The heart of Screenland is cozying up to artificial intelligence. The open space in Culver Steps typically hosts community events and movie nights. But on Wednesday, it turned into a job fair for companies looking to hire talent for AI studios.
Companies showed off their life-like AI videos, urging emerging talent — and out-of-work creatives — to join them as they worked to reinvent traditional filmmaking. Culver City is already home to big names in Hollywood and technology like Amazon MGM Studios, TikTok, Apple, and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Recently, a growing cluster of AI studios, including Promise, TrueShort, Native Foreign, and PhantomX, are expanding in the neighborhood.
Luma AI, a $4-billion Palo Alto startup that makes generative AI video software, opened a facility in Culver City last year. The company’s Dream Lab occupies a 7,000 square feet space and employs a team of 13. The companies said they are drawn by the legacy studios they hope to rival.
The fact that space is available and affordable thanks to the general decline of the entertainment business in L.A. also helps. Proponents of AI see it as an antidote to high production costs and say it allows creatives to make films that otherwise would never be made. However, many in Hollywood, its unions, and the public at large are suspicious of the surge in AI use, worried it is stealing the work of human creatives and taking people’s jobs.
The new wave of AI filmmakers have accepted the rise of AI as inevitable, and are forging ahead, increasingly in Culver City. The AI studio has raised $17 million and employs about 45 people. Around 75% of them are creatives: filmmakers, editors, sound designers and composers.
Its streaming app hosts short-form true crime audio and video shows that are fully AI-generated. On average, a 10-minute episode costs about $10,000 to make and takes about 10 days to go from idea to release. They’re going to be afraid of backlash.” The company outgrew its Santa Monica office and is now located near Culver Theater.
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