AMD Exec: AI Is ‘An Elevated Toolset,’ Not A Threat To Studio Jobs

James Knight, AMD’s global media and entertainment director, says content creation professionals should view AI technologies as an ‘elevated toolset’ for their work and not as a threat. The impact of AI on jobs in media and entertainment has been a contentious issue.

AMD executive James Knight said content creation professionals should view AI technologies as an “elevated toolset” for their work and not as a threat to jobs.

Knight, AMD’s global media and entertainment director, made the comments and referenced concerns by Hollywood workers about the impact of AI on their livelihoods in a panel at the SIGGRAPH 2024 conference in Denver on July 31.

The impact of AI on creative jobs in Hollywood had been a top-cited issue in the 2023 strikes held by the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, also known as the Screen Actors Guild. The strikes resulted in new contracts between the unions and Hollywood studios that address the use of AI technologies for writing and acting jobs. AI is once again a top concern for a new SAG-AFTRA strike that started against video game companies in July.

“AI is a scary subject in media and entertainment because many people look at the strikes. They view [AI] as taking away jobs or replacing jobs. I don’t see it that way,” said Knight, a visual effects veteran who worked on movies ranging from “Avatar” to “The Amazing Spider-Man” before joining the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip designer in 2015.

Instead, AI should be viewed as an “elevated toolset,” according to the AMD executive.

“Think of it like a graduated blank canvas. You’ve got maybe less to do, but you still have to have the supervisor look at it and artists look at it, make adjustments. We’re just not there,” he said.

Beyond content creation, said Knight (pictured above), there are many other aspects of a studio’s business where AI can have a positive impact, including human resources and data analytics.

“AI is going to have an impact on that stuff and making that a lot easier as well,” he said.

On the same panel, Ken Kajikawa, senior director of business development at Supermicro, said one area where he thinks AI will help content creation professionals is image generation, specifically using images as prompts to create new or enhanced images.

“Nobody’s really tackling the image-to-image generative AI solution, and more importantly, image-to-image 3-D and image-to-image 3-D 4K,” said Kajikawa.

Kajikawa, who previously worked in game development, said Supermicro has developed solutions with AMD using its Threadripper Pro CPUs “to increase the output of the workflow so that we’re able to enable studios to have that 3-D 4K output using generative AI.”

“It’s a game-changer in terms of my video game background and some of the film work that [Knight was] doing,” he said.

Knight wasn’t the only industry leader to address the impact of AI on jobs at SIGGRAPH 2024. Two days before Knight’s panel with Kajikawa, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a fireside chat that it’s “very likely” that AI will change everyone’s job, including his own.

“Every single company, every single job within the company, will have AIs that are assistants to them,” he said on July 29.