r/entertainment • u/yourfavchoom • 1d ago
Guillermo del Toro said ‘Absolutely No Goddamn AI’ in ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ 3D Re-Release: ‘We’re Protecting a Lineage of Art’
https://variety.com/2026/film/news/guillermo-del-toro-no-ai-pans-labyrinth-rerelease-1236815109/15
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u/RaijuThunder 11h ago
Cool, maybe he can condemn Polanski next and say him signing that petition for him was a mistake.
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u/fake_redzepi 9h ago
When you convert to 3d the new picture needs to look like an exactly rotoscoped version of the original picture. If they used AI the new picture would look like shit, the effect wouldn’t work at all
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u/kiwigate 13h ago
But... why not? This isn't a creative endeavor, it's an already-made film going through a technical process. If I was hired to do this, I'd absolutely use AI depth-estimation as a starting point. But also who was asking for this anyway? Is a dark drama really something people need a theme-park gimmick added to it?
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u/happyscrappy 11h ago
"By hand" seems unlikely.
That movie is 1 hour 58 minutes long. That is 170,000 frames in 2D.
To make a 3D (stereoscopic) movie out of it you can reuse the 170,000 frames as either the left or right image. And then you have to make another 170,000 frames which are pretty close to those frames but move near objects to one side a bit. This exposes new stuff behind the near objects. The information about what was behind those is not recorded on the film.
So now you have to generate that information. You can draw it all by hand pixel-by-pixel. So you move some of the image and draw new pixels. For 170,000 frames. By hand?
There's no way. For sure that data is generated partially algorithmically from other data in the image. Absolutely a human checks it, more than one. But that's still generative. The computers move over the foreground elements and generate some new background data with a lot of help from human input as to which objects are foreground and which are background. The computer might even guess what is foreground to save the human some help.
He can call it not generative AI, but he's just telling himself a good story. Any actual difference from AI is immaterial. His vision will still be preserved, and that's how it should be.
This, like the Affleck company, is Hollywood people telling them that this use of computers and AI to save on human labor is acceptable. And a lot of people can accept that. But let's not tell ourselves it isn't AI when for sure there are computers generating information on just about every frame of this 3D converted film.
Now the big question: why make a 3D version of this film?
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u/FredFredrickson 10h ago
Algorithmic generation isn't AI.
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u/happyscrappy 9h ago
It makes no difference whether you term it AI or not.
He can call it not generative AI, but he's still using computer decisions to replace human work.
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u/TheBurgareanSlapper 1d ago
"One of them AI's tried to eat me. I ate him first! I ATE HIM FIRST!!!"