That's like saying kids at home will be making enterprise software once code generation tools become smooth enough. ChatGPT won't replace novelists, either, no matter how solid its grammar gets.
People who don't mind having output that's an aesthetic amalgam of whatever it has already ingested won't mind using these sorts of tools to generate work. For a movie studio that lives and dies on presenting imagery so precisely and thoughtfully crafted that it leaves a lasting impression for decades, I doubt it will be anything more than a tool in the toolkit to smooth things along for the people who've made careers figuring out how to do that.
I think there's two reasons this sort of thinking is so prevelant. A) Since developers are only really exposed to the tools-end of other people's professions, they tend to forget that the most important component is the brain that's dreaming up the imagery and ideas to begin with. Art school or learning to be an artist is a lot more about thinking, ideas, analyzing, interpreting, and honing your eye than about using tools... people without those skills who can use amazing generative tools will make smooth, believable looking garbage in no time flat from the comfort of their own living rooms. Great. B) Most people, especially those from primarily STEM backgrounds, don't really understand what art communicates beyond what it physically represents and maybe some intangible vibe or mood. Someone who really knows what they're talking about would probably take longer to accurately describe an existing artistic image than would be reasonable to feed to a prompt. Once again, that will be fine for a lot of people-- even small game studios, for example, that need to generate assets for their 3rd mobile release this month, but it's got miiiiles to go before it's making a movie scene or key game moment that people will remember for decades.
> For a movie studio that lives and dies on presenting imagery so precisely and thoughtfully crafted that it leaves a lasting impression for decades
I'd hope so, but there are a lot of films churning out the next Michael Bay Transformers-type movie which also get the vast majority of VFX work and make the most revenue that upending the VFX industry might remove a lot of jobs.
You again vastly underestimate the amount of work that goes into the intellectual and artistic components of VFX, and vastly underestimate what the artistic components require of someone. Those movies are nearly entirely VFX. 50% of the budget in some cases. That's not because the tools are expensive or the pieces just take a long time to build-- it's repeatedly iterating and putting things in context to figure out what should be there. No matter how fast those iterations get, that's just not something machines will be able to do themselves. Ever. No machine will be able to say "this is the most emotionally impactful texture and drape for that superhero's cape in this scene." They might be able to give you a thousand different versions of it, but someone still has to look at all of that and respond to it. Replicants from Blade Runner couldn't do that and to say we're a ways off from that is a pretty huge understatement.
> No matter how fast those iterations get, that's just not something machines will be able to do themselves. Ever.
Why do people say stuff like this? How do you know what machines will ever be able to do, can you tell the future? And more fundamentally, do you believe humans are more than a biological machine? If you don't (and thus aren't a physicalist) then sure, you can make statements like this because you'd believe that humans have something fundamentally different that no machine can replicate, but if you do think so, you'd believe that anything humans can do, machines will eventually be able to do, even if it takes a long time.
Now you're moving the goal posts from automatic plausible image generation to full on general AI and saying 'some day' it could happen. This is not the same discussion.
It doesn't really have to be general AI to iterate on the same loop as humans, as the parent mentions. Using words like "(n)ever" should be restricted to things that we've proven to be unable to be done, like the laws of mathematics or physics, not stuff that we already see is feasible today (ie, human and animal minds and physical movement). It's not a question of "some day," it's more a question of which philosophical belief one holds to make them think it could or couldn't happen. Like I mentioned, some people simply believe humans are somehow better than machines or animals, and based on what we've seen so far, that's simply not the case.
I'm not even sure what you are actually trying to say at this point.
At first you seemed to be insinuating that AI will "upend vfx" because a lot fof movies are "like transformers" and now you're saying "never is a long time and what if AI becomes like a human"
Sorry, I was mainly responding to the criticism that many non-technical people say, "AI will never come for our jobs," discounting the rate of change that technology generally experiences over and above other types of human endeavors. I'm just frustrated by people thinking they and their job are somehow special and laying back while real change happens all around them. My points are a bit disjointed, I could have been clearer, sorry about that.
Your points were perfectly portrayed. The problem was that they are extrapolations based on assumptions born from idle musings and suppositions. AI is already used heavily in VFX and it's use is expanding. Tech artists in VFX, games , etc are not non-technical people. Much, if not most of any given job involves coding in Python, C++, or a handful of proprietary languages. I was a full-time developer for ten years and I know one with a masters in computer science in addition to an MFA. If you knew things like that, or anything about the way professional VFX was done, the logistics of how movies get made, what intellectually and creatively goes into creating movie scenes, the involved piplines and their purposes, both technical and artistic, or any of the other critical bits of knowledge needed to talk about how this stuff actually works, then your comments would have been a lot better. If that wasn't obnoxious enough by itself, it manifests in the urge rub your perceived insecurity of people's careers in their faces. No matter how insanely ill-informed your statements are, that's just a messed up thing to do. It's not normal. Man. Get some help.
Okay, let's change my statement to: many technical people (or just people with jobs in general) say that AI won't come for our jobs, using words like "n/ever" as you have done, that "that's just not something machines will be able to do themselves. Ever. No machine will be able to say 'this is the most emotionally impactful texture and drape for that superhero's cape in this scene.'". My point is not on non-technical people particularly, it's on the latter part of my statement, that people in general think that they are somehow special and will be in for quite a rude surprise when AI and automation eventually does do what they thought was was only in the realm of mere humans. People in general underestimate the end to end automation that will occur. You do too, seeing as you've said what I've quoted above. You say AI is heavily used, great, but don't be surprised when AI is so heavily used that it becomes the only thing used, eventually.
All of your hand waving and jungle gym of qualifications boil down to you thinking AI will "solve" art as a technical problem. Which, of course, is ridiculous. The purpose of art is to communicate intangible, and sometimes indescribable emotions and ideas about the human condition. It's the difference between a poem and prose describing the same thing using the same words in a different order. When AI can become it's own art critic so perceptive that it can make better qualitative judgements on microscopic levels about what constitutes good and bad art, it will no longer be artificial. It will just be intelligent. Can it remix it? Pantomime it? Demonstrably. Percieve and reason about it at a human enough level to remove humans from the process entirely? Magical thinking. Even if that did happen, and your crowd of starry-eyed bandwagoneers isn't just confusing technology with magic as humans have always done, the fact that your first instinct is to literally rub it in the faces of people who stand to lose the most is unfathomably pathetic. I can't imagine the person who did that would have anything close to the emotional perception and sophistication to reason about how most people perceive something as fundamentally emotional as art. You don't just need therapy, you need to read philosophy.
I'm completely done with this pointless pedantic argument against your lack of understanding.
There it is, only humans can make art, your paragraph is proving my own point. This is exactly the type of thing I'm talking about as I mentioned with non-technical people. The people who say this simply can't perceive that there is nothing special about humans and our brains that can't be replicated. It's because I've read enough philosophy that I'm a physicalist and not a dualist. Continue thinking that humans are more than biological machines while other people continue to make more and more powerful AI.
And if you're done with this argument, as you've mentioned a few times over threads, I'm not sure why you continue to reply.
Well you made a liar of me again because I'm going to take a swing at yet another soft ball you've lobbed. If you don't think there's anything fundamentally different about human brains and current computing technology, you should actually try reading neurologists' research about the structure of the human brain. Or any neurons at all. To quote Christof Koch-- chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle-- from a Wired article “The roundworm has exactly 302 neurons, and we still have no frigging idea how this animal works.” (Maybe he hasn't thought to ask an AI enthusiast!)
We're not even close to knowing what every part of the brain does, or even have a complete model of how individual biological neurons work, let alone know how we would replicate them, let alone have the potential for doing so in my career.
Might this happen in a really, really long time? Maybe? We're sure as hell not going to do it with a cluster of GPUs. The actual functions of the neurochemical parts that drive emotion are one of the parts we know least about.
So I guess I'm in this for the long haul. What other aspect of this topic can you make bold declarations about without actually having checked if they're correct?
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EDIT: I once again can't reply because HN probably has better sense than I do.
The context of this conversation is the VFX industry. Your assertion was that people who work in the VFX industry shouldn't be surprised if AI takes their jobs. You've moved the goalpost continents from that argument, instead arguing that you're still theoretically correct because in some distant future, science will prevail in mimicking or creating biological machines that can perceive emotion.
Please re-read what I said. In the very first comment I made where I said "Maybe a subsequent generation that is vastly more precise, but this isn't even ballpark." And then after that I said that when we get to the stage where machines can do this, it'll philosophically be actual intelligence and not artificial intelligence. Pretending that's in the scope of this conversation is just daft. And then in this very comment where I mused that it might happen in a really long time. We both know that's not relevant to the current VFX industry and you're just not capable of admitting you're wrong.
Any other topics you'd like to pretend the discussion is about so you can pretend you're still correct?
Don't make a God of the gaps type argument, just because we don't know doesn't mean it's unknowable. If one believes in a scientific universe where laws govern reality, then one must accept the fact that brains are biological machines, where removing any part affects the qualia that an organism experiences. Also, I never said that only GPUs are going to create a general intelligence. For example, if we clone a human brain in the future, we'd get the same outcome.
You are again missing my entire point, which is to not say things like something is "never" going to happen if we already observe it happening. I'm not sure how many times I can repeat this point over and over. If you disagree that brains are not biological machines or that they can be replicated by humans through technology, just tell me now and we can stop, that is a fundamental difference that is unreconcilable in just an HN conversation.
I'm just frustrated by people thinking they and their job are somehow special and laying back while real change happens all around them.
What makes you think industrial light and magic or anyone in the vfx thinks this way? It has been one of the most competitive and rapidly changing industries in the last 40 years.
I'd guess it's an abject lack of knowledge about the field, and a deep-seated insecurity that prevents him from feeling good about himself if he doesn't feel like he's superior to someone else.
People who don't mind having output that's an aesthetic amalgam of whatever it has already ingested won't mind using these sorts of tools to generate work. For a movie studio that lives and dies on presenting imagery so precisely and thoughtfully crafted that it leaves a lasting impression for decades, I doubt it will be anything more than a tool in the toolkit to smooth things along for the people who've made careers figuring out how to do that.
I think there's two reasons this sort of thinking is so prevelant. A) Since developers are only really exposed to the tools-end of other people's professions, they tend to forget that the most important component is the brain that's dreaming up the imagery and ideas to begin with. Art school or learning to be an artist is a lot more about thinking, ideas, analyzing, interpreting, and honing your eye than about using tools... people without those skills who can use amazing generative tools will make smooth, believable looking garbage in no time flat from the comfort of their own living rooms. Great. B) Most people, especially those from primarily STEM backgrounds, don't really understand what art communicates beyond what it physically represents and maybe some intangible vibe or mood. Someone who really knows what they're talking about would probably take longer to accurately describe an existing artistic image than would be reasonable to feed to a prompt. Once again, that will be fine for a lot of people-- even small game studios, for example, that need to generate assets for their 3rd mobile release this month, but it's got miiiiles to go before it's making a movie scene or key game moment that people will remember for decades.