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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I work in the media space. AI is absolutely ripping through film, TV, and advertising.

Several medium sized studios I've talked with are bidding $50k for projects (eg. Netflix, HBO, Proctor & Gamble are typical clients) they used to bid $400k on, and they're winning more contracts. They don't need to shoot in person in Venice for pharma ads or animate elaborate TV show intros anymore.

This is having a huge impact to the fundamentals of how they do business. They haven't laid anyone off yet, but they're talking about the ramifications if this gets cheaper.

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Have these studios actually shipped any of their projects to their customers yet? Do we have feedback from a quality perspective?

It's quite easy to promise dirt cheap services and get paperwork signed.

Yes. You wouldn't recognize them as AI.

These studios are doing a lot of roto and comp work. It's highly touched up and edited.

> Do we have feedback from a quality perspective?

... Have you watched YouTube (without attempting first-party ad blocking) recently? The ads created with AI are pretty obvious, and pretty bad.

Many people think all plastic surgery looks bad because, by definition, you don't notice the good examples.

Even if every ad on YouTube were AI-generated now, there would be enough bad examples for me to be negative on the entire idea.

You're not the customer.

Also, if the viewer doesn't recognize or care, then it's a moot point.

There is tons of bad CGI, but that hasn't stopped its near universal adoption.

Lol CGI makes up a tiny portion purely because economically it makes sense.

My local news has started using AI bullshit they would've used B roll for in the past. And it's obvious. And it's very jarring.

What component of the production process is the AI being used for? Is AI video now good enough for green screen backgrounds or something like that?

It's very powerful for various parts of VFX workflows. It's not gonna just be a full prompted shot, but more a means of creating and manipulating smaller elements in a shot with much less manual labor than before.

I can't speak for the industry side but as a consumer, I've noticed many cable TV ads in hotel rooms now are clearly using AI generated video. It looks like shit.

This is going to be the "bad chromakey" of this particular time period in terms of weirdly prolific visuals in media. Or if you prefer, the ads you used to see on late-night TV that were clearly broadcast from a poor quality VHS.

Cheap bullshit has always hung around our media apparatus, and it's just that: cheap bullshit. Tbh I just note it in the same way I've always done: well, that's a company I'm going to avoid doing business with if at all possible.

Now you mention it, I can see there's a lot of demand for very cheap video ads on YouTube and such and I can see those kind of productions using AI slop and not really caring. I was just surprised by the calibre of client the poster above mentioned, such as HBO and Netflix and such. That sounded more like AI video making an impact in higher class professional work.

I mean I'm sure they would LIKE to use AI. What sane company wouldn't explore the possibility? That said I think any serious creative team is going to run into headaches with it really, really quickly and give up on it.

They do. I watched a person quit because they had to hand edit video frames that came out of AI. It would have been cheaper to do traditional VFX.

I believe you, but what I don't understand is why aren't these companies producing custom models tailored to their in-house needs? You'd think that Hollywood would have the most advanced image and video generation models, after all the studios have high quality training data and more importantly, they have the IP rights to that data.

Meanwhile back in reality it's Google that is massively ahead of literally everyone.

What are they doing with AI instead of eg. shooting in person in Venice?

>Several medium sized studios […] don't need to animate elaborate TV show intros anymore.

What projects are these studios doing for HBO? Its shows generally have high enough production value that AI slop in intros would be a no-no (unless this has dramatically changed under Zaslav's leadership).

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