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Indian startup eyes AI film project

Dec 31, 2024, 6:34am EST
South Asia
The book cover of Kushwant Singh’s novel ‘Maharaja in Denims.’
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An Indian startup plans to produce a feature-length Bollywood movie using generative artificial intelligence.

Studios have twice bought the rights to Khushwant Singh’s 2014 novel Maharaja in Denims, but the plot is so complex and time-spanning that the movie never got made. Recent advances in AI-generated video, though, led Singh and a former Microsoft AI executive to believe that it could be made almost entirely with AI.

A trailer is already out, and the team plans to release the movie by the end of 2025. There are obstacles: “Generative AI is inherently probabilistic,” IEEE Spectrum noted, so keeping characters’ appearances consistent will be difficult. Creating an entire movie is possible, one AI expert said, but will need “an incredible amount of artistry.”

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