Machinima is made by people. Cutscenes are made by people. This is a list of every human who worked on Final Fantasy X. You're extrapolating "400 people worked on this thing in 2000" to "no one will work on anything in 2030" based squarely on your naiive and uninformed conception of the process of creating filmed entertainment. Here, let's play a game: This is the list of people who worked on Snow White in 1937. And this is the list of people who worked on Frozen II in 2019. I think if you compare those three lists in chronological order, you will find that modern animation takes more people, not less, and that the trend is such that all of Los Angeles will be working on Frozen 5 by 2063. SAG killed AI because the AMPTP wanted the right to scan an actor once and use them as a digital extra forever without paying dues, wages or royalties (just as an aside - "extra" is an uncredited role, so if Frozen 5 has extras, they'll have to come from San Diego). SAG fought this because every star you've ever seen in the theater played an extra for ramen money at some point and without the ramen money there's no Hollywood. You could have Googled that - but then you might have accidentally learned something. Just like what happens if you make an AI show in France - Netflix won't carry it, Canal Plus won't carry it, nobody will carry it because they're all signatories to the same contracts. In general? If you don't know anything about the subject, and the situation doesn't make sense to you, it's a sign you need to research the subject, not that everyone who knows anything about it is an idiot. I know something about this subject. Animation I've worked on has racked up over a billion views on Youtube. And as you've likely noticed, I'll freely share well past the point anyone else cares. My one word of advice is that if I've made assertions, it's likely because I'm confident in my knowledge of the subject, and that confidence is generally well-earned.
And these are the exact same stupid “it will never happen to MY industry” horseshit that has happened to every industry just before it got automated away. Nobody thought that computers would mean the death of stores, until they enabled people to shop from home and get it delivered. Robots were never supposed to replace workers in restaurants, except now even mid scale restaurants have discovered that it much cheaper to put a Wi-Fi enabled iPad on the table than pay a human to take your order. They pay one person to take the food out to all the tables. They reduce headcount and make more money. AI is taking over a lot of office jobs now too. But don’t worry, your industry is specialer than every other job that’s ever been automated away. I mean we NEED mailroom staff, because all the people who work in offices started in the mailroom (in the 1980s) except now there hasn’t been a mailroom since 1990s because people realized that they could reduce their labor costs by using emails instead of inter office memos hand delivered by humans.
Dude we had this discussion just a couple days ago: Are you arguing that my direct and existential experience with exactly this issue somehow disqualifies my opinion? To the contrary - EVERYONE thought Amazon was coming for their livelihood they just knew there was nothing they could do about it. Barnes & Noble was blocked from buying Ingram because it would have created a vertical monopoly; Amazon was allowed to eat everyone's lunch because they didn't have stores. The first time I read about the downfall of cheap service was in Newsweek in 1987. There's kiosks and there's table service and I think you will find that aside from the pandemic, hospitality employment has been growing steadily since WWII. McDonald's is definitely employing fewer workers per store but that's never really been considered an overly-desirable job and really - what have we lost? Which ones? I recognize that my experience is a count against me but I've got more employees than fingers at this point. How much of your payroll have you farmed out to AI? ...is this a Sammy Glick thing? What are you getting at, exactly? Let's back up a minute: I pointed out that it takes hundreds of skilled individuals to make a movie and you came back with - retail - fast food - mail sorting And you came back maaaaaaad. Once more with feeling: Izotope came out with a plugin called "total mix" in 2011 or 2012. Theoretically it would take your shitty Discovery Channel audio and magically tweak it so that it sounded like a TV show. It was pretty comical; a lot of us beta-test for Izotope and that one was something they didn't even tell us about because... you know. We would have been mad. It was okay though because instead they unleashed it on a bunch of editors who hate us anyway because we insist we need annoying things like "time" and "money" to make their pretty videos sound like television so Izotope didn't need us anymore anyway. Except the editors tried Total Mix and came back with "what is this hickory-roasted bullshit" because even though the "AI" (yes, they used that terminology) was definitely listening to their audio, and definitely doing something, it didn't know the audio equivalent of "cats have four legs". It was such a catastrophe that Izotope spent a bunch of money scrubbing the Internet of any mention of "Total Mix." You won't find any record of it now - in part because RME's had a product called "Totalmix" for 20 years (nice job Izotope) and in part because mostly what AI is doing these days is data poisoning. And really, Izotope now has a number of garbage products they sell to neophytes - Vea, Nectar, Neutron, Tonal Balance Control and Neoverb are all "AI" products designed to make your dogshit amateur production sound less dogshit. And they do! They make your dogshit sound less dogshit. But they don't make it sound good. Izotope, wisely, still sells real tools. They're expensive, they're complicated and you know what? They are fucking chockablock with AI. I've been using RX for more than 20 years now and the stuff it can do is spooky. But it won't do any of that spooky shit for you because you don't know what you're doing. You could learn? You could get as good at it as I am! But you'd have to put in the time, and then you'd want to be paid. And then we'd be right back where we started. Look. Let's say a robot can do 99% of my job. Let's say you spent $50k on a commercial with absolutely no humans in it. Let's say you're competing against an ad agency that you know has a human who gets a thousand dollars to do an audio polish. Let's be honest - you're going to pay me a thousand dollars. Because I can get you that last one percent that keeps you from losing your next contract. Machines have been displacing human workers since the mutherfucking plow, dude. The skills change and so does the work. I tell you what, though - an Amish dude with a team of horses is always going to kick my ass in a corn-growing contest no matter how bitchin' my tractor 'cuz the Amish dude? Knows a thing or two about growing corn. Me? I'm gonna google "how do you grow corn" and try and figure out which of five contradictory snippets I should pay attention to. I'm fukt. It's just a tool. It's feared by people who don't understand tools, and people who understand what happens when you let people do whatever they want with tools.And I say this as an apex predator in a field that has already experienced an "AI-like" mass extinction event: there are far fewer professional mixers now than there were ten years ago but not because AI can do it, but because the massive proliferation of untalented executives who don't understand post-production made everyone read their television. If you don't need it to actually sound good, you've been able to do it at your house since shortly after Nirvana's "Nevermind" came out. If you need someone to pay for it, I'm right here with $30k worth of Pro Tools.
Nobody thought that computers would mean the death of stores, until they enabled people to shop from home and get it delivered.
Robots were never supposed to replace workers in restaurants, except now even mid scale restaurants have discovered that it much cheaper to put a Wi-Fi enabled iPad on the table than pay a human to take your order.
AI is taking over a lot of office jobs now too.
I mean we NEED mailroom staff, because all the people who work in offices started in the mailroom (in the 1980s) except now there hasn’t been a mailroom since 1990s because people realized that they could reduce their labor costs by using emails instead of inter office memos hand delivered by humans.
I can see this putting some VFX artists out of work but I cannot imagine any future where I would want to see AI-Generated Art
VFX artists have been using AI tools for 20 years or more. Any artist who didn't have to hand-trace a rotoscope line has been using AI in one form or another. I recognize I'm the only person here who knows what "rotoscope" means which is part of the problem - my posse has been doing cutting-edge shit since college because if you wanna see rapid adoption, check out filmed entertainment. If you look at AI-generated content the obvious place to use it is backgrounds. Mattes have been effectively gone since the early-mid '90s because computers have been able to generate plenty-good-enough backgrounds. AI makes that cheaper which mostly means that the guys who are doing backgrounds are going to do more of them. Look. It's gonna play out like this. Here, sit with me for a few minutes: That took Kerry Conran, talented Cal Arts grad, dedicated cineaste, four fucking years to make: Worked out tho 'cuz after four years he finished "chapter 1", a friend got it in front of Jon Avnet and four years and $70m after that, the world got: HERE IS WHAT AI IS GOING TO DO It's not gonna take four years grinding on your own to make Chapter 1 of Sky Captain. It's going to take months or weeks. The skills you use to trick the AI are going to be novel and they will be successful. It will be impressive and those of us who grew up with Steenbecks will marvel. But it's still gonna take tens of millions of dollars, Jude Law and Angelina Jolie to make it into a movie. Because a bunch of amateurs are always going to be slain by a bunch of professionals. Period. Full stop. No discussion. And that's the stupidest bullshit about this whole kerfuffle - everyone's all "ZOMFG I can't imagine how threatened some hypothetical professional must feel about this" because they can't imagine some hypothetical professional ANYWAY. Trust me - if you make your living doing visual FX, you're eagerly watching all this AI bullshit to see if it's capable of giving you a tool to speed up your workflows. And so far, what you see is something that doesn't care how many kings there are in a game of chess and if you look deeper, you're troubled by the fact that none of the people selling this technology sense that's a problem.He could not afford better equipment, so he used equipment given him in payment for projects that he worked on, such as desktop publishing of articles. His computer (including the equipment he earned) was outdated and slow. He dropped out of society, and spent all of his free time creating the short, working only enough to support himself and his project. He later remarked that he "had no life", and would sometimes hide under his desk in a fetal position, feeling tempted to give up on his project.
> I recognize I'm the only person here who knows what "rotoscope" means which is part of the problem Nah, man. Everybody who played Prince of Persia on the Apple 2E remembers rotoscoping!
Except that in almost every instance where a profession has been automated, that’s exactly what happened. Having a computer that keeps track of your inventory makes the workflow better for the logistics department, and then using a computer to schedule deliveries makes that part easier as well. And you keep doing that and eventually you’re doing the work of twelve professionals and your team shrinks down to 1/12th of what it was. And then you chip away at those tasks until you halve the workforce again, and eventually the computer is doing all of those tasks and the people who used to do those things are obsolete. Then they go back to school hoping to find a training program where they can make money before AI takes those jobs too.
Bitch I've got four computers and eight screens in front of me and the only thing that has changed since the era of magnetic tape is I can do more, faster, with less. I can't say that any simpler. You would have no more idea what I'm doing now than you would in the era of magnetic tape because I'm a professional with professional tools. I can't say that any simpler either. There's this assumption that if the tools get better the budget will shrink and that simply Does not Happen.
But surely there's way more logistics and shipping being done now in the age of computers than there was before. I'm young but I still remember a time before Amazon. I think you're imagining the one exact thing the computer is now doing being the totality of the job, whereas Klein (i assume) is talking about the industry as a whole, which generally increase in scope as it becomes cheaper easier and more prevalent.
Oh yeah totally. Fwiw, I'm fairly into watching behind the scenes vids and have tried learning blender a few times, so while I don't dare call myself a beginner I a least know what rotoscoping and mattes are. And if your job was Just those, I'd be worried. I don't think most VFX artists are though ofc. The AI I see being useful for someone who actually cares about quality are the ones that speed up things already being done - rotoscoping like you said, inpainting, photogommetry, all the places AI is already being used that maybe the new techniques can do better. The NERF stuff in particular I think could be big- turning many simultaneous video recordings into a 3D scene, so the camera can be repositioned after the fact. Nobody besides a handful of nerds want to watch ugly stock footage stitched together with ChatGPT writing the story lol.
Here's the TRUE issue: 1) LLMs lose money whenever you use them. 2) ChatGPT plus is $20 a month. Midjourney is $10 or $60 a month. Copilot is $30 a month. Stable Diffiusion is $9 or $49 a month. 3) Photoshop is $23 a month. Premiere is $23 a month. Animate is $23 a month. Audition is $23 a month. All of them combined is $60 a month. 4) Adobe Stock is $30 a month. Fundamentally, "make me an image that might have too many toes that might just be a bad rip-off of a license-protected product" is consumer-cost-competitive with "find me an image that was created by humans under crystal-clear licensing terms." And fundamentally, "draw a fuzzy monster that is either kneeling or squatting, I don't care" is more expensive than "here is an absolute bazooka of a content tool in any medium you care to work in." And that is why none of this shit is being sold to professionals - it's nowhere near the costs-benefits breakpoint where they'd consider it. You know what fucking sucks about being a creative professional? You're surrounded by other creative professionals who are so fucking egotistical that they're 100% certain they're a creative genius while you're a button pusher. They'll slave away for weeks on something visual and then when it gets to the audio their every instruction is "no more like this. no more like that. No do it more like that. Can't you just give me your sessions and teach me how to use your software you're clearly a fucking idiot oh oops did I say that out loud?" I "worked" with this guy Jesse - friend of a friend - who was a graphics guy on Jimmy Kimmel. He wanted a sound effect for something - I think it was a brain ray zapping Bryan Cranston or some shit for half a second in a 2-minute throwaway bit before his interview. So I spent 20 minutes coming up with a brain ray zapping sound effect. Mutherfucker called me during lunch and left a seven minute message about all the changes he wanted. I noped out and said "sorry, Jesse, no bid" and the only award his short film ever got? Was for sound. That I did. It's fuckin' awesome. It's a werewolf in wrestling gear painted gold for some reason. But the idea that I might know what I'm doing is absolutely fucking unthinkable to a certain segment of creative. All this AI bullshit is for that guy. The dipshit who prefers to shout at other professionals rather than trust them, who has no respect for the expertise of others, who can't fucking wrap their head around the idea that art requires artists. And they don't have enough money to support it. Fuckin' every AI company out there is losing money at prices that make Creative Cloud look like a bargain and their solution is to ask for 10% of global GDP to fix the problem.
LOL I've been following a few AI artists for a couple years now. They're all really clear about the fact that what they're doing is a wholly different process than traditional pixel-pushing, with different inputs, different outputs and different happy little accidents. I am honestly and enthusiastically supportive of the use of AI by creative professionals, and I am honestly and enthusiastically supportive of the use of AI by amateurs. Every time the tools get better the world improves. The tedious thing for me is that the techbros REALLY want to make this about the death of the professional class and there's absolutely zero fucking evidence to even have the discussion. It comes back to that fucking storyboard girl. Yay, you paid $10 a month to get a bunch of dragon pictures that may or may not be associated with a "movie" you intend to make someday. You weren't about to pay a storyboardist anyway, nor were you about to even try to get vaguely good at it. I've got buddies who make $2k a day storyboarding. I also shoveled about $600 into Frameforge. Between Frameforge, Photoshop and ComicLife I got a half-dozen pages into a graphic novel; it's a lot of fuckin' work. And A) Microsoft Pilot Girl is NEVER putting in that effort B) No aspect of Microsoft Pilot, or any AI for that matter, reduces that effort in any meaningful way.