Like many people, I approach AI with a mixture of excitement and dread. There is excitement at the new technology, but a bit of dread as we don’t know where this is ending. Will AI really become smarter than us and replace us all at our jobs? And what does that mean?
The answers to those last two questions are “maybe” and “don’t know.”
I mean, I am a computer programmer, and that area has rapidly changed. You can just describe what you want and in a few minutes have working code that might have taken weeks to write (or cut and paste snippets from Stack Overflow).
But I am also a writer, and that is an area where AI has only been a marginal help. AI is still terrible at jokes, and while it has a very competent writing style for like informative essays and news articles, it can’t even attempt to match my voice for the type of eclectic writing I do.
But here is how it is changing things in a major way: If I have a funny idea, I no longer have to just write some text to express it. I can make it real in a video.
Now, I’ve enjoyed using AI video for quite some time. While many always just attack anything AI-related and peck at its current problems, my attitude has always been, “Well, knowing its limitations, what can I make with this now?” That’s why when a couple years ago I first got access to AI video generators, I went ahead and did a silent movie of the Three Little Pigs… because that’s where it was when it started out.
But it’s quite a bit further now.
For instance, I had this idea to do a bunch of hacky jokes about a woman president for The Babylon Bee, but instead of writing out some little article, I put this together one morning:
This is almost so simple now, it feels like cheating. It’s just a bunch of disconnected, couple-second clips, and all I had to do was tell AI what I wanted, and it made it (with me supplying images of the characters to keep them consistent between clips).
This, by itself, is not that threatening to Hollywood. What I don’t have here is a coherent narrative and scenes that flow into each other like in a movie. That is not easy with these tools. But it’s not impossible.
As an experiment, I did a joke horror movie scene. I used Grok Imagine as it’s the only one that never blocks you from using a celebrity. It took two mornings to make this. If I had more time and credits, I would have redone some scenes, but I think it turned out pretty well (Elon Musk even liked it — or acknowledged it existed):
I’m sure if you look at it very carefully, you can find inconsistencies with the background and such because the AI never knew what the rooms were supposed to look like — it was just going off of the still images I fed it and had no permanent concept of the locations.
But the thing is, these consistency problems are all solvable. Most AI video generators are now good at keeping a location consistent within a single video, and there has to be a way to extend that for multiple videos. And people consistency is obviously quite solved. The performance is another issue, but there are ways to better prompt that or feed in a reference video or audio for what you want.
Where this is headed is that if you can imagine it in your head, you can have AI video make it real just as you imagined it. While many artists are anti-AI, I can see this eventually being great for directors who want to completely control their vision with no compromise, as absolutely anything that can be described can be made.
And if the current economics for these AI video generators hold, we’re talking about costs capping out at thousands of dollars per production, not millions.
That’s what Hollywood needs to worry about. We’re talking no need for most of the crew. No need even for actors (though maybe for a while to feed into the AI for the performance wanted, but the actors will be basically anonymous as the AI will change them into whatever character is wanted). You just need a guy with a vision and a computer (and maybe a good video editor until AI gets good at that — which I’m not sure it will).
Really, the only thing AI is terrible at and not getting better at is true creativity. If you just tell it to come up with an interesting story, it will make something adequate, but never great (or at least it wouldn’t know it, and would need a human to determine it’s great). And all AI is still pretty terrible at humor (so there is still work for me if AI completely replaces me in programming). It’s great at executing a humorous concept and even seems to understand the humor, but just can’t come up with decent jokes itself.
So that’s where I see the future of filmmaking going: It will be a place for storytellers and people with great artistic vision. And then the computer just implements whatever is in your head.
What we’re also headed to, though, is a world of mediocre slop. As the tools get easier and easier, anyone will be able to make a film (and cheaply). And the AI will do an okay job when given open prompts by someone with no real vision. We’ll have a flood of content in the hope some of it will catch on (like you already see on YouTube with bizarre computer-generated kids content).
It’s just a question of whether the people who can make something great will be able to rise above the noise. So maybe Hollywood won’t die out because we’ll still need people with taste to separate the great from the okay. And one thing AI is still pretty bad at is showing that kind of taste.