alt Hacker NewsThe Blair Witch Project was a (surprise) creative masterpiece. It worked with very limited technology to create a very clever plot which was paired with an amazing marketing. The combination of which the world hadn’t seen before. It took some creative geniuses to peace the Blair Witch Project together.
Generative AI will never produce an experience like that. I know never is a long time, but I’m still gonna call it. You simply can’t produce such a fresh idea by gathering a bunch of data and interpolating.
Maybe someday enough AI will be good enough to create shorter or longer videos with some dialog and even a coherent story (though I doubt it), but it won‘t be fresh or creative. And we humans will at best enjoy it for its stupidity or sloppiness. Not for its cleverness or artistry.
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I'm suspicious of most claims of AI growth, but I think screenwriting is an area where there's real potential. There are many screenplays out there, many movie plots are very similar to each other, and human raters could help with training. And it's worth noting that the top four highest grossing movies right now are all sequels or film adaptations. It's not a huge leap to imagine an LLM in the future that's been trained on movie writing being able to create a movie script when given the Wicked musical. https://www.imdb.com/chart/boxoffice/
I'm thinking more of a Gibsonian 'Garage Kubrick'. A solitary auteur (or small team) that produces the film alone perhaps without even touching a camera, generating all the footage using AI (in the novel the auteur creates all the footage through photo/found-footage manipulation, or at least thats all we see in text). The script will probably be human written, I'm not talking about an AI producing a film from scratch, rather a film being produced using AI to create all the visuals and audio.
It's a tool. The cleverness and artistry comes from the humans, not from the tools they use.
The AI isn't creating the fresh ideas. People are.
Why does the idea need to be generated by AI? Let people generate the ideas, the AI will help execute. I think soon (3-5 years) a determined person with no video skills will be able to put together a compelling movie (maybe a short). And that is massive. AI doesn’t have to do everything. Like all tech, it’s a productivity tool.