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Wellness Wednesday for February 14, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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AI Video Gen just leapt forwards

Ay yo just look at this shit. Shame it's an OAI product and thus utterly neutered by the time it makes it to us plebs.

Increasingly clear that (at least in the first world) the future of human civilization, (barring collapse / elysium / manna scenarios) is living the lifestyles currently enjoyed by aimless funemployed rich kids. As someone who knows many, it’s not a bad life, but it is often an unfulfilling one.

I suppose CGI animators are next in line for the chopping block, we’re only a year of two from full Pixar movies being created with (AI-assisted) prompt engineering by one to two people.

we’re only a year of two from full Pixar movies being created with (AI-assisted) prompt engineering by one to two people.

Gosh, I hope so. But I must admit I'm skeptical. Stable Diffusion was released to the public in August 2022, about 1.5 years ago, and though the progress in those roughly 18 months have been amazing, it's still nowhere near the level of being able to create an image equivalent of a Pixar movie (I dunno, maybe a 30 page comic book with coherent characters and a plot that loosely follows the 3-act structure?) just with prompt engineering. I do think we'll see even faster progression in the next 2 years, but going from even the impressive stuff we have now to a full coherent 90-minute film seems sufficiently difficult that it would still need a lot of actual industry experts making edits and putting them together.

My prediction in 2 years would be that an amateur studio with 1/10-1/100 (but probably not a smaller fraction?) the manpower and resources that Pixar has today could make the equivalent of a Pixar film. Highly speculative, of course. But I really do hope you're right, and we enter a world where a couple of professionals could just use prompts to generate Pixar-equivalent films - and ideally this would imply that amateur individuals with little expertise could generate 10-20-minute videos with professional, if not necessarily Pixar-level, production values (though in the realm of AI, the way "production values" manifest themselves will be different, since AI is really good at some things that CGI has trouble with, and vice versa).