Fears as TV soaps could be made by chatbots within five years, warns director
TV soaps could be made by chatbots within five years, a director warned yesterday.
In worrying news for the cast and crew of Corrie, Emmerdale and EastEnders, James Hawes said artificial intelligence was well on the way to replacing humans, adding: “The genie is out of the bottle.”
He told MPs he was swayed by the launch of tech called Sora — made by free-to-use AI system ChatGPT — which can create realistic scenes from basic text prompts.
He said: “It’s text generative so someone’s typed or spoken into a machine, ‘Give me a scene of a woman in Tokyo walking in a rainy street’ — and it produces it.
“It’s not library footage assembled, it’s digitally produced. It’s not live-action perfect but it’s pretty damn close.”
TV veteran Hawes, best known for Doctor Who and fellow sci-fi series Black Mirror, added: “That’s happening now.
“I believe we have to live like this.”
He was quizzed by Culture, Media and Sport Committee members about the impact of tech on his industry.
Hawes, vice-chairman of Directors UK, told them he began looking into AI about the time the BBC axed soap Doctors last year.
He asked “various visual effects people” how long it would be before bots made a show. He said: “The best guess is between three to five years.
“Somebody (will) be able to say, ‘Create a scene in an ER room where a doctor comes in, he’s having an affair with a woman so they’re flirting — and somebody’s dying on the table’. And it will start to create it.
“It may not be as polished as we’d been used to but that’s how close we’re getting.”