AI Isn’t Coming for Hollywood. It’s Already Arrived
August 22, 2025 at 01:06AMSince 2022, film and TV production in the US has dropped by 40 percent. As Zoë Schiffer reports for Wired, some filmmakers see AI as the solution—promising lower costs, faster production turnarounds, and, ultimately, more (and better) movies. Industry skepticism remains, but a number of major Hollywood studios are already trying out the latest tools. These experiments, notes Schiffer, “[signal] openness to the technology, if not yet a full embrace.” At the center of this race is Stability AI, best known for its text-to-image model, Stable Diffusion. After a CEO shakeup, the company now counts Sean Parker (yes, the Napster guy) and James Cameron (yes, that director) among its backers.
Yes, the irony writes itself: The guy who once had a fever dream about murderous machines while “sick and broke” in Rome and proceeded to turn it into The Terminator—the creator of Skynet!—is on the board of an AI company. What’s doubly surprising, though, is that Cameron is on the board of an AI company run by Parker and Akkaraju. A decade ago, Cameron was helping lead Hollywood’s charge against them. He didn’t appreciate the premise of their streaming platform, the Screening Room, which let people watch new releases at home for $50 on the same day they came out in theaters. Cameron reportedly told a crowd at CinemaCon that he was “committed to the theater experience.” In the years that followed, none of the major studios publicly announced deals with the Screening Room, and in 2020 the company rebranded as SR Labs.
So Cameron is on the board, but is the “creator in the center,” as Akkaraju said? When I spoke with Parker, he emphasized the importance of using open source models and spoke of “respect for creators and respect for IP.” He added: “That sounds potentially kind of rich, coming from me, given my past association with Napster and early social media. But it is a lesson learned.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/21/hollywood-stability-ai/
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