Hollywood Is Already Using AI (and Hiding It) (opens in new tab)

A prediction does not make a report late. And many things obvious to some people are not obvious to a general audience.

> If the source of the idea cheapens the work I put into it with pencils and time, I’m not sure what to say.

This is a straw man. The idea is part of the product.

> This sounds eerily similar to the messaging around SWE.

Yes. This similarity included how the executive's imagination and the individual contributor's experience differed.

>... my reproduction is still an original...

I don't know how accurate that is.

The problem is not AI per se (which are only a mix of algorithms). The problem is that this new wave of AI is trained in propietary content, and the owners/creators didn't allow it in the first place.

If this AI worked without training, no one would say anything.

I'd say the comparison points at misunderstanding the current controversy, though I realize you are doing so deliberately to ask "Is it really that different if you think about it?"

But I'll bite. MASSIVE is a crowd simulation solution, the assets that go into the sim are still artist-created. Even in 2003, people were already used to this sort of division of labor. What the new AI tools do is shift the boundary between artists providing input parameters and assets vs. computer doing what its good at massively and as a big step change. It's the magnitude of the step change causing the upset.

But there's also another reason that artists are upset, which I think is the one that most tech people don't really understand. Of course industrial-scale art does lean on priors (sample and texture banks, stock images, etc.) but by and large operations still have a sort if point of pride to re-do things from scratch where possible for a given production rather than re-use existing elements, also because it's understood that the work has so many variables it will come out a little different and add unique flavor to the end product. Artists see generative AI as regurgitation machines, interrupting that ethic of "this was custom-made anew for this work".

This is typically not an idea that software engineers share much. We are comfortable and even advised to re-use existing code as is. At most we consider "I rewrote this myself though I didn't need to" a valuable learning exercise, but not good professional practice (cf. ridicule for NIHS).

This is one of the largest difference in the engineering method vs. the artist's method. If an artist says "we went out there and recorded all this foley again by hand ourselves for this movie", it's considered better art for it. If a programmer says "I rolled my own crypto for my password manager SaaS", they're in incredibly poor judgement.

It's a little like convincing someone that a lab-grown gemstone is identical to one dug up at the molecular level, even: Yes, but the particular atoms, functionally identical or not, have a different history to them. To some that matters, and to artists the particulars of the act of creation matters a lot.

I don't think the genie can be put back in the bottle and most likely we'll all just get used to things, but I think capturing this moment and what it did to communities and trades purely as a form of historical record is somehow valueable. I hope the future history books do the artists' lament justice, because there is certainly something happening to the human condition here.

This is AI in the gamedev sense, not the present-hype sense.

Tech people like it because it isn't good enough to completely replace them yet. The sophisticated, coherent architecture of a well designed system is (for now) still beyond the LLMs, so for tech people, it's still just a wonderful tool. But give it another year, and the worm will turn.

I’m an artist and also work in tech. Enjoy using AI for work, no interest in using it for my art.

Using AI for art is an idiotic proposition for me. If I was going to use AI to write my novel, I would literally be robbing myself of the pleasure of making it myself. If you don’t enjoy perfecting the sentence, maybe don’t be a writer?

That’s why there’s a disconnect. I make art for personal fulfillment and the joy of the creative act. To offload that to something that helps me do it “faster” has exactly zero appeal.

Or between artists in private and artists in public

And then there are the rest of us, indie developers who are building for and want to keep building things for the artists.

We don’t want any of this and are working to build around it.

It’s being really pushed by a lot of the same people who were pushing Web3 and NFTs and blockchain grifts.

The action I see is happening in comfy-ui workflows. That software is progressing rapidly and adapts to whatever sota models are available.

Heavy emphasis is on making cutting edge models work with limited local compute.

Wasn't Stability working on open sourced models? I wonder what happened to them, I remember some issues with their founder

IMHO, before the end of the decade you will absolutely be able to generate entire long form movies just by writing a paragraph in a prompt. And people will not be able to tell the difference.

Hollywood might save money on the short run but they are doomed to irrelevance on the long run, because you'll have access to the exact same tools as they do.

Is it good or bad? I don't know, it just is...

I think the really interesting part will be the illusion of choice presented by these systems. You'll think you've got the reins, but really it's a choose-your-own-adventure book that's effectively constraining you to the experience They want you to have.

The only way out of this will be HN types who roll their own, and those will probably suck in comparison to the commercial systems filled with product placement and mindblowing amounts of information harvesting.

They have to hide it because of the unions.

Would love to hear him define "cinematic."

AI will make professional level movies cheaper and easier to make, which will the medium more accessible. The AAA movies probably won't look any better, but indie stuff that previously would have been suggestive and bare due to budgetary constraints can now be more direct and lavish. In many cases that's going to be the difference an indie project being a viable film and not.

I use my instant pot to make risotto in 20 minutes with very little effort that is about 90% as good (in my very stubborn opinion) as making it the hard way. I very much appreciate an amazing risotto, but when I make it myself I'll usually choose the instant pot versus the extra work.

I feel Hollywood might be the same way.

I've never understood this argument... most of Hollywood today is already slop lol