- it can be automated. CGI still required a lot of human work.
- AI generated content requires way less skill. You had to train a lot to become good at CGI. We already see people getting Stable-Diffusion-proficient in a few hours.
- in the 90, CGI was introduced gently, through selected medias. AI content has access to the full internet right out of the box.
- producing CGI required a lot of hardware, but with SaaS, AI will be available to anybody.
- CGI was first exposed to professionals, who produced for the public. AI is already been used by hobbyists, and soon the public, directly.
- CGI was mostly about visual techs, but AI generated content can be applied to text, sound, molecules, basically any structured data.
In summary, the very nature and context in which AI generated content is taking form means the impact will be larger, stronger, and way more intense.
People are hardly capable at dealing with CGI intelligently, even after 20 years. They trust photos and videos a lot, and react strongly to them. Even when they know they are fake, like in a movie, some emotions will forge they judgement like if it were real.
AI generated content? Forget about it. People are not ready. The emotional impact it's going to have will make you feel like the cancel culture was a whisper in the wind.
I was underwhelmed by the last decade of AI dev, but 2022 is for AI what 2000 was for the dotcom revolution.
Question is, what the equivalent of domain name for AI, something cheap you can buy to sale later?
I think it's still comparable if you view it as "Generative AI is to CGI what CGI was to practical effects".
- CGI can be automated, practical effects required a lot of human work
- CGI content requires less skill. You had to train a lot to become good at sculpting / painting / makeup / carpentry / stunts / whatever to become good at practical effects. We already see people getting $MODELLING_PROGRAM proficient in a few weeks.
- producing practical effects required a lot of hardware, material and tools but with CGI you just need a powerful computer. CGI will soon be available to anybody as computers become cheaper
Your last two points are probably only true for AI generated content but there are still some barriers to people setting up their own AI models (technical know how, hardware) and there are certainly limitations on what type of content can be produced (you need a big and reliable dataset of examples).
Overall I think this will have a similar impact but probably more widely distributed in both terms of access and impact.
Having worked in CG for several decades, this is a pretty misleading summary. CG takes a lot of manual work, and there are other reasons and benefits to using CG than how much manual work it takes. It’s often less work than practical but not always. There are certain kinds of things that can be automated (with a lot of manual setup work!) but most of what you see in movies also involves lots and lots of manual work for every single shot. It’s not unlike how machines get used to automate certain parts of practical effects work, using for example, compressors, electrical rigging, vehicles, pneumatics & hydraulics, gas & explosives, etc..
> We already see people getting $MODELLING_PROGRAM proficient in a few weeks.
This is similar to saying we already see people getting C++ proficient in a few weeks. Some people can write very useful & interesting programs within a few weeks, but nobody understands all of it by then, and nobody’s getting a high paid career on just a few weeks of noodling. It takes a long time to understand all the ins and outs, and independently it takes a long time to understand complementary computer science fundamentals. Same is true for Maya, Blender, Houdini, etc.. Someone might have something cool to show after a few weeks, but nobody is ready to make a CG movie by then, and nobody is landing the good jobs in CG. (By “nobody” I’m talking about statistical relevance, not that it has never happened.)
Another reason a few weeks is insufficient for landing good jobs is that the CG industry is highly competitive; you have to be better than the guy who’s gone to art school and played in Blender for a few years if you want that job.
True, I just think that because of all the leverages in place for AI content generation, the effects will be orders or magnitude bigger. But it's just speculation, let's get the pop corn and watch the show.
> AI generated content? Forget about it. People are not ready. The emotional impact it's going to have will make you feel like the cancel culture was a whisper in the wind.
Forget about it? People are not ready? When has that ever been a blocker? This is like a new era of 80s computing where some people will get a home computer and their dork kids will dork on it and produce some unbelievable stuff in the decades to come. I'm scared, slightly optimistic, but what is available right now as commodity, there ain't no stopping it.
Sub-textual thought experiment: how big can Hugging Face get?
Can they achieve a Monopoly on Art Production into the Future?
To build their moat: they build the largest supercomputer for image training, acquire the largest image training set (~10B), and then institute an IDF Unit 8200 style Garin Lotam recruitment effort of the best artistic talent on earth to feed new forms into the machine, and everyone else simply forgets they ever knew how to make art in the first place as the drawing prompt becomes as ubiquitous as the google search box ;)
It will be much bigger, because:
- it can be automated. CGI still required a lot of human work.
- AI generated content requires way less skill. You had to train a lot to become good at CGI. We already see people getting Stable-Diffusion-proficient in a few hours.
- in the 90, CGI was introduced gently, through selected medias. AI content has access to the full internet right out of the box.
- producing CGI required a lot of hardware, but with SaaS, AI will be available to anybody.
- CGI was first exposed to professionals, who produced for the public. AI is already been used by hobbyists, and soon the public, directly.
- CGI was mostly about visual techs, but AI generated content can be applied to text, sound, molecules, basically any structured data.
In summary, the very nature and context in which AI generated content is taking form means the impact will be larger, stronger, and way more intense.
People are hardly capable at dealing with CGI intelligently, even after 20 years. They trust photos and videos a lot, and react strongly to them. Even when they know they are fake, like in a movie, some emotions will forge they judgement like if it were real.
AI generated content? Forget about it. People are not ready. The emotional impact it's going to have will make you feel like the cancel culture was a whisper in the wind.
I was underwhelmed by the last decade of AI dev, but 2022 is for AI what 2000 was for the dotcom revolution.
Question is, what the equivalent of domain name for AI, something cheap you can buy to sale later?