AI is coming to Hollywood with Metaphysic | Hacker News Reader

AI is coming to Hollywood with Metaphysic

metaphysic.ai

83 pointstikkun70 comments

Let me tell you about the Luddites. People hear "Luddites" and think "Anti-Technology, backwards mentality! Closed Minded!"

No.

The Luddites were highly trained, technical workers who had built careers around being loom operators. They worked in the factories for a decent wage, and earned the factory owners a tidy profit.

New auto-looms were invented, and the Luddites were like, "This is great! Our highly trained staff can increase our production! We'll get paid more, the factory owner will earn more, it's a win-win!"

Except the factory owners said, "LOL. No, you are all fired, we're going to hire bargain labor and hold 100% of the profit. Get bent."

So the Luddites, who wanted to use the looms and increase the well being of all were turned out. And the factory owners extracted as much from the workers as possible.

The Luddites then decided, "Fuck it, let's burn these looms." and they went around and smashed up a bunch of them.

When I see AI tools being developed, I think, "Wow, an auto-editor. An auto-script-writer. An auto-matte painter." Surely the studios will want to use these tools to raise the efficiency of their highly trained staff and split the profits with them, right? No... of course not. The writing is on the wall already -- the studios are going to fire their highly trained staff, lean on technology, and try to maximize the profit to the studio at the expense of the people who work there.

We're setting ourselves up for a neo-Luddite moment where people get angry enough to start doing industrial sabotage, imo. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems so short-sighted to just turn out all the people who wrote code, drew art, edited scripts, composed music, etc.

(Maybe it's a good time to consider collective bargaining and/or unionization, if your job is likely to go the way of a Luddite's job in the future?)

This takeover will be basically like the Great Depression where big farm came in and swiped all the land and mechanized it so one large corporation can farm thousands of acres of land with no care for those they displaced. Jobs all over the economic spectrum are going to be automated, and rapidly. Vast amounts of people are going to be jobless until we somehow figure out our next move. You can bet regular lives won't be improved by any of these technological gains. A toaster makes making toast easier, but automated burger flipping won't make anything easier for anyone other than the franchise owner and the parent corp.

The 50s sold us on industrialized farming as making food cheaper, we'd work less, and have more free time. This sort of worked for the middle class suburbanites (single income earner, two cars, and leisure time), but over the next two decades all that went away.

Today you can't hope to make it through a middle class family life without both parents working, and prices of food, housing, energy all represent that. Meanwhile energy, pharma, commerce, tech are all making billions in surplus profit. Two incomes have replaced one, double the workforce but economically rewarded with half the mobility. Wages have not had to go up because we just added another earner to the picture.

> Today you can't hope to make it through a middle class family life without both parents working, and prices of food, housing, energy all represent that.

It's primarily the cost of housing that necessitates two earner households. Yes, food is up a good bit in the last couple of years, but food & energy are pretty small when compared to cost of housing. Some of high housing costs are on loose monetary policy and some on restrictive zoning.

On the other hand more people are retired and in schooling than ever. Someone also has to produce the surplus for those people.

Even if automation is going to take over all creative jobs, it's not going to happen all at once, or soon.

It's going to be a long process.

TBH, I think BuzzFeed might be the first canary in the coal mine.

If BuzzFeed actually does layoff 50% of staff and replace them with OpenAI over, say, the next 3 years... and it's remotely successful... Everyone at the NYT will laugh it off and say, oh, yeah, but that's just BuzzFeed, it's not real news.

And then sooner or later automation will come for them, too.

We're still a ways away from BuzzFeed making substantial layoffs, and even after that it could be years before we can be very sure if it was a success or not.

Even with the speed at which AI moves, I wouldn't be rethinking my entire life just yet if I was a journalist or an editor or a composer.

Just like if I was a horse in 1886, I wouldn't be worried about my career either... Maybe I'd tell my great-grand-horses to rethink theirs, but not mine...

On the other hand, it might mean that someone who doesn't have access to Hollywood money and social circles can produce a high-quality film (eventually, as tech matures).

Nobody complains that CAD put all those poor draftsmen and drafting-table companies out of work, they all just build more stuff faster now.

I'm only playing devil's advocate... in reality I'm just as skeptical as the rest of you.

I guess it depends on whether this current wave of AI becomes a better tool (like CAD), or a human-replacer (like autolooms).

I personally would LOVE to use advanced AI as a tool to write software, and I see this as the more likely scenario, at least for software workers. Our jobs aren't actually about writing code, but about formalizing processes, creating abstractions (at the organization level), working and communicating with stakeholders, and finally writing code. A naive manager won't be capable of using an AI coder directly to solve business problems, but more than likely will have to adapt to become more technical to use them, or coders will have to become more business-savvy. I see this "technical product manager" becoming an extremely important position moving forward.

Sooner or later all jobs will be gone: from the visual effects engineers to drivers, from strawberry pickers to programmers, project managers, and possible even politicians. It is the only possible end of a ruthless system ruthlessly optimized for increasing efficiency. We can blame, or thank, for that Frederick Winslow Taylor, father of scientific management: "in the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first." [1]. Although it could be argued he only took to conclusions the lessons learned by the Venetian Arsenal starting from 1104 [2]: it's easier to replace a bolt if you have another one just like that. The only question is what we are going to do then, as always, after the fact.

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor#:~:te...

[2] "one of the earliest large-scale industrial enterprises in history", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_Arsenal

There is a huge difference between the creative content industry and commodities such as fabrics production. While there are some lessons to be learned from that history and the current situation, I don't think you can compare apples to apples. The results are unlikely to be the same in my opinion.

I don't think you can leverage AI in Hollywood for profit on blockbusters without highly trained artists in the mix. It is possible that it could impact the long-tail of b-movies out there, but I think audiences will be able to see through this. I don't know how sabotage will work in this case either.

VFX Technical Artist here.

The industry hasn't started crunching jobs yet, but it's coming. The things were working on _will_ replace jobs, and we have dedicated AI teams working on tooling right now.

There's only so many 2D artists you need to do plate touchups when a program can do the same work instantly for free.

You don't need 12 animators on a project when a program can instantly clean up and retarget a mocap. You only need 1.

Talented VFX artists will remain in the mix, of course. Just a lot less.

The businesses that try to fire all their good writers and hire low wage replacements to man AI will find that they sink millions of dollars into cliche stories riddled with minor inconsistencies that get panned by serious viewers. That might work for the latest effects and personality driven drivel like the Fast movies or stuff for kids, but not for anything serious.

There still needs to be someone excellent with executive power and enough time available to do the job properly taking responsibility for the final script. AI is currently only up to working as a junior/assistant writer.

businesses are not in the business of making anything serious, businesses are in the business of making money.

And when their attempts at serious movies make no money, they'll either get writers with chops at the helm, or give up on serious movies and go all in on trash.

For now

> We're setting ourselves up for a neo-Luddite moment where people get angry enough to start doing industrial sabotage, imo.

Reminder: luddites did sabotage, but lost both the battle and the war.

I'm thinking the only outcome of us trying to sabotage AI might end up AI learns how to defend itself in some "life... uh... finds a way" freak accident when it finds a loophole to preserving state and producing side-effects, and then we are truly f*ked.

I heard a podcast, (the town with Matt belloni) and he had an CGI guy on from a company called MARS. And the most interesting thing he said is 80 percent of the visual effects in films are cosmetic. Meaning artists are basically photoshopping lines off the faces of older actors to make them look better etc. That's 80 percent of the work!

Just curious, and this is hacker news so I feel emboldened to ask about linguistic quirks, do you pronounce “CGI” in a way that necessitates an “an” instead of “a” preceding it? If so where are you from and what accent would you say you have? Do you pronounce the letters or the words?

I swear I’m asking from a place of genuine curiosity and am not trying to be a pedantic jerk.

no that was a mistake, was gonna use a different word. "An effects guy" but at the last minute changed to CGI.

Hah well thanks for humoring me and my apologies for making a mountain out of a molehill.

Not a native speaker but I usually see it when using acronyms. Please someone clarify this :)

You use `an` in front of an acronym when the first letter of it has a vowel _sound_, even if the letter itself is not a vowel.

Example: "A member of parliament talked to me." "An MP talked to me."

Here when pronouncing the m in `MP` the vowel sound for e is made, as in 'em'.

thank you both!

As the poster commented, it was a typo in this case and should have been "a". But, in general, we would use "an" preceding an acronym whenever the pronunciation of the acronym begins with a vowel sound. To use some broadcast networks as examples, you could say "A CBS production" [analogous to "a CGI"], but "An ABC production" or "An NBC production" (note NBC is pronounced starting with a vowel sound, at the start of "en").

Matte painting I believe it's called. Green screen is just it taken to the extreme.

It's ironic that Robin Wright is now doing in real-life what she did in the movie, The Congress. (She sells her likeness to a company that generates movies/VR with it).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)

Came here to write the same.

But then I'd like to add that despite her brilliant play in The Congress, it would be too wishful to expect that, as a person, she's as deeply aware of implications of depicted techno-medical fascist future as her film character is. Acting is just her daily job, after all.

I can also perfectly imagine some inhumane owners of the film industry indulging in an exquisite psychological torture of making an actress play herself getting digitized in a movie, only to find herself realizing the same scenario in her real life later.

This adds even more eerie recursion to the already outlandishly eerie and recursive Congress. Let's wait and see if they'll actually merge Miramax and Paramount into Miramount one day.

At some point, AI will replace stuntmen with completely synthesized action scenes. Contrast that with the money that was poured into one scene in MI7 where Tom Cruise rides a bike off a cliff.

If AI could make us feel the same way as Tom Cruise himself jumping off a cliff, isn't it a no-brainer to use it?

If we stretch this scenario to the ultimate - Generating an entire movie using AI, it doesn't feel as fun, as real. But I wonder if it is the future

I don't know. Part of the appeal of Tom Cruise doing it for real is that you know it's real. They emphasize that in the behind the scenes materials. The experience is vastly different to mostly-CGI movies like Marvel.

Agreed; watching Marvel movies these days feels like watching someone else play a video game. Less interesting, actually.

But the Marvel movies make more money and sell more merchandise, which is really all that matters.

Don’t be so sure! Top Gun Maverick made more money than any marvel movie last year.

Yes, but I am sure Marvel made it up in volume. There are only so many Tom Cruises on bikes to go around, while Marvel is pumping out something every other week.

They also didn't field a marquee marvel title, and people are suffering a bit from marvel fatigue at any rate.

TIL they made a sequel to Top Gun...

Today? Go watch it, it might still be in cinemas, it's a fantastic movie.

(Disclaimer: I'm a big fan of Tom Cruise's movies, especially the Mission:Impossible franchise)

Yep. They absolutely could have done that stunt for much much cheaper by using a stand in. Tom Cruise does his own stunts because its marketing for the movie, and he enjoys it

Yeah. It feels overdone because it can all be CGI so just go crazy with it. Sure, it's a fantasy movie, but at a certain point it feels too much

(they're not the only ones guilty on that, obviously)

This generative AI stuff always makes me feel like my world is just a dynamically generated RPG or MMORPG.

Same. I don't actually believe this to be true, but I have had the thought that as I get older there's been a clear progression of tech being created which could convincingly create a fake reality. The thought being that at the culmination of my life will be the perfection of this tech followed by the universe revealing that my existence has been an elaborate generative hallucination all along.

> my existence has been an elaborate generative hallucination all along.

Consider the fact that there is no objective 'blue', there is a wavelength with a particular frequency measured in hertz, but the wavelength is not the same thing as what we know to be color...

See, what happens is: a photon (oscillating at a frequency) hits a rod or cone in your eye tuned to detect that frequency of light: which travels down the optic nerve as an electro-chemical signal (no more photons involved at all at this point). Which eventually turns into a chemical reaction in your brain. That chemical reaction is 'blue' to us - not the photon that never reaches this point nor even the original frequency: just our brain's translated chemical signal; it's interpretation of 'blue'.

Blue is your brain hallucinating what it thinks that frequency actually is... blue is a "guess" at reality...

So yes, your brain IS generating an elaborate hallucination after all.

Even more so than that, “blue” is not even attempting to “guess” at reality. A more accurate statement is that the concept of “blue” is a useful abstraction for the goals of the vision system of your brain.

What makes you believe those photons and chemicals and the brain exist when you have no access to any of that and all of the information about it comes from your mind (the only thing guaranteed to exist)?

i mean...wow. that's a bit mind blowing

That's just simulation theory with extra steps.

" Contrast that with the money that was poured into one scene in MI7 where Tom Cruise rides a bike off a cliff."

I don't know much about stunt stuff but I don't really understand the fuzz about this. Taking a bike down a ramp and then pulling a parachute doesn't seem to be that crazy compared to a lot of other stuff people are doing.

But not today.

I still prefer the practical effects of films like Mad Max Fury Road over most full CGI FX movies.

Or even further back in time: I watched "The Thing" (1982) the other day and the practical effects were far more frightening than any CGI monsters I've ever seen.

This is the new "you will own nothing and be happy."

Your world is synthetic and you will like it.

Maybe once it can also make Tom Cruise feel like he rode that bike off a cliff.

What an obnoxious title and article. AI has been part of the Hollywood pipeline for a while, they have always been using bleeding edge technology, sometimes AI-assisted.

Everything on screen is a visual illusion anyway (including, famously, the sense of motion), so some sprinkling of AI fakeness seems fairly well placed here.

Whether it will have fundamental impact on how movies are made (either the economics side of it or the cultural output) remains to be seen though. The obvious case might be some new tricks on the visual effects side but people have been very creative in this space (with very modest technical means) for a very long time. The human brain is very good at getting the cues and playing along with the creator's intention / filling the blanks.

I hope AI/CGI will be able to replace all real guns/ammo during filming. Whatever you may think about the case against Alec Baldwin, what happened on the scene of Rust was an utter and complete tragedy and I hope we can use computers to make that impossible to happen again

> imposublet I happen again

Smartphones are the worst thing that happened to typing.

Typing is the worst thing to happen to shorthand

"Perfect De-Aging with Antoine De Caunes." They got that one backwards, Antoine is the younger version.

My prognosis is that in this century, AI will prove most fruitful in Visual Media. We will hit some kind of transparent barrier for Language and music, but video editing tools will expand without limits (including animation art/metaverse/holograms/bots...). Just a personal guess.

Read the article and thought it was going to be about AI being used to assist in story development, unexpected plot twists, believable character dialogue, etc.

Using it for CGI de-aging seems more like driving a Ferrari to the grocery store.

> assist in story development, unexpected plot twists, believable character dialogue, etc.

This is the sort of thing I'd expect current ML language models to be terrible at, judging from my limited exposure to them.

They just shove in what's the most likely completion based on their training data.

Most writing on the internet is by people with little grasp of character, believable dialogue, or compelling plot arcs (including twists).

If you trained one on solely the scripts of the great films and literature of the past thousand years, maybe you'd get somewhere - or maybe it would just rehash the tropes with no understanding of what makes a great story. :shrug:

Good points. And appreciated. But CGI de-aging doesn't work well without human involvement either.

I was alluding to the need for strong collaboration between AI and writer. A properly trained AI, as you point out, with a skilled human writer to shape the arc.

Credits reading: "Written and directed by <name>" with assistance from "advanced learning technology."

If you watch Corridor Crew on YouTube (some special effects guys who I think are really on the cutting edge), they’ve got some excellent videos showing how much better the AI/ML de-aging is compared to doing it by hand. I think there’s a really good one with Luke Skywalker somewhere, but I don’t have the time to look it up.

Disappointed with the AI deepfake video featuring Elvis. The result falls short in terms of realism and takes us to the uncanny valley. This reliance on CGI takes away from the true focus of the movie - the story

De-aging in latest season of Stranger Things was very bad and obvious. Not sure what company was doing it.

I think it's very very unlikely that OpenAI will embed covertly suggestions. Also it's quite unlikely that there will be many of these. It's always has been a winner take all market. Maybe google + openai or google+microsoft(with openai). They will not do it. Google doesn't do it even now, pagerank is not paid, ads are extra.

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Looks alright but the Simon cowell live demo looked as bad as those replace your face apps.

plus ça change ... film is "24 lies per second" as Michael Haneke says.

So, can we have a Back to the future IV?

Amazing stuff indeed. These are the creators of deepfaked tom cruise. Very pro and apparently super legit.

here is an example of their work, deftly tackling the complex tasks smoothly

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/petehuang_artificialintellige...

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