Christopher Nolan says studios must protect films from AI recreations
Christopher Nolan - who is the current president of the Directors guild of America (DGA) - has warned it is "down to the studios" to protect their work from AI recreations.
Christopher Nolan has warned it is "down to the studios" to protect their work from AI recreations.
The 56-year-old director - who is the current president of the Directors guild of America (DGA) - insisted studio bosses need to take responsibility for protecting copyrighted work and admitted he is "very pleased" his latest movie The Odyssey features a legal warning against using the epic to train AI data.
Speaking to the Hollywood Insiders podcast, he said: “AI is too big a catchall term. It’s describing too many things and it’s being used by companies to absolve themselves of responsibility.
“They sort of want to portray it as this Frankenstein’s monster that can get out of control and can change the world without them having any accountability for it. We have to strongly resist that.
“There’s already legislation in place that protects people, protects creators, etc. And the fact that these companies hide behind fair-use provisions, for example, I think longer term that won’t hold up in court. There have already been some significant judgments against it.
"We’re very focused at the Guild about holding the studios to account for protecting their copyrights. We can’t do that.
"With very few exceptions in the Guild, we are not the copyright holders of the films that we’ve worked on. It’s down to the studios to do that.
“And I was very pleased to see that the boilerplate at the end of The Odyssey, for the first time, it contains a message saying that this film cannot be ingested and used as training data."
The Inception filmmaker's comments echo previous remarks he made after being elected as DGA president last September, when Nolan - who previously served on the Guild's Artificial Intelligence Committee - noted there are "excellent protections" in place against AI but warned "that's not enough".
He explained to Deadline at the time: “You have to have a voice in how this tool is used moving forward. Also, we like to try and have a voice in, what’s the legal framework?
“Because we generally aren’t the copyright holders of our work, but our income, our residuals, depends on the appropriate monetisation of those copyrights. So we’re constantly in dialogue with the companies about, are you maximising the value of the work that we’ve created? Because we do benefit from that enormously.”
