French. If you try in French, I can find it. Okay. But, yeah, no, I think that... It's like with any new technology, you know, internet and these things, it's very dangerous and it can be the worst thing that ever happened to us, but it can also be the best thing. So I think it would be worth experimenting with in the future. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for asking. Yeah, sure. Thank you. Maybe we can have three questions. I'm just wondering, like, you know,all these movements about independent cinema collectives that emerged, I don't know, like 80s or maybe even early 60s, which were kind of like about taking the means of production, like creating their own studios. I mean, is there some kind of... Probably there is like a movement to do a similar thing, like create their own LLMs that created... Because I mean, it's not just AI, like a generic thing, like what kind of AI, like what kind of LLMs. So is there like something going on where people kind of just develop their own tools for cinema that we can talk about? Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, with... Actually, I was reading there was Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck has, you know, Batman for a little while. He created his own AI sort of system, and Netflix had signed on for it for a while. I'm not sure if they're still with it, but it offered the opportunity to do reshoots, for instance, for certain scenes. Again, that's sort of a saving money tool and things because now they don't have to reshoot those scenes. They don't have to go back to the set. They don't have to recreate everything. They can just use the AI software to do that for them and then they don't have to pay actors to come back and they don't have to do all this. Yeah, there are starting to be unique kind of tools suited for filmmaking that are arising from the industry itself. Again, this deal with Google and A24, who knows what can come out of that. Yeah, it's crazy.It's a crazy time. Transformative time. Final question. Thank you. I'm not sure if it's working. So being a student of theater, I'm just wondering, is it possible by AI we can create a whole film script? And if it's possible, how do you see it yourself? Right, right. You're asking if it's possible to create... And if it's possible, does it question the authenticity of the film or the base of the film? Yeah, so I do believe it is possible to ask an AI to write a whole script for you. I haven't done it myself, but... It is possible and again it sort of it transgresses a lot of the laws that are starting to be put in place in the States at least in the context of Hollywood with writers rights and these things but it certainly is possible and I think for me I think that again the script is the foundation of everything so if you if you undermine the script if you erode the scripts human element, it's not, for me it's not, I don't think it's a human story necessarily anymore. At least not with how AI is now, because AI doesn't understand emotions, for instance. AI doesn't have that emotional resonance that we do. So for an AI to write a whole script like that, that, yeah, I feel like that takes away a lot. I remember one of my actingteachers saying, however, this is interesting, that if one day AI comes to a point where it is actually like a, or it is a human being, like if we develop AI to the point where it has emotions, where it has all of this, like a human being, it's basically like birthing a new baby. And at that point, it's a human being, so give it the job, you know? But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's sort of it. Okay. Yeah, that's been three questions. Then thank you very much for the lecture. Thank you very much.Okay. So we're going to have