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Ben Affleck's surprisingly comprehensive take on LLMs for video
- blueyes 2y agoFun fact: Justine Bateman of Family Ties, once the most famous TV actress in the world, holds a degree in computer science from UCLA.
- ofcourseyoudo 2y agofun fact but that is a real stretch to say she was the most famous TV actress in the world when she probably wasn't even the most famous on Family Ties
- blueyes 2y agoIn 1986-87, when Family Ties was at its peak, it had a rating of 32.7, which means almost a third of all US households watched the show every week. That probably amounted to 60m+ people tuning in, which is close to Super Bowl numbers ... every week. The TV audience was concentrated then in a way it isn't now. Yellowstone gets less than 12 million viewers per episode today. Maybe you think Meredith Baxter was better known, but I'll bet more people were paying attention to the teenager than the hippie mom. But let's say she was no 2, or no 5. She was galaxies more famous than the most famous people on TV today. And she has a CS degree. Which taken together is more astonishing than Ben Affleck opining on LLMs.
- ofcourseyoudo 2y agoI'll wager you at any point during Family Ties' run that more people knew who Baxter was, considering she had been a celebrity for 10 years going into that show. Also that's not how share works. A 32.7 share in 1986 is more like 29-30 million viewers. If you're just going by ratings/buzz Lisa Bonet and Phylicia Rashad are contenders, but this is a weird definition of "famous" that is just "who's popular right now ignoring history and context". Like, Betty White exists.
- TiredOfLife 2y agoIn 1986-87 there were 5 billion people. The only reason I even know of her is because of a tiny role in an episode of Arrested Development.
- ideasphere 2y agoI don’t disagree with everything he’s saying but it’s odd seeing the responses this is getting when it sounds extremely rehearsed.
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- danielmarkbruce 2y agoRehearsed word soup. He clearly knows zero about the underlying technology. If he did understand it in any depth, he'd show a lot less certainty about the future.
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- TheAtomic 2y agoWas it? He concludes that LLMs will never write Shakespeare, or create original work of that caliber, or animate an actor the way Ben Guinness could have done it. I'm paraphrasing but isn't this confirmaation bias from a guy now heavily vested in making movies? Move 37 was so astonishing the world champiion Go player, hardly known for theatrics, got up and left the table. It was considered an insanely "original" move. In every field we don't consider deeply "human," Ai has jumped light years ahead, in astonishing ways. Affleck is entitled to his opinion and seems like he's trying to understand things, but I think poetry, acting, music, they're all on the table until they aren't, for better or worse.
- jrflowers 2y agoI like this analogy. If one piece of software can win a game then a completely different piece of software can win at making movies
- haswell 2y agoIt has yet to be seen if this can truly be generalized and if such an analogy holds. Go is a game constrained by an extremely narrow set of rules. Brute forcing potential solutions and arriving at something novel within such a constrained ruleset is an entirely different scenario than writing or film-making which occur in an almost incomprehensibly larger potential "solution" space. Perhaps the same thing will eventually happen, but I don't think the success of AI in games like Go is particularly instructive for predicting what can happen in other fields.
- dartos 2y agoKind of tangential, but I don’t think you can brute force go. We’d run out of energy before it finished. Statistical models shortcut that search space. But I agree that just because a screwdriver is good at screws doesn’t mean its good at hammering a nail, even though both tools are made of metal.
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- moralestapia 2y agoThis will age like a dead fish out in the Sun. He even contradicts his whole premise of "actors will always be necessary" with his example of a custom generated series episode. Also, >implying the non-AI content we have nowadays is highly creative and unique *facepalm*
- sottol 2y agoHow soon though? 2 years? 10? 50? He starts by saying this won't happen soon, _maybe_ ever.
- moralestapia 2y agoI'd bet that in two years you could do something equivalent to that "make me a new episode" use case. I already see really convincing deep fakes on Facebook, etc., it's not an impossible problem anymore, it's just a matter of increasing their quality.
- dham 2y agoConvincing deepfakes is a strong word. There are also people out there who think modern CG looks good, too. There will always be people who are ultra-sensitive to things like this. So convincing might take 2x as long for some vs others.
- carabiner 2y ago> library of vectors of meaning and transformers that interpret the context New phrase from a hollywood actor.
- bdndndndbve 2y agoMy favorite quote on this topic is "Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?" Especially when you're talking about fiction and reading/watching for enjoyment, what does it matter if you can shit out 1000 hours of AI content? Maybe it's good to keep babies entertained? Studios have gotten so into the habit of treating "content" as a fungible commodity, but the fact is that even blockbuster movies still live and die by actually being entertaining.
- spiderice 2y ago> Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write? The answer seems obvious: because it's better. Obviously it isn't better now. But it's easy to imagine a day in the not-too-distant future where AI can shit out 1000 hours of content that is better in every way than what humans create. And it will even feel more human than the human made stuff because the AI will have learned that we like that. What do you do then? Watch the worse stuff? Maybe, and I think a lot still will. But how long does that last?
- mkleczek 2y ago> The answer seems obvious: because it's better. Define "better". The point really is that "better" in this context means "made by a human" - not "faked to look like made by a human". People need connection to other people - art is one of the means of communicating _between people_.
- bdangubic 2y agoI see maybe 4 things of TV per year this days than make me feel this way… the rest is garbage that may as well be created by non-human
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- impomura 2y agoit's impossible to answer to this line of reasoning without wasting time so I'll just start right away with the ad hominem. you just don't like art, you don't understand it and you want slop, admit it and don't feel compelled to enter the discussion with your growth oriented bullshit mindset
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- S0und 2y agoVfx subreddit reaction to this https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/1grgyps/affleck_on_ai_i_wouldnt_want_to_be_in_the_vfx/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/1grgyps/affleck_on_ai_...
- yodon 2y ago>Vfx subreddit reaction to this An amazing amount of angry finger pointing and very little actual reflection on the points raised. Burn the messenger! He's a witch! More video content is going to get made, at lower cost. The skills required will change. The economics will change. The VFX industry has struggled financially for many years. AI will not improve the financial prospects of the VFX industry.
- nwgo 2y agoHe is wrong. Movies will be automated and when they will be, all these actors will be first one to go. I say this despite him and Matt Damon my favorite actors. When it pours it rains. They don't know what is in store and what we are working on. Hint: codename: Project Hailey (named after Ho--y)
- dartos 2y agoStrong claims. Have we seen any other form of communication and/or artistic expression become totally automated? Even 2d art hasn’t been automated by image generation models. It’s just another tool in the bag.
- notahacker 2y agoWe haven't even automated live music performances, which are actually bigger business than they were before the existence of recorded music
- nunez 2y agoCounterpoint: ABBA at The Sphere
- dartos 2y agoPre-recorded != automated
- dartos 2y agoEven in the most popular vocaloid concerts, musicians still play music. I can’t imagine going to a “live” concert to watch a machine generate music, unless significant work went in to the light show. Defeats the purpose At that point I’m there for the lights.
- threetonesun 2y agoThe movie industry is already endlessly pumping out crap with real actors, I suppose it won't get much worse if it removes them entirely. On the other hand, there's a whole other medium for actors that AI can't replace.
- giantrobot 2y agoIf you've heard Ben Affleck speak before I don't really think his take is surprising. He's not a dumb guy. His take is also extremely realistic in contrast to the AI utopians that assume AI will just do everything better because computer magic. Generative AIs are cool tools people can use to make things but they're not magic. Once you ask for things outside of their training set you get really weird results. Even with a lot of fine tuning (LoRAs etc) results can be hit or miss for any given prompt. They're also not very consistent so which means series of clips are incongruent or just mismatched. That doesn't mean generative AIs aren't going to be useful and won't impact film making. You're not necessarily going to be able to ask ChatGPT to "write me an Oscar winning screenplay" but you can certainly use one to punch up dialog or help with story boarding. I think he's right on that visual effects people will be hard hit because there's going to be a lot less jobs for mundane tasks like cutting out an errant boom mic or Starbucks cup in a shot. I'd extend that to other "effects" jobs like ADR since can AI can fix a flubbed line in an otherwise good take.
- dartos 2y agoI feel like many fields are going to basically cut out junior level jobs for AI, then 10 years down the line complain that there are no more people they can hire for mid level/senior jobs.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoSource tweet: https://x.com/bilawalsidhu/status/1857816146688217099 https://x.com/bilawalsidhu/status/1857816146688217099
- rollinDyno 2y agoI'm not in the industry and I can tell he's failing to conceive many possibilities. I don't understand why he's being praised, I guess confidence impresses people.
- K0balt 2y agoWhile AI will ( and does) reduce the burden of writers, it’s going to -kill- celebrity acting in most cases. In doing so, it will turn directing on its ear in a way that many talented directors will not be able to adapt to. Directors will become proxy actors by having to micromanage AI acting skills. Or Perhaps they will be augmented with a team of “character operators” that do the proxy-acting. Either way, there will be little point in paying celebrity actors and their extravagant salaries for most roles. Instead, it might turn out that skilled and talented generic, no-name actors can play any role, then have the character model deepfaked onto them… which could actually create a large demand in lower paying jobs for character actors, possibly actually being a kind of boom in the acting business. Lots of possibilities, but the director is going to take center stage in this new reality, while celebrity actors will have to swallow hard as they are priced out of their field.
- rollinDyno 2y agoWhy would it require a director if a generative process can use the information it has on audience (even individual) preferences to produce the story and format that will best hook consumers?
- K0balt 2y agoBecause it will perform similarly to the way that writing LLMs do…. They obey and produce singularly predictable and droll stories that have trouble keeping the attention of a five year old. It’s the definition of stale tropes and predictable scenes at its worst. It has no idea of the mind of the viewer or the reader. It’s literally generating the most probable next few words to tack on to the story. LLMs are great for a lot of stuff, but they are by design not at all creative in any admirable sense of the term. They cannot produce a narrative that is simultaneously unique or genuinely surprising without it also being nonsensical. Hallucinations are not a bug, they are a result of proper operation , just undesirable. The same thing that makes nonsensical“hallucinations “ if the “temperature” is set too high is what prevents llms from having any unique ideas if the temperature is set low enough to not hallucinate wildly. LLMs are text prediction engines. Extremely useful and revolutionary in many ways, but not in creative work. Everything they do is by definition derivative and likely. What graphics models do in images is no different, it’s not all that creative, and works much better when you -tell it- to be derivative. It’s just that the nature of graphic representation is mainly predictable and derivable… so it doesn’t bore us when it produces derivative, predictable work.
- kleiba 2y agoThe trope of the sci-fi robot has been so engrained into our cultural narrative that I think people constantly underestimate the creative capabilities of AI. People still think in terms of this dichotomy of math/science and art/creativity. But AI has already broken through so many boundaries of what anyone would have believed possible just a few years ago. I hear people complaining about uncanny valley stuff all the time, but I think these guys are just hanging on to old-world thinking. Because it cannot not be what must not be. But even today AI is doing incredibly hard stuff that most people would have thought could never be done "mechanically" by a mere machine. Think coding assistants. If you don't think they are absolutely amazing, you are nuts! Sure, there's still a long way to go to perfection, but we don't have to wait until we get there because a lot of what is possible today, let alone tomorrow, is already incredibly useful.
- mkleczek 2y agoThe point is: art is a means of communicating _between people_. We can appreciate pictures/movies/music generated by machines but at the end of the day we (people) are in a deep need of connection to _other people_. I don't believe replacing people with machines in this context is possible (one might say: by definition). But if it happens it will be the anti-utopian world of loneliness.
- kleiba 2y agoThis is exactly the kind of argument I think is informed by 20th century ideas of AI. I also think in this form, it greatly exaggerates the issue at hand - AI will not totally replace human-human communication. Also, since the original context is Hollywood movies, I don't think that there is a lot of "art" in the storytelling of big block busters. Why AI shouldn't be able to write a compelling story needs to be argued more convincingly, I think.
- tartoran 2y agoWhen it comes to blockbuster movies AI could certainly create them, they're so formulaic that you could probably even get away with Markov chains.
- froonly 2y agoGetting closer every day. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1
- frm88 2y agoNot really, because the convincing point seems to have been the simplicity of AI-poetry: >Our findings suggest that participants employed shared yet flawed heuristics to differentiate AI from human poetry: the simplicity of AI-generated poems may be easier for non-experts to understand, leading them to prefer AI-generated poetry and misinterpret the complexity of human poems as incoherence generated by AI.
- mchlbnnn 2y agoExcellent art might be attributed less to genius and more to a selection process and creator-audience feedback loops. We might be falling into a bit of survivorship bias when missing that excellent art is the product of a variety of processes, not just human inspiration. Machines can probably replicate much of that process, for better or worse.
- squidsoup 2y agoArtists are very rarely concerned with their audience. Good Art, capital A, is the unique expression of a singular consciousness - you can't produce that by catering to an audience. That's just a product (see Warhol).
- mchlbnnn 2y agoYes, art is a product, particularly in the context of this conversation about AI. Very little is the unique expression of a singular consciousness. Art being "good" is subjective and the audience is the source of that valuation.
- squidsoup 2y agoArt is only a product if you have a repugnantly rapacious worldview.
- mchlbnnn 2y agoI don't mean art's value is only as a commodity, but I do mean that most of art's value is for its audience, not just the satisfaction of the creator. The view of art as not intentionally for others, and with concern for their appreciation, might actually be more off-putting.
- dmortin 2y agoMaybe the main actors, the stars of the movies are safe for now. But background actors who just sit in the background or have some small extra role will be decimated, because those roles can be replaced with AI. Since many actors start with small roles or background work, it will have an effect on the industry if entry jobs are eliminated. In the long run even the main stars can get into trouble, because it may be true that AI won't be able to reproduce what they do, creating a new, creative scene, but most movies are trash even today, so if AI can make an average, good enough movie in the future which is cheap to generate, but people still watch it then the bottom of the industry will fall out, lots of people who work on movies will lose their jobs which can have a huge impact on the industry.
- sfmz 2y ago80% as good for 1/10000th the price is quite the offer.
- K0balt 2y ago100 percent as good for 1/100 the price is where celebrity acting is headed. They will take roles for exposure and make their money on their brand, like influencer cattle. It will be the only way to compete with the human wave of extremely talented but unknown talent that currently can’t get parts, but who can absolutely wreck an audience as a human canvas upon which to render a studio owned character likeness. Ben went and drank his own celebrity exceptionalism cool-aid.
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- legitster 2y agoI think it's a great speech, but I may make the point that he's probably underrating audiences' demand for interesting or new content. Audiences already seem pretty happy with endless iterations of the same few concepts. His example of having AI generate a kludged together episode of Succession feels exactly like what most shows already do now.
- yegle 2y agoOne thing I'd really like AI to do (and Ben Afflect touched during his talk) is that once AI is cheap enough to run at home, I'd like to feed it all David Lynch movies/TV shows, and ask it to produce a Twin Peaks season 4.
- squidsoup 2y agoAnd you'd never get anything close to what Lynch would make, you'd get the equivalent of fan fiction.
- ruthmarx 2y agoLynch will be one of the easier things for an AI to replicate given his thing is weird for the sake of weird and being deliberately vague about it. His stuff is 90% atmosphere.
- squidsoup 2y agoEverything he has made is impregnated with meaning. He is absolutely not weird for the sake of weird, and if you think he is, you’ve misunderstood his work.
- ruthmarx 2y ago> Everything he has made is impregnated with meaning. Eh. He creates dreams via cinema. His work is abstract and open to interpretation, that doesn't mean it is 'impregnated' with meaning so much as you and others personally found meaning in it. > if you think he is, you’ve misunderstood his work. Given that no one can claim to understand his work since he refuses to answer questions on it, this is a rather meaningless claim. I can just as easily claim that if you think his work is 'impregnated' with meaning, then it is you who has misunderstood his work.
- squidsoup 2y agoThere are very clear themes and currents running through his work - fears around industrialisation and technology (electricity and machinery are recurring motifs), explorations of identity, exploitation both sexual and societal, the facade of the American dream, the cost of pursuing a creative life. I'm only scratching the surface there. Lynch does actually talk about his work quite a bit, but he prefers to talk about his process and its connection to his mediation practice, rather than explicit meaning of his symbolism.
- danjl 2y agoIt's funny how folks see their jobs as safe, but nearby jobs that they don't understand as at risk. In this case, actors are safe, but VFX better be worried. Ben knows actors are artists and it's going to be hard for an AI to mimic all the experience and subtleties he's gained over his life. The same is true in VFX, it's just that Ben doesn't understand the art or the process of visual effects.
- stormfather 2y agoHe's partially right. AI won't be able to write an interesting, wholly original script anytime soon. For that it's necessary to live as a human, to experience anguish, loss, fear, hope, etc. Art, true art, will be the last field to be taken over by AI. Has anyone seen a truly poignant AI image yet, that illuminates something about the human experience? One they would put in a museum? I haven't. However there is such a large body of work already, all the derivative stuff can be made effortlessly. What would happen for instance if you told the AI of 2050 "I want to mix the Brothers Karazamov with the Odyssey, set on Mars after the apocalypse?" I just tried with Sonnet and its not too bad. Maybe a large enough basis of stories has already been told that most AI scripts will feel novel enough to be interesting, even if they are just interpolations in the latent narrative space humans have constructed. Actors will be wholly unnecessary. A human director will prompt an AI to show more or less of a particular emotion or reaction. Actors are just instruments. The three most interesting transformations AI will bring are: 1. Allowing a single human "director" to rapidly iterate on script, scenery, characters, edits, etc. One person will be able to prompt their way through a movie for the price of electricity. 2. Movies will become interactive. "Show me this movie but with more romantic tension / with a happy ending / Walt loves Jesse" 3. Holodecks will allow young people to safely experience a much broader range of events and allow them to grow their souls faster, meaning they can make better movies. Modern movies suck because life is too predictable and tech-focused for good writers to emerge. We won't ever put ourselves in real danger, but what if your senior year of high school was to live through the French Revolution in a holodeck? It would change you forever.
- WheelsAtLarge 2y agoHis perspective mainly focuses on AI as a replacement for creativity, but he doesn't seem to consider it a tool for creative expression. I can envision a future where one person comes up with ideas, goes to their computer, puts everything together, and creates something comparable to what a small studio can produce today. This has already happened in music; in the '70s, the band Boston started with a single person working in a basement putting together a complete album and releasing it. Once it became a hit, they formed a full band. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_(band) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_(band) I can see a similar situation happening with AI. Hollywood is definitely undergoing changes; the traditional concept of having Hollywood in one location might fade away, leading to a global creation of filmmaking. While this increase in content could bring more creativity, it might also lead to an overwhelming amount of options. With thousands of films available, it may not be as enjoyable to watch a movie anymore. This could lead to a decline in the overall experience of enjoying films, which is not necessarily a positive outcome.
- vondragon 2y ago"AI will never write Shakespeare"... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chatgpt-or-shakespeare-readers-couldnt-tell-the-difference-and-even-preferred-ai-generated-verse-180985480/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chatgpt-or-shakesp... "Readers Couldn’t Tell the Difference—and Even Preferred A.I.-Generated Verse"
- jakubmazanec 2y agoDid you actually read the article you posted? Few quotes: - "Beyond the themes and emotions, ChatGPT’s poems were also simpler in terms of their overall structure and composition." - "Understanding poems written by humans requires deep, critical thinking—and that’s a big part of poetry’s appeal, the researchers write in the paper. But modern readers don’t seem to want to do this labor, instead preferring texts that give them “instant answers,” [...]" So AI didn't write better poems than Shakespear (it's only GPT-3.5, but I doubt newer models are better), and it seems to me that readers couldn't tell difference because they simply can't recognize quality.
- vondragon 2y agoFair enough but I don't see any reason to think the complexity and structure wouldn't improve over time.
- darkwater 2y ago"AI will never write Shakespeare"... if Shakespeare never existed. Since it did exist, it can clearly copy him.