In the opening scenes of the Amazon Prime series House of David season 2, shortly after the titular David slays Goliath with a stone to the forehead, battle rages around the biblical figure.
A dusty visual overlay partially obscures crowds of men in the desert, sword-fighting in armor and on horseback. With some wardrobe tweaks, this scene could look like something out of Game of Thrones or Dune. But House of David showrunner Jon Erwin says he didn’t have the budget to bring these scenes to life. Instead, he used AI.
“The entire shot is done using these tools, virtually,” Erwin tells WIRED. “And the cost of augmenting those shots is minuscule compared to the time and cost it would have been to generate those with, you know, traditional VFX methods.”
Erwin’s faith-based production company the Wonder Project sent WIRED nearly two dozen still images from “mostly AI-generated scenes” from House of David season 2, which the company says used more than four times as many AI shots compared to the show’s first season—from more than 70 in season 1 to between 350 and 400 shots for season 2. The show’s second season follows the eventual King David of Israel in the year 1000 BCE.
Many of the images were of crowds during battle sequences, but AI was also used for shots of stone fortresses, fires ravaging hillsides, and heroes standing at the tops of mountains, staring out over foggy landscapes. They don’t bear the wonky hallmarks of generative AI output from years past, but it’s not hard to believe they were AI-generated.
“Let’s say we only have the money to have a certain scale to the frame,” Erwin says. “You can put a very real camera on a very real actor and direct that actor, direct the camera, and that becomes, in essence, the hand inside a puppet. The puppet itself is this digital world that you create.”
The way Erwin talks about “magical” AI filmmaking is very different from how most people in Hollywood and its audience have. Oscar-winning Frankenstein director Guillermo del Toro recently told WIRED he hopes he dies before AI art goes mainstream, comparing the “arrogance” of tech bros to Victor Frankenstein himself. Wicked star Ariana Grande liked an Instagram post that indicated she’d prefer to never see an AI-generated image ever again. And Coca-Cola just steeled itself for another round of consumer backlash to its second annual AI-generated holiday ad, which it received in the form of viral reactions like, “Biggest company in the world proudly admitting to accelerating the apocalypse and asking ‘what are you going to do about it?’”
But Coca-Cola execs and AI enthusiasts like Erwin say that the loudest people complaining are more like a shrinking minority (the founder of the AI company that made the Coke ad actually told the Hollywood Reporter the “haters” were mainly creatives “afraid for their jobs” versus “average people”), while AI companies like Runway have signed deals with studios like Lionsgate to train custom AI tools on its archives. Erwin said he’s used Runway’s “image to video” tools, as well as Luma’s “modification” features and products from Google and Adobe.
