Source : @Variety
TURIN, 20 October — Artificial intelligence could “absolutely” replace human actors, the chief executive of New York-based generative AI company Runway has said, adding that the shift is “already happening in a way”, according to a report by Variety.
Cristóbal Valenzuela, Runway’s co-founder and co-CEO, made the remark during a fireside chat titled “Every Pixel Will Be Generated” at View Conference in Turin, which Variety describes as Europe’s top visual effects gathering. Asked by an audience member whether AI could eventually take the place of human performers, he replied: “Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s already happening in a way.” He went on to describe AI as “a new medium of expression” and “a new medium of storytelling”. Variety said the comments provoked one of the biggest debates of the conference.
Sharing the stage was Richard Kerris, Nvidia’s vice-president of developer relations and general manager of media and entertainment, who struck a more cautious note. Kerris recalled a director’s argument that the spontaneity between a filmmaker and an actor, such as Marlon Brando improvising with a cat on the set of “The Godfather”, could never be produced by a prompt. “That craft is something to behold, and I just think that that’s something that I don’t think we’ll ever lose,” he said.
Valenzuela was unconvinced. “Not now, but I think models are going to get probably to a point where you can probably direct them in a very similar way,” he replied. When Kerris stressed that filmmaking still demands an understanding of character, composition and story, and that there is no “make movie button”, Valenzuela joked: “I wish.”
According to Variety, Valenzuela has set out his thinking in essays including “It’s All About the Pixel Economy”, in which he predicts that “the value of creating pixels is trending towards zero” and that the number of “seconds consumed” will eventually converge with the number of “seconds generated”. In another essay, “The Cost of a Frame”, he traces the history of media through the cost of producing a credible frame and argues that high-production-value content, the tier in which Hollywood works, is “the last expensive layer”, one he believes AI is now collapsing.
Nvidia’s speakers broadly shared the optimism. Kerris framed resistance to the technology as similar to the fears stirred by earlier advances such as computer-generated imagery, while Jeff Kember, Nvidia’s principal technical evangelist for media, said in a separate presentation that adoption was already widespread, including among companies whose legal teams were not letting them talk about it. “I don’t know anyone who isn’t,” he said.
Not everyone at the event shared that view. Variety reported that between sessions, a number of visual effects artists, game studio heads and animation directors expressed anger over the material used to train generative models. Asked by Variety about Runway’s training data, Valenzuela said one of the “core misbeliefs” about AI was that “people thought AI was some sort of a database”. “They’re not databases,” he said. “They’re learning from representation.”
The question is increasingly being tested in court. Variety noted that a US federal judge has approved a US$1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and authors whose books were downloaded from pirate libraries, and that a proposed class action by visual artists against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway itself, alleging their copyrighted work was used to develop generative models without permission or compensation, is still making its way through the legal system.
Runway was founded in 2018 by Valenzuela, Alejandro Matamala and Anastasis Germanidis, who met as students at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and has become one of the best-known names in AI video. Its Gen-4 model, released in March 2025, was pitched on keeping characters and locations consistent across shots. The company has also built close ties with Hollywood: in September 2024 it announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with Lionsgate to build a custom model trained on the studio’s catalogue, and in June 2026 the two companies expanded the deal, with Lionsgate taking an equity stake in Runway and launching a joint programme to develop new content.
Taken together, Variety said, the talks at View Conference revealed a worldview in which the cost of generating moving images approaches zero and the traditional structures of film and television production are, at the least, fundamentally reshaped. The story was shared on X by Variety.
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