CULVER CITY – Three years ago, Hollywood executives sat silently in the audience at AI on the Lot, a conference on AI’s place in the media industry furiously taking notes while independent filmmakers shared their experiments with artificial intelligence tools. This year, Amazon Studios executives took the stage publicly on Thursday to discuss how they’re using generative AI — a milestone that signals the entertainment industry’s dramatic shift from fearful observer to active participant in the AI revolution.
The conference’s evolution from nervous attendees tentatively asking questions about AI to a group of tech CEOs and indie filmmakers embracing it reflects a broader transformation across Hollywood. The event’s location in Culver City — where Amazon, Apple and other tech companies have planted flags in their bid to reshape entertainment — underscores how the boundaries between Silicon Valley and Hollywood are blurring through AI adoption. The attendee mix reflected this convergence, with L.A.’s casual-cool creatives mingling alongside tech startup founders in their signature vests and button downs.
The change on display at this year’s conference was studios moving beyond experimentation to actual production implementation, with the goal no longer being to create “AI content” but rather good content that happens to leverage AI tools. The change is driven partly by clean AI models trained on licensed data that address copyright concerns, and partly by efficiency gains in pre-production that help filmmakers do more with less when time is money on set.
As one conference panelist put it, the industry has reached a “come to Jesus moment” where the technology has become too useful to ignore.
Growing up
The transformation is evident in the raw numbers. When AI on the Lot launched three years ago — just two weeks after the writers’ strike began — it sold out with 600 people despite — or perhaps because of — widespread worries about AI’s impact on creative jobs. “Everyone was more fearful because there was a lack of education,” said Todd Terrazas, the executive director of AI LA, the nonprofit behind the conference.
By year two, attendance grew to 850 people with at least 100 studios represented, though they still weren’t speaking publicly. This year’s conference, sold out at 1,200 attendees, had a fundamentally different energy.
“It’s a lot more people who are way more curious,” Terrazas said. “You’re having bigger names like James Cameron, Ben Affleck and Ted Sarandos from Netflix speaking publicly about it. I think it’s getting more people saying, ‘OK, maybe I shouldn’t have my head in the sand.’”
Behind this growth is an explosion of companies calling themselves AI studios. Terrazas estimates there are over 200 such studios now making tools or helping filmmakers navigate the tools out there. But the definition has become fluid — legacy studios that previously focused on Web3 or VR have rebranded as AI studios, and agencies are using the AI label to stay relevant and hopefully attract better clients, according to Terrazas.
The conference’s defining moment came when Amazon MGM Studios executives spoke publicly about AI for the first time in a panel titled “Cloud-Connected Workflows to Empower Storytellers With Gen AI.” The session featured Chris Del Conte, director of VFX at Amazon MGM Studios; Gerard Medioni, VP and distinguished scientist; and Danae Kokenos, head of Technology Innovation, discussing how the studio is helping creative partners navigate generative AI and integrating these tools into creative pipelines.
“I thought that was pretty amazing that this year, we finally had at least one studio panel from a major studio talking about this very taboo topic,” Terrazas said.
The willingness of a major studio to discuss AI openly reflects broader industry anxiety about relevance and survival. When conference organizers asked for a show of hands of who had seen a movie over Memorial Day weekend, less than about a quarter of the room raised a hand — a stark reminder of the challenges facing theatrical releases.
Dan O’Brien, the 54-year-old mayor of Culver City and feature film and promo editor with 25 years of experience, captured the mood in his remarks during the conference’s opening: “Do I embrace the change that is coming or do I let it roll me over?”
Beyond the hype
A key factor enabling Hollywood’s embrace of AI has been the emergence of “clean models” — AI systems trained on verifiably licensed data rather than scraped web content. Rachel Joy-Victor, co-founder of AI studio FBRC AI who has come to all three AI on the Lot conferences, sees this as crucial to the industry’s adoption.
These models address copyright concerns by using training data with clear licensing arrangements. Examples include Google’s Veo 3, trained on licensed YouTube content, and Adobe’s Firefly, which uses Adobe Stock imagery. Independent alternatives like Moon Valley are also emerging as clean options, providing studios with AI tools that don’t raise legal red flags.
This addresses the copyright concerns that have been a major barrier to adoption, according to Joy-Victor. While other industries have taken a more relaxed approach to AI training data, Hollywood’s need for clear intellectual property ownership makes the stakes different.
“We can’t do anything unless we can prove that there’s nothing copyrighted in our systems,” Joy-Victor said.
The technology is advancing at breakneck speed, with tools becoming outdated within weeks of release. Video AI models still lag roughly two years behind text-based large language models, according to Amit Jain, the CEO of Luma Labs, but the pace of improvement means what took months to achieve a year ago now happens in weeks — creating both opportunity and pressure for studios to adapt quickly.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. David Bianca, a director and co-founder of the recently announced AI studio GRAiL, warned the conference that change was going to have to come in traditional film and TV production. He pointed out that with daily shooting rates reaching $200,000 in Los Angeles and traditional VFX houses shutting down, the industry’s embrace of AI isn’t just about innovation — it’s about survival.
“The Hollywood model is broken,” he said.
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