First, labor laws isn’t the answer to technology. It would be like regulating the camera because it put portrait artists out of work, or steam drills because it puts tunnel diggers. Art improved dramatically in a short period of time with the advent of the camera, became reflective of what the camera couldn’t do - reflect the nature of humanity back to us.
Second, if you’ve done much with generative imagery you know the raw experience is difficult to control to a specific visual outcome. Fine tuning, in painting, image to image, control nets, all these things help. But it’s easy to make something stunning, but difficult to make your vision come out from the machine. It’s a tool, like any other. It’ll require rethinking what’s better to do with generative ai and what’s better to shoot directly. But direction, cinematography, and acting are about extreme control to achieve a specific outcome. Generative AI doesn’t help that. However what I’ve seen it really do well is take imagery and add detail and nuance, interpolate scenes, and other feats that will likely make post production much more powerful, requiring fewer reshoots, etc. Creating CGI will be simpler, especially bootstrapping, and l will bet it’ll be extremely heavily used preproduction to create visual story boarding.
But completely replace humans ? The camera didn’t replace artists, and if you’ve seen a tunnel boring, there’s no lack of humans there. A strong back isn’t as important as a strong engineering mind, but that’s a pressure on labor that’s been building for centuries.
These new tools won’t change the dynamic, it’ll just up the game.
Second, if you’ve done much with generative imagery you know the raw experience is difficult to control to a specific visual outcome. Fine tuning, in painting, image to image, control nets, all these things help. But it’s easy to make something stunning, but difficult to make your vision come out from the machine. It’s a tool, like any other. It’ll require rethinking what’s better to do with generative ai and what’s better to shoot directly. But direction, cinematography, and acting are about extreme control to achieve a specific outcome. Generative AI doesn’t help that. However what I’ve seen it really do well is take imagery and add detail and nuance, interpolate scenes, and other feats that will likely make post production much more powerful, requiring fewer reshoots, etc. Creating CGI will be simpler, especially bootstrapping, and l will bet it’ll be extremely heavily used preproduction to create visual story boarding.
But completely replace humans ? The camera didn’t replace artists, and if you’ve seen a tunnel boring, there’s no lack of humans there. A strong back isn’t as important as a strong engineering mind, but that’s a pressure on labor that’s been building for centuries.
These new tools won’t change the dynamic, it’ll just up the game.