PICTURE THIS HOW Al WILL MAKE FILMMAKERS OF US

摘要

In high school. Mackenzie Leake shot a movie about being afraid to get her driver's license. "A very millennial subject," she jokes. It gave her a punishing lesson in editing video: Leake spent countless hours, over the course of weeks, "scrubbing" through her footage to find the best shots, then painstakingly assembling them. "It's a ton of grunt work," she notes. ¶ Now, seven years later, she's trying to accelerate the process. A graduate student in computer science at Stanford, Leake is working with a team to make a piece of software that automatically analyzes scripted film footage. The program uses AI to recognize faces and shot types, and even transcribes the spoken words, so it knows where each frame ought to line up with the dialog. Once the AI has done its work, you can specify the style of shot you'd like to use in your edit—full-frame close-ups, wide shots—and voila: The software splices together a take using those parameters. In essence, it's a robot that produces a surprisingly decent-looking result in a few seconds. If you don't like the edit, you can have it generate a new one. ¶ Leake's work is still in the lab. But pretty soon, I predict, you'll be using software much like this. Because as AI sneaks its way into all corners of life—driving, finance, chatbots— everyday video will become ripe for an upgrade. An AI-propelled boom is about to transform the way we wield the moving image.