Imagine if drawing was invented recently. Like we had photographs and video, but lines on paper simply did not look like anything. Suddenly we figured it out, and now you can represent anything - absolutely anything! - through the medium of doodling. Excitement is high, standards are low, crude efforts will suffice.
And all anyone draws is boring shit you could easily photograph instead.
The whole realm of human imagination is suddenly available, the moment you put pen to paper, and every last industry professional or obsessive rando imagines some normal people standing around a normal place.
That’s where AI video is. You could roughly animate a scene, or play with dolls on camera, or just describe a thing happening, and the machine will progressively unfuck it until it’s alarmingly close to real life. As convincing as any modern CGI. And what do these zillion-dollar marketing departments make? The same B-roll montage bullshit as always. The sort of thing that only demands one nice camera and three attractive young people. (Incidentally, also all you’d need for the other thing people make with AI.)
Even outside advertising, where nothing’s left to say except limbic promises that the product will make you happy, nobody’s cobbling together a grand space opera or embracing the gloop for a horror movie. Alex Proyas tried some Clutch Cargo level animation for yet another Dark City mulligan. Beyond that? Zilch. No would-be Flash animators doing a House Of Cosbys with Nicolas Cage deepfakes. No cocksure upstarts casting their rude Youtube shorts with Tom Cruise, Carrie Fisher, and Roger Rabbit. No bitter veterans pulling their favorite script out of development hell with their own two hands.
It’s like the medium of comics was spread wide open and nobody was allowed to get more fantastical than Mary Worth.
Imagine if drawing was invented recently. Like we had photographs and video, but lines on paper simply did not look like anything. Suddenly we figured it out, and now you can represent anything - absolutely anything! - through the medium of doodling. Excitement is high, standards are low, crude efforts will suffice.
And all anyone draws is boring shit you could easily photograph instead.
The whole realm of human imagination is suddenly available, the moment you put pen to paper, and every last industry professional or obsessive rando imagines some normal people standing around a normal place.
That’s where AI video is. You could roughly animate a scene, or play with dolls on camera, or just describe a thing happening, and the machine will progressively unfuck it until it’s alarmingly close to real life. As convincing as any modern CGI. And what do these zillion-dollar marketing departments make? The same B-roll montage bullshit as always. The sort of thing that only demands one nice camera and three attractive young people. (Incidentally, also all you’d need for the other thing people make with AI.)
Even outside advertising, where nothing’s left to say except limbic promises that the product will make you happy, nobody’s cobbling together a grand space opera or embracing the gloop for a horror movie. Alex Proyas tried some Clutch Cargo level animation for yet another Dark City mulligan. Beyond that? Zilch. No would-be Flash animators doing a House Of Cosbys with Nicolas Cage deepfakes. No cocksure upstarts casting their rude Youtube shorts with Tom Cruise, Carrie Fisher, and Roger Rabbit. No bitter veterans pulling their favorite script out of development hell with their own two hands.
It’s like the medium of comics was spread wide open and nobody was allowed to get more fantastical than Mary Worth.