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Comment by sublinear | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand why there's such a race to the bottom.

If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all? The corner cutting across the board has become so bad that these movies are unwatchable.

This isn't even a new problem. A lot of traditional CGI can still be bad enough to ruin the illusion when it's the state of the art and a lot of attention to detail went into it. We've been circling the drain for decades. I suspect this is why everything became superheroes for a while. The illusion doesn't have to be good to meet that low of a bar.

If the goal is to be as cheap as possible, you might as well release the story as a picture book written by AI.

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> If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all?

Hollywood moves have little to do with art or even entrainment for that matter. They are simply revenue generating machines. Rich people invest in a movie production and expect a return. Hollywood moves don't take artistic risks anymore which is why franchises have become such a big thing. If it make money before, it will probably make money again. Even if it's bad, fans of the last movie will buy a ticket just to see. If it's bad, well, you have their money already!

It's pretty similar to Silicon valley these days. The technology is just a vehicle to produce a return on VC money.

90% of movies aren't shown at cinemas. 90% of movies are for home consumption. 90% of movies are Paw Patrol or some low rent action filler for Primes catalogue.

It's the same forces driving software quality to the bottom. Simply put, enshittification has become the expected norm and there is more money to be made pushing out barely acceptable slop than the higher effort(and cost) of better made stuff.

Also, it's not exactly that the higher effort, better quality stuff is gone as it's been drowned out by the slop. Higher quality things are still being made(e.g. The Odyssey which uses minimal CGI), just much smaller as a percentage of overall.

Earlier unit economics of slop were roughly comparable to higher effort output. It was cheaper, but not dramatically so to push out crap code, so the volume of slop was a bit lower. Now, low effort slop is genuinely low effort due to AI, so the economics work out even accounting for the lower adoption and higher complaints from the users.

Time will tell if this is a temporary phase, or the new, bleak normal.

The acceptance of the slop is the problem.

We've had low effort fraud for all of human history. We absolutely need to revise our definition of fraud to include AI slop. People need to wake the fuck up.

Nobody would accept a low quality product under any other circumstances, so why is AI different? We only have this large scale fascination with it because so many people are completely uneducated in computer science and have no clue how it works or what the limitations are.

What is "proper movie making?"

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