Comment on Disney's Sora Disaster Shows AI Will Not Revolutionize Hollywood
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 4 hours agoOkay, here’s reality from the recent past: some guy recreated GPT-2 for $20. Same size, similar training data, equal performance. The original required VC funding. This guy spent pocket change. That was a year ago. That’s how much efficiency has already improved, for training these models. These assholes only spend billions because it’s exclusionary, and they’re all caught in a dollar auction to see who can lose the gentlest. I’m sorry any hypotheticals about that are incompatible with your moral crusade.
Meanwhile, it does the thing.
That’s not going to change and you kind of have to deal with it. We now have programs that just do what you ask, for any output that’s text, images, audio, or video. They often fuck up in horrifying ways. But they’re usually about what you asked for. Especially if you asked for very little. That’s quite useful where small changes are wildly complex, like ‘make this guy look like another guy.’ The robot won’t do it as good as a team of human professionals, but I don’t have a million dollars to hire a team of human professionals, and I’m betting you don’t either. You can still consider projects that involve making one guy look like another.
That utility is new and it’s not going anywhere.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
I am an artist so I understand when I have the shallow desire to make something into a copy of another thing and my artistic capability fails me, or my lack of resources confines me from reaching my initial vision, that this is the true beginning of my artistic journey and all of that stuff before was just a way of backing myself into wanting something new or changed when I couldn’t get the perfect thing I wanted that was in my head.
I have done lots of community theater so I also understand the foolishness of thinking that the important part of making one thing look like another is aesthetic mimcry and not of capturing the elegant essence of something.
Do you think for all these years everybody watching Shakespeare plays has been getting a suboptimal experience because the two actors that are meant to play characters easily mistaken from each other aren’t actually perfectly convincing?
Image
Do you care that in Hamnet that two siblings that are supposed to look so alike that they are frequently mistook for one another, even by death itself, don’t actually look that similar? No, they are child actors who did an amazing job, to care about that in the context of the achievement Hamnet is, is to be shallow and miss the point.
My point is that even when AI is good at particular things, often the whole approach is hollow to Why? with AI. This is something artists could have explained easily to techbros if they ever listened, because the Why? is the whole point.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Denouncing the pursuit of verisimilitude is a novel response to hand-wave CGI. Are you this philosophical when a movie does spend a million dollars, to make two unrelated actors look exactly the same? Do you expect audiences should be happier if a no-budget sci-fi film has cardboard displays? It’s cute, certainly. But when a central complaint is that people will notice generated elements and object to low quality, I think they’re gonna notice literal cardboard.
Films are photographs. That’s why The Social Network didn’t just say the Winklevii were twins and expect people to pretend. Movies are a visual medium, whereas theater is mostly heard. Like how television has viewers but theater has an audience. You can Dogville it, and people will roll with that, but anything that looks fake is more commonly a technical failure than a stylistic choice.
So yes, you can tell people the tin can is a spaceship… but they’d rather be shown. The preference for showing over telling is so ingrained that it’s cliche. Nobody needs to announce ‘we lay our scene in fair Verona’ when you can put the mediterranean coastline onscreen, and then cut to a cobblestone village where people have pointy shoes. Folks will get it. They’ll get it on a level deeper than narration, or an overlay reading “Verona, Italy, 15° E, 40° N, June 17th 1435, 0700 hours.” They’ll get it even if the aerial shot of the coastline was bought as stock footage. Or rendered, in one way or another.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 hours ago
Your lack of media literacy is wild, film is entirely a honest fabrication of obvious fakes, that is the basis of cinema, the fundamental concept of the movie screen being itself simply a fake window that is honest to you about the speculative nature of the image presented beyond.
mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
Yeah imagine if I had the media literacy to describe an establishing shot’s form and function, even if it was borrowed or fabricated. But as someone who’s never seen a movie before, I could never suggest costume and set dressing conveying expectations beyond their literal imagery.
What are you doing?
Yes, professor, how and why I show an elephant will matter more than ‘hey look, an elephant.’ But in order for my intent to matter, when showing an elephant, I do require the ability to show an elephant. A depiction can’t mean anything unless I can in fact depict it. If I just tell you to use your imagination, that’s not a movie, that’s a book.
These tools let you show basically anything at basically no cost. What you want and why is your own problem. The premise, the message, and the edit are still entirely human art. This only replaces the part where real photons bounce off a fake building and look real enough on a sensor. (Or the part where a guy fakes that in Blender.)