VFX artists have been using AI tools for 20 years or more. Any artist who didn't have to hand-trace a rotoscope line has been using AI in one form or another. I recognize I'm the only person here who knows what "rotoscope" means which is part of the problem - my posse has been doing cutting-edge shit since college because if you wanna see rapid adoption, check out filmed entertainment.

If you look at AI-generated content the obvious place to use it is backgrounds. Mattes have been effectively gone since the early-mid '90s because computers have been able to generate plenty-good-enough backgrounds. AI makes that cheaper which mostly means that the guys who are doing backgrounds are going to do more of them.

Look. It's gonna play out like this. Here, sit with me for a few minutes:

That took Kerry Conran, talented Cal Arts grad, dedicated cineaste, four fucking years to make:

He could not afford better equipment, so he used equipment given him in payment for projects that he worked on, such as desktop publishing of articles. His computer (including the equipment he earned) was outdated and slow. He dropped out of society, and spent all of his free time creating the short, working only enough to support himself and his project. He later remarked that he "had no life", and would sometimes hide under his desk in a fetal position, feeling tempted to give up on his project.

Worked out tho 'cuz after four years he finished "chapter 1", a friend got it in front of Jon Avnet and four years and $70m after that, the world got:

HERE IS WHAT AI IS GOING TO DO

It's not gonna take four years grinding on your own to make Chapter 1 of Sky Captain. It's going to take months or weeks. The skills you use to trick the AI are going to be novel and they will be successful. It will be impressive and those of us who grew up with Steenbecks will marvel.

But it's still gonna take tens of millions of dollars, Jude Law and Angelina Jolie to make it into a movie. Because a bunch of amateurs are always going to be slain by a bunch of professionals. Period. Full stop. No discussion.

And that's the stupidest bullshit about this whole kerfuffle - everyone's all "ZOMFG I can't imagine how threatened some hypothetical professional must feel about this" because they can't imagine some hypothetical professional ANYWAY.

Trust me - if you make your living doing visual FX, you're eagerly watching all this AI bullshit to see if it's capable of giving you a tool to speed up your workflows. And so far, what you see is something that doesn't care how many kings there are in a game of chess and if you look deeper, you're troubled by the fact that none of the people selling this technology sense that's a problem.