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Comment by howlin | Hacker News Reader

In theory it could empower amateur storytellers to punch above their weight by creating semi-professional animated films. Though to be fair, there was a similar realization when it was clear the Quake engine could be used for filming custom narratives rather than just recording gameplay. Not too much came out of that era. Professional artists still better understand what media humans want to consume.

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Sounds like the Unreal engine is living the Quake engine film dream: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/solutions/film-television

Of course, it’s professionals using it rather than amateurs. I expect generative AI would largely turn out the same way.

Remember Blahbalicious?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVCGqcXzLak

Amateur storytellers will be replaced too… as this thing goes exponential, it will create a glut of content where previously we had scarcity.

In about 10 years from now, nearly all the activities - playing music, composing music, animation, live action footage etc. and yes storytelling — will all be mostly automated. And curation of them, too. It will be like you knitting your own sweaters… most people wouldn’t see the point. They could just buy an endless variety of shirts on Amazon.

I'm glad that you have no idea about the future.

> where previously we had scarcity

Great to know someone saw everything. I thought a human could never finish watching any genre.

In Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, written during the rise of photoshop (such things were already being predicted back in the 90s), people eventually reject tv/movie style media and go back to plays since the generated media is just too easy to pump out an chintzy.

This one resonates with me a bit.

We already see this in goods to an extent "artisinal" vs "cheap dropshipped crap".

People find value in seeing other people do something well (see the popularity of maker videos, or the number of people commenting on someone's performance in a movie rather than the plot, etc). It also captures the idea that art isn't just a product, but a method of communication and is inherently human.

I dunno, just rambling before my morning coffee.

I think that will be true for "mass produced content" things like music for specific activities or uses e.g. workout music, background music for TV/movies/games/restaurants. I think there will still be a lot of people involved in higher value productions. They will definitely be using AI generated content as a multiplier but will likely add their own composition and tweaks to it in order to make it fit their vision. The first step in any design process will probably be to generate a bunch of related content kind of like 3D modelling artists dig up a bunch of reference material before starting their work except the reference material will probably be able to be directly incorporated into the finished piece. There will also be a bunch of purists who do everything themselves, this is obvious since there are still a lot of people who knit their own sweaters.

Not only that but it may turn out story tellers would still want to use words and the listeners to prefer using their imagination sometimes too. Not that I have something against CGI or animations but when somehing becomes too much humans get bored.

Light novels (From Japan) already balance these two demands. Illustrations depict the core characters, and images are far better than words in depicting appearances. Words do the rest.

AI will just mean most fiction start following this same model. Where characters and key environments get detailed designs and images, but the rest remain in words.

> Not too much came out of that era.

Are you sure it isn't the complete opposite? I'm pretty sure that the amateur kids who played around with Machima in the age of Quake went on to become the professionals in the video game industry.

Yes, but it didn't break down the divide between the professionals and the amateurs. CGI is still not common in the amateur world. People aren't producing successful movies in game engines in their homes. That is still up to Hollywood, even so Hollywood is using the same game engines that people have access to at home.

Compare that to what Youtube did to TV, where Youtube did in fact replace a lot of peoples TV watching with Youtube content. A similar shift hasn't happened with movies. Good low budget indie movies are still extremely rare, and generally aren't done in CGI, but filmed classically with cameras.

Cameras, editing and compositing getting cheaper and completely changed the game for Youtube-style video productions. Machinima just didn't have the same impact. Creating CGI/game assets is still a costly and timely endeavor out of reach for most amateurs at a movie-scale. You see a few 5min shorts every now and then, but no two hour movies.

I think the thing is once you get good enough at CGI you make enough to become a small studio Think about RocketJump who went on to make Video Game High School after making cool looking Youtube videos for a while.

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