[NEW YORK] Gone are the days of six-fingered hands or distorted faces – artificial intelligence (AI)-generated video is becoming increasingly convincing, attracting Hollywood, artists, and advertisers, while shaking the foundations of the creative industry.

To measure the progress of AI video, you need only look at Will Smith eating spaghetti.

Since 2023, this unlikely sequence – entirely fabricated – has become a technological benchmark for the industry.

Two years ago, the actor appeared blurry, his eyes too far apart, his forehead exaggeratedly protruding, his movements jerky, and the spaghetti did not even reach his mouth.

The version published a few weeks ago by a user of Google’s Veo 3 platform showed no apparent flaws whatsoever.

“Every week, sometimes every day, a different one comes out that’s even more stunning than the next,” said Elizabeth Strickler, a professor at Georgia State University.

Between Luma Labs’ Dream Machine, launched in June 2024, OpenAI’s Sora in December, Runway AI’s Gen-4 in March 2025, and Veo 3 in May, the sector has crossed several milestones in just a few months.

Runway has signed deals with Lionsgate studio and AMC Networks television group.

Lionsgate vice-president Michael Burns told New York Magazine about the possibility of using AI to generate animated, family-friendly versions from films such as the John Wick or Hunger Games franchises, rather than creating entirely new projects.

“Some use it for storyboarding or previsualization” – steps that come before filming – “others for visual effects or inserts”, said Jamie Umpherson, Runway’s creative director.

Burns gave the example of a script for which Lionsgate has to decide whether to shoot a scene or not.

To help make that decision, they can now create a 10-second clip “with 10,000 soldiers in a snowstorm”.

That kind of pre-visualisation would have cost millions before.

In October, the first AI feature film was released, Where the Robots Grow, an animated film without anything resembling live action footage.

For Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, Runway’s co-founder, an AI-generated feature film is not the end goal, but a way of demonstrating to a production team that “this is possible”.

Resistance everywhere

Still, some see an opportunity.

In March, startup Staircase Studio made waves by announcing plans to produce seven to eight films per year using AI for less than US$500,000 each, while ensuring it would rely on unionised professionals wherever possible.

“The market is there,” said Andrew White, co-founder of small production house Indie Studios.

People “don’t want to talk about how it’s made”, White pointed out. “That’s inside baseball. People want to enjoy the movie because of the movie.”

But White himself refuses to adopt the technology, considering that using AI would compromise his creative process.

Jamie Umpherson argues that AI allows creators to stick closer to their artistic vision than ever before, since it enables unlimited revisions, unlike the traditional system constrained by costs.

“I see resistance everywhere” to this movement, observed Georgia State’s Strickler.

This is particularly true among her students, who are concerned about AI’s massive energy and water consumption as well as the use of original works to train models, not to mention the social impact.

But refusing to accept the shift is “kind of like having a business without having the internet”, she said. “You can try for a little while.”

In 2023, the American actors’ union SAG-AFTRA secured concessions on the use of their image through AI.

Strickler sees AI diminishing Hollywood’s role as the arbiter of creation and taste, instead allowing more artists and creators to reach a significant audience.

Runway’s founders, who are as much trained artists as they are computer scientists, have gained an edge over their AI video rivals in film, television, and advertising.

But they are already looking further ahead, considering expansion into augmented reality and virtual reality, for example, creating a metaverse where films could be shot.

“The most exciting applications aren’t necessarily the ones that we have in mind,” said Umpherson. “The ultimate goal is to see what artists do with technology.” AFP

Semiconductor and smartphone giant Samsung Electronic Co. Ltd. said on Tuesday morning in South Korea that it’s anticipating its second-quarter profit to plunge 56% from a year earlier, blaming it on sluggish sales in its chip business and the impacts of U.S. trade restrictions.

The forecast comes in much lower than what analysts had expected. Samsung said in a preliminary earnings statement that it’s expecting a second-quarter operating profit of 4.59 trillion won ($3.4 billion), down sharply from the 10.44 trillion won profit it posted in the year-ago period. Analysts had been targeting a profit of 6.2 trillion won, Reuters reported.

On a sequential basis, Samsung’s profit is expected to drop by around 31%, from 6.69 trillion won. Revenue for the period is expected to come to 74 trillion won, more or less flat from a year earlier.

In a separate press release issued to South Korean media, Samsung blamed the unexpected decline in profit on inventory replacements and the negative impact of the United States’ expanded sanctions on the export of advanced artificial intelligence processors to China.

“The memory business saw a decline in performance due to one-off costs, such as provisions for inventory asset valuation,” the company said. “However, improved HBM products are currently being evaluated and shipped to customers.”

Samsung was referring to its High-Bandwidth Memory chips, which are a critical component of AI processors. The company has struggled to match the progress of its rival memory chipmaker SK Hynix Inc., which currently provides the vast majority of HBM chips to Nvidia Corp. for use in that company’s graphics processing units.

However, Samsung said it expects to see a sharp increase in HBM chip sales to Nvidia in the upcoming quarter, despite recent reports that its products have not yet passed the AI chip leader’s quality tests. It also said its non-memory chipmaking foundry is expected to reduce its losses in the third quarter due to improved utilization rates and a recovery in global chip demand.

Analysts said Samsung’s profits were also hit by a decline in NAND flash prices and a stronger Korean won, and its stock was down 1% in early morning trading in Korea.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE it’s notable that Samsung is still growing its chip business, despite not being able to grow its profit. “The most critical challenge is for Samsung to be able to deliver its HBM chips, and if it can do this it will likely show stellar results like its competitors, given the insane hunger for AI chips,” the analyst said.

According to Mueller, investors will be happy to hear that Samsung believes it will soon be able to deliver a significant number of HBM chips to Nvidia, which is the most important customer. If it does do this, it could well see growth of the kind that it hasn’t enjoyed in years.

“But another challenge for Samsung is its smartphone business, which is also struggling right now,” Mueller added. “The flywheel will only come back and deliver as it used to once both of these businesses have strong offerings. Samsung will also need to demonstrate strong execution in production and on the go-to-market side.”

Samsung has not yet disclosed detailed earnings regarding the performance of its individual business units, but analysts estimate that its semiconductor business will deliver an operating profit of around 1 trillion won, based on the company’s preliminary forecast.

The company is also unlikely to see much benefit from the launch of its new flagship smartphone, the AI-powered Galaxy S25, in January. Meanwhile, its television and home appliance businesses are also expected to see a drop in profitability, due partly to the impact of U.S. tariffs on imports.

Although the report was disappointing for investors, Hyundai Motor Securities Co. analyst Roh Geun-chang said the company’s profit is likely to rebound in the third quarter, driven by an expected increase in memory chip prices. “Samsung’s operating profit appears to have bottomed out in the second quarter and is expected to show gradual improvement,” the analyst told Yonhap.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Dreamina