Comment by yunwal

Comment by yunwal 11 hours ago

> we are getting extremely close to being able to make films with only AI tools

AI still can’t reliably write text on background details. It can’t get shadows right. If you ask it to shoot things from a head on perspective, for example a bookshelf, it fails to keep proportions accurate enough. The bookshelf will not have parallel shelves. The books won’t have text. If in a library, the labels will not be in Dewey decimal order.

It still lacks a huge amount of understanding about how the world works necessary to make a film. It has its uses, but pretending like it can make a whole movie is laughable.

wild_egg 9 hours ago

I don't think they're suggesting AI could one-shot a whole movie. It would be iterative, just like programming.

Reply View 1 reply

echelon 3 hours ago

Exactly. You can still open the generations in Photoshop.
I'd say the image and video tools are much further along and much more useful than AI code gen (not to dunk on code autocomplete). They save so much time and are quite incredible at what they can do.

Reply View | 0 replies

gabriel666smith 9 hours ago

I don't think equating "extremely close" with "pretending like it can" is a fair way to frame the sentiment of the comment you were replying to. Saying something is close to doing something is not the same as saying it already can.

In terms of cinema tech, it took us arguably until the early 1940s to achieve "deep focus in artificial light". About 50 years!

The last couple of years of development in generative video looks, to me, like the tech is improving more quickly than the tech it is mimicking did. This seems unsurprising - one was definitely a hardware problem, and the other is most likely a mixture of hardware and software problems.

Your complaints (or analogous technical complaints) would have been acceptable issues - things one had to work around - for a good deal of cinema history.

We've already reached people complaining about "these book spines are illegible", which feels very close to "it's difficult to shoot in focus, indoors". Will that take four or five decades to achieve, based on the last 3 - 5 years of development?

The tech certainly isn't there yet, nor am I pretending like it is, and nor was the comment you replied to. To call it close is not laughable, though, in the historical context.

The much more interesting question is: At what point is there an audience for the output? That's the one that will actually matter - not whether it's possible to replicate Citizen Kane.

Reply View 0 replies