5 ms·

An interesting read but also feels like the rearranging of the deckchairs on the Titanic given the forthcoming disruption from generative AI in this industry.

by dotBen 2mo ago

An interesting read but also feels like the rearranging of the deckchairs on the Titanic given the forthcoming disruption from generative AI in this industry. I spent some time last month with a relative in the industry (camera operator and producer) and he already uses some very sophisticated AI to map out scenes and shots in gen ai full video before they shoot IRL. It's mostly a cost saving exercise as well as occasionally helping to improve the quality of the deliverable. He is totally expecting that the next shift will be that gen ai video will become good enough to be considered the master (ie no need to film) and he is already transferring his skills as a camera operator into prompting and AI assisted scene design. He knows that many different disciplines he works with will all compete for that prompting work and there obviously won't be enough work for everybody to go around. The first part of this is using human actors in front of 360 video stages like The Volume [0] to display the sets (which was pioneered by The Mandalorian) and then ultimately the actors themselves will be AI rendered. And at this point it doesn't matter where this is filmed. I grew up close by to Pinewood Studios 30+years ago - I can't imagine them putting a lot more investment and development into that lot given where this is all going. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft

coliveira 2mo ago
What will probably happen is that they'll buy the rights to use faces of famous people (actors or not) and use AI (or cheap actors) to do the real scenes.
keiferski 2mo ago
This is only going to replace movies that were already using CGI. If every movie defaulted to CGI over natural settings, you wouldn't have stuff like the Odyssey made...which is setting sales records.
sublinear 2mo ago
I still don't understand why there's such a race to the bottom. If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all? The corner cutting across the board has become so bad that these movies are unwatchable. This isn't even a new problem. A lot of traditional CGI can still be bad enough to ruin the illusion when it's the state of the art and a lot of attention to detail went into it. We've been circling the drain for decades. I suspect this is why everything became superheroes for a while. The illusion doesn't have to be good to meet that low of a bar. If the goal is to be as cheap as possible, you might as well release the story as a picture book written by AI.
- khriss 2mo ago
  It's the same forces driving software quality to the bottom. Simply put, enshittification has become the expected norm and there is more money to be made pushing out barely acceptable slop than the higher effort(and cost) of better made stuff. Also, it's not exactly that the higher effort, better quality stuff is gone as it's been drowned out by the slop. Higher quality things are still being made(e.g. The Odyssey which uses minimal CGI), just much smaller as a percentage of overall. Earlier unit economics of slop were roughly comparable to higher effort output. It was cheaper, but not dramatically so to push out crap code, so the volume of slop was a bit lower. Now, low effort slop is genuinely low effort due to AI, so the economics work out even accounting for the lower adoption and higher complaints from the users. Time will tell if this is a temporary phase, or the new, bleak normal.
  - sublinear 2mo ago
    The acceptance of the slop is the problem. We've had low effort fraud for all of human history. We absolutely need to revise our definition of fraud to include AI slop. People need to wake the fuck up. Nobody would accept a low quality product under any other circumstances, so why is AI different? We only have this large scale fascination with it because so many people are completely uneducated in computer science and have no clue how it works or what the limitations are.
- gtowey 2mo ago
  > If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all? Hollywood moves have little to do with art or even entrainment for that matter. They are simply revenue generating machines. Rich people invest in a movie production and expect a return. Hollywood moves don't take artistic risks anymore which is why franchises have become such a big thing. If it make money before, it will probably make money again. Even if it's bad, fans of the last movie will buy a ticket just to see. If it's bad, well, you have their money already! It's pretty similar to Silicon valley these days. The technology is just a vehicle to produce a return on VC money.
- butlike 2mo ago
  What is "proper movie making?"
jezzamon 2mo ago
A lot of people, especially left leaning and young people, are very against any AI use and especially for AI pictures or video. For them it's very cringe-worthy. So that would all need to change somehow. Remember that a lot of the people driving opinions on stuff are the artists that would be displaced by this technology. Also... Actors aren't hired based on acting skill. AI can't replace the notoriety part of why studios hire actors.
- projektfu 2mo ago
  I was at a Brazilian restaurant in the US that had TVs showing a well-known Brazilian singer/guitarist performing, and the middle-school-aged kids at the table next to me were discussing whether it was AI. It was clearly not, to me, but it seems to be getting hard for the next generation to tell it apart. I think they will be craving authentic experiences, but also willing to accept inauthentic ones when they do not have the money for the real thing.
  - butlike 2mo ago
    I think you're right. I think there will be a giant "tock" back to real experiences. I'm 37, and the internet was new and novel during my formative years, so we flocked to it. Now, as it's becoming the old new thing, internet fatigue will lead to more and more "offline experiences." At least, it already has started to for me.
- 999900000999 2mo ago
  Once it’s good enough no one will care. A green room in Atlanta can become Venice Beach. Actors will still be in demand, at least leads and most speaking roles. 3000 extras, that’s going to be AI. My hope would be this allows for hyper small budget shows to rival what takes millions today. Maybe we can actually get some creative stories instead of Marvel slop fest 43
  - watwut 2mo ago
    > My hope would be this allows for hyper small budget shows to rival what takes millions today. No way. Small creatives will go elsewhere. Unless the structural "winner takes all" economy changes, small players will have no chance, especially when they have to use monopoly expensive tech. Good writing already left hollywood, hollywood is already repetitive reboot factory.
UltraSane 2mo ago
People want to see expensive effort in movies they have to buy tickets to see and AI is the opposite of effort.
- Ekaros 2mo ago
  Expensive movies are liked because they look impressive much more so than cheap movies. Say Titanic in past. Or Lord of The Rings. If AI can do the same they don't actually care if it was expensive or not.
  - UltraSane 2mo ago
    AI isn't going to be able to replace AAA CGI for a very long time. We are in the Tron era
andyfilms1 2mo ago
Man, this is so misguided.... 1. Stagecraft/virtual production is a thing, yes, but the backgrounds are not "AI rendered," they're 3D scenes built in Unreal. They have to be, because they need to dynamically react to the camera moving to create parallax. 2. Yes, some people are using AI to plan scenes. With respect to your relative, those people are not the ones getting hired on large projects. When someone is hired in the film industry, they're hired for their specific taste, creative eye, and opinions. That contribution is literally their whole job. Outsourcing that task to AI is, within the industry, seen as an indication that someone is inexperienced or simply bad at their job. Crews don't want to work for those people, and audiences don't want to watch content created that way. 3. It's easy to "expect" that "one day" AI might become the way movies are captured if you don't actually understand the limitations of AI video generation versus the demands of filmmakers and the expectations of audiences. Putting aside the obvious stuff like continuity, shot duration, and resolution...GenAI is not color managed, it's not physically accurate, the results can't be copyrighted and it struggles with anything not in its training data (I.E., genuinely new ideas.) This is NOT to say that this technology has no future in the film industry, obviously it does. But half the movies at the Oscars last year were shot on film, so the notion that all filmmaking is just going to turn into pixel soup being generated from prompts is just hilarious to everyone actually within the industry.
- moronicles 2mo ago
  Who cares about Oscars? It's about sales and mind-share. Ticket sales still have not recovered to pre-COVID levels, and they were already in a severe downward trend before the pandemic. The trend is that increasingly, the entertainment people consume comes from small-time creators. And these small creators have thus far had very little capacity to create truly visually appealing content and take on more ambitious works. And still, they've been taking mindshare from the movie industry. Increasingly sophisticated experiences are becoming possible for these creators via AI tools. Where do you think this is going? Keep on laughing it up at your award ceremonies, but the audience is moving on.
  - andyfilms1 2mo ago
    Sure, but saying that AI is the magic bullet to solve this is completely speculative. If and when a fully GenAI film is released and performs well at the box office, than I'm sure the industry will align itself to the new direction. But pretending like that situation is an inevitability is just wishful thinking...any number of things could, or could not happen.
Animats 2mo ago
> He is totally expecting that the next shift will be that gen ai video will become good enough to be considered the master (ie no need to film) and he is already transferring his skills as a camera operator into prompting and AI assisted scene design. Yes. Asian drama is already there.[1] The first AI-generated Asian vertical-format drama was released in November 2025. Now, about 400 new ones are released each day. The tools are online, and you can sign up for a few dollars a month. Quality varies widely. The visuals are now quite good, but chatbots used to generate screenplays still have trouble holding the plot together. Much of this stuff looks like fan fiction authors are at the controls. When someone competent is driving, the results are quite good. Cost is about 10% of live action. Hollywood probably has less than three years to live. [1] https://pinedrama.com/blog/paradigm-shift-ai-short-drama-revolution-2026 https://pinedrama.com/blog/paradigm-shift-ai-short-drama-rev...
- robocat 2mo ago
  Can you link to a high quality example of a short drama? The article mentions ShortMax's "Too Late! The Daughter of Olympus Forsakes You" and NetShort's "One Move God Mode". I found something on YouTube for both, but there's zero chance what I saw was Hollywood level quality (unless you really hate Hollywood movies!)
  - Animats 2mo ago
    Most of these things have awful plots. As yet, the AI systems used are not very good at plotting. If given a screenplay and character sheets, they can do reasonably well. But the "generate a 60 episode drama from one prompt" jobs are not very good. This is more of a problem with the Asian drama industry than the technology. There are not that many different plots. The visuals are consistently good now. If you put in a decent script, there's a good chance of getting something good. The script has to tell the characters what to emote. The automation isn't good at that yet. Nor are the vocals good at all. Give it six months.
    - Animats 2mo ago
      Here's a half-decent example.[1] The visuals are good, the plot is adequate, and the audio is poor. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5w1jiTYrTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5w1jiTYrTw
twister2920 2mo ago
[dead]
nitwit005 2mo ago
It's not a forthcoming disruption. They've been using "AI" for various visual effects tasks for a long time already. If something is not being done using AI now, it's because the results are poor, not because of some sort of reluctance to embrace it.
croes 2mo ago
Practical effects still beat CGI most of the time. AI doesn’t help with that. AI may replace classic CGI
AlexeyBelov 2mo ago
> he is already transferring his skills as a camera operator into prompting Thanks for the laugh.

by dotBen 2mo ago

coliveira 2mo ago

What will probably happen is that they'll buy the rights to use faces of famous people (actors or not) and use AI (or cheap actors) to do the real scenes.

keiferski 2mo ago

This is only going to replace movies that were already using CGI. If every movie defaulted to CGI over natural settings, you wouldn't have stuff like the Odyssey made...which is setting sales records.

sublinear 2mo ago

I still don't understand why there's such a race to the bottom. If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all? The corner cutting across the board has become so bad that these movies are unwatchable. This isn't even a new problem. A lot of traditional CGI can still be bad enough to ruin the illusion when it's the state of the art and a lot of attention to detail went into it. We've been circling the drain for decades. I suspect this is why everything became superheroes for a while. The illusion doesn't have to be good to meet that low of a bar. If the goal is to be as cheap as possible, you might as well release the story as a picture book written by AI.

khriss 2mo ago
It's the same forces driving software quality to the bottom. Simply put, enshittification has become the expected norm and there is more money to be made pushing out barely acceptable slop than the higher effort(and cost) of better made stuff. Also, it's not exactly that the higher effort, better quality stuff is gone as it's been drowned out by the slop. Higher quality things are still being made(e.g. The Odyssey which uses minimal CGI), just much smaller as a percentage of overall. Earlier unit economics of slop were roughly comparable to higher effort output. It was cheaper, but not dramatically so to push out crap code, so the volume of slop was a bit lower. Now, low effort slop is genuinely low effort due to AI, so the economics work out even accounting for the lower adoption and higher complaints from the users. Time will tell if this is a temporary phase, or the new, bleak normal.
- sublinear 2mo ago
  The acceptance of the slop is the problem. We've had low effort fraud for all of human history. We absolutely need to revise our definition of fraud to include AI slop. People need to wake the fuck up. Nobody would accept a low quality product under any other circumstances, so why is AI different? We only have this large scale fascination with it because so many people are completely uneducated in computer science and have no clue how it works or what the limitations are.
gtowey 2mo ago
> If they don't want to make a movie properly, why make it at all? Hollywood moves have little to do with art or even entrainment for that matter. They are simply revenue generating machines. Rich people invest in a movie production and expect a return. Hollywood moves don't take artistic risks anymore which is why franchises have become such a big thing. If it make money before, it will probably make money again. Even if it's bad, fans of the last movie will buy a ticket just to see. If it's bad, well, you have their money already! It's pretty similar to Silicon valley these days. The technology is just a vehicle to produce a return on VC money.
butlike 2mo ago
What is "proper movie making?"

jezzamon 2mo ago

A lot of people, especially left leaning and young people, are very against any AI use and especially for AI pictures or video. For them it's very cringe-worthy. So that would all need to change somehow. Remember that a lot of the people driving opinions on stuff are the artists that would be displaced by this technology. Also... Actors aren't hired based on acting skill. AI can't replace the notoriety part of why studios hire actors.

projektfu 2mo ago
I was at a Brazilian restaurant in the US that had TVs showing a well-known Brazilian singer/guitarist performing, and the middle-school-aged kids at the table next to me were discussing whether it was AI. It was clearly not, to me, but it seems to be getting hard for the next generation to tell it apart. I think they will be craving authentic experiences, but also willing to accept inauthentic ones when they do not have the money for the real thing.
- butlike 2mo ago
  I think you're right. I think there will be a giant "tock" back to real experiences. I'm 37, and the internet was new and novel during my formative years, so we flocked to it. Now, as it's becoming the old new thing, internet fatigue will lead to more and more "offline experiences." At least, it already has started to for me.
999900000999 2mo ago
Once it’s good enough no one will care. A green room in Atlanta can become Venice Beach. Actors will still be in demand, at least leads and most speaking roles. 3000 extras, that’s going to be AI. My hope would be this allows for hyper small budget shows to rival what takes millions today. Maybe we can actually get some creative stories instead of Marvel slop fest 43
- watwut 2mo ago
  > My hope would be this allows for hyper small budget shows to rival what takes millions today. No way. Small creatives will go elsewhere. Unless the structural "winner takes all" economy changes, small players will have no chance, especially when they have to use monopoly expensive tech. Good writing already left hollywood, hollywood is already repetitive reboot factory.

UltraSane 2mo ago

People want to see expensive effort in movies they have to buy tickets to see and AI is the opposite of effort.

Ekaros 2mo ago
Expensive movies are liked because they look impressive much more so than cheap movies. Say Titanic in past. Or Lord of The Rings. If AI can do the same they don't actually care if it was expensive or not.
- UltraSane 2mo ago
  AI isn't going to be able to replace AAA CGI for a very long time. We are in the Tron era

andyfilms1 2mo ago

Man, this is so misguided.... 1. Stagecraft/virtual production is a thing, yes, but the backgrounds are not "AI rendered," they're 3D scenes built in Unreal. They have to be, because they need to dynamically react to the camera moving to create parallax. 2. Yes, some people are using AI to plan scenes. With respect to your relative, those people are not the ones getting hired on large projects. When someone is hired in the film industry, they're hired for their specific taste, creative eye, and opinions. That contribution is literally their whole job. Outsourcing that task to AI is, within the industry, seen as an indication that someone is inexperienced or simply bad at their job. Crews don't want to work for those people, and audiences don't want to watch content created that way. 3. It's easy to "expect" that "one day" AI might become the way movies are captured if you don't actually understand the limitations of AI video generation versus the demands of filmmakers and the expectations of audiences. Putting aside the obvious stuff like continuity, shot duration, and resolution...GenAI is not color managed, it's not physically accurate, the results can't be copyrighted and it struggles with anything not in its training data (I.E., genuinely new ideas.) This is NOT to say that this technology has no future in the film industry, obviously it does. But half the movies at the Oscars last year were shot on film, so the notion that all filmmaking is just going to turn into pixel soup being generated from prompts is just hilarious to everyone actually within the industry.

moronicles 2mo ago
Who cares about Oscars? It's about sales and mind-share. Ticket sales still have not recovered to pre-COVID levels, and they were already in a severe downward trend before the pandemic. The trend is that increasingly, the entertainment people consume comes from small-time creators. And these small creators have thus far had very little capacity to create truly visually appealing content and take on more ambitious works. And still, they've been taking mindshare from the movie industry. Increasingly sophisticated experiences are becoming possible for these creators via AI tools. Where do you think this is going? Keep on laughing it up at your award ceremonies, but the audience is moving on.
- andyfilms1 2mo ago
  Sure, but saying that AI is the magic bullet to solve this is completely speculative. If and when a fully GenAI film is released and performs well at the box office, than I'm sure the industry will align itself to the new direction. But pretending like that situation is an inevitability is just wishful thinking...any number of things could, or could not happen.

Animats 2mo ago

> He is totally expecting that the next shift will be that gen ai video will become good enough to be considered the master (ie no need to film) and he is already transferring his skills as a camera operator into prompting and AI assisted scene design. Yes. Asian drama is already there.[1] The first AI-generated Asian vertical-format drama was released in November 2025. Now, about 400 new ones are released each day. The tools are online, and you can sign up for a few dollars a month. Quality varies widely. The visuals are now quite good, but chatbots used to generate screenplays still have trouble holding the plot together. Much of this stuff looks like fan fiction authors are at the controls. When someone competent is driving, the results are quite good. Cost is about 10% of live action. Hollywood probably has less than three years to live. [1] https://pinedrama.com/blog/paradigm-shift-ai-short-drama-revolution-2026 https://pinedrama.com/blog/paradigm-shift-ai-short-drama-rev...

robocat 2mo ago
Can you link to a high quality example of a short drama? The article mentions ShortMax's "Too Late! The Daughter of Olympus Forsakes You" and NetShort's "One Move God Mode". I found something on YouTube for both, but there's zero chance what I saw was Hollywood level quality (unless you really hate Hollywood movies!)
- Animats 2mo ago
  Most of these things have awful plots. As yet, the AI systems used are not very good at plotting. If given a screenplay and character sheets, they can do reasonably well. But the "generate a 60 episode drama from one prompt" jobs are not very good. This is more of a problem with the Asian drama industry than the technology. There are not that many different plots. The visuals are consistently good now. If you put in a decent script, there's a good chance of getting something good. The script has to tell the characters what to emote. The automation isn't good at that yet. Nor are the vocals good at all. Give it six months.
  - Animats 2mo ago
    Here's a half-decent example.[1] The visuals are good, the plot is adequate, and the audio is poor. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5w1jiTYrTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5w1jiTYrTw

twister2920 2mo ago

[dead]

nitwit005 2mo ago

It's not a forthcoming disruption. They've been using "AI" for various visual effects tasks for a long time already. If something is not being done using AI now, it's because the results are poor, not because of some sort of reluctance to embrace it.

croes 2mo ago

Practical effects still beat CGI most of the time. AI doesn’t help with that. AI may replace classic CGI

AlexeyBelov 2mo ago

> he is already transferring his skills as a camera operator into prompting Thanks for the laugh.