Indonesia's film industry embraces AI to make Hollywood-style movies for cheap (restofworld.org)

OpenAI’s recent release of Sora 2 — a model that can produce high‑definition, up-to‑minute realistic video clips with synchronized sound and improved physical realism — is accelerating a fast AI pivot in Indonesia’s film industry. Filmmakers there are already combining Sora 2 with Runway, Midjourney, Google Veo and ChatGPT for scripting, storyboarding, previsualization and first-pass VFX, enabling Hollywood‑style sequences on tiny budgets. Outputs from these tools are being used for storyboards, preproduction and draft VFX (one VFX artist reported a 70% time cut), and projects from short festival winners to a feature animation (Critterz) demonstrate how AI can shrink timelines and costs dramatically. That shift has practical and ethical consequences: routine, rules‑based tasks — roto work, some storyboard and editing roles, and voice work — are being automated, pressuring tens of thousands of local jobs even as new roles in prompt engineering and AI‑augmented production emerge. Indonesia’s film market (box office >$400M in 2023; typical local film budget ≈10B rupiah/$602k) and training programs are adapting, but concerns persist about copyright (Sora 2 was likely trained on copyrighted media), deep‑fake actors and voice cloning, and loss of the “human soul” in art. The net effect is greater creative democratization and efficiency, paired with urgent needs for regulation, upskilling and new labor frameworks.