Are we only a few years away from one person/small group made movies where the dialog, acting, location and special effects can be tweaked endlessly for a relatively low cost. If I was a studio exec I'd be worried.
Not that cyber-bullying and usurpation schemes escalating a whole new level being less of a concern in the aftermaths, to be clear.
Most people will not notice if the soundtrack to a new TV show is made by a 5 word AI prompt of "exciting build-up suspense scene music" while they're playing pouring money into their mobile gacha game to get the "cute girl, anime, {color} {outfit}" prompt picture that is SSS rank.
You or I might not care for AI slop, but it's a lot cheaper to produce for Netflix or Zinga or Spotify or whatever, and if they go this route, they don't have to pay for writers, actors, illustrators, songwriters, or licensing for someone else's product. They'll just put their own AI content on autoplay after what you're currently watching, and hope most people don't care enough to stop it and choose something else.
I don't think you get "The Green Mile" from something like this.
Local art, local actors, local animations telling stories about local culture. A netflix for every city, even neighborhoods. That's going to be crazy fun.
There is so much that has to be conveyed in making a film, if you want it to say something particular.
And? What's the problem with that? You seem to be locked in a "prompt to get a movie" mindset.
...yet
The limitations of reality seem to have a positive effect on the overall process of film making, for whatever reason. I expect generative AI film will be at least as bad. Gonna be hard to get an entire well-crafted film out of them.
The same AI can still raise the minimum bar for quality. Or replace YouTubers and similar while they're still learning how to be good in the first place.
No idea where we are in this whole process yet, but it's a continuum not a boolean.
Pinnacle is not the word I'd use. Race to the bottom, least possible effort, plausibly deniable quality, gross exploitation, capitalist bottom line - those are all things I'd use to describe current "art" awards like Grammy, Oscars, Cannes, etc.
The media industry is run by exploiting artists for licensing rights. The middle men and publishers add absolutely nothing to the mix. Google or Spotify or platforms arguably add value by surfacing, searching, categorizing, and so on, but not anywhere near the level of revenue capture they rationalize as their due.
When anyone and everyone can produce a film series or set of stories or song or artistic image that matches their inner artistic vision, and they're given the tools to do so without restriction or being beholden to anyone, then we're going to see high quality art and media that couldn't possibly be made in the grotesquely commercial environment we have now. These tools are as raw and rough and bad performing as they ever will be, and are only going to get better.
Shared universes of prompts and storylines and media styles and things that bring generative art and storytelling together to allow coherent social sharing and interactive media will be a thing. Kids in 10 years will be able to click and create their own cartoons and stories. Parents will be able to engage by establishing cultural parameters and maybe sneak in educational, ethical, and moral content designed around what they think is important. Artists are going to be able to produce every form of digital media and tune and tweak their vision using sophisticated tools and processes, and they're not going to be limited by budgets, politics, studio constraints, State Department limitations, wink/nod geopolitical agreements with nation states, and so on.
Art's going to get weird, and censorship will be nigh on impossible. People will create a lot of garbage, a lot of spam, low effort gifs and video memes, but more artists will be empowered than ever before, and I'm here for it.
Any accolades, be that professional groups, people's awards, rotten tomatoes or IMDB ratings.
> Race to the bottom, least possible effort, plausibly deniable quality, gross exploitation, capitalist bottom line - those are all things I'd use to describe current "art" awards like Grammy, Oscars, Cannes, etc.
I find them ridiculous in many ways, but no, one thing they're definitely not is a race to the bottom.
If you want to see what a race to the bottom looks like, The Room has a reputation for being generally terrible, "bad movie nights" are a thing, and Mystery Science Theater 3000's schtick is to poke fun at bad movies.
> The media industry is run by exploiting artists for licensing rights.
Yes
> The middle men and publishers add absolutely nothing to the mix. Google or Spotify or platforms arguably add value by surfacing, searching, categorizing, and so on, but not anywhere near the level of revenue capture they rationalize as their due.
I disagree. I think that every tech since a medium became subject to mass reproduction (different for video and audio, as early films were famously silent) has pushed things from a position close to egalitarianism towards a winner-takes-all. This includes Google: already-popular things become more popular, because Google knows you're more likely to engage with the more popular thing than the less popular thing. This dynamic also means that while anyone will be free to make their own personal vision (although most of us will have all the artistic talent of an inexperienced Tommy Wiseau), almost everyone will still only watch a handful of them.
> Art's going to get weird, and censorship will be nigh on impossible.
Bad news there, I'm afraid. AI you can run on your personal device, is quite capable of being used by the state to drive censorship at the level of your screen or your headphones.
Nearly all the movies that go to theaters aren't "meaningful art". Not only that but what's meaningful to you isn't necessarily what's meaningful to others.
If someone can get their own personal "Godzilla VS The Iron Giant" crossover made into a feature-length film it will be meaningful to them.
No but what they are is expensive, flashy, impressive productions which is the only reason people are comfortable paying upwards of $25 each to see them. And there's no way in the world that an AI movie is going to come anywhere close to the production quality of Godzilla vs Kong.
And like, yeah, their example videos at the posted link are impressive. How many attempts did those take? Are they going to be able to maintain continuity of a character's appearance from one shot to the next to form a coherent visual structure? How long can these shots be before the AI starts tripping over itself and forgetting how arms work?
We will be the old ones going "back in my day, you had to actually shoot movies on a camera! And background objects had perfect continuity!" And they will roll their eyes at us and retort that nobody pays attention to background objects anyway.
But I have faith that people will notice the difference. The current generation may not care about autotune, but that doesn't mean another generation won't. People rediscover differences and decide what matters to them.
When superhero movies were new, almost everyone loved them. I was entranced. After being saturated with them... the audience dropped off. We started being dissatisfied with witty one-liners and meaningless action. Can you still sell a super-hero movie? Sure. Like all action movies, they internationalize well. But the domestic audiences are declining. It makes me think of Westerns. At one time, they were a hollywood staple. Now, not so much. Yes, they still make them, and a good one will do fine, but a mediocre one... maybe not.
The previous generation's care about autotune was also flatly wrong. Autotune was used by a few prominent artists then and is more widely used now as an aesthetic choice, for the sound it creates which is distinctly not natural singing, as the effect was performed by running the autotune plugin at a much, much higher setting than was expected in regular use.
Tone correction occurs in basically every song production now, and you never hear it. Hell, newer tech can perform tone correction on the fly for live performances, and the actual singing being done on the stage can be swapped out on the fly with pre-recorded singing to let the performer rest, or even just lipsync the entire thing but still allow the performer to jump in when they want to and ad-lib or tweak delivery of certain parts of songs.
The autotune controversey was just wrong from end to end. When audio engineers don't want you to hear them correcting vocals, you don't hear it. I'd be willing to buy another engineer being able to hear tone correction in music, but if a layman says they do, sorry but I assume that person's full of shit.
And maybe they won't have a problem with it, like you say, maybe that'll just be their "normal" but that seems so fucking sad to me.
For newer in-copyright works, public libraries commonly offer Libby:
https://company.overdrive.com/2023/01/25/public-libraries-le...
It gives anyone with a participating-system library card free electronic access to books and magazines. And it's unlikely that librarians themselves will be adding AI book-slop to the title selection.
To be clear, I'm not talking great literature. I'm talking Clifford the Big Red Dog type stuff.
That said I still have a number of problems with this assertion:
It will absolutely be down, in part, to economic necessity. Amazon's platform is already dealing with a glut of shitty AI books and the key way they get ahead in rankings is being cheaper than human-created alternatives, and they can be cheaper because having an AI slop something out is way less expensive and time consuming than someone writing/illustrating a kid's book.
Moreover, our economy runs on the notion that the easier something is to do, the more likely people are to do it at scale, and vetting your kids media is hard and annoying as a parent at the best of times: if you come home from working your second job and are ready to collapse, are you going to prepare a nutritious meal for your child and set them up with insightful, interesting media? No you're going to heat up chicken nuggets and put them in front of the iPad. That's not good, but like, what do you expect poor parents to do here? Invent more time in the day so they can better raise their child while they're in the societal fuckbarrel?
And yes, before it goes into that direction, yes this is all down to the choices of these parents, both to have children they don't really have the resources to raise (though recent changes to US law complicates that choice but that's a whole other can of worms) and them not taking the time to do it and all the rest, yes, all of these parents could and arguably should be making better choices. But ALSO, I do not see how it is a positive for our society to let people be fucked over like this constantly. What do we GAIN from this? As far as I can tell, the only people who gain anything from the exhausted-lower-classes-industrial-complex are the same rich assholes who gain from everything else being terrible, and I dunno, maybe they could just take one for the team? Maybe we build a society focused on helping people instead of giving the rich yet another leg up they don't need?
This is what I mean by "complicated factors of culture and habit." An iPad costs more than an assortment of paper books. Frozen chicken nuggets cost more than basic ingredients. But the iPad and nuggets are faster and more convenient. The kids-get-iPad-and-nuggets habit is popular with middle-income American families too, not just poor families where parents work two jobs. The economic explanation is too reductive.
I'm not trying to say that this is the "fault" of parents or of anyone in particular. When the iPad came out I doubt that Apple engineers or executives thought "now parents can spend less time engaging with children" or that parents thought of it as "a way to keep the kids quiet while I browse Pinterest" but here we are.
Is it too much to ask for a hint of caution with regard to our most vulnerable populations brains?
Circa 2020 a huge number of fed-up good-intentioned engineers and designers quit. It had no effect, at all.
To be clear: I am not saying that engineers need to be better at preventing this stuff. I am saying regulators need to demand that companies be careful, and study how this stuff is going to affect people, not just yeet it into the culture and see what happens.
There is a vast difference between a formulaic hollywood movie and some guy with a camera. If I say "Godzilla vs. The Iron Giant" what is the plot? Who is the good guy? Why does the conflict take place?
AI will come up with something. Will it be compelling even to the audience of one?
As a toy, maybe. As an artistic experience... not convinced.
You still aren't getting it. Movie directors aren't making these decisions either.
What they are doing, is listening to market focus groups and checking off boxes based on the data from that.
A market focus group driven decisions for a movie is just as much, if not more so, of an "algorithm" than when a literal computer makes the decision.
Thats not art. Its the same as if a human manually did an algorithm by hand and used that to make a movie.
If it were really all just market decisions, directors would have no influence. This is not remotely the case. Nor are they paid as though that were true.
Yes I agree that it is not remotely the case that AI videos involve zero creative input.
Thats my point. If anything, there could be a lot more creative input into AI videos, than a bog standard hollywood film.
> Some of it is done that way, but by no means all of it
Oh? So just like how that is the case some of the time for AI videos, but by no means for all of it? Yes, thats my point.
I assure you, they don't do surveys on the punchiness and strategy used by foley artists; the slope and toe of the film stock chosen for cut scenes by the DP or that those cut scenes should be shot like cut scenes instead of dream sequences; the kind of cars they use; how energetic the explosions are; clothing selection and how the costumes change situationally or throughout the film; indescribably nuanced changes in the actor's delivery; what fonts go on the signs; which props they use in all of the sets and the strategies they use to weather things; what specific locations they shoot at within an area and which direction they point the camera, how the grading might change the mood and imply thematic connections, subtle symbolism used, the specifics of camera movements, focus, and depth of field, and then there's the deeeep world of lighting... All of those things and a million others are contributions from individual artists contributing their own art in one big collaborative project.
Well no. Instead, I am implying that they are as much of a "technician" so someone who is putting in a huge amount of effort into making AI videos.
If you want to say that it is perfectly possible for someone to put a high amount of vision and make a large amount of creative decisions into AI videos, then I agree.
> All of those things and a million others are contributions
Yes I agree that there can be a million other contributions to making AI videos. Glad you agree too.
Its just that other people need to admit that yes it is possible for AI to include a lot of creative decisions.
You, being someone who claimed to care about that should be willing to admit that it is possible to do this.
I agree completely that creative input, such as the creative input that people can put into AI if they choose to do so, is important.
And just like how in other forms of media, yes sometimes people don't put in that creative input. But its still possible if you put in the effort.
And since you didn't address this at all, I can only assume that you agree with me completely.
I use prompt-based generative AI in creative ways as part of my professional processes all the time. And you know what? They are nowhere close to being useful for generating anything that plays a significant on-screen role in high-end media creation. Anybody who says they are does not know how different the requirements for high-end use cases are.
You're using me as a proxy to toe the line of a ridiculous ideological polemic that I have nothing to do with. If you want to argue with someone that has the uniform, standard-issue set of anti-AI opinions you expect to encounter so you don't have to consider your arguments too much, there's like thousands of them right over on reddit. Easy.
"Its just that other people need to admit that yes it is possible for AI to include a lot of creative decisions."
You response is actually, "yes, I agree with you. You are correct"
It sounds like you simply agree with me.
> You still aren't getting it. Movie directors aren't making these decisions either.
> What they are doing, is listening to market focus groups and checking off boxes based on the data from that.
> A market focus group driven decisions for a movie is just as much, if not more so, of an "algorithm" than when a literal computer makes the decision.
> Thats not art. Its the same as if a human manually did an algorithm by hand and used that to make a movie.
I responded as a professional in the field pointing out how ridiculous that take is, and then everything else that you said is putting words in my mouth based on opinions you assumed I had, but do not. I'm not arguing a "side" here-- I'm pointing out that something you said about practices in my field is entirely baseless. I have too much of a professional stake in this to pick a "side" because I actually have to deliver great work to spec, on time, and can't be bothered to field a whole bunch of people either with dunning-kruger confidence in their understanding technology or dunning-kruger confidence in understanding art having the nerve to be condescending while making entirely baseless, glib comments about what I do for a living, and acting like the righteousness of their cause makes it ok to be full of shit. If you want to be able to argue a "side" where you're just vaguely responsible for your grand idea and it doesn't really matter if you're full of it because nobody else there knows what they're talking about, either, then reddit is a tiny little ascii string down the street.
Hey well you said this. This is agreeing with what my point is, and I am glad we were able to clear up any possible misunderstandings, or I convinced you or similar.
As far as I am concerned you don't have any disagreements with my central point, which is good enough for me.
I am glad we cleared up the main miscommunication.
You're imagining "pls write film" but the case of being able to film something and then adjust and tweak it, easily change backdrops etc could lead to much higher polish on creations from smaller producers.
Would the green mile be any less hard hitting if the lights flickering were caused by an AI alteration to a scene? If the mouse was created purely by a machine?
The printing press led to publishing works being reachable by more people so we got tons of garbage but we also got those few individual geniuses that previously wouldn't have been able to get their works out.
I see similarities in indie video/PC games recently too. Once the tech got to the point that an individual or small group could create a game, we got tons of absolute garbage but also games like Cave Story and Stardew Valley (both single creators IIRC).
Anything that pushes the bar down on the money and effort needed to make something will result in way more of it being made. It also hopefully makes it possible for those rare geniuses to give us their output without the dilution of having to go through bigger groups first.
I'm also excited from the perspective that this decouples skills in the creative process. There have to be people out there with tremendous story telling and movie making skills who don't have the resources/connections to produce what they're capable of.
To do something similar, this has to allow the director (or whomever is prompting the AI) to control all meaningful choices so that they get more or less the movie the intend. That seems far away from what is demonstrated.
So now a director with a limited budget but with a good vision and understanding of the tools available has a better chance to realize their vision. There will be tons of crap put out by this tool as well. But I think/hope that at least one person uses it well.
But because it will make shooting a movie more accessible to people with limited budgets, the movie studios, who literally gatekeep access to their sets and moviemaking equipment, are going to have a smaller moat. The distribution channels will still need to select good films to show in theaters, TV, and streaming, but the industry will probably be changing in a few years if this development keeps pace.
I'm not against tools for directors, but the thing is, directors tell actors things and get results. Directors hire cinematographers and work with them to get the shots they want. Etc. How does that happen here?
Also, as someone else mentioned, there is the general problem that heavily CG movies tend to look... fake and uncompelling. The real world is somehow just realer than CG. So that also has to be factored into this.
It will start out with more believable green screen backgrounds and b roll. Used judiciously, it will improve immersion and cost <$10 instead of thousands. The actors and normal shots will still be the focus, but the elements that make things more believable will be cheaper to add.
Have you ever noticed that explosions look good? Even in hobby films? At some point it became easy to add a surprisingly good looking explosion in post. The same thing will happen here, but for an increasing amount of stuff.
Which doesn't mean it won't keep happening (economics), but it doesn't necessarily mean any improvement in movie quality.
https://www.vulture.com/article/movies-fire-computer-generat...
But maybe you do get Deadpool & Wolverine 3
Guess where the money is?
But, in reality, even making that kind of film is miles away from these examples.
Well, given the studios still hold the copyright, they can severely constrain supply to keep profits up.
My suspicion is that this kind of stuff gradually reduces some of the labor involved in making films and allows studios to continue padding their margins.
It's a powerful tool. A painting isn't better because the artist made their own paint. A movie made with IRL camera may not be better than one made with an AI camera.
However, I see an interesting middle ground appear: a talented writer could utilize the AI tooling to produce a movie based upon their own works without having to involve Hollywood, both giving more writers a chance to put their works in front of an audience as well as ensuring what's produced more closely matches their material (for better or worse).
The algorithms and people making content for the algorithm were trends that have dominated for years already.
None of that is "real" art, when you are just making something optimized for an algorithm.
Similarily, a film director "just" gives guidance to a bunch of people: actors, camera operator, etc. Do you consider the movie is his creation, even if he didn't directly perform any action? A photographer just has to push a button and the camera captures an image. Is the output still considered his creation? Yes and Yes, so I think we should consider the same with AI assisted art forms. Maybe the real topic is the level of depth and sophistication in the art (just like the difference between your iPhone pictures and a professional photographer's) but in my opinion this is orthogonal to it being human or AI generated.
To be honest so far we have mostly seen AI video demos which were indeed quite uninteresting and shallow, but now filmmakers are busy learning how to harness these tools, so my prediction is that in no time you will see high quality and captivating AI generated films.
(1) https://artefact-ai-film-festival.com/golden-hours-66f869b36... Please consider liking it!
Excellent work!
If yall needed evidence of these tools giving everyday people the ability to make emotion-tugging creations, I'll send you a picture of the tears!
Now I'm thinking I can finally make the (IMO) dope music videos that come to me sometimes when I'm listening to a song I really love.
[1] The first minutes of UP
I liked it.
What happened to the mom? Why does the kid get older and younger looking? why does the city flicker in the beginning? which kid is his in the ballet performance? why do they randomly have "lazy eye"? i could keep going but i think we all get my point.
I can intuit the tropes used by the AI to convey meaning, and i'd be willing to list them all with relevant links for the paltry sum of $50. Be warned, it will be a very large list. Tropes and "memes" are doing 100% of the heavy lifting of this "art".
Sorry, human. As someone who stopped creating art on a daily basis due to market dilution (read: it's too hard to build a fanbase that i care about), i am very critical of most "art" produced anyhow.
this is dogshit.
Ever notice how they never show anyone moving quickly in these clips?
Counterpoint: home "studio" recording has been feasible for decades, but music execs are not ruffled. Sure, you get a Billie Eilish debut album once a generation, but the other 99.99% of charting music is from the old guard. The media/entertainment machine is so much bigger than just creating raw material.