It is the Amazon-backed AI company Fable Studio that wants to reconstruct 43 minutes of the mutilated feature film, reports several media outlets.
The news comes in connection with the company launching the AI service Showrunner, which allows users to "create" their own animated TV series.
"We start with Orson Welles because he is the greatest storyteller of the past 200 years. Many are rightly skeptical of AI's impact on film, but we hope this gives people a sense of the positive contribution that AI can make to the art of storytelling", says the company's CEO Edward Saatchi to Indiewire.
However, they have no rights to the film and there are no plans to show the reconstruction in commercial contexts.
"The Magnificent Ambersons" starring, among others, Dolores Costello and Tim Holt was filmed in 1941 and was to become Welles' next masterpiece after "Citizen Kane". But the film company RKO cut out large parts of the film and filmed a new ending before the premiere the following year. The film company then destroyed the cut material, and Welles' version is considered completely lost.
