AI actors seems like a good thing. Generative AI will allow small groups of creatives to stick to their vision and create truly unique art. The massive staff required for movies today seems like a major cause of the blockbusterfication of hollywood where every movie is trying as hard as possible to play it safe.
It'll be a revolution for indie filmmakers. $0 budget movies with top-notch visuals.
When movies take $100 million each to make, you need execs and investors to make it happen, and they want safe returns. When they cost $0, anybody with an idea can turn it into a film - the kind of stuff studios would never have greenlit.
The "AI is going to destroy creative work" view requires either 1) wild optimism about the future of AI, a belief that it will quickly become orders of magnitude better than anything we can do today, or 2) a lack of understanding and appreciation for good art.
Like yeah you'll probably be able to churn out some hideously mediocre content slop with AI. I'm extremely skeptical that we're anywhere near producing anything good with AI.
One of my all time favorite films is It's such a Beautiful Day, an animated film painstakingly created by a single visionary. If generative AI allows creatives to create similar projects in unique ways, which I believe it will, then I'm all for it.
> a belief that it will quickly become orders of magnitude better than anything we can do today
I don't think this is true, all we need is a belief that generative AI will quickly become a tool that allows small groups or individuals to create projects that are better than they can create today. If my theory that small groups are better able to create artistic statements than large groups is true then the small group + AI will be better than the current massive group paradigm.
obviously AI won't be able to compete with traditional movies for some time, but for amateur film makers who don't have a budget for sets and actors, AI is going to help them make their work better.
i don't know if that is good or bad though. one side effect of AI helping to make movies is that there will be so many more of them. think about all that cheap content on youtube. imagine a bunch of that enhanced with AI. it will still be cheap content, but it will look better, which means we will have a harder time to detect it and dismiss it.
Enlighten us, then, on what you understand art to be. If art in your view is simply defined as something humans make and that computers will never be able to do regardless of how much quality the final product has (or, imagine if I were to blind watch two movies, one human made of excellent quality and an AI one of an even better quality, and I choose the AI one), then honestly we (and likely many of us on this forum) disagree on such a fundamental level that it is not worth elaborating.
It's a poor analogy, but maybe they imagine something like a composer being able to release their classical music without requiring a conductor and orchestra to convert it to sound.
The odd bit to me is how such tools open up a spectrum of possibilities with poorly defined roles or boundaries. When is someone a musician with electronic instruments, versus a DJ, versus a consumer? And what are the equivalents for film synthesis...?
Indeed, imagine if people cried the same way when electronic music or synthesizers were getting started (well, some people did). It is just that now when it is coming for their profession, they are panicking.
