Throughout the course of this year, several actors have secured protection for their personality rights from AI-generated impersonation. But when Shekhar Kapur consulted his lawyer about claiming rights over a dialogue from one of his films, the outcome was different. “I wanted to copyright the dialogue ‘Mogambo khush hua’ (from Mr India ), but I was told that the court would have granted protection of this dialogue to Amrish Puri. It’s the actor’s copyright,” he told the audience during a session at the ongoing International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa.

The IFFI Director, who is making an AI-driven film titled Warlord , spoke about celebrity personality rights and what AI can and cannot do during a conversation with Berlin International Film Festival chief Tricia Tuttle at the festival. Excerpts:

​Discussing the possibilities and the limits of AI, Kapur explained that he can tell when a script has been written by it. He recalled his cook using ChatGPT to write a script for Mr India 2, saying, “He came to me with so much enthusiasm. I genuinely didn’t know what to appreciate first – the meal he had cooked or the script he had written.”

When an audience member pointed out that it was possible to generate the script only because the original exists, Shekhar responded that influence is natural. “It took me ten years to write this script, and it takes ten days to do it with AI tools,” he said, adding, “I know that I am better than ChatGPT.”

During the audience interaction, questions around plagiarism and ethics came up. Kapur said, “AI is not magic. It’s not chaos. It’s changed. But real storytelling is unpredictable. AI cannot predict the future; it can only imitate the past. Plagiarism, with or without AI, comes from creative laziness. Emotional storytelling will always reveal the human behind the work.”

While working on a film that uses AI, Kapur also described the limitations he has encountered. He emphasized that the energy of collaboration and the presence of great actors are irreplaceable. “It’s unpredictable – the unpredictability of the moment actually happens when everybody is working together. There’s an electric atmosphere that is created between, say, me and my DOP Rand, and Cate Blanchett (on the set of Elizabeth). I don’t think AI, yet, can do what Cate Blanchett can do.”

He added, “If you have Cate Blanchett or Shabana Azmi, there are variations of expressions and emotions that they bring (which are captured in a close-up). There is an interesting thing that we are looking at right now – the close-up. That’s where AI has a problem, because we don’t even scientifically understand how the pupil works. So when a great actor comes on screen, with amazing eyes – be it Cate or Shabana or Brad Pitt – something happens. A connection is formed quite subconsciously between the actor and the audience. And that’s why the close-up works so well. AI can’t do that yet.”