As Hollywood leans into AI, the real battle is over likeness and who gets paid

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When Brian Grazer has an idea for a movie, he now starts with a chatbot.The co-founder of Imagine Entertainment — the company behind “A Beautiful Mind,” “Apollo 13” and “Liar Liar” — said he sits down with Anthropic’s AI assistant, Claude, to rough out a story before handing it to a writer.“You can build the whole thing into an outline.

You still need a screenwriter.I always believe you need a screenwriter,” Grazer said during a keynote at UCLA’s Entertainment Symposium on Thursday.

What once could have taken up to a year, he said, now takes him about a week — but the human writer stays.That balance — AI as an accelerant rather than a replacement — captures where much of Hollywood has landed in practice.Amazon MGM, Lionsgate, Netflix and Disney have all made major investments in the technology.

The sharper question at the symposium, which drew many of the industry’s top lawyers and dealmakers to the Westwood campus, was not whether to use AI but how: who authorizes it, how far it goes and who gets paid.Business Amid rapid technological change, a growing number of filmmakers and companies in Southern California are using AI tools to radically rethink how films and TV shows are made.For the companies building the tools, the answer increasingly comes from the client.

Studios, production companies and distributors regularly approach Promise, a generative AI company, to bring AI into their productions, and each arrives with its own usage guidelines, said the company’s president, Jamie Byrne.Those rules govern which AI models Promise may use and what protections apply — effectively letting each client decide how heavily AI figures into the work.“It comes down to a risk appetite,” Byrne said during a panel on AI.

“We know that there’s talent that are staunchly against it.We know that there are many who are okay with it.”He framed adopti...