Not every application of AI is "do the creativity for me."
I am reminded of an interview I saw about the Stranger Things intro (before mainstream audiences got weird about the show). The producers wanted a practical effects intro, and consulted with people who actually made 1980s intros the show was trying to replicate.
The old guard said the show’s producers were crazy to do it with practical effects and should just use CGI since this was what they would have done, if they had the technology.
Edit: oh god, there is a nearly identical HN post from 2024 from me that I do not remember making. I swear I am not an LLM. I am also hoping that I am not an old man telling his stories over and over either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40453073
George Lucas seemed pretty satisfied when filming the Star Wars prequels to plop himself down in a chair in a room with a giant bluescreen set where he didn't have to walk around and direct in a hot, sandy desert for hours like in the original films. But the movies looked a lot worse for it.
Episode III was pretty good despite filming in 2K.
Source? As a CGI VFX artist in a previous life, I disagree vehemently, and I think you’re spinning an untrue narrative. I’ve never met any VFX artists, whether practical or CG (and I’ve met many), who weren’t keenly aware of how bad effects were and how poorly they age. The few practical folks left are way less enamored of CGI than the CGI people, and they were always that way (by definition?), so it seems like you’re mixing them up.
The fact that shoddy effects get used speaks to directors and budgets and production studios and what audiences pay for, it has almost nothing to do with the artists. That said, you’re also comparing bad CGI with good practical effects, which undermines your point. There were plenty of practical effects that lost their charm as fast as any CG ever did, and today there is plenty of CGI that remains convincing; it depends entirely on which effect and which shot in which movie you’re talking about.
However it can lead to AI "doing the creative for them" and them out of a job in the near future.
See also: 3D modeling. Autodesk Fusion's interface is truly awful and people put years into learning it to do complex things. The MCP server functionality they added, though still in its infancy with Claude and what it can do, vastly lowers the barrier to entry for people just looking to get into making basic things. They can focus on the actual creative process rather than fumbling with the awkward tooling.
The role of music producer includes a large chunk of ‘knowing how to program synths and samples and drums and effects’. The role of industrial designer includes a lot of ‘knowing how to model things in CAD’. Even roles like academic researchers require skills like ‘formatting LaTeX’.
I’m genuinely quite excited for a shift in human computer interaction which reduces that ‘knowing how to do things on the computer’ tax.
But there are a whole swathe of jobs where a lot of what people do is ‘know how to do the thing on a computer’. Some of that is really because the bureaucracy has been embodied in a computer system so for example the job of handling an insurance claim seems to involve a lot of ‘knowing how to operate the claims computer system’ - actually that person’s skill is ‘knowing how to navigate the claims bureaucracy’.
> Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing.
That was that character’s take on Jobs’s ‘bicycle for the mind’ concept.
Then you have experience and skills.
Someone with zero skills in music will be able to make a 'song' but a savvy producer would use tools differently and could leverage them to actually make something creative.
Anyone can make an app those days (or a website or whatever) but mileage varies based on one's nature, also the gotchas of someone with zero knowledge of a field could result issues that someone with experience would've noticed and resolved much earlier or avoided completely.
Me with zero knowledge in architecture can "design" my house but I wouldn't trust my plan without someone looking at it.
AI and AGI provides great lengths in empowering but it might also introduce the false feeling of being capable.
Creativity, capability and motivation still takes important place even with AI.
IIRC House MD was one of the first shows to use digital (5D mkII).
Soon there will be AI generated shows. Perhaps entirely personalized.
Youtube, generate me a TNG episode.
It will never be that simple.
For example: the guys on youtube using AI to make new Star Wars movies [1] still did tons of work putting it all together, including the 3d renderings and editing, and they are leaning on old scriptwriting/dialogue from a 1991 Star Wars book. AI is just helping them automate the process and generate some visuals/voice acting, but it still takes a skilled artist with lots of technical knowledge to guide it in the right direction and properly utilize their existing tools/workflows... and most importantly good taste.
Which is maybe why Mechanical Turk will be shutdown in 3 weeks. No more people laundering AI.
The problem of AI “art” has never been that it cannot pass for the real thing. There are plenty of people buying slop ebooks on Amazon today. People will gladly generate a new episode of TNG.
And it will be popular because the discerning ones are the minority. Netflix is a multibillion dollar company serving a lot of mediocre stuff that people happily pay for just to turn off their brain for 2 hours every night.
Hence why I don’t care to justify why I avoid AI generated content at all costs, no matter how good it might look, with most people. It might sound snobbish to say, but they just wouldn’t get it.
If the chat-bot/spy-ware aren't integrated, than I don't see a problem with LLM plug-in opt-in support. =3
smh
Why can Openshot, Kdenlive, any other Linux-native video editor edit MP4 files but DaVinci cannot, unless you pay for it?
Genuine question.
Primarily because Resolve is meant as a tool for professionals - and as a result it can’t get away with using things like Ffmpeg under the hood.
Ffmpeg (for example) doesn’t use officially licensed codec SDK’s to handle certain codecs - it uses reverse engineered tooling.
If you’re working on a personal project or something that is just getting pushed to YouTube that won’t matter 99% of the time.
However if you are working on a professional color grading pipeline for a project that might go to broadcast or into theaters, there are very specific QA tests that the final rendered product must pass - and these unofficial reverse engineered rendering tools often result in rendering errors that can fail these QA tests (and in a way that is basically impossible to troubleshoot).
It’s already enough of a challenge to manage a color pipeline using the officially licensed tools - they can’t really risk that kind of issue with their pro and semi-pro customers.
That said, it’s important to note that MP4 is a just a container/wrapper, not a codec.
So an mp4 file might contain video (or just audio) that is rendered using one of many possible codecs depending on what was chosen by the person doing the render. That will determine whether Resolve whether the free edition of Resolve will support it or not.
I appreciate that it can be confusing for users that patents can still apply to techniques where implementations exist that are both libre and gratis from a copyright perspective, but this has been an issue for Linux-adjacent software distribution for ages—like, see how Debian used to put certain stuff that was encumbered by patents in the US but not in other jurisdictions in special “non-US” repository sections, that sort of thing. It's not Black Magic's doing that the codec space is like this. I wish people wouldn't make so many mocking assumptions sometimes.