One of the first people in Hollywood to admit to using generative AI in the final frame is Jon Irwin, the director and producer of Amazon’s biblical epic House of David. He became interested in the technology while shooting the first season of the show in Greece. “I noticed that my production designer was able to visualize ideas almost in real time,” he says. “I was like, ‘Tell me exactly how you’re doing what you’re doing. What are you using, magician?’” he recalls.
Irwin started playing around with the tools himself. “I felt directly tethered to my imagination,” he says. Eventually, he made a presentation for Amazon outlining how he wanted to use generative AI in his production. The company was supportive.
“We film everything we can for real—it still takes hundreds of people,” Irwin tells me. “But we’re able to do it at about a third of the budget of some of these bigger shows in our same genre, and we’re able to do it twice as fast.” A burning-forest scene in House of David would have been too expensive to do with practical effects, he says, so AI created what audiences saw.
Irwin says he has spoken with the team at Stability but has “not been able to use their tools successfully on a show at scale.” The comment reflects a theme I found in my reporting: While I was able to identify a number of filmmakers who admitted to toying around with Stability’s text-to-image generators, none used the tools professionally—at least not yet.
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