The relationship between Hollywood and the AI industry is extremely fraught. Many filmmakers and industry workers abhor the idea of using AI in the moviemaking process, and worry that it will be used as a pale replacement for human creativity. In June, Disney and Universal sued the AI company Midjourney for copyright infringement.
But several AI companies are nevertheless attempting to forge a path forward in Hollywood. And on Tuesday, one such startup, Moonvalley, took a major step forward by releasing a fully-licensed, professional-grade video model to the public.
Moonvalley was founded by DeepMind engineers and has close ties with the film industry—the company owns AI film studio Asteria Film Co., which was founded this year by filmmaker and actress Natasha Lyonne and her boyfriend Bryn Mooser. Asteria has been advising Moonvalley on the development of its AI model Marey, which is now available to filmmakers for subscription tiers of $14.99, $34.99, and $149.99 a month.
Marey may become AI’s main entry point into Hollywood, as it’s being developed with the approval of filmmakers and trained on licensed data, theoretically allowing studios to avoid the ethical issues and copyright lawsuits that have plagued the AI industry.
“We have to make sure that we’re building these tools the right way: building with the filmmaker and the artist at the center of it, rather than trying to automate their job away,” Naeem Talukdar, Moonvalley’s CEO and co-founder, tells TIME.
Moonvalley has raised over $100 million from investors, including Khosla Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners. Asteria is using Marey for a new documentary about Carl Sagan, to restore and tweak footage. Talukdar also says that Marey is being tested in pilot programs at over a dozen “large studios,” as well as by major advertising companies.
Many other AI video models are black-box…
