I saw a quote earlier this week that I'll copy here:

> I considered renting out sound stages, flying to exotic desert locations, getting a scuba team to shoot the underwater scenes in an aquarium, commissioning custom-made Teletubbies costumes, hiring SAG actors, building dozens of miniature sets, and spending my life savings on making this video. But using AI just seems slightly easier.

Making short films with AI is still incredibly effortful. If you're being careful and diligent, it takes days to "shoot" and edit the entire shot list for a 5-7 minute short.

Would you say that the creators of today's animated TV shows, in mechanizing production with Toon Boom Studio, have stripped the beauty away? I still found "Bojack Horseman" to be a salient dramedy.

Would you say that Pixar, in using motion capture and algorithms to simulate light, physics, and movement, is cutting away the journey?

This is a new adventure and new level of abstraction we're embarking upon.

I'm already thinking about the next way points: real time mocapped improv for D&D campaigns and live community theater fantasy and science fiction productions.

These are tools that bring us to new places, that enable us to tell new stories. Previously you'd have to win Disney budget approval to tell a story matching your vision - now you don't.

But I will still be entertained. Expedient AI expression can touch most people the same way a low effort meme or an off the cuff whitticism.

Art is not effort. Art is not labour. Beauty is not suffering. Art =/= craft. Art is communication.

If someone wants to suffer long the endurance journey to becaome skilled at a craft we can still respect/appreciate it the same way a sprinter spends 10 years training to run real fast, in the mean time most of us will use a vehicle to get somewhere faster.

What we're going to lose is a bunch of interesting behind the scene videos because no one is going to watch someone prompt for an hour wondering why can't I do that, but rather why didn't I do that.

Proliferating tools for creation is net good in the same sense that teaching masses to write is net good. It's strange people are opposing lowering the barrier to entry to visual communication. That's what art ultimately is, communication. Once difficult, soon ubiquituous.

So landscapes are not beautiful?

Now, creative people with ambition and limited resources have a new, powerful tool.

This will also be used to create great content.

We mustn't teach peasants how to read or write or else one day we'll live in hellscape of infinte unread inboxes and eternal september... both of which sucks, but much less than a world where masses were illiterate. Ai art/slop is just that for visual communication. Now it's supremely shitty this power is currently being monetized / controlled by a few, the same way communication material like papyrus and paper was jealously guarded/exploited before printing press proliferated, then the mistake that was the internet giving desemination power to every pleb. But there's free models out there and maybe (hopefully) in the not too distant from now the barrier to entry is accessible commodity level hardware and artists just have to eat shit and realize they've contributing to the creative common/canon like those before, i.e. world where monks/literati simply copied and duplicated work in pre copyright era because knowledge/expression, unless jealously guarded, was a collective resource to be built upon.

Precisely.

I have a really big problem with letting low quality stuff infest into the species.

> "The studios and creators who thrive in this new landscape will be those who can effectively harness AI’s capabilities while maintaining the human creativity and vision that ultimately drives the art of cinema."

..Just somehow several years on, these optimistic statements still all end up being in the future tense, somehow for all the supposed greatness and benefits, we still dont see really valuable outputs. A lot of us do not want more of the "CONTENT" as envisioned by corporate ghouls who want their employees or artists to "thrive" (another word kidnapped by LinkedIn-Linguists). The point is not in the speed and easiness of generation of outputs, visual and sound effects etc. The point is the artists interpretation and their own vision, impressions etc. Not a statistical slop which "likely" fits my preferences (i.e. increases my dopamin levels).

I'll have you know that in this year's Atlanta 48 Hour Film project (something I've been doing since I was a teen), several teams used AI.

Rewind to just one year prior -- 2024.

AI video was brand-spanking new. We'd only just gotten over the "Will Smith" spaghetti video and the meme-y "Pepperoni Hug Spot" and "Harry Potter by Balenciaga" videos.

I was the only person to attempt to use AI in 2024's competition. It was a time when the tools and infrastructure for video barely existed.

On the debut night, I was resoundingly booed by the audience. It felt surreal. Working all weekend to have an audience of peers jeering at you in a dark theater. The judges gave me an award out of sympathy.

Back then, image-to-video models really were not a thing (Luma launched "Dream Machine v1" shortly after this). I was using Comfy, Blender, Mocap, a full Mocap suit (the itchy kind), and a lot of other hacks to build something with extremely crude tools.

We lost a day of filming and had to scramble to get something done in just 24 hours. No sleep, too much caffeine. Lots of sweat and toil.

The resulting film was a total mess, of course:

https://vimeo.com/955680517/05d9fb0c4f (It's seriously bad - I hate it. It might legitimately be the very first time AI was used in a 48 hour competition.)

That said, it felt very much like a real 48 Hour competition to me. Like a game jam. The crude ingredients, an idea, the clock. The hustle. The corners being cut. It was palpable.

I don't think you can say there isn't soul in this process. The process has so much soul.

Anyway, fast forward to this year. Three teams used AI, including my own. (I don't think I have a link to our film, sadly.)

We all got applause. The audience was full of industry folks, students, and hobbyists. They loved it. And they knew we used AI.

The industry is anxious but curious about the tech. But fundamentally, it's a new tool for the tool box. The real task is storytelling.

Carter needs a new laptop. His daily driver has been falling apart for ages but he refuses to give it up.

We all told him about the sound mix - he let a couple of videos slip with a bad "mono as single-channel stereo audio" renders. On his machine it sounded normal. He got flack for that, and he's been hearing this for months.

I'm going to show him this thread. I don't think he'll ever forget to check again.

Despite that, he's a really talented guy. Chalk this up as a bad production deploy. We didn't want to delete and re-upload since the videos had legs when we first released them. There's a checklist now.