Welcome to Alumni Live: The Podcast.

These are conversations with Grand Valley State University film and video

graduates about the industry, the film, video, major and alumni profiles.

Welcome back to Alumni Live.

I'm Jeff Staub, a senior in Grand Valley's film and video production program.

Joining us to talk about artificial intelligence and the ways that

it will impact filmmakers is Michelle Terpstra, the Director of

Digital Content at toolfarm.com.

Hi.

Thank you for having me.

So for students and alumni who are listing right now who are afraid

of artificial intelligence, may not know a lot, do you have a simple

definition that you could explain?

AI, it stands for artificial intelligence and it is machine learning.

Basically, these computers have been trained on data.

It could have been trained on books, or trained on images,

or trained on old films, and it learns different things about those

films and it then is put to use.

For example, this has nothing to do with film and video, but I

think it's a really good example.

I'm a breast cancer survivor and so I keep up on that.

And they have been using AI to go over different scans and mammograms, and

they have trained the AI to find tumors.

And it does it as well as a doctor, if not better in certain cases.

So that's something that they have a specific goal in mind.

And they have trained the AI to do that job.

For something like generative AI, where they are creating images

like Adobe Firefly or Midjourney are a couple of examples where you

can put in a prompt, you can say, do it in such and such a style.

Make a teddy bear who's sitting on a table, in the desert.

I don't know.

But you put that in there and the AI has been trained on images and it

will go through all of those images and create something and generate

an image based on those prompts from what it has learned from artists and,

photographs and everything else that has been trained on over the years.

I think you said something really important.

Artificial intelligence is made for a specific task.

We're not talking about Skynet, something that has the full experience

of life like we see ourselves, but it's there to do repetitive tasks,

it's there to learn patterns.

Artificial intelligence is good at things that we are bad at naturally,

like our memories, for instance.

It has a computer database that knows millions of things.

Terabytes of information.

It was trained to see and recognize patterns and to spit out

things that fit those patterns.

Exactly.

Yes.

Most platforms that we already use have AI built into them, but they don't

necessarily broadcast that everywhere.

For instance, this podcast that you're listening to, we ran it through an AI and

it sounds a lot better and most podcasts run through Adobe Audition, software

plugin that cleans up the background.

It can remove ums, can transcribe the sequence.

It can help you in a lot of different ways.

We sell a lot of audio plugins at my company that are AI enhanced and

they have trained those on all sorts of different background noises and

crowd noises and birds and nature.

And so it can recognize what is background noise, what is an HVAC

system sounds and that kind of thing.

So you can remove them.

It's pretty impressive.

Yeah.

I believe on this podcast we're using Descript.

And it does, like you mentioned, it removes the background and,

and it helps edit the podcast in a cohesive way, saving us time.

That's awesome.

It was a great day to sit down and have this conversation because the SAG-AFTRA

strike just reached a deal with Hollywood and there are new regulations and

definitions on artificial intelligence.

Yes, that's pretty interesting.

One of the things that I've read about that is that they cannot take a deceased

actor and use their face without permission from that actor's estate.

Yeah, and I saw that there's a clause where when you do give your consent

that that consent will stay after you die, unless you say otherwise, which is

interesting that we have those regulations in place for people already deceased,

and not those that are living right now.

Also one of the things that I read about it is that if you're an actor who's in

the background, that the studios wanted to be able to use your likeness to create or

to generate background people and crowds in future productions without paying you.

So I guess they are not able to do that.

Two out of the four definitions that I'm aware of are those on generative

artificial intelligence, which are creating wholly new characters without

referencing people who exist in real life.

So they're people who haven't walked the earth.

If they do have a facial structure or a nose that looks similar to someone,

that's where they have to pay someone.

So, you have these new regulations where you can have a claim that this

character has a likeness to your own.

And if they find that to be true, then you'll get a check in the

Hmm.

That's interesting.

And the other definition are for, the digital replication of the background

actors, like we were talking about.

With any of these AI regulations, it goes to an actor's voice or

likeness, and without being physically present, they get paid for each

day that that character is used,

I wonder the whole likeness thing, if the actor, or if the character does

look like you, with music in the past, they've had lawsuits saying that, "Oh,

this sounds like this song," even if it really doesn't sound that much like it,

and juries will go a certain direction.

That seems like it's a little sticky, legally.

But who knows, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

I believe it was Midjourney who was found using Adobe's stock photos to

program their AI and a court ruled that any AI photo does not have any copyright

claim, therefore you can't make money off of selling that or distributing it.

I didn't realize that it was Adobe.

That's interesting.

I know with Adobe's AI, if you make something that looks like it's from

Disney or Pixar or something like that, that goes against their terms of service.

You can't actually say a company name or a proper name, or a

character like Mickey Mouse or Darth Vader or anything like that.

It won't allow you to.

You can describe something like that, but you can't actually use the name or

it goes against their terms of service.

And they have not been training their AI only on their own content.

I think they're going to have to just put in a whole bunch of regulations here.

I know that Biden just filed some executive order about, they need

to get this AI regulations going, all these different industries do.

It's like in the Wild West right now.

And I know that they've done things in Europe and in the UK working toward

getting regulations in place for AI.

I think it's going to be an interesting next few years to see what comes

of all of this with laws about deep fakes and that kind of thing.

Yeah.

So in, terms of filmmaking how do you see this change in the

industry affecting people who are just getting into the industry?

Some of those entry level jobs are probably going to be disappearing.

But I don't know if that's such a bad thing.

It's a lot of the tedious work, rotoscoping and green screen keying and

transcription jobs and things like that.

Those are not going to be needed anymore.

However, if you know how to do that, you're still going to have a job, because

the AI isn't going to do it perfectly.

You're going to have to go in and fix things and I just don't

see them doing it perfectly.

If you're a student right now or someone who's just getting started in the

industry, it is in your best interest to get up to speed with the current

AI tools out there, because it's a great thing to list on your resume.

A lot of employers are looking for that, at least familiarity with it.

At Toolfarm, do you give suggestions to employers on these tools?

Are they reaching out to you in regards to ways that they

can improve their workflows?

Yes, all the time, actually, we sell video plugins and animation software,

and it is mind boggling how many tools in the last two years have AI built in.

There's noise reduction plugins that are just fantastic.

A lot of audio plugins that will remove background sounds and

ums and birds tweeting and all sorts of things that are AI.

We have tools that have generative AI built in.

Like Adobe, of course, the creative cloud with Photoshop and Firefly and all that.

But then we have some others that use Midjourney or Stable Diffusion,

for example, like Autodesk Flame.

That's one of the higher end products that has some built in generative AI.

Silhouette, which is our rotoscoping tool, that now has it.

BSKL is a diffuse AE.

It uses Stable Diffusion.

There's just a lot of different tools now that use it for all sorts of things.

Keying tools, there's several keying tools out there.

I know I've used most of the things you just mentioned in my projects and they've

helped me quite a bit with the repetitive side, but, they do need to be refined

to a point, and I know that that's only temporary because they do learn over time.

Yeah.

I haven't had great luck with the generative AI, getting

it to do exactly what I want.

It's a little bit frustrating.

If I'm not too specific and I don't really care, like for Halloween, I

did a couple of generative things.

I was like, okay, make a spooky graveyard with a dark road and a moon, and it

was fine, but if I wanted to be really specific about things, the results

were a little bit underwhelming, so I think it does have a ways to go.

These AIs really rely on specific prompts, and I know searching on LinkedIn, I'm

a senior, I'm looking for jobs, I've seen "prompt engineer" as a job title.

So people are searching.

And they make a lot of money.

Yeah, a lot of money, and they know the software well, and they know how

it functions and where it messes up.

Understanding or just experimenting with the softwares, maybe for a personal

project, maybe just for fun, it'll help you when you need to use it, because

you can always refine your craft, even if it's an AI doing the job.

Writing the prompt is half of it.

Yeah, I've seen some video editing tools that are pretty interesting, how

basically, you edit with text, and there's several softwares that have that now.

It's in Premiere, maybe it's only in the beta of Premiere, I don't

know if it's in the release yet.

Vegas, I want to say, has it, or it's coming in the beta, or it's

in the beta and coming out soon.

Oh, DaVinci Resolve, that also has text editing where you can type in

what you want and you can edit by the transcription that it generates also.

But that kind of thing too, you have to finesse it.

It's not perfect right out of the box.

It does take some skills as an editor still.

That's another example of where I don't think it's quite there yet.

Bill Gates just was quoted that he thinks that, generative AI is

kind of plateauing right now and it's not going to get much further.

I don't think that that's true.

I think that it's going to be pretty fantastic in five years.

I still think, we're needed as visual artists.

I would agree with that.

My specific trade is in editing and I'd use different tools, not within Adobe

or DaVinci but I've used ChatGPT, for instance, and I transcribed an interview.

I had them rearrange the interview, basically make the edit.

And then I had to perform the tasks of cutting.

it helped me work within the time I was given and I think

it made a better product.

I've been asked a few times about why are these programs free?

Most of them are free.

Some of them come with subscriptions like in Adobe.

Are these companies making profit off of these platforms?

And do you think that they can sustain that much longer?

Well, I think a lot of them are free for competition.

They're training.

A lot of them are in beta still.

I've beta tested a couple of audio programs and a few other things.

They're not going to be free forever, or what they'll do is they will

have a free version and then they will have a " look, more features!"

And then that will be the paid version.

Looking at how much money these companies are just pouring into AI.

NVIDIA, Google, Apple, I was just reading about the billions and billions

of dollars that they're putting into it.

And it's like some serious competition for billionaires out there.

They're making money.

They're certainly making money.

They might lose money for a while, but yeah.

We're taking a short break to tell you about the Dirk Koning

Memorial Film and Video scholarship.

Here's Gretchen Vinnedge remembering Dirk Koning.

The Koning Scholarship enables students to get that kind of an education, to be

a good filmmaker, to be able to express their voice and to continue Dirk's dream.

For more information, and to donate to the scholarship, visit

the link in the description.

Now, back to the show.

The big question is, with new things, people are afraid at

first, and we've definitely seen that with artificial intelligence.

Do you have any stories from your life of people being afraid

of artificial intelligence?

You just hear about things all the time, you know, people will just bring

up casually in conversation about, Skynet and Terminator, how they're

going to take over our systems and start a nuclear war or whatever, but

what's probably more of a concern is privacy and, people using your image

and deep fakes and that sort of thing.

People fear their jobs, of course, being taken by AI.

There is a lot of fear out there But it's here to stay so you better embrace it.

Do you have any suggestions for filmmakers using generative AI

when it comes to ethics and reason?

I don't really have any advice for that.

I mean just use your own moral compass.

However, YouTube, they're testing some watermarking for anything that is

generative AI that looks too realistic it'll be taken down if you don't check

the box that's saying "this is AI."

And so companies are going to be hopping on that.

So we will know if it's generated AI and not something that you created.

But as it is now, I see so much AI and it's usually fairly obvious.

It just, has that look, I don't know how to describe it, but it has

an artificial sort of look to it.

I think that's going to change, of course, as the algorithms get better and better.

But I think that they will be watermarking things in the future.

They've been testing some that I was reading that it's pretty

easy to bypass the watermark.

So they need to make it digital inside the image or inside the

video that you're creating.

And they were talking about that with ChatGPT to put it in the text.

I don't know how they're going to be doing that, but.

On the visual side, I know I can spot it very, very easily.

On the voice side, a few weeks ago, I was at my house and I get

a call from an unknown number.

And Apple put underneath the phone number, "AI caller suspected,"

something along those lines.

Oh.

So they were able to detect that this wasn't a real person.

And I picked it up 'cause I'm like, "I'm interested now."

And it sounded like a real person, but there were still traces of robotic nature.

And the responses were a little bit too quick.

But what was interesting is, whoever programmed it added ums and filler

words into their speech pattern.

So it sounded more human and it didn't sound like it was

perfect like ChatGPT does.

Wow, that's pretty impressive.

That's how they're gonna trick us all.

There's a service that I was looking at a couple of weeks ago.

I can't think of the name of it off the top of my head.

But basically, it will let you create your own avatar, or you can use one

of their avatars, and it's based on a person, an actual actor, or yourself.

So it will scan yourself, you do video, and you speak for a bit, and

it will learn your speech patterns, and your vocal tonality, and all that.

And you can give it a script and it will speak that for you and have you moving

your head and body and natural arm movements, but you can't move too much.

It's not like you can do a full action film.

It's like just a talking head video.

So I think that's pretty interesting, and it was fairly inexpensive too.

That sounds like it's going to affect the corporate industry

with filmmaking and videos.

Yeah.

I actually did a project once where we used generative AI twice.

It was already a pre made character and we just typed in the script and spit it out.

There were some things we needed to fix and cut around, but for the most

part, we worked around not filming and not hiring an actor, saving

money and doing the job quicker.

And a second commercial project I worked on, we recorded the movements

of someone on a green screen.

Didn't have any motion capture equipment on them.

And I forget which program we used, but we turned it into an animation

and it animated a character and was pretty low poly and used a few colors.

So it was a stylistic thing.

It wasn't realistic, but it was able to produce something that the client

enjoyed and, it probably took the same amount of time as editing the

video would have taken, but we cut out all the time for animation and

research and rigging and lighting.

Which for a small team we were able to produce something with higher quality than

we would have been able to at the time.

Yeah.

And I think that right there is the beauty of a lot of these tools.

How did you get into artificial intelligence and where

you're working right now?

I've been actually at this job for more than 20 years now.

I've done all sorts of roles here.

So I don't really do a lot of AI stuff, but I answer customer support questions

and I create content for the website.

And that's just a topic that a lot of people are interested in.

And we have a lot of new products that are coming in with it.

So it's just something I've had on my radar for a while.

And it's just amped up exponentially since the beginning of the year.

Last year, I was like, "Oh, 2022, it's the year of AI."

Well, yeah, not even close to what 2023 has given us.

I've learned as I've gone along and I have a couple of friends who are really on the

cutting edge of what's going on in AI.

There's a guy named Jeff Foster, if you Google him, he's going to be teaching

sessions at this AI summit and he writes articles for different magazines and He's

trying out all these different things.

We've been friends for a while and he shares all sorts of images and he was

one of the earliest people that was creating things with a generative AI.

I have a few friends who are always sharing what they're creating

with AI and it's just been fun.

They got me interested, so it came from there.

Plus the products that we're selling at work.

Plus, I mean, gosh, it's really going to affect our industry in a big way.

So it's good to stay on top of this.

Does Toolfarm code and create these products in house?

No, we don't create anything.

We're like the middleman.

So you might think that's a bad thing.

However, sort of like a huge superstore that has everything.

You can buy everything that you need and in one place and keep

everything together all neat and tidy.

Plus we discount things and we have really great customer service.

That's why people come to us.

We briefly talked about some some ethics.

Do you foresee there being tools that are like Midjourney where it's

like, " edit this film in the style of David Fincher or Martin Scorsese."

Oh, a hundred percent, that is going to happen.

There's already video tools out there that you can do that type of thing with it.

I bet we're going to see that in the next year or so.

Should institutions and schools be teaching students about how to use tools

and the ethics of using these tools?

It can't hurt.

That's for sure.

I think that they're going to have to.

AI is going to take over everything.

We'll still be doing video editing and all that, but we're going

to be using AI enhanced tools and it's going to be everywhere.

And hopefully most people will have good ethics with it and not

just let the AI do all their work.

And if they do, I think they're not going to have a great result.

You need the human, the art, the artist's interaction to

get these tools to work well.

But it's going to be part of the industry.

The industry is changing.

This is just the next stage, the next evolution.

Fight it if you want, but it's here.

I think it'll give young, independent filmmakers a great opportunity.

Yeah, I think so too.

And if they don't see it that way, in a few years, they'll

realize the potential of it.

Yeah, and I think that there's so many stories to be told, that

this will just make it easier for people to tell those stories.

You don't have to worry about rounding up a big budget and a full crew if you can

do it with just a few people and some AI.

I think it will open the door for a lot of artists.

You've mentioned the Wild West.

Why do you use that phrase?

Well, just there's like no real law in place for it.

It's people or companies doing what they can.

I think a lot of them are probably doing what they can get away with

right now until there are laws in place that will change that.

But maybe that's what we need, because if nobody's breaking laws, they won't

know that they need these laws in place.

I think I agree with that.

It'll be interesting to see how things are enforced also.

That's fair as well.

And this makes me wonder with our government.

I'm not intending to get political, but having these laws written by older

congressmen and women who are disconnected from artificial intelligence and the

internet, how will that turn out?

Will there be loopholes?

And will it be effective in what it's intending to do?

I think that that is gonna be a big problem.

Not only that, you have big companies who have a lot of money invested in this who

will be pushing their agenda to lobbyists.

we probably won't have very strong laws about privacy protection.

Hopefully that's not gonna be what happens, but I just

don't see it happening.

How can you even protect yourself from that?

I don't know.

I've saw somewhere on the internet someone created a fashion brand

and they print this special pattern on it and it somehow confuses

artificial intelligence and cameras who recognize you and keep track of

where you're going what you're doing.

Wearing this shirt or this hoodie will confuse the artificial intelligence

and it will misidentify you.

It looks like a weird camouflage of sorts, like a digital, AI made it.

I mean, I probably would never wear this for fashion reasons, but

functionality, it does something.

that's kind of like in the old days you could buy fuzz busters for your car that

would tell you if there was a police officer up ahead with a speed gun, to

protect yourself from, but you feel like you're breaking the law by using them.

Will you feel like you're breaking the law by using a mask?

I don't know.

AI seems like it's a little bit of a can of worms, an ethical can of

worms that they'll take care of one thing and it'll just be more and more

and more that needs to be addressed.

Do you think we'll reach a point

where we get enough tools, where it improves everyone's lives, and makes

everything more efficient, and we can just safely say, "Okay, we have enough.

We can slow it down, even stop producing more.

We don't need to push it any further.

It helps our lives and we don't want to see this fall back on our heads."

That will not happen under a capitalist, economy like this, no.

if the world were to change and we'd all become socialists, maybe.

I think it'll just keep growing and growing and growing and they'll just

make more and more and more money and we'll have more media to consume.

We're consumers here.

And artists will need to make all that, even with the AI.

Is there anything that we haven't touched on yet that you'd like to talk about?

Runway and HeyGen are two AI tools that you might want to check out.

Runway They had an example of a boat, and they just took a brush over it,

and suddenly the water's moving, and it, turns a still image into video.

They had a still image of someone with a cigarette, I think it was.

And they took a paintbrush over the smoke and suddenly the smoke is moving.

So they're making moving images out of still images and they

look completely believable.

It's pretty impressive.

Have you seen some of those where you can take photos from your ancestors

and animate them it's kind of creepy.

That kind of technology is very cool and very interesting.

And I think that that's something that's going to touch every

person, not just artists.

But what AI is, is great for filmmakers or for anybody who works in this industry.

Brainstorming.

I find, great ideas for scripts or if I'm having problems creating an ending

or I need to touch up some dialogue, ChatGPT is a great tool for that.

I found a lot of uses for that sort of thing with grammar too, fixing

your grammar and your spelling, it's, really nice, tools like Grammarly.

There's so many tools out there that become workhorse tools that we use

every single day, and I think that that is where AI is going to be heading to.

Audio dubbing, I think that all of these languages that are not quite

as popular, if they can use dubbing for different television shows and

that sort of thing, people will have their audience expanded hugely.

Filmmakers that want your film dubbed in Czech, you can just automatically

program it to do like 10 different languages and release it online and

your audience is quintupled right there.

There are a lot of things that AI is going to do to help filmmakers.

I didn't hear you mention there was Adobe's AI and improving podcasts,

which if you're listening right now, this was ran through an AI.

Oh, cool, cool.

I haven't tried it yet.

Have you played with it much?

It works like magic.

It removes background sounds and really isolates your voice.

One thing I have noticed is when you're cutting with it, you can kind of get

more sense that it is robotic sounding.

It loses a little bit of the human quality, but I think it sounds

a lot better than the original.

Well, thank you so much for sitting down and talking with us about

artificial intelligence today.

It was a real treat to have you.

I hope our listeners got some value out of this conversation, learned about

the tools and what's on the horizon for filmmaking and more efficient

ways that you can tell stories.

Well, thank you for having me on.

It was a lot of fun.

Do you have any last comments, anything you want to add for students?

It's really worthwhile to learn AI and that AI is not going to take

your job, but what could take your job is another person who knows AI.

It's just a good thing to add to your skill set.

Pivot a little bit and learn about some AI, so you're keeping up with everything,

because it's going to be everywhere.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Alumni Live: The Podcast.

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