7 ms·

Are we only a few years away from one person/small group made movies where the dialog, acting, location and special effects can be tweaked endlessly for a relat

Are we only a few years away from one person/small group made movies where the dialog, acting, location and special effects can be tweaked endlessly for a relatively low cost. If I was a studio exec I'd be worried.

Workaccount2 2y ago
If I was a human I'd be worried.
- edgyquant 2y ago
  These are tools by and for humans
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    So are nukes.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    I guess cats probably think we are tools for feeding them...
adamc 2y ago
I wouldn't be. How is any of this going to lead to meaningful art? I don't think you get "The Green Mile" from something like this.
- meiraleal 2y ago
  > I wouldn't be. How is any of this going to lead to meaningful art? Local art, local actors, local animations telling stories about local culture. A netflix for every city, even neighborhoods. That's going to be crazy fun.
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  There are plenty of great outsider storytellers and artists. Youtube is proof of this. People mostly do comedy on youtube because that's what the medium supports on a low budget, but AI is going to change that.
  - adamc 2y ago
    I'm really not seeing how that would happen from these examples. It would seem like achieving an adequate, directorial level of control would require writing a novel -- or, anyway, more than a conventional screenplay -- to get the AI to make the movie you wanted. There is so much that has to be conveyed in making a film, if you want it to say something particular.
    - meiraleal 2y ago
      > It would seem like achieving an adequate, directorial level of control would require writing a novel -- or, anyway, more than a conventional screenplay -- to get the AI to make the movie you wanted. And? What's the problem with that? You seem to be locked in a "prompt to get a movie" mindset.
      - adamc 2y ago
        Those are the examples provided. When they deliver pro tools for generating movie clips, I will be more convinced, but that hasn't remotely happened yet.
- spacebanana7 2y ago
  I'd love to see what'd happen if someone dumped the entire text of the Silmarillion or the Hobbit into one of these models. Assuming context windows and output capacity become large enough.
  - bnj 2y ago
    Especially primed by all the lord of the rings movies, for example; I could see the studio taking all the archived footage, camera angles, all the extra data that was generated in the creation of the films and feeding that into something like this model to create all kinds of interesting additional material.
- Hrun0 2y ago
  > I don't think you get "The Green Mile" from something like this. ...yet
- vundercind 2y ago
  Extremely-heavily-CG movies already mostly look like shit compared to ones where they build sets and have props and location shoot, even if somewhat assisted by computer compositing and such (everything is, nowadays). [edit: I don’t even mean that the graphics look bad, but the creative and artistic choices tend to be poor] The limitations of reality seem to have a positive effect on the overall process of film making, for whatever reason. I expect generative AI film will be at least as bad. Gonna be hard to get an entire well-crafted film out of them.
- ben_w 2y ago
  You're unlikely to get an AI that wins accolades for the same reason that's unlikely with humans: they represent the absolute pinnacle of achievement. The same AI can still raise the minimum bar for quality. Or replace YouTubers and similar while they're still learning how to be good in the first place. No idea where we are in this whole process yet, but it's a continuum not a boolean.
  - observationist 2y ago
    What accolades? The Hollywood self-congratulatory conspicuous consumption festivals they use to show how good they are at producing "art" every year? The film festivals where billions of dollars are spent on clothing and jewelry to show off the "class" of everyone attending, which people like Weinstein used to pick victims, and everyone else uses as conspicuous consumption and "marketing" media? Pinnacle is not the word I'd use. Race to the bottom, least possible effort, plausibly deniable quality, gross exploitation, capitalist bottom line - those are all things I'd use to describe current "art" awards like Grammy, Oscars, Cannes, etc. The media industry is run by exploiting artists for licensing rights. The middle men and publishers add absolutely nothing to the mix. Google or Spotify or platforms arguably add value by surfacing, searching, categorizing, and so on, but not anywhere near the level of revenue capture they rationalize as their due. When anyone and everyone can produce a film series or set of stories or song or artistic image that matches their inner artistic vision, and they're given the tools to do so without restriction or being beholden to anyone, then we're going to see high quality art and media that couldn't possibly be made in the grotesquely commercial environment we have now. These tools are as raw and rough and bad performing as they ever will be, and are only going to get better. Shared universes of prompts and storylines and media styles and things that bring generative art and storytelling together to allow coherent social sharing and interactive media will be a thing. Kids in 10 years will be able to click and create their own cartoons and stories. Parents will be able to engage by establishing cultural parameters and maybe sneak in educational, ethical, and moral content designed around what they think is important. Artists are going to be able to produce every form of digital media and tune and tweak their vision using sophisticated tools and processes, and they're not going to be limited by budgets, politics, studio constraints, State Department limitations, wink/nod geopolitical agreements with nation states, and so on. Art's going to get weird, and censorship will be nigh on impossible. People will create a lot of garbage, a lot of spam, low effort gifs and video memes, but more artists will be empowered than ever before, and I'm here for it.
- mathgeek 2y ago
  We already exist in a world where most of the revenue for film companies comes from formulaic productions. Studio execs certainly worry about how they are going to create profits in addition to any concerns about the qualitative cultural value of the films.
  - adamc 2y ago
    Even formulaic movies from hollywood have directors and actors doing a million things the AI will do randomly unless you tell it otherwise.
- riskable 2y ago
  > How is any of this going to lead to meaningful art? Nearly all the movies that go to theaters aren't "meaningful art". Not only that but what's meaningful to you isn't necessarily what's meaningful to others. If someone can get their own personal "Godzilla VS The Iron Giant" crossover made into a feature-length film it will be meaningful to them.
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    > Nearly all the movies that go to theaters aren't "meaningful art". No but what they are is expensive, flashy, impressive productions which is the only reason people are comfortable paying upwards of $25 each to see them. And there's no way in the world that an AI movie is going to come anywhere close to the production quality of Godzilla vs Kong. And like, yeah, their example videos at the posted link are impressive. How many attempts did those take? Are they going to be able to maintain continuity of a character's appearance from one shot to the next to form a coherent visual structure? How long can these shots be before the AI starts tripping over itself and forgetting how arms work?
    - wavemode 2y ago
      My suspicion is that, if AI moviemaking actually becomes common, there will be a younger generation of folks who will grow up on it and become used to its peculiarities. We will be the old ones going "back in my day, you had to actually shoot movies on a camera! And background objects had perfect continuity!" And they will roll their eyes at us and retort that nobody pays attention to background objects anyway.
      - adamc 2y ago
        Shades of autotune. But I have faith that people will notice the difference. The current generation may not care about autotune, but that doesn't mean another generation won't. People rediscover differences and decide what matters to them. When superhero movies were new, almost everyone loved them. I was entranced. After being saturated with them... the audience dropped off. We started being dissatisfied with witty one-liners and meaningless action. Can you still sell a super-hero movie? Sure. Like all action movies, they internationalize well. But the domestic audiences are declining. It makes me think of Westerns. At one time, they were a hollywood staple. Now, not so much. Yes, they still make them, and a good one will do fine, but a mediocre one... maybe not.
- IanCal 2y ago
  But what they're describing is a case where someone with the storytelling ability but not the money or technical skills could create something that looks solid. You're imagining "pls write film" but the case of being able to film something and then adjust and tweak it, easily change backdrops etc could lead to much higher polish on creations from smaller producers. Would the green mile be any less hard hitting if the lights flickering were caused by an AI alteration to a scene? If the mouse was created purely by a machine?
  - adamc 2y ago
    I don't have a problem with adjusting small elements of the film, but that isn't going to make it a tool for youtubers (or home users off the grid) to tell their own stories.
- cjenkins 2y ago
  Looking back on history I think this will lead to meaningful art (and tons and tons of absolute garbage!). The printing press led to publishing works being reachable by more people so we got tons of garbage but we also got those few individual geniuses that previously wouldn't have been able to get their works out. I see similarities in indie video/PC games recently too. Once the tech got to the point that an individual or small group could create a game, we got tons of absolute garbage but also games like Cave Story and Stardew Valley (both single creators IIRC). Anything that pushes the bar down on the money and effort needed to make something will result in way more of it being made. It also hopefully makes it possible for those rare geniuses to give us their output without the dilution of having to go through bigger groups first. I'm also excited from the perspective that this decouples skills in the creative process. There have to be people out there with tremendous story telling and movie making skills who don't have the resources/connections to produce what they're capable of.
  - adamc 2y ago
    The printing press enabled the artistic visions of single individuals (the writers) to find a wide audience. To do something similar, this has to allow the director (or whomever is prompting the AI) to control all meaningful choices so that they get more or less the movie the intend. That seems far away from what is demonstrated.
- parsimo2010 2y ago
  You don't get "The Green Mile" from this, because it's a tool. You get "The Green Mile" with artistic vision. The tool has to be told what to do. But now a director can shoot a film with actors who don't match the physical description of a character in a story, and then correct their race/gender/figure/whatever with AI. That probably means they save money on casting. A director can shoot a scene inside a blank set and turn it into a palace with AI. That saves money from shooting on location or saves money from having to pay for expensive sets. So now a director with a limited budget but with a good vision and understanding of the tools available has a better chance to realize their vision. There will be tons of crap put out by this tool as well. But I think/hope that at least one person uses it well. But because it will make shooting a movie more accessible to people with limited budgets, the movie studios, who literally gatekeep access to their sets and moviemaking equipment, are going to have a smaller moat. The distribution channels will still need to select good films to show in theaters, TV, and streaming, but the industry will probably be changing in a few years if this development keeps pace.
  - adamc 2y ago
    This is the best answer I've seen, but I think what was demonstrated is miles away from this. A lot would need to be able to be specified (and honored) from the prompts, far more than any examples have demonstrated. I'm not against tools for directors, but the thing is, directors tell actors things and get results. Directors hire cinematographers and work with them to get the shots they want. Etc. How does that happen here? Also, as someone else mentioned, there is the general problem that heavily CG movies tend to look... fake and uncompelling. The real world is somehow just realer than CG. So that also has to be factored into this.
    - wrsh07 2y ago
      I think it starts simple. Have you ever been watching a movie or tv show, and it shows the people walking up to the helicopter or Lamborghini and then cut to "they've arrived at their destination no transportation in sight"? It will start out with more believable green screen backgrounds and b roll. Used judiciously, it will improve immersion and cost <$10 instead of thousands. The actors and normal shots will still be the focus, but the elements that make things more believable will be cheaper to add. Have you ever noticed that explosions look good? Even in hobby films? At some point it became easy to add a surprisingly good looking explosion in post. The same thing will happen here, but for an increasing amount of stuff.
- JeremyNT 2y ago
  > I don't think you get "The Green Mile" from something like this. But maybe you do get Deadpool & Wolverine 3 Guess where the money is?
  - adamc 2y ago
    If it becomes easy to make "Deadpool & Wolverine", it will no longer be where the money is. Everything that becomes a commodity attracts competition and ceases to be special. (You can see some of that in super-hero movies, which have started to be generic and lost some of their audience.) But, in reality, even making that kind of film is miles away from these examples.
    - JeremyNT 2y ago
      > If it becomes easy to make "Deadpool & Wolverine", it will no longer be where the money is. Everything that becomes a commodity attracts competition and ceases to be special. (You can see some of that in super-hero movies, which have started to be generic and lost some of their audience.) Well, given the studios still hold the copyright, they can severely constrain supply to keep profits up. My suspicion is that this kind of stuff gradually reduces some of the labor involved in making films and allows studios to continue padding their margins.
- xnx 2y ago
  > How is any of this going to lead to meaningful art? It's a powerful tool. A painting isn't better because the artist made their own paint. A movie made with IRL camera may not be better than one made with an AI camera.
  - adamc 2y ago
    No, what makes art are choices (and execution). But the examples given were too general and didn't exercise much control over the choices.
    - aenvoker 2y ago
      The examples given aren't trying to be artistic. They're demonstrating technical capabilities as simply as possible.
- atmavatar 2y ago
  From this and other comments, I get the impression that most on HN assume the tool will be used exclusively by people without any sort of artistic talent, either plagiarizing existing works and/or producing absolute dreck. However, I see an interesting middle ground appear: a talented writer could utilize the AI tooling to produce a movie based upon their own works without having to involve Hollywood, both giving more writers a chance to put their works in front of an audience as well as ensuring what's produced more closely matches their material (for better or worse).
- stale2002 2y ago
  Who says even a majority of the content you see online is meaningful art? The algorithms and people making content for the algorithm were trends that have dominated for years already. None of that is "real" art, when you are just making something optimized for an algorithm.
- denisvlr 2y ago
  Shameless plug: I just created a short AI film (1) and tried to tell an actual story and trigger emotions. I spent countless hours crafting the script, choosing the shots, refining my prompts, generating images, animating images, generating music, sounds, and so on... For me AI tools are just that - tools. True, you have to yield them some "control", but at the end of the day you are still the one guiding and directing them. Similarily, a film director "just" gives guidance to a bunch of people: actors, camera operator, etc. Do you consider the movie is his creation, even if he didn't directly perform any action? A photographer just has to push a button and the camera captures an image. Is the output still considered his creation? Yes and Yes, so I think we should consider the same with AI assisted art forms. Maybe the real topic is the level of depth and sophistication in the art (just like the difference between your iPhone pictures and a professional photographer's) but in my opinion this is orthogonal to it being human or AI generated. To be honest so far we have mostly seen AI video demos which were indeed quite uninteresting and shallow, but now filmmakers are busy learning how to harness these tools, so my prediction is that in no time you will see high quality and captivating AI generated films. (1) https://artefact-ai-film-festival.com/golden-hours-66f869b36a208 https://artefact-ai-film-festival.com/golden-hours-66f869b36... Please consider liking it!
  - herval 2y ago
    this is an excellent example that despite all the technical limitations (the ugly image artifacts, the lack of exact image consistency, etc), it's _already possible_ to create something that connects. The "format purists" currently dismiss AI tooling the same way they used to dismiss computer graphics animation back when Toy Story 1 came out. Excellent work!
  - wanderingbit 2y ago
    I have a newborn daughter, so watching this made me cry a little bit, alone at my desk. If yall needed evidence of these tools giving everyday people the ability to make emotion-tugging creations, I'll send you a picture of the tears! Now I'm thinking I can finally make the (IMO) dope music videos that come to me sometimes when I'm listening to a song I really love.
lairv 2y ago
I'm not sure, I see a common pattern with autonomous vehicle, text to image, llms: the last 10% are hard to achieve
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  It’s true of everything
- ActionHank 2y ago
  Yet VCs are sold that last 10% and an additional 10% on top. No idea why they keep throwing their money into the fire.
  - LordDragonfang 2y ago
    Because VCs are compulsive gamblers, and they're convinced the payout if they "win" is enormous
    - herval 2y ago
      to be fair, that's exactly what the asset class EXISTS for - betting on huge outcomes, no matter the odds. People misunderstand that due to how much of tech is "VC funded" when building stuff that would fare better as a bootstrapped company (or funded by other means)
  - darepublic 2y ago
    I'm grateful for this
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  If we judge from AI writing, we can extrapolate what an AI movie would be like. I cannot imagine reading an AI book. It would look and smell like a book but nothing of value or new insight would be inside. Michael Bay might be very interested.
  - bovermyer 2y ago
ActionHank 2y ago
I doubt it and if we were no one would be earning money anymore and wouldn't have cash to pay for the cost to run these services.
void-pointer 2y ago
Or this is the top, and the only thing AI will be able to generate is boring and uninspiring clips. Ever notice how they never show anyone moving quickly in these clips?
cle 2y ago
Studio execs don't do any of that stuff anyway. It's the long list of people in the movie credits who should be worried.
sangnoir 2y ago
> If I was a studio exec I'd be worried Counterpoint: home "studio" recording has been feasible for decades, but music execs are not ruffled. Sure, you get a Billie Eilish debut album once a generation, but the other 99.99% of charting music is from the old guard. The media/entertainment machine is so much bigger than just creating raw material.

Workaccount2 2y ago

If I was a human I'd be worried.

edgyquant 2y ago
These are tools by and for humans
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  So are nukes.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  I guess cats probably think we are tools for feeding them...

adamc 2y ago

I wouldn't be. How is any of this going to lead to meaningful art? I don't think you get "The Green Mile" from something like this.

meiraleal 2y ago
> I wouldn't be. How is any of this going to lead to meaningful art? Local art, local actors, local animations telling stories about local culture. A netflix for every city, even neighborhoods. That's going to be crazy fun.
CuriouslyC 2y ago
There are plenty of great outsider storytellers and artists. Youtube is proof of this. People mostly do comedy on youtube because that's what the medium supports on a low budget, but AI is going to change that.
- adamc 2y ago
  I'm really not seeing how that would happen from these examples. It would seem like achieving an adequate, directorial level of control would require writing a novel -- or, anyway, more than a conventional screenplay -- to get the AI to make the movie you wanted. There is so much that has to be conveyed in making a film, if you want it to say something particular.
  - meiraleal 2y ago
    > It would seem like achieving an adequate, directorial level of control would require writing a novel -- or, anyway, more than a conventional screenplay -- to get the AI to make the movie you wanted. And? What's the problem with that? You seem to be locked in a "prompt to get a movie" mindset.
    - adamc 2y ago
      Those are the examples provided. When they deliver pro tools for generating movie clips, I will be more convinced, but that hasn't remotely happened yet.
spacebanana7 2y ago
I'd love to see what'd happen if someone dumped the entire text of the Silmarillion or the Hobbit into one of these models. Assuming context windows and output capacity become large enough.
- bnj 2y ago
  Especially primed by all the lord of the rings movies, for example; I could see the studio taking all the archived footage, camera angles, all the extra data that was generated in the creation of the films and feeding that into something like this model to create all kinds of interesting additional material.
Hrun0 2y ago
> I don't think you get "The Green Mile" from something like this. ...yet
vundercind 2y ago
Extremely-heavily-CG movies already mostly look like shit compared to ones where they build sets and have props and location shoot, even if somewhat assisted by computer compositing and such (everything is, nowadays). [edit: I don’t even mean that the graphics look bad, but the creative and artistic choices tend to be poor] The limitations of reality seem to have a positive effect on the overall process of film making, for whatever reason. I expect generative AI film will be at least as bad. Gonna be hard to get an entire well-crafted film out of them.
ben_w 2y ago
You're unlikely to get an AI that wins accolades for the same reason that's unlikely with humans: they represent the absolute pinnacle of achievement. The same AI can still raise the minimum bar for quality. Or replace YouTubers and similar while they're still learning how to be good in the first place. No idea where we are in this whole process yet, but it's a continuum not a boolean.
- observationist 2y ago
  What accolades? The Hollywood self-congratulatory conspicuous consumption festivals they use to show how good they are at producing "art" every year? The film festivals where billions of dollars are spent on clothing and jewelry to show off the "class" of everyone attending, which people like Weinstein used to pick victims, and everyone else uses as conspicuous consumption and "marketing" media? Pinnacle is not the word I'd use. Race to the bottom, least possible effort, plausibly deniable quality, gross exploitation, capitalist bottom line - those are all things I'd use to describe current "art" awards like Grammy, Oscars, Cannes, etc. The media industry is run by exploiting artists for licensing rights. The middle men and publishers add absolutely nothing to the mix. Google or Spotify or platforms arguably add value by surfacing, searching, categorizing, and so on, but not anywhere near the level of revenue capture they rationalize as their due. When anyone and everyone can produce a film series or set of stories or song or artistic image that matches their inner artistic vision, and they're given the tools to do so without restriction or being beholden to anyone, then we're going to see high quality art and media that couldn't possibly be made in the grotesquely commercial environment we have now. These tools are as raw and rough and bad performing as they ever will be, and are only going to get better. Shared universes of prompts and storylines and media styles and things that bring generative art and storytelling together to allow coherent social sharing and interactive media will be a thing. Kids in 10 years will be able to click and create their own cartoons and stories. Parents will be able to engage by establishing cultural parameters and maybe sneak in educational, ethical, and moral content designed around what they think is important. Artists are going to be able to produce every form of digital media and tune and tweak their vision using sophisticated tools and processes, and they're not going to be limited by budgets, politics, studio constraints, State Department limitations, wink/nod geopolitical agreements with nation states, and so on. Art's going to get weird, and censorship will be nigh on impossible. People will create a lot of garbage, a lot of spam, low effort gifs and video memes, but more artists will be empowered than ever before, and I'm here for it.
mathgeek 2y ago
We already exist in a world where most of the revenue for film companies comes from formulaic productions. Studio execs certainly worry about how they are going to create profits in addition to any concerns about the qualitative cultural value of the films.
- adamc 2y ago
  Even formulaic movies from hollywood have directors and actors doing a million things the AI will do randomly unless you tell it otherwise.
riskable 2y ago
> How is any of this going to lead to meaningful art? Nearly all the movies that go to theaters aren't "meaningful art". Not only that but what's meaningful to you isn't necessarily what's meaningful to others. If someone can get their own personal "Godzilla VS The Iron Giant" crossover made into a feature-length film it will be meaningful to them.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > Nearly all the movies that go to theaters aren't "meaningful art". No but what they are is expensive, flashy, impressive productions which is the only reason people are comfortable paying upwards of $25 each to see them. And there's no way in the world that an AI movie is going to come anywhere close to the production quality of Godzilla vs Kong. And like, yeah, their example videos at the posted link are impressive. How many attempts did those take? Are they going to be able to maintain continuity of a character's appearance from one shot to the next to form a coherent visual structure? How long can these shots be before the AI starts tripping over itself and forgetting how arms work?
  - wavemode 2y ago
    My suspicion is that, if AI moviemaking actually becomes common, there will be a younger generation of folks who will grow up on it and become used to its peculiarities. We will be the old ones going "back in my day, you had to actually shoot movies on a camera! And background objects had perfect continuity!" And they will roll their eyes at us and retort that nobody pays attention to background objects anyway.
    - adamc 2y ago
      Shades of autotune. But I have faith that people will notice the difference. The current generation may not care about autotune, but that doesn't mean another generation won't. People rediscover differences and decide what matters to them. When superhero movies were new, almost everyone loved them. I was entranced. After being saturated with them... the audience dropped off. We started being dissatisfied with witty one-liners and meaningless action. Can you still sell a super-hero movie? Sure. Like all action movies, they internationalize well. But the domestic audiences are declining. It makes me think of Westerns. At one time, they were a hollywood staple. Now, not so much. Yes, they still make them, and a good one will do fine, but a mediocre one... maybe not.
IanCal 2y ago
But what they're describing is a case where someone with the storytelling ability but not the money or technical skills could create something that looks solid. You're imagining "pls write film" but the case of being able to film something and then adjust and tweak it, easily change backdrops etc could lead to much higher polish on creations from smaller producers. Would the green mile be any less hard hitting if the lights flickering were caused by an AI alteration to a scene? If the mouse was created purely by a machine?
- adamc 2y ago
  I don't have a problem with adjusting small elements of the film, but that isn't going to make it a tool for youtubers (or home users off the grid) to tell their own stories.
cjenkins 2y ago
Looking back on history I think this will lead to meaningful art (and tons and tons of absolute garbage!). The printing press led to publishing works being reachable by more people so we got tons of garbage but we also got those few individual geniuses that previously wouldn't have been able to get their works out. I see similarities in indie video/PC games recently too. Once the tech got to the point that an individual or small group could create a game, we got tons of absolute garbage but also games like Cave Story and Stardew Valley (both single creators IIRC). Anything that pushes the bar down on the money and effort needed to make something will result in way more of it being made. It also hopefully makes it possible for those rare geniuses to give us their output without the dilution of having to go through bigger groups first. I'm also excited from the perspective that this decouples skills in the creative process. There have to be people out there with tremendous story telling and movie making skills who don't have the resources/connections to produce what they're capable of.
- adamc 2y ago
  The printing press enabled the artistic visions of single individuals (the writers) to find a wide audience. To do something similar, this has to allow the director (or whomever is prompting the AI) to control all meaningful choices so that they get more or less the movie the intend. That seems far away from what is demonstrated.
parsimo2010 2y ago
You don't get "The Green Mile" from this, because it's a tool. You get "The Green Mile" with artistic vision. The tool has to be told what to do. But now a director can shoot a film with actors who don't match the physical description of a character in a story, and then correct their race/gender/figure/whatever with AI. That probably means they save money on casting. A director can shoot a scene inside a blank set and turn it into a palace with AI. That saves money from shooting on location or saves money from having to pay for expensive sets. So now a director with a limited budget but with a good vision and understanding of the tools available has a better chance to realize their vision. There will be tons of crap put out by this tool as well. But I think/hope that at least one person uses it well. But because it will make shooting a movie more accessible to people with limited budgets, the movie studios, who literally gatekeep access to their sets and moviemaking equipment, are going to have a smaller moat. The distribution channels will still need to select good films to show in theaters, TV, and streaming, but the industry will probably be changing in a few years if this development keeps pace.
- adamc 2y ago
  This is the best answer I've seen, but I think what was demonstrated is miles away from this. A lot would need to be able to be specified (and honored) from the prompts, far more than any examples have demonstrated. I'm not against tools for directors, but the thing is, directors tell actors things and get results. Directors hire cinematographers and work with them to get the shots they want. Etc. How does that happen here? Also, as someone else mentioned, there is the general problem that heavily CG movies tend to look... fake and uncompelling. The real world is somehow just realer than CG. So that also has to be factored into this.
  - wrsh07 2y ago
    I think it starts simple. Have you ever been watching a movie or tv show, and it shows the people walking up to the helicopter or Lamborghini and then cut to "they've arrived at their destination no transportation in sight"? It will start out with more believable green screen backgrounds and b roll. Used judiciously, it will improve immersion and cost <$10 instead of thousands. The actors and normal shots will still be the focus, but the elements that make things more believable will be cheaper to add. Have you ever noticed that explosions look good? Even in hobby films? At some point it became easy to add a surprisingly good looking explosion in post. The same thing will happen here, but for an increasing amount of stuff.
JeremyNT 2y ago
> I don't think you get "The Green Mile" from something like this. But maybe you do get Deadpool & Wolverine 3 Guess where the money is?
- adamc 2y ago
  If it becomes easy to make "Deadpool & Wolverine", it will no longer be where the money is. Everything that becomes a commodity attracts competition and ceases to be special. (You can see some of that in super-hero movies, which have started to be generic and lost some of their audience.) But, in reality, even making that kind of film is miles away from these examples.
  - JeremyNT 2y ago
    > If it becomes easy to make "Deadpool & Wolverine", it will no longer be where the money is. Everything that becomes a commodity attracts competition and ceases to be special. (You can see some of that in super-hero movies, which have started to be generic and lost some of their audience.) Well, given the studios still hold the copyright, they can severely constrain supply to keep profits up. My suspicion is that this kind of stuff gradually reduces some of the labor involved in making films and allows studios to continue padding their margins.
xnx 2y ago
> How is any of this going to lead to meaningful art? It's a powerful tool. A painting isn't better because the artist made their own paint. A movie made with IRL camera may not be better than one made with an AI camera.
- adamc 2y ago
  No, what makes art are choices (and execution). But the examples given were too general and didn't exercise much control over the choices.
  - aenvoker 2y ago
    The examples given aren't trying to be artistic. They're demonstrating technical capabilities as simply as possible.
atmavatar 2y ago
From this and other comments, I get the impression that most on HN assume the tool will be used exclusively by people without any sort of artistic talent, either plagiarizing existing works and/or producing absolute dreck. However, I see an interesting middle ground appear: a talented writer could utilize the AI tooling to produce a movie based upon their own works without having to involve Hollywood, both giving more writers a chance to put their works in front of an audience as well as ensuring what's produced more closely matches their material (for better or worse).
stale2002 2y ago
Who says even a majority of the content you see online is meaningful art? The algorithms and people making content for the algorithm were trends that have dominated for years already. None of that is "real" art, when you are just making something optimized for an algorithm.
denisvlr 2y ago
Shameless plug: I just created a short AI film (1) and tried to tell an actual story and trigger emotions. I spent countless hours crafting the script, choosing the shots, refining my prompts, generating images, animating images, generating music, sounds, and so on... For me AI tools are just that - tools. True, you have to yield them some "control", but at the end of the day you are still the one guiding and directing them. Similarily, a film director "just" gives guidance to a bunch of people: actors, camera operator, etc. Do you consider the movie is his creation, even if he didn't directly perform any action? A photographer just has to push a button and the camera captures an image. Is the output still considered his creation? Yes and Yes, so I think we should consider the same with AI assisted art forms. Maybe the real topic is the level of depth and sophistication in the art (just like the difference between your iPhone pictures and a professional photographer's) but in my opinion this is orthogonal to it being human or AI generated. To be honest so far we have mostly seen AI video demos which were indeed quite uninteresting and shallow, but now filmmakers are busy learning how to harness these tools, so my prediction is that in no time you will see high quality and captivating AI generated films. (1) https://artefact-ai-film-festival.com/golden-hours-66f869b36a208 https://artefact-ai-film-festival.com/golden-hours-66f869b36... Please consider liking it!
- herval 2y ago
  this is an excellent example that despite all the technical limitations (the ugly image artifacts, the lack of exact image consistency, etc), it's _already possible_ to create something that connects. The "format purists" currently dismiss AI tooling the same way they used to dismiss computer graphics animation back when Toy Story 1 came out. Excellent work!
- wanderingbit 2y ago
  I have a newborn daughter, so watching this made me cry a little bit, alone at my desk. If yall needed evidence of these tools giving everyday people the ability to make emotion-tugging creations, I'll send you a picture of the tears! Now I'm thinking I can finally make the (IMO) dope music videos that come to me sometimes when I'm listening to a song I really love.

lairv 2y ago

I'm not sure, I see a common pattern with autonomous vehicle, text to image, llms: the last 10% are hard to achieve

zeroonetwothree 2y ago
It’s true of everything
ActionHank 2y ago
Yet VCs are sold that last 10% and an additional 10% on top. No idea why they keep throwing their money into the fire.
- LordDragonfang 2y ago
  Because VCs are compulsive gamblers, and they're convinced the payout if they "win" is enormous
  - herval 2y ago
    to be fair, that's exactly what the asset class EXISTS for - betting on huge outcomes, no matter the odds. People misunderstand that due to how much of tech is "VC funded" when building stuff that would fare better as a bootstrapped company (or funded by other means)
- darepublic 2y ago
  I'm grateful for this
Mistletoe 2y ago
If we judge from AI writing, we can extrapolate what an AI movie would be like. I cannot imagine reading an AI book. It would look and smell like a book but nothing of value or new insight would be inside. Michael Bay might be very interested.
- bovermyer 2y ago

ActionHank 2y ago

I doubt it and if we were no one would be earning money anymore and wouldn't have cash to pay for the cost to run these services.

void-pointer 2y ago

Or this is the top, and the only thing AI will be able to generate is boring and uninspiring clips. Ever notice how they never show anyone moving quickly in these clips?

cle 2y ago

Studio execs don't do any of that stuff anyway. It's the long list of people in the movie credits who should be worried.

sangnoir 2y ago

> If I was a studio exec I'd be worried Counterpoint: home "studio" recording has been feasible for decades, but music execs are not ruffled. Sure, you get a Billie Eilish debut album once a generation, but the other 99.99% of charting music is from the old guard. The media/entertainment machine is so much bigger than just creating raw material.