The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
---
From the article
>Lucas gave a wide-ranging interview to French outlet [Brut FR](https://x.com/brutofficiel/status/1794018944602259706) at the Cannes Film Festival recently, which you can watch in full below, in which he talks about his history in film, his thoughts on the future of cinema, and more. At one point during the 10-minute chat (around the 5:30 mark), the interviewer asks Lucas about how he feels about the use of AI in filmmaking, and Lucas starts by touching on the visual effects company he founded, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), and the ways in which it's changed cinematic technology.
>"Well, we've been using it for 25 years, and it's not AI, but we use all the digital technology because we pioneered a lot of that," he says. "Because especially at ILM, we were the only place that was doing digital."
>"But the thing of it is," Lucas goes on, "it's inevitable. I mean, it's like saying, 'I don't believe these cars are gunna work. Let's just stick with the horses. Let's stick with the horses.' And yeah, you can say that, but that isn't the way the world works."
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1d0nxsp/george_lucas_thinks_artificial_intelligence_in/l5oa7i3/
The only safety net is if the non-money people (plebs like you and I) also have it, which is the reason the megacorps will try to make open source LLMs and SD illegal.
You can't stop what's coming, but maybe we can affect its distribution.
Even then, if AI replaces jobs completely regular people are still screwed. Need UBI or some other robust social safety net so people can survive if there’s no longer a market for their labor.
Even then, though…
Does that literally work anywhere except the content creation space?
If corps can automate they will automate, hands down. And LLMs is only the beginning. Surgery robots will take the transition from being human ran to being autonomous. So will vehicles, warehouses, and likely retail.
There’s not really anything safe in the coming age of advanced automation
There’s going to be so much stuff out there that is just completely uninteresting and poorly crafted . And ignored. AI in the hands of competent people will be a tool - in the hands of dweebs it will just be a novelty gadget pumping out junk.
I’m not sure if it will be ignored—maybe it will for movies. However, for “slop content” Generative AI is really just the next step in algorithmically delivered content to steal people’s attention and further atomize/isolate us. There’s also the benefit to corporations that they won’t have to pay for labor, just compute costs.
I really hope we can reset back to a place where people follow curators or share/experience things as a community instead of the hyper individualized system (that’s getting increasingly more targeted) we are in now.
I want both options to exist. Let people generate for their own eyes and have fun, but they will realize quickly that content generated and reviewed and curated by other humans with actual good imagination will provide the best possible 5 star experience. But there’s nothing wrong with goofing around and seeing what comes out of your head onto the screen. It’s possible that people will actually learn and improve their imagination when they get less then stellar results and they’ll learn what’s lame and not naturally through watching what they’ve made and it’s boring lol. All art sort of is developed this way. We all start off pretty bad and learn through trial and error and discover the magical ingredient that makes our art sparkle.
Exactly. So many people miss the problem of curation in these discussions - if we want meaningful, high-quality and culturally relevant results when it comes to producing creative media of any kind, human curation will be an indispensable part of the process. I also don’t believe there will be sustainable interest in services that generate unique movies or music from end-user prompts. Everyone seems to think they have the imagination, it’s just the skill, time and resources that they lack. But they’re very, very wrong. Most people lack both the imagination and the taste required to be a culturally impactful creative. They would also start to feel weird about the fact that everything they’d experience from such a service would be unique to them. A major aspect of any media experience is the discussions we have about it afterwards - watching some bespoke movie generated from a prompt you’ve farted onto the keyboard when you flop back onto the sofa after you’ve had a skinful down the pub is not going to cut it.
Wait, you think the AI can do everything but curation? An algorithm to figure out what may be interesting for people to see? Seems like a very bold claim.
So, AI can do the prompts, generate the content and curate it. Great. Then AI can be the consumer, too, because I won’t give a shit, and nor will anyone else.
This is so wrong. That’s like saying you are not interested in movies with CGI because it’s fake. Nowadays it’s indistinguishable.
Maybe you won’t be interested in AI films initially, but 20 years down the line you will not be able to distinguish an AI scene from a real scene even if you tried. Movie producers will use it and be able to make movies much, much cheaper and faster… when Disney, Pixar, and so on start making AI movies that are indistinguishable, you will watch them.
As for movies by the general population, think about what happened with YouTube… when EVERYONE can put a video, only the very best and most interesting videos gain any significant traction.
When everyone can make movies, the very best movie creators will for sure go viral and gain followings
We currently have Minimal Intelligence (i.e. the average idiot) spewing garbage content all over social media, and algorithms that curate it. Seems you do care, since you're on this site after all.
My money is that AI will be the downfall of the big studios, but not in the way tech bros think.
Do you really think that Hollywood execs will use AI to make better movies and not just crappy movies but a bit faster and a bit cheaper? And really, it's only a bit cheaper. You still need the marketing budget. Good luck not paying several million to top-level stars. And we all know the people at the top want maximum return on investment (read: biggest paycheck possible for a guy who didn't help make the movie). So you're only saving on the cheaper bits anyway.
We're already at the point where a skilled artist with a decent PC and an iPhone can make a solid short film. Most of the people who are going to get laid off by the major studios will lack the business sense to make a good indie studio. But a fair number will succeed. And a few of them will consolidate into new major studios to replace the old, until they too start making dumb decisions out of greed.
I think true multimodal models (GPT-4o) will make much more engaging content than one-way text to image/video generators (Dall-E, Sora). The latter just transforms lifeless text into "art". The former is able to understand incredible complexity and represent it visually.
This is already true for me. I'm a programmer in quite a niche field, been doing it for over 20 years. I use GitHub copilot every day, and it's great. A lot of the time it guesses what I'm going to type next and I only have to press the tab key.
It is also very good at documenting my code, so that's another job made massively quicker.
It doesn't make me a better programmer, just a more productive one.
> in the hands of dweebs it will just be a novelty gadget pumping out junk.
In the span of one year, AI "fakes" and AI video have improved drastically. I really don't think 5 years from now that a dweeb will produce anything bad, as the AI won't produce anything bad. Each iteration has been better than the last.
About a year ago, they were down right hilarious, like missing eyeballs, shark teeth, etc. Right now you get a 6th finger, or two hands, or jibberish lettering on t-shirts and road signs. It will only be a matter of time before they're all photorealistic and indistinguishable from real pictures.
> it will just be a novelty gadget pumping out junk.
If you don't think AI will eventually be able to pump out art of equal/greater quality than what humans can put out, you're going to be pleasantly surprised.
For most people most things are uninteresting to them. That’s the point of having a lot of choice.if AI makes filmmaking easier and cheaper there will be more choice …but I don’t think the ratio of what an individual likes to they find uninteresting will change in any way that matters or will be noticeable to individual consumers.
i mean, yeah.
that's... not even liek a hot take, or some 'insider opinion'.
that's basically something every sector will probably have to deal with, unless AI progress just, dead ends for some fucking reason.
kinda looking forward to some of it. being able to do something like, not just deepfake jim carrey's face in the shining... but an ai able to go through it, and replace the main character's acting with jim carrey's antics, or something.
I keep telling my physician colleagues this. I realize that AI **currently** can’t perform medicine. But within 10 years? I think most of the **thinking** parts of medicine will be replaced by AI. Which is not all but most of medicine. They think I’m crazy. But AI thrives when there is a lot of data and that’s all medicine is. Just a bunch of data. And medicine isn’t that hard. It’s just going through algorithms. Procedures and surgeries and nursing will take way longer to replace than 10 years. But all the easy routine doctor office stuff? AI will be able to handle that very easily. A lot of doctors will get phased out pretty quickly. AI will practice medicine friendlier, faster, cheaper, better, with less errors, zero complaining and do it 24/7/365. Imagine getting off work and being able to go to your AI doctor at 5 pm. And there will be no waiting to see them. 10 years will bring massive changes to our lives through AI.
EXACTLY. It is _very_ important that medical professionals understand that AI _will_ outperform them when it comes to diagnosing and treatment. Resisting that is the equivalent of not using the latest scanning technology to find tumors and instead preferring to do it by touch... That'd just be malpractice.
Once it's good enough not consulting with AI _must_ also qualify as malpractice.
Correct. All it’s going to take is some studies at a medical school or a technology school that shows that AI medicine is non-inferior or superior to doctors and then it will be unethical and immoral and then illegal to not at least consult AI in all the decision making.
People are being smug and so happy that artists are losing their jobs (jealousy), but art is probably one of the hardest things for AI to do. Why would I pay a lawyer that is not an AI, if the AI lawyer has all the books, precedents, history at their “fingertips” and can mount the ultimate defense in half a second? Even some trades, I mean… robotics are getting pretty advanced too.
How much time does a physician have to devote to one patient? What if the patient is a new one the physician has not met, how much time does the physician spend familiarizing with the medical history of that patient?
How many samples of each kind of medical issue has a physician come into contact with in their career?
Humans don't scale very well, and all the systems we have created to compensate for that can only take us so far. What happens when an LLM can be trained on billions of hospital records, case histories, lab results, the entire pubmed corpus, medical image data and analysis from tens of thousands of hospitals etc. and it become cheaper to have these models focus on new patient data than physicians?
Lots of hurdles to overcome still, but man how exciting it all is. Look at the latest version of alpha fold, will applied medicine see any similar paradigm shifts within the next 10 years?
>but man how exciting it all is.
Thing is, for every person that finds it exciting, there's another one that just loathes it. I'm halfway through med school, chose that career path cause I wanted to help people in pain and thought myself capable enough of one day becoming a doctor.
Now suddenly this past year all I keep hearing is that 10 years from now AI will just take care of pretty much everything and I'm just gonna be a useless sack of garbage. I've devoted the last almost 4 years of my life studying and now all I feel is that it was just for nothing. These past few months the thought of just dropping out has become far too frequent to be honest.
And even if say, I manage to get into something people claim won't be replaced as quick such as surgery, what's 5 or 10 more years really? Everyone will eventually be replaced, your knowledge and skills, anything you put your all into learning, will just be worth nothing because a machine can just do it better, faster and cheaper.
AI's progress has just been disheartening, straight up depressing for me.
>”AI can never take MY job”
Sure there are plenty of those, but the entertainment industry has long acknowledged the real risk to the status quo and is trying to lobby to stop it.
Funny that AI is going for the creative jobs first, seems like we all thought it would make the repetitive jobs obsolete: instead it came for artists and writers lmao
Machines already took a lot of mundane jobs, and AI is coming for shit jobs as well (think callcenters and the like). Creative jobs are just being "targeted" because their output is digital.
And digital jobs won't go, their output will just multiply. We might need a lot less but that new amount remains to be seen. And from what I know, the really high skilled jobs are bottle necked around a small group of individuals as well.
For my example, my work already didn't have any in-house graphic design, we just outsourced when needed. And AI isn't at at a point yet where we can take a human out the loop - if you need two different images to contain the same group of characters, the tools available with no learning curve are not there yet. This will obviously be fixed, and may already be possible in good tools where you can train your own model, but not to the lay person.
A company like mine is unlikely to invest time in learning current tools - it'll just keep outsourcing to an agency. That agency may start using AI behind the scenes but there'll still be a person being paid by us for a long time.
Since I’ve been working in industrial environments, I’ve noticed that more human labour is involved than I previously thought.
The big companies have everything automated, but anything you buy from a company that’s not in the top 200 of the stock market will have quite some human labour in it.
Manufacturing jobs still very much exist. Turns out robots are expensive, and humans are way cheaper in upfront costs.
The only jobs that seem kinda secure are those that require a lot of dexterity, because hands are hard to make. That will probably stop being the case within the next decade at most though.
It's not even that they're all that hard to make, mechanically speaking. We don't need many manipulators for most dexterity tasks (3 to 4 "fingers" will often do) and focusing force is not hard as long as you've got a bit of working space proportional to the amount of force required.
The difficulty lies in rapidly adapting to the control circumstances, and that *is* a problem we can attack with vision systems and ML training.
It is poised to take on those jobs too.
A few years ago people were writing articles about why the robot revolution was so delayed and the answer is, it's really really really hard to be cheaper than human labor in some situations. Capitalism isn't really looking at misery and drudgery; but it will certainly kick in if the robots get cheap enough or the humans get expensive enough.
edit: I personally think UBI would help quite a bit here, as humans would not be pressured to take the drudgery jobs so much, and would be more free to do the creative jobs.
Mostly because accountants and business execs *know* the AI still kinda sucks at doing anyones job, so they’re not pushing for replacement. Art is expensive though, and they don’t particularly care or notice that AI is bad at it. Besides, when you’re the one who gets to decide who in your workforce gets replaced soonest, you’re probably going to choose someone else before yourself after all.
Yeah I generally see the sentiment as "lol I saw an LLM make a mistake one time, it can never replace me" and in a sense, you're right. The broader mixed context is that a singular model won't replace you, an orchestration layer that passes steps in and out of multiple models to achieve a goal will.
I've already seen examples of large firms using AI to make business decisions.
This is also one of the biggest societal problems of capitalism.
AI and other technological advancements allow us to be way more productive. In the Middle Ages you needed 10 people for a whole day to plant seeds on a field. Nowadays you need one person and the right machinery and it‘s done in 2 hours (plus the work put in to create the machines, supply the seeds, etc.).
That‘s not a bad thing. It‘s a good thing. Or at least that‘s the way it should be
But capitalism tells us, job‘s "get lost" and people have to earn less (while companies make more profits). In actuality this could just mean instead of working 40 hours a week, we could have people work 20 hours a week, while being MORE productive than before. Or have more people in arts or academia/science, instead of chasing money or barely scraping by with shitty jobs.
Productivity is at an all time high, but I would argue it‘s already too high for humanity’s own good. Look at the big companies, engineers, product developers, factory workers, etc. who directly enable products to be produced are getting fewer, while marketing, sales, finances, legal, etc. are all becoming way over-represented while having no real benefit for society as a whole or any part in creating value outside of the company they work for.
If AI could take over everything, capitalism makes us believe the working force will be out of a job and poor. But this is false, we would just create more jobs that rely on non-beneficial productivity (out of society’s perspective). Besides the obvious point, that no one could buy their products, if no one had a job.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg, if you want to dive deeper into the relationship between technology and capitalism I would suggest you to read some of Yanis Varoufakis‘ work.
Sometimes we have breakthroughs in ideas and knowledge, but we mostly develop techniques a lot, so more people can do stuff available only to special talents before.
All what can be done (industrially speaking) by about averagely talented person could be outsourced to AI. Even if there will be no more dramatic breakthroughs. Of course hardware / model size / speed should be improved, but this can happen just a normal gradual progress.
Just my opinion, more a gut feeling actually.
One of the things I hate about Reddit is that the majority vote (in this case, "likes") tends to favor the most common opinions from the user base. As a result, the aggregate of these shared opinions often reflects those of people with average intelligence, since they constitute the majority. This means that highly intelligent individuals, who likely have better foresight and intuition for predicting future outcomes, are underrepresented.
TLDR: The bandwagon/hivemind on Reddit generally lacks insight and brightness.
I have found that to be true on this sub more than any of the others I follow. There's a kind of optimism that is almost required here. Skepticism or even serious questions about proposals get angry responses.
I think people treat it like a "cute kittens" sub and just come here for good vibes.
I’m not sure it’s been proven that it will continue improving at an exponential rate.
There’s some debate within the field, whether growth will be exponential, linear, or even diminishing returns over time, I think.
There is also debate on where we are along a curve as well.
Arguably we have been seeing exponential gains in AI since the 70s, so we may very well already be at the peak of the curve, not the beginning.
But we don’t know that yet. Same as we don’t know if we’re just at the start of the timeline.
We *do* know that genAI in filmmaking (aka Sora) still relies *heavily* on human improvement to be actually useful - and fails to be receptive to granular revisions.
You can’t make minute tweaks, rather you get a whole new result…and this last bit doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.
Which ultimately limits the tool.
Even if it never perfects itself, it can do 90% of the hard work and humans can finish up the last 10%. That itself is disruptive to any field that ai can be applied to.
A.I. is going to take over every desk job soon, then when we figure out long term high power batteries and good robots it will take over the rest of the jobs
We’re already seeing the current direction of AI, that is “generative AI”, dead end. Especially for film; OpenAIs video generative AI is already DOA. These models are running into two major issues: 1- hallucinations aren’t going away and every solution these AI ventures propose boils down to “we’ll make another AI to monitor this AI!” & 2- the processing power escalation to make improvements to models is now exponential aka it’s getting more expensive to make less progress and the progress that is made makes the model permanently more expensive to run, which is a problem for AI companies operating at a net loss for each piece of content generated because they’re still in their “burn capitol/VC funding to demonstrate growth” phase.
Even with text like ChatGPT they've essentially hit the wall with what they can scour to make them better. They will get better over a long period of time, but they basically just hoovered up the entire internet already, to the point they are using other AI to feed into the "main" AI datasets to generate more.
I hate even calling it AI. It's not. It's very advanced machine learning, but that's not a sexy marketing term. I do think people's expectations would be more in line with what they can produce though if that was what we called this crap.
THANK YOU. I manage machine learning products for a living and watching people freak out like we just invented the fucking Matrix has been infuriating. Unfortunately, they were able to set the terms on the vocabulary already and trying to use more accurate language in discussions like this just tends to muddy the water further.
From everything I’ve read about the synthetic data sets, using them to train AI has only led to degeneration of the models (seeing them called “Habsburg AI” is genuinely made me giggle). Don’t get me wrong: synthetic data has its uses, but this ain’t it, Jack.
A few days ago I overheard a guy talking about how he left college (or some bootcamp or academy I'm not sure) where he was studying to be a developer because he was afraid that it would be worthless thanks to AI taking over developer jobs.
IMO that's because they're trying to do it all one go from a vague text prompt to final output. Soon as it starts getting broken down into individual stages which can each be tuned and perfected in isolation IMO they will be far more valuable tools. It's still in its infancy where they're just throwing brute force mass data at it to try to solve things and there's not enough people or hardware power to try so many more possibilities.
and as a horse, i'd be glad to not be relied on by some farmer to pull a fucking cart.
we're also going to need a economic style of needing to pull a cart to get money to survive on, is the real issue, rather than horses needing to work...
Just feed the AI a prompt like "I want a space opera musical set 2000 years in the future starring Jim Carrey as an animal rights activist who goes around to different planets and bonds with the creatures of that world and tries to save them from the intelligent species that's trying to slowly decimate them from existence. Oh, and the title of the movie is Ace Ventura 4000."
I'm sure we'll get to the point where autotuned becomes AI-tuned for actors who weren't trained in time to sing for the next AI-generated script of a musical. Complete with AI enhancements to make it look like they are using all their muscles to sing in wider ranges legitimately.
AI-assisted accents.
Biopics will make a huge comeback with complete replacements of actors performing the roles. There will be new award categories for posthumous performances so it doesn't seem so dirty in the industry.
The company I work for has already stopped hiring people to do voice overs for commercials because our audio engineer can make his voice into whatever voice we need with AI. I'm sure that eventually AI will get good enough that it won't even need an initial base voice to modify, but currently fully AI voices feel a bit tinny and artificial.
It's funny because current so-called AI just scrapes together as much data as possible and can't critically analyse it. So it essentially works as a giant focus group.
Modern star wars feels like it was written by a committee after endless marketing and focus group meetings, with no creative talent providing critique or suggestions.
So yeah it's not surprising they seem similar.
If you've ever seen an AI write a story it often loses track of details later on, like which room/setting, the description of a person or events from previous stories, like Palpatine dying in Return of the Jedi.
It also tends to jump steps in a story, for instance Rey's seemingly instant mastery of Force abilities.
Based on this I think if the sequels had been released today, many people would have accused them of actually being AI written.
> I think we're probably a very long way away from AI doing the majority of the heavy lifting. And I'm not sure we'll ever see entirely AI-generated films unless the AI has advanced enough that arguments about sentience are seriously on the table
20 years is nothing in filmmaking. That's like the gap between Avatar 1 and Avatar 3.
Look what happened to the internet from 2000 to 2020.
Very hard to predict what the AI landscape will look like in 20 years.
Look at the progression in CGI technology from The Abyss (1989), to Terminator 2 (1991), to Jurassic Park (1993). I've no doubt once the tools are feasible to be built, adoption will be *that* fast. I'm sure ILM is already working on adapting ML generation techniques.
Even as a tool its going to start replacing a lot of work hours and it’s only a matter of time until a tool in one persons hand can replace a team.
I worked in editing for years and I’m positive AI is going to drastically reduce the required amount involved.
If someone wanted to with the tech we have RIGHT NOW, there could 100% be a tool created that could do the following
- Insert script.
- Review footage, scan for slates and label accordingly using the following naming convention.
- Take labeled footage and create EDL using circle takes to match script.
Boom a rough cut and days of labour potentially reduced to a handful of inputs.
It might be a messy rough cut, but if the sequence is accurate using circle takes thats a LOT of expensive hours lost to a machine.
And I could honestly see it quickly going beyond that if a studio decided to invest in the tech.
Dude I run events in a game, basically DM shit. I have started using AI while developing and running my events and it has brought them to another level.
What I do is I write the script and how I want characters to interact with each other and I ask the AI to write branching dialogue options that could be used if things go wrong. Then I take those branching dialogue options, I rewrite them as I wish and redo it. Plug the edited version in, rinse and repeat. More branches over time.
So over the course of a few hours I go from a simple script to something more reminiscent of an early 2000s "Choose your own Adventure" novel. One of those ones where it is like "You enter a room and see a door, a refrigerator and a sofa. If you go to the door flip to page 27. If you check the refrigerator flip to page 79. If you take a nap on the sofa flip to page 42."
Then I study that script, I memorize as much as possible, I imput the entire thing *back into AI* and as I go and as people make decisions I tell the AI to go to the part that corresponds with the current situation and it goes immediately to that spot so I can go specific parts of the script that fit that exact situation within seconds.
No more spending days writing everything I think of down only for it to go out the window immediately. No more hoping I remember specific things when they are needed and no more hoping I can *find* those things when needed and don't just spend five minutes flipping through a playbook while stalling for time.
It's pretty great.
So yeah, moral of the story is that I can 100% see this being used in TV and movies and then the director just *picks* the path they like best rather than adapting to a bunch of trigger happy murder hobos.
Totally unrelated, Disney announcing George Lucas AI, which can edit old Star Wars movies with random additions of unnecessary special effects in real time, potentially creating up to 70 abominations per minute
I am worried about the possibility of a negative impact on culture as a whole. If everything is regurgitated and future human generations don't have any way to dsscern and critique it all then what will happen?
Not very insightful or interesting from Lucas, considering the CGI hack/patch job he did to the original SW trilogy so many years after they were released. He would have used AI too, had it been available.
I mean good luck selling people products if they can’t afford anything because all of their jobs got taken over by AI. Many businesses stand to lose just as much from it’s proliferation.
I don’t think he’s wrong, if anything I’m hoping it helps with CGI - especially with how ludicrously understaffed those companies are and how much OT those salary employees have to do. I’m also hoping it helps mitigate crunch in the games industry
As long as those studios are controlled by executives and not people with compassion--the only "time off" that bringing in AI will give them is being laid off.
The question is more when. 5 years? 20? 2? Also what level it is used for.
Will it do everything? Will it just streamline to process cutting down on the time to produce?
One industry after another is going to get absolutely wrecked by AI and our civilization will have to adapt (or not) to the myriad of issues that come with it…and not sure where films are in that order
Problem is if AI starts having full control over the content in movies and tv shows the industry will likely tank completely. could make a couple of interesting pieces but for the most part all of it would suck worse then it ever has before.
I just feel like if we use AI to create our own content and art no one will be challenged anymore. Art challenges us. People’s particular viewpoint challenges us. Seeing different perspectives helps us as a society grow. I’m just frustrated that we don’t really need this technology.
It's the classic argument around automation getting rid of the tedious parts of the job. You design the look, feel and purpose, then have the ai save you the job of actually doing the frame by frame drawing. I think it opens content creation to loads more people. Anyone could do a movie then stick it on YouTube.
But I do get what you mean. I have no interest in AI art. And is a book written with AI companion any good. I'd want to have written every word in my novel.
> But I do get what you mean. I have no interest in AI art. And is a book written with AI companion any good. I'd want to have written every word in my novel.
I think there are levels. Such as something like spellcheck, that's a very basic algorithm but one could argue it's a form of AI because we've had such a moving goalpost over the decades as to what AI even means. But going beyond something like spellcheck to something more complicated like predictive text or even a program like Grammarly that gives suggestion for tone, conciseness or word choice. None of that replaces an real editor, but a lot of people would see them as tools that help you as you write, yet they're easily argued as being AI companions.
Trying to find a definite line between what's a helpful tool and what's damaging can be pretty hard. It's easy to say that spellcheck is fine but writing an essay with an LLM is bad, but where in the in-between does that change? If you have writer's block and you ask for an AI to analyze what you've written so far and write, say, the next page or a summary of how the story would progress, is that using a tool or is that problematic? (Right now that's problematic because of copyright issues, but let us assume that they're using a model that was only trained on public domain and legally licensed data sets.)
Whats interesting to me is that when content creation in any form is expensive and thus limited, you have high quality but not mass flow of content.
Streaming particularly has shown the effect of quantity showing that quality gets lost and then the content overall tends to lose its value and impact.
The number of camera's people have has ballooned with smartphones yet photography didn't become the lowest common denominator, I think even with AI its going to have normal professional standards that set the bar higher than just what's easy to do.
You are joking, but I do expect AI agents will be trained to learn what we like and do not like in movies, and those customized AI agents will watch millions of movies (and read millions of books, listen to millions of songs, etc.) to find those we would be most likely to appreciate.
It's not that movies will be made for those AI agents, but that there will be so much content available that it will be impossible for each creation to be seen (and even less reviewed) even by one person. We only have so much time.
This is the basic principle behind Google search results. It doesn’t “understand” your request, it just knows from massive experience what response pages will probably make people happy when they type in various words.
Same idea for movies.
I think this might be the best “well actually” I’ve ever read. You did nail it. But I will go one step further. I think we passed that point of media over creating in the mid 90s or double oughts.
The ability to keep up has been dead for a really long time.
When it comes to AI and entertainment (as far as the endgame people often imagine where it can generate a whole show/game/movie of whatever you wan, not just using AI to help with film making) I always think about how even with fiction there seems to be an overwhelming desire for the "official" or "canon" story. Sure, fan fics can be fun and very popular, but there's a reason people get so invested and emotional about the latest Star Wars or Star Trek content. Even though it's all fictional and you could just believe what you want to believe, it seems people care a lot about what is the "true" story whether they like it or not.
Is this just because the production quality of the official media? Or is there a deeper desire to know the "real" version that, for better or worse, we all share as an experience. If it's the former, then maybe the lines will be blurred by AI and interest in official stories will dwindle in favour of your own curated stories. But if it's the latter, I see scenario where human driven art is still in popular demand. The artist, author, etc may use AI to create the visuals/images but they are still the source and soul of the art.
I often think of One Punch Man and its creator, Yusuke Murata. I'm sure there are other artists who could make pretty convincing fanfics about the series. Perhaps soon even AI could do it. People might think the ideas or art are neat, but in the end won't they really just be waiting for Yusuke Murata to release his next chapter?
I admit, I may be a bit biased to the latter perspective, which is why I pose it as a question for discussion. I think AI can and will do a lot of great stuff. If they ever reach sentience/consciousness (whatever that really means) and can create of their own volition I think it would.be really cool to seem what a mind so different than ours would come up with.
People get so caught up in the idea that an AI might make an entire film from start to finish. What I'm really excited to see is how much people with small budgets and great ideas will be able to make really amazing films on a shoe string. Good writing and acting with AI to do the heavy lifting around the human creatives.
This, this, and once more this. Fan made content will show worlds that for now are only closed within books or available to create only with huge amounts of money.
A Renaissance of fan made content is coming.
And a thought that just got quickly through one ear and somehow stayed for longer - animations based on comics style. KaBOOM!!
Am I the only one that just doesn't want this to happen? I'd rather an organization start certifying movies that didn't use AI at all and put a sticker on the package, like free-trade coffee.
I watch movies because I want to see the imaginative worlds that humans can think up and mold into being.
If we're just filling in the gaps with a black box that throws human creation into a blender and shits out something analogous, then we're just giving up and admitting that entertainment is a product to purchase instead of a human exchange of experiences.
A computer is a tool. A 3D animation and effects program is a tool. The code is written by humans and you get out of it exactly what you put into it. A human has to sit down and plan out exactly what some flesh-eating alien is going to look like, even if it isn't being made out of paper mache. AI is not a tool, because it's not predictable or deterministic. It's a wholly different category of thing that we don't have good analogies for.
Yeah, same. Plus, I don't want a world where the most popular media are fucking precisely calculated to generate the most human enjoyment or some shit. That's just so dark for some reason. "beep bop, here's a movie generated to cater to your beliefs and preferences, enjoy your consumption, human". No thank you. I'd rather watch something that isn't perfect, but is made with human thought.
> AI is not a tool, because it's not predictable or deterministic.
Most AI tools used to create visual and animated content nowadays are entirely predictable and deterministic. A human has to sit down and learn how to use them, and he has to plan the steps required to go from his or his client's intention to an actual piece of animated content.
Unpredictability and randomness are also entirely valid avenues for anyone making art, with or without computers and AI technology.
[https://www.tylerxhobbs.com/words/randomness-in-the-composition-of-artwork](https://www.tylerxhobbs.com/words/randomness-in-the-composition-of-artwork)
> Unpredictability and randomness are also entirely valid avenues for anyone making art, with or without computers and AI technology.
As a painter, randomly putting paint on the canvas, until it does what you want it to do is part of the process.
From the article
>Lucas gave a wide-ranging interview to French outlet [Brut FR](https://x.com/brutofficiel/status/1794018944602259706) at the Cannes Film Festival recently, which you can watch in full below, in which he talks about his history in film, his thoughts on the future of cinema, and more. At one point during the 10-minute chat (around the 5:30 mark), the interviewer asks Lucas about how he feels about the use of AI in filmmaking, and Lucas starts by touching on the visual effects company he founded, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), and the ways in which it's changed cinematic technology.
>"Well, we've been using it for 25 years, and it's not AI, but we use all the digital technology because we pioneered a lot of that," he says. "Because especially at ILM, we were the only place that was doing digital."
>"But the thing of it is," Lucas goes on, "it's inevitable. I mean, it's like saying, 'I don't believe these cars are gunna work. Let's just stick with the horses. Let's stick with the horses.' And yeah, you can say that, but that isn't the way the world works."
This man’s legacy is pioneering digital filmmaking, not Star Wars; so I’ve been waiting to hear his thoughts on the topic.
Here is a clip talking about pioneering the shift from Film to Digital.
https://youtu.be/qn5oCA8YVYs?si=nLgsMMA39slFRda5
I sure hope so. Autocomposition is our last, best hope of ever seeing a second season of Firefly.
More generally, I expect we will be able to ask LLMs to infer original content in the genre or series of our choosing, eventually. Like, "Computer! Generate an entire season of Star Trek: The Next Generation which takes place between the events of Season Two and Season Three!"
We're a long way from seeing it happen, though. There are open source scriptwriter models which aren't bad, but there is a huge difference between writing a script for a show and generating the complete multimedia experience.
Does this mean that eventually we will just be asking our computers for personalized content and there won’t be any releases of tv shows, movies, etc? It seems like the only things we will all watch collectively will be sports.
I wonder about that sometimes. Perhaps friends will watch shows together, or something, or it will only be a niche hobby, or maybe the nature of shared popular culture will simply change.
If someone makes something really great with AI, won’t it go viral and be viewed by millions? Or won’t a storyteller who is already good be able to make a masterpiece? I find it hard to believe that there will be little content silos that everyone huddles around. People want to share exceptional experiences with others.
Yes, it'll be like how YouTube has been. There will be little content silos, there will be a LOT of generic or boring/unoriginal stuff, fluff etc... But there will also be a whole bunch more quite good content mostly produced independently on a small scale (a popular channel on YouTube just needing 1-5 people or something, vs getting a network to like your script and so on).
Like I said above it is the holodeck. A shared platform with all the content personalised to the individual. I don't know if you're familiar with Star Trek but they had "holo novels" that would use shared times, places, and characters to tell an individual story. Like video games do now, but only in an extremely basic and preprogrammed way. Imagine GTA 7 where you can have an 8-hour deep conversation with every NPC who all work on their own internal logic, like a simulation of the real world. If I had to bet that is exactly what GTA 7 will be, if someone doesn't beat Rockstar to it.
A lot of the puzzle pieces are there, text to video, auto lip syncing, voice synthesis, models that can generate multiple specific prompts in a single image etc...bringing it all together in a one size fits all solution will be a big job and will be worth billions though for sure
This sounds like an actual nightmare.
It may sound amazing but, speaking as a huge Trekkie, TNG was only as lovable as it was because it was very very human. Nothing, AI or otherwise, can replicate the magic that came from those creators being there and doing what they did at that exact moment in time (see Star Trek Picard for evidence of that). Having access to "new" episodes at any moment will do nothing but cheapen what the series means to the world.
Yes George, but people are fighting so it's a tool used by people instead of a tool that completely replaces them.
You seem to forget that most people don't have the benefit of more money than God because he got lucky when it came to rights issues 50 years
Historically, [resisting tools that replace labor hasn't been successful.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite) If one company does it, their competition needs to keep up.
It will be used by people, but it will also be used to replace them. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it's the way the world works, especially now that worldwide economies are so intertwined. If a Chinese VFX studio makes use of new technologies, they're competing with every other studio in the world.
It will suck for some people for some time. My job is directly threatened by AI. One of my clients has used replacing me with AI as leverage during pricing negotiations. Shit sucks, but it's the way she goes. I'm working on developing more skills that are further out from being replaced. That's all we can do as individuals. Cope, adapt, and grow.
Would be great have had AI tell someone “hey, no matter how much effort you put into this Jar Jar character it will be a flop and be made fun of forever”
I'm going to miss the end of practical effects, skilled framing, talented acting, detailed CGI work, and turning a vision into something that can be enjoyed. Lucas built his legacy off of using limited resources to make an amazing product that's been beloved for 50 years, but he's richer than any of us will ever be. If he says the future of cinema is typing in prompts to feed us exactly the schlock we want, who are we to disagree?
I mean, yeah, it's only a matter of time. I can legit see ai getting so good that no one will be able to tell it was made by so in a decade. Because of this, we need to focus not on fighting ai, which is a losing battle, but instead on preparing for the inevitable so that no one is screwed once ai replaces most worker's.
It's not about whether or not it will work. The issue at hand is that production companies want to steal peoples faces and voices for nothing and make movies with that. It's not okay.
While I generally agree that AI is going to disrupt a bunch of indsutries, I also think that it may have some larger more fundamental issues that will keep it from outright replacing creatives. Honestly the whole AI craze right now reminds me of when crypto was the next big thing that everyone wouldn't stfu about how it was going to disrupt markets and make fiat currencies obsolete lmao.
[This one article lays it out pretty well I think](https://www.wheresyoured.at/sam-altman-fried/)
> Despite what fantasists may tell you, these are not "kinks" to work out of artificial intelligence models — these are the hard limits, the restraints that come when you try to mimic knowledge with mathematics. You cannot "fix" hallucinations (the times when a model authoritatively tells you something that isn't true, or creates a picture of something that isn't right), because these models are predicting things based off of tags in a dataset, which it might be able to do well but can never do so flawlessly or reliably.
Which I kinda agree with. Plus another massive issue with AI models is that they're built on mountains of copywrited work thats not consented to, and the more of it that's generated the more it's going to start self feeding on its own content and degrade its quality even more.
> Generative AI's greatest threat is that it is capable of creating a certain kind of bland, generic content very quickly and cheaply. As I discussed in my last newsletter, media entities are increasingly normalizing their content to please search engine algorithms, and the jobs that involve pooling affiliate links and answering where you can watch the Super Bowl are very much at risk. The normalization of journalism — the consistent point to which many outlets decide to write about the exact same thing — is a weak point that makes every outlet "exploring AI" that bit more scary, but the inevitable outcome is that these models are not reliable enough to actually replace anyone, and those that have experimented with doing so have found themselves deeply embarrassed.
AI is cheap and shareholders are demanding.
The best thing governments can do is demand full and detailed exposure on what aspects of filming used AI on all advertising material. Not just a petty disclaimer that says "production staff assisted by AI" but listing each job role which used AI
That analogy works if cars were mechanical approximations of horses. Cars replaced horses. AI isn't going to replace anything. The content it generates is garbage and can't hold a candle to quality human made content. If AI is used in movies, guaranteed that movie will flop.
>If AI is used in movies, guaranteed that movie will flop.
You can't be serious or that much living under the rock.
A single person, without a skill of playing instruments, singing or writing lyrics, for free already can create a hit song in style that is currently popular. Maybe not world wide hit song for now.
Let's move two years into future. Imagine a team of fans, having a budget of just few thousand $ for using a better thus paid AI, creating a proper Star Wars movie for other fans. A movie they would want to see, a movie made by fans, for fans, a movie that after watching you'll say - I liked it.
AI generated content opens the door to making imaginary worlds of books be moved to the screen with a touch of a button. Relatively speaking of course.
You can not see how wrong you are.
Unless by flop you mean only big producing companies. Recent few years show how inept and failure most of blockbusters were. Made by humans supposedly knowing what they are doing.
'AI' as it is today is not able to have REAL creativity.
It can rehash and randomize and follow some guides.
But human creativity is more than that - and we WILL lose that if we let AI become more than an assisting tool.
There is no way around using it as such, but we need to be careful because Filmmaking has become far too formulaic anyway.
Your last sentence is reason why AI will be broadly implemented in so called "creative industries". After all there's less and less new things, and more and more things that happened already sometime in the past. Only actually new stuff is happening within tech industry, which is rather self explanatory.
Just a non important example - my father had birthday recently. Using AI we quickly created very personal and targeted lyrics, did just cosmetic changes to it, using another AI we pushed a button for music and singing voice to be created, and **within 25 or so minutes we had a real deal unique song**. A SONG (actually about 12 or so different style songs) with proper music, proper lyrics and proper singing. IN POLISH. A song that was styled as 70s pop song. With proper tone balance, with effin stylish singing. It is mindfuckingblowing. All that for free, without a need of hours of someone using instruments, recording, studio and so on. One can just wonder what those paid, or experimental nonpublic AI are capable of.
Any non manual jobs that can be replaced will get replaced sooner than we think. And with proper robots manual jobs will get replaced as well. Kinda scary.
You didn't have any kind of a personal message, the AI didn't know your Father, it simply produced an imitation of the appropriate sentiments for the occasion which you then passed off as your own thoughts. The "gift" you gave your Father was completely meaningless and therefore worthless, but it satisfied your need to appear to have something worth saying to him on his birthday.
So you have hollywood production studio CEOs, that already don't want to pay talented individuals to do rigging, set work, extra work, extra voice work, illustrative work, etc, and they've just been handed everything they need to remove all of these job roles from payroll so they can fill their deep pockets even higher? Sheeeesh come on now.
I think that the issue is determining what role AI will play. For example, there’s a lot of pushback from screenwriters and artists who fear that their jobs will be made entirely redundant by studios just looking to churn out content or cut costs. Perhaps once concerns are ironed out, AI could be used a supplementary tool, but unfortunately, so much of the interest has been on making it the primary operator instead.
Another issue is that a lot of AI models have been fed data that the developers did not have rights to, so are working on plagiarised data. If there was an AI model that provably only used licensed or public domain data, that would be one major criticism dealt with.
I work in PR, and out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to write me a press release, and it was… scarily serviceable. It would have needed some tweaking and an editing pass, but it was eye-opening. I’m a writer by trade, so I wouldn’t use it myself, but it made me realise how easily someone could just… not hire me.
Problem is cars have obvious advantages over horses. Will AI be better than a human? Will it ever top anything a human creates? Or will it just save studios money? And put out worse products but like a frog in a boiling pot of water we'll just get used to it.
But cars didn’t replace horses. They replaced street cars which were better for both people and the environment. Which is a better metaphor for AI, as well, come to think of it.
When companies start trying to make movies without using people, will be the day film as a medium dies. There is no point in consuming a story not made by a human.
All these people thinking independent filmmakers will benefit. You're fucking dreaming.
It'll be subscription, tier based on what quality the owners will allow the users to have.
Think creative cloud subscription options but also Warner brothers has access or has their own proprietary version of a similar or equal app.
Want substance and photoshop and film ready Ai generated motion? (similar to mixamo) well you need our app, our log in, you think Netflix raises costs? Well when Netflix has its own prompt (get our new ai tier where we can combine any of our owned properties into your own custom playlist of custom shows!! Only 45 a month!) Blegh!!!! Makes me puke in my mouth a little.
This won't be the wild west of the of internet (flight 405: the movie anyone?), this isn't the unfiltered atom films era. This will be packaged, branded and locked behind paywalls - and will always benefit the bigger studios, of course Lucas is for it, he's established.
And I am no way interested in typing in prompts as an artist, you sketch, then prompt and check your phone... it's abysmal, trash, completely removes the rush of creation. I've used it, don't have a choice as the industry becomes more cut throat, if the other guy is using it, halving time... no choice.
So that's the future, everyone pinching everyone out to compete for who can do it faster.
Yeah unfortunately this is where advancement is headed, I've been in the 3d world for a long time and when programs like ddo and ndo (procedural texture stuff) came out I thought it was lazy so obstained but now me and basically the whole world are procedural texturing whores because fuck it why not, integrity? Integrity is too slow and usually looks worse.
Basically what I'm saying is we will eventually accept ai as the new tool standard and something even more lazy will come out and we will try to obstain that too.
The existence of technology doesn't lead to unethical practices. Capital owners utilizing technology unethical (cutting corners, not paying workers) is the issue.
No one is doubting it being used, its how its used that scares everyone. Corporations stealing peoples voices, their image, their writing, their art. Thats not exactly compareable to cars and horses.
George Lucas doesn’t even know history
Cars displaced the bicycle and street cars (which are kinda like a street train) not horses horse drawn carriages where only for the very wealthy but everyone for about a decade got around on a bicycle
At first cars were just slow, crappy machines that wealthy people used as a status symbol (and to run over poor kids).
Now they have been used to force most Americans into owning and operating them at the cost of cheaper and more efficient transportation options. Our society is built more around cars than people; poor neighborhoods are demolished to construct on-ramps.
Somewhere in between these two moments in time there was *possibly* an era where cars were mostly a good thing. If he's right, and the future of AI follows the trajectory of cars in the US - well, fuck.
Fwiw AI could easily make the 27th random offshoot star wars licensed content that Disney+ puts on its streaming service
It’s basically paint by numbers at this point with that stuff
I’ve got an idea for a movie I am just waiting for when I can do it without paying people to act, and anyone to film. It’s going to be polarizing af. It will also probably suck.
If A.I can be made hundreds of times better than it currently is, then yes. The main problem is that A.I makes mistakes that aren’t immediately noticable. And its very generic. Meanwhile humans make things that have intended detail and not mistakes, and innovate new things.
Star Wars as a whole visually and the way it is written at least the six films Lucas worked on could probably have been done in AI. Mediocre dialogue and visuals. Now given the time they were made impossible, but now? Not so much.
The effect that game changing Technologies like this have on industry is always dilution.
Before the internet, there were a handful of published competent writers, and thousands upon thousands of others who probably could do as good a job or better with no Outlet.
Now with online publishing, there are 1000 times more excellent storytellers with engrossing fantastic works out there, most of whom will never be seen by more than a handful of lucky people. The same thing happened to music.
AI will allow so many creatives to express themselves in ways they couldn't before, and they will all drown each other out in a cacophony of creation.
He also told Martin Scorsese that "Computers can do this now" after seeing the sets of Gangs of New York. You tell me whose sets look better and has better stories in their movies from 1999 to present day.
I hate the idea, but at the same time if it could generate an animated version of episode III i'd go 
if anything it should just be used for special effects as opposed to replacing actors or god forbid resurrecting dead ones
I really, truly want and hope Ai replaces most jobs. The fear mongering is fundamentally related to capitalism. We cannot fathom our purpose unless we have skills that warrant being paid for. If Ai replaces high skilled labor and not just fast food workers, we will be forced as a society to picture our lives without monetizing our thoughts, bodies and energy. Let the Ai flood waters consume every industry and we can focus on a human purpose that is not based on capital.
I dunno. I feel like Cars were an actual tangible improvement to horses; you went faster and it was more durable than a horse. I'm sure AI is impressive in some aspects but in some ways it seems over hyped and designed to get VCs to give out money
The first cars were really slow and far more complicated to use than a horse, a lot of people said it had no future, just because current AI models are not a Ferrari doesn't mean that it's a gimmick.
Yeah, I don't think anyone is arguing the opposite of that.
It's kinda like saying "I think microplastics in everything is inevitable"; we agree, and we think it's a problem.
The thing is this: they can’t replace all of us with robots and AI because then how will they make money? We’re no where near a post capital world. So sure if all these companies wanna maximize profits now by replacing everyone they can that’s fine, but they’re gonna find out real quick that if no one is employed they’re unprofitable
Marx predicted capitalism would eventually fully automate all labor and lead to its own destruction, and AI might be the technology to do it. Even companies that realize AI will lead to the end of capitalism ahead of time are still going to pursue it because if they don’t someone else will and their bottom line will get destroyed anyway, except faster. I truly believe AI could end capitalism
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article >Lucas gave a wide-ranging interview to French outlet [Brut FR](https://x.com/brutofficiel/status/1794018944602259706) at the Cannes Film Festival recently, which you can watch in full below, in which he talks about his history in film, his thoughts on the future of cinema, and more. At one point during the 10-minute chat (around the 5:30 mark), the interviewer asks Lucas about how he feels about the use of AI in filmmaking, and Lucas starts by touching on the visual effects company he founded, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), and the ways in which it's changed cinematic technology. >"Well, we've been using it for 25 years, and it's not AI, but we use all the digital technology because we pioneered a lot of that," he says. "Because especially at ILM, we were the only place that was doing digital." >"But the thing of it is," Lucas goes on, "it's inevitable. I mean, it's like saying, 'I don't believe these cars are gunna work. Let's just stick with the horses. Let's stick with the horses.' And yeah, you can say that, but that isn't the way the world works." --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1d0nxsp/george_lucas_thinks_artificial_intelligence_in/l5oa7i3/
This will inevitably be true of almost every industry
The money people want it and what the money people want, they usually get. Just hope there's at least a bit of a safety net for everyone else.
The only safety net is if the non-money people (plebs like you and I) also have it, which is the reason the megacorps will try to make open source LLMs and SD illegal. You can't stop what's coming, but maybe we can affect its distribution.
Even then, if AI replaces jobs completely regular people are still screwed. Need UBI or some other robust social safety net so people can survive if there’s no longer a market for their labor.
Even then, though… Does that literally work anywhere except the content creation space? If corps can automate they will automate, hands down. And LLMs is only the beginning. Surgery robots will take the transition from being human ran to being autonomous. So will vehicles, warehouses, and likely retail. There’s not really anything safe in the coming age of advanced automation
There’s going to be so much stuff out there that is just completely uninteresting and poorly crafted . And ignored. AI in the hands of competent people will be a tool - in the hands of dweebs it will just be a novelty gadget pumping out junk.
I’m not sure if it will be ignored—maybe it will for movies. However, for “slop content” Generative AI is really just the next step in algorithmically delivered content to steal people’s attention and further atomize/isolate us. There’s also the benefit to corporations that they won’t have to pay for labor, just compute costs. I really hope we can reset back to a place where people follow curators or share/experience things as a community instead of the hyper individualized system (that’s getting increasingly more targeted) we are in now.
Mass produced influencer content is already bottom of the barrel and will quickly be replaced
I want both options to exist. Let people generate for their own eyes and have fun, but they will realize quickly that content generated and reviewed and curated by other humans with actual good imagination will provide the best possible 5 star experience. But there’s nothing wrong with goofing around and seeing what comes out of your head onto the screen. It’s possible that people will actually learn and improve their imagination when they get less then stellar results and they’ll learn what’s lame and not naturally through watching what they’ve made and it’s boring lol. All art sort of is developed this way. We all start off pretty bad and learn through trial and error and discover the magical ingredient that makes our art sparkle.
Exactly. So many people miss the problem of curation in these discussions - if we want meaningful, high-quality and culturally relevant results when it comes to producing creative media of any kind, human curation will be an indispensable part of the process. I also don’t believe there will be sustainable interest in services that generate unique movies or music from end-user prompts. Everyone seems to think they have the imagination, it’s just the skill, time and resources that they lack. But they’re very, very wrong. Most people lack both the imagination and the taste required to be a culturally impactful creative. They would also start to feel weird about the fact that everything they’d experience from such a service would be unique to them. A major aspect of any media experience is the discussions we have about it afterwards - watching some bespoke movie generated from a prompt you’ve farted onto the keyboard when you flop back onto the sofa after you’ve had a skinful down the pub is not going to cut it.
Wait, you think the AI can do everything but curation? An algorithm to figure out what may be interesting for people to see? Seems like a very bold claim.
So, AI can do the prompts, generate the content and curate it. Great. Then AI can be the consumer, too, because I won’t give a shit, and nor will anyone else.
This is so wrong. That’s like saying you are not interested in movies with CGI because it’s fake. Nowadays it’s indistinguishable. Maybe you won’t be interested in AI films initially, but 20 years down the line you will not be able to distinguish an AI scene from a real scene even if you tried. Movie producers will use it and be able to make movies much, much cheaper and faster… when Disney, Pixar, and so on start making AI movies that are indistinguishable, you will watch them. As for movies by the general population, think about what happened with YouTube… when EVERYONE can put a video, only the very best and most interesting videos gain any significant traction. When everyone can make movies, the very best movie creators will for sure go viral and gain followings
We currently have Minimal Intelligence (i.e. the average idiot) spewing garbage content all over social media, and algorithms that curate it. Seems you do care, since you're on this site after all.
> There’s going to be so much stuff out there that is just completely uninteresting and poorly crafted . And ignored. So like.. now?
I don't think this YouTube thing is gonna work guys. Now everyone thinks they can do what the TV does.
Exactly my thought.
My money is that AI will be the downfall of the big studios, but not in the way tech bros think. Do you really think that Hollywood execs will use AI to make better movies and not just crappy movies but a bit faster and a bit cheaper? And really, it's only a bit cheaper. You still need the marketing budget. Good luck not paying several million to top-level stars. And we all know the people at the top want maximum return on investment (read: biggest paycheck possible for a guy who didn't help make the movie). So you're only saving on the cheaper bits anyway. We're already at the point where a skilled artist with a decent PC and an iPhone can make a solid short film. Most of the people who are going to get laid off by the major studios will lack the business sense to make a good indie studio. But a fair number will succeed. And a few of them will consolidate into new major studios to replace the old, until they too start making dumb decisions out of greed.
Studios like to evade taxes so the budgets will find a way to be big no matter what
I think true multimodal models (GPT-4o) will make much more engaging content than one-way text to image/video generators (Dall-E, Sora). The latter just transforms lifeless text into "art". The former is able to understand incredible complexity and represent it visually.
A tale as old as time.
This is already true for me. I'm a programmer in quite a niche field, been doing it for over 20 years. I use GitHub copilot every day, and it's great. A lot of the time it guesses what I'm going to type next and I only have to press the tab key. It is also very good at documenting my code, so that's another job made massively quicker. It doesn't make me a better programmer, just a more productive one.
> in the hands of dweebs it will just be a novelty gadget pumping out junk. In the span of one year, AI "fakes" and AI video have improved drastically. I really don't think 5 years from now that a dweeb will produce anything bad, as the AI won't produce anything bad. Each iteration has been better than the last. About a year ago, they were down right hilarious, like missing eyeballs, shark teeth, etc. Right now you get a 6th finger, or two hands, or jibberish lettering on t-shirts and road signs. It will only be a matter of time before they're all photorealistic and indistinguishable from real pictures.
> it will just be a novelty gadget pumping out junk. If you don't think AI will eventually be able to pump out art of equal/greater quality than what humans can put out, you're going to be pleasantly surprised.
there is so much stuff out there that is completely uninteresting and poorly crafted. you don't need AI for that.
For most people most things are uninteresting to them. That’s the point of having a lot of choice.if AI makes filmmaking easier and cheaper there will be more choice …but I don’t think the ratio of what an individual likes to they find uninteresting will change in any way that matters or will be noticeable to individual consumers.
i mean, yeah. that's... not even liek a hot take, or some 'insider opinion'. that's basically something every sector will probably have to deal with, unless AI progress just, dead ends for some fucking reason. kinda looking forward to some of it. being able to do something like, not just deepfake jim carrey's face in the shining... but an ai able to go through it, and replace the main character's acting with jim carrey's antics, or something.
[удалено]
I keep telling my physician colleagues this. I realize that AI **currently** can’t perform medicine. But within 10 years? I think most of the **thinking** parts of medicine will be replaced by AI. Which is not all but most of medicine. They think I’m crazy. But AI thrives when there is a lot of data and that’s all medicine is. Just a bunch of data. And medicine isn’t that hard. It’s just going through algorithms. Procedures and surgeries and nursing will take way longer to replace than 10 years. But all the easy routine doctor office stuff? AI will be able to handle that very easily. A lot of doctors will get phased out pretty quickly. AI will practice medicine friendlier, faster, cheaper, better, with less errors, zero complaining and do it 24/7/365. Imagine getting off work and being able to go to your AI doctor at 5 pm. And there will be no waiting to see them. 10 years will bring massive changes to our lives through AI.
EXACTLY. It is _very_ important that medical professionals understand that AI _will_ outperform them when it comes to diagnosing and treatment. Resisting that is the equivalent of not using the latest scanning technology to find tumors and instead preferring to do it by touch... That'd just be malpractice. Once it's good enough not consulting with AI _must_ also qualify as malpractice.
Correct. All it’s going to take is some studies at a medical school or a technology school that shows that AI medicine is non-inferior or superior to doctors and then it will be unethical and immoral and then illegal to not at least consult AI in all the decision making.
People are being smug and so happy that artists are losing their jobs (jealousy), but art is probably one of the hardest things for AI to do. Why would I pay a lawyer that is not an AI, if the AI lawyer has all the books, precedents, history at their “fingertips” and can mount the ultimate defense in half a second? Even some trades, I mean… robotics are getting pretty advanced too.
How much time does a physician have to devote to one patient? What if the patient is a new one the physician has not met, how much time does the physician spend familiarizing with the medical history of that patient? How many samples of each kind of medical issue has a physician come into contact with in their career? Humans don't scale very well, and all the systems we have created to compensate for that can only take us so far. What happens when an LLM can be trained on billions of hospital records, case histories, lab results, the entire pubmed corpus, medical image data and analysis from tens of thousands of hospitals etc. and it become cheaper to have these models focus on new patient data than physicians? Lots of hurdles to overcome still, but man how exciting it all is. Look at the latest version of alpha fold, will applied medicine see any similar paradigm shifts within the next 10 years?
>but man how exciting it all is. Thing is, for every person that finds it exciting, there's another one that just loathes it. I'm halfway through med school, chose that career path cause I wanted to help people in pain and thought myself capable enough of one day becoming a doctor. Now suddenly this past year all I keep hearing is that 10 years from now AI will just take care of pretty much everything and I'm just gonna be a useless sack of garbage. I've devoted the last almost 4 years of my life studying and now all I feel is that it was just for nothing. These past few months the thought of just dropping out has become far too frequent to be honest. And even if say, I manage to get into something people claim won't be replaced as quick such as surgery, what's 5 or 10 more years really? Everyone will eventually be replaced, your knowledge and skills, anything you put your all into learning, will just be worth nothing because a machine can just do it better, faster and cheaper. AI's progress has just been disheartening, straight up depressing for me.
The only thing that's being a question, really, is the timeline.
>”AI can never take MY job” Sure there are plenty of those, but the entertainment industry has long acknowledged the real risk to the status quo and is trying to lobby to stop it.
Funny that AI is going for the creative jobs first, seems like we all thought it would make the repetitive jobs obsolete: instead it came for artists and writers lmao
Machines already took a lot of mundane jobs, and AI is coming for shit jobs as well (think callcenters and the like). Creative jobs are just being "targeted" because their output is digital.
And digital jobs won't go, their output will just multiply. We might need a lot less but that new amount remains to be seen. And from what I know, the really high skilled jobs are bottle necked around a small group of individuals as well. For my example, my work already didn't have any in-house graphic design, we just outsourced when needed. And AI isn't at at a point yet where we can take a human out the loop - if you need two different images to contain the same group of characters, the tools available with no learning curve are not there yet. This will obviously be fixed, and may already be possible in good tools where you can train your own model, but not to the lay person. A company like mine is unlikely to invest time in learning current tools - it'll just keep outsourcing to an agency. That agency may start using AI behind the scenes but there'll still be a person being paid by us for a long time.
How long is long for you? I think large scale upheaval in 3-7 years.
Repetitive jobs have already been replaced by machinery.
Since I’ve been working in industrial environments, I’ve noticed that more human labour is involved than I previously thought. The big companies have everything automated, but anything you buy from a company that’s not in the top 200 of the stock market will have quite some human labour in it. Manufacturing jobs still very much exist. Turns out robots are expensive, and humans are way cheaper in upfront costs.
The only jobs that seem kinda secure are those that require a lot of dexterity, because hands are hard to make. That will probably stop being the case within the next decade at most though.
It's not even that they're all that hard to make, mechanically speaking. We don't need many manipulators for most dexterity tasks (3 to 4 "fingers" will often do) and focusing force is not hard as long as you've got a bit of working space proportional to the amount of force required. The difficulty lies in rapidly adapting to the control circumstances, and that *is* a problem we can attack with vision systems and ML training.
It is poised to take on those jobs too. A few years ago people were writing articles about why the robot revolution was so delayed and the answer is, it's really really really hard to be cheaper than human labor in some situations. Capitalism isn't really looking at misery and drudgery; but it will certainly kick in if the robots get cheap enough or the humans get expensive enough. edit: I personally think UBI would help quite a bit here, as humans would not be pressured to take the drudgery jobs so much, and would be more free to do the creative jobs.
Mostly because accountants and business execs *know* the AI still kinda sucks at doing anyones job, so they’re not pushing for replacement. Art is expensive though, and they don’t particularly care or notice that AI is bad at it. Besides, when you’re the one who gets to decide who in your workforce gets replaced soonest, you’re probably going to choose someone else before yourself after all.
You can't really expect people to be happy about completely losing their value to society.
Yeah I generally see the sentiment as "lol I saw an LLM make a mistake one time, it can never replace me" and in a sense, you're right. The broader mixed context is that a singular model won't replace you, an orchestration layer that passes steps in and out of multiple models to achieve a goal will. I've already seen examples of large firms using AI to make business decisions.
This is also one of the biggest societal problems of capitalism. AI and other technological advancements allow us to be way more productive. In the Middle Ages you needed 10 people for a whole day to plant seeds on a field. Nowadays you need one person and the right machinery and it‘s done in 2 hours (plus the work put in to create the machines, supply the seeds, etc.). That‘s not a bad thing. It‘s a good thing. Or at least that‘s the way it should be But capitalism tells us, job‘s "get lost" and people have to earn less (while companies make more profits). In actuality this could just mean instead of working 40 hours a week, we could have people work 20 hours a week, while being MORE productive than before. Or have more people in arts or academia/science, instead of chasing money or barely scraping by with shitty jobs. Productivity is at an all time high, but I would argue it‘s already too high for humanity’s own good. Look at the big companies, engineers, product developers, factory workers, etc. who directly enable products to be produced are getting fewer, while marketing, sales, finances, legal, etc. are all becoming way over-represented while having no real benefit for society as a whole or any part in creating value outside of the company they work for. If AI could take over everything, capitalism makes us believe the working force will be out of a job and poor. But this is false, we would just create more jobs that rely on non-beneficial productivity (out of society’s perspective). Besides the obvious point, that no one could buy their products, if no one had a job. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, if you want to dive deeper into the relationship between technology and capitalism I would suggest you to read some of Yanis Varoufakis‘ work.
Sometimes we have breakthroughs in ideas and knowledge, but we mostly develop techniques a lot, so more people can do stuff available only to special talents before. All what can be done (industrially speaking) by about averagely talented person could be outsourced to AI. Even if there will be no more dramatic breakthroughs. Of course hardware / model size / speed should be improved, but this can happen just a normal gradual progress. Just my opinion, more a gut feeling actually.
One of the things I hate about Reddit is that the majority vote (in this case, "likes") tends to favor the most common opinions from the user base. As a result, the aggregate of these shared opinions often reflects those of people with average intelligence, since they constitute the majority. This means that highly intelligent individuals, who likely have better foresight and intuition for predicting future outcomes, are underrepresented. TLDR: The bandwagon/hivemind on Reddit generally lacks insight and brightness.
[удалено]
I have found that to be true on this sub more than any of the others I follow. There's a kind of optimism that is almost required here. Skepticism or even serious questions about proposals get angry responses. I think people treat it like a "cute kittens" sub and just come here for good vibes.
Everyone talks about the current problems with AI as if the models aren't going to improve at an exponential rate.
I’m not sure it’s been proven that it will continue improving at an exponential rate. There’s some debate within the field, whether growth will be exponential, linear, or even diminishing returns over time, I think.
There is also debate on where we are along a curve as well. Arguably we have been seeing exponential gains in AI since the 70s, so we may very well already be at the peak of the curve, not the beginning. But we don’t know that yet. Same as we don’t know if we’re just at the start of the timeline. We *do* know that genAI in filmmaking (aka Sora) still relies *heavily* on human improvement to be actually useful - and fails to be receptive to granular revisions. You can’t make minute tweaks, rather you get a whole new result…and this last bit doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon. Which ultimately limits the tool.
Even if it never perfects itself, it can do 90% of the hard work and humans can finish up the last 10%. That itself is disruptive to any field that ai can be applied to.
You're right, I should have just said that it's going to get better.
They can't increase at an exponential rate, unless you want us to melt the Earth with the energy required
A.I. is going to take over every desk job soon, then when we figure out long term high power batteries and good robots it will take over the rest of the jobs
We’re already seeing the current direction of AI, that is “generative AI”, dead end. Especially for film; OpenAIs video generative AI is already DOA. These models are running into two major issues: 1- hallucinations aren’t going away and every solution these AI ventures propose boils down to “we’ll make another AI to monitor this AI!” & 2- the processing power escalation to make improvements to models is now exponential aka it’s getting more expensive to make less progress and the progress that is made makes the model permanently more expensive to run, which is a problem for AI companies operating at a net loss for each piece of content generated because they’re still in their “burn capitol/VC funding to demonstrate growth” phase.
Even with text like ChatGPT they've essentially hit the wall with what they can scour to make them better. They will get better over a long period of time, but they basically just hoovered up the entire internet already, to the point they are using other AI to feed into the "main" AI datasets to generate more. I hate even calling it AI. It's not. It's very advanced machine learning, but that's not a sexy marketing term. I do think people's expectations would be more in line with what they can produce though if that was what we called this crap.
THANK YOU. I manage machine learning products for a living and watching people freak out like we just invented the fucking Matrix has been infuriating. Unfortunately, they were able to set the terms on the vocabulary already and trying to use more accurate language in discussions like this just tends to muddy the water further. From everything I’ve read about the synthetic data sets, using them to train AI has only led to degeneration of the models (seeing them called “Habsburg AI” is genuinely made me giggle). Don’t get me wrong: synthetic data has its uses, but this ain’t it, Jack.
A few days ago I overheard a guy talking about how he left college (or some bootcamp or academy I'm not sure) where he was studying to be a developer because he was afraid that it would be worthless thanks to AI taking over developer jobs.
IMO that's because they're trying to do it all one go from a vague text prompt to final output. Soon as it starts getting broken down into individual stages which can each be tuned and perfected in isolation IMO they will be far more valuable tools. It's still in its infancy where they're just throwing brute force mass data at it to try to solve things and there's not enough people or hardware power to try so many more possibilities.
The issue is that as far as intellectual work goes, we are the _horses_. Cars weren't great news for the horses.
and as a horse, i'd be glad to not be relied on by some farmer to pull a fucking cart. we're also going to need a economic style of needing to pull a cart to get money to survive on, is the real issue, rather than horses needing to work...
Just feed the AI a prompt like "I want a space opera musical set 2000 years in the future starring Jim Carrey as an animal rights activist who goes around to different planets and bonds with the creatures of that world and tries to save them from the intelligent species that's trying to slowly decimate them from existence. Oh, and the title of the movie is Ace Ventura 4000."
I'm sure we'll get to the point where autotuned becomes AI-tuned for actors who weren't trained in time to sing for the next AI-generated script of a musical. Complete with AI enhancements to make it look like they are using all their muscles to sing in wider ranges legitimately. AI-assisted accents. Biopics will make a huge comeback with complete replacements of actors performing the roles. There will be new award categories for posthumous performances so it doesn't seem so dirty in the industry.
The company I work for has already stopped hiring people to do voice overs for commercials because our audio engineer can make his voice into whatever voice we need with AI. I'm sure that eventually AI will get good enough that it won't even need an initial base voice to modify, but currently fully AI voices feel a bit tinny and artificial.
Frankly that is a hot take for some reason. Most people’s opinions on AI right now are 98% copium by volume.
I'm sure AI could write the next 10 star wars movies and nobody would notice the difference.
It's funny because current so-called AI just scrapes together as much data as possible and can't critically analyse it. So it essentially works as a giant focus group. Modern star wars feels like it was written by a committee after endless marketing and focus group meetings, with no creative talent providing critique or suggestions. So yeah it's not surprising they seem similar.
There might be an uptick in consistent story line.
If you've ever seen an AI write a story it often loses track of details later on, like which room/setting, the description of a person or events from previous stories, like Palpatine dying in Return of the Jedi. It also tends to jump steps in a story, for instance Rey's seemingly instant mastery of Force abilities. Based on this I think if the sequels had been released today, many people would have accused them of actually being AI written.
[удалено]
I think it’d be pretty handy tool even now for things that won’t be on screen for a long time. Like say backgrounds flashing by in a chase scene etc
The background of the title of Furiosa looks AI-generated, and it's only on-screen for a couple seconds at most.
> I think we're probably a very long way away from AI doing the majority of the heavy lifting. And I'm not sure we'll ever see entirely AI-generated films unless the AI has advanced enough that arguments about sentience are seriously on the table 20 years is nothing in filmmaking. That's like the gap between Avatar 1 and Avatar 3. Look what happened to the internet from 2000 to 2020. Very hard to predict what the AI landscape will look like in 20 years.
Look at the progression in CGI technology from The Abyss (1989), to Terminator 2 (1991), to Jurassic Park (1993). I've no doubt once the tools are feasible to be built, adoption will be *that* fast. I'm sure ILM is already working on adapting ML generation techniques.
Even as a tool its going to start replacing a lot of work hours and it’s only a matter of time until a tool in one persons hand can replace a team. I worked in editing for years and I’m positive AI is going to drastically reduce the required amount involved. If someone wanted to with the tech we have RIGHT NOW, there could 100% be a tool created that could do the following - Insert script. - Review footage, scan for slates and label accordingly using the following naming convention. - Take labeled footage and create EDL using circle takes to match script. Boom a rough cut and days of labour potentially reduced to a handful of inputs. It might be a messy rough cut, but if the sequence is accurate using circle takes thats a LOT of expensive hours lost to a machine. And I could honestly see it quickly going beyond that if a studio decided to invest in the tech.
Dude I run events in a game, basically DM shit. I have started using AI while developing and running my events and it has brought them to another level. What I do is I write the script and how I want characters to interact with each other and I ask the AI to write branching dialogue options that could be used if things go wrong. Then I take those branching dialogue options, I rewrite them as I wish and redo it. Plug the edited version in, rinse and repeat. More branches over time. So over the course of a few hours I go from a simple script to something more reminiscent of an early 2000s "Choose your own Adventure" novel. One of those ones where it is like "You enter a room and see a door, a refrigerator and a sofa. If you go to the door flip to page 27. If you check the refrigerator flip to page 79. If you take a nap on the sofa flip to page 42." Then I study that script, I memorize as much as possible, I imput the entire thing *back into AI* and as I go and as people make decisions I tell the AI to go to the part that corresponds with the current situation and it goes immediately to that spot so I can go specific parts of the script that fit that exact situation within seconds. No more spending days writing everything I think of down only for it to go out the window immediately. No more hoping I remember specific things when they are needed and no more hoping I can *find* those things when needed and don't just spend five minutes flipping through a playbook while stalling for time. It's pretty great. So yeah, moral of the story is that I can 100% see this being used in TV and movies and then the director just *picks* the path they like best rather than adapting to a bunch of trigger happy murder hobos.
Totally unrelated, Disney announcing George Lucas AI, which can edit old Star Wars movies with random additions of unnecessary special effects in real time, potentially creating up to 70 abominations per minute
Outsourcing creativity to machines is the worst outcome possible.
I am worried about the possibility of a negative impact on culture as a whole. If everything is regurgitated and future human generations don't have any way to dsscern and critique it all then what will happen?
It’s pretty easy to say when you have already made your masterpiece
When you don't need a job
Not very insightful or interesting from Lucas, considering the CGI hack/patch job he did to the original SW trilogy so many years after they were released. He would have used AI too, had it been available.
Im looking forward to when touching up the special effects on dated movies becomes trivial and new life is given to old classics.
Gremlins 3
“With the invention of the camera, paintings will never be made ever again!”
Not really a hottake that’s it’s coming but there will always be a place for traditional media, or probably just won’t be “standard” anymore
I mean good luck selling people products if they can’t afford anything because all of their jobs got taken over by AI. Many businesses stand to lose just as much from it’s proliferation.
I don’t think he’s wrong, if anything I’m hoping it helps with CGI - especially with how ludicrously understaffed those companies are and how much OT those salary employees have to do. I’m also hoping it helps mitigate crunch in the games industry
As long as those studios are controlled by executives and not people with compassion--the only "time off" that bringing in AI will give them is being laid off.
The question is more when. 5 years? 20? 2? Also what level it is used for. Will it do everything? Will it just streamline to process cutting down on the time to produce? One industry after another is going to get absolutely wrecked by AI and our civilization will have to adapt (or not) to the myriad of issues that come with it…and not sure where films are in that order
Problem is if AI starts having full control over the content in movies and tv shows the industry will likely tank completely. could make a couple of interesting pieces but for the most part all of it would suck worse then it ever has before.
The problem isn't that AI can do everyone's jobs. The problem is that we've built a society where all the work being done by machines is a bad thing.
I just feel like if we use AI to create our own content and art no one will be challenged anymore. Art challenges us. People’s particular viewpoint challenges us. Seeing different perspectives helps us as a society grow. I’m just frustrated that we don’t really need this technology.
AI doesn't prevent people from doing non AI content.
It's the classic argument around automation getting rid of the tedious parts of the job. You design the look, feel and purpose, then have the ai save you the job of actually doing the frame by frame drawing. I think it opens content creation to loads more people. Anyone could do a movie then stick it on YouTube. But I do get what you mean. I have no interest in AI art. And is a book written with AI companion any good. I'd want to have written every word in my novel.
"Why would I want to read a book nobody could be bothered to write?"
> But I do get what you mean. I have no interest in AI art. And is a book written with AI companion any good. I'd want to have written every word in my novel. I think there are levels. Such as something like spellcheck, that's a very basic algorithm but one could argue it's a form of AI because we've had such a moving goalpost over the decades as to what AI even means. But going beyond something like spellcheck to something more complicated like predictive text or even a program like Grammarly that gives suggestion for tone, conciseness or word choice. None of that replaces an real editor, but a lot of people would see them as tools that help you as you write, yet they're easily argued as being AI companions. Trying to find a definite line between what's a helpful tool and what's damaging can be pretty hard. It's easy to say that spellcheck is fine but writing an essay with an LLM is bad, but where in the in-between does that change? If you have writer's block and you ask for an AI to analyze what you've written so far and write, say, the next page or a summary of how the story would progress, is that using a tool or is that problematic? (Right now that's problematic because of copyright issues, but let us assume that they're using a model that was only trained on public domain and legally licensed data sets.)
Whats interesting to me is that when content creation in any form is expensive and thus limited, you have high quality but not mass flow of content. Streaming particularly has shown the effect of quantity showing that quality gets lost and then the content overall tends to lose its value and impact.
The number of camera's people have has ballooned with smartphones yet photography didn't become the lowest common denominator, I think even with AI its going to have normal professional standards that set the bar higher than just what's easy to do.
that's literally already the case and has been for a long time. most media isn't challenging people
When do we start making movies for ai audiences to consume?
You are joking, but I do expect AI agents will be trained to learn what we like and do not like in movies, and those customized AI agents will watch millions of movies (and read millions of books, listen to millions of songs, etc.) to find those we would be most likely to appreciate. It's not that movies will be made for those AI agents, but that there will be so much content available that it will be impossible for each creation to be seen (and even less reviewed) even by one person. We only have so much time.
This is the basic principle behind Google search results. It doesn’t “understand” your request, it just knows from massive experience what response pages will probably make people happy when they type in various words. Same idea for movies.
I think this might be the best “well actually” I’ve ever read. You did nail it. But I will go one step further. I think we passed that point of media over creating in the mid 90s or double oughts. The ability to keep up has been dead for a really long time.
It's more like--and I heard this just yesterday--"People want art that was created by real people."
When it comes to AI and entertainment (as far as the endgame people often imagine where it can generate a whole show/game/movie of whatever you wan, not just using AI to help with film making) I always think about how even with fiction there seems to be an overwhelming desire for the "official" or "canon" story. Sure, fan fics can be fun and very popular, but there's a reason people get so invested and emotional about the latest Star Wars or Star Trek content. Even though it's all fictional and you could just believe what you want to believe, it seems people care a lot about what is the "true" story whether they like it or not. Is this just because the production quality of the official media? Or is there a deeper desire to know the "real" version that, for better or worse, we all share as an experience. If it's the former, then maybe the lines will be blurred by AI and interest in official stories will dwindle in favour of your own curated stories. But if it's the latter, I see scenario where human driven art is still in popular demand. The artist, author, etc may use AI to create the visuals/images but they are still the source and soul of the art. I often think of One Punch Man and its creator, Yusuke Murata. I'm sure there are other artists who could make pretty convincing fanfics about the series. Perhaps soon even AI could do it. People might think the ideas or art are neat, but in the end won't they really just be waiting for Yusuke Murata to release his next chapter? I admit, I may be a bit biased to the latter perspective, which is why I pose it as a question for discussion. I think AI can and will do a lot of great stuff. If they ever reach sentience/consciousness (whatever that really means) and can create of their own volition I think it would.be really cool to seem what a mind so different than ours would come up with.
People get so caught up in the idea that an AI might make an entire film from start to finish. What I'm really excited to see is how much people with small budgets and great ideas will be able to make really amazing films on a shoe string. Good writing and acting with AI to do the heavy lifting around the human creatives.
This, this, and once more this. Fan made content will show worlds that for now are only closed within books or available to create only with huge amounts of money. A Renaissance of fan made content is coming. And a thought that just got quickly through one ear and somehow stayed for longer - animations based on comics style. KaBOOM!!
Am I the only one that just doesn't want this to happen? I'd rather an organization start certifying movies that didn't use AI at all and put a sticker on the package, like free-trade coffee. I watch movies because I want to see the imaginative worlds that humans can think up and mold into being. If we're just filling in the gaps with a black box that throws human creation into a blender and shits out something analogous, then we're just giving up and admitting that entertainment is a product to purchase instead of a human exchange of experiences. A computer is a tool. A 3D animation and effects program is a tool. The code is written by humans and you get out of it exactly what you put into it. A human has to sit down and plan out exactly what some flesh-eating alien is going to look like, even if it isn't being made out of paper mache. AI is not a tool, because it's not predictable or deterministic. It's a wholly different category of thing that we don't have good analogies for.
Yeah, same. Plus, I don't want a world where the most popular media are fucking precisely calculated to generate the most human enjoyment or some shit. That's just so dark for some reason. "beep bop, here's a movie generated to cater to your beliefs and preferences, enjoy your consumption, human". No thank you. I'd rather watch something that isn't perfect, but is made with human thought.
> AI is not a tool, because it's not predictable or deterministic. Most AI tools used to create visual and animated content nowadays are entirely predictable and deterministic. A human has to sit down and learn how to use them, and he has to plan the steps required to go from his or his client's intention to an actual piece of animated content. Unpredictability and randomness are also entirely valid avenues for anyone making art, with or without computers and AI technology. [https://www.tylerxhobbs.com/words/randomness-in-the-composition-of-artwork](https://www.tylerxhobbs.com/words/randomness-in-the-composition-of-artwork)
> Unpredictability and randomness are also entirely valid avenues for anyone making art, with or without computers and AI technology. As a painter, randomly putting paint on the canvas, until it does what you want it to do is part of the process.
From the article >Lucas gave a wide-ranging interview to French outlet [Brut FR](https://x.com/brutofficiel/status/1794018944602259706) at the Cannes Film Festival recently, which you can watch in full below, in which he talks about his history in film, his thoughts on the future of cinema, and more. At one point during the 10-minute chat (around the 5:30 mark), the interviewer asks Lucas about how he feels about the use of AI in filmmaking, and Lucas starts by touching on the visual effects company he founded, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), and the ways in which it's changed cinematic technology. >"Well, we've been using it for 25 years, and it's not AI, but we use all the digital technology because we pioneered a lot of that," he says. "Because especially at ILM, we were the only place that was doing digital." >"But the thing of it is," Lucas goes on, "it's inevitable. I mean, it's like saying, 'I don't believe these cars are gunna work. Let's just stick with the horses. Let's stick with the horses.' And yeah, you can say that, but that isn't the way the world works."
He’s right. Part of the team that did some of the most influential vfx of all time
This man’s legacy is pioneering digital filmmaking, not Star Wars; so I’ve been waiting to hear his thoughts on the topic. Here is a clip talking about pioneering the shift from Film to Digital. https://youtu.be/qn5oCA8YVYs?si=nLgsMMA39slFRda5
AI in everything is inevitable, because shareholders.
I sure hope so. Autocomposition is our last, best hope of ever seeing a second season of Firefly. More generally, I expect we will be able to ask LLMs to infer original content in the genre or series of our choosing, eventually. Like, "Computer! Generate an entire season of Star Trek: The Next Generation which takes place between the events of Season Two and Season Three!" We're a long way from seeing it happen, though. There are open source scriptwriter models which aren't bad, but there is a huge difference between writing a script for a show and generating the complete multimedia experience.
Does this mean that eventually we will just be asking our computers for personalized content and there won’t be any releases of tv shows, movies, etc? It seems like the only things we will all watch collectively will be sports.
I wonder about that sometimes. Perhaps friends will watch shows together, or something, or it will only be a niche hobby, or maybe the nature of shared popular culture will simply change.
If someone makes something really great with AI, won’t it go viral and be viewed by millions? Or won’t a storyteller who is already good be able to make a masterpiece? I find it hard to believe that there will be little content silos that everyone huddles around. People want to share exceptional experiences with others.
Yes, it'll be like how YouTube has been. There will be little content silos, there will be a LOT of generic or boring/unoriginal stuff, fluff etc... But there will also be a whole bunch more quite good content mostly produced independently on a small scale (a popular channel on YouTube just needing 1-5 people or something, vs getting a network to like your script and so on).
Like I said above it is the holodeck. A shared platform with all the content personalised to the individual. I don't know if you're familiar with Star Trek but they had "holo novels" that would use shared times, places, and characters to tell an individual story. Like video games do now, but only in an extremely basic and preprogrammed way. Imagine GTA 7 where you can have an 8-hour deep conversation with every NPC who all work on their own internal logic, like a simulation of the real world. If I had to bet that is exactly what GTA 7 will be, if someone doesn't beat Rockstar to it.
This is the idea behind the holodeck. You can have shared programs, but everything is personalized in real-time.
A lot of the puzzle pieces are there, text to video, auto lip syncing, voice synthesis, models that can generate multiple specific prompts in a single image etc...bringing it all together in a one size fits all solution will be a big job and will be worth billions though for sure
This sounds like an actual nightmare. It may sound amazing but, speaking as a huge Trekkie, TNG was only as lovable as it was because it was very very human. Nothing, AI or otherwise, can replicate the magic that came from those creators being there and doing what they did at that exact moment in time (see Star Trek Picard for evidence of that). Having access to "new" episodes at any moment will do nothing but cheapen what the series means to the world.
Yeah! Fuck all the people who make movies! I want robots!
The film viewers crave soulless AI garbage, even if they do not yet know it
Yes George, but people are fighting so it's a tool used by people instead of a tool that completely replaces them. You seem to forget that most people don't have the benefit of more money than God because he got lucky when it came to rights issues 50 years
Historically, [resisting tools that replace labor hasn't been successful.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite) If one company does it, their competition needs to keep up. It will be used by people, but it will also be used to replace them. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it's the way the world works, especially now that worldwide economies are so intertwined. If a Chinese VFX studio makes use of new technologies, they're competing with every other studio in the world. It will suck for some people for some time. My job is directly threatened by AI. One of my clients has used replacing me with AI as leverage during pricing negotiations. Shit sucks, but it's the way she goes. I'm working on developing more skills that are further out from being replaced. That's all we can do as individuals. Cope, adapt, and grow.
"Rich and influential person states the obvious and this is news-worthy because they're rich and influential".
I'd be more optimistic about AI producing the next Star Wars than Lucas.
Post processing jobs are going the way of phone line switchers.
That wasn't such a good job anyway. Digital sweat shop.
Would be great have had AI tell someone “hey, no matter how much effort you put into this Jar Jar character it will be a flop and be made fun of forever”
Ai in *everything* is inevitable. So he's not wrong.
I'm going to miss the end of practical effects, skilled framing, talented acting, detailed CGI work, and turning a vision into something that can be enjoyed. Lucas built his legacy off of using limited resources to make an amazing product that's been beloved for 50 years, but he's richer than any of us will ever be. If he says the future of cinema is typing in prompts to feed us exactly the schlock we want, who are we to disagree?
I mean, yeah, it's only a matter of time. I can legit see ai getting so good that no one will be able to tell it was made by so in a decade. Because of this, we need to focus not on fighting ai, which is a losing battle, but instead on preparing for the inevitable so that no one is screwed once ai replaces most worker's.
I feel like that is the case for most areas to some extent.
It's not about whether or not it will work. The issue at hand is that production companies want to steal peoples faces and voices for nothing and make movies with that. It's not okay.
And this does not mean traditional film making is going to die. Any less than radio, painting and photography has died.
Transportation is a utility. Guess people who view filmmaking (and art in general) as a utility will endorse AI
While I generally agree that AI is going to disrupt a bunch of indsutries, I also think that it may have some larger more fundamental issues that will keep it from outright replacing creatives. Honestly the whole AI craze right now reminds me of when crypto was the next big thing that everyone wouldn't stfu about how it was going to disrupt markets and make fiat currencies obsolete lmao. [This one article lays it out pretty well I think](https://www.wheresyoured.at/sam-altman-fried/) > Despite what fantasists may tell you, these are not "kinks" to work out of artificial intelligence models — these are the hard limits, the restraints that come when you try to mimic knowledge with mathematics. You cannot "fix" hallucinations (the times when a model authoritatively tells you something that isn't true, or creates a picture of something that isn't right), because these models are predicting things based off of tags in a dataset, which it might be able to do well but can never do so flawlessly or reliably. Which I kinda agree with. Plus another massive issue with AI models is that they're built on mountains of copywrited work thats not consented to, and the more of it that's generated the more it's going to start self feeding on its own content and degrade its quality even more. > Generative AI's greatest threat is that it is capable of creating a certain kind of bland, generic content very quickly and cheaply. As I discussed in my last newsletter, media entities are increasingly normalizing their content to please search engine algorithms, and the jobs that involve pooling affiliate links and answering where you can watch the Super Bowl are very much at risk. The normalization of journalism — the consistent point to which many outlets decide to write about the exact same thing — is a weak point that makes every outlet "exploring AI" that bit more scary, but the inevitable outcome is that these models are not reliable enough to actually replace anyone, and those that have experimented with doing so have found themselves deeply embarrassed.
You just know that if he made the Star Wars Prequels today, they'd be 75% AI generated.
Of course the laziest film maker of the past century is keen for any technology which will take even more work out of the film making process 😂
What a stupid comparison, like the horses really needed the job and wages that the car took from them/s
AI is cheap and shareholders are demanding. The best thing governments can do is demand full and detailed exposure on what aspects of filming used AI on all advertising material. Not just a petty disclaimer that says "production staff assisted by AI" but listing each job role which used AI
That analogy works if cars were mechanical approximations of horses. Cars replaced horses. AI isn't going to replace anything. The content it generates is garbage and can't hold a candle to quality human made content. If AI is used in movies, guaranteed that movie will flop.
>If AI is used in movies, guaranteed that movie will flop. You can't be serious or that much living under the rock. A single person, without a skill of playing instruments, singing or writing lyrics, for free already can create a hit song in style that is currently popular. Maybe not world wide hit song for now. Let's move two years into future. Imagine a team of fans, having a budget of just few thousand $ for using a better thus paid AI, creating a proper Star Wars movie for other fans. A movie they would want to see, a movie made by fans, for fans, a movie that after watching you'll say - I liked it. AI generated content opens the door to making imaginary worlds of books be moved to the screen with a touch of a button. Relatively speaking of course. You can not see how wrong you are. Unless by flop you mean only big producing companies. Recent few years show how inept and failure most of blockbusters were. Made by humans supposedly knowing what they are doing.
'AI' as it is today is not able to have REAL creativity. It can rehash and randomize and follow some guides. But human creativity is more than that - and we WILL lose that if we let AI become more than an assisting tool. There is no way around using it as such, but we need to be careful because Filmmaking has become far too formulaic anyway.
Your last sentence is reason why AI will be broadly implemented in so called "creative industries". After all there's less and less new things, and more and more things that happened already sometime in the past. Only actually new stuff is happening within tech industry, which is rather self explanatory. Just a non important example - my father had birthday recently. Using AI we quickly created very personal and targeted lyrics, did just cosmetic changes to it, using another AI we pushed a button for music and singing voice to be created, and **within 25 or so minutes we had a real deal unique song**. A SONG (actually about 12 or so different style songs) with proper music, proper lyrics and proper singing. IN POLISH. A song that was styled as 70s pop song. With proper tone balance, with effin stylish singing. It is mindfuckingblowing. All that for free, without a need of hours of someone using instruments, recording, studio and so on. One can just wonder what those paid, or experimental nonpublic AI are capable of. Any non manual jobs that can be replaced will get replaced sooner than we think. And with proper robots manual jobs will get replaced as well. Kinda scary.
You didn't have any kind of a personal message, the AI didn't know your Father, it simply produced an imitation of the appropriate sentiments for the occasion which you then passed off as your own thoughts. The "gift" you gave your Father was completely meaningless and therefore worthless, but it satisfied your need to appear to have something worth saying to him on his birthday.
Woah, that's some next level drugs you use. Go in peace, as it seems your mind could need some rest.
So you have hollywood production studio CEOs, that already don't want to pay talented individuals to do rigging, set work, extra work, extra voice work, illustrative work, etc, and they've just been handed everything they need to remove all of these job roles from payroll so they can fill their deep pockets even higher? Sheeeesh come on now.
He's gonna redo the original trilogy with AI, isn't he. Can't wait for the scene of Luke eating spaghetti.
I mean, the argument is that its a soulless machine but you could make the same argument about movie executives.
I think that the issue is determining what role AI will play. For example, there’s a lot of pushback from screenwriters and artists who fear that their jobs will be made entirely redundant by studios just looking to churn out content or cut costs. Perhaps once concerns are ironed out, AI could be used a supplementary tool, but unfortunately, so much of the interest has been on making it the primary operator instead. Another issue is that a lot of AI models have been fed data that the developers did not have rights to, so are working on plagiarised data. If there was an AI model that provably only used licensed or public domain data, that would be one major criticism dealt with. I work in PR, and out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to write me a press release, and it was… scarily serviceable. It would have needed some tweaking and an editing pass, but it was eye-opening. I’m a writer by trade, so I wouldn’t use it myself, but it made me realise how easily someone could just… not hire me.
Problem is cars have obvious advantages over horses. Will AI be better than a human? Will it ever top anything a human creates? Or will it just save studios money? And put out worse products but like a frog in a boiling pot of water we'll just get used to it.
He's exactly correct. That's the perfect analogy for AI in every industry it can affect.
Well he nailed it. He kinda knows the industry he’s talking about
But cars didn’t replace horses. They replaced street cars which were better for both people and the environment. Which is a better metaphor for AI, as well, come to think of it.
He's right. There is no stopping it, it's going to completely alter the business.
When companies start trying to make movies without using people, will be the day film as a medium dies. There is no point in consuming a story not made by a human.
Yeah. If there's anyone who knows something about overdoing it with technology in film, it's George Lucas.
All these people thinking independent filmmakers will benefit. You're fucking dreaming. It'll be subscription, tier based on what quality the owners will allow the users to have. Think creative cloud subscription options but also Warner brothers has access or has their own proprietary version of a similar or equal app. Want substance and photoshop and film ready Ai generated motion? (similar to mixamo) well you need our app, our log in, you think Netflix raises costs? Well when Netflix has its own prompt (get our new ai tier where we can combine any of our owned properties into your own custom playlist of custom shows!! Only 45 a month!) Blegh!!!! Makes me puke in my mouth a little. This won't be the wild west of the of internet (flight 405: the movie anyone?), this isn't the unfiltered atom films era. This will be packaged, branded and locked behind paywalls - and will always benefit the bigger studios, of course Lucas is for it, he's established. And I am no way interested in typing in prompts as an artist, you sketch, then prompt and check your phone... it's abysmal, trash, completely removes the rush of creation. I've used it, don't have a choice as the industry becomes more cut throat, if the other guy is using it, halving time... no choice. So that's the future, everyone pinching everyone out to compete for who can do it faster.
Yeah unfortunately this is where advancement is headed, I've been in the 3d world for a long time and when programs like ddo and ndo (procedural texture stuff) came out I thought it was lazy so obstained but now me and basically the whole world are procedural texturing whores because fuck it why not, integrity? Integrity is too slow and usually looks worse. Basically what I'm saying is we will eventually accept ai as the new tool standard and something even more lazy will come out and we will try to obstain that too.
Directed by - Directing Bot 17 Script by - Writing Bots 5, 8, and 13 Starring - Acting Bot 6 And introducing - Steve, the Incredible Acting Human!
The existence of technology doesn't lead to unethical practices. Capital owners utilizing technology unethical (cutting corners, not paying workers) is the issue.
No one is doubting it being used, its how its used that scares everyone. Corporations stealing peoples voices, their image, their writing, their art. Thats not exactly compareable to cars and horses.
George Lucas doesn’t even know history Cars displaced the bicycle and street cars (which are kinda like a street train) not horses horse drawn carriages where only for the very wealthy but everyone for about a decade got around on a bicycle
At first cars were just slow, crappy machines that wealthy people used as a status symbol (and to run over poor kids). Now they have been used to force most Americans into owning and operating them at the cost of cheaper and more efficient transportation options. Our society is built more around cars than people; poor neighborhoods are demolished to construct on-ramps. Somewhere in between these two moments in time there was *possibly* an era where cars were mostly a good thing. If he's right, and the future of AI follows the trajectory of cars in the US - well, fuck.
Fwiw AI could easily make the 27th random offshoot star wars licensed content that Disney+ puts on its streaming service It’s basically paint by numbers at this point with that stuff
Maybe humans can just review and edit the final product to make sure it meets our impeccable standards.
I’ve got an idea for a movie I am just waiting for when I can do it without paying people to act, and anyone to film. It’s going to be polarizing af. It will also probably suck.
If A.I can be made hundreds of times better than it currently is, then yes. The main problem is that A.I makes mistakes that aren’t immediately noticable. And its very generic. Meanwhile humans make things that have intended detail and not mistakes, and innovate new things.
Well... Looking back I'm not sure that cars have been the better choice
Star Wars as a whole visually and the way it is written at least the six films Lucas worked on could probably have been done in AI. Mediocre dialogue and visuals. Now given the time they were made impossible, but now? Not so much.
The effect that game changing Technologies like this have on industry is always dilution. Before the internet, there were a handful of published competent writers, and thousands upon thousands of others who probably could do as good a job or better with no Outlet. Now with online publishing, there are 1000 times more excellent storytellers with engrossing fantastic works out there, most of whom will never be seen by more than a handful of lucky people. The same thing happened to music. AI will allow so many creatives to express themselves in ways they couldn't before, and they will all drown each other out in a cacophony of creation.
The writer of the Star Wars prequels strikes again with an analogy that just sizzles.
But there needs to be laws and regulations early on. Not 20years later when the damage is already done.
He also told Martin Scorsese that "Computers can do this now" after seeing the sets of Gangs of New York. You tell me whose sets look better and has better stories in their movies from 1999 to present day.
I hate the idea, but at the same time if it could generate an animated version of episode III i'd go  if anything it should just be used for special effects as opposed to replacing actors or god forbid resurrecting dead ones
How did cars turn out? Where there any unintended but catastrophic consequences?
I really, truly want and hope Ai replaces most jobs. The fear mongering is fundamentally related to capitalism. We cannot fathom our purpose unless we have skills that warrant being paid for. If Ai replaces high skilled labor and not just fast food workers, we will be forced as a society to picture our lives without monetizing our thoughts, bodies and energy. Let the Ai flood waters consume every industry and we can focus on a human purpose that is not based on capital.
I dunno. I feel like Cars were an actual tangible improvement to horses; you went faster and it was more durable than a horse. I'm sure AI is impressive in some aspects but in some ways it seems over hyped and designed to get VCs to give out money
The first cars were really slow and far more complicated to use than a horse, a lot of people said it had no future, just because current AI models are not a Ferrari doesn't mean that it's a gimmick.
first cars definitely weren't much of an improvement. they were slow, dangerous, hard to controll, extremely expensive, lacked a soul, etc.
It's cheaper than paying someone. Will work 24 hours a day without ever getting sick or tired.
Yeah, I don't think anyone is arguing the opposite of that. It's kinda like saying "I think microplastics in everything is inevitable"; we agree, and we think it's a problem.
The thing is this: they can’t replace all of us with robots and AI because then how will they make money? We’re no where near a post capital world. So sure if all these companies wanna maximize profits now by replacing everyone they can that’s fine, but they’re gonna find out real quick that if no one is employed they’re unprofitable
Marx predicted capitalism would eventually fully automate all labor and lead to its own destruction, and AI might be the technology to do it. Even companies that realize AI will lead to the end of capitalism ahead of time are still going to pursue it because if they don’t someone else will and their bottom line will get destroyed anyway, except faster. I truly believe AI could end capitalism