15 ms·

Hollywood Is Already Using AI (and Hiding It)

41 points by 1sembiyan 1y ago

sxp 1y ago
https://archive.is/ATD9T https://archive.is/ATD9T
leptons 1y ago
It's a race to the (AI-slop) bottom. But most of the inhabitants of the world will barely notice. I have to wonder if movies will improve or not with AI, because some really stupid franchises have seen stupid amounts of money, while most people barely watch the actually good creative stuff. We're already swamped with unwatchable schlock, but I'm not sure it will improve if we automate it. It's the same people spending the money to make, promote, and distribute movies, the AI doesn't have any money to make a movie or the impetus. But if most people cared about art, creativity, and good storytelling, there probably wouldn't be a race to the bottom in the entertainment industry. Idiocracy was a documentary, and "ASS" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kJZjU2k5abs https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kJZjU2k5abs is what the AI will calculate we want to see, and it will win awards.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  AI will make professional level movies cheaper and easier to make, which will the medium more accessible. The AAA movies probably won't look any better, but indie stuff that previously would have been suggestive and bare due to budgetary constraints can now be more direct and lavish. In many cases that's going to be the difference an indie project being a viable film and not.
  - leptons 1y ago
    >AI will make professional level movies cheaper and easier to make If you're talking about the kind of movies with big-budget explosions and violence, then no thanks. That isn't what I'm talking about at all. Sure, AI will make that schlock cheaper. A lot of the "indie" stuff is garbage, too.
- bobxmax 1y ago
  I've never understood this argument... most of Hollywood today is already slop lol
- jerrysievert 1y ago
  I use my instant pot to make risotto in 20 minutes with very little effort that is about 90% as good (in my very stubborn opinion) as making it the hard way. I very much appreciate an amazing risotto, but when I make it myself I'll usually choose the instant pot versus the extra work. I feel Hollywood might be the same way.
Michelangelo11 1y ago
> It might cost only $10 million, but it would look closer to a $100 million movie. "We’re going to blow stuff up so it looks bigger and more cinematic,” he said. No comment needed.
- rideontime 1y ago
  Would love to hear him define "cinematic."
  - deadbabe 1y ago
    Feed it to an AI prompt if you want an answer, no point explaining.
jmugan 1y ago
I would imagine that if it is shameful among the established players to use AI, what will happen is that entirely new players will come in. For me, it's the story that matters, and if they can tell a better story with AI, then many people will naturally flock to them.
simonw 1y ago
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King back in 2003 used early AI VFX software MASSIVE to animate thousands of soldiers in battle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MASSIVE_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MASSIVE_(software) - I don't think that was controversial at the time. According to that Wikipedia page MASSIVE was used for Avengers: Endgame, so it's had about a 20 year run at this point.
- 101008 1y ago
  The problem is not AI per se (which are only a mix of algorithms). The problem is that this new wave of AI is trained in propietary content, and the owners/creators didn't allow it in the first place. If this AI worked without training, no one would say anything.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    People would still be griping about how it devalues the hard work artists have put in, "isn't real art" and all the other things. The only difference is the public at large would be telling them to put a sock in it, rather than having some sympathy because of deceptive articles about how big tech is stealing from hardworking artists.
    - righthand 1y ago
      Yes they're two different issues from AI: - LLMs were trained on copy protected content and devaluing the input a worker puts into creating original work - LLMs are a tool for generating statistical variations and refinements of work, this doesn't devalue the input but makes generating output easier Form vs Function issues. So it would be preferable to give people a legal pathway to continue making money and own their work instead of allowing their work to be vacuumed up by the people at corporations looking to automate them away. The functional issue still exists but doesn't put your personal work at risk of theft/abuse outside of it's economic intent. Then the social stigma doesn't really matter because "an LLM is just a tool" is now a solid argument not causing abuse or deterioration of existing legal protections.
    - deleted 1y ago
AndrewKemendo 1y ago
I would absolutely love being able to create the movies I’ve always wanted to be made and them be plausibly good. I wonder who is making the oss version of these tools? So you can specify all the hundreds of parts needed to just compose a decent framework
- bredren 1y ago
  The action I see is happening in comfy-ui workflows. That software is progressing rapidly and adapts to whatever sota models are available. Heavy emphasis is on making cutting edge models work with limited local compute.
  - bobxmax 1y ago
    Do you know any resources for getting started with ComfyUI? Last time I looked into these tools ages ago it was a complex mess
    - bredren 1y ago
      I suggest starting with their tutorial with a decent LLM to help. The workflows can be represented in written syntax which you can export repeatedly, pasting into a chat for feedback from the LLM based on your goal. For example, I wanted help setting up the use of a lora and batch iteration. The LLM can figure out where you've hooked things up incorrectly. The UI is funky and the terms and blocks require familiarity you won't have to start. I think learning the basics of it this way would be useful because you'll get some positive feedback loop going before trying to make use of someone's shared, complex workflow.
      - bobxmax 1y ago
        Thanks - I didn't think of using an LLM to debug the json, that's smart. I'll give it another shot.
- bobxmax 1y ago
  Wasn't Stability working on open sourced models? I wonder what happened to them, I remember some issues with their founder
antithesizer 1y ago
When there is a cost to a business from you knowing about something, prepare to be lied to.
bredren 1y ago
This article seems to be three to six months past due. As in the insights are late. >One animator who asked to remain anonymous described a costume designer generating concept images with AI, then hiring an illustrator to redraw them — cleaning the fingerprints, so to speak. “They’ll functionally launder the AI-generated content through an artist,” the animator said. This seems obvious to me. I’ve drawn birthday cards for kids where I first use gen AI to establish concepts based on the person’s interests and age. I’ll get several takes quickly but my reproduction is still an original and appreciated work. If the source of the idea cheapens the work I put into it with pencils and time, I’m not sure what to say. > “If you’re a storyboard artist,” one studio executive said, “you’re out of business. That’s over. Because the director can say to AI, ‘Here’s the script. Storyboard this for me. Now change the angle and give me another storyboard.’ Within an hour, you’ve got 12 different versions of it.” He added, however, if that same artist became proficient at prompting generative-AI tools, “he’s got a big job.” This sounds eerily similar to the messaging around SWE. I do not see a way past this—-one must rise past prompting and into orchestration.
- jjulius 1y ago
  >... my reproduction is still an original... I don't know how accurate that is.
- pseudalopex 1y ago
  A prediction does not make a report late. And many things obvious to some people are not obvious to a general audience. > If the source of the idea cheapens the work I put into it with pencils and time, I’m not sure what to say. This is a straw man. The idea is part of the product. > This sounds eerily similar to the messaging around SWE. Yes. This similarity included how the executive's imagination and the individual contributor's experience differed.
  - bredren 1y ago
    > This is a straw man. The idea is part of the product. It is a part of the product but I’m not sure I agree it is a straw man. (Side note I just realized the …absolutely no one… meme labels this fallacy!) In music, few artists can count themselves as capable songwriters, producers, instrumentalist and vocalist recording artists and live performers. Yet the front page of Rolling Stone is generally reserved for those on the tail end of the full stack of talent described above. To continue the parallel, in SWE engineers are generally compensated better than non-technical product folks.
ramoz 1y ago
My neighbor is a director and is secretly using and in love with Claude for much of their work.
mwkaufma 1y ago
> James Cameron teamed up with Stability AI, one of the tech companies making inroads in Hollywood. ... and produced the worst AI-upscales of True Lies and Aliens, to universal scorn from audiences.
est31 1y ago
Tech companies love to show off that they are using AI, how they are embracing it, etc. Among engineers, there is also a growing community of folks who embrace tools like Cursor, Chat GPT, Gemini, v0, etc. When it comes to artists, I have less insight but what I see is that they are extremely critical of it and don't like it at all. It's interesting to see that gap in reactions to AI between artists and tech companies.
- mattl 1y ago
  And then there are the rest of us, indie developers who are building for and want to keep building things for the artists. We don’t want any of this and are working to build around it. It’s being really pushed by a lot of the same people who were pushing Web3 and NFTs and blockchain grifts.
- antithesizer 1y ago
  Or between artists in private and artists in public
- taylorius 1y ago
  Tech people like it because it isn't good enough to completely replace them yet. The sophisticated, coherent architecture of a well designed system is (for now) still beyond the LLMs, so for tech people, it's still just a wonderful tool. But give it another year, and the worm will turn.
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    lumberjacks didn't go away when chainsaws were invented; demand for wood rose to meet the falling cost of wood and lumberjacks kept cutting down trees. don't see why it won't be any different for programmers.
    - spwa4 1y ago
      In the US, there were entire cities with essentially just lumberjacks. In other words, there used to be a LOT more lumberjacks than there are today, and they were a lot better paid. Now there are a LOT of software engineers.
throwaway743 1y ago
Hiding it? Are they supposed to slap on a disclaimer? Feels like one could safely assume they've been using it. Anyways, AI generated media is gonna lead to hyper-personalized, on-demand, generated media for people to consume. Sure, hollywood will still be around, but once consumer computing power and the models catch up, there are gonna be a ton of people choosing their own worlds than the ones curated by an industry.
- aerostable_slug 1y ago
  I think the really interesting part will be the illusion of choice presented by these systems. You'll think you've got the reins, but really it's a choose-your-own-adventure book that's effectively constraining you to the experience They want you to have. The only way out of this will be HN types who roll their own, and those will probably suck in comparison to the commercial systems filled with product placement and mindblowing amounts of information harvesting.
- yahoozoo 1y ago
  They have to hide it because of the unions.
nilirl 1y ago
So much 'he says, she says' that I honestly lost track of the point it was trying to make. Takeaway: Maybe AI good. Maybe AI bad. Scary. But possibility. Everybody try.
calvinmorrison 1y ago
We watched the live action Lilo & Stitch reboot yesterday. One thing that struck me was almost every shot was like 2 seconds or less. A lot of camera work for a kids movie... or that's all they could manage to generate?
layer8 1y ago
https://archive.is/yvvyy https://archive.is/yvvyy
sherdil2022 1y ago
Reminds me of: “NO CGI" is really just INVISIBLE CGI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo

41 points by 1sembiyan 1y ago

sxp 1y ago

https://archive.is/ATD9T https://archive.is/ATD9T

It's a race to the (AI-slop) bottom. But most of the inhabitants of the world will barely notice. I have to wonder if movies will improve or not with AI, because some really stupid franchises have seen stupid amounts of money, while most people barely watch the actually good creative stuff. We're already swamped with unwatchable schlock, but I'm not sure it will improve if we automate it. It's the same people spending the money to make, promote, and distribute movies, the AI doesn't have any money to make a movie or the impetus. But if most people cared about art, creativity, and good storytelling, there probably wouldn't be a race to the bottom in the entertainment industry. Idiocracy was a documentary, and "ASS" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kJZjU2k5abs https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kJZjU2k5abs is what the AI will calculate we want to see, and it will win awards.

CuriouslyC 1y ago
AI will make professional level movies cheaper and easier to make, which will the medium more accessible. The AAA movies probably won't look any better, but indie stuff that previously would have been suggestive and bare due to budgetary constraints can now be more direct and lavish. In many cases that's going to be the difference an indie project being a viable film and not.
- leptons 1y ago
  >AI will make professional level movies cheaper and easier to make If you're talking about the kind of movies with big-budget explosions and violence, then no thanks. That isn't what I'm talking about at all. Sure, AI will make that schlock cheaper. A lot of the "indie" stuff is garbage, too.
bobxmax 1y ago
I've never understood this argument... most of Hollywood today is already slop lol
jerrysievert 1y ago
I use my instant pot to make risotto in 20 minutes with very little effort that is about 90% as good (in my very stubborn opinion) as making it the hard way. I very much appreciate an amazing risotto, but when I make it myself I'll usually choose the instant pot versus the extra work. I feel Hollywood might be the same way.

Michelangelo11 1y ago

> It might cost only $10 million, but it would look closer to a $100 million movie. "We’re going to blow stuff up so it looks bigger and more cinematic,” he said. No comment needed.

rideontime 1y ago
Would love to hear him define "cinematic."
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Feed it to an AI prompt if you want an answer, no point explaining.

jmugan 1y ago

I would imagine that if it is shameful among the established players to use AI, what will happen is that entirely new players will come in. For me, it's the story that matters, and if they can tell a better story with AI, then many people will naturally flock to them.

simonw 1y ago

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King back in 2003 used early AI VFX software MASSIVE to animate thousands of soldiers in battle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MASSIVE_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MASSIVE_(software) - I don't think that was controversial at the time. According to that Wikipedia page MASSIVE was used for Avengers: Endgame, so it's had about a 20 year run at this point.

101008 1y ago
The problem is not AI per se (which are only a mix of algorithms). The problem is that this new wave of AI is trained in propietary content, and the owners/creators didn't allow it in the first place. If this AI worked without training, no one would say anything.
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  People would still be griping about how it devalues the hard work artists have put in, "isn't real art" and all the other things. The only difference is the public at large would be telling them to put a sock in it, rather than having some sympathy because of deceptive articles about how big tech is stealing from hardworking artists.
  - righthand 1y ago
    Yes they're two different issues from AI: - LLMs were trained on copy protected content and devaluing the input a worker puts into creating original work - LLMs are a tool for generating statistical variations and refinements of work, this doesn't devalue the input but makes generating output easier Form vs Function issues. So it would be preferable to give people a legal pathway to continue making money and own their work instead of allowing their work to be vacuumed up by the people at corporations looking to automate them away. The functional issue still exists but doesn't put your personal work at risk of theft/abuse outside of it's economic intent. Then the social stigma doesn't really matter because "an LLM is just a tool" is now a solid argument not causing abuse or deterioration of existing legal protections.
  - deleted 1y ago

AndrewKemendo 1y ago

I would absolutely love being able to create the movies I’ve always wanted to be made and them be plausibly good. I wonder who is making the oss version of these tools? So you can specify all the hundreds of parts needed to just compose a decent framework

bredren 1y ago
The action I see is happening in comfy-ui workflows. That software is progressing rapidly and adapts to whatever sota models are available. Heavy emphasis is on making cutting edge models work with limited local compute.
- bobxmax 1y ago
  Do you know any resources for getting started with ComfyUI? Last time I looked into these tools ages ago it was a complex mess
  - bredren 1y ago
    I suggest starting with their tutorial with a decent LLM to help. The workflows can be represented in written syntax which you can export repeatedly, pasting into a chat for feedback from the LLM based on your goal. For example, I wanted help setting up the use of a lora and batch iteration. The LLM can figure out where you've hooked things up incorrectly. The UI is funky and the terms and blocks require familiarity you won't have to start. I think learning the basics of it this way would be useful because you'll get some positive feedback loop going before trying to make use of someone's shared, complex workflow.
    - bobxmax 1y ago
      Thanks - I didn't think of using an LLM to debug the json, that's smart. I'll give it another shot.
bobxmax 1y ago
Wasn't Stability working on open sourced models? I wonder what happened to them, I remember some issues with their founder

antithesizer 1y ago

When there is a cost to a business from you knowing about something, prepare to be lied to.

bredren 1y ago

This article seems to be three to six months past due. As in the insights are late. >One animator who asked to remain anonymous described a costume designer generating concept images with AI, then hiring an illustrator to redraw them — cleaning the fingerprints, so to speak. “They’ll functionally launder the AI-generated content through an artist,” the animator said. This seems obvious to me. I’ve drawn birthday cards for kids where I first use gen AI to establish concepts based on the person’s interests and age. I’ll get several takes quickly but my reproduction is still an original and appreciated work. If the source of the idea cheapens the work I put into it with pencils and time, I’m not sure what to say. > “If you’re a storyboard artist,” one studio executive said, “you’re out of business. That’s over. Because the director can say to AI, ‘Here’s the script. Storyboard this for me. Now change the angle and give me another storyboard.’ Within an hour, you’ve got 12 different versions of it.” He added, however, if that same artist became proficient at prompting generative-AI tools, “he’s got a big job.” This sounds eerily similar to the messaging around SWE. I do not see a way past this—-one must rise past prompting and into orchestration.

jjulius 1y ago
>... my reproduction is still an original... I don't know how accurate that is.
pseudalopex 1y ago
A prediction does not make a report late. And many things obvious to some people are not obvious to a general audience. > If the source of the idea cheapens the work I put into it with pencils and time, I’m not sure what to say. This is a straw man. The idea is part of the product. > This sounds eerily similar to the messaging around SWE. Yes. This similarity included how the executive's imagination and the individual contributor's experience differed.
- bredren 1y ago
  > This is a straw man. The idea is part of the product. It is a part of the product but I’m not sure I agree it is a straw man. (Side note I just realized the …absolutely no one… meme labels this fallacy!) In music, few artists can count themselves as capable songwriters, producers, instrumentalist and vocalist recording artists and live performers. Yet the front page of Rolling Stone is generally reserved for those on the tail end of the full stack of talent described above. To continue the parallel, in SWE engineers are generally compensated better than non-technical product folks.

ramoz 1y ago

My neighbor is a director and is secretly using and in love with Claude for much of their work.

mwkaufma 1y ago

> James Cameron teamed up with Stability AI, one of the tech companies making inroads in Hollywood. ... and produced the worst AI-upscales of True Lies and Aliens, to universal scorn from audiences.

est31 1y ago

Tech companies love to show off that they are using AI, how they are embracing it, etc. Among engineers, there is also a growing community of folks who embrace tools like Cursor, Chat GPT, Gemini, v0, etc. When it comes to artists, I have less insight but what I see is that they are extremely critical of it and don't like it at all. It's interesting to see that gap in reactions to AI between artists and tech companies.

mattl 1y ago
And then there are the rest of us, indie developers who are building for and want to keep building things for the artists. We don’t want any of this and are working to build around it. It’s being really pushed by a lot of the same people who were pushing Web3 and NFTs and blockchain grifts.
antithesizer 1y ago
Or between artists in private and artists in public
taylorius 1y ago
Tech people like it because it isn't good enough to completely replace them yet. The sophisticated, coherent architecture of a well designed system is (for now) still beyond the LLMs, so for tech people, it's still just a wonderful tool. But give it another year, and the worm will turn.
- dingnuts 1y ago
  lumberjacks didn't go away when chainsaws were invented; demand for wood rose to meet the falling cost of wood and lumberjacks kept cutting down trees. don't see why it won't be any different for programmers.
  - spwa4 1y ago
    In the US, there were entire cities with essentially just lumberjacks. In other words, there used to be a LOT more lumberjacks than there are today, and they were a lot better paid. Now there are a LOT of software engineers.

throwaway743 1y ago

Hiding it? Are they supposed to slap on a disclaimer? Feels like one could safely assume they've been using it. Anyways, AI generated media is gonna lead to hyper-personalized, on-demand, generated media for people to consume. Sure, hollywood will still be around, but once consumer computing power and the models catch up, there are gonna be a ton of people choosing their own worlds than the ones curated by an industry.

aerostable_slug 1y ago
I think the really interesting part will be the illusion of choice presented by these systems. You'll think you've got the reins, but really it's a choose-your-own-adventure book that's effectively constraining you to the experience They want you to have. The only way out of this will be HN types who roll their own, and those will probably suck in comparison to the commercial systems filled with product placement and mindblowing amounts of information harvesting.
yahoozoo 1y ago
They have to hide it because of the unions.

nilirl 1y ago

So much 'he says, she says' that I honestly lost track of the point it was trying to make. Takeaway: Maybe AI good. Maybe AI bad. Scary. But possibility. Everybody try.

calvinmorrison 1y ago

We watched the live action Lilo & Stitch reboot yesterday. One thing that struck me was almost every shot was like 2 seconds or less. A lot of camera work for a kids movie... or that's all they could manage to generate?

layer8 1y ago

https://archive.is/yvvyy https://archive.is/yvvyy

sherdil2022 1y ago

Reminds me of: “NO CGI" is really just INVISIBLE CGI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo