As artificial intelligence continues to be a focal point in Hollywood amid the actors and writers strikes, terms such as “responsible AI” and “ethical AI” became key messaging for computer graphics thought leaders gathered in Los Angeles for the 50th SIGGRAPH conference.

“The generative AI era is upon us, the iPhone moment of AI, if you will,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said during his Aug. 8 keynote. Before thousands of delegates, he introduced the tech giant’s newest related tech, including its GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and AI Workbench toolkit. “Startups are doing amazing things,” Huang added. “Of course they’re doing content creation, but they’re also using generative AI to steer a self-driving car … generate proteins, chemicals, discover new drugs.”

The CG and VFX community has been using AI in some form for decades — like the software that helped created armies in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the early 2000s. So it’s no surprise that, compared with Hollywood at large, the narrative at SIGGRAPH was more optimistic about the power of this technology. “[AI] is scary because of the speed at which it moves,” admits Habib Zargarpour, an Oscar nominee and co-founder of Interdimensional VFX. “Everybody who says, ‘It’s not quite there yet’ — wait a week.”

Read more at The Hollywood Reporter.