Congress takes on TikTok, privacy, and AI

25:51And at the time, I remember thinking, like, OK, sure. Like, yeah, we're going to go back. Maybe they're going to reintroduce the ADPPA, something like that. But then we got this totally new bill with Senator Cantwell. And that was kind of a moment of, well, OK, maybe some of this has been really happening behind the scenes. So, yeah, I think, you know, it is significant that privacy is something that kind of underpins a lot of the other conversations we have around tech policy. But, you know, I think things often in Congress just move when you can get the political will to do them. Well, and that's, I think, kind of the big open question still to me is, is this moment different in that respect than we've had before, right?

26:36I think the privacy thing in general is so tricky, because there is this sort of intellectual understanding that I think most people have come to, where we all kind of know, there's too much information about us out there. And it's bad that there is too much access to it. And we kind of have no control over it. And it sort of feels intellectually weird. but knowing what that is and what to do about it and what the sort of downstream ramifications are is just complicated enough that it has never really felt like anyone's first priority it's just kind of a thing that lingers at the back of everybody's mind but then part of me wonders a with tiktok becoming this very visceral outpouring of what it looks like when a platform knows you very well that is one thing that i think has like maybe made it more present to people what's really going on here.

27:24But then I also just wonder if this is yet another kind of lark from people who there's just a kind of chorus of folks in Congress who are like, we need privacy legislation. And everybody goes, I agree, and then just kind of goes off to other priorities. But it sounds like even maybe just from like conversations you're having, that at least it's moving up the priority list, it might not be the top thing. But at the very least, it is a thing people are willingly talking about instead of just sort of waving their hands at and saying, we'll get to that eventually. Is that is that how it feels just to talk to people right now?

27:57I think basically, I think, you know, I didn't necessarily anticipate that we would get a real conversation around comprehensive privacy this year. You know, it's an election year. There's a lot going on. Yeah. So I think there is the sense that, you know, maybe maybe this is the time. But, you know, I'm hesitant to say that because it's felt like that in the past. But I think there's a certain way you could look at this and say maybe it would be kind of a good look for Congress to pass a comprehensive privacy bill if they're also passing this TikTok legislation. Since, you know, I think when TikTok CEO came to testify, some people are talking about, well, aren't all of these problems just like problems with privacy on platforms in general?

28:40And some of them are. So I think in a way, it would be kind of a good look for Congress to pass comprehensive privacy reform alongside something like that. Is that going to be enough to push them over the edge? You know, I think that's anyone's guess. But at least it seems like these conversations are really happening in a real tangible way again around an actual piece of legislation. Yeah, I agree. I think my guess is we are a ways away from having an answer to that one. But I think it's going to be fascinating, especially in an election year when so many people are talking about tech. I think it's going to come up maybe more than it has even at kind of hot moments in the past.

29:18It's going to be really interesting. Before I let you go, the last one I just want to touch on briefly is the Future of AI Innovation Act, which is another thing that is sort of in the air everybody's talking about, but it's not necessarily exactly clear where we're headed with this. Tell me a little bit about the Future of AI Innovation Act. What are we doing here? Yeah, so this is a bill that was introduced by a bunch of senators that have been involved in AI discussions. Again, we have Senator Cantwell. Cantwell, man. We have Senator Todd Young, who has been involved in some of the bipartisan work with Senator Schumer around AI.

29:56So this bill would basically it's basically about creating standards around AI and just, you know, spurring innovation. So, you know, it's not really dealing with some of these like nitty gritty issues that we're thinking about with like copyright and things like that. But it's really about just trying to, like, create a framework for AI to be developed in a safe way and also for innovation to take place. OK, so this is one of those bills that is like, let's let's make a plan to make a plan kind of thing. And you have to write that in a very and that feels small when I say it. But there was like there was that executive order from the White House, which was like a plan to make a plan to make a plan.

30:32This is at least like a plan to make a plan. So we're like we're like inching towards a plan. It's something. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's certainly a start. I mean, I think AI is such a huge issue that touches on so many different areas that it's hard to imagine just like one piece of legislation being the be all end all of this. So, you know, it's certainly it's a reasonable place to start, I would say. Yeah, I still remember the Benedict Evans, who the back when he was a venture capitalist always had this line that we don't regulate cars, we regulate parts of cars, which I think is very smart. And I think AI is going to end up being the same way.

31:05Like instead of if we try to regulate AI as a thing, it's just gonna, it'll never work. And I feel like to some extent, we've run into this with with privacy and the internet, like we try to regulate the whole internet all at once. And it's just impossible. But it's like, okay, we can regulate seatbelts, and we can regulate steering wheels, and we can regulate carburetors, and we can regulate gas mileage. And it's like, that's maybe what we do with AI. And this feels like, you know, setting up the what is it called the Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute, I think, is like, okay, you need a group that is like in charge of looking at this.

31:35And that's not anything, but it is a step towards something. And that I sort of appreciate as a as a way of saying like, okay, AI is too big for one bill that we shove into a foreign aid package. Let's let's start somewhere else. Yeah. Also, I think there are certain things that, you know, the American people would probably rather see a specialized agency looking at rather than Congress just going ahead and dictating a bunch of rules. So I think that is a significant step. Yeah, fair enough. All right. Well, here's hoping that you at least get a weekend next weekend. But Lord only knows this TikTok thing is just going to keep happening.

32:10So I suspect we will be talking again sooner rather than later. Yes, I'm sure. Awesome. Thanks, Lauren. Appreciate it. Thanks, David. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk AI.

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35:58All right, we're back. A couple of weeks ago, The Verge did a series of panels at the Chicago Humanities Festival all about AI and creativity. Our big question, basically, was what does it mean to be a creative person in a world filled with AI? And how is AI changing the lives and livelihoods of creative people? We had three really fun conversations, and I just want to play you a chunk of mine. I got on stage with Ty Sheridan, who's an actor you might know as Wade Watts, the protagonist in Ready Player One, or from movies like X-Men Apocalypse and the show Wireless, along with Nikola Todorovic, who is a writer and a visual effects artist.

36:34Ty and Nikola are friends, they're collaborators, and as of a few years ago, they're co-founders. They started a company called Wonder Dynamics that brings a bunch of really cool AI tools to the visual effects business. Basically, imagine you film a real scene and with like three button clicks, you can comp over a regular person and turn it into an animated character. Visual effects with essentially the touch of a button. It's pretty cool. So both Tai and Nicola are right in the center of this really complicated AI moment. So I wanted to talk to them about how they think about AI, how they're trying to build a company, how human creativity and AI can work together, and lots more.

37:15We had a really good time chatting, actually, and I learned a lot. So I thought I'd just play you a bit of that conversation. Let's do it. Hello, everybody. So I want to start by telling the story of Wonder Dynamics. Well, we had originally started developing shows together. So Nikol and I were both dabbling writing, and Nikol had directed several films, and they showed me. I thought he was a really talented filmmaker and obviously a really smart guy. And we just became kind of pals through our mutual love of movies and storytelling. And we had started developing a series that had kind of a, it was like it had an interactive element to it, and there wasn't really technology that existed, so we just kind of built a prototype.

37:57and that was really the beginning of us getting into technology. It's really the writing that started it. We wrote a project that we wanted to say, and this is going to sound super meta, but it was about robotics, right? So we're writing this sci-fi series that we wanted to make and every time you write something, as an indie person especially, you have to think about how do I cut my script to afford it? Because you can't go out and write Dune and hope to get it funded, right? As a filmmaker that hasn't proven itself. especially in visual effects. Most indie filmmakers in visual effects stay away from visual effects and CG because it's so expensive, right?

38:32Every single scene or shot you add that has a visual effects element adds so much more to your budget and you can't really afford it. So Ty and I really started it like that. We wrote this and we realized, okay, this will cost about$150 million to make and there's no way we can get that money. So we started looking at technology. But funny enough, we were studying technology as we were writing. And this started from us going really deep in robotics and self-driving cars technology, which is all about understanding the world and space around you, right? That's movement of AGI, which is the computer vision.

39:03It's like understanding what a chair is, understanding how much distance I have from something. So that's how it started. Then we started getting deeper and deeper into it. And then we started building the tech and realized, okay, this is a bit bigger than just our movies. Let's turn it into a platform. And let's really start a company to be focused towards that. And then we'll make our movies down the line. But we were lucky that we discovered it early. before GenitV was even a thing. We internally called it Visual AI. There was no term at the time. And we knew it was going to be. So we built in stealth mode for about close to four years.

39:34Just real quick, give me the 15-second explanation of what Wonder Studio does right now, just for folks who haven't seen it before. Yeah, so essentially, if you have seen movies like Avatar, you always have these motion capture suits that people perform in. And then you have a lot of equipment you need to do on set to pick up that data, performance data, et cetera. So we essentially sped up that process and let you extract your scene in 3D space. So you can get your performance capture, your camera move capture, your lighting capture, and get to your final VFX shot much, much quicker than traditional.

40:05Okay, yeah, the demo I've seen is basically, it's like a person coming out of, I think it's a library or something, sort of coming down the stairs of the building, and then it wipes, and all of a sudden, it's a cartoon character doing the same movements in the same place the same ways, and you're essentially automating that out of having Tai wear a mocap suit. which I'm assuming is not a lot of fun, by the way. It depends how sweaty you are. If you're a naturally sweaty person, no, it's not that much fun. Also, those volumes, they have all the infrared cameras and sensors and they're very warm.

40:39Extremely expensive. Very expensive. That's why you have a lot of, 99 % of filmmakers cannot afford production side of things, but post-production is really where it gets extremely, extremely expensive. So that was our mission. is like, how do we get indie filmmakers to have access to this, which traditionally has always been reserved to high budgets and big studios? Yeah. And I think the timing that you guys were dealing with is really interesting because on the one hand, you got this massive technical development, right? Like the state of the art and everything you're talking about has gone up exponentially over the last few years.

41:11On the other hand, we're now talking about this stuff in a cultural way, like we've been doing all day in a very different way than we were before. You You have access to mountains of data that comes from, in some cases, artists who would prefer that their data not be there. And so I'm really curious, as you guys were thinking about product building, especially coming from this sort of creative background, what should we build? What can we build? Where does the right answer for something like this begin and end? Are those conversations you're having? Yeah, a lot. Yeah, a lot. And especially from beginning.

41:43I think we're in a different situation because, you know, obviously we've been super fortunate to have some leaders in the space like Joe Russo, Steven Spielberg, the others who've been on our board. Obviously, Ty is an actor. So we spent a lot of time, and I was a visual effects artist and a supervisor. So we purposely from day one build it with, we're not going to be generating art. We're just going to extract information. We call it observing nature. So we're observing how the actor is moving and performing. It's still driven by a shot from a cinematographer. the character is still built by an artist.

42:15So we're very different than a lot of Gen AI companies that you see which are generating pixels by other art. For us, you mostly get information in that 3D space. So we're not really producing art. We're speeding you up and giving you that scene in 3D space so you can manipulate it. And also you'll never see us replace the actor with another human. We only are driving characters that don't exist in the real world. So that's a little bit of a thing we had to stop ourselves a lot of time. Because you get very driven with this innovation, and you can go that route and say, you know, I'm just going to build whatever I want, right?

42:50Because I can with this technology. But I think for us, it was really important to be ethical in that. It's one of those things in a tech company, we call ourselves a story company first, because this is a technology to help storytellers, right? A story will always come first for us. So, you know, it is a tough one. It's one of those things that we have a lot of our users that say, like, you're one of the, you know, rare ethically built company around this. But it's tough because you do have to pull back for innovation. There's a lot of stuff we've done research internally, right, that we had to pull back a little bit.

43:23We've been having this conversation for a long time. We've been telling people three years ago, you know, AI and visual effects is coming. You know, educate yourself. This change is going to seem extremely drastic overnight, but it's not overnight. This research has been going on in academia, Ivy League schools, for decades now. It's just that we are now seeing it extremely accelerated. And a lot of innovation you see that comes out gets viral. It's not from yesterday. It's been built on top, on top, on top, on that side. So I think the conversation is getting more serious now about these moral issues.

43:55For us, I don't think we should see the future where we don't have people on set. We don't have artists working on it, but just someone kind of typing away. I do think it will happen. We want to be a part of the good side of that story, which is you're always going to have performance arts. I think a lot of people underestimate how hard this thing is. I'm talking generally filmmaking. It's extremely hard. All of these artists have incredible high skill sets of that, right? It takes decades to learn some of these things and some of these tools, how to use them properly. So I think this kind of promise, it's a one-click solution promise, it's one line away, we're not there yet.

44:35I'm talking AI in general, not us. So I don't think we're going to replace artists, all of these actors, you know, overnight. I think people will try. They will try, but I think us as audience members, we love that human connection. I don't think all of a sudden everybody's going to be, you know, I don't have a favorite actor anymore because all the actors I watch are AI. I don't think that's going to happen, right? So I think that human connection is really important. Sometimes we like art we watch because of the meaning put by a person behind it, not generate something. So I think if you ask me where the future is going to go, I think it's going to be a combination.

45:08There's going to be some prompting that's going to be a part of it. There's going to be performance art that's going to be a part of it. Because think of it this way. We always say this. How do you describe a performance with words? It's very hard. That's why we have directors that say cut five times or I joke with Ty always, 20 times with him. But some things we cannot even, even body movement, we don't have English word for some body movements, right? So I think the performance art will always be there, especially in these kind of cases. But let's see where it goes. I always say it's important that these tools are also built with people in the industry.

45:44Because if we just let it go on a tech side, it's a very different goal. It's a goal of, let me build a tool that's used by TikTokers in billions in numbers so I can get higher value for my company, right? I say we need to build it alongside artist community. Because if you put an artist behind building something, they will think about it because they'll think about it from their perspective as well. Ty, one of the things you were saying when we were talking the other day that I've been thinking a lot about since is the question of basically the upside of these tools is that it gives access to the kind of creative process to more people.

46:18who for reasons of money or accessibility or literally where they live in the world, they just couldn't make Hollywood movies, right? Like Hollywood was a small group of people in a small place that did this stuff. And now we're getting to the point where these tools and these platforms and these audiences are available to many more people. And I think that's awesome. And I think like anything that gets us there is really great. Is there a flip side to that? Like if we democratize all of this stuff and make it all so automated that anybody can use it, I think that's very cool. And also just, it feels like it changes what that stuff is in a way that I haven't quite sorted out in my brain.

46:55I think it increases our potential to find original voices. You know, I think what happens when you have a group of people that are surrounded by like-minded individuals, they start to think the same things. It's the same with Hollywood. And you know, you have people, you know, in one place, it's a very localized industry. And if you want to get a project greenlit, that's where you have to go. You have to go to the executives that are in Hollywood. And I think... This is why we get 600 Marvel movies every day. That's right. Yeah. So I think for us, that was the real exciting mission with our company.

47:26And the exciting potential is that, hey, a group of kids growing up in the middle of some small town in Norway or Kenya can go out and make a science fiction film that today could only be made in Hollywood and do it on a budget. And that's super exciting for us because we don't know where the next James Cameron or Steven Spielberg is going to come from, you know, and I think giving, you know, thinking even about us, you know, not having a lot of tools growing up, I mean, we would die to have stuff like the tools like this. And I'm not even just saying what we're building, but I think the tools that are coming, you know, this next generation of filmmakers, I do, I think the biggest potential there is really to discover original voices and, yeah, and to kind of pave a new path for storytelling.

48:10And I think Hollywood traditionally prides itself on stories of inclusivity and trying to recognize certain cultures or people that are maybe misunderstood or underrepresented. And I think the way to truly do that in the best and most authentic way is to really democratize the tools and allow people from all walks of life to go and make these films, regardless of their socioeconomical status. Yeah. It also makes me think that maybe rather than like, you know, your close personal friend, Steven Spielberg, making tons of movies with all of these new tools very soon, what actually might happen is that like YouTubers and TikTokers and the people who are making this stuff who have never had access to these kinds of tools at any cost might be able to do this kind of stuff.

48:56Like one thing I've been thinking a lot about is dubbing, which is a thing that is AI is all over. Like text to speech is starting to get really good. Speech to text is starting to get really good. And the idea that you could have something that you make that is actually localized successfully in two languages all over the world I think is very cool and super exciting. And we're a long way from the tech of that being sort of perfect, but it's already like the stuff that Squid Game was a couple of years ago, where you see their mouth moving and you hear the words and they're obviously different.

49:24Those two things are coming closer together. And I think that's very cool. Yeah. It's also from an actor's perspective. You just revealed you watched the US version on Netflix or the Squid Games. Come on, you have to watch the original with the subtitles. You've got to watch the original with the subtitles. Yeah, I mean, from an actor's perspective, do you really want someone else in some other country dubbing your voice in a foreign language? I mean, I would rather... This is a whole different panel now. We're getting in a whole different panel now. No, I think it's a good example. I mean, I think we can recognize where AI is starting to be used in some ways to stay true to the performance of the artist, the original artist.

50:03And I think, I think that's awesome. I mean, obviously I have a biased perspective, probably being an actor, but well, but, and again, this is like, I've realized a lot of what I'm going to do here is just like throw weird tensions at you and make you sort them out in front of me. But the thing that I struggle with on that one is like, they're doing this a lot with podcasts too, right? And I host a podcast and we, we get a lot of people who are like, I don't speak English. I would like to listen to your stupid podcast. Can I do that? And there are companies out there that are like, we will automatically dub you into 60 languages.

50:30And on the one hand, super cool on the other hand i i don't know if they're good or i'm gonna say what is right like so it there's it sort of crosses this invisible line where i go from like oh access is awesome to like this feels weird because it's you're now no longer getting the thing that i did and that somewhere in there it starts to it starts to feel odd there's definitely those lines but i think what you were saying earlier is what i think is going to happen right i don't think studios are going to have issues. I think what the people don't realize, there's so much sacrifice in every project we see.

51:02Turning things from page to screen is really, really hard. There's always a lot of sacrifice that comes from it. So I think studios are just going to keep pushing things higher. But I think indie filmmakers, as you mentioned, like, you know, YouTubers, if you remember the days when, you know, DSLRs came out, right? And you have people who are saying, oh my God, everybody's going to be able to make a movie now, right? With it. But that doesn't mean those movies were necessarily great. Because storytelling is still hard. Coming up with a good story is still extremely hard, right? So we're going to open access with these innovations in AI, right, across the board, which is really exciting.

51:35I think what YouTube did, and I always say this, YouTube is a good example of distribution changing, right? So we had open distribution. I think what's happening now with generative AI is that we're changing production, so open production, right? So meaning these kids could come up and express themselves and put it on YouTube, and if they're good, people will like them. They will find them, right? There's billions of people watching it. I think now in production, we're going to have these tools where it was going to be easier, direct line for them to express themselves. But again, there's no guarantee that's good, right?

52:03If you go into masses. On the flip side of that, which you were saying, you know, kind of mentioning Marvel movies, it's a hard thing. I understand both sides. It's a really hard thing for studios because if you spend$250 million, you need to make $500 to break even, right? And you're spending another$100 probably on marketing, right? So you can't really take a big risk. And I always say it would almost be impossible to get 2001 Space Odyssey greenlit today. It's too artsy, right? And I think that's what, for us, was really excited. Once you get these tools and you bring the price down, you can take high risks.

52:35And you can make visually spectacular films that a young audience would want to watch, but make a grounded story really about the character. Push some narrative. Push some subject matter that's extremely, extremely important. And if you're not spending$200 million, if you're spending$20 million on each, you can make way more films and employ more artists. When we were talking before, one of you brought up Netflix as another sort of wrench in the engine of like what people think that we make and how it changes what things were. Like we got different kinds of TV shows because Netflix existed and what that platform wanted.

53:07So to some extent, do you think AI is just sort of another in this like long series of changes that Hollywood has been going through forever? Or is there something different about AI? I think it's different because of scale. I think it's different because it's going to distribute it much more. It's not going to be as localized. But I don't know. I'm optimistic. I think the beauty of it, the positive side is that democratization we're talking about. The negative side is like, how much is it going to affect it? But if you look at through history, Hollywood kind of always found its way, right? It always found its way to survive.

53:38You know, early days of television, people said movies were over, right? And now that cycle went and kind of repeated itself. Now, you know, 80 years later with the streaming platform, and then it's coming in a slower recovery on that. So I think storytelling finds its way on that, but I do think it's going to be a big shift. A lot of people in production side, especially below the line, a lot of artists below the line, you know, Ty and I talk a lot about like, what if shooting in person is going to be like black and white movies today? You don't see many of them, but you see some, right? What if that happens and going around?

54:12So it's interesting. Nobody really has an answer of what that's going to end up being. But yes, again, to repeat, like we've been telling people for three, four years, start learning these things. Start learning these tools. It's the only way to kind of survive through it. I think it's genius out of the bottom. It's really hard to stop some of this research and some of this innovation. Yeah, I think that was the big thing during the strikes that didn't happen. You know, people, there was a lot of controversy. People were saying, oh, AI is either bad or good. And people were jumping on this, you know, spectrum on one extreme end or the other.

54:43and no one was really coming together to talk about it in an open way and say, hey, let's educate ourselves on this. And I think that's truly what everyone needs to do. It's what the industry needs to do. It's what artists need to do. Artists need to understand exactly how it's going to change the course of their careers, what benefits it poses, what threats it poses to their careers. I think we really, as creators, have to come together and really openly educate ourselves on what it means for the future. Do you think there's room to influence that as creatives? I think to some extent that there's a version of that conversation that basically sounds like, you know, we're screwed.

55:21The old way is dead. All we can do is just sort of hunker down and try to move forward. But there's another way that says, and I think this is like talking to folks, especially during the writer's strike, there's this question of like, how can we make this better? Like, we agree that there are things that ChatGPT can do for scripts that are useful, but we have to do that in a way that also works for us as people who have jobs and do creative work. Like, can we, my worry with a lot of things about AI is that tech is getting better faster than we are at dealing with it. And so it's just going to sort of leave us behind and we're going to end up at this place of all we can do is just sort of give up and try to survive.

55:56I think it's not getting as fast as you would read online. Okay. It's flashy, but practically on film, it's still not completely usable. It'll get there. That's one of the reasons we built it that way, because we knew there's no way you can push every shot just with AI. You'll get 60 % there, so you need to give this data to the artist to be able to manipulate it all the way there. So it's still a bit like flashiness and excitement. We're kind of seeing it now, in a way, with some films that I think are dominating the box office. I think audiences are seeing films that they're not enjoying. And sure, you can argue that that's happened always.

56:34But I think ultimately, you know, people will, good stories attract people, you know, and people go and they see a good story and they tell someone about it. And then that person goes and they see it and they tell someone else. And so I don't think that will ever stop, you know. And so if you have, let's say, a studio or a production company or anyone that thinks, oh, we can just use AI and replace everyone. Well, if they're not making good stories, it's not going to matter. These stories won't be successful because they won't connect with people in an emotional, in a real way. And that's what artists are good at.

57:05That's why we need artists, you know, regardless of what tools they have. And that's always been true since the dawn of time, since we've been telling stories, since we've been, you know, telling stories through art. And I don't think that'll ever change. You know, thinking about making a movie, like, I don't know, how many people in this room made a$100 million movie or made a movie, right? How many people would like to make a movie? Tiesh and a racist. Just that. Tiesh and a racist. Yeah, yeah. But I'm saying if you ask, you know, a really large group of people how many would like to be able to make a movie, most people say, oh, that'd be fun.

57:40I would like to do that, right? I would like to express my feeling and tell people my story. The amount of people that get to, like, make a$150 million movie, it's a handful. It's a handful of these directors that you get to work. So I think our industry will just grow because it's not going to shrink. It will grow because it's going to be very, very global. We're talking Hollywood. and I always say like storytelling extremely extremely is extremely important it should not be dependent on your socio-economical status that's why we started this and I think that's what's important about AI but yes you got to build it responsibly otherwise you can it can it can hurt us long way let's just talk about sort of Hollywood more broadly right now and I'm curious especially sort of specific AI stuff you're starting to see work its way into how these things get made we've talked about dubbing a little bit we talked about what you're doing it wonder with the VFX stuff.

58:28Like, are there other things that are starting to sort of appear in the filmmaking process and be part of the conversation in Hollywood that are either cool or early versions of something cool? Yeah, I think Hollywood is, it's odd because it's hypocritical, but Hollywood, I think, is notoriously standoffish to new technology, even though it's an entire industry predicated on the advent of a camera. And then thereafter, you know, new stories and the best movies were making technological advancements, you know, and they wouldn't be possible without those technological advancements. But I think now, you know, there are certain decision makers in Hollywood, and I'm not saying it's everyone, but there are a lot of decision makers in Hollywood who know nothing about technology.

59:11They know nothing about how visual effects work really, you know, at a very high level maybe. But there are people who make a lot of decisions and I think they don't understand technology at a certain depth. So I think sometimes it's also kind of a risk management business too. You know, you have thousands of artists working in certain pipelines. You can't just, you know, decide to use some AI tool and change that entire pipeline overnight. No one's ever going to go for that. And that's one reason why, you know, we built Wonder Studio the way we did so that it plugged in directly to the pipeline that artists were used to, that productions were using.

59:48It could actually utilize this tool. It's not a black box, right? So yeah, I think the industry has kind of been battered over the past few years. I mean, I think it's fair to say, you know, we had COVID, which was a major dent in the global box office. And, you know, then we had the streaming wars and, you know, digital distribution has been, the landscape of digital distribution has been changing and distribution at large has been changing. And now the strikes and AI. And so So it's just, it's kind of, yeah, it's been a rumble tumble past few years. I think people are really trying to understand like, you know, what, how can we come out of this?

1:00:22And, and, you know, are we actually on stable ground now? And can we go and green light films? And if so, how much risk can we take? And what tools can we utilize? So I think it's, it's really like we're in a discovery phase right now. And I think people are trying new things. I think people are really starting to test a lot of things behind closed doors. So I do think this will be the year where we really start to see a lot of new use cases. And we've seen a few. But I do think there will be more significant examples that we'll see in the next year. A lot of the tech is not there yet. A lot of tech is really good to push it to something that you can put on social media.

1:00:59But film is different. You've got to get it up to 8K. It needs to be crisp. And also, we said this kind of age of generative AI has been last year, year and a half. but storytelling and film is all about collaboration and back and forth. You turn in your shot to a director or editor and they're going to give you back notes. And sometimes you're going to have, they're called passes. Sometimes you're going to have up to 20 of them and the changes are going to be so specific. And so these generative AI tools just haven't gotten there yet that you can edit the finest pixels of that. And that's the limitation of 2D space a little bit in that side because you can generate something that's really cool but it's a little bit off.

1:01:33How do I fix it? I think it will get better. Also, we haven't seen really performance so it hasn't been used. I mean, a lot of these text video, they don't yet know how to generate performance completely on that side. So I think a lot of filmmakers are still kind of exploring it. So the promise is big, but we're not completely there yet. I read somewhere that actors are starting to put in their contracts that they have to use VFX to make them look however many years younger or remove the lines. I thought you were saying something else. There's a budget just for wrinkle removal on Tom Cruise's face.

1:02:02I can't confirm that. I used to do that early in my career. There you go. It was just removing people's under eyes and stuff like that. But not Tom Cruise. He's ageless. Exactly. Tom Cruise don't come after me. Yeah, no, never. Okay. I thought Tom Cruise was AI. There is an AI. That's metaphysics. Yeah, yes. That is. That's true. All right. We're going to run out of time here soon, so let's take some questions if folks have questions. Hi. can you quantify the access that you're talking about, the democratization? What is the pricing model of your product? And what are the price, the cost savings that you promise your clients when you go in for a pitch?

1:02:46And across what tasks? I'm curious about kind of the material benefits of the product. Yeah, no, that's a great question. When I say democratization, I mean AI in general, where it's going. We're not saying we're the only player out there that's just going to democratize the entire... You're just in it for the money. Yeah, that's a very big promise. I'm talking in general. For us, we really see savings up to 60%, 70 % going in aspect. The thing that we're really saving people on production side, you need a lot of this hardware, not just the motion capture suit. You need to track your camera, which is additional hardware.

1:03:20You need all the sensors, which is more priced than the hardware. And then in post-production, there's a lot of these monotone tasks that really take weeks sometimes that we brought down to hours on the side. So we've seen quite a bit of significant change. Again, it really depends. We just spoke earlier in visual effects, you have something called easy, medium, and hard shots. And usually when you bid a project, you say, okay, I have 2 ,000 shots, 500 is going to be easy, about 1 ,000 is going to be medium, and then 500 is going to be hard. So what we did is kind of brought down some of those hard to be medium and medium to be easy.

1:03:53So that's really where the savings come on. And what we've seen also, what's really interesting is a lot of our users are, because our tool goes from$20 a month to$100 a month. So we really build this to be affordable. Traditionally, if you use MoCap, sometimes you're going to spend$30 ,000 a day to do that, right? So there's a drastic, drastic change there. But, you know, we were talking earlier, it's like our goal is to open it up free as well as a part of that. The only reason, as a startup, you can't do that because these computers, you know, we made it as a web browser so everybody can, accessibility was a big one for us.

1:04:27So everybody can access it. But that means you have the cloud cost. But I always say cloud's not an actual cloud up there that's free. It's, you know, Amazon has a workstation somewhere that you have to pay by the hour, right? So that is a cost on us, you know. Even chat GPT, they're spending millions of dollars a second when someone's prompting. Someone's, you know, someone's got to pay for that. So for us as a startup, we picked a route where we're not going to go out to raise hundreds of millions of dollars just to get higher numbers so we can claim we have hundreds of millions of users, right?

1:04:57We did end up close to a million of users on our platform. But the hard part there is like, okay, we can't open it up yet until we bring the cost down for us so we can make sure that this can run for a long time. Totally. All right, let's do a couple more. Do you guys have any thoughts around the end game for materials being created these days, like at the movie theater, for instance? Are we going to see changes in how we view these new products at some point? It seems like going to the movies has fundamentally changed. I don't know if it was the pandemic or what have you, but now we are at these inflection points with the AI, the new ways that we inhabit spaces.

1:05:39Do you have any thoughts around that? Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, we'll continue to see that change. You know, will it ever go away entirely? I don't think so. I think people will go to the movies, and they may be sitting in a virtual cinema, but they might be watching movies still. I don't think that'll ever go away. I think that's a very special experience. But I do think with new advancements, you know, we will see new mediums that are extremely compelling. I especially think interactive for games is going to be huge, obviously. Yeah, we'll continue to see new mediums as technology continues to evolve.

1:06:13But I don't know if we'll ever lose, you know, there's going to be some form of nostalgia of like, oh, I love going to see a movie in a theater surrounded by other people on a huge screen. And I hope we'll never lose that. I'm wondering if you have a POV on like other industries outside of Hollywood, whether it's like Nollywood or Bollywood, are they embracing AI more? And like maybe seeing that as an opportunity to even like skyrocket closer to Hollywood? Yeah, definitely. We've seen one of our first users have been from Nollywood and different ones. We've seen it definitely happen. To me, that's exciting because I think we'll get more chances.

1:06:51Especially in CG and visual effects, a lot of these smaller markets really want to do the same thing that Hollywood's doing, but they either didn't have the know-how or the budgets needed to do that. Or the production equipment. They just don't have the hardware. Yeah, exactly. So that's where it's really exciting. We've seen it a lot. And I think there's a stat somewhere in Hollywood is making more films per month than something about like Hollywood and one more industry combined. Yeah, it's quite fascinating. And if you start looking into it, it's a crazy quantity of it. But again, as you mentioned earlier, like if we have good dubbing and stuff that comes out, we might probably see more of those films, right?

1:07:26Because I was joking. My girlfriend doesn't like to watch films with subtitles, which is, again, terrible for me, right? Because I love to watch foreign films. I can't look at my phone and read subtitles. Yeah, I know. She says she doesn't like to read movies, and I can't hear her say that every time. But I do think a lot of audience actually doesn't like to read sub-tellelos. So if we figure out a way how do we bring these foreign films more and make people comfortable to watch it, it will help on that side. Yeah, but we have users all over the world, from Japan to China, England, Norway, US, Mexico, South America.

1:08:04Yeah, we have users kind of globally. I think generally outside of our platform, yeah, we're seeing a lot more AI usage on that side. Everybody's trying to figure out. What's exciting is sometimes you see things on YouTube that just some kid came up with a new pipeline. It's extremely promising. And I was like, wow, that's very interesting. This is, you know, if this kid goes out, you could raise$10 million on idea on a startup because this is a really good pipeline. But it's one kid sitting at the computer and researching things. I think that's the exciting part. And we said it's kind of like equal starting point for everyone.

1:08:35that's the fear of it but that's also to me the exciting part of it is meaning like oh everybody has a chance to figure out how to do this and obviously you know the traditional kind of gatekeepers will be worried about that and maybe at some point you know maybe those gatekeepers even get replaced by people who are telling better stories who are coming up with more efficient ways to tell those and you know it's better for the world maybe here's hoping alright I could talk to you guys about this for hours and I also didn't ask you a single question about Ready Player One so you should be grateful All right, Nikola, this one's for you.

1:09:06We got to go. Ty, Nikola, thank you so much for doing this. I think this is really fun. Thank you. Of course, thanks for having us. Thanks, everyone. All right, we got to take one more break and then we'll be back to do a question from the First Cast Hotline. We'll be right back.

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1:12:59We're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE11 and the email is vergecast at theverge.com. We love all your questions and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. Thank you, by the way, to everybody who keeps reaching out about the book's palma. That is like the most intriguing device, according to the Vergecast hotline, in a long time. I'm getting one, and I'm going to have a lot to say with Alex on this show very soon. Get ready. This week, we have a question from Brayden. Hey, David, this is Brayden from Utah. Why has iMessage not improved? I mean that, like, I remember when, like, iOS 10 happened and Game Pigeon was a thing where you could play games through iMessage with your friends.

1:13:41It was the coolest thing. And I still play game pigeon games with my friends and family to this day. But I remember in 2016, that's eight years ago, I was like, dang, this is cool now. But think of the things people will make with this, how there will be other things to do in iMessage. And currently, like, the list has not grown at all. It is game pigeon, gifs, and then weird apps that want to be in your messages that don't belong there. And it's just like, don't you feel like iMessage held more promises and just haven't fulfilled? Does the Verge cast play game pigeon games together? What are your thoughts?

1:14:20I want to hear them. This is actually something I've done a lot of reporting about over the last couple of years, not necessarily with iMessage specifically, but with messaging apps in general. And I think you can look at the whole world of messaging apps to kind of answer the question. So the thing that turns out to be true about messaging apps is that, A, you can't really build a business on a messaging app. There's just no real evidence that lots of people will pay you lots of money for a way to talk to their friends, right? Like the idea of a texting app is so commoditized at this point that there's really no business to be had there.

1:14:55So if you're a messaging company, let's say Snapchat or WhatsApp or Telegram or iMessage in this case, you have to figure out a way to be successful that isn't just messaging, right? If you and I messaging each other is never going to be a business, and I believe that it's not, you have to figure out something else to do. So you essentially have two options. You can either try to build stuff around messaging, which is like what Snapchat does with things like Snapchat Originals and Spotlight and all the creator stuff that they've been doing. And Stories, frankly, is a way around messaging stuff so that you come to the app to do messaging and you stay to do everything else.

1:15:37And that's where all the money is, right? That's essentially what WeChat is. WeChat's whole idea was to build an entire universe around the place that people go to communicate with their friends. That's a real business. You can do it. It's a tricky thing to get right from a UI perspective. I think Snap has been through this in a bunch of complicated ways, trying to say, okay, you came here for a messaging app. How do we get you into all of the things that we can do to make money? But that is one way to do it. That's also, I would say, what WhatsApp is doing with things like business messaging.

1:16:07WhatsApp is really interested in getting you to get menus or business hours or things like that through WhatsApp. That's a thing people are doing kind of informally anyway. And they would really, really, really like to bring that into the WhatsApp ecosystem. That's also a way they can make money. They can charge businesses for those services. They can take a portion of money that gets moved around inside of these things. But again, all of this is kind of ancillary to this is where you message your friends. The other way to do it is to try to figure out a way to insert experiences into the place where you message with your friends.

1:16:41And this is where it gets really messy. I think about like Google Allo is probably the best example of this, if you remember that this messaging app Google made from years ago. And its big idea was that you could bring an AI system at that time, you know, Google Assistant into your chat with your friends. So you could say, you know, we're planning to go to dinner or we're planning to go to the movies. Let's buy movie tickets. And you could actually buy movie tickets inside of your chat with your friends. Cool idea in theory. I think this is also where things like games like Braden is talking about or this idea that we can have experiences together inside of our chat window seems cool.

1:17:22Emphasis on seems. In reality, this ends up being a pain. It's very hard for these apps to find a way to sort of insert themselves or add these services or even make you aware of these services without getting in the way of just you talking to your friends. And if you think about it, the idea of screwing up your chat interface with your friends is like totally untenable. People just won't do it, right? You get to the point where I want to have messages back and forth with my friends. And if you change that or screw it up, disaster. And I think in a funny way, Apple has been trying to almost do it without fully doing it for a really long time.

1:18:00There was the iMessage app store where you could send stuff, but that had an incredible discovery problem. Like most people, I don't think knew the iMessage app store existed. It was buried in a menu in the iOS keyboard when you were in iMessage. That didn't really work. Now there's this new menu where you can send stuff that works a little bit better, but that menu is really slow and kind of awkward. But I think what Apple would really like to do is make messages a full on internet platform in a very real way. You should be able to send somebody a link to tic-tac-toe and it just expands and you can play tic-tac-toe inside of the iMessage window right there without ever leaving the app.

1:18:40If you think about it right now, a lot of this stuff is just links, right? Like if I want to play a game with you, I send you a link, you tap on the link and we go play the game. That's actually a pretty good user experience. So to bring that into the messaging system is a pretty tall order. And to do it in a way that doesn't disrupt anything else or threaten to take your data or break encryption in these encrypted messaging apps, it's just hard. People want private messaging. They want simple messaging and they want to be able to talk to their friends. And to add things to that is borderline impossible.

1:19:09That said, they're going to keep trying. They are just going to keep trying. There are too many people spending too much time in messaging apps for these companies to not try and find ways to insert themselves. And so you'll see more stuff like this, that inside of things like Slack and Discord, you're already starting to see these fuller web-like experiences you can have just inside of a chat window. I think that's where we're headed in certain ways, but I also think that's gonna make basic messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp and frankly, iMessage all the more valuable to people because that's where you go to just talk.

1:19:44And that is like the main thing we wanna do on the internet. Think about how annoying Gmail ads are. You're like, I just want to look at my emails and you're showing me a bunch of ads at the top of my inbox for some reason. Add that to your text messages with friends and family, which are even more intimate and even more important. And that just sucks. People will run away from that. And if you're Apple, again, iMessage is one of the core things that keeps people using iPhones. Being a blue bubble is a very important thing. And so if you make people hate iMessage to the point where they'll start using WhatsApp, app, that's a huge, huge risk for Apple.

1:20:17So Apple is in this tricky spot, just like everybody who makes a messaging app of saying messaging is so important. We want to build a business out of it. It's where people are. It's what people want to do. But if we do it even slightly wrong, people will run away. And that kills a huge amount of any kind of moat and advantage that we have to keep people in that tension mostly means we get to keep our simple, good messaging apps, but that Tension may not last forever, and I think it's going to be really interesting because it is abundantly clear to everyone who makes an app that if you can get people to message inside of it, they will live inside of your app, and that becomes very powerful.

1:20:55You don't want to screw it up, but it's a powerful thing to have going for you. So we'll see. I would bet we're going to see a lot more experimentation inside of these apps, especially these kind of just outside of messaging things where like I can send you a game in the way that I send you a GIF or I can send you an interactive poll inside of a group chat. That's the kind of stuff that's already coming to WhatsApp. And I think you'll start to see that in more places. But I sort of hope we never get these like massively interactive full web experiences. I do not need a chatbot in my messaging system.

1:21:29I just I just don't. This thing where you can talk to an AI chatbot like you talk to a person. Fine. Do not put an AI bot in my group chats. Meta, Apple, Google, whoever else. I don't want that. I don't think anybody does. But they're probably going to do it. We'll see. All right, that is it for The Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about at TheVerge.com. We'll put a bunch of Lauren's stuff into the show notes. She's been covering all of these privacy builds really well. But also, just read TheVerge.com.

1:22:02There's a lot going on right now, and we are also running headlong into developer conference season with Google and Microsoft and Apple. Stuff's about to get nuts. as always if you have thoughts questions feelings or want to ban tiktok you can always email us at vergecast at the verge.com or call the hotline 866 verge 11 we truly love hearing from you also again the books palma if you want to know about the books palma send us questions i think we're gonna have to do a whole big thing on it on this show because i'm getting the clear sense that y 'all are interested so if you have questions keep them coming this show is produced by andrew marino liam james and will poor the verge cast is verge production and part of the vox media podcast Network.

1:22:41Eli, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about the Rabbit R1, all the other news in tech, and all of our feelings about everything. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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