Film studios only existed because (1) distribution used to be hard and (2) films were financially and logistically difficult to make. Netflix and YouTube slayed the first challenge, and now GenAI will fell the latter and give indie directors the same kind of platform that indie game and indie music folks currently have: true one person studios.
I came across the following recently. I think a casual viewer would assume it was just Bakshi-style rotoscoped animation without a major AI component.
Very much no throughline of concepts from one shot to the next. You never see the same character twice. No foreground dynamic action.. not even simple walking except one far-away character directly away from the camera which means that their silhouette hardly changed.
This all comes from the current generation of video diffusion models that basically just generate an image like they always have except with a hint of temporal coherence they expand that into a short shot with no types of movement except those seen a million times in their training set.
Getting gen models to be able to reason better about motion and to build mental world models of the 3d scene they are managing a 2d window into is going to be a big challenge, and require some additional breakthroughs on a par with the original GPT and stable diffusion breakthroughs that currently act as a foundation to a majority of modern AI innovation.
You say this like Stable Diffusion isn't a 2022 technology. And not early 2022, but quite late (August). ChatGPT is younger.
I mean sure we need more breakthroughs, but we've barely even seen a new hardware generation since those things came out and the researchers are really only getting started with the new capabilities of generative tech. If we don't get more breakthroughs in short order then that would be a stunning halt of progress, a breaking stop the likes of which we have almost never before seen. More breakthroughs are a given.
If I were to watch 90+ minutes of that with dubbed voices on top of it, absolutely. There's practically zero cohesion between any of those shots. No real action, no real narrative. It's a collection of non-cohesive stills that were stretched, not any bit of a story at all.
AI is pretty clearly advancing orders of magnitude faster than CGI has. Just because it sucks now doesn't mean it's going to suck in another 5 years.
We will see. Some flaws might be baked in, like LLM's halucinating. That won't go away, unless we invent a new tech. So here with generating videos, will morphing objects for example ever go away? I am sceptical with the current approach.
I know the work I'm doing is valuable and that this field is the future. I'm sure it'll click for more folks soon.
A series that is a variant of the stories of “The Wire”, but taking place in the Harry Potter universe? Coming right up.
Obscure prog rock band from the 90s put out one album? Now its two.
I can understand people their apprehension, feeling like art is losing something essential without the human touch behind it, but I saw an article a few days ago where people thought generated Shakespeare was better than actual Shakespeare. Until it was revealed which was generated.
If AI can generate me another, better Illmatic, I’m all here for it.
'Ah ha! LLMs are better than Shakespeare!' is a meaningless statement.
Besides, no one reads Shakespeare for pleasure; there is no need to generate more. ;)
> Besides, no one reads Shakespeare for pleasure
Exactly (kind of). Lots of rewarding works take effort to learn to appreciate, for a bunch of reasons that may include (as in Shakespeare's case) that they're old and their context and vernacular is not ours. Lots of people (I'd say a large majority, in my experience) dismiss entire genres and forms of art that they weren't heavily exposed to as children, often going so far as to judge them bad, simply because it would take some time and effort to learn how to enjoy them and to be able to discern what's good or remarkable about a given work.
What proportion of the population has ever in their lives enjoyed the experience of reading a Shakespeare play? Even once? It's gotta be tiny. Of course you can get them to choose AI junk over Shakespeare, it's not a kind of thing they understood or enjoyed to begin with, in most cases.
Maybe because not everyone shares your opinion? Having an LLM generate art isn't necessarily a net benefit for society. Computers were supposed to improve our lives but instead of robots to perform dangerous menial work it's taking the creativity out of humanity.
Hey guys you no longer have to do fun things, tech bros have that covered. Now get back down the mine.
eg somebody uses it to illustrate an article there will always be somebody who complains.
So anything that enough people see will generate at least one complaint.
The creativity has already gone sideways for most of this. I can with a few simple sentences create an acceptable picture (in some cases a short film). With a AI pipeline I can make some pretty cool scenes. Instead of having to know how to properly draw an s curve with a nice gradient bit of layered colors over it and 14 meticulously created layers. I tell the program to do it for me. It does an acceptable job in a fraction of the time. People can complain all they want but the rest of us are already using these tools and will continue to do so until something better comes along.
Maybe it'll get to the point where it's good enough to have on as background television - not everything needs to be great, after all - but what's the point of that? We already have far more high-quality television shows and movies than most people can ever watch.
It's also funny to see AI turn people who normally dislike copyright into die-hard copyright lovers.
My wife and I both work in the field, I on the tech side, her on the creative side, and she's been in it since the earliest days of industry trying to adapt these tools. There's a lot (like, holy shit, so much) of effort and money going into it, but so far it's only marginally helpful for non-evil jobs.
It would be nice if you didn't assume that anybody who doesn't share your opinion is mindlessly regurgitating slop.
It’s also a matter of fact that we have the copyright we have that’s prohibitive to people and favors corporations. It’s upsetting to see how a bunch of Silicon Valley companies stomps right across those lines with impunity, while people like Aaron Swartz are persecuted and threatened with decade long prison sentences for crimes that in my mind ought to be much less upsetting.
If copyright was fair, training of AI intended for non-personal use ought to be a sufficient commercial activity to require a license. That would stiffle the development of AI, which is what I’d argue happens to human creators under our current system.
If we had a 25 year copyright, we could easily make useful AI trained on the sum of human creation until 1999, _and_ have badass human made remixes of 80s and 90s songs — we wouldn’t have to do legal gymnastics to allow the development of useful AI, as it’d have access to quite substantial training material from the 1900s, and unlock relatively modern training material year-by-year.
So yes, I dislike AI for infringing on copyright and I dislike copyright (in its current state).
Those make up an infinitesimally small portion of the total output, which is largely a deluge of crap, certainly. But, generally, rarity makes something more valuable and beautiful by comparison.
What about Shakespeare.
What about the Brothers Grimm. Should Disnay have to pay for those fairy tales?
In the end every creative work stands on the shoulders of giants. We should reward creators for contributing to our culture but this notion that they should be able to own their creations way past when they become popular is absurd.
It can take a long time for certain works to find their wings or true market potential, especially books and music.
Some examples of music: "Take On Me", "Running Up That Hill", "Bohemian Rhapsody", or even bands, like Neutral Milk Hotel
It was far more popular in the recent revival!
yes and it's possible someone could have done it even better, had they not been required to convince investors to purchase copyright. GoT was a masterpiece, don't get me wrong, but it's a fallacy to think it couldn't have been better, or that other book adaptations could have been as good or better, without copyright being in the way.
It's a minor issue in the grand scheme, but my pet peeve is with "synch licenses" (not sure if that's even the right term), but where sitcoms can't go to home video because of stupid disputes about shitty songs that happened to be included. Did anyone watch "Married With Children" because of Frank Sinatra's song "Love and Marriage" in the intro? It's a catchy song, and I'm sure it lured people in who might have otherwise changed the channel, so yes it has value. But it should only be a tiny fraction of the royalties for a full performance of the song. doubly so for home video releases. Would anyone buy even 1 season of MWC just to hear the Sinatra song? I say no. And therefore should not be required to pay any royalties.
I am watching "Murphy Brown" reruns from pirateflix because apparently it never went to home video because of license disputes about the 60's soul songs in the intro. They add character to the show, for sure. But they're not why I watch the show. I watch it for the story and the acting. In this case, actors (who worked extremely hard over 10 seasons of that show!) are being wrongfully deprived of royalties because record execs can't be reasonable about how much 10 seconds of a 60 -year-old song is worth.
If someone writes a book, copyright will begin when they publish the book and the 10-15 years copyright expiration would only be applicable for paper book medium. After the copyright for the paper book medium expires, anybody can republish it. But, only the original copyright owner can "recreate" the work again in another medium - like Games, TV/ Films, Virtual reality etc. Even if that happens after the expiration of copyright on the first medium it originally appeared on.
With the Game of Thrones example, with short copyrights, Martin would lose the copyright on the books (the first original medium it was published on) in 10-15 years. But he would retain the copyright on his work for other medium. So if 20 years down the lane, HBO wanted to recreate his work for TV, they would still have to get his permissions to do so. Once Martin's gives HBO the rights to his work for TV, HBO would own it only for the 10-15 years, and after that, anybody could use it freely too, but only for paper book and TV medium. This means if Meta or Apple want to recreate Game of Thrones as a virtual reality show, they would again have to approach Martin to get his permission. If they do, then they own the copyright to his work, on virtual reality medium, till it expires in 10-15 years.
In this kind of system, the original author would continue to retain the future rights for any new future medium of delivery too.