Looks like I'm still good for my bet with some friends that before 2028 a team of 5-10 people will create a blockbuster style movie that today costs 100+ million USD on a shoestring budget and we won't be able to tell.
Back in the mid 90s to 2010 or so, graphical improvements were hailed as photorealistic only to be improved upon with each subsequent blockbuster game.
I think we're in a similar phase with AI[0]: every new release in $category is better, gets hailed as super fantastic world changing, is improved upon in the subsequent Two Minute Papers video on $category, and the cycle repeats.
[0] all of them: LLMs, image generators, cars, robots, voice recognition and synthesis, scientific research, …
Many more examples, of course.
Big quality improvement over Marathon 2 on a mid-90s Mac, which itself was a substantial boost over the Commodore 64 and NES I'd been playing on before that.
Whenever I saw anybody calling those graphics "photorealistic", I always had to roll my eyes and question if those people were legally blind.
Like, c'mon. Yeah, they could be large leaps ahead of the previous generation, but photorealistic? Get real.
Even today, I'm not sure there's a single game that I would say has photo-realistic graphics.
Looking just at the videos (because I don't have time to play the latest games any more and even if I did it's unreleased), I think that "Unrecord" is also something I can't distinguish from a filmed cinematic experience[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2381520/Unrecord/
Though there are still caveats even there, as the pixelated faces are almost certainly necessary given the state of the art; and because cinematic experiences are themselves fake, I can't tell if the guns are "really-real" or "Hollywood".
Buuuuut… I thought much the same about Myst back in the day, and even the bits that stayed impressive for years (the fancy bedroom in the Stoneship age), don't stand out any more. Riven was better, but even that's not really realistic now. I think I did manage to fool my GCSE art teacher at the time with a printed screenshot from Riven, but that might just have been because printers were bad at everything.
IMO, though, the lighting in the indoor scenes is just not quite right. There's something uncanny valley about it to me. When the flashlight shines, it's clearly still a computer render to my eyes.
The outdoor shots, though, definitely look flawless.
On a more serious note, I don't think Roger Deakins has anything to worry about right now. Or maybe ever. We've been here before. DAWs opened up an entire world of audio production to people that could afford a laptop and some basic gear. But we certainly do not have a thousand Beatles out there. It still requires talent and effort.
As well as marketing.
Surely it will be written using machine vision and llms !
Geordi: "Computer, in the Holmesian style, create a mystery to confound Data with an opponent who has the ability to defeat him"