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Hollywood is cautiously adopting AI, using it to cut time and costs from tasks ranging from script evaluation to post-production. But concerns that it will steal creative works and wipe out jobs persist.

Minta Carlson, 35, who goes by Araminta K professionally, represents an emerging class of labor in Hollywood. She’s a senior creative AI architect at Moonvalley, one of the prominent AI companies working in Hollywood. Moonvalley, which just raised $84 million, pitches an ethical AI model it calls Marey and owns AI film studio Asteria Film Co., which was cofounded by filmmaker and actor Natasha Lyonne and filmmaker Bryn Mooser.

Carlson shared her career path in this as-told-to essay and how other creative people in Hollywood can adapt to AI. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

After studying theater and working in graphic design, I taught myself how to train AI models.

In the Hollywood context, what we do is called “fine-tuning” models. Let’s say you wanted a specific dragon in a production. You could train a model to understand who that dragon is, how it moves, what it looks like — what it looks like really close up and really far away. And when you point the dragon this way and you tell it to fly upward toward the sunset, it’ll understand what that means.

I started working at Asteria full time early this year. Sometimes, I’m working on animated shorts in-house, and other times, I’m working with studios on VFX or background pieces. I’ll work with creative directors and others to flesh out how a project’s characters and styles should look. We recently helped a studio augment a party scene that otherwise would have been cut for budgetary reasons.

I have not seen a lot of people like me before starting this job. Anyone with a technical and art background can do it. It takes less than an hour to explain how to curate a dataset in the context that we need. What’s really difficult to teach someone is how to have taste and how to have a really critical eye. With people who don’t have an art background, it can be weeks of going back and forth.

I could definitely see technical artists, traditional animators, and colorists doing this work, as well as people with less traditionally technical roles, like a creative director or a concept artist — anyone who has to communicate visual content to other people.

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The most misunderstood idea is that AI is this amorphous blob that can replace an artist. At the end of the day, AI doesn’t have a perspective, vision, or opinion about anything. If you’re just prompting a model, whatever results you’re getting are just that model’s bias unless you know what you’re asking for and how to ask it.

I still lean on my traditional skills

I was born in Berkeley and moved to New England when I was young. I went to school for theater directing and playwriting. After college, I worked as an independent graphic designer and honed art skills on my own. I also built websites.

I started working with Stable Diffusion in 2022 when AI was starting to blossom. I wasn’t happy with the results, so I started to learn how to train the model. It was very technical, so I just muscled through. It’s a very artistic and curatorial process.

In the case of Marey, you’re usually putting in 20 or 30 images or videos to fine-tune the model, so each one has so much impact, and you need to understand each one’s strengths and weaknesses and how each one relates to the other. Knowing how to look technically at art and think about a whole piece is something I had to do in school for theater, and those skills came back in full force.

For people already working in Hollywood, it’s really easy to get overwhelmed by all of the different tools. I tell people, don’t test every single tool. Come up with something you’re trying to solve, like making someone walk across the screen or drawing multiple angles of an animated character. I like sites like Replicate or Fal that let you test a lot of open-source models.

Knowing how to illustrate and animate are still valuable, but I recommend people prioritize creativity and not just technical skills. Otherwise, you might never think of all of those different movements that you need to show the AI. Rather than drawing a million of the same character to try to perfect it, I would draw a million different characters to create a perspective and unique style.

Artists have a future in Hollywood

When I was consulting, I had conversations with people in marketing who wanted to try to replace artists with AI, and it didn’t really work. It was very obvious that the person asking didn’t understand how AI and art worked, and they didn’t have self-awareness around their own standards. Even when I saw colleagues try to follow through with those requests, it was never good enough.

Now, I’m rarely involved with a project if we’re not taking direction from an artist or a director.

I think the fear of AI impacting jobs in Hollywood is understandable, but I’m seeing that AI is going to unlock a lot of productions that may be struggling to get funding or forward momentum.