It will be ironic if Meta sinks all this money into the new trend and finds out later that it has been a huge boondoggle, just as publishers followed Facebook's "guidance" on video being the future, subsequently gutting the talent pool and investing into video production and staff - only to find out it was all a total waste.
It already paid off. When the world moved from determinisic to probablistic ad modeling. That's why their numbers are so good right now compared to every other advertiser
Apple turned off a lot of "signals" used by advertisers for precisely targeted ads via persistent user-beacons. Facebook ad placement quality (and revenue) cratered in the immediate aftermath.
Meta has since gotten better at it- likely with lots of AI-assistance and their revenue numbers reflect this. The targeting is now likely probabilistic in that the advertiser now makes educated guesses on the best ads to serve based on limited or non-existent identity information.
So the AI efforts would have paid back by way of higher revenues.
There are reports [1] that a bunch of companies like "College Humor" were convinced to switch to producing native video for facebook (instead of directing users to their own sites) on the basis of bullshit metrics from facebook, and had an extremely bad time as a result, with some companies going bankrupt.
Something like counting an autoplaying video that ran for 3 seconds as a 'view' IIRC
Thankfully, Dropout (a spin-off of College Humor) is alive and well, and producing some of the best D&D Actual Play series as well as other non-D&D comedy shows. One of the entertainment services that I happily pay for because I want to support what they're doing.
Said the butter churner, cotton ginner, and petrol pumper.
I work in film. I've shot dozens of them the old fashioned way. I've always hated how labor, time, and cost intensive they are to make.
Despite instructions from the luminaries to "just pick up a camera", the entire process is stone age. The field is extremely inequitable, full of nepotism and "who you know". Almost every starry-eyed film student winds up doing drudge work for the rest of their lives. Most will never make a feature to match their ambition.
If the whole task was to simply convey my thoughts and dreams to others, why am I scrambling around to sign location rights, capture photons on expensive glass, and then smear and splice things together for months on end? This is ceremonial and soon to be anachronistic. I'm glad that whole mess is going to be replaced. It's a farce.
To phrase it another way - would you like to be hand-writing assembly on punch cards? To only gain entrance into the field with your mathematics PhD?
To speak of the liberty and the economics, why should I have to sell the rights to my idea to a studio so I can get it off the ground? Why should I have to obey the studio's rules and mind their interference?
This whole Gen AI thing is going to be the biggest liberating moment for filmmaking creatives. I know, because I am one.
And if you think any Jack or Jill can just come in and text prompt a whole movie, you're crazy. It's still hard work and a metric ton of good taste.
Art will never die. It's the human soul. It'll take more than some tech bros with GPUs to kill it.
AI is just another tool for the artist. A "bicycle for the mind" to quote Jobs, and a rocket ship for the imagination to convey my own direct experience.
> And if you think any Jack or Jill can just come in and text prompt a whole movie, you're crazy. It's still hard work and a metric ton of good taste.
If you want anything good, yes. If you just want something… I reckon it'd take a week to assemble an incomprehensible-nonsense-film pipeline, after which it's just a matter of feeding the computer electricity.
Short-term, this is going to funnel resources away from the people with good taste. Long-term, it might help collapse the entire "creative industry", after which we might get some of that artist liberation stuff you're talking about – but we might just end up with new gatekeeping strategies from the wealthy and connected, and business as usual.
The idea that AI isn't going to be used as a creative tool too and that it won't lead to more and better art is a defeatist, Luddite attitude.
Similarly shaped people thought that digital cameras would ruin cinema and photography.
> Short-term, this is going to funnel resources away from the people with good taste.
On the contrary - every budding film student will soon [1] be able to execute on their entire visions straight out of the gates. No decades of clawing their way to a very limited, almost impossible to reach peak.
> it might help collapse the entire "creative industry"
The studio system. Not the industry.
> new gatekeeping strategies from the wealthy and connected, and business as usual.
Creatives have more ways of building brands and followings for themselves than ever before. It's one of the largest growing sectors of the economy, and lots of people are earning livings off of it.
You'll be able to follow that steampunk vampire creator that's been missing from the world until now. Every long tail interest will be catered to. Even the most obscure and wild tastes, ideas, and designs. Stuff that would never get studio funding.
As a creative, I'm overjoyed by this. My friends and I are getting to create things we never could make before [2].
>You'll be able to follow that steampunk vampire creator that's been missing from the world until now. Every long tail interest will be catered to. Even the most obscure and wild tastes, ideas, and designs. Stuff that would never get studio funding.
Your optimism reminds me of the optimism I had around the early internet. Power to the people, long tail, rise of the creative class, the fall of gatekeeping corporations, etc.
It was like that for a couple of years in the late 90s before power and control got vastly more centralized than before. Maybe this time it’ll be different.
The big difference is that back then, anyone with a consumer-level computer in their bedroom could turn it into a server and be a first-class citizen on the Internet.
With generative AI, models will be controlled by a handful of giant corporations who have the enormous corpuses (of dubious provenance) and compute ability to train them.
You can run ComfyUI and AnimateDiff on your PC. If you haven't checked them out, please do.
And there are other angles to consider. Apple, for one, is expressly interested in not becoming a thin client to cloud AI. They're baking a lot of inference power into their chips. If the creative class don't need their devices, that doesn't bode well for them...
FakeYou, CivitAi, WeightsGg, Comflowy, ... -- there are tons of vibrant communities to teach you everything you need to know. The tools are open source, free to use, and accessible.
Many YouTube Poops are artistic expression (e.g. https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=dO4eIEvHjSw). Skibidi Toilet is definitely artistic expression: it's a full-on epic. (Reactions from one ≈50-year-old: “baffling” “how did they do that?” “why would anyone make this?”)
If you think the Luddites were defeatist, you don't know much about the Luddites.
> On the contrary - every budding film student will soon [1] be able to execute on their entire visions straight out of the gates. […] Creatives have more ways of building brands and followings for themselves than ever before.
Yet, we have no shortage of starving artists. Will AI provide them food and shelter?
This is unequivocally a win for creative expression for hobbyists, but it stands to harm professionals – at least in the short term, perhaps longer-term. It's not happening in a vacuum: the greedy are revoking livelihoods because they think AI can do it faster and cheaper (laundering appropriated hobbyist and increasingly-cheap professional labour).
> The studio system. Not the industry.
Huh, the word 'industry' has a specialised meaning in economics. Didn't know that.
> Similarly shaped people thought that digital cameras would ruin cinema and photography.
Obviously, but you seem to be arguing that AI is just another evolution of productivity tools. You still need to have a photographer's eye while using this technology.
If you couldn't make a good composition on film, a digicam will not save you, and it definitely did not replace photographers. Perhaps lowered the barrier of entry for prosumers.
Are you talking about some as yet unseen research/technology? The aesthetic sample looks like something we could have seen on the SD subreddit for the last year.
> Said the butter churner, cotton ginner, and petrol pumper.
Said the bank teller, record producer, etc.. Plenty of cases where we've been told technology and automation would democratise the field and remove the middleman, and actually it's the opposite.
Yes, it would be nice if AI made it easy for anyone who wanted to make a great movie. That doesn't mean it's going to happen.
> The field is extremely inequitable, full of nepotism and "who you know"
Maybe, but it's never been cheaper to make a movie.
I know someone with no connections and (almost) no money which in 4 years made multiple no. 1 box-office films (obviously not in US, in a smaller country) and then got picked up by Netflix.
