Ashton Kutcher is beta testing OpenAI's Sora and thinks people will probably 'render a whole movie' on it someday

• Ashton Kutcher has been playing around with OpenAI's Sora and thinks the tool is "pretty amazing."

• Kutcher believes advancements in AI could mean that whole movies will be made with AI some day.

• Kutcher's VC firm has backed AI upstarts like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Hollywood actor and venture capitalist Ashton Kutcher believes that one day, entire movies will be made on AI tools like OpenAI's Sora.

The actor was speaking at an event last week organized by the Los Angeles-based think tank Berggruen Institute, where he revealed that he'd been playing around with the ChatGPT maker's new video generation tool.

"I have a beta version of it and it's pretty amazing," said Kutcher, whose VC firm Sound Venture's portfolio includes an investment in OpenAI. "You can generate any footage that you want. You can create good 10, 15-second videos that look very real."

"It still makes mistakes. It still doesn't quite understand physics. But if you look at the generation of this that existed one year ago, as compared to Sora, it's leaps and bounds. In fact, there's footage in it that I would say you could easily use in a major motion picture or a television show," he continued.

Kutcher said this would help lower the costs of making a film or television show.

"Why would you go out and shoot an establishing shot of a house in a television show when you could just create the establishing shot for $100?" Kutcher said. "To go out and shoot it would cost you thousands of dollars,"

Kutcher was so bullish about AI advancements that he said he believed people would eventually make entire movies using tools like Sora.

"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," Kutcher said.

Kutcher, of course, is no stranger to AI. The actor revealed last year that his Sound Ventures had raised $243 million for an AI-focused fund.

Besides investing in OpenAI, Kutcher's firm has backed other AI upstarts like Amazon-backed Anthropic.

"We've been investing in AI for the last seven years. But when we saw GPT be launched, we realized that this was an absolute breakthrough," Kutcher told Bloomberg Television in May 2023.

Representatives for Kutcher and OpenAI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

An excerpt of Kutcher's remarks was originally uploaded to the Berggruen Institute's YouTube channel. The video, however, has since been made private and is no longer visible.

Representatives for the institute didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

AI has divided Hollywood

The rise of AI has been a huge source of contention in Hollywood and the wider entertainment industry.

Last year, both the Writers Guild of America, or WGA, and the actors union SAG-AFTRA went on strike over issues such as compensation and the threat posed by AI to their livelihoods.

Members of both groups believed studios could use AI to supplant writers and actors in their productions.

Both strikes were eventually resolved after studios brokered agreements with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA in September and November, respectively.

Shortly after OpenAI debuted Sora in February, filmmaker and actor Tyler Perry said he was putting his studio expansion plans on hold, per The Hollywood Reporter.

"There's got to be some sort of regulations in order to protect us. If not, I just don't see how we survive," Perry told the outlet.

However, some believe that the fears of AI overtaking the industry are overblown.

"I don't believe that an AI program is going to write a better screenplay than a great writer, or is going to replace a great performance, or that we won't be able to tell the difference," Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told The New York Times last month.

"AI is not going to take your job. The person who uses AI well might take your job," he added.

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