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“Shazam!” star Zachary Levi, on The George Janko Show podcast, compared the rise of artificial intelligence to the biblical great flood from Genesis, warning of a looming disaster.
“We can talk all day long and wax philosophical about how do we save the industry from itself in the way that it treats people, or it doesn’t make great content or whatever,” said Levi. “Guys, honestly like, t-minus two years from now, good luck finding any job, because the studios will have a technology … it’s already basically here.”
Levi gave an example of audiences being able to generate their own movies thanks to AI technology:
“Imagine if you will, not only will every studio have possessed this technology, but then they’ll go to you and say, ‘Hey as a part of your HBO Max subscription you can pay ten extra dollars, and you get to use the creator sandbox, and in there, you can make your own movies. And you can type in anything that’s a Warner Brothers asset, so it can be Shazam and Batman and Neo from ‘The Matrix,’ and you can type in all these characters, and you want them to go on a treasure hunt on Mars and I want it to feel like a Stephen Spielberg movie, go.’ And then it will make that movie, and it will look indiscernible from human-made, in fact it will look amazing. And it will be entirely animated, but it will look like real life. This is where we’re about to be.”
Levi revealed he’s building his own studio, likening it to Noah’s ark, saying, “The flood is coming” with AI advancements. When asked why he remains in entertainment despite AI’s threat, Levi emphasized the importance of the human element in storytelling: “There should always be, hopefully will always be, a niche, at least a niche part of the entertainment industry where people are like, ‘I still want to go support humans making art. Human-made art.’”
“Like no matter how good AI-derived art becomes, it will become very, very, very, very good, and they’ll be cheap,” said Levi, admitting AI’s flaws. “Most people think, ‘Yeah, but I’m never going to want a computer-generated movie.’ If we’re being super-altruistic, obviously, but if a human-made movie still costs you twenty bucks, but for two bucks you can make a movie where you, by the way you get to scan your own face and your own voice and you get to be Superman or, better yet your kid gets to be Superman, and now you can shut them up for the next couple hours for two bucks and watch themselves be Superman in the movie, you are absolutely going to pay for that movie.”
‘Shazam!’ star Zachary Levi compares AI to biblical disaster https://t.co/TYN7hEFBeb
— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 3, 2025
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