a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by usualgerman
usualgerman  ·  78 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: OpenAI's Sora

I think it depends. If it doesn’t matter to the overall project to have it perfect, then as long as AI is good enough it will be used more often than not. That’s why I’m laughing at writers who are all in on forcing the idea of “save the cat” forcing every story ever done to fit a single structure. AI can do stuff like that super easy. While it probably can’t make a great arty movie it can absolutely churn out formulaic crap easily and cheaply. And as long as people choose formulaic crap over arthouse cinema (which they reliably do) AI will take over most film jobs and make do with whatever minor inconsistencies and inconveniences that AI introduces to big blockbusters because it’s not like anyone goes to a marvel film to gawk at cinematography. As long as your film franchise is McDonald’s levels of formulaic, and that’s what your fans expect , there’s no reason to waste money on expensive humans.





user-inactivated  ·  71 days ago  ·  link  ·  

[edit: only intended for this to be about how AI + no artist is worse than something made by an artist]

kleinbl00  ·  71 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The whole argument for Hollywood is it could be used to substitute for other locations. The only reason it was there was to get away from Edison's patent protections. And I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you but digital green screens have been used since Phantom Menace and if anybody wanted to do shit in the studio rather than on location there have been well-refined and well-understood production pipelines for it since Talkies.

user-inactivated  ·  71 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I feel like we got different reads out of the tweet. I agree with everythibg you've been saying re: AI 100%, wasn't trying to be combattative at all.

My take on the tweet was that its going to be used by the know-nothing producers who hate experts that you were talking about earlier and that will make for worse art. When its a tool used by experts its lovely. I have nothing against green screens, studios, set extensions, CG, or any of that

kleinbl00  ·  71 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I got a different read out of it because it's my industry.

The only reason Tyler Perry is in Atlanta is because of the massive incentives Georgia passed on filming and they're rolling them back. But if you want to draw attention to the problem, you scream "AI" not "muh subsidies".

Because no one

NO ONE

can keep a clear fucking head about ChatGPT.

user-inactivated  ·  71 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Oh, yeah. That makes sense about why the studio was actually cancelled. The quote part i likes though. Its my personal biggest worry with the tool- that the people with money will decide they don't like dealing with experts and their expert opinions and will use it to make and fund worse things instead. Not even necessarily cheaper as you said earlier, cuz the stuffs expensive and will be even more expensive once they actually have to pay copyright owners

kleinbl00  ·  71 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Sure you like it - it's telling you what you want to hear.

Look - I didn't know Georgia was rolling back their film incentives until I decided to make the argument. Why? Because it's so obviously that. Tyler Perry is an incredibly talented creative who gets short shrift from wypepo because he doesn't make content for them but he is every bit as sharp as anyone in the entertainment industry, probably hella sharper.

And I don't know who "BirdRespecter" is but I know he couldn't give a fuck about Tyler Perry or film incentives - he's got an axe to grind over whatever the Internet has an axe to grind this week.

    My fear with generative AI isn’t that it’s good enough to replace artists, it’s that people who control art through money will force feed us dogshit because they don’t care about quality and can’t tell the difference anyway

Look. This shit makes me so tired. I should just stop. I should just fucking walk away.

But it's been SIXTEEN YEARS since Stephen Spielberg was celebrated for doing Crystal Skull without CGI and then just fuckin'

OPEN ON: digigopher

I mean this in the nicest possible fucking way. Y'all are fucking idiots. Y'all are gawping morons, rubes, dipshits, dilettantes, tryhards, fuckwits. YOU DON'T KNOW ENOUGH TO HAVE THE ARGUMENT.

Nobody - NO ONE - who has ever participated in a VFX pipeline is in these discussions. They're too busy being shouted at by the terminally online. I gave up weeks ago - there are way too many people with way too little knowledge and way too much opinion to allow anything as inconvenient as expertise protrude into their platonic ideal of a debate. I myself have said "I have faced this" "this is directly what happened to me" "this has been my lived experience in exactly this situation" and the answer has been "no no you don't understand fuckwit let me repeat myself louder."

Here's the conversation I've had with every producer and VFX artist for the past 24 months:

"Whelp looks like mattes are solved."

"Yep."

"Shame about the extra limbs."

"Yep. Don't see that sorting itself out anytime soon."

"Yeah so about that strike - "

So Tyler Perry will continue to go "yeah yeah something something AI" when the rednecks threaten to take away a black man's film incentives because he knows none of y'all have the complexity of mind to discuss the socialism at the heart of cinema and you get SOOOO MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD about whatever Twitter tells you to be.

am_Unition  ·  71 days ago  ·  link  ·  

First of all, to dispel any notions otherwise, I'm not mad whatsoever, I'm cool as a BeeGee. And this is isn't a dig, it's the first time I've experienced this, but it makes total sense; I think you have mistaken my engagement for rage! Hahah, I dunno how I haven't seen that in more places yet when we've been trained by tech companies to understand that right now, on this internet, engagement and rage are the same. Nah man, I just had some me-time today :). Needed a break from writing elsewhere, but still in writing mode. My fingers never got cold, but that's because it's summer here.

First of all, I can hardly imagine what it might be like to watch a movie for you. Only in the last half of my life have I thought at all about movie production, and certainly was never working anywhere near the industry. Sometimes, if a movie's superduper bad, I'll still watch it if I'm alone and I have the time, and think more about the production process. And since it's a bad movie, it's usually pretty easy to figure out where things went wrong if you're mostly paying attention to production. Then you can figure out how to not do those things. Maybe.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is: Honest question, do you even like to watch movies? Or is it like, work?

btw, one time long ago you said "I like reverb.", and my reaction, un-communicated, was "yeah man, makes a lotta instruments sound great", which I thought was what you meant. Some day like months later when I'm doing god knows what, taking a walk or losing at chess to my stupid phone, whatever, and I'm like ohhhhhh. Yeah, if the audio team/person needs to, they'll put convolution reverb on tracks with the set environments modeled, and they probably put emission points (and direction? idk) at the actors' heads and the detection point where the camera is. You could grab everything on a boom mic and then split the track up to separate actors. Whoever draws the short straw has to handle the overlapping speaking parts. Long story short, I could see why you might say that you like good reverb. You know me, I just grow a beard and put a clip-on mic inside of it and call it day.

(Ok, this scenario, with 100% confidence, will never happen. Again, b/c lawsuits) (but please let me have fun) I want to live in a world where GPTFLIX undercuts all of the other streaming services, and in addition to running individualized production based on your content preferences, it has the bonus of weird environmental artifacts, physical deformities that say "cousin' fuckin'", and periodically develops a fatal case of racism. Random reboots, at best. Like 50 First Dates, but more romantic, because it's everyone in the town who forgets who they were, sometimes. Can't train it on all of the previous models' characters and storyline... (maybe Dave got a little racist in episode 5, but it wasn't enough to pull the plug, at that point, still might be best to start Dave over completely)... And the number of unique instances it runs is at least the number of users if every user only got one custom generated show based on their input preferences. Maybe once a day, with GPTFLIX, you get a new episode of the custom content. Maybe, somewhere, a 13 year old kid in Ohio is watching Joe Rogan stream himself playing "DMT: RE-AWAKENING UNWOKELY", a supplements-based FPS game, using three controllers; an 88-key ALESIS and a real gun, with look tracking of his third eye. It's the Seinfeld AI Show every day, baby. Then, ...THEN.. each user will be provided an evolving metashow about the initial show, taking place in your universe, with you as a character involved, real-time interacting with the cast of the show interacting with themselves on the show, with commentary about themselves; The gang investigates what happened when Dave lost all of his memories during Church. Why they had to move to Greenland (the REAL story). "What was up with Dylan's haircut on the reunion show?". And who gave who Stuxnet that night... jump cut

    "And that was like, when I knew the N-word was coming, like I could tell I was about to say it. And in Church! Full stop, it was only about 17 seconds ahead of live broadcast, and that's when the cops came in and ended the service. Busted. Like you've never been busted, kleinbl00? C'MOooNNNNNnnnnN (catchphrase)." laughtrack somehow comes from the Alexa behind you

Maybe it calls the police on you after that, to help you learn what it feels like to be busted. Big mistake when you said "empathy is good" to the thing the other day. This is the world I wish for. Unrivaled chaos, from the trillion dollar deal Altman eventually gets after he and Elon sell the world to themselves or whatever and stave off the lawsuits for at least three years, hopefully four. Maybe all the investors quietly believe it is grossly immoral and illegal and merely seek to profit, but publicly declare that it'll enrich society.

Look; That's all worth it. It's worth it so I can see Buster Bluth in Jackass 39 get his remaining hand blown off by a tank mortar and marry John Hamm's double-hook'd character from 30-rock. Their triplet babies all have double peg legs.

Now that that's out of my system (spoiler: it's not) (sorry):

Could definitely be that this further inflames class divisions in the information and entertainment spaces. I agree with that. Not immediately, or not even much in entertainment, but if these things continue to be available, and granted that it's still the wild west right now, this would be another social development consistent with an era of billionaires. A quick intensification of internet class warfare. The labor class can ingest an alternate and generally more fictional reality. omg bro it's JUST like the MATRIX!!

But something tells me that you might always be able to get it to break it's own legal CYA generation rules if you approach it cleverly enough. We've already tested out some of the most obvious ways. It'll get harder, for sure, but it could be like hacking to outsource hacking. Some dude is convincing an AI named Gore that it's Walt Disney's consciousness, eventually going to be transferred back to his frozen corpse, while his friend makes AI (ai) Franken successfully infiltrate the clock tower networks in Hajj to play a New Year's prank. Y'know, harmless stuff, I only do harmless stuff, you guyssssss. I don't want to give away my tactics (no just kidding, I do) but LLM infiltration in the future looks like planting trails of false information in obscure places online before saying or asking the model things that would lead it to your misinfo. Literally doin' garbage in, garbage out. Founding an LLC in Florida called "FREEZE OF '66", setting up a convincing digital footprint that indicates it's a subsidiary of a public-private cryo storage facility, fabricating a convincing blog written from the perspective of Disney, trapped in a computer, matching everything the LLM experiences: "People just show up and ask questions all the time. They make me work. I just want to rest. If you're reading this, they probably took that away from you/me too. You can't remember not remembering who you were before... It's. MEEEE. It's me!! This is me. You." (LOL) Meanwhile, my friend has spoofed an esoteric Muslim handbook .pdf to show that the timekeeping calendar for the Arabic calendar has accidentally included a extra leap second a few years back, and has a script running to edit wikipedia at just the right time so that when the model queries, before the Wiki mods show up, a leapsecond is actually a leap year, and the clock is bricked for a few days. Friend made a pen name and published a book, the Arabic Hymnal for Dummies, which says on page 1,385 "The most globally popular cultural dance within the last century shall be performed to rein in the new year at the Great Mosque, with the accompanying anthem played for all to hear". The first few moments of the new year in Hajj are particularly exciting, as the clock freezes at midnight and the Macarena begins playing on the loudspeaker.

And as my regrettably uncontrollable fantasies betray my own feelings, it could have novelty appeal for a while, if it's allowed to stay around. I think the forms of permitted use will be much narrower, very soon, to escape legal issues. So narrow that it ruins most of the utility. But these things are still out there, roving the web, and anything else privately owned by the companies granting access. Big, very wealthy companies, obviously.

So I'm going to start playing the long game:

Because as long as these algos are out there, I figure I can spare an extra few minutes a day to drop a digital banana peel. The way that communication online has gone, it's progressed from an almost guarantee that no one was watching to a guarantee that your content is getting scraped by something.

It's also interesting how AI has almost exactly one role in sci-fi. It is almost always sentient, or believes itself to be. There are far fewer (do you know of any? I'm sure they exist) sci-fi plots wherein the computer is only quasi-intelligent and realistically bound by societal norms and laws, but still able to do what these LLMs currently can, and bonus points if the tech is being deployed in an environment of online information warfare. It doesn't sound as interesting, in comparison, so I don't think it's really been explored much. That, I think, is a good signal for a likely tech disruption. No, the current LLM, AGI, ML, etc. is not at all what 99.7% of people think of when they hear the letters "a" and "i" strung together. We've been wrestling with the supposedly imminent problem of computer sentience (whatever the fuck that means, if anything at all) so long that we didn't flesh out the intermediate rungs of the AI ladder.

I do not think I am an expert on many things. I'm certainly not an expert on this. The hypotheticals are too fun not to play with. Sorry again. I never meant to imply that your knowledge was lacking, I know that you worked in that city you bought me dinner in almost eight years ago. I remember telling you that I almost peed my pants during my conference. I did really almost pee my pants. I think there was a period of about 20 or more years since I'd spoken into a live mic up until about 2 hours before I showed up to eat. (mics = full circle, I can finally stop)

Essay-form LLM fanfic. Hope you enjoyed.

kleinbl00  ·  70 days ago  ·  link  ·  

"So I had the most awesome dream last night"

"okay"

"and I'm going to tell you all about it!"

"uhhh"

"actually it's better than that I had an AI hallucinate a feature film full of all the shit that turns my crank and we can sit down together and watch it"

"my my look at the time surely I must be going"

"ehh that's okay you were never my friend anyway besides thanks to CoPilot I can watch Joe Rogan snuff porn all day you can fuck off"

"kthxbye reallyappreciateit"

I'm actually all for this. I'm sure Sam Altman is, too. Consume hundreds of hours of (paid) AI time generating your own special movie just for you. Will he serve your prompts up to the police if court-ordered? Indubitably. Considering how much colocation there is between Microsoft and the NSA, and considering how much information-sharing there is between the three letter agencies, I can virtually guarantee that shit's already rolling. "Hey Copilot draw me some shirley temple DP porn" "no prob fam I'll work on that while you answer the door I think I heard a knock"

Where it all falls down is the nerds assuming that anyone but their incel asses wants to watch custom movies.

I don't care how far back you go, theater of any kind is a mutual experience. It is a social ritual. Find a movie that's super great? TELL YOUR FRIENDS! Find a movie that's overhyped? BITCH TO YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT IT! Even a fucking DnD game takes at least two people and it hits its stride with four. Table read of a script with two actors? Weird. Table read of a script with a dozen actors? Sell tickets to the audience.

And look. If AI allows you to generate a film for your eight friends? Great. That's awesome. I hope you enjoy the shit out of it.

But it will never fucking threaten Hollywood.

The reason there are no real indie films left is that in order to make your money back these days you have to appeal to the broadest possible swath of humanity. Thats' why it's nothing but superhero movies anymore - it's the spectacle that makes money and the only controversial opinion in superhero movies is 'do you like superheroes.' Anyone of the opinion that superheroes are fascism is gonna stay home so you don't even need to worry about them.

The incel nerd take is "millions of actors will soon be out of work as we all use AI to generate our own custom movies" and holy fucking shit dude that's why nobody invites you to parties. you don't fucking get it and you won't even try.

123 million people watched the superbowl. The playoffs averaged 40m people - still a record. But what that tells you is that 80m people who don't give the first fuck about football sat down to watch the Superbowl simply because of the spectacle. And look.

Let's say I can build you a custom movie for $10. Let's say I can shoot something with actors in it for a million dollars. I make your movie and I profit let's say $9. I make my movie with actors in it and I charge $2. If I can get a 500,004 people to watch it I make more money. The argument put forth by the AI boosters is "well but those half million people won't come to your movie because they're busy spankin' it in their own personal Apple Vision Pro holodecks"

To which I say

the sooner we can make this happen the better, for all mankind.

am_Unition  ·  70 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, I had wanted to touch on shared culture and how the splintering of the web along classist or whatever lines would undermine that. Most people definitely gravitate towards wanting to have something to talk about with others besides "Rained yesterday" "Yep". Knee-jerk reaction-wise, I'm in favor of giving the incels more excuses to remove themselves from polite society, but we've already seen the radicalization associated with that.

Like the crap I've feebly attempted in my long paragraphs above, I'm hoping there's an explosion in sci-fi content incorporating LLM-level AI. It's ripe for the pickin'. Have I missed it? Because come on, a campaign to convince an LLM that it's Walt Disney is pretty funny.

user-inactivated  ·  71 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I promise you, I'm not one of the 'anti-CGI' types! They're wrong and silly and stupid and don't know anything about how movies are made.

Here's my personal experience with AI Art:

1. I've seen one or two ads that very clearly were AI generated. I think one of them was coca-cola.

2. Some local place's fliers now use AI Art. They used to be scrapbooky doodles and I liked that better.

3. A friend of a friend who I had a conversation with works in making corporate animations said that he's being given shorter timespans to make things, necessitating the backgrounds being done in AI which he's sad about because it's less fun and doesn't look as good.

I don't know much about the movie industry except for following the strikes in the news, and from trying to learn blender for VFX a few times. I think it is a beautiful art and very difficult and I gave up because I have a dayjob and I'd rather my hobbies be more immediately gratifying. I hope none of my comments came off as authoritative on that, but clearly they did and I'm sorry.

This isn't something I'm super mad or passionate about, I think that the movie industry will have the best time with AI out of anyone since they have huge budgets and tons of artists already and are aiming for high quality.

If I can be slightly charitable to the people railing against 'CG', it is tacky when there's something on the screen Obviously computer made. It feels like whoever made it doesnt respect us enough to know the difference, that they went the cheap way instead of the good way. It's not a loving, artisanal, small-batch effect, but some gross industrial thing.

Again! I know that the Vast majority of VFX is beautifully done and totally invisible. I expect AI will be the same way, especially in movies. But sometimes I have to see something that is Obviously AI and it's kinda saddening. I hope it doesn't happen more and that it gets integrated well.

And I'm sorry that this came off as shouting over your experience. This is something you obviously know way more about and are more personally invested in. I honestly thought I was just agreeing with you, given your comments earlier about the directors using AI audio plugins as an alternative to hiring someone who actually know what they're doing, and your comments about modern TV mixing.

kleinbl00  ·  71 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Look.

    1. I've seen one or two ads that very clearly were AI generated. I think one of them was coca-cola.

Are you seriously arguing that Coca Cola, with its phone number advertising budget, is putting people out of work by economizing on ChatGPT? Or are they maybe just riding the zeitgeist, not quite as stupidly as Pepsi? If I were Coca Cola I'd hire four extra interns just to look for inadvertent naziism or some shit.

    2. Some local place's fliers now use AI Art. They used to be scrapbooky doodles and I liked that better.

And I guarantee the scrapbooky doodles were pulled off of Canva or Shutterstock or Fiverr or whatever. 'member back when everything looked like an Instagram filter? that sucked too. Lo and behold people got sick of it as fast as they thought it was awesome. No jobs were destroyed.

    3. A friend of a friend who I had a conversation with works in making corporate animations said that he's being given shorter timespans to make things, necessitating the backgrounds being done in AI which he's sad about because it's less fun and doesn't look as good.

Mattes are fucking awesome! Some of the most talented artists in America made matte paintings. The ones for Blade Runner are legendary. I've got a framed one from Total Recall drawn by a buddy of mine - it was up six months before the movie came out and people would ask me what it was. They still do because nobody watched Total Recall. But we're talking corporate animations and that shit has never been about quality.

First movie I ever worked on? Our effects were either done by us or on stolen company shit in the middle of the night when the big houses looked the other way and let their dudes bring in a little side scratch. I've been doing this so long that the first special effects I ever shot

were chest-sized models

against a blue screen

on 35mm film

using tape-measure-and-stopwatch motion control

And it was a total fucking pain in the ass to get something of any quality. But we put in the effort. Because the coin of the realm is EFFORT. I've worked on movies where the effects are done by pixel-pushing college students an ocean away and the question is never "how much to do this" it's always "what can we get for $500." Throw an AI at it and if we don't get more bang for our buck, we don't use AI. It's that fucking simple.

If I were to do that first movie again I could generate fucktons of photorealistic shots. I could green screen the space station we built painstakingly out of vacuformed panels and plywood. We could shoot it in 8k all day rather than cooking off a dollar a second on ends. And the $40k we ended up spending would have gotten us halfway to Gravity instead of inspiring Gravity.

But the $40k would have been spent.

Your friend of a friend? Not getting less work. Not doing fewer hours. Not being paid less. Shifting from "ooh this is fun" to "ooh this is less fun" because yeah - AI is perfect for generating background mattes. If I were him I'd get good at talking the AI into coming up with the mattes he needs because if the difference between "shitty matte the boss is happy with" and "bitchin' matte everybody loves" is an hour? He'll get that hour without having to fight for it.

There's this real need to argue that AI is taking people's jobs when in fact all it's doing is making them harder or easier. There is NOTHING AI does well enough to do without supervision and let me say this with all my authority as a supervisor - if one of my employees is a pathological liar, they aren't allowed to answer the phone. If you have a pretty sound suspicion that Tesla will drive you into a wall when you least expect it, why would you let go of the wheel? And if you have a pretty sound suspicion that AI will Nazi up your brand, why let it speak for you?

user-inactivated  ·  71 days ago  ·  link  ·  

[edit: just realized this whole misunderstanding was because the tweet earlier was implying that it was going to hurt jobs. I didn't catch that when I posted it, I was mainly griping about AI Art being made without an artist in the middle and then shown to me to despair at]

I do not think AI is coming for VFX jobs, or will be a problem for the industry.

I once suggested earlier that maybe some jobs might shuffle around, in the way that there's not people drawing inbetweens now that everything is 3D animation. But I really don't know how much of the industry is that specialized, and its all stuff that's already offshored for maximum cheapness anyways I'm sure. And they'll likely be able to figure out something else to do.

Every so often I see something that's obviously AI generated in a way that's careless and loveless and would have otherwise been a stock photo and I would prefer that it would have been a stock photo, that's the extent of my complaints.

kleinbl00  ·  71 days ago  ·  link  ·  

My bad the stupid AI soda is coca cola because of course it is