Film/video editing isn't exactly known as the industry where everybody loves their job and doesn't want to kill themselves.
I made a twitter thread[1] with weird metal cybertrucks using Midjourney a couple days ago. I personally enjoyed the process and do not have the talent nor the time to do that without generative AI. There are people who do have that talent, but honestly I doubt anyone else would've put in the time.
I think you might have it a little backwards. For most people, the fun part is "making a movie", not "watching hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage picking between 10 different shots". That's the drudgery, and that's the part generative AI can eliminate.
I've made my living that way and absolutely loved it. What I did not love (and partly why I left the industry) was the difficulty of getting paid decently at the bottom tier; I had the bad timing to come in right as the bottom was beginning to fall out of the indie market and making straight-to-video b-movies 3 or 4 times a year ceased to be a viable business model.
I think you might have it a little backwards. For most people, the fun part is "making a movie", not "watching hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage picking between 10 different shots". That's the drudgery, and that's the part generative AI can eliminate.
No, that's the craft, and solving problems where the continuity doesn't line up, or production had to drop shots, or the story as shot and written sucks in some way, is where the art comes in.
The drudgery is things like ingesting all the material, sorting it into bins, lining up slate cues, dealing with timecode errors, rendering schedules, working your way through long lists of deliverables and so on. You have literally confused the logistics part with the creative act.
I have not confused it, I'm simplifying to make a point. Yes, of course there are many people who love the art of editing, or taking the right shot, or acting, or directing, or special effects, or all of the 100s of things that go into making a movie or TV show or other video.
But many of those things involve a lot of drudgery, and the drudgery is what these "AI" solutions are best at. If you want to go above and beyond and craft the perfect shot, that opportunity would still be available to you. Why would it not?
When we invented machines that make clothes, did that reduce the number of jobs in the clothing industry? When we got better and better at it, did that make fashion worse? No. If you want a machine made suit for $50, you can find one. If you want a handmade suit for $5000, you can find one.
Tech like this expands opportunities, it does not eliminate them. If and when it gets to the point where Sora is better at making videos than a human in every conceivable dimension, then we can have this discussion and bemoan our loss. But we're not even close to that point.
I don't buy this simplification claim; you literally described the core skillset as drudgery. Put another way, what parts of film editing do you not consider drudgery? Could it be that you tried it previously and just didn't really like it?
And with your suit example, you're looking at it from the point of view of consumer choice (which is great) without really looking at the question of of how people in the clothing/textile industry are affected. It's difficult to find longitudinal data at the global level, but we can look at the impact of previous innovations (from outsourcing to manufacturing technology) on the US clothing market; employment there has fallen by nearly 90% over 30 years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/242729/number-of-employe...
The usual response to observations like this is 'well who wants to work in the clothing industry, those people are now free to do other things, great opportunity for people in other parts of the world etc.', but the the constant drive to lower prices by cutting labor costs or quality has big negative externalities. Lots of people that used to make a living thanks to their skill with a sewing machine, at least in the US, are no longer able to monetize that and had to switch to something else; chances they were less skilled at that other thing (or they'd have been doing it instead) and so suffered an economic loss while that transition was forced upon them.
The "someone must have lost out economically" argument falls fairly hollow when you actually look at the stats and see that the vast, vast majority of people end up better economically when we develop technology and increase efficiency.
Luddism is never the answer.
Scratch that; luddism is the answer for people who don't actually care about humanity as a whole (but frequently pretend they do) and just want their hobby or their job or their neighborhood to stay the same and for everyone else to stop ruining things. But for the rest of the world, increasing technological efficiency means more people get more things for less. This is good actually.
This reduces filmmaking to only editing. Filmmakers won't be choosing between 10 different shots but instead between 10 different prompts and dozens of randomized outputs of those prompts, and then splicing them together to make the final output.
Prompts are just the starting point. Take image generation for example and the rise of ComfyUI and ControlNet, with complex node based workflows allowing for even more creative control. https://www.google.com/search?q=comfyui+workflows&tbm=isch
I see these AI models as lowering the barrier to entry, while giving more power to the users that choose to explore that direction.
All that amounts to just more complex ways of nudging the prompt, because that prompt is all an LLM can "comprehend." You still have no actual creative control, the black box is still doing everything. You didn't clear the barrier to entry, you just stole the valor of real artists.
So wrong. There are some great modern artists in the AI space now who are using the advanced AI tools to advance their craft.. look at eclectic method before AI and look at how he evolving artistically with AI
Shadiversity made the same class of attribution error. AI users aren't evolving artistically, the software they are using to simulate art is improving over time. They are not creators, they are consumers.
Photographers have a great deal of creative control. Put the same camera in your hands versus a professional and you will get different results even with the same subject. You taking a snapshot in the woods are not Ansel Adams, nor are you taking a selfie Annie Leibovitz. The skill and artistic intent of the human being using the tool matters.
Meanwhile with AI, given the same model and inputs - including a prompt which may include the names of specific artists "in the style of x" - one can reproduce mathematically equivalent results, regardless of the person using it. If one can perfectly replicate the work by simply replicating the tools, then the human using the tool adds nothing of unique personal value to the end result. Even if one were to concede that AI generated content were art, it still wouldn't be the art of the user, it would be the art of the model.
It takes different skills depending on how deep you want to go. Try setting up your own video creating lab using stable diffusion to generate frames. It can make AI videos, you also need to have a lot of Linux dev op skills and python skills..
I did in fact make the twitter thread. The images I used in said thread were generated using midjourney, which I stated here and in the thread (which I made, by tweeting).
I appreciate you being straight up about it. I wasn’t trying to be harsh, and I apologize for not being clear. I find the terminology used when using ai to create things interesting. “I wrote this using X” versus the never used “I instructed X to write this for me”.
Are you honestly comparing taking a photograph (and "properly", i.e. thinking about lighting and composition and such, versus firing off a snapshot on your phone) with typing "Make me a picture of Trump riding a dragon"?
Are you genuinely equating the profound and labor-intensive process of painting, with its meticulous brushstrokes, profound understanding of lighting, composition, and the tactile relationship between artist and canvas, to the trivial button pressing of photography?
Disclaimer: This post was generated using an llm guided by a human who couldn't be bothered explaining why you're wrong.
This comparison doesn't work because when you talk about photography, you say you need to do it "properly", but you don't apply that same logic to prompt crafting. Typing "Make me a picture of Trump riding a dragon" is not "proper" use of generative AI.
I became a software engineer because I enjoy coding. If you told me software will now be written by simply describing it to a computer, I would quit because that sounds like a fucking terrible way to spend your life. I assume that video editing and post production is the same: a creative problem that is enjoyable to solve in itself. When you remove any difficulty or real work from the equation, you probably get a lot of bad, meaningless content and displaced people without marketable skills
I made a twitter thread[1] with weird metal cybertrucks using Midjourney a couple days ago. I personally enjoyed the process and do not have the talent nor the time to do that without generative AI. There are people who do have that talent, but honestly I doubt anyone else would've put in the time.
I think you might have it a little backwards. For most people, the fun part is "making a movie", not "watching hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage picking between 10 different shots". That's the drudgery, and that's the part generative AI can eliminate.
[1] https://twitter.com/acnebs/status/1757641901438894338