The ad for Flow would be much better if they laid off the swirly and wavy effects, and focused on realism.
Soon, you should be able to put in a screenplay and a cast, and get a movie out. Then, "Google Sequels" - generates a sequel for any movie.
Soon, you should be able to put in a screenplay and a cast, and get a movie out. Then, "Google Sequels" - generates a sequel for any movie.
This "fixes" Hollywood's biggest "issues". No more highly paid actors demanding 50 million to appear in your movie, no more pretentious movie stars causing dramas and controversies, no more workers' unions or strikes, but all gains being funneled directly to shareholders. The VFX industry being turned into a gig meatgrinder was already the canary in the coal mine for this shift.
Most of the major Hollywood productions from the last 10 years have been nothing but creatively bankrupt sequels, prequels, spinoffs and remakes, all rehashed from previous IP anyway, so how much worse than this can AI do, since it's clear they're not interested in creativity anyway? Hell, it might even be an improvement than what they're making today, and at much lower cost to boot. So why wouldn't they adopt it? From the bean counter MBA perspective it makes perfect sense.
Except it bankrupts Hollywood, they are no longer needed. Of people can generate full movies at home, there is no more Hollywood.
The end game is endless ultra personalized content beamed into people's heads every free waking hour of the day. Hollywood is irrelevant in that future.
That's why I think Hollywood is rushing to adopt gen-AI, so they can churn out personalized content faster and cheaper straight to streaming, at the same rate as indie producers.
LLMs have been in the oven for years longer than this, and I'm not seeing any signs of people generating their own novels at home. Well, besides the get-rich-quick grifters spamming the Kindle store with incoherent slop in the hopes they can trick someone into parting with a dollar before they realize they've been had.
Most humans are also not good at writing great scripts/novels either. Just look at the movies that bring in billions of dollars at the box office. Do you think you need a famous novelist to write you a Fast & Furious 11 script?
Sure, there are still great writers that can make scripts that tickle the mind, but that's not what the studios want anymore. They want to push VFX heavy rehashed slop that's cheap to make, easy to digest for the doom-scrolling masses of consumers, and rakes in a lot of money.
You're talking about what makes gourmet Michelin star food but the industry is making money selling McDonals.
The good "creators" are already making bank, helped by app algorithms matching people up to content they'll find addictive to view.
The content doesn't have to be good it just has to be addictive for 80% of the population.
Whatever gets the views.
Then the first fully non-human (but human-like) actors will be created and gain popularity. The IP of those characters will be more valuable than the humans they replaced. They will be derided by old people as "Mickey Mouse" AI actors. The SAG will be beside themselves. Younger people will not care. The characters will never get old (or they will be perfectly rendered when they need to be old).
The off-screen dramas and controversies are part of the entertainment, and these will be manufactured too. (If there will even be an off-screen...)
This is the future, and we've been preparing for it for years by presenting the most fake versions of ourselves on social media. Viewers have zero expectation of authenticity, so biological status is just one more detail.
It will be perfect, and it will be awful. Kids born five years from now will never know anything different.
Very few actors have an appearance or a voice worth a lot in licenses. That's like the top 1% of actors, if that.
I think if done right, humans could also end up getting emotionally attached to 100% AI generated characters, not just famous celebrities.
So the appearance licenses for these 1% are valuable in Stage 1 of the takeover.
The rest are just forgotten collateral damage. Hollywood is full of 'em.
All this is in line with my prediction for the first entirely AI generated film (with Sora or other AI video tools) to win an Oscar being less than 5 years away.
And we're only 5 months in.
I bet they will soon add rules that AI movies can't even compete on it.
We are about six years into transformer models. By now we can get transformers to write coherent short stories, and you can get to novel lengths with very careful iterative prompting (e.g. let the AI generate an outline, then chapter summaries, consistency notes, world building, then generate the chapters). But to get anything approaching a good story you still need a lot of manual intervention at all steps of the process. LLMs go off the rail, get pacing completely wrong and demonstrate gaping holes in their understanding of the real world. Progress on new models is mostly focused in other directions, with better storytelling a byproduct. I doubt we get to "best screenplay" level of writing in five years.
Best Actor/Actress/Director/etc are obviously out for an AI production since those roles simply do not exist.
Similar with Best Visual Effects, I doubt AI generated films qualify.
That leaves us with categories that rate the whole movie (Best Picture, Best International Feature Film etc), sound-related categories (Best Original Score, Original Song, Sound) and maybe Best Cinematography. I doubt the first category is in reach. Video Generation will be good enough in five years. But editing? Screenwriting? Sound Design?
My bet would be on the first AI-related Oscar to be for an AI generated original score or original song, and that no other AI wins Oscars within five years.
Unless we go by a much wider definition of "entirely AI generated" that would allow significant human intervention and supervision. But the more humans are involved the less it has any claim to being "entirely AI". Most AI-generated trailers or the Balenciaga-Potter-style videos still require a lot of human work
I have done quite a bit with AI generated audio/sound/music.
At some point in the process, the end result feels like your own and the models were used to create material for the end work.
At some point, using AI in the creative process will be such a given that it is left unsaid.
I would assume the screen play next year that wins the Oscar will have been helped with the aid of a language model. I can't imagine a writer not using a language model to riff on ideas. The delusional idea here is the prompt "write an Oscar winning screenplay" and that somehow that is all there is going to the creative process.
You're assuming Oscar voting is primarily driven by film quality but this hasn't been true for a long time (if it ever was). Many academy voters are biased by whatever cultural and political trends are currently ascendant among the narrow subset of Hollywood creatives who belong to the academy (the vast majority of people listed in movie credits will never be academy voters). Due to the widespread impact of Oscar wins in major categories, voters heavily weight meta-factors like "what should the Hollywood community be seen as endorsing?"
No issue in recent memory has been as overwhelmingly central as AI replacing creatives among the Hollywood community. The entire industry is still recovering from the unprecedented strikes which shut down the industry and one of the main issues was the use of AI. The perception of AI use will remain cultural/political poison among the rarified community of academy voters for at least a decade. Of course, studios are businesses and will hire vendors who use AI to cut costs but those vendors will be smart enough to downplay that fact because it's all about perception - not reality. For the next decade "AI" will be to Academy-centric Hollywood what "child labor" is to shoe manufacturing. The most important thing is not that it doesn't happen, it's ensuring there's no clear proof it's happening - especially on any movie designed to be 'major category Oscar-worthy' (such films are specifically designed to check the requisite boxes for consideration from their inception). predict that in the near-term AI in the Oscars will be limited to, at most, a few categories awarded in the separate Technical Oscars (which aren't broadcast on TV or covered by the mainstream media).