2024 marked the second annual AI on the Lot, an annual event founded by AILA President Todd Terrazas and Late Arrivals Studios founders Mike Gioia and Ian Eck. This year saw the conference expand into the largest conference in the world dedicated to generative AI’s impact on the film and entertainment industry.
In its second year, the conference grew from 600 attendees to just over 850 attendees, taking over the Los Angeles Center Studios Lot. As one attendee told volunteers at check-in, AI on the Lot is the physical epicenter for the AI media industry.
The day consisted of thought leadership discussions on the main stage from Hollywood figures and AI startup CEOs as well as special demos of cutting-edge technology on LA Center Studios’ volumetric stage operated by Synapse VP.
On the main stage, film director David Slade (known for directing Twilight and the genre-bending Black Mirror episode “Bandersnatch”) spoke with Edward Saatchi about the absolute frontier of media, including how AI agents and AI simulations could become a media format in and of itself.
Also taking the stage were TV showrunners such as Matt Nix (creator of Burn Notice) and Mark Goffman who spoke about the use of Large Language Models in writers rooms as brainstorming tools. Matt Nix claimed LLMs are certainly useful in writers rooms but have practical limits. While they can mimic writing styles, such as a few of his own stylistic hallmarks, LLMs cannot adapt well to the constantly evolving nature of a creative project and problem solving required from TV writers. On the volumetric stage several demonstrations of generative AI’s extreme impact in virtual production were shown.
Above the main stage was the Dream Lab where filmmakers and technologists simply hung out, showed off product demos & film projects, and collaborated. Later in the day, the conference hosted a GenJam where attendees were divided into teams and tasked with creating a short film using generative tools.
The conference spanned a full day across the lot. When polled, attendees remarked on two aspects in particular. First, how much they learned at the conference in the fast-moving space of generative AI video. And second, how many of the people shaping AI media were all there, in one place. For them, it felt like the center of the AI media space embodied as a physical place. When polled attendees mentioned “education” and “networking” as the two most common benefits of the event. Also frequently mentioned was the conference’s usefulness as a place to find collaborators and partners for companies and film projects.
The day served as a forum for different ideas about AI filmmaking, as many speakers and attendees expressed different points of view on how useful exactly generative AI products were to filmmakers, how they were best used, and what actual impact they would have on Hollywood. “It’s clearly wrong to ask an LLM to do your work for you” Matt Nix said. But he insisted there are plenty of ways the tool can be useful for a writer trying to break a story or do background research for a story.
While the conference was filled with a huge enthusiasm for generative AI’s applications in film and television, ultimately many attendees admitted the technology is not entirely ready for primetime film production yet. Outside of the realm of traditional Hollywood, attendees also demonstrated excitement over the growing movement of totally generative video and “neumorphic media”, or stories and experiences that are only enabled through generative AI and were not possible with cameras or traditional film.
AI on the Lot is an annual conference that occurs every May in Los Angeles.
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