Actress-director Maggie Gyllenhaal said Friday she had abandoned using AI video-generation technology for her upcoming film about Marilyn Monroe because "it fundamentally did not work."
The American is head of the jury at this year's Venice Film Festival, but she is also premiering her new 17-minute film depicting 1950s screen icon Monroe.
The short movie imagines Monroe as a 100-year-old, with Dakota Johnson playing her before her death in 1962.
"The people who commissioned this project from me asked me to use AI," Gyllenhaal told a panel discussion about AI in Venice.
"They were using licensable AI, training it off of Marilyn Monroe films that we had licensed. And I went for it. I was like, 'All right, I'm curious. I don't know. Let's see'," Gyllenhaal told The Future of Creativity event.
"And it fundamentally did not work. We worked hard at it, and in the end, I threw it away because what was coming through Dakota playing Marilyn Monroe was so much more moving, human, alive."
Her statement underlines the current limitations of AI video technology, which has sparked fears about the impact on jobs throughout the film and TV industries.
The "Dark Knight" actress and director of "The Lost Daughter" also revealed how AI companies are seeking to license the images of actors in order to reproduce them through software.
"Someone who I respect a lot theoretically asked me to consider the idea of asking actors who trust me, because I have a lot of actors who trust me that I love, and they should trust me to give me their likeness and to make a film with them," she said.
"I thought it's completely and absolutely different paradigm than how I think, how I work," she added.
