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/r/singularity has been blowing up with Veo's progress in video, with something like this or this being examples.
Clearly a ton of progress has been made here, but I'm still wondering when these will move from merely being able to generate silly short videos to demonstrate "progress", to actually being able to be part of robust production pipelines. Stuff like artwork is much more simple, and still isn't quite ready for primetime (i.e. fully replacing artists).
There's a reason I do expect someone (or a very small team) to produce a feature-length film on a shoestring budget using AI by year's end.
The different modalities were already demonstrated, the only thing that was needed was someone to combine them into an extended, coherent end product.
This one makes it probably an order of magnitude easier. In my previous post I speculated that they could produce 1 minute of usable footage a day and pull it off. Well, now you can get a minute or so of 'usable' footage in two hours, apparently.
Won't be long until you can type a sufficiently detailed prompt into one of these things, pay a couple thousand dollars worth of credits, and it can spit out a whole movie for you.
I find this unlikely. It might happen in a few years if current progress continues but this year is too early. If I arbitrarily set the threshold of a "film" at >75 minutes long, and set some baseline quality standard of say >50 on Metacritic, and stipulate that principle photography must be done entirely through AI (humans doing minor touch-ups would be fine), I think people would be very hard pressed to do that in the very short term. The scaffolding and pipelines don't really exist yet to make that feasible.
In fact, I'm writing this one down in my list of predictions that won't happen to keep track of.
My hedge is that I'm saying its >50%, so not a certainty, but I want to be clear that IF it happens I wasn't caught off-guard and if it doesn't happen (or indeed never happens) I did stick my neck out and will accept the derision.
Because obsessive auteurs (or autists) with time on their hands and the proper tools CAN in fact create amazing works in relatively short time frames. It took Michelangelo 4 years to paint the Sistine Chapel. Would we agree that with modern tools and a few decent assistants, in the current era he could easily knock it out in less than 1?
Bo Burnham produced an acclaimed 87 minute-long special all by his lonesome in just over a year.
A small and dedicated team that animated an 84-minute long film over 5 1/2 years using free tools totaled about 40-50 people working on it but was mostly down to just two guys doing the critical work.
(Incidentally, "Flow" is also what Google is calling their AI video workspace)
So if the AI is sufficiently good to 10x the productivity of the creators, a team of about 5 could probably get something that's Netflix-Worthy (derogatory way to put it, granted) done inside of a year, if they share a vision and have maniacal but competent leadership.
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Do we know how good it is at building coherent multi-scene videos? Can I have the same two people in the same room, from a different angle? Ideally in a long continuous shot, but even after a cutover would be amazing. Otherwise, this is pretty limited in utility for entertainment media - maybe commercials.
But either way, it's enough to be a problem for trusting video. It's like the world envisioned in The Truth Machine, in which everyone tells the truth. Everyone becomes highly trusting, and life is good. Only with AI video-gen, it's inverted: everything could be lies, so no one believes anything, so life is terrible. Fun.
If my (extremely amateur) experiences with images is any guide, then it’s extremely bad at permanecense (google tells me this is not a word but I feel like it is).
maybe "continuity" is the word you're looking for?
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For most of human history, you didn't believe something unless you saw it yourself or someone you trusted told you about it. Photo and video evidence wasn't a thing. If we lose it, it would be a shame, but I don't think it would make life terrible.
There are ways to mitigate this of course, multiple independent sources. A problem is if you have a large group of people with institutional/cultural power willing to act semi-organically to further lies.
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I haven't heard anything one way or the other in terms of building coherent multi-scene videos. This, from my experience, means that it's probably pretty terrible at doing this. If it wasn't, people would be aggressively showing it off.
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