Comment by dudeinhawaii | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dudeinhawaii | Hacker News Reader

I say this with all sincerity, if you're not overwhelmingly impressed with Sora then you haven't been involved in the field of AI generated video recently. While we understand that we're on the exponential curve of AI progress, it's always hard to intuit just what that means.

Sora represents a monumental leap forward, it's comically a 3000% improvement in 'coherent' video generation seconds. Coupled with a significantly enhanced understanding of contextual prompts and overall quality, it's has achieved what many (most?) thought would take another year or two.

I think we will see studios like ILM pivoting to AI in the near future. There's no need for 200 VFX artists when you can have 15 artists working with AI tooling to generate all the frame-by-frame effects, backgrounds, and compositing for movies. It'll open the door for indie projects that can take place in settings that were previously the domain of big Hollywood. A sci-fi opera could be put together with a few talented actors, AI effects and a small team to handle post-production. This could conceivably include AI scoring.

Sure, Hollywood and various guilds will strongly resist but it'll require just a handful of streaming companies to pivot. Suddenly content creation costs for Netflix drops an order of magnitude. The economics of content creation will fundamentally change.

At the risk of being proven very wrong, I think replacing actors is still fairly distant in the future but again... humans are bad at conceptualizing exponential progress.

I strongly believe that AI will have massive impact on the film industry however it won't be because of a blackbox, text to video tool like Sora. VFX artists and studios still want a high level of control over the end product and unless it's very simple to tweak small details like the blur of an object in the background, or the particle physics of an explosion, then they wouldn't use it. What Hollywood needs are AI tools that can integrate with their existing workflows. I think Adobe is doing a pretty good job at this.

You're completely missing the point. Who cares what VFX artists and studios want if anyone with a small team can create high quality entertaining videos that millions of people would pay to watch? And if you think that's a bar too high for AI, then you haven't actually seen the quality of average videos and films generated these days.

I was specifically responding to this point which seemed to be the thesis of the parent commenter.

> I think we will see studios like ILM pivoting to AI in the near future. There's no need for 200 VFX artists when you can have 15 artists working with AI tooling

Yes this will bring the barrier to entry for small teams down significantly. However it's not going to replace the 200 people studios like ILM.

I believe this to be a failure of imagination. You're assuming Sora stays like this. Reality is we are on an exponential and it's just a matter of time. ILM will be the last to go but it'll eventually go, in the sense of having less humans needed to create the same output.

I think it's fair to be impressed with Sora as the next stage of AI video, yet not be too surprised or consider it some insurmountable leap from the public pieces we've seen of AI video up to this point. We've always been just a couple papers away, seeking a good consistency modelling step - now we've got it. Amazing and viscerally chilling - seeing the net effect - but let's not be intimidated so easily or prop these guys up as gods just for being a bit ahead of the obviously-accelerating curve. Anyone tracking this stuff had a very strong prediction of good AI video within a year - two max. This was a context size increase and overall impressive quality pass reaching a new milestone, but the bones were there.

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