September 17th Session
This recap highlights the key discussions and insights from our latest “GenTalks,” featuring a focus on the essential intersection of technology, creative collaboration, and the evolving legal implications of generative media.
The session kicked off with Fred Grinstein and Kenny Miller catching up, touching on the inevitable technical challenges of virtual meetings (dubbed “Wancom’s disease”).
Kenny shared updates on his busy schedule, including work on an experimental project and a new storyboard tool utilizing nano banana technology.
The conversation quickly turned to a major theme: the ongoing identity crisis in the creative sector. Is generative media a technology thing or a film school thing? Kenny’s recent discussions with NYU’s ITP program highlighted a shared realization:
“It’s actually about collaboration,” which resonated as “the answer,” underscoring the shift required to navigate the new landscape of AI-driven creative work.
While waiting for guests to join, Fred shared the community’s “Creative Pick of the Week”—a short film from the Gen 48, 48-hour film challenge by Ron Barinoff.
The film, featuring an AI character undergoing therapy after being rejected during a prompt (e.g., “White tiger with a pimp outfit”), provided a compelling example of the expressive power achievable even within the constraints of a quick challenge. Fred noted that Barinoff’s success was rooted in staying true to his storytelling instincts and script, emphasizing the human point of view over the technical sprint.
The session also gave a shout-out to the Chroma Awards, a major new film festival from Matty Shamor and Eleven Labs, encouraging submissions from the Gen AI community.
Fred introduced our first featured guest, Kelsey Farish, a media and entertainment lawyer based in London (originally from the West Coast U.S.) with an impressive specialty in generative AI and the creative arts.
Kelsey explained how her niche began in 2018, shortly after deepfakes emerged. While many focused on criminalizing non-consensual deepfakes (like revenge porn), her focus, as a media lawyer, was on the corporate and production side:
“What’s stopping a studio or a production company… from making a deepfake of an actor?”
Her work, which predates the SAG-AFTRA strike and the commercial availability of ChatGPT by about three years, established her as a leading expert on digital clones, replicas, and voice cloning.
Kelsey stressed that legal advice in this space requires looking beyond the “boring stuff” of traditional law (copyright, trademark, data protection). She approaches problems from three interconnected perspectives:
Kelsey offered two illustrative anecdotes from her practice:
Kelsey emphasized that she is neither pro-AI nor anti-AI. Her role involves seeing both sides, championing the democratization of content when speaking to skeptics, and being risk-averse when dealing with zealous builders.
Kelsey concluded her talk with crucial advice for anyone working with generative AI:
The biggest red flags in T&Cs often revolve around the scope of license (how inputs/outputs are used for retraining the algorithm) and the limitation of liability (the risk balance assumed by the platform).
Fred welcomed Eric Weaver, Executive Producer at the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at USC, whose work focuses on the intersection of cloud computing, virtual production, and emerging media.
The transcript ends here, but the introduction sets the stage for a discussion on cutting-edge research in production technology.
You can watch an interview with Erik Weaver on the work being done at the ETC here: The ETC Presents “Pathways” and “The Bends” with Erik Weaver. The video is relevant because Eric Weaver is the second featured guest, and the video discusses his work on AI-assisted creative workflows at the ETC.