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Comment by SunlightEdge | Hacker News Reader

Just think how many more interesting movies there could be, if the costs to produce them were drastically reduced. There are pros and cons with AI actors

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While this looks good on the surface. The stress and justifications a Director/artists makes to create a movie acts as an effective filter for quality work. Only with a lot of effort from a lot of people is that possible.

Without that effort and filters, We're going to have a deluge of poorly inspired, sloppy content.

My brain just switches off if I realize something is AI generated. be it blogs, videos or audio.

Theres already plenty of good actor making minimum wage serving coffees in LA while waiting for their breakthrough. Somehow, they are not hired, so I doubt that actor wages is the real issue at hand.

I have no doubt there would be more movies. But more interesting? I seriously doubt it, outside of a rounding-error percentage.

That’s a silly framing. Without actual human actors? Considerably fewer. Something around zero I’d say.

And who's going to be able to afford to see them, when all the jobs are gone?

You think a human audience won't be able to clock an AI actor in an instant? A huge chunk of our sensorium is devoted to finding the slightest thing "off" about human interaction. AI actors will mess with our suspension of disbelief in ways even cartoon actors can't touch.

I don't need more movies. I want higher quality movies. And I don't think AI will work out any better for movies than it does for youtube documentaries. It's getting tiresome to find anything worth watching among all the slop.

This is like saying it's a bad thing that phone cameras are getting so good because expensive cameras were keeping out the garbage films.

Expensive cameras are still better. And yet, it's good that people who were never going to be able to afford those cameras have something else they can use to tell their story.

But more isn't necessarily better; if producing movies costs nothing, then watching it is worth nothing.

I can fire up chatgpt and have it write a thousand stories. Would you read it?

AI is good for generating content, but that doesn't make it valuable content. And we had low value slop before AI, just thinking of e.g. buzzfeed back when.

Anyway, go browse Youtube, plenty of interesting content that doesn't get enough views as it is.

It really depends how you view the actor’s role. Are they a human prop executing the director’s vision or a co-collaborator? I think AI will struggle to be the latter.

counter point, think of how much more interesting movies would be if there were only like 3 a year and the rest of your time you were waiting for one

i call this model: everything before 1990

i'm not appealing to tradition, i'm just saying what if our focus is the source of enjoyment... what if 1000 things to pick for dinner is exhausting but 1 that you think about all day always ends up good

To be pedantic, before 1990 there were nearly 5000 movies released: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/v1fsld/oc_... (based on IMDB's dataset).

For a better comparison, you could look at China which only allows for a few dozen foreign films per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_censorship_in_China#Quota...); which films depends on whether the publisher thinks it'll be successful there, whether it passes China's censors, and whether China was involved in its production. It's a different audience though, for example the Warcraft film bombed in the west but was hugely popular in China, possibly because of the relative scarcity of western films there?

Can't you still replicate the experience by only watching the top n blockbuster of the year? Spoiler: it'll mostly be mainstream slop.

Did porn get more interesting when it's just a bloke, his iPhone, and his trollop wife?

Yes. The PornHub Community stuff was some of the rawest, realest, therefore sexiest porn out there.

You described a married couple making a porno together but only felt the need to slander the wife.

Will you watch if it's a fat wanker?

Didn't we learn anything with streaming? The costs will stay low until a new tech is fully established and then continuously go up after we're dependent. Just benefitting different parties. And with streaming the main difference between the old and new parties is that the new ones, being primarily tech companies, added surveillance capitalism.

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