Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora
hollywoodreporter.com
hollywoodreporter.com
Yes, it will get better. But generating anything close to coherent film / television show is a tall task.
For all of the progress in image generation we still seem somewhat stagnant when it comes to fixing hallucinations. Video generation is a much harder problem than image generation, so it's not super clear to me we're very close to this having a material impact on Hollywood.
AI is just going to make the rich... richer. We do need some protections in place.
Anyway, if we see it coming, it'd be silly not to prepare for it in some fashion.
And I'm guessing once the evidence is strong enough to convince you, it will be too late to do anything about it.
I'm not gonna trust the pyromaniacs with the next bridge if I can help it.
> The bridge is currently burning and much of the world still doesn't notice its being burnt alive.
Citation required.
Not really. IMHO the idea of universal basic income is not an actual solution, it's a soporific to passivate people until all their power is drained from them. What we really need is a Butlerian Jihad, to make technology and technologists subordinate to society, instead of letting society be subordinate to technologists and their technology (and the capital they serve and/or control).
I'm very concerned about the impact of this thing that I get to control, and benefit from, the impact of.
i find impossible to believe that people that are currently working in the music/film industries will not take advantage of these new technologies (see designers that went from pen and paper to software).
i think a decent analogy is music. software has completely taken over music production. but musicians are still making great music, analogue or otherwise.
these new technologies might even open up these industries to a lot more people since creation will no longer be hindered by learning different types of software.
yes, i'm an optimist :)
its like how excel didn't eliminate payroll or accounts-payable, but now instead of needing 10 people you need 3, and will still attempt to pay them peanuts.
- the behavior of big tech in the last 10-15 years minimum - The arguably decrease of quality of movies as is from corporate ignoring artists who already had to protest just to prevent themselves from being degraded from writers to AI prompt editors. - history of artists in film since... forever
I'm honestly very pessimistic. In theory, this means less artists in a VFX studio can charge the same amount (which as is, is way too little. Remember that multiple award winning movies had their VFX studio shutter months after the award), and each artist gets paid a proper living wage, now that there are less hands to re-distribute the money too. In reality, this may shut down what remnants of VFX there are, reduce in house artist, and the remaining artist make even less despite now being as productive as 10-50 artists from the decade prior.
A lot of optimism for such tech would need to come from trust, and every company involved have spent decades eroding that trust and then digging further underground.
>i think a decent analogy is music. software has completely taken over music production. but musicians are still making great music, analogue or otherwise.
music is a decent analogy. No one makes money making music anymore. You're an entrpreneur peddling merchandise as an emotional response from music that people listen to on Spotify that pays pennies (or less, if you sign on a record company). Modern music is the classic "being paid in exposure" trope in action.
when was "making music" a money maker? or for that matter, when was creating any art form a money maker? i think making money out of art is an anomaly, not a rule. and i think that's good, as money corrupts art.
the problem as i see it is that lots of us live in a capitalist world. and in that case it's very hard to hold my beliefs and still lead a fulfilling life.
i don't have the answer to this issue. but i think there was a similar issue a few decades ago, when making money from art was considered "selling out".
>i think making money out of art is an anomaly, not a rule. and i think that's good, as money corrupts art.
Until we live in a post scarcity society, or until the arts is some random eccentric billionaire hobby, most art will be trading a craft for compensation to survive. That isn't a recent nor local phenomenon. The arts made from love that somehow succeeds only on its own merits has always been the minority. As you said, it's hard to hold your beliefs (I.e. Make exactly what you want) and still pay the bills. There isn't enough time in the day, or maybe there is now but corporate demands more of our time than ever despite thst.
But yes, there's about to be a massive shakeup. You can blame Perry, but someone has to fund these tremendously expensive human efforts. If everyone else is underselling him with cheaper AI productions, where does that leave him?
The other comments are correct about fully generative imaging from AI .. having that fluid and tight to a directors vision is still some way down the road.
As mentioned in article what will change is being able to generate fully digital sets with AI assistance, character makeup and "look" to tie onto a real actor, background non player AI extras, etc.
This sees a AV media future with a lot more work in giant green rooms and AI production .. and the $800 m is most likely "on hold" while the big picture is revaluated - fewer carpentry shops, more server farms.
Second, if you’ve done much with generative imagery you know the raw experience is difficult to control to a specific visual outcome. Fine tuning, in painting, image to image, control nets, all these things help. But it’s easy to make something stunning, but difficult to make your vision come out from the machine. It’s a tool, like any other. It’ll require rethinking what’s better to do with generative ai and what’s better to shoot directly. But direction, cinematography, and acting are about extreme control to achieve a specific outcome. Generative AI doesn’t help that. However what I’ve seen it really do well is take imagery and add detail and nuance, interpolate scenes, and other feats that will likely make post production much more powerful, requiring fewer reshoots, etc. Creating CGI will be simpler, especially bootstrapping, and l will bet it’ll be extremely heavily used preproduction to create visual story boarding.
But completely replace humans ? The camera didn’t replace artists, and if you’ve seen a tunnel boring, there’s no lack of humans there. A strong back isn’t as important as a strong engineering mind, but that’s a pressure on labor that’s been building for centuries.
These new tools won’t change the dynamic, it’ll just up the game.
I will wager you we will see a dramatic realignment in the sorts of work that go into production, but the demand for those skills will be so high and the value so immense that we will see a profusion of new work, better output, and more employment in the arts.
Most of white collar work is very much rooted in the “mechanical” tasks.
I do think rote learning is about to seriously take a step back in the world and the future won’t reward the ability to turn the crank nearly as much. The white collar readjustment will be realizing memorizing facts is much less valuable than understanding and synthesizing.
As for salaries - you can be a hopelessly mediocre engineer, doctor, lawyer, etc, and still earn good money. You can even be a bad professional who is actively incompetent and still earn good money.
The fact that salaries can be hyped so they don't accurately reflect social value is a symptom of the problem, not an explanation for it.
Why shouldn’t health insurance exist? Most lawyers make terrible money. Doctors don’t make a lot of money in most countries.
Laws have always been created to deal with new technologies and their fallout. Labour laws are no different.
You should read about the musicians strike of 1942 [1]. When the record player was invented some people thought 'why pay a singer for more than one performance if technology allows you to record them and sell infinite copies'? No one would try that today with Taylor Swift for example.
[1] https://jacobin.com/2022/03/1940s-musicians-strike-american-...
Your analogy is wrong, Spotify, or really the phonograph, didn't put musicians out of work. The television did, because once that came along "just" playing well wasn't enough to be a star, on camera presence became more important.
But I also don’t think the life of the musician is all that dire, at least compared to the portrait artist and tunnel digger. There are plenty of jazz clubs in any major city, and live music that pays enough to at least supplement a day job is a thing. Even at the height of live music your average musician would have needed a day job to get by.
The underlying question is: what are the values of the culture? Predatory selfishness is thrilling [1] for the winners, but ultimately self-defeating - literally suicidal from a sustainability POV, physically and socially.
The neoliberal definition of "freedom" is exactly synonymous with predatory selfishness, so everything else can only suffer.
But it's not everyone's definition of freedom. Plenty of people have other motivations, and this economic model aggressively disenfranchises their values.
[1] In a surprisingly unsatisfactory way.
Right now control net can do pretty good character pose control, but you have to make the pose. Well… next step is to generate the pose with a request. Same for faces.
If you’re imagining that AI tools mean it has to be a straight text -> output model that’s not correct. They are very much iterative transformations.
The goal is of course to make this unnecessary, because adjusting a single element doesn’t benefit much from ai. But there’s nothing say you can’t?
The point is to look at the patterns in how creative work is performed, it's generally about fine-grained control. E.g., the commonality across a musician, film editor, animator, music producer, photographer, painter, etc... if you're making the claim that suddenly AI is going to replace this need for fine-grained control then I'd put the burden of proof on the supporter of the AI tool to describe why the fine-grained control suddenly won't be important.
(And re AI also doing fine-grained yeah addressed that above: Just showing up isn't impressive, it needs to be absolutely amazing at fine-grained control to be a real creative tool in my opinion.)
1) you can go as fine grained as you want. This is not a limitation.
2) going fine grained beyond a certain point is stupid. You don’t edit individual pixels in high resolution art. The tools allow it, but it is not a part of practical workflows.
3) the goal is of course to make fine grained adjustments not needed, because the fine grained details are well executed with high level executions. Same as experienced in (2).
If you still think this is worth debating I’d request a specific example of a practical detail that you think is fine grained and not servable by AI.
A frame of a film is just an image and is easily handled. A decibel is not a thing.
There are also "coarse" tools, and a market for them, e.g., iMovie and Canva, and I'd put AI tools in that same category of course. There's nothing new about coarse tools, but those are general for a different audience, and for a different production level.
I.e., another way of saying this is that important thing is not "high-level of execution", Steve Albini didn't become a sought after producer by being technically great. In high-level creation, technical excellence is usually table stakes. He became sought after by having a particular vision for his music production, and that vision was executed by having fine-grained control over every single audio element of what he was working on.
You can believe AI will negate the need for all this, but my point is simply that would be a mighty large coup to how high-level creation works today, ergo extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The problem is not that there will be 0 humans needed. The problem is that something that used to take 100 people, might be done with 5. And that 95 is still creative jobs, jobs that require education, skill, grit.
You make a living either by hunting and gathering, or creating value for others and exchanging that value for things you need through a generic value token of money. The bar for being able to generate value that can sustain you (let alone a family) was already increasing day by day. But with the sudden spike of generative AI, the bar shot up faster than any time in known human history. With things as they stand right now, the amount of education and experience you need to generate value for others is going off the charts. It will be unfathomable in a few years. Yes, humans will be needed, but not as many to provide what we need. Yet those people will not simply stop existing. What is in the cards for them? That is the problem.
Modern farm equipment put a whole lot of unfree* agricultural laborers "out of work", but most of us consider that to have been a good thing.
*serfs, slaves, indentured servants, etc.
All the major tech companies are laying off due to their ambitions/utilizations of AI. This is a major employer in a major city seeing the writing on the wall.
Citation needed.
Tech companies are having layoffs because they spent the last decade under the assumption that money was free and profits were optional. Now they are hitting reality and investors/shareholders are demanding returns. AI has nothing to do with it. Heck the wave of layoffs started well before ChatGPT even launched. If anything AI is actually fueling another bubble and extending the charade. Look at the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people that suddenly work "in AI" now.
Googles layoffs in ad sales are attributed to their leaning into AI ads
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-plans-ad-sale...
By who? What is the source?
He doesn't have to be "the greatest technology prognosticator of our time". He is a large capital owner and employer.
Big difference between getting it to generate a plausible snowy Tokyo scene vs actually controlling the detail and style on a manner that is consistent and controllable.
No point in having a movie where every perspective and angle has a slightly different style
I wouldn’t want to be in that biz right now
Michael Bay begs to differ ("Transformers: The Last Knight has aspect ratio changes throughout the film, often randomly, mid-scene and between shots.")
We're not going to get better movies and shows by unleashing the TikTok generation on movies and shows. We'll get more, but not better because they are simply not capable of better. They don't have the training and the practice and it doesn't matter how cheap the tools if you don't have the ability, the skills that come with an education and a lot of trial and error. These skills are absent in all but the rarest of untrained persons so your friend's tv series is going to be shit, along with any tv series or movie created by people without the skills of a trained tv or movie maker. We don't need more shit. We have enough with the Disney, Apple, and Netflix and I should also include YouTube and TikTok.
Wider is not better in art because art is a developed skill not a party trick. As someone who went to art and architecture schools, I promise you that the camcorder did not bring a grand new wave of democratized citizen cinema. It just didn't and neither will so-called A.I. because, once again, art is a skill, not trick. There are no shortcuts and no secrets to bypass learning and practice.
When I was young, they were not many, but most of them were amazing. And there was a real story. Now, on Netflix there are thousands. But most feel like completely empty and stupid. Recently after watching one with my kids, I'm much more careful in the selection.
Sadly, it looks like it's the case with everything that will be available on the internet soon.
There are some very nice animated movies coming out of smaller countries - but finding them amongst the drek is the hard part.
We’re unlikely going to be watching movies like we have been in the next 10 years.
If movie-quality content is easy to generate, then what is left to separate the good from the bad?
Probably story, characters, originality, etc.
Generative models could, across the board, commoditize the aesthetic leaving only substance as a discernible trait.
This could be positive for the world in both encouraging people to create things of substance and consume things of substance.
When instagram pictures are so easily made perfect, why bother posting? Or watching? What credit do you get for looking the way you do?
When shallow political arguments are made in a comment, why not just assume they are computer generated?
We could become blind to vapid content like we are blind to billboard ads.
What happened to the quality of video games once game frameworks became easily available? The market got flooded with low-effort garbage.
Youtube and Tiktok and other social media platforms make global video distribution easy, but most of it is uninteresting and uninspired, when not low-effort clickbait or ragebait. Making things easy doesn't lead to more substance, only exponentially more of what sells, which is shallow, low effort aesthetic.
What point is there in encouraging people to create things of substance when that substance will only be consumed, commoditized and shat out by AI? Every time you see authentic, human generated art online now, it just gets assimilated. It's a sign of something forever tainted and blighted from the collective human soul.
We can't be blind to vapid content when the systems and algorithms that generate our culture optimize only for it. The only hope is that somehow AI fails to follow through on its promise. Maybe it will never be able to create content of high enough quality, quickly enough or at a low enough cost. Given the evolution of technology, and the capability of LLMs in particular, that seems unlikely. Only another AI winter can save us. As long as AI remains deeply integrated into all possible electronic and online means of communication, creativity and expression (as it seems destined to be) then human expression just feeds the machine, and becomes as impossible to find in the ocean of machine-generated slime as non-commercial content on Google.
So we go from 98% not worth looking at to 99.9% not worth looking at, or whatever the figure is.
I read a blog today and it was high-quality long form tech journalism - something I haven't seen for a long time, tucked away on a no-mark site in a far corner of the Internet.
I didn't agree with all of the content, but it was so good to see something written at that level. 50 years ago it would have been normal for tech publishing. Today most tech journalism is gossip and clickbait. It's not thoughtful and referenced long form analysis of where the industry may be heading, written with original critical insights.
So, yes, there are a lot of new video games because it's easy. It's also true that the most aggressively marketed and therefore quite popular games are bad. Mobile games now make up over half of the gaming revenue. This is a problem not of volume but of incentive. These popular games have created a cycle of [heavy monetization > more ads > more popularity]. They exploit people. This is a problem but a different kind of problem.
On the other hand, the indie games on steam have never been better. They're extremely creative, and fun, and they invent. They riff off each other. And most new things in gaming come first from here. The only thing not healthy about it is the lack of money they make. These games are so cheap that they have a hard time paying the developer's rent.
Platforms and cynical games with better marketing and monetization have stolen their lunch and poisoned their audiences.
The point is that bringing down the barrier of creation did allow much better creations. However, marketing and exploitation ruined a lot.
I won't go into it as deeply, but you can imagine the same pattern played out everywhere else.
YouTube has great content and would have more if it was more discoverable. It's hard to find because the algorithm made for maximizing marketing dollars suggests things that we don't tell the algorithm we want but what the algorithm thinks will keep us watching. It resists helping us. Because marketing money.
With these new generative models, we can imagine decreasing money needed to create but we will all compete for the same finite source of attention. Like with games, the good stuff will still be there, but it might be hard to find.
A positive sum game (creation) turns into a zero-sum game (attention auctions) with negative externalities (ragebait, mobile game addiction).
Those that control who gets attention will be able to soak up all the gains from the positive sum game. It's already been happening with app stores and google ads. And there's no reason it shouldn't soak up all the margin gains.
The enemy is not bringing down barriers - that's the good stuff. It's reining in marketing and attention platforms so that we can all benefit from these creations instead the benefits being greatly attenuated and, in some cases, made negative but the attention gatekeepers.
I assume you've never seen a Tyler Perry 'Madea' movie before
https://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchise/fr4115107589/
I think I can see where the meat is.
Already happening without AI, see superhero movies.
What we are actually going to get is millions of stories, the vast majority of which will be terrible but a small percent that will be revolutionary.
> Pay-per-use: $0.01-$0.10 per second of generated video, based on existing tools and computational demands.
https://medium.com/@christianray.drapete/openai-sora-underst...
Quite simply, there's no practical combination of top-tier hardware that you can buy which will put you even close to that number, even if replicated 8-10 times as the article implies multiple rooms.
That tells me most of the money would be poured into vanity aspects - literally gold toilets and the like - which would impact the ego, not the sound.
It's easy to spend $1M on gear. You would have to work really, really hard to spend $25M on gear. I'd bet that everything Steve Albini has in his two rooms is worth under $10M.
The word “sound” implies that it’s soundproof so you can record sound. This makes a soundstage generally much more expensive to build than the alternative, a silent stage.
$800M isn’t crazy if you’re building a dozen of these and all the supporting infrastructure.
I could see it adding up pretty fast.
Yeah, it's not gonna be cheap by a damned sight.
Mea culpa; I honestly thought Tyler Perry was a music guy.
Just owning my mistake.
Assume AI does pan out and widespread change is soon upon us, making a very significant percentage of labor unemployable. So one solution widely touted is universal basic income. Is that even possible? The US government prints money and then collects some of that money as taxes. Remove a large part of the taxes and it is just printing money. Maybe that works? I haven't seen any analysis, especially on the short term changeover. Maybe in the future only corporations and AI's will pay taxes and everybody else lives for free and starts a restaurant for extra cash? Congress today seems unlikely to pay to support people whose skills have become obsolete, but maybe if it happens to a lot of people at the same time...
[1]https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-is-asking-for-an-additional-do...
I think same will happen with AI once we get tons of autogenerated TV shows and movies watching 3 min of 40 min show or 5 min of 2 hr movie would become common. People would bulk delete unwatched movies/shows and other material from queue without ever playing it. Or maybe by then person entertainment AI bot would be tasked with processing 5000 hour worth of media every week and summarize it to owners.
The idea that 5 million dollar movie would generate 500 million dollar revenue would be hilarious just from plain economic analysis.
- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
I had no idea Tyler Perry movies made so much as to necessitate such a big studio
- it’s only short videos
- it’s not fully consistent
- it is hard to direct to get what you want
Five years from now parents will be mashing up Winnie the Pooh and Avatar, starring their children, in immersive 3D, for the Apple Vision Pro 4 or the Quest 7.
Tyler Perry is making a wise choice.
Special effects are nothing new. But we all know special effects don't make a good movie.
All the components will still be needed, but the levels and origins of them all will change.
If you go back and look at how the median productions have changed at 5 year intervals (going in the past), it'd be a poor choice to commit $800M to something that's probably going to remain exceedingly fluid for a while.
The SFX industry is probably the most prepared to shift, as it's already screens, pixels, and servers. The days of green dots are already (mostly) over (see the ILM SFX reel for The Creator -- wholesale human detail replacements without tracking dots).
The change will affect everyone else more.
five years MAYBE expert creators will be able to do this in a satisfactory way after a lot of polish in editing out the edges and hundreds to thousands of prompts. And even then we're talking more about 5-10 minute short, not a feature length film.
five years for a parent with no technical/artistic expertise, sure. some will make some 10 second shorts on par with a current college freshman's early film project. minus understandings of the fundamentals of film, of course.
Five years ago, there was nothing in existence that could respond well to a prompt like "Write a short story about my six-year-old daughter Emily traveling undersea to rescue her favorite sea horse, who's been kidnapped by the Shrimp King. Make her have several adventures along the way, engaging in side quests and making friends who ultimately help her succeed in her quest"
Today ChatGPT responds to the above with no difficulty, and part of the reason is that it has been trained not just to output reasonable responses, but aesthetically pleasing ones.
There is every reason to believe that video output will be more responsive five years from now than text is right now. Sure, it's possible it will be a little stilted, or a little generic, but it's possible it won't be.
Obviously we're both speculating, but I find it hard to believe that one minute today won't turn into hour-length in five years.
1. Text has come car, but I don't think anything other than blogspam sites have heavily leveraged AI as a commercial product. There's a huge gulf of difference between "this looks okay enough that the common user won't question it" and "this is helping professionals make money for products consumers the self seek out". AI is 90% of the way there, and it has another 90% to go, just like any human.
2. With all that noted, Video is a lot more computationally expensive than text generation. Which is multiple magnitudes of more information to edit/refine. It will only magnify the problem since the common user is a lot better at recognizing defects in visuals than in text (where native speakers famously don't process every word while reading).
I'm not saying that this won't massively improve efficiency. But I think we both will agree that this tech won't lead to a large studio making content in months so much as letting a very lean team make content in 3-5 years for much less money when they lay off 95% of the staff.
if you think we're still shooting green screen for anything with a budget, you'd be a bit out of touch
that's one hell of an endorsement, and not a good one. pretty much sums it up. 300 and Sin City at least styled them to look like the comic they were based, but the Willy Wonka and Alice all just were a bunch of nope from me. these movies just look/feel uncanny valley, and we just expected to accept it.
compare Mad Max Fury Road. yes, there's some digital additions, but it feels real because so much of it was real.
Nobody (to my knowledge) has ever said that you can't train on copyrighted material - what you aren't allowed to do is copy or directly plagiarize. Something that all the generative systems are going to great pains to remove from their system where possible.
Are they doing a perfect job - nope. But they'll get better, and this is good - copyrights are supposed to prevent replication, not use of their material.
Also, performance licenses for movies, plays, recorded music, and copyrighted scores are all required. The lack of copying is not relevant there, the performance alone can be infringing.
I like that you bring up music - almost every musician you have ever listened to (some exceptions of course) developed their talent by learning from others - chords, bridges, etc... And I'm just as certain that close to 0% of them had a "license to learn" from their material.
I lost all optimism with tech hoping "they'll get better" quite a while ago. No, it's time to regulate them before they burn the bridge this time.
Are there problems when it reproduces it verbatim? Absolutely, but that's not what the copyright maximalists are talking about. They're saying it's a violation of their right of reproduction when someone simply reads their work.
I remember when people were upset that someone would (gasp!) link to their site without permission. Especially if it was a "deep link".
Expanding copyright in this novel way obviously is going to lead to a whole slew of problems, least among which is going to be ensuring regulatory capture by the largest of the largest simply because only they will have the money to license reading.
It's a shakedown by industries that no longer have a viable business model.
and then storing it in a database, as shown by the ability to nearly replicate images with enough prompting before they band-aided a fix over it (which does not remove it from their database). It's clearly not just "reading". You can argue the same for a human mind, but it's a lot easier to peer into a mind of code for now (and honestly, by the time we can accurately read brainwaves LLM's won't even be in the top 10 of ethical concerns anyway).
All that aside, web scraping has been legally contentious for over a decade. This mass scraping for commercial LLM usage is honestly making a horrible argument for that already dubious factor.
>Expanding copyright in this novel way obviously is going to lead to a whole slew of problems, least among which is going to be ensuring regulatory capture by the largest of the largest simply because only they will have the money to license reading.
It's probably for the best, since at that point at least the owners of the data are getting paid (though there's other grey areas to iron out. Especially with User-generated content being sold as if the site "owns it", while being legally exempt from being sued for hosting it). the opposite effect just means the corporations win indirectly instead of directly, with less money flowing around. A company that can outspend the competition can also out spend on hardware to process faster, scrape more, and polish he final effects. There's no endgame here where the corporation loses and the indies win, short of some absolutely radical policy changes.
Plagiarism is copying without attribution. Transformative works do not qualify as plagiarism.
"Copilot has been found to regurgitate long sections of licensed code without providing credit — prompting this lawsuit that accuses the companies of violating copyright law on a massive scale."
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/8/23446821/microsoft-openai...
Copyright is about the outcome, not the destination. Short of edge cases where two contemporary inventors in different parts of the world funnel upon the same novel idea at the same-ish time, the method doesn't change how we interpret infringement.
So the fact that it's capable of doing it is enough to bring about legal suspicion.
Put another way, one group enables people to make things. The other does not.
One group is downloading things other people made, sometimes transforming them - but we certainly haven't seen an explosion of remixes at the scale of OpenAI creations. The other group, OpenAI, makes tools that ingest copyrighted material and enable people to make a huge number of more complex transformations than the original "remix" culture, where the inputs are usually quite visible.
FWIW, I don't even really think the content pirates have as terrible a name as in GP's comment. I certainly have no criticism of them, especially considering that's how I got my start in technology. It's fine, it's just not as cool or as widespread as GenAI.
yeah we have. It's just that there was no Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Tiktok/Vine/Youtube/Reddit and 20 other sites with more people on them today than there were on the internet 20 years prior. But if you browsed the Livejournals and other relics of the early 00's these aren't hard to find at a proportional mass. This drove a lot of MySpace to the point where the post-Tom era chose to try and pivot into the music service angle over a Facebook competitor. And a lot of that was possible thanks to being able to easily access rips of CD's.
Ironically enough, the main thing holding back music from being as profitable as photos was the music industry itself. They were so aggressive in shaping copyright and hoarding everything into Vevo that they lost billions as new media shaped itself. Squandering talent instead of grabbing that talent for themselves to profit from, trying to remain the trend setter instead of expand or leaning into emergent genres, surrendering that waning control to a subscription service (which consistently remains unprofitable) instead of themselves establishing a platform to profit from (from in-house talent and indies alike). So many missteps and it ends in artists no longer being able to make money from the music themselves.
>The other group, OpenAI, makes tools that ingest copyrighted material and enable people to make a huge number of more complex transformations than the original "remix" culture, where the inputs are usually quite visible.
under what metric? It's weird to talk about "remix culture" and argue that AI can transform it futher... at which point it's no longer a remix and arguably an original song. Which people already do.
Some artists are fine focusing on remixing, but remixing for others is a step towards building the talent to make their own music, and hopefully the remixes establish a brand others want to follow.
>It's fine, it's just not as cool or as widespread as GenAI.
I don't think any people starting their careers in tech in the 90's-early '10's would be here if "cool" was a preliminary for their happiness.
Funny how BigCorp gets benefit of the doubt. By the way, despite the name, OpenAI and teens are both doing it for their own gratification.
If a tool I used is suspected of containing copyright violations, it'd get sued. This happens even in software as Google v. Oracle has shown (among dozens of other cases. Maybe hundreds by now).
And lo and behold, OpenAI is getting sued on suspicion of copyright violation. "tools for other to use" isn't a defense against copyright violation, and never has been.
sure do wish we had those.