The Zurich Summit is an event for film industry professionals, which places producers, sales executives, creators in film & TV, and tech entrepreneurs at The Dolder Grand for a yearly conference.

A highly discussed-upon panel featuring Jim Rivera, Chief Product Officer at AI production company Flawless, David Unger, CEO Artist International Group, Chris Jacquemin, Partner & Head of Strategy WME, and Sara Murphy, Producer Fat City, tackled the issues of AI and its place in the industry. At the same time, the execs optimistically discussed the opportunity that the quickly advancing technology has on the production process for film and TV.

Flawless operates as one of the leading companies for the use of AI in indie cinema — using tech such as TrueSync to dub performances into different languages and modify scenes.

‘The Fall’ is one of their films that has proven streamlining in the production process to reduce costs and implement more efficient techniques instead of reshoots.

Lionsgate acquired the film's distribution rights and ordered the crew to change over 30 F-bombs from the film so it could earn a PG-13 rating from the MPA, instead of the R-rated it had originally received.

Flawless was employed to deepfake the actor's faces and artificially redub the swear words to PG-13-appropriate dialogue. ‘The Fall’ was the the first projects to use Flawless's services, and the tech was also used for foreign language dubbing.

Principal Rivera noted that there are still a few hiccups to tackle with output quality: “AI is amazing, and it really raises the bar for what people can do, but for cinematic films, there’s the quality. The resolution, the color depth, color space. Research science is not built on this….Also, if you modify some someone’s performance, you really need to get their consent based on how substantial that changes is.”

He continued: “From the very inception of the company, we’ve been talking to the guilds about this. We were really imploring them to lean into this and to think about it. As we were having these conversations, what became clear is that as the technology evolves, new rights around consent start to emerge that need to be managed…The right to allow a company to use your image and likeness in a generated performance, for example.”

Jacquemin chimed in and said: “It reminds me of that early couple of years after the iPhone launched and the App Store launched, where most of the product that you saw felt like a toy. It wasn’t quite real…A lot of our clients are now in the development phase using these AI tools to storyboard things as easier ways to pitch their their ideas. But you’re also starting to see products that could absolutely be used in a filmmaking sense.”

He also touched on consent for filmmakers with talent and operating within contractual obligations:

“A few years ago we had two different major media companies that were negotiating deals with our clients. Their perspective was, ‘we own that voice for this animated project so can use it for sequels and derivatives without having to go back to the actor’. One was a film, one was a TV show. I remember thinking ‘This is crazy. This can’t this can’t work. This is not how the business is going to sustain’.”

Later in the panel, the guests were asked if there could be an AI movie star in the future — and they all agreed.

“Yeah, I think so. A number of years ago, we were representing a company that was creating virtual worlds, and they believed then that some of those digital characters, no different than video game characters, could develop some sort of celebrity status. It just seems inevitable that there’ll be some version of that,” concluded Jacquemin.

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