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Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora

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Re: Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora

#141
post #125

Just came to say that spending $800M on a sound recording studio expansion was literally insane even before the current AI boom. Quite simply, there's no practical combination of top-tier hardware that you can buy which will put you even close to that number, even if replicated 8-10 times as the article implies multiple rooms. That tells me most of the money would be poured into vanity aspects - literally gold toilet…

Soundstages are studios for movie production. The word “sound” implies that it’s soundproof so you can record sound. This makes a soundstage generally much more expensive to build than the alternative, a silent stage. $800M isn’t crazy if you’re building a dozen of these and all the supporting infrastructure.

Not only are these aircraft hangar sized buildings with soundproofing, they’re also likely wired for hundreds of amps of lighting, including truss and catwalk systems to he able to position and distribute that lighting.

I could see it adding up pretty fast.

Re: Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora

#142
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not clear what you mean. If you’re imagining that AI tools mean it has to be a straight text -> output model that’s not correct. They are very much iterative transformations.

There's an enormous golf between just being iterative and control down to the last decibel/frame. Professional creative software is design around this fine-grained control.

Ok but what’s your point? This is not outside the capabilities of AI enabled tooling. You can adjust whatever you want, at whatever granularity you want.

The goal is of course to make this unnecessary, because adjusting a single element doesn’t benefit much from ai. But there’s nothing say you can’t?

Re: Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora

#143
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we need a universal basic income and progressive tax rates urgently if we want to avoid the world turning into a Gotham City kind of inequal shitshow.

AI is not good enough to take over most jobs. The hype is overblown and lacking in evidence.

Its just a matter of time

Re: Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora

#144

First, labor laws isn’t the answer to technology. It would be like regulating the camera because it put portrait artists out of work, or steam drills because it puts tunnel diggers. Art improved dramatically in a short period of time with the advent of the camera, became reflective of what the camera couldn’t do - reflect the nature of humanity back to us. Second, if you’ve done much with generative imagery you know…

> It would be like regulating the camera because it put portrait artists out of work, or steam drills because it puts tunnel diggers.

Modern farm equipment put a whole lot of unfree* agricultural laborers "out of work", but most of us consider that to have been a good thing.

*serfs, slaves, indentured servants, etc.

Re: Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora

#145

Just came to say that spending $800M on a sound recording studio expansion was literally insane even before the current AI boom. Quite simply, there's no practical combination of top-tier hardware that you can buy which will put you even close to that number, even if replicated 8-10 times as the article implies multiple rooms. That tells me most of the money would be poured into vanity aspects - literally gold toilet…

Well, if I had read the interview it quickly would have been apparent that he's talking about video production.

Mea culpa; I honestly thought Tyler Perry was a music guy.

Re: Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora

#146
post #141
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soundstages are studios for movie production. The word “sound” implies that it’s soundproof so you can record sound. This makes a soundstage generally much more expensive to build than the alternative, a silent stage. $800M isn’t crazy if you’re building a dozen of these and all the supporting infrastructure.

Not only are these aircraft hangar sized buildings with soundproofing, they’re also likely wired for hundreds of amps of lighting, including truss and catwalk systems to he able to position and distribute that lighting. I could see it adding up pretty fast.

And all of that at Southern California real estate prices and construction labor costs.

Yeah, it's not gonna be cheap by a damned sight.

Re: Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora

#147
post #140

Seems like quite the overreaction to a research demo. Yes, it will get better. But generating anything close to coherent film / television show is a tall task. For all of the progress in image generation we still seem somewhat stagnant when it comes to fixing hallucinations. Video generation is a much harder problem than image generation, so it's not super clear to me we're very close to this having a material impact…

Not for Oscar-worthy films, but definitely for a bunch of marginal stock-photography-ish material. Look at the state of generated videos 2 years ago to get a sense of the trajectory.

TV commercials will probably be the first to fall. They're short, and don't really need to be realistic at all -- just eye-catching. Right up generative AI's alley.

Re: Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora

#148
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could have the exact opposite effect. If movie-quality content is easy to generate, then what is left to separate the good from the bad? Probably story, characters, originality, etc. Generative models could, across the board, commoditize the aesthetic leaving only substance as a discernible trait. This could be positive for the world in both encouraging people to create things of substance and consume things of su…

What happened to the quality of journalism once it went online? When news media had to compete against bloggers and social media. It went into the toilet. What happened to the quality of video games once game frameworks became easily available? The market got flooded with low-effort garbage. Youtube and Tiktok and other social media platforms make global video distribution easy, but most of it is uninteresting and un…

I wanted to respond to this because there's some truth to it. However, I think the mechanism of action is more layered and the outcomes varied so that both can be true.

So, yes, there are a lot of new video games because it's easy. It's also true that the most aggressively marketed and therefore quite popular games are bad. Mobile games now make up over half of the gaming revenue. This is a problem not of volume but of incentive. These popular games have created a cycle of [heavy monetization > more ads > more popularity]. They exploit people. This is a problem but a different kind of problem.

On the other hand, the indie games on steam have never been better. They're extremely creative, and fun, and they invent. They riff off each other. And most new things in gaming come first from here. The only thing not healthy about it is the lack of money they make. These games are so cheap that they have a hard time paying the developer's rent.

Platforms and cynical games with better marketing and monetization have stolen their lunch and poisoned their audiences.

The point is that bringing down the barrier of creation did allow much better creations. However, marketing and exploitation ruined a lot.

I won't go into it as deeply, but you can imagine the same pattern played out everywhere else.

YouTube has great content and would have more if it was more discoverable. It's hard to find because the algorithm made for maximizing marketing dollars suggests things that we don't tell the algorithm we want but what the algorithm thinks will keep us watching. It resists helping us. Because marketing money.

With these new generative models, we can imagine decreasing money needed to create but we will all compete for the same finite source of attention. Like with games, the good stuff will still be there, but it might be hard to find.

A positive sum game (creation) turns into a zero-sum game (attention auctions) with negative externalities (ragebait, mobile game addiction).

Those that control who gets attention will be able to soak up all the gains from the positive sum game. It's already been happening with app stores and google ads. And there's no reason it shouldn't soak up all the margin gains.

The enemy is not bringing down barriers - that's the good stuff. It's reining in marketing and attention platforms so that we can all benefit from these creations instead the benefits being greatly attenuated and, in some cases, made negative but the attention gatekeepers.

Re: Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora

#149
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for Oscar-worthy films, but definitely for a bunch of marginal stock-photography-ish material. Look at the state of generated videos 2 years ago to get a sense of the trajectory.

TV commercials will probably be the first to fall. They're short, and don't really need to be realistic at all -- just eye-catching. Right up generative AI's alley.

Great example. The best commercials will still have big budgets and location shoots but generated videos will raise the quality floor for local commercials.

Re: Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of what is made is not that good. For every shawshank redemption we have 20 'leonard part 6' movies or worse. People just do not realize how much content there is out there in the big budget space. In the low budget space that ratio is even worse. Most of it is not good. We are going to see the volume of low effort items cranked to 11.

And the Shawshank Redemption movies will stop being made. Or if they are being made, they will be ignored. I read a blog today and it was high-quality long form tech journalism - something I haven't seen for a long time, tucked away on a no-mark site in a far corner of the Internet. I didn't agree with all of the content, but it was so good to see something written at that level. 50 years ago it would have been norma…

I picked that movie because it is considered one of the best movies on IMDB. However, it did very poorly on release. It was years later it did much better. Gems are made. But they also do not always get the recognition they deserve. With AI we are about to get a lot more rubish to dig thru. However, we may be surprised too. At this point is kind of too soon to tell. But my gut reaction is 'a small bit of good tons of bad'.
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