Meta Movie Gen

And you wouldn’t even know it

I agree that people do want to be creative, and I don't think that people are going to let Gen AI supplant that for them. However, the lower-end of the creative markets doing the low-end high-volume work-- think folks shotgunning out template-based logos on Fiverr-- are the ones that have already been displaced in large numbers, and there are far more of them. While they generally don't have the right skillset to do the higher-end work, their seeing that as the only viable career move is majorly fucking up companies' ability to find workers and vice versa, and for employers that don't know any better, they think the market is saturated which is bringing down wages.

Also, clueless executives just don't realize that having a neural network generate a "80% right" version of your work in a flat PNG file will take more effort to mold into shape for higher-end work than starting from scratch, so they've been making big cuts. A coworker on a contract also works in an animation house that fired their entire concept art department and replaced them with prompt monkeys making half as much money-- the problem was that standard art director changes-- e.g. I want this same exact image and garment, just make those lapels look a little fuller and softer but with sharper angles at the end, and change the piping on that jacket from green to purple-- might have been half an afternoon for a professional concept artist but would be DAYS of work to get art-director right using neural network tools... if for no other reason that the prompt writers just don't have the traditional visual art sophistication to even realize when they've got an appropriate solution, because learning that is a lot harder than learning to draw, and you learn that when you learn how to draw. So all the time they saved on the initial illustration was totally sucked up by art directors not being able to iterate even a tenth as quickly as they used to, and fast iteration was the major selling point for Gen AI to begin with. It simply does not do the task if you absolutely require specificity, and having a raster non-layered png that looks like it already went through post is a beast to edit, even for a skilled post-prod person. Well, three months later, they canned the prompt engineers and were begging their concept artists to come back and work for them again. What a waste of everything.

Why do I even bother torturing myself in forums like this by giving a real-world creative industry counterpoint to the tech crowd perspective, despite many of the most vocal ones being smug, patronizing, and self-aggrandizing? Maybe one executive out there will read this stuff and say "Hmm... maybe I should actually talk to people that work in this field that I trust to see if it's really beneficial to replace our [insert creative department] rather than relying on software execs and their marketing people say is feasible."

Yeah it's really hard to get across to a lot of folks that are really amped up about these tools that what they're focused on refining is not getting them any closer to their imagined goal in most professional workflows. This will be great right off the bat for what most developers would need images for-- making a hero image for a blog post, making a blurb of video for a background, or a joke, or making assets for their video game that would never cut it for a non-cheapo commercial project but are better than what they'd have been able to cobble together themselves. But those workflows are fundamentally so different from the very first steps in the process. It's a larger-scale version of trying to explain to no-compromise FOSS zealots 20 years ago that Gimp was nowhere near able to replace Photoshop in a professional toolkit because they're completely disinterested in taking feedback about professional use cases, and that being able to write your own filters in Perl doesn't really help graphic designers-- well 20 years later, the gap is as wide as it ever has been, and there are even more people, almost exclusively FOSS nerds with to professional visual work experience, that insist it's better.

That said, it's nearly as hard to get this across to ADs who are like "what do you mean this shot is going to take you 3 days? I just made these stills which are like 70% there in midjourney in 10 minutes."

> To be clear, I think it's probably possible to create a video AI that would be truly useful in a real production workflow, it's just that I haven't seen anything working in that direction yet.

I think that neural networks, generally, are already fantastically useful in tools like Nuke's Copycat node. Nobody misses masking frame-by-frame if they don't have to do it. But prompt-based tools? Nah. If even 200 words in a prompt was enough information to convey work that needed to be done, why do creative workflows need so many revisions and why are there so many meetings with sketches and mood boards and concept art among career professionals? Text prompts are great for people that are working with a medium they don't really know how to create in because the real artistic decisions are already made by the artists whose artwork was ingested into the models. If you don't understand that level of nuance, you don't see how unbelievably consequential it is to the final product, and not having granular control of it seems nearly inconsequential. Most professionals look at it and see a toy because they know it will never be capable of making what they want it to make.