Hollywood backlash puts spotlight on ByteDance's sketchy launch of Seedance 2.0.
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ByteDance backpedals after Seedance 2.0 turned Hollywood icons into AI “clip art”
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Yeah, but have you watched it though? I agree that review bombing is a thing but this was downright unwatchable.
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Who are the totally naive developers who did not see this coming? IP theft will probably be the least of the problems this type of software creates.
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timeline404
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
Calling this 'clip art' is an insult to the hard-working clip artists of the 90s. At least their drawings had the correct number of fingers.
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Is that really much different than soundcloud artists, most gets ignored and the talented end up getting noticed and elevated by other artists or labels? Who is browsing YouTube looking for random feature films?
I imagine the gatekeepers will still be there, but instead of studios it may shift to platforms sorting the wheat from the chaff.
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Surely creating an image of say Superman means it has trained data from Superman images, ie a safeguard is no use whatsoever, the models need to be scrapped...
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AI still struggles with consistent appearance over numerous shots and video generations. That's thankfully a big hindrance to videos longer than a couple clips.
If OpenAI is unfortunately still around in 3 years I will be very curious to see how this works out. The model will have spent 3 years training itself with those characters, and they clearly don't have a handle on how to block everything they want.
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Wouldn't be so sure about that. As I said earlier, that's very quickly become less of an issue.
https://www.stashmedia.tv/a-panda-ponders-the-ai-production-pipeline/
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Like it or not the cat is out of the bag. We are about 10-15 years away from people being able to run these video models locally. Companies like byte dance will license them to production houses. There will also be open source video models. There will be a flood of content breaking every existing IP law.
That a movie was made with real actors will become a selling point.
That a movie was made with real actors will become a selling point.
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I've never used genAI so I have no reference for how fast the results are generated after a prompt is submitted. However, IIRC each frame of ents in Jackon's LOTR took 24 hours to render. I imagine genAI to be quite a bit faster.
A movie is nothing but a bunch of scenes stitched together. What I saw was a fight scene created by a computer with a quality that was just as good as the CGI in a marvel fight scene; certainly better than the cgi in The Last Starfighter.
If it can make a fight scene, it can make a 'talking in a cafe, having a emotional bonding moment' scene, especially if the prompt can fed the character's dialog for the scene. stitch them together, and it's a movie.
The IP issues are avoidable, the job losses are not.
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I’m a CG artist. I’ve spent over 30 years honing my craft and passing my knowledge on to others, as a TD.
When I hear this kind of philosophizing, I roll my eyes and die a little inside, because it almost always comes from a place that seems to have some good intention, yet is paving the way for the destruction of an entire culture.
I have lots of ideas, more than I will ever get to see realized, but I won’t steal other peoples work and call it “standing on their shoulders” to do so … this is not the same as cutting out newspaper clippings or searching google images for textures to use on a matte painting: it’s theft, wholesale and without conscience.
And this is coming from someone who can see a genuine use for AI tools, but remembers how everyone in the 90s made such a big deal of how “the internet is going to improve the world by bringing us closer together.”
Follow the money for the truth.
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This is similar to my own opinion about generative video tools. They lower the barrier to entry. That means both many people who have no business making a show or movie will be able to and that individuals with a great idea might actually have a chance. I’m kind of looking forward to what sorts of formally gate-kept ideas will be brought out
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If they had reacted like this when the AI cancer started maybe we would have avoided a lot of shit. But it's only when a Chinese company showed their models could do the same as the western ones that they start complaining.
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On YT/FB? Slop has been heavily promoted by YT and Meta, who want to control clicks in any way possible. Funny they invest 300 billion in it, then dont provide filter technologies.
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it brings out a giant flood of dogshit to the point where scifi magazines have to cut off submissions because they're overwhelmed with AI slop
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Ars editors push the most upvoted comment to 3rd place... What do you mean, criticize MPAA on ARS-condénast? Maximalism rules ok buddy. Time for spiderman 5.
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It's Ars Technica, not ARS Technica. I swear, we can't even get good trolls these days.
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When I started my career, working for some of the studios and with some of the actors mentioned here, it required education, skill and talent as well as creativity. When I retired the writing was already on the wall. Now any person with a computer thinks they can make a feature film by AI. Replacing all the talent with a computer program and the creative individuals with AI. It’s sad. I’m glad I got out when you could still take pride in your work and with those you worked with and for.
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GenAI video doesn't scale to a full movie. It's fine for augmenting shots, fixing shots, changing things... but the amount of work involved in replacing a full movie, with good performances, with nothing wrong... it's just huge. The overhyped demos that get widely shared don't pass a quick visual inspection, and they aren't going to replace full movies any time soon. It's good as a replacement CGI and for memes.
It's a mistake to think that because it's gotten better, it'll keep getting better at the same pace. Tesla's been promising self-driving cars for a long, long time, and it's always just out of reach.
Now, coding... that's far more ordered, and it has gotten a lot better recently. And images are easier too. Yes, this is getting better, but many videos will need real people saying real things for a long time yet.
If anyone really wants to dig into AI for creative uses, I wrote this book which came out recently: https://aiforcreativeproduction.com
It's a mistake to think that because it's gotten better, it'll keep getting better at the same pace. Tesla's been promising self-driving cars for a long, long time, and it's always just out of reach.
Now, coding... that's far more ordered, and it has gotten a lot better recently. And images are easier too. Yes, this is getting better, but many videos will need real people saying real things for a long time yet.
If anyone really wants to dig into AI for creative uses, I wrote this book which came out recently: https://aiforcreativeproduction.com
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And if the book writers are the very same people writing the Marvel slop scripts?
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Hollywood is facing its most serious existential threat since talkies first appeared. This genie is not going back into the bottle. Leaving aside the question of IP infringement for a moment, imagine you can produce a feature-length film with bespoke 'actors' and 'actress' for a script you input at that level of verisimilitude, for thousands of dollars instead of tens or hundreds of millions. Things are just never going to be the same.
The ways that digital streaming transformed the music industry, going all the way back to services like Napster, those changes are going to be dwarfed by what happens to visual content in the next decades.
The ways that digital streaming transformed the music industry, going all the way back to services like Napster, those changes are going to be dwarfed by what happens to visual content in the next decades.
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Stuntmen should be replaced by AI. Although I'm sorry their will lose their income, it's ethically wrong to put people in harm's way when a suitable safe alternative exists.
The Three R's of clinical research on humans and animals should be applied to stuntmen as well: Replace, Reduce & Refine, and only use humans when no suitable alternative exists.
The Three R's of clinical research on humans and animals should be applied to stuntmen as well: Replace, Reduce & Refine, and only use humans when no suitable alternative exists.
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Nothing's pinned, it's just in time order, and that's when I commented.
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When the bubble pops, it won't be the AI boosters left holding the bag.
Crypto produced numerous rug pulls where foolish hopefuls were constantly getting scammed.
Given how much of the US economy is balanced on the AI investments, it really spooks me how it'll all go when it comes crashing down.
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While I agree that GenAI video isn’t there yet, it’s a mistake to look at self-driving and conclude that video AI will be equally slow to develop. The biggest difference between AI self-driving and AI video generation is that, when these AIs inadvertently drive Tom Cruise’s car through a concrete wall, the self-driving AI’s operator is left with a billion-dollar lawsuit, while the video AI’s operator can simply try again. This makes iteration quite a bit easier for the latter case.
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This is just... automation. Once upon a time it was about spinning yarns, now it's about the act of taking pictures. CGI was decried as the death of an art many years ago, since you no longer had to carefully construct miniatures and arrange for crazy stunts to be performed; film acting was looked down on by theatre performers. The Luddites did have some good points, but in the end, in the bigger picture, automation will liberate humanity from hard, tedious work and let us focus on bigger things (as we have seen in the last 200 years... mostly. Consumerism has sort of muddied the waters). The problem is just who has access to and control of such automation, and that is the real point of contention. I'd say that people should read more Marx, but Americans place him in a similar place to Hitler.
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To be fair, the West did steal lots of Chinese IP before that, such as when a pair of monks smuggled silkworm eggs for the Roman Empire, somewhere around 650AD. Or when Robert Fortune smuggled tea plants out of the country around 1848.
Fast forwarding a bit, there's plenty of examples of the USA stealing IP from "friendlier" countries too, from the various bits of steam technology "borrowed" by Lowell, Moody and Slater, to the wholesale pirating of Charles Dicken's works.
And then there's the whole business of WW2, where the US was first gifted lots of cutting-edge tech by the British via the Tizzard mission, and then by rummaging through the smashed up remnants of German industry to grab the choicest bits, from rocket technology all the way up to the 15,000 ton closed die presses acquired as part of the Heavy Press program. Arguably, neither of these are "stealing", but neither were they the results of internal R&D!
Fundamentally, there's always been an element of "borrowing" in economic bootstrapping, and you could perhaps argue that LLM systems are just continuing that tradition.
On the other hand, just as countries start to enforce IP laws once they have something worth stealing, it's likely that the owners of these LLM systems will also start trying to enforce ownership over the information and data which they've (often illegally) subsumed.
And for all intents and purposes, that is pretty much the sum total of all human knowledge.
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Disney's lawyers will be eating good in the AI era. Truly an age of scavengers and vultures.
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IIRC once Pandora's box had been opened, there was no way of closing it. This is just an early skirmish, and AI is keeping the Panzers, which it is feverishly building, in reserve for now. But over the next 3-5 years our culture will become a virtual world, quite likely a total desertscape.
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I always laugh when "hollywood" (esp Disney) cries about copyright or intellectual property infringement!!
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Ironically you could use LLMs to filter all of that excess out.= so you wouldn't have to do that.
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Actors don't care they are already selling their voice/face.
And Disney will still make movies.
This is a problem for the California movie industry.
If the next "movie" can be made in a non descript office tower in Shenzhen a lot of folks will be out of a job...
And Disney will still make movies.
This is a problem for the California movie industry.
If the next "movie" can be made in a non descript office tower in Shenzhen a lot of folks will be out of a job...
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So is AI a threat or is it not a threat?
Artists are upset that it's threatening jobs.
Also, artists are upset that it is generating "slop" that can never replace human-created content.
If it's just creating "slop" then people won't consume and it's not a threat. Why not let it die on the vine?
Artists are upset that it's threatening jobs.
Also, artists are upset that it is generating "slop" that can never replace human-created content.
If it's just creating "slop" then people won't consume and it's not a threat. Why not let it die on the vine?
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I think the other thing to remember is that AI doesn’t need to do everything to change the industry: LLMs are indeed incapable of true reasoning and creativity, but it’s still a huge change if a movie production crew goes from hundreds of people to a cab-full, and even if it takes months of repetition to get a usable result those people will do it because most of them are never going to get a budget to make a film the traditional way. The stories about everyone in LA working on a screenplay aren’t much of an exaggeration and I think we’ll see more people trying to self-produce a movie, especially as the class warfare escalates: if middle class jobs continue to disappear, trying a long shot to get discovered on social media starts to seem almost reasonable if you’re going to be driving for Uber anyway.
Having at least one relative employed in the field, I’m not in love with that outcome but the only way I see it not happening is some unlikely legal ruling for copyright maximalism.
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Your second sentence is begging the important question: the big social media companies are pushing the technology hard because they need an almost endless amount of stuff to keep people watching ads and they only care about quality to the extent that people keep scrolling. This could leave everyone else in a position similar to what most quality manufacturers have been in where the market between the cheapest imported junk and the high-end premium stuff has been shrinking rapidly: think about how North Carolina’s furniture industry has faded because the number of middle-class people who can and do buy quality wood furniture rapidly shrunk — the continued existence of people who buy heirloom-grade furniture doesn’t really help them keep the doors open, and there’s no possible way they can possibly compete with Southeast Asian manufacturers on pricing.
Social media is basically the crack version of that problem because the most effective content producers get most of the revenue, and AI means they actually can keep up with advertisers’ demand for new spots. It’s very easy to imagine people just zoning out and watching slop because it’s too hard to find anything else when the algorithm keeps steering them to the cheap slop. I’m reminded of how, before my time, most neighborhoods had small grocery stores which disappeared as convenience/dollar stores undercut on packaged junk food and didn’t leave enough of a market to be viable.
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