Netflix has already used AI in various capacities on about 300 titles, one of its senior production executives said Saturday during an industry discussion at the Busan International Film Festival.
Sung Q Lee, Netflix’s senior director of production for Asia-Pacific, said the technology was being deployed across the filmmaking process, but stressed the importance of preserving human creativity.
“[AI] is being used in previsualization, production design, working out set-dressing concepts ahead of time, in editing and of course in VFX,” Lee said. “But the question that matters to me isn’t, ‘How much AI can we put into this title?’ but, ‘What more can this title do with AI’s help?’”
Lee was speaking at Netflix’s annual Creative Asia event, presented in partnership with the Busan International Film Festival. The panel, co-hosted with the Motion Picture Association, also featured Korean filmmaker Kang Yun-sung, the director of The Outlaws and an enthusiastic adopter of AI tools, and Kimball Thurston, chief technology officer at Wētā FX.
Much of the discussion focused on the opportunities AI could create for filmmakers working with limited budgets, although the speakers repeatedly emphasized the need to preserve human creative judgment. The occasion also highlighted just how differently the Hollywood creative community and Asian content sector tend to perceive the potential perils and promise of the technology, with the former profoundly wary and the latter seeing it mostly as an opportunity.
Kang partnered with self-described AI filmmaker Kwon Han-seul last year to co-direct Run to the West, billed as Korea’s first fully AI-assisted feature. The project struggled at the box office amid bad buzz over its AI visuals, earning about $100,000. Kang said the pace of AI’s advancement meant the film already looked somewhat dated by the time of its release, but he remains undeterred about the technology’s potential for screen storytelling.
The director is now in production on an action film called The Gulf of Aden, which heavily utilizes generative AI tools from China’s Kling AI. He said the technology has enabled him to realize myriad scenes that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible due to the budgetary constraints “that have held the Korean industry back from growing to its full potential.”
Kang estimated that the AI-assisted approach could reduce the film’s production costs by around 40 percent.
“When we calculated how much we’d save on The Gulf of Aden for financing, it came to a reduction of around 40 percent,” Kang said. “That’s not just from replacing CG and VFX. The shoot itself was streamlined, and that cut down our production time to some extent.”
He added: “What has been buried due to budgetary issues was able to be put back on the table.”
Netflix’s Sung tried to place AI within the context of the constant technological revolutions that have characterized the film industry since its earliest days.
“Technological changes and new tools have helped a great deal with the ‘how,’ or how we make what we make better,” he said. “But they never decided the ‘why’ — why we have to tell this story.”
“But when it comes to conveying emotion,” he later added, “ultimately, a human has to touch it. AI can get many jobs done, but does it touch human emotion? The human touch is critical and necessary.”
Thurston similarly described Wētā FX’s use of the technology, so far, as “assistive AI,” rather than something that’s “allowed to change the creative intent in any way.”
“It provides us — very fast — with the visual images and visualization. So from the director’s perspective or the cinematographer’s perspective, it’s very easy to identify the errors and correct them,” he explained.
“Our goal is to reduce simple, repetitive tasks,” he added.