An indie film with poor production values, even bad acting can grip you, make you laugh and make you cry. The consistency of quality is key - even if it is poor. The directing is the red thread throughout the scenes. Anything with different quality levels interrupts your flow and breaks your experience.
The problem with AI video content at this stage is that the clips are very good 'in themselves', just as LLM results are, but putting them together to let you engage beyond an individual clip will not be possible for a long time.
It will work where the red thread is in the audio (e.g. a title sequence) and you put some clips together to support the thread. But Hollywood has nothing to fear at this stage. In addition, remember that visual artists are control freaks of the purest kind. Film is still used because of the grain, not despite it. 24p prevails.
You might want to look up NeuralViz on YouTube. 180k subscribers. They've been building out an entire cinematic universe using AI video tools. And it's by far the funniest show I've watched in years. So the claim that "let you engage beyond an individual clip will not be possible for a long time" isn't true. People are already doing it.
I hadn't seen these before, but they're working because of the limitations of the technology.
The format of the shows are mostly clip-based - man on the street, news hour, etc - and obviously the jokes are all written by someone with a good sense of humour.
Not to discount that this is, as you say, an example of someone using AI to successfully create characters and stories that resonate with people. it's just still very much because of a creative human's talent and good taste that it's working.
Ok, I went from being pleasantly surprised to breakout laughter at that point.
But I also think this points out a big problem: high-quality stuff is flying under the radar simply because of how much stuff is out there. I've noticed that when faced with a lot of choice, rather than exploring it, people fall back into popular stuff that they're familiar with in a really sad way. Like a lot of door dash orders will be for McDonalds, or people will go back to watching popular series like Friends, or how Disney keeps remaking movies that people still go to see.
Since the first GenAI started popping up, many people have glossed over the fact that they are just tools. All the anger from artists and keyboard warriors completely ignored the fact that you still need skill and time to make something good with these tools.
Artists aren't going to be replaced by AI tools being used by me on my iPhone, those artists were already replaced by bulk art from IKEA et al. Artists who reject new tools for being new will be replace by artists who don't. Just like many painters were replaced by photographers.
The Dor Brothers on YouTube have also been making some very funny, stylized music videos with AI. They've managed to use the limitations to their advantage
You don't need to make an entire movie out of this. One or two scenes that are difficult or impossible to film on a certain budget is enough to lift the production value of a movie. One can use this as CGI replacement, for example to produce a couple seconds scene of an ancient city and stretch that out with fake panning.
You can also use it as a communication tool such as making a "live" storyboard to prep location, blocking, maybe even as notes for actors.
Yeah, I did an amateur short once as part of a college assignment and doing the storyboard was the most difficult part for me as I'm not a good drawer at all. Getting the idea for a certain shot from my head to the paper was a struggle.
Being able to express visual ideas with words is one of the most powerful things of this AI craze. Text/code is whatever.
There’s already more good content than anyone can watch. It’s impossible to disentangle strength of the art from strength of distribution. Google, the world’s biggest distributor of culture, is focusing on this problem they do not need to solve, instead of the one everyone in art actually suffers from, because: they’re bad at this. It’s that simple.
AI video may be to Hollywood as photography was to painting. Photography wasn't "painting, but better" - it was a different thing. AI-native video may not resemble typical Hollywood 3-act structure. But if it takes enough eyeballs away from Hollywood then Hollywood will die all the same.
I think you're contradicting your own argument. Painting didn't die from photography.
Photography increased the abstract and more creative aspects of painting and created a new style because photography removed much of the need to capture realism. Though, I am still entranced by realist painting style myself, it is serving different purpose than capturing a moment.
I'm not an expert so I may be wrong about all this. But my impression is that Pictorialist photography aped painting for 50 years. Photography only came into its own as a "photography native" art form with Stieglitz and people like that around ~1905. By that time, non-representational painting styles like Cubism had already sucked the remaining juice out of painting, with Duchamp's 1917 urinal perhaps deserving credit for the coup de grace. Today painting is a shadow of what it once was - and public interest and auction prices reflect that. Museums occasionally have abstract painting exhibits but they're poorly attended because the public dislikes them. Ask a person on the street what their favorite painting movements are and likely every name will be more than 100 years old, possibly hundreds of years old. Compare auction prices between pre-1917 paintings and post-1917 paintings. Besides a few middlebrow pop artists like Dali or Warhol, meme painters like Pollock, or trendy political painters like Basquiat or Johns, the older paintings will be orders of magnitude more in demand. Painting used to move the conversation forward, now nobody cares.
Well if you want to really be pedantic, they said every name, not average answer, so if most people reply with a blank state, that is still not in the set of every name, because they're not names. So the ones who actually do reply with a name are, as I agree with them, likely to be older than 100 years.
