Jeffrey Katzenberg Says A.I. Will Eliminate 90% of Artist Jobs on Animated Films

Some people like doing that minutia.

>This is from November 2023 prior to Sora.

Before I would have said we have plenty more to do before A.I takes over. And a.i ( Assisted Intelligence ) would aid those creative process. So it will be 50% job cut in the near 10-15 years, while the other 50% being basically double as effective if not more.

After Sora I think future is quite bleak for a lot of artist. Sora is like 80% there, I think we would be 90% there in 2 years time with 5-10x more GPGPU power training. And in 6 years time 95% there by 2030. Even if it didn't eliminate 90% of job but 80%. The redundancy would mean the job market is flooded with animators and their salary will likely stagnant if not fall.

At the same time I finally understand why Nvidia is worth so much.

I think you're looking at what's needed to replace a lot more than 90% of the jobs.

The comparison was against 500 artists working for 5 years.

So you don't need to get to "write a script and have it render" but get it to the point where a top class animated film can be made with 50 artists working for 5 years.

Also at that scale it can cost an enormous amount and still be totally fine.

It starts with AI generating a short scene. Maybe a transition scene. The public doesn't have to accept it if they don't know it's there.

It's interesting you mention Westworld, the first movie to use CGI. It was extremely primitive, 2D, and only for a few seconds. See now CGI in modern movies.

Even if progress halts at Sora's level (the absolute worst case scenario), I think it's good enough to replace some 1-5% of scenes (meaning 1-5% of animators' jobs are ticking down since last Thursday).

> the minutia of vfx, animating, rigging, 3d models, actors, cameras, set designers, trucks, food, lighting, electrical, location, licensing, permits, etc. all go away.

They won't go away, they'll be chosen by default by software. Analogous to the vast majority of powerpoint docs, which are shitty and created by people who don't know anything other than some vague ideas and bullet points they want to put down, but nothing about what it takes to make a quality presentation.

Why not? Why do you assume you could tell if its AI-produced or -enhanced?

Early computer generated visual effects were obvious and bad, they had to be used sparingly to avoid alienating the audience.

Now, they're on basically every frame of basically every film.

> I certainly don't see myself queuing up to watch any AI-produced or -enhanced movie.

When animated hand drawn cartoons (think Disney) were first introduced, film critics said they would never watch it, because didn't have actors in it.

When CGI was introduced, film critics said they would never watch it, because the acting wasn't real.

When 3D rendered movies (think Pixar) were first introduced, film critics said they would never watch it, because it wasn't hand drawn.

Just like cartoons, CGI and 3D rendered movies, AI generated movies has the potential to become a huge market. Maybe not in long format at the beginning, but you bet that short format video platforms such as TikTok and YouTube (shorts) will be flooded with AI generated content soon.

> TBH, they lost me much longer time ago, but I assume it will be a larger transition.

The 'great' thing about platforms like TikTok, is that it'll give a very fast feedback loop on whether the audience is willing to watch it or not. So I expect we'll know whether this transition you speak of will happen or not rather soon. My bet is that it won't, I expect people to watch it anyway.

AI has already written the last few Disney movies, so why not animation?

I feel the same way, but time after time it's shown that 90% of people stick with the heavily enshittified product if it's what they're used to. Most people are passive and docile.

I think we'll see these types of films going the way of books and recorded music. We'll have an explosion of films released to hyper-niche audiences (at best). The middle of the market goes away. 10-20 traditional films still get produced and marketed to large audiences. This evolution makes more sense, since to your point — people like you have already stopped watching the product.

I suspect there is a market for adult-focused genre-based animated films that where never economically feasible before.

Oh, the guys at Nvidia think Sora was trained on synthetic data from Unreal …

Most films don't reinvent cinematography, but follow established patterns, maybe with a twist. Sure, there are the Roger Deakins of the world, but I'd wager that most cinematographers aren't that.

I find this to be the real strange bit of the "AI art debate". All the management and publishing are very bearish on AI, even though its legality relies on wide-scale copyright infringement. Actual artists are far more skeptical, begging for copyright to become a de-facto AI ban, even though they're way more likely to infringe copyright than to own it. And then you have the Free Software people - i.e. the people opposed to software copyright entirely - who were the first to actually point out that AI training was infringement and trying to sue over it.

Yep. Maybe there will be a net reduction in jobs but I can't help but feel like catastrophic 90% reductions involve "lump of labor"-type fallacies where we just imagine taking the given set of work being done and imagine how much of that will be handled via AI vs. humans in 5 or 10 years or whatever.

When the reality is that good AI tools will cause lots of projects to add video content where it wasn't before, or to spend more time creating high-quality video content. And this will undoubtedly involve some new labor.

So we will get a lot a bad animation movies and and will be harder to find the good ones.

Personally I find both of these assumptions to be unlikely to be true. Obviously a subjective evaluation, but they don't ring true to me.

2. Disney can train its own models and make its (oh how I dislike this metaphor) "lobotomy" match the corporate policies the were otherwise going to force on human writers and artists.

Which will be automated in 5 years considering where we were 1 year ago.

Hyped? Yes; Major flaws? Minor, these days; Impossible to fix? No, not even at the pure AI level, though at the consumer level I could believe any percentage impact on how many artists it would take to fix vs. having the artists create in the fist place.

There already was a discussion somewhere about no more new main actors.

Why would studio executives bet on some new talent when they can generate Bruce Willis, John Depp or already put their faces on some less known actors in convincing way.

Then they make a reboot of a reboot of previous generation movies and it rolls ad infitum.

You are assuming that's what people want to see. We still have a long way to go before any human can be eliminated from the big screen. Issues with details such as hands and eyes are still way to obvious.