Artist-led generative AI film and animation studio Asteria has joined with AI research startup Moonvalley to create Marey, “the entertainment industry’s first clean foundational AI model.” Trained exclusively on “ethically sourced data” owned by Asteria, Marey is named after the French physiologist who helped put the “motion” in motion pictures, Étienne-Jules Marey. Asteria says Marey is being trained for a 2025 debut targeting major Hollywood productions with a pitch that says it has not and will not rely on scraped data, something Big Tech competitors have taken heat on.

Asteria could be open for business with Marey as soon as “January or February 2025,” according to Variety, which says the partner companies will jointly own and operate the model, “developed in close collaboration over the past six months.”

Asteria, Variety points out, is “owned by XTR, a nonfiction film and television studio. Moonvalley was founded last year by former employees of just about every top tech firm (including Google, DeepMind, Meta and Microsoft).

The team must have taken an unusual approach to the technical aspects of model training if Marey is to accomplish what Variety says is its goal of “enterprise-grade productions” with a model trained in six months on a very specific data set and no unauthorized scraping.

Forbes reports that Asteria CEO Bryn Mooser previously founded XTR and along with it a streaming platform, Documentary+. Asteria appears be taking a sort of Adobe Stock approach, on a smaller scale. (Adobe also emphasizes ethical training, going so far as to indemnify users of its Firefly AI against IP lawsuits).

While Asteria is too new to have credits, its announcement promises “the highest standards of data integrity and creative freedom.”

Deadline reports that “Asteria has added filmmaker Paul Trillo as a strategic partner,” in which capacity “he will lead Asteria’s artist-focused approach to incorporating AI into the creative process.”