9 ms·

I could literally see a future where films and tv become more like extended video game cut scenes. The studios are already struggling to make the next generatio

by rcarr 3y ago

I could literally see a future where films and tv become more like extended video game cut scenes. The studios are already struggling to make the next generation of Hollywood stars. People like Tom Holland and Timothee Chalomet just don't seem to cut it compared to the 80s and 90s stars. I could see them doing away with them all together and then just hiring less expensive actors to do motion capture work. The director would then have an application which is a hybrid between an AI and the character creation screen of a video game. They put in a brief description of what they want into the AI and it then creates a photo realistic 3d model which the director can tweak to their liking. The director then applies the skin to the motion capture and boom - movie. The bankable big name actor dies and the cgi character rises in its wake. Even the voice acting work could be handled by AI. Leaves the professional actor with no other choice but to go back to the origins of the profession with theatre work. Scary stuff if true.

Sahbak 3y ago
I don't know if "sorry" is what I'd feel for Hollywood stars like Tom Holland. I'm not sure what I will feel, if at all, but it is probably not close to empathy.
rs999gti 3y ago
> People like Tom Holland and Timothee Chalomet just don't seem to cut it compared to the 80s and 90s stars. Who is the next Tom Cruise? No one in Hollywood or British Film is like him. He is a relic from the early days of film, such as Burt Lancaster or Steve McQueen
- TylerE 3y ago
  The Rock was the next Tom Cruise. The better question is who’s the next The Rock, since he’s not exactly box office gold these days either.
  - rs999gti 3y ago
    The Rock was more of an Arnold or Stallone replacement from the 80s-2000s. A muscle bound, action star. Maybe the next Rock is Kumail Nanjiani? He has been getting pumped for more Marvel Universe movies. Tom Cruise is more like Steve McQueen - a normal looking movie star. The only actor like him is maybe Leonardo DiCaprio?
    - klipklop 3y ago
      >Maybe the next Rock is Kumail Nanjiani? He has been getting pumped for more Marvel Universe movies. You are kidding, right?
      - ashwagary 3y ago
        Kumail's gains have surprised many people.
- spywaregorilla 3y ago
  Ryan Reynolds and Leonardo DiCaprio come to mind. Chris Pratt a bit.
  - sillyfluke 3y ago
    If there ever is an example of Hollywood trying to force feed audiences actors who have little talent or range Chris Pratt is one of them. Nothing against the guy, but the guy has no acting range at all. Ditto for the guy from the Office now in all those tom clancy type shows or movies. Plus we're talking about the younger generation. The only actor that has exhibited the range and raw talent that could cover Joaquin Pheonix/Tom Cruise/Keanu Reeves roles is Ezra Miller. Christian Bale proved he could do all of that if he gave a shit. Ezra Miller could too. If they gave a shit.
    - spywaregorilla 3y ago
      Chris Pratt's "short" career has more or less been Parks and Rec -> Guardians of the Galaxy -> Jurassic Park. I thought he was pretty great for the first two but the scale of jurassic world being generic trash has managed to completely undermine any interest I had in him. I'm not clear where he stands on public opinion. I also think Office Jim being Jack Ryan is strange. But I don't think people care about the amazon shows. His news thing and production of a Quiet Place was interesting. People fucking love Office Jim if they could put him in something that was not action man. I find it kind of hilarious to highlight keanu reeves as an actor with range, as someone who loves reeves movies good or bad. Or tom cruise for that matter. The titles that made most of the "big actors" big were not things showing range. It's shit like top gun. Actors showing range are not doing big movies because big movies mostly don't ask for range. Young actors don't tend to have that much star power either. That comes after a career. I feel like I can't agree on your entire framework here. But I guess if we had to target actors under... 35 that people want to see I would say it's probably shifted a fair bit to women. Perhaps Margot Robbie. Anya Taylor Joy. Jenna Ortega. Emma Stone. off picks for men: Michael B. Jordan largely for the Black community. Harry Styles perhaps.
      - 3y ago
- rcarr 3y ago
  The issue is that all the modern actors have emerged from the tongue-in-cheek Marvel franchise or similar. Tom Cruise almost exclusively plays dramatic roles (the only comedic role I can think of is the one where he's in Harvey Weinstein-esque prosthetics for Tropic Thunder) and he picks his roles very carefully. He dedicates 100% of his life not just to the movie he's in but to the role and mystique of the movie star which is at complete odds with social media marketing and trying to be a relatable person to get the public to like you. Compare Cruise with Chris Hemsworth who's probably the closest thing to a bankable action star we've got right now (The Rock doesn't count because he essentially isn't acting, but is just playing the Rock in every movie). Chris Hemsworth makes some good movies but he doesn't choose the directors and projects he works on carefully the way Cruise did with Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson etc. Hemsworth is also out there hawking his fitness app, he's doing comedic bit roles and he relies quite heavily on his physique in a way that's closer to Stallone and Arnie. Cruise doesn't do any of these things because he knows that the more you see behind the curtain the less mystique there is. Hemsworth or an actor like him might raise his net worth by creating and selling his own whiskey but his value as a movie star declines when he does it - it cheapens him and his work, which have now become a vehicle to sell things outside of the movie. In contrast, Tom Cruise cares, above all else, in being a movie star. He dedicates himself to it not just inside the movies, but with his entire life outside of it too. She's since changed, but there was a good interview with Lady Gaga on Johnathan Ross' talk show just after her first album came out. She was sat on the sofa in one of her extravagant costumes and Ross was trying to get her to admit that she went home afterwards and stuck her jogging bottoms on and her takeout stained t shirts and just chilled like the rest of us. Obviously it's true - you'll even see her in her casual attire around the house in her documentary. But at this point in time, pre-social media, Gaga refused to cave. She didn't want her fans to associate her with that - she wanted to be an embodiment, a symbol, an archetype, whatever you want to call it, of the elevated, mysterious pop star. Because that is what feeds the fanatic energy - people want their heroes to be bigger than them, to be above the drudgery of normal life, because that is what inspires them to dream bigger themselves. Tom Cruise is basically the last actor in the lineage of the mysterious movie star, dating right back to the early days of Hollywood with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and later, Clark Gable, Cary Grant etc where movies and moviemaking themselves were both novel, mysterious and glamorous. Until Hollywood stops making every leading role an ironic tongue in cheek comedian and also stops with the relentless "we're just like you" YouTube video press machine, you won't get another Tom Cruise because Tom Cruise is the embodiment of the movie star archetype. Between the current crop of actors and the studios, none of them seem interested in going to the lengths necessary to craft the mystery, spectacle and otherness necessary for a movie star anymore.
gjsman-1000 3y ago
It feels almost like Hollywood is trying very hard to make Timothee Chalomet's career take off and it just... I don't know, I might be out of touch, but it just isn't? I recently saw the Wonka trailer that he stars in, and I just don't buy him as Wonka. He doesn't pull off the "weird" or "eccentric" correctly for me. Also, the moment when they are flying in the trailer and he meets an Oompa-Loompa, despite the realism and visual detail elsewhere, made the whole thing look tonally confused.
- not-my-account 3y ago
  but also, why the heck are they making another wonka? I don't think that the big studios are worth watching anymore - they're attempting to maximize expected ROI, not make a great movie (which is understandable in their position). Luckily there are many other smaller studios that will continue making much better movies for the sake of making art.
  - smcl 3y ago
    I honestly don’t know what people are getting out of seeing the same movies getting remade again and again. Wonka isn’t even the worst, how many Spider/Batmen have there been this century alone?
    - spywaregorilla 3y ago
      They're not really the same. Many of them are not good. You may not like them. But they're clearly different stories tackling different ideas. Personally I think Spiderman 1 and 2 were solid, genre defining films. Amazing Spiderman 1 & 2 were ruined by Sony but the art direction was honestly super good. and the MCU Spiderman 1 and 2 were pretty neat.
      - PawgerZ 3y ago
        Don't forget about spider verse 1 & 2.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
AbrahamParangi 3y ago
By and large the boomers won't vote for someone younger than them (notice our politicians are the oldest they've ever been and have been getting older since the boomers started voting). I bet their other preferences have a lot to do with the decrease in new 80s-type movie stars, because the other thing that we've seen is the retention of stars well past their prime. I mean, they brought back Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher for the new Star Wars.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  As of 2022, boomers only make up 20.58% of the US population, though. https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-share-by-generation/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-sha...
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Do they go to the movies at a higher rate though? My gut says yes, the young people I know generally never go and older folk who grew up with less entertainment options still do.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      A bunch of my peers go to the movies pretty frequently and, though perhaps we're not precisely "young people" anymore, boomers are decades older.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      This 2019 study found that On a whole, the study showed that 35.2 percent of U.S. moviegoers are above the age of 50; and 33.8 percent under the age of 25. So, at least then, the distribution seems very roughly even. And there are fewer boomers living today than in 2019. Anecdotally, I am an older gen-X, not a boomer, but going to the movies is not a frequent thing (anymore) amongst my social group. For whatever that's worth. https://www.digitalcinemareport.com/news/new-study-tracks-ages-gender-moviegoers https://www.digitalcinemareport.com/news/new-study-tracks-ag...
ars 3y ago
Why is it scary? It would become like books: A single author creates the entire work, except it's audiovisual instead of written. You can already do that now with written text, audio (if you have a talent for voices), and animation (if you can draw), why does adding realistic video make it "scary"? Why is that bad? It seems great to me - way way way more stuff will be available, and it will be open to anyone (the cost is high now, but it will go down of course).
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  It's "scary" for present-day actors who will likely see their entire occupation erased by the end of the century. It's also "scary" for consumers today who, justifiably, don't want the temporary but inevitable drop in quality that the switch over to "AI" will create. But on the grander scale, I agree with you. It isn't scary. "AI" is poised to democratize art like we've never seen before, and if "AI" can replace human artists that points more to the brutal reality that art actually isn't as valuable as some of us want it to be.
  - __loam 3y ago
    I disagree I think it is pretty scary that we're handing over the generation of cultural artifacts to algorithms. It's also pretty funny to see people like you talk about democratizing art, then in the next breath talk about art as if it has no value, despite that art being extremely valuable to the training of these models in the first place. Hell, this might even make human art more valuable as the price of autogenerated, samey, computer generated sludge goes to zero as the supply explodes.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      >I think it is pretty scary that we're handing over the generation of cultural artifacts to algorithms. Art has always been based on algorithms, the appeal of art is determined purely by the whims of society and the beholders without any regard for the process. Art that does not suit the algorithms of its time do not survive the test of time. >It's also pretty funny to see people like you talk about democratizing art, then in the next breath talk about art as if it has no value, despite that art being extremely valuable to the training of these models in the first place. When everyone can create art, art has no value. Value is always determined by supply against demand, and art is currently poised to see an absolute oversupply in the coming century. This is also discounting the fact that the real value of art has always been low, "Artists are destitute." isn't a stereotype for no reason. The brutal reality is art really isn't valuable in the first place (it is after all an unnecessary and inefficient luxury) and "AI" is only going to make that fact even further apparent. >Hell, this might even make human art more valuable as the price of autogenerated, samey, computer generated sludge goes to zero as the supply explodes. That assumes human art is somehow more valuable than "AI" art, but I don't necessarily believe that could be a constant forever. Photographs were considered inferior to illustrations when it was first invented, likewise the invention of block printing and then typewriting to calligraphy, and look where we are now.
Salgat 3y ago
We're going to get to a point where ML will just dynamically generate entire movies custom tailored to each person's taste; all you do is pay for the compute time (plus a small fee) to generate the movie.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  A shared culture is valuable to society. With social media vs. old school television, we don't have nearly the same shared reality with media/news/life. We walk around with headphones listening to nothing but our custom playlists and watching our custom shit. Now, we're going to have customized movies and content that we can't explore with society at large? I'll cash out.
  - milesward 3y ago
    It’s the next Tower of Babel
  - Legend2440 3y ago
    I think this is a very close-minded view. "old school television" is also a very new invention, we went most of history without all watching the same thing. People will still share the things they find interesting with the people they care about.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > we went most of history without all watching the same thing. Kinda true? Before movies, there was the shared experiences of books, magazines, plays, etc.
      - __loam 3y ago
        Before movies you also had a family based agrarian society lol. Talking about AI like it's some return to the pasture, despite its potential to further alienate us, is silly.
carabiner 3y ago
It's because they're nepo babies. Nepo babies are the logical actor extension of sequels churning and critical viewers are tired of recycled content. I think movies are becoming more like packaged goods, not just in stories but also the actors, and studios are fine with becoming more like McDonalds because McD's makes a fuckton of money.
- jasmer 3y ago
  [dead]
- souplesse 3y ago
  Are you saying that the current generation of Hollywood stars are generally nepo babies? I’m not saying it’s not true, but Tom Holland and Timothee Chalamet are not good examples for that.
throwaway14356 3y ago
hybrid actors
- throwaway14356 3y ago
  picture for example stalone and schwarzenegger combined into one person.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
That's not scary. That's actually fantastic for movies. "Movie stars" were created as a concept by Hollywood to enable people who otherwise wouldn't be able to suspend disbelief to watch a guy they've seen play 10 characters already play another. This was capitalized on by good actors who knew their worth and made a lot of money. Now you don't go watch a movie and expect a unique person for every role, you actively seek out films with the same face in them. Imagine every movie you watch is not a recycled face with a cult of personality, it's just a story with people in it. I think movies without celebrities would be much better.
- rcarr 3y ago
  What you're describing is literally Netflix. I can go on Netflix and watch unlimited shows with completely unknown actors from across the globe. When I was 19, I decided to make my way through the entirety of the imdb top 250 (which actually meant something at the time) as well as a few other big movie lists. To this day, I can remember many of those films and they influence how I see the world. I'm not convinced the Netflix shows I've watched carry such clout. The cult of personality emerges when the rare talent warrants it. The face may be the same but the character transformation sure isn't. If they haven't got it then the cult soon flounders with all but the Kool-Aid drinkers which seems to be what we're witnessing with the current crop of actors. Try telling me Christian Bale's Batman is the same as his Machinist performance or Jake Gyllenhaal's Nightcrawler is the same as his Jarhead. These two are literally next level at their craft, and watching a top performer in any craft is immensely satisfying. If we lose that to CGI it will be a massive shame.
Balgair 3y ago
The Last Action Heroes by Nick de Semlyen, editor of Empire magazine, goes into the 'why' of the 80's action movie stars. Great book, well worth a summer read. TL;DR: Unique factors of the stars themselves mostly growing up in poverty, the Cold War, and the film industry coming out of 'funks' in the 70s lead to this hyper-masculine juiced to the gils ur-hero of relatively 'cheap' films. Stalone really isn't like the others but was kinda forced into it by all the money he was making (guy's more of a tender-soul/starving artist in reality). Schwarzenegger is his own beast, as many will attest to. Segal is just woah ... looney tunes. Norris is also a strange duck that was super comfortable doing TV movies for some reason. ETC. Again, great book, well worth the read!

by rcarr 3y ago

Sahbak 3y ago

I don't know if "sorry" is what I'd feel for Hollywood stars like Tom Holland. I'm not sure what I will feel, if at all, but it is probably not close to empathy.

rs999gti 3y ago

> People like Tom Holland and Timothee Chalomet just don't seem to cut it compared to the 80s and 90s stars. Who is the next Tom Cruise? No one in Hollywood or British Film is like him. He is a relic from the early days of film, such as Burt Lancaster or Steve McQueen

TylerE 3y ago
The Rock was the next Tom Cruise. The better question is who’s the next The Rock, since he’s not exactly box office gold these days either.
- rs999gti 3y ago
  The Rock was more of an Arnold or Stallone replacement from the 80s-2000s. A muscle bound, action star. Maybe the next Rock is Kumail Nanjiani? He has been getting pumped for more Marvel Universe movies. Tom Cruise is more like Steve McQueen - a normal looking movie star. The only actor like him is maybe Leonardo DiCaprio?
  - klipklop 3y ago
    >Maybe the next Rock is Kumail Nanjiani? He has been getting pumped for more Marvel Universe movies. You are kidding, right?
    - ashwagary 3y ago
      Kumail's gains have surprised many people.
spywaregorilla 3y ago
Ryan Reynolds and Leonardo DiCaprio come to mind. Chris Pratt a bit.
- sillyfluke 3y ago
  If there ever is an example of Hollywood trying to force feed audiences actors who have little talent or range Chris Pratt is one of them. Nothing against the guy, but the guy has no acting range at all. Ditto for the guy from the Office now in all those tom clancy type shows or movies. Plus we're talking about the younger generation. The only actor that has exhibited the range and raw talent that could cover Joaquin Pheonix/Tom Cruise/Keanu Reeves roles is Ezra Miller. Christian Bale proved he could do all of that if he gave a shit. Ezra Miller could too. If they gave a shit.
  - spywaregorilla 3y ago
    Chris Pratt's "short" career has more or less been Parks and Rec -> Guardians of the Galaxy -> Jurassic Park. I thought he was pretty great for the first two but the scale of jurassic world being generic trash has managed to completely undermine any interest I had in him. I'm not clear where he stands on public opinion. I also think Office Jim being Jack Ryan is strange. But I don't think people care about the amazon shows. His news thing and production of a Quiet Place was interesting. People fucking love Office Jim if they could put him in something that was not action man. I find it kind of hilarious to highlight keanu reeves as an actor with range, as someone who loves reeves movies good or bad. Or tom cruise for that matter. The titles that made most of the "big actors" big were not things showing range. It's shit like top gun. Actors showing range are not doing big movies because big movies mostly don't ask for range. Young actors don't tend to have that much star power either. That comes after a career. I feel like I can't agree on your entire framework here. But I guess if we had to target actors under... 35 that people want to see I would say it's probably shifted a fair bit to women. Perhaps Margot Robbie. Anya Taylor Joy. Jenna Ortega. Emma Stone. off picks for men: Michael B. Jordan largely for the Black community. Harry Styles perhaps.
    - 3y ago
rcarr 3y ago
The issue is that all the modern actors have emerged from the tongue-in-cheek Marvel franchise or similar. Tom Cruise almost exclusively plays dramatic roles (the only comedic role I can think of is the one where he's in Harvey Weinstein-esque prosthetics for Tropic Thunder) and he picks his roles very carefully. He dedicates 100% of his life not just to the movie he's in but to the role and mystique of the movie star which is at complete odds with social media marketing and trying to be a relatable person to get the public to like you. Compare Cruise with Chris Hemsworth who's probably the closest thing to a bankable action star we've got right now (The Rock doesn't count because he essentially isn't acting, but is just playing the Rock in every movie). Chris Hemsworth makes some good movies but he doesn't choose the directors and projects he works on carefully the way Cruise did with Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson etc. Hemsworth is also out there hawking his fitness app, he's doing comedic bit roles and he relies quite heavily on his physique in a way that's closer to Stallone and Arnie. Cruise doesn't do any of these things because he knows that the more you see behind the curtain the less mystique there is. Hemsworth or an actor like him might raise his net worth by creating and selling his own whiskey but his value as a movie star declines when he does it - it cheapens him and his work, which have now become a vehicle to sell things outside of the movie. In contrast, Tom Cruise cares, above all else, in being a movie star. He dedicates himself to it not just inside the movies, but with his entire life outside of it too. She's since changed, but there was a good interview with Lady Gaga on Johnathan Ross' talk show just after her first album came out. She was sat on the sofa in one of her extravagant costumes and Ross was trying to get her to admit that she went home afterwards and stuck her jogging bottoms on and her takeout stained t shirts and just chilled like the rest of us. Obviously it's true - you'll even see her in her casual attire around the house in her documentary. But at this point in time, pre-social media, Gaga refused to cave. She didn't want her fans to associate her with that - she wanted to be an embodiment, a symbol, an archetype, whatever you want to call it, of the elevated, mysterious pop star. Because that is what feeds the fanatic energy - people want their heroes to be bigger than them, to be above the drudgery of normal life, because that is what inspires them to dream bigger themselves. Tom Cruise is basically the last actor in the lineage of the mysterious movie star, dating right back to the early days of Hollywood with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and later, Clark Gable, Cary Grant etc where movies and moviemaking themselves were both novel, mysterious and glamorous. Until Hollywood stops making every leading role an ironic tongue in cheek comedian and also stops with the relentless "we're just like you" YouTube video press machine, you won't get another Tom Cruise because Tom Cruise is the embodiment of the movie star archetype. Between the current crop of actors and the studios, none of them seem interested in going to the lengths necessary to craft the mystery, spectacle and otherness necessary for a movie star anymore.

gjsman-1000 3y ago

It feels almost like Hollywood is trying very hard to make Timothee Chalomet's career take off and it just... I don't know, I might be out of touch, but it just isn't? I recently saw the Wonka trailer that he stars in, and I just don't buy him as Wonka. He doesn't pull off the "weird" or "eccentric" correctly for me. Also, the moment when they are flying in the trailer and he meets an Oompa-Loompa, despite the realism and visual detail elsewhere, made the whole thing look tonally confused.

not-my-account 3y ago
but also, why the heck are they making another wonka? I don't think that the big studios are worth watching anymore - they're attempting to maximize expected ROI, not make a great movie (which is understandable in their position). Luckily there are many other smaller studios that will continue making much better movies for the sake of making art.
- smcl 3y ago
  I honestly don’t know what people are getting out of seeing the same movies getting remade again and again. Wonka isn’t even the worst, how many Spider/Batmen have there been this century alone?
  - spywaregorilla 3y ago
    They're not really the same. Many of them are not good. You may not like them. But they're clearly different stories tackling different ideas. Personally I think Spiderman 1 and 2 were solid, genre defining films. Amazing Spiderman 1 & 2 were ruined by Sony but the art direction was honestly super good. and the MCU Spiderman 1 and 2 were pretty neat.
    - PawgerZ 3y ago
      Don't forget about spider verse 1 & 2.
- Dalewyn 3y ago

AbrahamParangi 3y ago

By and large the boomers won't vote for someone younger than them (notice our politicians are the oldest they've ever been and have been getting older since the boomers started voting). I bet their other preferences have a lot to do with the decrease in new 80s-type movie stars, because the other thing that we've seen is the retention of stars well past their prime. I mean, they brought back Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher for the new Star Wars.

JohnFen 3y ago
As of 2022, boomers only make up 20.58% of the US population, though. https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-share-by-generation/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-sha...
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Do they go to the movies at a higher rate though? My gut says yes, the young people I know generally never go and older folk who grew up with less entertainment options still do.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    A bunch of my peers go to the movies pretty frequently and, though perhaps we're not precisely "young people" anymore, boomers are decades older.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    This 2019 study found that On a whole, the study showed that 35.2 percent of U.S. moviegoers are above the age of 50; and 33.8 percent under the age of 25. So, at least then, the distribution seems very roughly even. And there are fewer boomers living today than in 2019. Anecdotally, I am an older gen-X, not a boomer, but going to the movies is not a frequent thing (anymore) amongst my social group. For whatever that's worth. https://www.digitalcinemareport.com/news/new-study-tracks-ages-gender-moviegoers https://www.digitalcinemareport.com/news/new-study-tracks-ag...

ars 3y ago

Why is it scary? It would become like books: A single author creates the entire work, except it's audiovisual instead of written. You can already do that now with written text, audio (if you have a talent for voices), and animation (if you can draw), why does adding realistic video make it "scary"? Why is that bad? It seems great to me - way way way more stuff will be available, and it will be open to anyone (the cost is high now, but it will go down of course).

Dalewyn 3y ago
It's "scary" for present-day actors who will likely see their entire occupation erased by the end of the century. It's also "scary" for consumers today who, justifiably, don't want the temporary but inevitable drop in quality that the switch over to "AI" will create. But on the grander scale, I agree with you. It isn't scary. "AI" is poised to democratize art like we've never seen before, and if "AI" can replace human artists that points more to the brutal reality that art actually isn't as valuable as some of us want it to be.
- __loam 3y ago
  I disagree I think it is pretty scary that we're handing over the generation of cultural artifacts to algorithms. It's also pretty funny to see people like you talk about democratizing art, then in the next breath talk about art as if it has no value, despite that art being extremely valuable to the training of these models in the first place. Hell, this might even make human art more valuable as the price of autogenerated, samey, computer generated sludge goes to zero as the supply explodes.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    >I think it is pretty scary that we're handing over the generation of cultural artifacts to algorithms. Art has always been based on algorithms, the appeal of art is determined purely by the whims of society and the beholders without any regard for the process. Art that does not suit the algorithms of its time do not survive the test of time. >It's also pretty funny to see people like you talk about democratizing art, then in the next breath talk about art as if it has no value, despite that art being extremely valuable to the training of these models in the first place. When everyone can create art, art has no value. Value is always determined by supply against demand, and art is currently poised to see an absolute oversupply in the coming century. This is also discounting the fact that the real value of art has always been low, "Artists are destitute." isn't a stereotype for no reason. The brutal reality is art really isn't valuable in the first place (it is after all an unnecessary and inefficient luxury) and "AI" is only going to make that fact even further apparent. >Hell, this might even make human art more valuable as the price of autogenerated, samey, computer generated sludge goes to zero as the supply explodes. That assumes human art is somehow more valuable than "AI" art, but I don't necessarily believe that could be a constant forever. Photographs were considered inferior to illustrations when it was first invented, likewise the invention of block printing and then typewriting to calligraphy, and look where we are now.

Salgat 3y ago

We're going to get to a point where ML will just dynamically generate entire movies custom tailored to each person's taste; all you do is pay for the compute time (plus a small fee) to generate the movie.

unethical_ban 3y ago
A shared culture is valuable to society. With social media vs. old school television, we don't have nearly the same shared reality with media/news/life. We walk around with headphones listening to nothing but our custom playlists and watching our custom shit. Now, we're going to have customized movies and content that we can't explore with society at large? I'll cash out.
- milesward 3y ago
  It’s the next Tower of Babel
- Legend2440 3y ago
  I think this is a very close-minded view. "old school television" is also a very new invention, we went most of history without all watching the same thing. People will still share the things they find interesting with the people they care about.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > we went most of history without all watching the same thing. Kinda true? Before movies, there was the shared experiences of books, magazines, plays, etc.
    - __loam 3y ago
      Before movies you also had a family based agrarian society lol. Talking about AI like it's some return to the pasture, despite its potential to further alienate us, is silly.

carabiner 3y ago

It's because they're nepo babies. Nepo babies are the logical actor extension of sequels churning and critical viewers are tired of recycled content. I think movies are becoming more like packaged goods, not just in stories but also the actors, and studios are fine with becoming more like McDonalds because McD's makes a fuckton of money.

jasmer 3y ago
[dead]
souplesse 3y ago
Are you saying that the current generation of Hollywood stars are generally nepo babies? I’m not saying it’s not true, but Tom Holland and Timothee Chalamet are not good examples for that.

throwaway14356 3y ago

hybrid actors

throwaway14356 3y ago
picture for example stalone and schwarzenegger combined into one person.

friend_and_foe 3y ago

That's not scary. That's actually fantastic for movies. "Movie stars" were created as a concept by Hollywood to enable people who otherwise wouldn't be able to suspend disbelief to watch a guy they've seen play 10 characters already play another. This was capitalized on by good actors who knew their worth and made a lot of money. Now you don't go watch a movie and expect a unique person for every role, you actively seek out films with the same face in them. Imagine every movie you watch is not a recycled face with a cult of personality, it's just a story with people in it. I think movies without celebrities would be much better.

rcarr 3y ago
What you're describing is literally Netflix. I can go on Netflix and watch unlimited shows with completely unknown actors from across the globe. When I was 19, I decided to make my way through the entirety of the imdb top 250 (which actually meant something at the time) as well as a few other big movie lists. To this day, I can remember many of those films and they influence how I see the world. I'm not convinced the Netflix shows I've watched carry such clout. The cult of personality emerges when the rare talent warrants it. The face may be the same but the character transformation sure isn't. If they haven't got it then the cult soon flounders with all but the Kool-Aid drinkers which seems to be what we're witnessing with the current crop of actors. Try telling me Christian Bale's Batman is the same as his Machinist performance or Jake Gyllenhaal's Nightcrawler is the same as his Jarhead. These two are literally next level at their craft, and watching a top performer in any craft is immensely satisfying. If we lose that to CGI it will be a massive shame.

Balgair 3y ago

The Last Action Heroes by Nick de Semlyen, editor of Empire magazine, goes into the 'why' of the 80's action movie stars. Great book, well worth a summer read. TL;DR: Unique factors of the stars themselves mostly growing up in poverty, the Cold War, and the film industry coming out of 'funks' in the 70s lead to this hyper-masculine juiced to the gils ur-hero of relatively 'cheap' films. Stalone really isn't like the others but was kinda forced into it by all the money he was making (guy's more of a tender-soul/starving artist in reality). Schwarzenegger is his own beast, as many will attest to. Segal is just woah ... looney tunes. Norris is also a strange duck that was super comfortable doing TV movies for some reason. ETC. Again, great book, well worth the read!