Star Wars' Showcase of AI Special Effects Was a Complete Disaster
Star Wars' Showcase of AI Special Effects Was a Complete Disaster

Star Wars' Showcase of AI Special Effects Was a Complete Disaster

Star Wars' Showcase of AI Special Effects Was a Complete Disaster
Star Wars' Showcase of AI Special Effects Was a Complete Disaster
I watched the video. It's all 1-3 second shots of either recolored animals or two animals combined. In other words, exactly the kind of video AI can deliver at a consumer level. Not impressive. The TED audience politely clapped, but aside from one or two folks the audience didn't seem particularly impressed either.
It's all C-suite executives pushing this onto executives below them, who push it onto their organizations as mandates. The C-suite execs don't care about creativity; they only care about cutting costs. At first this means shortening development times. Soon this will mean cutting staff, and not 10 years from now, but way before this technology can actually replace a human.
You know what would've been a good showcase? Show Rogue One but with the film shots digitally composited with an AI Tarkin or an AI Leia, and have it be better than what was originally released in 2016. And have it be lip-synced. It shouldn't be too hard to improve upon those shots; they weren't very good.
But AI can't do that.
Good lord. It's very bad. I like how the presenter clearly knows that it sucks, too, but he's required to go out and pretend it doesn't and try to hype it up.
It’s like if you’re looking for a 3D modeling job, you make something that exists already so the viewer has a frame of reference.
That is currently the core of the issue. It's tech-bros and executives gassing eachother up, and most are too far gone to realize that they're heading for a cliff.
Maybe it's because typing "make something cool plz" and getting a picture back is finally an interface that C-levels can use
Right, deep fakes never caused objections. AI for dead actors is a widely beloved use case! People would totally understand a replacement, versus only being able to tweak what's already been done the hard way.
No one likes AI in movies, period. I'm just saying this reel sucked and that would actually be impressive. Anyway, SAG negotiated rules around this that require consent from family estates and compensation, so if the estate wanted to block it, they could.
It can do much more. This was literally someone that typed "owl slug" into the prompt.
Character replacement and lip synching can currently be done. Its not perfect but its advancing very fast.
Your points are valid and all but AI can do a lot, and can do more every month. It's already pretty versatile and this is currently the worse it is going to be.
Yes, this is a favorite line from the industry, who assume the trend line continues uninterrupted into the future. But how about this as a counter future: what if AI plateaus?
What if it doesn't get much better than it already is except around the edges, and the next breakthrough is two decades away? Companies have exhausted training data and exhausted data center capacity in the quest to keep the trend line at the previous vector. Yes, they're building new capacity, but no one is making any money on this except Nvidia.
LLMs haven't seen any significant improvement in a couple years. Image generation has improved, but at a much slower pace. Video is no longer Will Smith eating spaghetti, but there's a long, long valley between where we are today and convincing, photorealistic, extended scenes that can be controlled at a fine level. Hence the challenge I posed.