What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?

The Los Angeles headquarters of Metaphysic, a Hollywood visual-effects start-up that uses artificial intelligence to create digital renderings of the human face, were much cooler in my imagination, if I’m being honest. I came here to get my mind blown by A.I., and this dim three-room warren overlooking Sunset Boulevard felt more like the slouchy offices of a middling law firm. Ed Ulbrich, Metaphysic’s chief content officer, steered me into a room that looked set to host a deposition, then sat me down in a leather desk chair with a camera pointed at it. I stared at myself on a large flat-screen TV, waiting to be sworn in.

But then Ulbrich clickety-clicked on his laptop for a moment, and my face on the screen was transmogrified. “Smile,” he said to me. “Do you recognize that face?” I did, right away, but I can’t disclose its owner, because the actor’s project won’t come out until 2025, and the role is still top secret. Suffice it to say that the face belonged to a major star with fantastic teeth. “Smile again,” Ulbrich said. I complied. “Those aren’t your teeth.” Indeed, the teeth belonged to Famous Actor. The synthesis was seamless and immediate, as if a digital mask had been pulled over my face that matched my expressions, with almost no lag time.

Ulbrich is the former chief executive of Digital Domain, James Cameron’s visual-effects company, and over the course of his three-decade career he has led the VFX teams on several movies that are considered milestones in the field of computer-generated imagery, including “Titanic,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Top Gun: Maverick.” But in Ulbrich’s line of work, in the quest for photorealism, the face is the final frontier. “I’ve spent so much time in Uncanny Valley,” he likes to joke, “that I own real estate there.”

In the spring of 2023, Ulbrich had a series of meetings with the founders of Metaphysic. One of them, Chris Ume, was the visual-effects artist behind a series of deepfake Tom Cruise videos that went viral on TikTok in early 2021, a moment many in Hollywood cite as the warning shot that A.I.’s hostile takeover had commenced. But in parts of the VFX industry, those deepfake videos were greeted with far less misgiving. They hinted tantalizingly at what A.I. could soon accomplish at IMAX resolutions, and at a fraction of the production cost. That’s what Metaphysic wanted to do, and its founders wanted Ulbrich’s help. So when they met him, they showed him an early version of the demonstration I was getting.

Ulbrich’s own career began during the previous seismic shift in the visual-effects field, from practical effects to C.G.I., and it was plain to him that another disruption was underway. “I saw my career flash before my eyes,” Ulbrich recalled. “I could take my entire team from my former places of employment, I could put them on for eternity using the best C.G.I. tools money can buy, and you can’t deliver what we’re showing you here. And it’s happening in milliseconds.” He knew it was time to leave C.G.I. behind. As he put it: “How could I go back in good conscience and use horses and buggies and rocks and sticks to make images when this exists in the world?”