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.