In 2023, actors and writers went on strike as fears over artificial intelligence’s rapid development gripped Tinseltown.
The entertainment workers picketed for weeks, demanding guardrails around AI’s use in Hollywood. They got their wish when the Writers Guild of America (WGA) agreed with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to put new rules into place.
The fears are understandable, especially for those whose jobs are centered on writing scripts or editing videos. But for Jonathan Yunger, AI can be a major boost for Hollywood — the talented people who work there just have to embrace it and learn how to master it.
“Hollywood is old school. They’re scared about being replaced, but I truly believe that, and I’ve been saying this from the beginning, AI is here and it’s not going anywhere,” Yunger told The Daily Wire. “We have to learn to work together.”
Yunger doesn’t just express that belief. He’s putting his career behind it. Yunger — who’s worked on blockbuster films such as “Expendables,” “Hellboy,” “Hitman’s Bodyguard,” and “Rambo” — co-founded Arcana Labs, a new AI production studio that he believes will help lead the way in revolutionizing the way creative content is made.
Many in Hollywood fear that if AI continues to move at the pace tech whizzes expect it to, it won’t be long before it’s capable of producing any type of creative content without the countless hours of dozens of writers and actors. Yunger has a different perspective on Hollywood’s use of AI, saying that creative content will always need “real actors” and “real storytellers.”
“You go to ChatGPT and ask it to tell a joke, it’s not going to tell you a funny joke,” he said. “If you tell it to write a story that will make you cry, it’s not going to make you cry. You still need human involvement. You still need the human element.”
“So Arcana is geared more towards artist-driven AI rather than AI-driven art,” he added.
Arcana’s capabilities were introduced to the world on February 25, when President Donald Trump posted a satirical video about the remaking of Gaza. The AI-generated video that took social media by storm that day was made by someone who was testing Arcana’s tools, according to Yunger. Now, the company based in Los Angeles has $5.5 million in funding and officially launched its production studio earlier this week with SEMCAP AI and co-CIOs Walter Buckley and Cyrus Vandrevala jumping on board.
“It was around the time I was doing ‘Hellboy’ — I wasn’t using any AI in ‘Hellboy’ — but me and my co-founder Hank Hoffman got hipped to generative AI at the time,” Yunger told The Daily Wire in his first interview since the launch of Arcana AI’s production studio. “And I was like, ‘Wow, it’s amazing.’”
Yunger said that AI’s capabilities to immediately turn words into images were “like the ultimate high” for a producer, but he added that he soon grew frustrated with the new tool because it took “hundreds of generations” to get AI to generate the image he had in his mind.
“This is amazing tech, but how do you incorporate this into a workflow if you’re either making a movie or making a comic book, or whatever it is, and you’re on a deadline?”
Out of this question, Arcana AI was born, and Yunger and his team believe it will help kickstart the “future of filmmaking.” Arcana also offers tools for small businesses, photographers, videographers, and everyone in between. Content creators and companies have already begun extensively using AI to produce everything from short films and memes to marketing campaigns and advertisements. Even Jeremy’s Razors, which shares common ownership with The Daily Wire, released a fully AI-generated commercial earlier this year.
As AI continues to grow, a top priority for Arcana is to ensure that creators have a place to develop their skills with AI without fearing censorship. Yunger said that many other AI programs don’t allow creators to make scenes that include violence, blood, horror, or nudity. He argued that since AI is going to play a major role in the future of artistic content, it’s vital to allow artists the freedom to create content without fear of censorship.
“Imagine if they said, ‘No more nudity in every single art museum in the world.’ Or imagine if the Renaissance was censored, or imagine if every movie studio said, ‘Okay guys, only PG-13 movies from now on,’” Yunger said. “That is an attack on our liberty.”
Striking a balance between creative liberty and inappropriate content is an age-old question that AI is also facing. One of the biggest concerns is how AI is all-too-often used for sexual predation, such as revenge porn and “deepfake” nudity.
As AI has progressed, so has the ability of bad actors to create realistic images and videos that show the faces of real people who gave no consent for their likeness to be remade through artificial intelligence. The top targets of this unethical use of AI are celebrities, women, and girls, whose faces are attached to pornographic images. Often, the victims are underage girls who learn that one or more of their classmates used a “nudify” program to generate naked photos of them, as reported by The New York Times last year.
When asked about the troubling trend of AI being used for revenge porn or other illegal activities, Yunger said that Arcana can both defend free speech and stamp out unethical uses of its studio. Arcana’s security protocols warn users if they type a potentially illegal prompt into the AI generator and identify illegal content and those who create it.
“We have technology deployed that basically stamps every image made on Arcana with the username in an invisible watermark,” he told The Daily Wire. The security system allows Arcana to quickly identify illegal content and track down who is behind it.
Creators on Arcana are free to make what they want, but Yunger added that if something gets sent to the police, “We will find you very, very quickly.”
Excitement and fear around AI will remain as the technology affects more industries, jobs, and people, and Yunger acknowledged that “at the end of the day, things shift,” and those in Hollywood will have to keep up with the changes AI brings just as previous generations adapted to the computer revolutionizing the way people work.
“I don’t think AI will replace people,” Yunger added. “I think people who use AI will replace people who don’t.”
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[[{“value”:”
In 2023, actors and writers went on strike as fears over artificial intelligence’s rapid development gripped Tinseltown.
The entertainment workers picketed for weeks, demanding guardrails around AI’s use in Hollywood. They got their wish when the Writers Guild of America (WGA) agreed with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to put new rules into place.
The fears are understandable, especially for those whose jobs are centered on writing scripts or editing videos. But for Jonathan Yunger, AI can be a major boost for Hollywood — the talented people who work there just have to embrace it and learn how to master it.
“Hollywood is old school. They’re scared about being replaced, but I truly believe that, and I’ve been saying this from the beginning, AI is here and it’s not going anywhere,” Yunger told The Daily Wire. “We have to learn to work together.”
Yunger doesn’t just express that belief. He’s putting his career behind it. Yunger — who’s worked on blockbuster films such as “Expendables,” “Hellboy,” “Hitman’s Bodyguard,” and “Rambo” — co-founded Arcana Labs, a new AI production studio that he believes will help lead the way in revolutionizing the way creative content is made.
Many in Hollywood fear that if AI continues to move at the pace tech whizzes expect it to, it won’t be long before it’s capable of producing any type of creative content without the countless hours of dozens of writers and actors. Yunger has a different perspective on Hollywood’s use of AI, saying that creative content will always need “real actors” and “real storytellers.”
“You go to ChatGPT and ask it to tell a joke, it’s not going to tell you a funny joke,” he said. “If you tell it to write a story that will make you cry, it’s not going to make you cry. You still need human involvement. You still need the human element.”
“So Arcana is geared more towards artist-driven AI rather than AI-driven art,” he added.
Arcana’s capabilities were introduced to the world on February 25, when President Donald Trump posted a satirical video about the remaking of Gaza. The AI-generated video that took social media by storm that day was made by someone who was testing Arcana’s tools, according to Yunger. Now, the company based in Los Angeles has $5.5 million in funding and officially launched its production studio earlier this week with SEMCAP AI and co-CIOs Walter Buckley and Cyrus Vandrevala jumping on board.
“It was around the time I was doing ‘Hellboy’ — I wasn’t using any AI in ‘Hellboy’ — but me and my co-founder Hank Hoffman got hipped to generative AI at the time,” Yunger told The Daily Wire in his first interview since the launch of Arcana AI’s production studio. “And I was like, ‘Wow, it’s amazing.’”
Yunger said that AI’s capabilities to immediately turn words into images were “like the ultimate high” for a producer, but he added that he soon grew frustrated with the new tool because it took “hundreds of generations” to get AI to generate the image he had in his mind.
“This is amazing tech, but how do you incorporate this into a workflow if you’re either making a movie or making a comic book, or whatever it is, and you’re on a deadline?”
Out of this question, Arcana AI was born, and Yunger and his team believe it will help kickstart the “future of filmmaking.” Arcana also offers tools for small businesses, photographers, videographers, and everyone in between. Content creators and companies have already begun extensively using AI to produce everything from short films and memes to marketing campaigns and advertisements. Even Jeremy’s Razors, which shares common ownership with The Daily Wire, released a fully AI-generated commercial earlier this year.
As AI continues to grow, a top priority for Arcana is to ensure that creators have a place to develop their skills with AI without fearing censorship. Yunger said that many other AI programs don’t allow creators to make scenes that include violence, blood, horror, or nudity. He argued that since AI is going to play a major role in the future of artistic content, it’s vital to allow artists the freedom to create content without fear of censorship.
“Imagine if they said, ‘No more nudity in every single art museum in the world.’ Or imagine if the Renaissance was censored, or imagine if every movie studio said, ‘Okay guys, only PG-13 movies from now on,’” Yunger said. “That is an attack on our liberty.”
Striking a balance between creative liberty and inappropriate content is an age-old question that AI is also facing. One of the biggest concerns is how AI is all-too-often used for sexual predation, such as revenge porn and “deepfake” nudity.
As AI has progressed, so has the ability of bad actors to create realistic images and videos that show the faces of real people who gave no consent for their likeness to be remade through artificial intelligence. The top targets of this unethical use of AI are celebrities, women, and girls, whose faces are attached to pornographic images. Often, the victims are underage girls who learn that one or more of their classmates used a “nudify” program to generate naked photos of them, as reported by The New York Times last year.
When asked about the troubling trend of AI being used for revenge porn or other illegal activities, Yunger said that Arcana can both defend free speech and stamp out unethical uses of its studio. Arcana’s security protocols warn users if they type a potentially illegal prompt into the AI generator and identify illegal content and those who create it.
“We have technology deployed that basically stamps every image made on Arcana with the username in an invisible watermark,” he told The Daily Wire. The security system allows Arcana to quickly identify illegal content and track down who is behind it.
Creators on Arcana are free to make what they want, but Yunger added that if something gets sent to the police, “We will find you very, very quickly.”
Excitement and fear around AI will remain as the technology affects more industries, jobs, and people, and Yunger acknowledged that “at the end of the day, things shift,” and those in Hollywood will have to keep up with the changes AI brings just as previous generations adapted to the computer revolutionizing the way people work.
“I don’t think AI will replace people,” Yunger added. “I think people who use AI will replace people who don’t.”
“}]]
