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A24's new horror movie "Heretic" is a terrifying rumination on faith and belief. But writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods are far less afraid of a sadistic Hugh Grant than they are of something else taking over Hollywood: artificial intelligence.
It's fairly obvious that Beck and Woods' film, about a pair of Mormon missionaries (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) who are ensnared by a charming yet sinister older man (Hugh Grant), doesn't contain any major computer-generated effects. But the duo still chose to include a disclaimer in their film's end credits stating that no generative AI was used to make their movie.
Beck and Woods, who are best known for writing the screenplay for "A Quiet Place," aren't issuing a blanket warning against AI, which they acknowledge can be useful for making people's lives easier in some ways. They're specifically talking about generative AI, in which the technology creates new images, videos, or text content.
Woods told BI that he doesn't understand why it's legal for generative AI to take in existing creations and use them to regurgitate new work, profiting the company that owns the AI without compensating the original creators.
"Stealing other people's things and then generating something that's better in a matter of seconds is insane," Woods said.
"That's very weird. We're in weird times," he continued. "That should not be allowed by any kind of ethical standard, but it's all so new and it's all moving so fast that we are, as a culture, not keeping up with it."
The use of AI in Hollywood was a major concern during the 2023 Hollywood strikes and remains a source of contention between creatives, who are worried about being put out of a job, and executives, who are worried about the bottom line.
The use of AI in recent releases like "Furiosa," "Alien: Romulus," "Late Night With the Devil," and "Civil War" (another A24 release), either within the films or in their marketing materials, has caused controversy this year.
Most recently, the horror studio Blumhouse Productions caught flak for partnering with Meta on a new initiative that will allow select filmmakers, including Casey Affleck, to test out the tech company's generative AI video system, Meta Movie Gen.
The system uses text inputs to create and edit realistic videos; in this partnership, the filmmakers would use the AI-generated video clips within larger works. (Blumhouse head Jason Blum said in a statement accompanying the news that artists would remain "the lifeblood of our industry" and that new technology like this would help artists in telling their stories.)
Beck said he and Woods hope there's a path forward for a "marriage" between AI and the "human touch" of creatives.
"'Heretic' is very much a personal movie," Beck said. "Our hope would be AI generators can't really culminate and create a human experience."
Woods said he and Beck wanted to use their film's disclaimer to point viewers' attention to this issue.
"It's something that we hope people keep talking about and flagging before human purpose is kind of just wiped off of planet Earth overnight," he said. "We're kind of in a very scary turning point here."