I don't agree that it is because of the "quality" of the video. The issue with AI art is that it lacks intentional content. I think people like art because it is a sort of conversation between the creator and the viewer. It is interesting because it has a consistent perspective. It is possible AI art could one day be indistinguishable but for people to care about it I feel they would need to lie and say it was made by a particular person or create some sort of persona for the AI. But there are a lot of people who want to do the work of making art. People are not the limiting factor, in fact we have way more people who want to make art than there is a market for it. What I think is more likely is that AI becomes a tool in the same way CGI is a tool.

CGI is a good analogy because I think AI and creators will probably go in the same direction:

You can make a compelling argument that CGI operators outcompeted practical effects operators. But CGI didn’t somehow replace the need for a filmmaker, scriptwriter, cinematographers, etc. entirely – it just changed the skillset.

AI will probably be the same thing. It’s not going to replace the actual job of YouTuber in a meaningful sense; but it might redefine that job to include being proficient at AI tools that improve the process.

That's a Nolan thing like how Dunkirk used no green screen.

I think Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings embody the transition from old school camera tricks to CGI as they leaned very heavily into set and prop design and as a result have aged very gracefully as movies

That said, the complaint is coming back. Namely because most new movies use an incredible amount of CGI and due to the time constraints the quality suffers.

As such, CGI is once again becoming a negative label.

I don’t know if there is an AI equivalent of this. Maybe the fact that as models seem to move away from a big generalist model at launch, towards a multitude of smaller expert models (but retaining the branding, aka GPT-4), the quality goes down.

Do you get the feeling that AI generated content is lacking something that can be incrementally improved on?

Seems to me that it's already quite good in any dimension that it knows how to improve on (e.g. photorealism) and completely devoid of the other things we'd want from it (e.g. meaning).

>But that's because, at present, AI generated video isn't very good.

It isn't good, but that's not the reason. There's a paper about 10 years ago where people used some computer system to generate Bach-like music that even Bach experts couldn't reliably tell apart, but nobody listens to bot music. (or nobody except for engine programmers watches computer chess, despite superiority. Chess is thriving more now including commercially than it ever did)

In any creative field what people are after is the interaction between the creator and the content, which is why compelling personalities thrive more, not less in a sea of commodified slop (be that by AI or just churned out manually).

It's why we're in an age where twitch content creators or musicians are increasingly skilled at presenting themselves as authentic and personal. These people haven't suffered from the fact that mass production of media is cheap, they've benefited from it.

Ironically, while the non-CGI SFX in e.g. Interstellar looked amazing, that sad fizzle of a practical explosion in Oppenheimer did not do the real thing justice and would've been better served by proper CGI VFX.