Meta Movie Gen

That's not exactly what McLuhan meant by that statement. "The medium is the message" refers more to how the medium itself influences the way a message is perceived by an audience. It is not an assessment of the creative process itself. It's not as though I disagree entirely with what you're saying though. There are certainly ways in which the medium is highly influential over the process of creating something. But it's a mixed bag, and technical skill is not something to be celebrated in all cases. A technically accurate painting is oftentimes quite dull and uninspired. One could argue that creativity isn't just the interaction of skill and mind, but rather the ability to think beyond the medium, to embrace accidents, imperfections, and impulsive decisions.

> I personally think are amazing but nobody else really responds to.

Welcome to making music lol. Since there is so much of it, you have to make the absolute best to even be considered. And then, because so many people make the absolute best, people only care about the persona making the music (as great as you are, you aren’t Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Damon Albarn). Your friends will never care about your music just because you are friends, don’t fall into that trap. Also nobody cares about music without good lyrics, because again, there is just so much instrumental content out there that sounds the same, lyrics differentiate it with a human, emotional element.

Just make stuff for fun. Listen to it every now and then and feel the magic of “hehe I made that”

It's still very different. What you describe is exactly what an art director does, which is creative and difficult— there's a good reason many commercial artists end their careers as art directors but none start there. Anybody that says making things that look good and interesting using generative AI is easy or doesn't require genuine creativity is just being a naysayer. However, at most, the art director is credited with the compilation of other people's work. In no situation would they claim authorship over any of the pieces that other people made no matter how much influence they had on them. This distinction might seem like a paperwork difference to people outside of the process, but it's not. Every stroke of the pen or stylus or brush, scissor snip, or pixel pushed is specifically informed by that artist's unique perspective based on their experience, internal state, minute physical differences, and any number of other non-quantifiable factors; there's no way even an identical twin that went to the same school and had the same work experience would have done it exactly the same way with the same outcome. Even using tools like Photoshop, which in professional blank-canvas art creation context use little to no automation (compared to finishing work for photography and such that use more of it.) And furthermore, you can almost guarantee that there's enough consistency in their distinctions that a knowledgeable observer could consistently tell which one made which piece. That's an artistic perspective— it's what makes a piece that artist's own piece. It's what makes something someone's take on the mona lisa rather than a forgery (or, copy I guess if they weren't trying to hide it) of the mona lisa. It's also what NN image generators take from artists. Artists don't learn how to do that— they learn broad techniques— their perspective is their humanity showing through in that process. That's what makes NN image generators learning process different from humans, and why it's can make a polaroid look like a Picasso in his synthetic cubist phase but gets confused about the upper limit for human limb counts. I think generative AI could be used to make statements with visual language, closer to design than art. I definitely think it could be used to make art by making images and then physically or digitally cutting pieces out and assembling them. But no matter how detailed you get in those prompts, there aren't enough words to express real artistic perspective and no matter what, your still working with other people's borrowed humanity usefully pureed and reformed by a machine. These tools are fundamentally completely different than tools like Photoshop. In art school I worked with both physical media and electronic media and the fundamental processes are exactly the same. Things like typography in graphic design are much easier, but you're still doing the same exact process and reasoning about the same exact things on a computer that you do working on paper and sending it to a "paste up man," as they did until the 80s/90s. People aren't just being sour pusses about this amazing new art tool— it's taking and reselling their humanity. I actually think these image generators are super neat — I use them to make more boards and references all the time. But no matter how specific I get with those prompts, I didn't make any of that. I asked a computer and that computer made it for me out of other people's art. A lot of people who are taken by their newfound ability to make polished images on command refuse to believe it, but it's true. It's a fundamentally different activity.

I don't know about you, but my friends and family are boring af. I wouldn't want to watch their queue of noise.

I do hope that more talented people will have more leverage to create without the traditional gatekeeping, but I also doubt this will happen as the gatekeepers are all funding AI tooling as well.

The opposite will occur. Very little will change from how people consume content today. There won't be endless amounts of quality content, there will still be very little high quality content. There will be brief bursts of large amounts of garbage that nobody pays attention to (as a small percentage of people flirt with generative media and quickly lose interest; and the vast majority never bother at all).

The extreme majority will all watch the same things just as they do today. High quality AI content will be difficult to produce and will be nearly as limited in the future as any type of high quality content is today. The masses will stick to the limited, high quality media and disregard that piles of garbage. Celebrity will also remain a pull for content, nothing about that will ever change (and celebrity will remain scarce, which will assist in limiting what the masses are interested in).

By and large people only want to go where other people are at. Nothing about AI will change that, it's a trait that is core to humanity. The way that applies to content is just the same as it does a restaurant: content is a mental (and sometimes physical) destination experience just as a restaurant or vacation trip is.