Comment on Star Wars' Showcase of AI Special Effects Was a Complete Disaster
xyzzy@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I watched the video. It’s all 1-3 second shots of either recolored animals or two animals combined. In other words, exactly the kind of video AI can deliver at a consumer level. Not impressive. The TED audience politely clapped, but aside from one or two folks the audience didn’t seem particularly impressed either.
It’s all C-suite executives pushing this onto executives below them, who push it onto their organizations as mandates. The C-suite execs don’t care about creativity; they only care about cutting costs. At first this means shortening development times. Soon this will mean cutting staff, and not 10 years from now, but way before this technology can actually replace a human.
You know what would’ve been a good showcase? Show Rogue One but with the film shots digitally composited with an AI Tarkin or an AI Leia, and have it be better than what was originally released in 2016, and have it be lip-synced. It shouldn’t be too hard to improve upon them; those shots weren’t very good.
But AI can’t do that.
It’s all C-suite executives pushing this onto executives below them, who push it onto their organizations as mandates.
That is currently the core of the issue. It’s tech-bros and executives gassing eachother up, and most are too far gone to realize that they’re heading for a cliff.
Maybe it’s because typing “make something cool plz” and getting a picture back is finally an interface that C-levels can use
As someone who has been the “deal with C-suite issues” IT guy, that is honestly accurate.
In other words, exactly the kind of video AI can deliver at a consumer level.
It can do much more. This was literally someone that typed “owl slug” into the prompt.
But AI can’t do that.
Character replacement and lip synching can currently be done. Its not perfect but its advancing very fast.
Your points are valid and all but AI can do a lot, and can do more every month. It’s already pretty versatile and this is currently the worse it is going to be.
this is currently the worst it’s going to be
Yes, this is a favorite line from the industry, who assume the trend line continues uninterrupted into the future. But how about this as a counter future: what if AI plateaus?
What if it doesn’t get much better than it already is except around the edges, and the next breakthrough is two decades away? Companies have exhausted training data and exhausted data center capacity in the quest to keep the trend line at the previous vector. Yes, they’re building new capacity, but no one is making any money on this except Nvidia.
LLMs haven’t seen any significant improvement in a couple years. Image generation has improved, but at a much slower pace. Video is no longer Will Smith eating spaghetti, but there’s a long, long valley between where we are today and convincing, photorealistic, extended scenes that can be controlled at a fine level.
Every two weeks, theres a new generative AI game changer that pops out. There is nothing pointing towards hitting a plateau.
LLMs haven’t seen any significant improvement in a couple years.
Chat gpt 3.5, which started the whole craze, came out less then 2.5 years ago. There has been a mountain of improvements since then.
Likewise, there has been monumental steps for all generative services. That long valley for video gen is just a stroll away now.
The futur is hard to predict but everything points away from a plateau. AGI might be far but not animators making extensive use of AI tools for example.
I was referencing 4, which was released over two years ago and was a significant improvement over 3.5. I was genuinely impressed with 4, but I haven’t been very impressed with anything since then. Probably the most substantive change was pulling chain of thought into the model itself, but everyone was already doing anyway.
I’m not coming at this from a place of ignorance: I have AI patents to my name as both first inventor and supporting, and I’ve worked with these teams directly. I’m saying that the rate of improvement in critical (i.e., non-toy) areas is slowing down, and I believe it’s a significant possibility that AI will start to hit the same walls it did many times before. That was before it entered the consciousness of execs and the general public, and because they aren’t as familiar with the long stop-start history of AI, they don’t think that wall exists.
AI companies definitely know that wall exists, and in at least one case they’re getting increasingly nervous about it.
Show Rogue One but with the film shots digitally composited with an AI Tarkin or an AI Leia
Right, deep fakes never caused objections. AI for dead actors is a widely beloved use case! People would totally understand a replacement, versus only being able to tweak what’s already been done the hard way.
No one likes AI in movies, period. I’m just saying this reel sucked and that would actually be impressive. Anyway, SAG negotiated rules around this that require consent from family estates and compensation, so if the estate wanted to block it, they could.
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 week ago
Good lord. It’s very bad. I like how the presenter clearly knows that it sucks, too, but he’s required to go out and pretend it doesn’t and try to hype it up.
5in1k@lemm.ee 1 week ago
It’s like if you’re looking for a 3D modeling job, you make something that exists already so the viewer has a frame of reference.