Amazon’s “House of David” used more than 350 AI shots in season two. Its maker is not sorry

At the opening Behind the scenes of the Amazon Prime series House of David Season 2: Shortly after David slays Goliath with a rock on his forehead, a battle rages over the biblical character.

A dusty visual overlay partially obscures crowds of men in the desert, fighting with swords while wearing armor and on horseback. With a few wardrobe adjustments, this scene might seem like something out of the ordinary game of thrones or Sand dunes. but House of David Showrunner John Irwin says he didn’t have the budget to bring these scenes to life. Instead, use artificial intelligence.

“The entire shot was done using these tools virtually,” Irwin tells WIRED. “And the cost of augmenting those shots is minimal compared to the time and cost that would have been produced using, you know, traditional visual effects methods.”

Irwin’s religious production company, Wonder Project, sent WIRED nearly two dozen still images of “mostly AI-generated scenes” from House of David The second season, which the company says used more than four times the number of AI shots than the show’s first season — from more than 70 in the first season to between 350 and 400 shots for the second season. The second season of the show follows King David, the eventual king of Israel, in the year 1000 B.C.

Many of the images were of crowds during battle scenes, but AI was also used in shots of stone forts, fires sweeping through hillsides, and heroes standing on mountaintops, gazing out over misty landscapes. It doesn’t have the wonky hallmarks of generative AI output from years past, but it’s not hard to believe it was generated by AI.

“Let’s say we only have the money for a certain tire range,” Irwin says. “You can put a very real camera on a very real actor and direct that actor, direct the camera, and that becomes, in essence, a hand inside a puppet. The puppet itself is this digital world that you’re creating.”

The way Irwin talks about making “magical” AI movies is very different from the way most people in Hollywood and its audiences approach it. Oscar winner Frankenstein Director Guillermo del Toro recently told WIRED that he hopes to die before AI art becomes mainstream, comparing the “arrogance” of the tech bros to Victor Frankenstein himself. evil Ariana Grande liked an Instagram post in which she noted that she would rather never see an AI-generated photo ever again. Coca-Cola has braced itself for another round of consumer backlash over its second annual AI-generated holiday ad, which it received in the form of viral reactions such as: “World’s largest company proudly admits to accelerating the end of the world and asks ‘What are you going to do about it?’

But Coca-Cola executives and AI enthusiasts like Irwin say the people who complain loudly are more like a shrinking minority (the founder of the AI ​​company that made the Coca-Cola ad told The Hollywood Reporter that the “haters” were essentially creatives “fearing for their jobs” versus “regular people”), while AI companies like Runway have signed deals with studios like Lionsgate to train custom AI tools on their archives. Irwin said he used Runway’s “image-to-video” tools, as well as the “editing” features of Luma, Google and Adobe products.