Comment by ugh123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ugh123 | Hacker News Reader

These are baby steps towards what I think will be the eventual "disruption" to the film and tv industry. Directors will simply be able to write a script/prompt long enough and detailed enough for something like Imagen (or it's successors) to convert into a feature-length show.

Certainly we're very, very far away from that level of cinematic detail and crispness. But I believe that is where this leads... complete with AI actors (or real ones deep faked throughout the show).

For a while I thought "The Volume" was going to be the disruption to the industry. Now I think AI like this will eventually take it over.

https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/1225599-the-volum...

The main motivation will be production costs and time for studios, of which The Volume is already showing huge gains for Disney/ILM (just look at how much new star wars content has popped up within a matter of a few years). But i'm unsure if Disney has patented this tech and workflow and if other studios will be able to leverage it.

Regardless, AI/software will eat the world, and this will be one more step towards it. Exciting stuff.

I feel like this is very similar to those people who say "have you seen GPT-3? Soon there will be no programmers anymore and all of the code will be generated," and it's wrong for the same reasons.

Can GPT-3 generate good code from vague prompts? Yes, it's surprisingly, sometimes shockingly good at it. Is it ever going to be a replacement for programmers? No, probably not. Same here. This tool's great grandchild is never going to take a rough idea for a movie and churn out a blockbuster film. It'll certainly be a powerful tool in the toolbox of creators, especially the ones on a budget, but it won't make art generation obsolete.

> This tool's great grandchild is never going to take a rough idea for a movie and churn out a blockbuster film.

What about the tool's nth child though? I think saying it will never do it is a bit much, given what we know about human ingenuity and economic incentives.

I think individual special effects sound very plausible. "Okay, robot, make it so that his arm gets vaporized by an incoming laser, kinda like the same effect in Iron Man 7" is believable to me.

But ultimately these things copy other stuff. Artists are often trying to create something that is, at least a bit, new. New is where this approach falls over. By its nature, these things paint from examples. They can design Rococo things because they have seen many Rococo things and know what the word means. But they can't come up with a new style and use it consistently. "Make a video game with a fun and unique mechanic" is not something these things could ever do.

I think it's certainly possible, maybe inevitable, that some AI system in the distant future could do that, but it won't be based on this style of algorithm. An algorithm that can take "make a fun romantic comedy with themes of loneliness" and make something award worthy will be a lot closer to AGI than it will be to this stuff.

What makes these models feel so impressive is that they don't just copy their training sets. They pick up on concepts and principles.

To make a blockbuster you don't need to come up with anything new.

I really doubt you’d be able to have the fine grained control that most high end creatives want with any of these diffusion models, let alone the ability to convey specific emotions.

At that point, we’d have reached some kind of AI singularity and the disruption would be everywhere not just in the creative sphere

There's no doubt that it's only a matter of time.

Like bloggers had the opportunity to compete with newspapers, the ability to generate videos will allow to compete with movies/marvel/netflix/disney & company.

Eventually, only high quality content will justify the need to pay for a ticket or a subscription, and there's going to be a lot of free content to watch, with 1000x more people able to publish their ideas, as many have been doing with code on github for a while now, disrupting the concept of closed source code.

You’re conflating the ability to make things for the masses and being able to automatically generate it.

Film production is already commoditized and anyone can make high end content.

Being able to automatically create that is a different argument than what you posit.

I don't think this matters, new movies and TV shows already have to compete with a huge amount of old content, some of it amazing. Just like a new painting or professional photo has to compete with the billions of images already existing on the web. Generative models for video and image are not going to change the fact we already can't keep up.

I disagree. It's a rudimentary features of all these models to take a concept picture and refine it. It won't be like the director would give a prompt and get a feature length movie, it will be more like the director uses MS Paint (as in a common software for non tech people) to make a scene outline and directs AI to make a stylish and animated version of that. Something is wrong? just erase it and try again. Dalle2 had this interface from the get go. The models just haven't gotten there yet.

Try again and do what? How are you directing the shot? How do you erase an emotion? How do you erase and redo inner turmoil when delivering a performance?

You tell it, "do it all over again, now with less inner turmoil". Not joking, that's all it's going to take. There are also a few diffusion based speech generators that handle all sounds, inflections and styles, they are going to come in handy for tweaking turmoil levels.

Yep!

"Restyle that last scene, showing different mixtures of fear/concern/excitement on male lead's face. Try to evoke a little of Harrison Ford's expressions in his famous roles. Render me 20 alternate treatments."

[5 minutes later]

«Here are the 20 alternate takes you requested for ranking.»

"OK, combine take #7 up to the glance back, with #13 thereafter."

«Done.»

> Certainly we're very, very far away from that level of cinematic detail and crispness.

Can you quantify what you mean by "very, very far away"?

With the recent pace of advances, I could see feature-length script, storyboard, & video-scene generation occurring, from short prompts & interatively-applied refinement, as soon as 10y from now.

Barring some sort of civilizational stagnation/collapse, or technological-suppression policies, I'd expect such capabilities to arrive no further than 30y from now: within the lifetime, if not the prime career years, of most HN readers.

We thought creative jobs were going to be the last thing AI replaces, now it's among the first.

What's next that may be counterintuitive?

AI will also be able to fill in dialog, plot points, etc.

I think long-term, yes. If you include the whole multimediosphere of 2D inputs and the wealth of 3D engine magickry, yes.

How long? Could be decades. But ultimately, yes.

There's already a surplus of video and an apparent lack of _quality_ video. This might be enough to get folks to shut the TV off completely.

Has this alleged lack of quality video caused total consumption of televised entertainment to decline recently?

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