From search engines to email summaries, A.I. tools are now legion in our everyday lives. In filmmaking disciplines, they are no less endemic. But the Motion Picture Sound Editors have decided that Generative A.I. tools will not have a place in its Golden Reel Awards, which annually celebrate excellence in sound editing in feature films, broadcast, gaming, and interactive media, as well as giving out awards for individual recognition to leaders in the field.
Within sound production, A.I. can be used for voice generation, dialogue cleanup, and speech enhancement in applications like Descript and Riverside.fm, and both Adobe and Avid have pushed AI features for “boosting creativity” in more industry-level editing workspaces like Audition and Pro Tools. Just to name a few uses, A.I. features pitch or change the quality of human speech, generate wholly AI speakers from a written script, or remove silences between speakers — although, as sound designer Taylor Moore pointed out to IndieWire, working in that algorithmic way can destroy important context for audiences and can actually rob creators of the chance to make artistic choices.
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“The urge with all the hyper-intelligent machine learning, polishing mix algorithms out there and the ease with which modern technology allows you to pull all the silences out and all the breaks — I mean, I could hit one button on Pro Tools and it’ll strip all the silences and shorten the dialogue so there’s no gaps. But that destroys it,” Moore told IndieWire.
The MPSE‘s Golden Reel qualification rules are currently in the process of being updated and re-published on the MPSE website, detailing what it will mean in practice to not accept projects for awards consideration where Generative A.I. is used to create elements for the final soundtrack. The organization also said that the MPSE board of directors and its A.I. committee will continue to study the existing and evolving tools on the market and make additional changes to the awards guidelines as appropriate. But the MPSE wants to firmly come down on the side of supporting human artists working in sound and music editorial, sound design, and Foley artistry.
“We support and prize technological advances that assist artists in their creations. However, standards for the legal and ethical use of Generative A.I. have yet to be established and are far from being accepted broadly. What we choose to promote as award-worthy points to how much we value the human endeavor of artistic creation,” the MPSE released in a statement announcing their ban on projects that utilize Generative A.I.
David Barber, president of the MPSE, added in the same statement that, “It is an enormous question to ask: how much of our humanity are we willing to give away to technology, especially in the arts? The time to ponder that question, set up boundaries, and guide how A.I. is assimilated into our workflow and lives was yesterday. The dam of A.I. has broken, and the waters are upon us. Choosing what we embrace as award-worthy filmmaking is a way of diverting those waters while we grapple with this exponential change. As A.I. technology infiltrates and permeates our industry, rules and accepted practices for its use need to emerge that keep artists at the forefront.”
