Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured. What took this industry decades to advance it taking months in AI. Think the spaghetti Will Smith and now this. Another one people don't mention here but is specific to video is higgsfield ai.
>Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured
The industry haven't matured except until a certain point. Then it declined. Modern visual effects are worse than practical effects in their heyday. They are also worse done than 3D effects in their tasteful early days (like Jurassic Park).
I think this has more to do with the cutthroat business than the technology involved. It seems the tech has improved, but the quality has suffered due to pressure to just fling shit out the door using the least amount of money to generate the most amount of profit. They are squeezing every penny dry. It seems to me the person you're responding to still has a valid point.
Are you sure this is not just a case of good VX has hard to spot? And you only notice the bad/cheap examples.
It's a case of the biggest blockbusters, with the biggest budgets, like the MCU movies or Fast and Furious and such, looking like crap vfx wise. Same for movies at every level.
VFX can be more subtle (e.g. how Fincher uses it), but it's rare. The industry (which is separate from the technology) didn't mature, it enabled crappy effects to dominate.
> with the biggest budgets, like the MCU movies or Fast and Furious
Oh, I hundred percent believe it. But did they spend the money on the vfx?
For example 1917 or Nolan movies I think have great VFX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bRZbsk_wuA (last part)
CGI animals are still universally awful.
Those old movies with old visual effects are watchable and still enjoyable. This is never good, interesting or enjoyable.
> Those old movies with old visual effects are watchable and still enjoyable.
Id say it’s definitely possible to get spoiled by high production quality - if I went back to the old Star Trek or even the first seasons of the Doctor Who reboot, I’d mostly have to try to enjoy it for the story (then again, Doctor Who has never been overly concerned with presentation, the most fearsome aliens in the galaxy being metal boxes with plungers sticking out of them is quite silly). Same with most CGI in the older movies or even the style of older anime, it can all be a bit hard to watch.
I guess I also experience the same with video games, though to a lesser degree - some like Hidden & Dangerous 2 can still be enjoyed whereas something like Operation Flashpoint would be quite frustrating, though more often due to controls rather than graphics.
Ehh, they did what they could at the time.
Also, just to be clear, the AI generated videos are quite trash.
However, you could imagine that maybe with a decade of refinement they'll get better - the existing prompting and composition were okay, it's just that they were plain bad technically. Then again, so was Will Smith eating spaghetti.
Survivorship bias.
Not disagreeing with you that these are unwatchable, but it’s a little rose-tinted to think that (non-AI) slop didn’t exist a long time ago.
It's logical for slop to exist. It's bad when slop production is automated.
At least non-AI slop had a human behind it.
The AI slop isn't making itself either.
Yes it is.
It is remixing what the industry created, not advancing past it. OpenAI even ended Sora in under a year. Anthropic doesn't even bother.
CGI effects actually got worse once they were used en-masse to make movie production cheaper. Good CGI still takes care, skill and taste.
Spaghetti Will Smith was 3 years ago, so it’s taking a little longer than months.
Any day now LLMs will develop taste
Don't many people have poor taste?
Like any other instance of this tired cliché, people can develop taste.
What does a developed taste look like to you when expressed in words?
guess that's what AI trained itself on
Yes, I imagine in six months or so this will be far better.
Nonsense. Ray Harryhausen's work today is still incredible, by any standard.
Spaghetti Will Smith was funny, this only inspires disgust in me: a clear downgrade. We're just getting deeper in the uncanny valley, with no end in sight.
> Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured.
The difference is intent. Watching an old movie, the effects are obviously janky and far from seamless, but the authors had intent and the imperfections are understandable. When an AI jumbles a basic walk animation, it's just weird and soulless. The prompter just didn't want to spend any time doing actual work, so used this slop as a stand-in, when better techniques exists.