An Unusual Reason ‘Heretic’ May Be The Best Movie Of 2024
Hugh Grant's Heretic is one of the top-rated films of the year with a 94% critic score, but I'd consider it one the best for a very specific reason. And it has nothing to do with its actual quality.
Heretic marks the first time that a film has specifically decried AI use. There's a message in the credits that says "No generative AI was used in the making of this film" in the vein of "no animals were harmed," in a message that hopefully becomes standard. Directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods spoke to Variety on why they put that in there, and their stance of GenAI in the creative process.
"We have no illusions that when people watch 'Heretic' they're going to go, 'Wait, did they use generative AI?' It doesn't feel like that at all, but it was important for us to put that out there because we think it's something people need to start talking about."
I'm curious as to which parts of Heretic would imply the use of GenAI, but they wanted to make it clear. They continued:
"I think this idea that an algorithm can just scrape all of human history and art off the internet, repackage it, regurgitate it, spit it out and somebody else can use that to create profit ... I don't know why that's legal. It's important for people to start talking about the need for human intersection in art, business and every facet of this life, because we're on the precipice of every job on planet Earth being replaced overnight. It's going to happen so fast. And it's easy for it to happen in the arts. We're in a business that is exceptionally greedy. Decisions are made for the bottom line and not for the good of the artistic process."
GenAI use is already spreading in Hollywood, sometimes detectible, sometimes not. Famously, then entire opening credits of Marvel's (exceptionally awful) Secret Invasion were made using GenAI. At the time, director and EP Ali Selim seemed proud of it:
"When we reached out to the AI vendors, that was part of it — it just came right out of the shape-shifting, Skrull world identity, you know? Who did this? Who is this?" Selim said, later saying he didn't "really understand" how AI art works.
"We would talk to them about ideas and themes and words, and then the computer would go off and do something. And then we could change it a little bit by using words, and it would change."
Of course the issue creatives have with AI is that essentially all GenAI systems have scrapped everything in existence, video, audio, text, images, without permission of their creators, and remixed it into whatever comes out through prompts and shaping of the content. This has led to a number of lawsuits but in many ways it feels like there's no closing Pandora's box. So, filmmakers and other artists have to purposefully reject GenAI like what we're seeing here. Hopefully this becomes the rule, not the exception.
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