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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The Hollywood Reporter says many in the industry are very scared.[1]

“I’ve heard a lot of people say they’re leaving film,” he says. “I’ve been thinking of where I can pivot to if I can’t make a living out of this anymore.” - a concept artist responsible for the look of the Hunger Games and some other films.

"A study surveying 300 leaders across Hollywood, issued in January, reported that three-fourths of respondents indicated that AI tools supported the elimination, reduction or consolidation of jobs at their companies. Over the next three years, it estimates that nearly 204,000 positions will be adversely affected."

"Commercial production may be among the main casualties of AI video tools as quality is considered less important than in film and TV production."

[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/ope...

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Honest question: of what possible use could Sora be for Hollywood?

The results are amazing, but if the current crop of text-to-image tools is any guide, it will be easy to create things that look cool but essentially impossible to create something that meets detailed specific criteria. If you want your actor to look and behave consistently across multiple episodes of a series, if you want it to precisely follow a detailed script, if you want continuity, if you want characters and objects to exhibit consistent behavior over the long term – I don't see how Sora can do anything for you, and I wouldn't expect that to change for at least a few years.

(I am entirely open to the idea that other generative AI tools could have an impact on Hollywood. The linked Hollywood Reporter article states that "Visual effects and other postproduction work stands particularly vulnerable". I don't know much about that, I can easily believe it would be true, but I don't think they're talking about text-to-video tools like Sora.)

It wouldn't be too hard to do any of the things you mention. See ControlNet for Stable Diffusion, and vid2vid (if this model does txt2vid, it can also do vid2vid very easily).

So you can just record some guiding stuff, similar to motion capture but with just any regular phone camera, and morph it into anything you want. You don't even need the camera, of course, a simple 3D animation without textures or lighting would suffice.

Also, consistent look has been solved very early on, once we had free models like Stable Diffusion.

I suspect that one of the first applications will be pre-viz. Before a big-budget movie is made, a cheap version is often made first. This is called "pre-visualization". These text to video applications will be ideal for that. Someone will take each scene in the script, write a big prompt describing the scene, and follow it with the dialog, maybe with some commands for camerawork and cuts. Instant movie. Not a very good one, but something you can show to the people who green-light things.

There are lots of pre-viz reels on line. The ones for sequels are often quite good, because the CGI character models from the previous movies are available for re-use. Unreal Engine is often used.

This is a fascinating idea I'd never considered before.

Especially when you can do this with still images on a normal M-series MacBook _today_, automating it would be pretty trivial.

Just feed it a script and get a bunch of pre-vis images for every scene.

When we get something like this running on hardware with an uncensored model, there's going to be a lot of redundancies but also a ton of new art that would've never happened otherwise.

People are extrapolating out ten years. They will still have to eat and pay rent in ten years.

It shows that good progress is still made.

Just this week sd audio model can make good audio effects like doors etc.

If this continues (and it seems it will) it will change the industry tremendously.

The OpenAI announcement mentions being able to provide an image to start the video generation process from. That sounds to me like it will actually be incredibly easy to anchor the video generation to some consistent visual - unlike all the text-based stable diffusion so far. (Yes, there is img2img, but that is not crossing the boundary into a different medium like Sora).

Right now you’d need a artistic/ML mixed team. You wouldn’t use an off the shelf tool. There was a video of some guys doing this (sorry can’t find it) to make an anime type animation. With consistent characters. They used videos of themselves running through their own models to make the characters. So I reckon while prompt -> blockbuster is not here yet, a movie made using mostly AI is possible but it will cost alot now but that cost will go down. Why this is sad it is also exciting. And scary. Black mirror like we will start creating AI’s we will have relationships with and bring people back to life (!) from history and maybe grieving people will do this. Not sure if that is healthy but people will do it once it is a click of a button thing.

> There was a video of some guys doing this (sorry can’t find it) to make an anime type animation. With consistent characters. They used videos of themselves running through their own models to make the characters.

That was Corridor Crew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9LX9HSQkWo

It won’t be Hollywood at first . It will be small social ads for TikTok, IG and social media. The brands likely won’t even care if it’s they don’t get copyright at the end, since they have copyright of their product.

Source: I work in this.

Seconding this. There is also a huge SMB and commercial business that supports many agencies and production companies. This could replace a lot of that work.

Probably a bad time to be an actor.

Amazing time to be a wannabe director or producer or similar creative visionary.

Bad time to be high up in a hierarchical/gatekeeping/capital-constrained biz like Hollywood.

Amazing time to be an aspirant that would otherwise not have access to resources, capital, tools in order to bring their ideas to fruition.

On balance I think the ‘20s are going to be a great decade for creativity and the arts.

> Probably a bad time to be an actor.

I'm thinking people will probably still want to see their favorite actors, so established actors may sell the rights to their image. They're sitting on a lot of capital. Bad time to be becoming an actor though.

Likely less and less tho given that people will be able to generate a hyper personalized set of actors/characters/personalities in their hyper personalized generated media.

Younger generations growing up with hyper personalized media will likely care even less about irl media figures.

You are talking about movie and TV stars, not actors in general. The vast majority of working actors are not known to the audience.

Even the average SAG-AFTRA member barely makes a living wage from acting. And those are the ones that got into the union. There's a whole tier below that. If you spend time in LA, you probably know some actress/model/waitress types.

There's also the weird misery of being famous, but not rich. You can't eat fame.

> established actors may sell the rights to their image

I had a conversation with a Hollywood producer last year who said this is already happening.

> Probably a bad time to be an actor.

I don't see why -- the distance between "here's something that looks almost like a photo, moving only a little bit like a mannequin" and "here's something that has the subtle facial expressions and voice to convey complex emotions" is pretty freaking huge; to the point where the vast majority of actual humans fail to be that good at it. At any rate, the number of BNNs (biological neural networks) competing with actors has only been growing, with 8 billion and counting.

> Amazing time to be a wannabe director or producer or similar creative visionary. Amazing time to be an aspirant that would otherwise not have access to resources, capital, tools in order to bring their ideas to fruition.

Perhaps if you mainly want to do things for your own edification. If you want to be able to make a living off it, you're suddenly going to be in a very, very flooded market.

* Flesh out a movie about x following the Hero's Journey in the style of Notting Hill.

* Create a scene in which a character with the mannerisms of Tom Cruise from Top Gun goes into a bar and says "...."

Considering a year ago we had that nightmare fuel of will smith eating spaghetti and Don and Joe hair force one it seems odd to see those of you who assume we’re not going to get to the point of being indistinguishable from reality in the near future.

We might enter a world where "actors" are just for mocap. They do the little micro expressions with a bunch of dots on their face.

AI models add the actual character and maybe even voice.

At that point the amount of actors we "need" will go down drastically. The same experienced group of a dozen actors can do multiple movies a month if needed.

It’s for sure plausible that acting remains a viable profession.

The bull case would be something like ‘Ractives in “The Diamond Age” by Neal Stephenson; instead of video games people play at something like live plays with real human actors. In this world there is orders of magnitude more demand for acting.

Personally I think it’s more likely that we see AI cross the uncanny valley in a decade or two (at least for movies/TV/TikTok style content). But this is nothing more than a hunch; 55/45 confidence say.

> Perhaps if you mainly want to do things for your own edification.

My mental model is that most aspiring creatives fall in this category. You have to be doing quite well as an actor to make a living from it, and most who try do not.

> the distance between "here's something that looks almost like a photo, moving only a little bit like a mannequin" and "here's something that has the subtle facial expressions and voice to convey complex emotions" is pretty freaking huge;

The distance between pixelated noise and a single image is freaking huge.

The distance between a single image and a video of a consistent 3D world is freaking huge (albeit with rotating legs).

The distance between a video of a consistent 3D world and a full length movie of a consistent 3D world with subtle facial expressions is freaking huge.

So... next 12 months then.

>If you want to be able to make a living off it, you're suddenly going to be in a very, very flooded market.

That is, I believe, GPs point.

It's always a bad time to be an actor, between long hours, low pay, and a culture of abuse, but this will definitely make it worse. My writer and artist friends are already despondent from genAI -- it was rare to be able to make art full-time, and even the full-timers were barely making enough money to live. Even people writing and drawing for marketing were not exactly getting rich.

I think this will lead to a further hollowing-out of who can afford to be an actor or artist, and we will miss their creativity and perspective in ways we won't even realize. Similarly, so much art benefits from being a group endeavor instead of someone's solo project -- imagine if George Lucas had created Star Wars entirely on his own.

Even the newly empowered creators will have to fight to be noticed amid a deluge of carelessly generated spam and sludge. It will be like those weird YouTube Kids videos, but everywhere (or at least like indie and mobile games are now). I think the effect will be that many people turn to big brands known for quality, many people don't care that much, and there will be a massive doughnut hole in between.

> Even the newly empowered creators will have to fight to be noticed amid a deluge of carelessly generated spam and sludge. It will be like those weird YouTube Kids videos, but everywhere (or at least like indie and mobile games are now).

Reminds me of Syndrome's quote in the Incredibles.

"If everyone is super, then no one will be".

I dunno. Thanks to big corpo shenanigans (and, er, racism?) a lot of people have turned away from big brands (or, at least obviously brand-y brands) towards "trusted individuals" (though you might classify them as brands themselves). Who goes to PCMag anymore? It's all LTT and Marques Brownlee and any number of small creators. Or, the people on the right who abandoned broadcast and even cable news and get everything they "know" from Twitter randos. Even on this site, asks for a Google Search alternative are not rare, and you'll get about a dozen different answers each time, each with a fraction of the market share of the big guy (but growing).

You can’t replace actors with this for a long time. Actors are “rendering” faster than any AI. Animation is where the real issues will show up first, particularly in Advertising.

I think you can fill-in many scenes for the actor - perhaps a dupe but would look like the real actor - of course the original actor would have to be paid, but perhaps much less as the effort is reduced.

If it requires acting, it likely can't be done with AI. You underestimate, I think, how much an actor carries a movie. You can use it for digi doubles maybe, for stunts and VFX. But if his face in on the screen... We are ages away from having an AI actor perform at the same level as Daniel Day Lewis, Williem Dafoe, or anyone else that's in that atmosphere. They make too many interesting choices per second for it to replaced by AI.

Quality aside, there's a reason producers pay millions for A-list stars instead of any of the millions of really good aspiring actors in LA that they could hire for pennies. People will pay to see the new Matt Damon flick but wouldn't give it a second glance if some no-name was playing the part.

If you can't replace Matt Damon with another equivalently skilled human, CGI won't be any different.

Granted, maybe that's less true today, given Marvell and such are more about the action than the acting. But if that's the future of the industry anyway, then acting as a worthwhile profession is already on its way out, CGI or no.

Yes, people also take actors as a sign of the quality of the film, or at least they used to, before Marvel. Hence films with big names attached get more money, etc.

Still the idea that actors are easy to replace is preposterous to anyone who's ever worked with actors. They are preposterously HARD to replace, in theatre and film. A good actor is worth their weight in gold. Very very few people are good actors. A good actor is a good comedian, a master at controlling his body, and a master at controlling his voice, towards a specifically intended goal. They can make you laugh, cry, sigh, or feel just about anything. You just look at Paul Giamatti or Willem Dafoe or Denzel Washington. Those people are not replaceable, and their work is just as good and just as culturally important as a Picasso or a Monet. A hundred years from now people will know the name of actors, because that was the dominant mode of entertainment of our age.

Have you seen the amount of CGI in movies and TV shows? :)

In many AAA blockbusters the "actors" on screen are just CGI recreations during action scenes.

But you're right, actors won't be out of a job soon, but unless something drastic happens they'll have the role of Vinyl records in the future. For people who appreciate the "authenticity". =)

The idea that this destroys the industry is overblown, because the film industry has already been dying since 2000's.

Hollywood is already destroyed. It is not the powerful entity it once was.

In terms of attention and time of entertainment, Youtube has already surpassed them.

This will create a multitude more YouTube creators that do not care about getting this right or making a living out of it. It will just take our attention all the same, away from the traditional Hollywood.

Yes there will still be great films and franchises, the industry is shrinking.

This is similar with Journalism saying that AI will destroy it. Well there was nothing to destroy because the a bunch of traditional newspapers already closed shop even before AI came.

They shouldn’t be worried so soon. This will be used to pump out shitty hero movies more quickly, but there will always be demand for a masterpiece after the hype cools down.

This is like a chef worrying going out of business because of fast food.

Yeah, but how many will work on that singular masterpiece? The rest will be reduced and won’t have a job to put food on the table

Only if the entertainment market remains the same size.

Without a change in copyright law, I doubt it. The current policy of the USCO is that the products of AI based on prompts like this are not human authored and can't be copywritten. No one is going to release AI created stuff that someone else can reproduce because its public domain.

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