Comment by gabriel666smith

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.