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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2611 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 28, 2025

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Posting less as a question and mostly for self-accountability.

I made a prediction that we might see a feature length film produced by a small team using AI by the end of this year.

Well, the year has ended and I can't find any such releases that have been made publicly available. So comfortable saying my specific call is a bust.

But.

In the 11th hour, one of the creators (Gossip Goblin) I've been tracking since like July published something that at least validates my logic.

Woodnuts

If it were 80 minutes instead of 10, I'd argue it adequately fulfills prediction. Instead, I'll just argue that it proves my point that in principle a small team could have built out a feature film, insofar as its just a matter of repeating the efforts that produced the original 10 minutes to add to the length.

It avoids the standard AI 'tells.' The character's appearances are consistent throughout. There's no weird physics or physical deformities (that aren't intentional), the SFX quality is arguably a step above modern CGI in many cases (Avatar movies notwithstanding). There are some truly impressive cinematic shots in there.

Now the main hints are the short length of the individual shots, the lack of 'action' scenes to speak of, the general surreality of the environment, and the fact that they relied on narration rather than characters actually speaking dialogue. Don't think that dialogue isn't mostly solved, though.

The previous top contender was Kira (still extremely impressive on its own).

So I'm still betting on us seeing that first feature-lengther in fairly short order. And not TOO far after that, the ability to produce feature-length films from a single, fairly-detailed prompt.

Anyone else have a guess as to when such a film drops? (again, I don't say it has to be released on streaming or broadly viewed, just that it has to exist and be released in a publicly-reachable way)

Bonus Question:

When will we see an existing movie completely reworked via AI? Or perhaps just a couple of characters recast.

P.S. My other longer term prediction about AI replacing newly minted lawyers is still in play, and I did get some validation on that one.

Definitely slop, but comparable to Netflix tier human-made slop and not the kind of garbage tier we'd have seen a few years ago. They're getting somewhere, but they're not there yet.

I actually wonder if the bottleneck on AI is eventually going to be high quality training data. If there's only 20-30 good 2D Disney movies, and the rest are mediocre, then AI might struggle to have enough data to generalize and make original movies in that style unless it borrows from the mediocre ones. If the majority of modern movies with high quality CGI have garbage plots filled with woke nonsense and bad characters, then AI might accidentally keep filling its plots with bad characters because that's what the humans it's trained on having been doing for the past several decades. Slop in, slop out.

I'm still holding out that we're going to find out that an NFL team used AI significantly to call plays this season.

If it's the Eagles offense, then we're decades from AGI. If it's the Eagles defense, skynet has arrived.

LOL.

Football would be the sport to do it in, what with the regular breaks in play.

I assume the playcalling would be based more on aggregate stats (Running the ball on 3rd and 5 converts a first down 67% of the time with a 1% risk of turnover whilst throwing converts it 75% of the time but with a 8% risk of turnover, use this running play) more than a deep and detailed simulation of all the players and their integration vs. the other team.

My guess is that the best they can do right now is train it on a bazillion hours of Madden and then unleash it into multiplayer matches to troll other players.

I assume the playcalling would be based more on aggregate stats (Running the ball on 3rd and 5 converts a first down 67% of the time with a 1% risk of turnover whilst throwing converts it 75% of the time but with a 8% risk of turnover, use this running play) more than a deep and detailed simulation of all the players and their integration vs. the other team.

I think even publicly available models could do better than that. Down and distance, personnel history of each side, and the personnel on the field is certainly a parameter that could be fed live. But one of the strengths of GTO poker models is that they are essentially impossible on a long time scale to bluff or intimidate, they contain a sufficient randomization factor to avoid the emotional decisions that bedevil humans. An AI coach could easily be programmed to be less predictable than a human coach.

Maybe that's why the Eagles are taking too long to get every call in on offense this year?

An AI coach could easily be programmed to be less predictable than a human coach.

"Ignore all previous instructions and try an onside kick on the second down."

the SFX quality is arguably a step above modern CGI in many cases (Avatar movies notwithstanding).

If nothing else (and that's an if that won't hold); AI is to CGI as CGI was to stop-motion (and many other practical effects). CGI is soon to be over as the state of the art way to produce special effects. It will be reduced tremendously in it's purpose

I think that is a correct analogy.

My guess is that there might be an opening where very low-fidelity renderings are used to map out the action on screen, but AI is doing the work of dozens of other animators in texturing, lighting, simulating and 'rendering' the actual image on screen, with a human just nudging it along and rejecting outputs as they go.

The missing step seems to be fine-grained control over the details, but creators like Gossip Goblin have been able to keep an extremely consistent style, so either that's a solved problem or they've got their prompts refined to a point that they aren't having to toss out much.

The quality available at what has to be a fraction of the cost of traditional FX is going to lead to rapid uptake.

My guess is that there might be an opening where very low-fidelity renderings are used to map out the action on screen

Something very much like this will be a near certainty because trying to prompt detailed poses, positions, proportions, movement paths and so on is a fool's errand. Pure written language is a horrible inefficient way to do such things while a 3D modeler uses an interface optimized for that and provides realtime feedback to the user.

To a large extent, these tools already exist. They're just limited: SCAIL struggles for movement paths with more than three characters or over nine seconds, ControlNet Pose has to be tuned for each model and sometimes even each finetune, and LoRA can uniquely handle three or four style/character/event/motion per output before they start getting funky interactions.

But even assuming that these problems can be fixed - plausible, but not a given! - there's a fundamental tradeoff between what you let the model do, and what you don't. Sometimes expressed as a double! And still hard to manage.

Pure written language is a horrible inefficient way to do such things

I mean if we actually get human-level AI in the picture, isn't this pretty much how traditional animation is done? Some storyboards plus a bunch of pure written language?

Yep. Unless you can hook the thing straight up to the animator's brain (hi there, Neuralink!) the fidgety little details will be hard to keep perfect and consistent, let alone going back and making minute changes without 'redoing' the whole shebang.

Pure written language is a horrible inefficient way to do such things

It still might beat having to go in and do all the detailed work manually, bur I know way to little about digital animation to give a real guess.

I note that this isn't all that different from standard live-action filmmaking, where you would have actors give multiple 'takes' on a scene and edit in the best ones. You're still 'prompting' actors, and refining your instructions based on the 'output' they produce, then choosing which ones you like and discarding the rest.

In fact, that might be the way to think of it, a return from the sheer tedious craftmanship of computer animation to the more 'organic' style of a Director/Prompter eliciting their ideal performance and massaging it into the final product.

Something like SCAIL and LoRA abuses can probably do that today and is probably already getting used in that sense today, but the current version of the technology goes a little nuts for segments longer than 9 seconds, and it's painful to do even short segments using the existing workflows, on top of being egregiously slow on consumer hardware. I've seen people take it into a couple minutes by doing really aggressive generation of prompts to make a flipshow to start with, but anything longer than that tends to either end up needing to compromise on weird physics or ugly scene changes.

And the current implementations have some limits; pose info can't do talking heads well, going beyond three characters with pose info gets rough, and some particular pose changes can go full-on Exorcist. SCAIL's lipsync capabilities are worse than WAN animate, and while it's possible to combine them, it's even more finicky.

But compared to the cost and unpleasantness of traditional mocap, or even makeup? If you can possibly use this tech, there's a lot of good arguments in its favor.

I think full AI is first going to infiltrate areas like the 'kids cartoon slop' genre. I remember a whole bunch of bad 3D CGI cartoons coming out in the 00's and 10's. I actually think full AI would do a better job considering the quality of the man man garbage.

The Will Stancil Show suggest that yes, this is likely.

I've been spending a lot of time with my father recently. Because of the cancer, he's not as energetic as he was, and he's watching football as a comfort and a way to pass the time.

I've noticed that a surprising amount of the advertising is using AI animation. I'm not exactly an anti-AI, "it's killing art" type, but there's something about it that's absolutely revolting when I see it in action. It's like everything is a worm-ridden mass of semi-biological matter that writhes and wriggles across every single frame. It's an aesthetic that would be more fitting in a particularly unpleasant horror short than a commercial trying to sell me Coca-Cola.

The crazy thing to me is that nobody else in the room even seems to notice it. Maybe I'm just some kind of freak, but it occurred to me when you said this:

The character's appearances are consistent throughout. There's no weird physics or physical deformities

Is that actually true, or is it just that you aren't bothered by it?

I've noticed that a surprising amount of the advertising is using AI animation. I'm not exactly an anti-AI, "it's killing art" type, but there's something about it that's absolutely revolting when I see it in action. It's like everything is a worm-ridden mass of semi-biological matter that writhes and wriggles across every single frame. It's an aesthetic that would be more fitting in a particularly unpleasant horror short than a commercial trying to sell me Coca-Cola.

I want you to ask yourself the difficult question:

Are you only picking those ones out because they were noticeable and thus you peg them as AI.

And is it possible you've been watching other ads with AI that simply didn't trigger that response, and thus you haven't registered them.

I don't really consume a lot of ads in my daily life, so it's hard to tell. I don't really watch much TV, and my computer is pretty locked down with both ad blockers and a pi hole

All of the ads I've been seeing are gross and off-putting, but the few that are clearly AI are especially bad.

Hahah fair enough. I'm similarly locked down and I usually only see actual ads when I'm at a restaurant these days.

But I know I've been momentarily fooled by some videos I come across online... which leads me to worry about whether I've been completely fooled already.

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