Ray Seilie recently spoke to TheWrap about the growing legal concerns stemming from the controversial partnership between Lionsgate and AI startup Runway. The partnership was announced last year and aims to utilize Lionsgate’s film library to train AI models that are expected to generate new content for the studio.
The promise of AI filmmaking eventually making its way into mainstream Hollywood is nothing new. Still, neither are the merited concerns over unresolved copyright and talent rights disputes that go hand in hand with this new reality.
“In the movie and television industry, each production will have a variety of interested rights holders,” Ray aptly notes. “Now that there’s this tech where you can create an AI video of an actor saying something they did not say, that kind of right gets very thorny.”
The dilemma surrounding AI’s role in filmmaking isn’t just a question of whether studios can leverage their own film libraries to generate AI entertainment. Protecting the ancillary rights of actors, writers, and directors will limit how deeply and widely studios like Lionsgate can train AI models as well. “There will be a lot of litigation in the near future to decide whether the copyright alone is enough to give AI companies the right to use that content in their training model,” says Ray.
As studios begin to test the limits of copyright and likeness rights with AI, Ray emphasizes that lawyers will respond to the tug-of-war between technological advances and copyright infringement with “seeking permission rather than forgiveness.”
