Anika Begay
The latest generative models are great for demos, but will they actually change the way people make movies and TV shows? Not in the short term, according to film and VFX experts. But in the long term, the changes could be literally beyond our imagination.
In a panel at SIGGRAPH in Denver, Nikola Todorovic (Wonder Dynamics), Freddy Chavez Olmos (Boxel Studio), and Michael Black (Meshcapade, Max Planck Institute) discussed the potential of generative AI and other systems to change, but not necessarily improve, the way media is created today. Their consensus was that while we can rightly question the usefulness of these tools in the immediate future, the rate of innovation is such that we should be prepared for radical change at any point thereafter.
One of the first topics addressed was the impractical nature of current video generators.
Todorovic noted the “misperception of AI that it’s a one-click solution, that’s going to give you a final VFX shot, and that’s really impossible. Maybe we’ll get there, but if you don’t have the ability to edit, that black box isn’t going to give you much. What we’re seeing right now is that UX is still in the discovery phase: these research companies are starting to learn the ways of 3D and filmmaking terms.”
Black pointed out that language is fundamentally incapable of describing some of the most important aspects of visual creation.
“I mean, things like yoga poses, ballet poses, there are some classical things that we have names for, that we can define, but most of the things that we do, we don’t have names for,” he said. “And there’s a good reason for that: It’s because human beings actually have a generative model of behavior built into them. But I don’t have a generative model of Images in my head. If I want to explain to you what I’m seeing, I can’t project it out of my eyeballs, and I’m not a good enough artist to draw it for you. So I have to use words, and we have lots of words to describe the visual world. But if I want to describe a particular movement to you, I don’t have to describe it in words: I just do it for you, and then your motor system sees me and is active in understanding it. And so we, I think it’s a biological reason, a neuroscientific reason, that we don’t have words for all our movement.”
This may sound a bit philosophical, but the result is that text-based prompt systems for images are fundamentally limited in how they can be controlled. The hundreds of technology and art terms used every day on set and in post-production are also inadequate.
Chavez Olmos noted that, as a Mexican, he had few opportunities to get involved in the film industry because all the money and expertise was concentrated in Los Angeles. But he said AI expertise (and demand) is more widely distributed. “I had to leave Mexico because I didn’t have opportunities there; now I see that there are the same opportunities for people who don’t have to go abroad to do it.”
Black, however, fears that sudden access to these processes could have unintended consequences in the short term.
“You can give someone a powerful car, but that doesn’t make them a Formula One driver, right? It’s a bit like what we have now. People talk about it, everyone will make movies. They’ll be s—–, honestly,” he said. “The question of democratization is exactly what [Chavez Olmos] said, and the power is that maybe some new voice will get an opportunity that otherwise wouldn’t have. But the number of people making really good movies is still going to be small, in my opinion.”
“The real revolution,” he continued, “the real power of what we’re seeing in AI is that we’re going to see a whole new kind of entertainment, and I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like. I predict it’s going to be somewhere between a video game, a movie, and real life. The movie industry is a passive storytelling: I sit there and observe, it’s like theater or a podcast. I’m the passive recipient of the entertainment. But in our daily lives, we tell each other stories, we chat about what we did on the weekend, and so on. And this is a very active interactive storytelling.”
Before that happens, though, Chavez Olmos said he expects a more traditional acceptance curve for AI-generated images and actors.
“I think it’s going to have the same reaction that we had when we saw the first ‘Final Fantasy’ movie or ‘The Polar Express’: something’s not going to be there yet, but people are going to start accepting these movies,” he said. “And instead of a completely CG movie, it’s going to be a completely AI movie, which I think we’ll see later this year. I think people are going to go beyond, like, ‘OK, this is AI,’ people are going to accept it.”
“The important thing,” Black said separately, “and Pixar has taught us this very clearly: It’s all about the story. It’s all about the connection to the characters. It’s all about the heart. And if the movie has heart, it doesn’t matter if the characters are AI, I think people will enjoy the movie,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they won’t want human actors. There’s a thrill in knowing that they’re real humans like us, but much better than us, to see a human at the top of their game, it inspires all of us and I don’t think that’s going to go away.”
