While some creators are happy to see the growing capabilities of generative AI products like ChatGPT and Gemini, others are opposed to using AI tech, afraid that the AI could replace them. The movie industry is the best example of that. There’s concern that AI might take over jobs or alter performances, especially now that it’s more sophisticated than ever.
Products like Google’s Veo 3 can create lifelike video sequences that include dialogue and sound. With enough money and time, you could use such tools to make a full movie without hiring real actors or a production team.
Veo 3 isn’t the only advanced AI video generation tool out there, but it’s a good example of what’s possible today. And Google’s AI tech has already been used in at least one movie. Google said so a few months ago.
Fast-forward to mid-July, and Netflix confirmed that it used unnamed generative AI tools to create special effects for a widely acclaimed new TV show that became a monster hit earlier this year. The revelation came during Netflix’s quarterly earnings report, where the streamer reported a 16% rise in revenue for the June quarter.
If “less affluent film markets” use AI, where are the artists going to get their first shot? How will they learn and hone their craft if not in the industry as lower paid talent on lower budget stuff? Just work for free for years and then Disney will start raining money on you eventually? (note: this will not happen)
I don’t know what to do about AI. It’s not even AI that is a problem. It’s capitalism. It’s corporations slashing every tiny expense to maximize profits for the shareholders. If they could just pretend that us film crews were actually valuable, treated us like shareholders, we could have a bigger piece of the pie and they could have better media, but then they’d have slightly less money so…
Oh well.
Same place they get their first shot now. It’s not like there is a pipeline from cheap Argentinian movies to big Hollywood movies. VFX, like game development, is a fairly global, buy-in-bulk thing where artists are put in a big warehouse and sell their work to productions worldwide. You buy VFX by the frame and it’s a pretty harsh race to the bottom.
You’re actually right that it’s not AI, outsourcing these things is pretty straightforward cost/quality/time optimization nonsense. If an Argentinian TV show could afford a VFX shot by having it look a bit worse using tools that are a bit cheaper then the needle hasn’t really moved much in any direction. They still had to hire some guy to still use some tools to still make some frames of VFX. The alternative wasn’t a cheaper VFX artist, it was probably no VFX shot. And if it was a cheaper shot that’s probably just one made by the same people in less time that looks much worse and makes you less close to the results that same VFX house gives someone else.
People are treating this issue overly simplistically on the Internet (what else is new) and just going “AI bad”, but there’s a big range of applications, implementations and interactions with different results and implications. I suppose that’s why it’s such an effective “being mad online” thing. People can posture maximalist outrage but the overall arc of the thing is that almost everybody does have some way or reason to use the thing effectively and many of those will misjudge what that is and use the thing poorly or get a bad result, thus creating a reason for the thing to continue to exist and for examples of the thing being misused or backfiring to keep feeding the outrage furnace.
It’s not even AI and it’s not even capitalism. It’s public opinion in the age of social media.
Still, they made an Etheranut adaptation with Ricardo Darín and I didn’t know it was out. I guess they at least Streisanded this into me becoming aware of it. The fact I didn’t know already is a painful reminder that we’ve lost the ability to share a mainstream means of communication beyond the algorithmic social media firehose, but at least the firehose’s less palatable side sprayed me with some information I can use by accident.
For the record I went and watched the first episode. It’s well shot, a bit slow and not partiularly expensive. 80% of the runtime is a handful of character actors talking in a basement. This is bookeneded by a couple of VFX shots. One is simple and works alright, the other one is harder and looks pretty bad.
I’m still not mad.