Google DeepMind Invests 75 Million in A24: AI Enters Hollywood Through the Back Door

Google DeepMind has invested 75 million dollars (around 69 million euros) in the independent film studio A24 - the same studio behind titles like "Everything Everywhere All At Once" and the recent hit "Backrooms." The two companies call the move a "partnership, the first of its kind," in which they will jointly build artificial-intelligence tools for making films, with "feedback and guidance from leading artists."

"We believe the best way to develop tools that empower artists is to work directly with them," said Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind. It sounds nice. But when one of the world's most powerful AI companies pours tens of millions into a studio just as Hollywood is drowning in a debate over whether AI is stealing the jobs of screenwriters and actors, the question isn't whether artists will get "tools" - but who will end up owning those tools.

A24 isn't the first studio to flirt with artificial intelligence. Netflix earlier this year bought Ben Affleck's company, InterPositive, which makes AI tools for filmmakers, and Amazon, through MGM Studios, last year opened its own AI department for production. The trend is clear: the tech giants aren't waiting for Hollywood to invite them - they're buying their way in from the inside.

For the Balkan viewer, this isn't a distant story from Los Angeles. The same tools that today "help" the big studios will tomorrow shape the economics of every small producer, editor and cinematographer here too. When a machine learns to make a scene that once took a crew of twenty, the question "whose creativity is it" becomes the question "whose wage is it." And that one Demis Hassabis didn't answer.