I can see this putting some VFX artists out of work but I cannot imagine any future where I would want to see AI-Generated Art
VFX artists have been using AI tools for 20 years or more. Any artist who didn't have to hand-trace a rotoscope line has been using AI in one form or another. I recognize I'm the only person here who knows what "rotoscope" means which is part of the problem - my posse has been doing cutting-edge shit since college because if you wanna see rapid adoption, check out filmed entertainment. If you look at AI-generated content the obvious place to use it is backgrounds. Mattes have been effectively gone since the early-mid '90s because computers have been able to generate plenty-good-enough backgrounds. AI makes that cheaper which mostly means that the guys who are doing backgrounds are going to do more of them. Look. It's gonna play out like this. Here, sit with me for a few minutes: That took Kerry Conran, talented Cal Arts grad, dedicated cineaste, four fucking years to make: Worked out tho 'cuz after four years he finished "chapter 1", a friend got it in front of Jon Avnet and four years and $70m after that, the world got: HERE IS WHAT AI IS GOING TO DO It's not gonna take four years grinding on your own to make Chapter 1 of Sky Captain. It's going to take months or weeks. The skills you use to trick the AI are going to be novel and they will be successful. It will be impressive and those of us who grew up with Steenbecks will marvel. But it's still gonna take tens of millions of dollars, Jude Law and Angelina Jolie to make it into a movie. Because a bunch of amateurs are always going to be slain by a bunch of professionals. Period. Full stop. No discussion. And that's the stupidest bullshit about this whole kerfuffle - everyone's all "ZOMFG I can't imagine how threatened some hypothetical professional must feel about this" because they can't imagine some hypothetical professional ANYWAY. Trust me - if you make your living doing visual FX, you're eagerly watching all this AI bullshit to see if it's capable of giving you a tool to speed up your workflows. And so far, what you see is something that doesn't care how many kings there are in a game of chess and if you look deeper, you're troubled by the fact that none of the people selling this technology sense that's a problem.He could not afford better equipment, so he used equipment given him in payment for projects that he worked on, such as desktop publishing of articles. His computer (including the equipment he earned) was outdated and slow. He dropped out of society, and spent all of his free time creating the short, working only enough to support himself and his project. He later remarked that he "had no life", and would sometimes hide under his desk in a fetal position, feeling tempted to give up on his project.
> I recognize I'm the only person here who knows what "rotoscope" means which is part of the problem Nah, man. Everybody who played Prince of Persia on the Apple 2E remembers rotoscoping!
Except that in almost every instance where a profession has been automated, that’s exactly what happened. Having a computer that keeps track of your inventory makes the workflow better for the logistics department, and then using a computer to schedule deliveries makes that part easier as well. And you keep doing that and eventually you’re doing the work of twelve professionals and your team shrinks down to 1/12th of what it was. And then you chip away at those tasks until you halve the workforce again, and eventually the computer is doing all of those tasks and the people who used to do those things are obsolete. Then they go back to school hoping to find a training program where they can make money before AI takes those jobs too.
Bitch I've got four computers and eight screens in front of me and the only thing that has changed since the era of magnetic tape is I can do more, faster, with less. I can't say that any simpler. You would have no more idea what I'm doing now than you would in the era of magnetic tape because I'm a professional with professional tools. I can't say that any simpler either. There's this assumption that if the tools get better the budget will shrink and that simply Does not Happen.
But surely there's way more logistics and shipping being done now in the age of computers than there was before. I'm young but I still remember a time before Amazon. I think you're imagining the one exact thing the computer is now doing being the totality of the job, whereas Klein (i assume) is talking about the industry as a whole, which generally increase in scope as it becomes cheaper easier and more prevalent.
Oh yeah totally. Fwiw, I'm fairly into watching behind the scenes vids and have tried learning blender a few times, so while I don't dare call myself a beginner I a least know what rotoscoping and mattes are. And if your job was Just those, I'd be worried. I don't think most VFX artists are though ofc. The AI I see being useful for someone who actually cares about quality are the ones that speed up things already being done - rotoscoping like you said, inpainting, photogommetry, all the places AI is already being used that maybe the new techniques can do better. The NERF stuff in particular I think could be big- turning many simultaneous video recordings into a 3D scene, so the camera can be repositioned after the fact. Nobody besides a handful of nerds want to watch ugly stock footage stitched together with ChatGPT writing the story lol.
Here's the TRUE issue: 1) LLMs lose money whenever you use them. 2) ChatGPT plus is $20 a month. Midjourney is $10 or $60 a month. Copilot is $30 a month. Stable Diffiusion is $9 or $49 a month. 3) Photoshop is $23 a month. Premiere is $23 a month. Animate is $23 a month. Audition is $23 a month. All of them combined is $60 a month. 4) Adobe Stock is $30 a month. Fundamentally, "make me an image that might have too many toes that might just be a bad rip-off of a license-protected product" is consumer-cost-competitive with "find me an image that was created by humans under crystal-clear licensing terms." And fundamentally, "draw a fuzzy monster that is either kneeling or squatting, I don't care" is more expensive than "here is an absolute bazooka of a content tool in any medium you care to work in." And that is why none of this shit is being sold to professionals - it's nowhere near the costs-benefits breakpoint where they'd consider it. You know what fucking sucks about being a creative professional? You're surrounded by other creative professionals who are so fucking egotistical that they're 100% certain they're a creative genius while you're a button pusher. They'll slave away for weeks on something visual and then when it gets to the audio their every instruction is "no more like this. no more like that. No do it more like that. Can't you just give me your sessions and teach me how to use your software you're clearly a fucking idiot oh oops did I say that out loud?" I "worked" with this guy Jesse - friend of a friend - who was a graphics guy on Jimmy Kimmel. He wanted a sound effect for something - I think it was a brain ray zapping Bryan Cranston or some shit for half a second in a 2-minute throwaway bit before his interview. So I spent 20 minutes coming up with a brain ray zapping sound effect. Mutherfucker called me during lunch and left a seven minute message about all the changes he wanted. I noped out and said "sorry, Jesse, no bid" and the only award his short film ever got? Was for sound. That I did. It's fuckin' awesome. It's a werewolf in wrestling gear painted gold for some reason. But the idea that I might know what I'm doing is absolutely fucking unthinkable to a certain segment of creative. All this AI bullshit is for that guy. The dipshit who prefers to shout at other professionals rather than trust them, who has no respect for the expertise of others, who can't fucking wrap their head around the idea that art requires artists. And they don't have enough money to support it. Fuckin' every AI company out there is losing money at prices that make Creative Cloud look like a bargain and their solution is to ask for 10% of global GDP to fix the problem.
LOL I've been following a few AI artists for a couple years now. They're all really clear about the fact that what they're doing is a wholly different process than traditional pixel-pushing, with different inputs, different outputs and different happy little accidents. I am honestly and enthusiastically supportive of the use of AI by creative professionals, and I am honestly and enthusiastically supportive of the use of AI by amateurs. Every time the tools get better the world improves. The tedious thing for me is that the techbros REALLY want to make this about the death of the professional class and there's absolutely zero fucking evidence to even have the discussion. It comes back to that fucking storyboard girl. Yay, you paid $10 a month to get a bunch of dragon pictures that may or may not be associated with a "movie" you intend to make someday. You weren't about to pay a storyboardist anyway, nor were you about to even try to get vaguely good at it. I've got buddies who make $2k a day storyboarding. I also shoveled about $600 into Frameforge. Between Frameforge, Photoshop and ComicLife I got a half-dozen pages into a graphic novel; it's a lot of fuckin' work. And A) Microsoft Pilot Girl is NEVER putting in that effort B) No aspect of Microsoft Pilot, or any AI for that matter, reduces that effort in any meaningful way.