The reason most creative media is good is because you see the vision of a creative team or individual.

If the vision is diluted due to lack of control afforded by AI tools, then the tools won’t be used.

Many times in Hollywood have we seen directors spend unjustifiable amounts of money in the pursuit of creative control.

Hand camera tracking a dinosaur in Jurassic Park, developing a novel diffraction algorithm for THE ABYSS, hand-drawing 3-Dimensional computer animations for 2001, creating an entire scale model practically for a single fight scene in LOTR.

AI allows you to get anything. The best movies are a direct reflection of a particular vision. AI can’t provide this and I see no way to solve it.

A natural response is - well directors already outsource some creative control to VFX artists so why not to a machine instead.

Because an artist can control everything. Even if the artist is prompting a model, at the end of the day an artist can drill right down to the tooling itself (photoshop for example) and exactly achieve the vision.

I don’t see AI achieving this granularity while maintaining its utility. It’s a sliding scale of trading utility as a time saving device for control.

If you lean too far to the control side, well you might as well fire up photoshop. If you lean too much to the utility side, you sacrifice creative control.

When looked at under this lens the utility of AI generation is actually limited as it solves a non existent problem. One can think of it as an additional piece of tooling for use only as a generational tool where there is less need for control, such as for background characters.

The team at Red Barrels, for example, train a local model on their own artwork to automatically generate variant textures for map generation. Things such as this. No need to be doom and gloom about this stuff.