AI videos have been around for a couple of years now, but they now seem to have gotten good enough to be used in some of the most mainstream platforms.
Netflix has said that it has used AI in one of its shows for the first time. AI was used to create a scene in which a building was collapsing in the Argentinian science fiction series The Eternauts, said Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. Sarandos said that AI was much cheaper than using traditional VFX methods, and was 10 times faster as well.
“In that production, we leveraged virtual production and AI-powered VFX there was a shot in the show that the creators wanted to show a building collapsing in Buenos Aires,” Sarandos said on an earnings call. “So our iLIGHT team partnered with their creative team using AI-powered tools they were able to achieve an amazing result with remarkable speed. And in fact, that VFX sequence was completed 10 times faster than it could have been completed with visual, traditional VFX tools and workflows,” he added.
“The cost of it would just not have been feasible for a show in that budget. So that sequence actually is the very first GenAl final footage to appear on screen in a Netflix, Inc. original series or film,” he added.
Netflix rival Amazon Prime has already used AI in one of its shows. Amazon Prime’s House Of David had heavily used generative AI, its creators had said. “We are the first, or among the first, to use generative AI tools to create some of the scope and scale that would’ve been otherwise impossible,” the creator of the show had said in March this year. House of David is a sweeping biblical epic chronicling the rise of Israel’s most celebrated king, and used AI to create its grand historical scenes. Meanwhile, companies like Kalashi have created AI-generated ads and garnered millions of views. And with AI now coming to Netflix as well, it might not be long before it takes a bigger and bigger role in the content that we see on TV and in film.