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An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip

(theaiunderwriter.substack.com)
1503 points participant3 | 4 comments | 03 Apr 25 17:55 UTC | HN request time: 1.056s | source
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KronisLV ◴[04 Apr 25 08:20 UTC] No.43579579[source]▶
I think the cat is out of the bag when it comes to generative AI, the same way how various LLMs for programming have been trained even on codebases that they had no business using, yet nobody hasn’t and won’t stop them. It’s the same as what’s going to happen with deepfakes and such, as the technology inevitably gets better.

> Hayao Miyazaki’s Japanese animation company, Studio Ghibli, produces beautiful and famously labor intensive movies, with one 4 second sequence purportedly taking over a year to make.

It makes me wonder though - whether it’s more valuable to spend a year on a scene that most people won’t pay that much attention to (artists will understand and appreciate, maybe pause and rewind and replay and examine the details, the casual viewer just enjoy at a glance) or use tools in addition to your own skills to knock it out of the park in a month and make more great things.

A bit how digital art has clear advantages over paper, while many revere the traditional art a lot, despite it taking longer and being harder. The same way how someone who uses those AI assisted programming tools can improve their productivity by getting rid of some of the boilerplate or automate some refactoring and such.

AI will definitely cheapen the art of doing things the old way, but that’s the reality of it, no matter how much the artists dislike it. Some will probably adapt and employ new workflows, others stick to tradition.

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M95D ◴[04 Apr 25 08:57 UTC] No.43579798[source]▶
It's a very clear difference between a cheap animation and Ghibli. Anyone can see it.

In the first case, there's only one static image for an entire scene, scrolled and zoomed, and if they feel generous, there would be an overlay with another static image that slides over the first at a constant speed and direction. It feels dead.

In the second case, each frame is different. There's chaotic motions such as wind and there's character movement with a purpose, even in the background, there's always something happening in the animation, there's life.

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1. paulluuk ◴[04 Apr 25 11:10 UTC] No.43580571[source]▶
There is a huge middle ground between "static image with another sliding static image" and "1 year of drawing per 4 second Ghibli masterpiece". From your comment is almost looks like you're suggesting that you have to choose either one or the other, but that is of course not true.

I bet that a good animator could make a really impressive 4-second scene if they were given a month, instead of a year. Possibly even if they were given a day.

So if we assume that there is not a binary "cheap animation vs masterpiece" but rather a sort of spectrum between the two, then the question is: at what point do enough people stop seeing the difference, that it makes economic sense to stay at that level, if the goal is to create as much high-quality content as possible?

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2. M95D ◴[04 Apr 25 13:55 UTC] No.43582442[source]▶
Yes, that the current trend in the western world. Money is all that matters. There's only lowest accepted quality. Anything above that is a waste of money, profits that are lost. Nobody wants masterpieces. There is no market for that.

That lowest-accepted quality also declines over time, as generations after generations of people become used to rock-bottom quality. In the end, there's only slop and AI will make the cheapest slop ever. Welcome to a brave new world. We don't even need people anymore. They're too expensive.

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3. pmyteh ◴[04 Apr 25 16:52 UTC] No.43584996[source]▶
To be fair, we've already been through this cycle at least once with animation. The difference between early Disney or even Looney Tunes and (say) late '60s Hanna-Barbera or '80s He-Man is enormous. Since then there has been generally higher-quality animation rather than lower (though I know it varies a lot by country, genre etc.)

It's not inevitable that it's a race to the cheapest and shittest. That's just one (fairly strong) commercial force amongst many.

4. paulluuk ◴[06 Apr 25 13:42 UTC] No.43601370[source]▶
I don't think that's true at all. There might be (and probably are) tens of thousands of artists creating masterful artwork at home.

But you're talking about PAID artwork, and yes: when it comes to paid art, money does matter.

You can't expect artists to completely ignore financial incentives, and at the same time expect the creative industry to just throw lots of money at these artists. That's just not how (capitalist) businesses work.

The world absolutely does care for super high quality artwork. But very few people are willing to pay $2000 for a movie ticket when they could also go to 100 $20 movies.

On top of that: who gets to decide what is high quality, anyway? The creative world is fraught with corruption, elitism and "who knows who", making it very unlikely that a highly talented artist is ever even "discovered".

It's a lot more complicated then just "money is all that matters".

And finally: I don't think this "trend" is just in the western world. Show me a place in the world where artists are rewarded based on purely the quality of their work, rather than the profitability of their work.