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by thomastraum 853 days ago
I am a CG artist and Director and this made me so sad. I am watching in horror and amazement. I am not anti AI at all, but being on the wrong side of efficiency, for the individual this is heartbreaking. its so much fun to make CG and create shots and the reason its hard (just like anything) makes it rewarding.
5 comments

Ex colleague then! I'm kind of glad I went out of it all now that I see all of this, but on the other hand it's also an amazing opportunity unfolding, as long as it's directable. What a great toolset! For what you've had to have army of people, freezing ass on location, working with actors.. soon gone. Well, if you want it to. On the other hand, look at what happened to imagery, concept art in general. For the better part it cheapened it. Turned it into this mass produced, easily available thing that it's not special anymore. Skills are still needed to produce exactly what you want, but the special flair is kind of gone. It will need way more energy and creativity now to stand out.
I'm conflicted though because on the flip side it could open up filmmaking to way more people who don't have the skills/money/time

Like what if any artist could make a whole movie by themself without needing millions of dollars or hundreds of people

Similar to how you used to need a huge studio full of equipment to record music and now someone in their bedroom with a DAW can do it

The point is by doing you become really good in creative fields. in any field. Prompting is not doing. What makes you a really good programmer? Writing code.

the pursuit of mastery is at the essence of any craft.

I can't help but worry that this will make it too easy to create movies and the product will be of much lower quality. There is precedence here in the music industry. A recent report came out that said that about 70% of music sales was catalog music, implying that people are buying less new music than old. I personally feel that's because the new music just isn't very good and one of the reasons is, it's too easy to make and distribute music now.
That is a ridiculous take. Look at the absolute SEA of bottom-barrel content flooding every single streaming platform. For people at the top of the studio system, they are already living out their AI power trips, just in the meatspace.

The entire industry is already turning out terrible shit, but doing it by wasting hundreds of thousands of actors, production teams, and studio dollars in order to churn out that nonsense.

Meanwhile, there are millions of latent storytellers, who, for whatever reason (but primarily: not born into extreme wealth and nepotistic connections) could never express their ideas in motion/cinema at such ambitious scales.

By putting this power in the hands of actually talented writers and storytellers, you create a completely new market of potentially incredible works of art.

Sure. But you have to admit that you also create a new market of low effort garbage art. The question is which is bigger, and where the money will ultimately go.
"Things are already bad. How could you be mad about making it much easier to make things worse? Quality isn't compatible with today's business ambitions."
I think an important skill in the future would be just having good ideas. That's going to differentiate the winners from the losers
I think it's worth remembering that all of these AI's work by having an unbelievably large number of weights. So many weights that it's all an uncontrollable black box. On the other hand, your work is all about having control, and I don't personally expect your work to lose value for this reason.

Another thing to think about is what the AI is designed to do. Without knowing the details, I would expect it to be trained to produce the 'most likely' output given the prompt. Consequently, I would think being inventive is against its design, and 'most likely' is effectively that same as 'average'.

I think it's okay to be a bit anti ai lol.
Why the terror? Your job will change a bit but won't be gone. You would guide the output and make prompts not with text but your own video CGI shorts to make things 100% to your liking and the AI will do the rest of the dirty work. You productivity will grow and quality of your work too. You would be able to make an AAA movie all by yourself on a laptop. Since everyone would be able to do the same, the fight for the imagination and inginuity in scripting and artists view would skyroket. :) IMHO
You are rather cavalier about other people's livelihoods. There will be budget for maybe 10% of the people currently employed, and yes, they will be making use of the new tools and they'll adapt. The other 90% are going to be doing doordash until they can figure out a new career.
Initial displacement will happen and it will require time for society to adapt and new industries to mature. The printing press significantly reduced the cost of producing books and other printed materials, which led to a dramatic increase in the availability of books, literacy rates, and the spread of knowledge. This technological advancement didn’t just replace the scribes; it created new jobs in printing, publishing, book selling, and eventually led to the creation of new genres of literature.
Yes, in the long term the printing press brought many benefits. In the short term, a lot of people were out of work.
Who lost their jobs to the printing press? The monks who were the only scribes back then? They got their time freed to spend it on other duties in the monasteries and mayhaps even more time to read other books rather that to scribe them. So the level of education grew even for them.

The same will be for the FX artist and 3D artists etc. The level of their work will grow, they will spend less time on dull work and more on tinkering with tiny but more important things like ideas, emotions, art overall etc.

The terror is because companies want to maximize profits and a great way to do that is to minimize costs.

If you have a team of X people producing Y pieces, and now X people can produce 10Y pieces, everything is fine as long as the demand for pieces keeps up. But if your company really only needs Y pieces or really any amount less than 10Y then the easiest thing for a company to do is go, "We don't really need X people, let's fire some"

Getting fired, in America at least, means loss of healthcare, income, and if it persists long enough housing. Most people are terrified of being homeless, broke, and without access to medicine.

> as long as the demand for pieces keeps up

So the problem not in the AI but in demand...

AI causes the supply and demand to change by creating additional supply of pieces through increased productivity.

It's cold comfort to someone getting fired to tell them "If demand had also increased 10 fold you wouldn't have to sleep on the street."

The actual living human being who has had their livelihood destroyed probably isn't any less scared of their fate because you cleverly tut at them and go, "In actuality the AI didn't do anything bad to you, it just created a glut of supply and the market demand didn't keep up."

> Your job will change a bit but won't be gone. > You[r] productivity will grow

This aren't compatible at scale. If productivity grows, there will be less people doing the job.

Programmers are more productive than years ago and there are many more of them
Sometimes it looks like the peek is ending. Who knows.
Many people consider what you refer to as "the dirty work" as precisely the point of creative practices.
Depends on what you think is "dull work". I think there are many artist who could welcome some of the "creating work" to be automated. What part? Depends on the artists and his preferences. AI can take the burden of any type of work and leave those parts which are needed for the human to do. Human can choose what parts he will work on. That's the point.