Re: Moho 14. And The Rise Of AI.
Posted: Mon May 22, 2023 8:36 am
Think of SIGGRAPH demos, the kind we see for 30 years now: always impressive, sometimes with good ideas, but they all are just lab setups with no connection to the real world. There's a reason why we don't see the impressive renderings of 3D fractals, Stable Diffusion's Steal&Morph, or any of those "automatic inbetweening of 2D drawings" in the context of complete films. All this is still standalone software (if implemented at all and not just a paper), there's no API to connect it to established tools of the industry, and often not even an UI to use it easier than with line-by-line coding.
Ever heard animators complain about the restrictions of their software? "It doesn't let me do X" is a common one. Do you know that all the new AI projects are heavily censored? No matter who finances them or where they come from, they all have long lists of forbidden terms, be it "foul language", anything related to sexuality, also politics, and, most of all, persons. Which of them was it that didn't let you prompt the name of its CEO? "Sorry Dave, I can't let you do that." They all are crippled in more ways than you could imagine. So it's not just a reduction of visual imagination, it's cutting off large parts of possible content, it restricts your very thinking.
Does Moho do that? No. Does any Adobe software do that? No, aside from one restriction to manipulate legal tender scans. But as soon as you are using any database not your own, you make yourself and your art dependent on other people's decision about what's in it.
It is quite easy to spot the results of visual AI right now, and it will be for some time. I'm more worried about chatGPT and the like, text-based AI, because it is already in use, experimentally right now, but improving soon, and cannot be detected because it's in pre-production, in scripting. Ever ranted about cookie-cutter animated shows? Always the same little conflicts, always the same story arcs? Be prepared for heaploads more of that. And as a writer, be prepared to be paid even less (that's why they're on strike right now).
Visual AI will, as long as I can foresee it, be used in short forms only: advertisement, video clips, tiktok and Instagram, and the occasional non-narrative short film on festivals. Anywhere else it just doesn't fit, not in our traditional narrative structures and not in our filmic languages. It's like performing Shakespeare, but each actor wears a glitter suit: doesn't add anything to the story.
Ever heard animators complain about the restrictions of their software? "It doesn't let me do X" is a common one. Do you know that all the new AI projects are heavily censored? No matter who finances them or where they come from, they all have long lists of forbidden terms, be it "foul language", anything related to sexuality, also politics, and, most of all, persons. Which of them was it that didn't let you prompt the name of its CEO? "Sorry Dave, I can't let you do that." They all are crippled in more ways than you could imagine. So it's not just a reduction of visual imagination, it's cutting off large parts of possible content, it restricts your very thinking.
Does Moho do that? No. Does any Adobe software do that? No, aside from one restriction to manipulate legal tender scans. But as soon as you are using any database not your own, you make yourself and your art dependent on other people's decision about what's in it.
It is quite easy to spot the results of visual AI right now, and it will be for some time. I'm more worried about chatGPT and the like, text-based AI, because it is already in use, experimentally right now, but improving soon, and cannot be detected because it's in pre-production, in scripting. Ever ranted about cookie-cutter animated shows? Always the same little conflicts, always the same story arcs? Be prepared for heaploads more of that. And as a writer, be prepared to be paid even less (that's why they're on strike right now).
Visual AI will, as long as I can foresee it, be used in short forms only: advertisement, video clips, tiktok and Instagram, and the occasional non-narrative short film on festivals. Anywhere else it just doesn't fit, not in our traditional narrative structures and not in our filmic languages. It's like performing Shakespeare, but each actor wears a glitter suit: doesn't add anything to the story.