Runway CEO: AI Can 'Absolutely' Replace Actors — SkimNews
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- Cristóbal Valenzuela, co-CEO of generative AI startup Runway, told an audience at Turin’s View Conference that AI could "absolutely" replace human actors, adding, "I think it’s already happening in a way."
- Nvidia VP Richard Kerris countered that a director’s spontaneity with an actor — citing Marlon Brando improvising with a cat on The Godfather set — is craft that "I don’t think we’ll ever lose."
- In his essay "It’s All About the Pixel Economy," Valenzuela predicted "the value of creating pixels is trending towards zero," envisioning a future where audiences generate personalized entertainment as fast as they consume it.
- Nvidia principal technical evangelist Jeff Kember claimed generative AI adoption in media is already universal, telling attendees that many users stay silent about it only because their legal teams won’t let them speak.
- Between sessions, VFX artists, game studio heads, and animation directors told Variety their prevailing emotion was anger over training data — not fear of displacement — describing it as something peculiar to generative models.
- Runway is a named defendant in a proposed class action by visual artists alongside Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, alleging copyrighted works were used without permission or compensation to train the models.
Why it matters: The people doing the on-stage cheerleading — Runway’s CEO and Nvidia’s executives — are explicitly targeting the high production-value tier that Hollywood and most View Conference attendees operate in, with Valenzuela’s "last expensive layer" framing the displacement as economic inevitability rather than creative choice. Meanwhile, the VFX artists between sessions made clear the legal ground is contested: a pending class action over training data sits against the backdrop of a federal judge approving Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors in July, meaning the studios face both a collapsing production cost and an unresolved copyright fight.
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