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Comment by gen3 | Hacker News Reader

100% agree, the background replace that puts the guy into a stadium would be fully usable as a cut in a movie/tv show, and the background is believable enough that no one would bat an eye. If you use it properly, I expect a quality uplift on indie films/shorts. Your limit is your creativity

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I personally expect a decrease in quality. Without limits people tend to get less creative. Sure, there is some balance here in that tools also enable new things to be done which are not possible without tools but working around limits has often inspired some of the most creative works.

I don't think that is necessarily true. Right now movies are so expensive that they can be created only by a few handfuls of people. But those people might not be the most creative people around. If thousands of people can create movies, we might find out that some people we didn't know of are far more creative.

Also "creation by committee" isn't a thing when somebody can produce a movie in their basement.

Anyway, I look forward to people using this tech to create alternative endings of existing movies.

So expensive? It has never been cheaper to create movies thanks to digital cameras and non-linear editors, digital audio workstations, etc. You are no longer encumbered by the costs of film, development, renting an edit bay, requiring an audio editing studio to mix audio and maintain a tape library of special effects or hire foley artists, no need for an optical printer to layer visual effects, etc.

You already can produce a movie in your basement, many of which can be found on YouTube.

Sure, the cost of making Clerks has dropped, but not the cost of making Dune.

You aren’t going to be making dune with this. Maybe a “we have dune at home version”…

If the results aren't cherry-picked it looks like more than good enough to make any high budget movie from the early 2010s if not Dune.

Like with all generative AI this comes down to how specific you can get, and how consistent you can be. If you can art direct each element of the frame, down to the design of the individual props and scenic items, and have those items remain consistent from shot to shot. Then do the same with lighting, actors, camera characteristics (eg lens, focus, position in the scene, framing), etc, etc, etc, then maybe you’ve got a chance of making a ‘high budget movie from the early 2010s’. But I haven’t seen any generative ai that comes even close to this level of control or consistency… They’re closer to slot machines than anything consistent…

Yup, you can notice some issues even in their picked example. e.g. the prompt for the video of the painting woman says "there is a bear cub at her feet" and it quite clearly is not "at her feet" in the video.

> Without limits people tend to get less creative

But lowering those limits allows for more people to get creative

How many beautiful stories never left their author's head because their author couldn't afford it? Either the monetary cost or the opportunity cost

Considering how many movies come from one place in one country (Hollywood), we haven't even scratched the surface of human creativity

And without being forced to interact with other people. The movie made by one creative and 100 automatons does not ai all compare to the one where there are multiple brilliant creatives butting heads and personalities and choosing never to work with each other again but the show must go on.

How many movie lines have been adlibbed but are absolute classics? Sonofabitch, he stole my line!

What a bizarre statement in an age when the phrase "executive meddling" can describe the sameness of so much content output, and most of the greatest flops have a story which goes "yeah there were too many people involved".

Like the second Avengers movie had this problem in spades.

It's not a bizarre statement at all. An executive meddling with something because X or Y element of a piece of art doesn't align with A or B market trend is not the same thing as people working together and sometimes clashing due to creative differences. You'll find that most works that you, or other people, like weren't the result of a sole individual's creative decisions going completely unchallenged. Others suggested, or revised, or fought. There can be too many cooks in the kitchen, of course, but that's an entirely different issue from executive meddling.

I'm not sure why you jump to executive involvement when I specifically stated two creatives butting heads. There's all sorts of stories where execs or someone came in and forced a movie to have, eg a giant robot spider in a wild west settint that didn't make sense but they really wanted one in some movie so they forced it to happen in one of the projects they were overseeing. but the sum of us is better than individual, so while there are solo artists out there, they're the exception rather than the rule.

The era of easily available game engines have brought to live hundreds of thousands of garbage games, but that doesn't matter. What matters are hundreds of really innovative ones that we wouldn't get otherwise.

Using AI has all kinds of new and unusual limits. It's hard to get exactly what you want and you often get unexpected results along the way.

> Your limit is your creativity

In the professional creative tools business, "Now the only limit is your creativity" has been a popular marketing tagline for decades, especially for products based on new enabling technologies. It's common enough that a wry corollary has developed in response, which goes: "Unfortunately, for a lot of people that's a pretty big limit."

> Your limit is your creativity

And how many tokens you can afford.

You’re not wrong, but the comment somewhat misses the point. A shot like that would require you to rent a stadium (generally not cheap) along with paying for a believable number of extras. That would put the shot out of budget for most indie filmmakers. Spending $20 on tokens to get “good enough” is totally worth it, and allows you to get shots that were previously out of reach.

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