Amazon’s “House of David” used more than 350 AI shots in Season 2. Its creator is not sorry
In the opening Amazon Prime series scenes House of David Chapter 2 Shortly after David gets Goliath branded on his forehead with a rock, the battle rages around the biblical figure.
A dusty visual cover partially obscures the crowd of men in the desert fighting with swords and armor. With some wardrobe changes, this scene might look like something Game of Thrones or sand hill. but House of David Showrunner Jon Erwin says he didn’t have the budget to bring these scenes to life. Instead, it used artificial intelligence.
“The whole shot is done virtually using these tools,” Irwin tells WIRED. And the cost of enhancing these shots is negligible compared to the time and cost of producing them with traditional VFX methods.
Erwin’s faith-based production company The Amazing Project sent WIRED nearly two dozen still images of “mostly AI-generated scenes.” House of David Season 2, which the company says used more than four times as many AI shots as Season 1 — from more than 70 shots in Season 1 to between 350 and 400 shots for Season 2. Season 2 follows King David of Israel in 1000 BC.
Many of the images were of crowds during battle sequences, but AI was also used for shots of stone castles, fires ravaging hillsides, and heroes standing atop mountains gazing out at misty landscapes. They don’t have the tell-tale signs of productive AI output from years past, but it’s not hard to believe they were produced by AI.
“Let’s say we only have the money to have a certain scale in the frame,” says Irwin. “You can put a very real camera on a very real actor and direct that actor, direct the camera, and it essentially becomes a hand inside a puppet. The puppet itself is this digital world that you’re creating.”
The way Irwin talks about making a “magical” AI movie is very different from what most people in Hollywood and its audience have. Oscar winner Frankenstein Director Guillermo del Toro recently told WIRED that he hopes to die before AI art goes mainstream, comparing the tech bros’ “pride” to Victor Frankenstein himself. the villain Ariana Grande star liked an Instagram post revealing she’d rather never see an AI-generated image again. And Coca-Cola just braced itself for another round of consumer backlash to its second annual AI-powered holiday ad, which took the form of viral reactions like “The world’s biggest company proudly admits to hastening the apocalypse and asks ‘What are you going to do about it?’
But Coca-Cola executives and AI enthusiasts like Irwin say the loudest complainers are more like a shrinking minority (the founder of the AI company that made the Coke ad actually told The Hollywood Reporter that the “haters” are mostly creative people “fearing for their jobs” as opposed to “average people”), while AI companies like AI Studios have signed deals with custom tools. Archivist Ann Irwin said she used Runway’s “picture-to-video” tools, as well as Luma’s “transformation” features and Google and Adobe products.
