Renowned filmmaker Shekhar Kapur issued a stern warning to Hollywood studios and tech giants at WAVES Film Bazaar, declaring that artificial intelligence will cause the collapse of traditional entertainment industry hierarchies and predicting that big companies built on high barriers to entry may not survive the transition.
In a session titled “Combining AI and Creativity to Create Inspiring Stories,” moderated by Sujay Sen, Executive Vice President and Global Head of Interactive Services, LTI Mindtree, the director of “Elizabeth” and “Bandit Queen” made a provocative assessment from the review of entries for India’s first AI film festival: “Big companies are going to collapse because the pyramid is flattening. New companies will be founded.”
WAVES Film Bazaar is the market component of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), of which Mr. Kapur is the festival director.
Mr Kapur’s comments came after viewing the entries of 181 teams who took part in a 48-hour AI filmmaking hackathon that created two-minute films on the theme of ‘memories’ using only AI tools. The participants were not professional filmmakers, but artists, students, and writers exploring the creative potential of AI. “The first thing I said was that I should retire. Literally, I’m not kidding,” said Mr. Kapoor, noting that it would have been impossible to produce such a quality film in such a short period of time using traditional filmmaking methods.
At the heart of Mr. Kapur’s theory is what he calls the “collapsing of the pyramid,” or the collapse of traditional hierarchies in both the corporate and creative industries. He illustrated this with a parable about a CEO preparing to raise $10 billion. A CEO realizes that a cleaning lady armed only with AI prompting skills and intuition can write a better investment proposal than a team trained at MIT or Harvard.
“The janitor woman knows more about raising $10 billion than he does because she learned the art of facilitation and went at it with all her heart and emotion,” Kapur explained. “She had an intuition and used that intuition with the help of AI.”
The director claimed that AI will significantly lower the barrier to entry into filmmaking. “The best thing about AI is that it is the most democratic technology. A $300 million movie can now be made for $300,000. In India, it can be made for $30,000,” he said.
Kapur predicted that major studios and large corporations will face collapse as AI democratizes content creation. “India has only 8,000 working screens. We keep saying India is the greatest film-making nation in the world, but we only have 8,000 screens,” he said, adding that similar constraints exist in the UK and US.
His solution is for AI to build its own distribution platform, similar to TikTok and YouTube. “If you want to tell a story and you can’t go to the theater, you have to think that AI movies can do it right away. With AI, you can create an ‘Avatar’ for YouTube with the same quality.”
Mr. Kapoor also issued a stern warning to executives. “CEOs say to me, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to happen to jobs?’ And I tell them, ‘Watch your jobs, because people won’t want to work for you.’ AI allows people to explore themselves. Everyone wants to be their own CEO. ”
He also warned tech companies with huge AI valuations, saying, “Don’t trust tech companies and their multi-trillion dollar valuations. It’s like poker. No one’s ever seen the money, no one’s seen the cards. We’re on the verge of the valuations of these big AI companies being driven by Wall Street.” The filmmaker believes regions like India and China will lead the way in AI adoption. Because “we need AI here to advance people.”
Despite AI’s capabilities, Kapur stressed that the technology cannot replace basic human experience. “AI cannot be human. AI is artificial intelligence. We don’t even know where intelligence resides,” he said, citing recent neuroscience research that suggests intelligence may reside in the heart and microbiome as much as in the brain.
The director argued that human traits such as hope, fear, and faith remain beyond the reach of AI. “AI can only take over humanity if we have enough inertia to become predictable,” Kapur explained.
When asked about the current limitations of AI in filmmaking, Kapur pointed out that there are major challenges. “With AI, we still don’t know how to create close-ups, and there’s a very specific reason why. It’s something that science hasn’t yet figured out: the relationship between the pupils,” he explained, noting that human pupils change thousands of times per second in a way that current technology can’t reproduce.
Addressing concerns about social media shortening attention spans, Kapur suggested that the causal relationship could be reversed: “Are our attention spans getting shorter and shorter because our attention spans are getting shorter? Or are our attention spans getting shorter because movies are getting shorter?”
Despite this, Mr. Kapoor insisted that the fundamentals of storytelling remain the same. “Storytelling never changes. Storytelling is how we communicate with each other. Everything is a story,” he said, citing the influence of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, whose visual storytelling transcends language barriers.
In a lighter segment, Kapoor revealed that his favorite actor is his uncle, the late Bollywood icon Dev Anand, and said Kurosawa was his biggest influence.
The session concluded with Mr. Kapur’s philosophical response to the time machine thought experiment, noting that time itself is relative: “Time is your perception of the past, present, and future. Unless you are aware of it, time does not exist.”
The AI Film Festival’s hackathon films will be screened on November 26th. LTI Mindtree has partnered with Shekhar Kapur Films on this initiative and plans to introduce AI filmmaking to students at the Mumbai music school that Kapur helps run.
