"Or you can learn to read and write in Latin and be a practicing member of the clergy."
Everyone should have the means of being able to express the ideas in their heads visually in front of others. It shouldn't require arcane and difficult to use tools. Nor should it cost millions of dollars and require a studio apparatus to tell stories to an audience.
Pretty soon creating worlds, filming movies, and sculpting images and three dimensional forms will be accessible to everyone.
What do you mean by “should”? Everyone does and always has had the right to express themselves visually with the best tools available. But why shouldn’t it require difficult to use tools or cost a lot? That depends entirely on what ideas you’re trying to express and what tools exist, does it not?
Blockbuster movies will never get significantly cheaper, no matter what tools we invent. They will spend as much or more money on using the new tools to make more grandiose movies that individual people have no hope of doing themselves. There’s already a hundred year history of this happening, despite the tools having always been accessible to everyone.
I think this Gaussian splatting tool is great, and I’m in favor of forward progress in imaging tools, and I work in this field. But where is the line between having accessible tools, and putting time and effort into your craft to make something that’s high quality, or telling a story with images that are personal and new? And if you’re really talking about AI (even though this Gaussian splat tool isn’t really AI), where is the line between being able to express your ideas effortlessly and stealing the means to do that from artists who had to put it effort to produce the content that trained the AI?
> Everyone does and always has had the right to express themselves visually with the best tools available.
The fact is that not everyone can do so.
What about an elderly grandparent that wants to paint their hometown as they remember growing up? Do we expect them to spend years learning illustration before they can show their grandchildren?
> But why shouldn’t it require difficult to use tools or cost a lot?
Would "640K" [1] be enough for you? What about if computers were still only housed in DoD facilities and in universities? Too giant, arcane, and expensive for you to use?
> Blockbuster movies will never get significantly cheaper, no matter what tools we invent.
The industry thinks otherwise [2].
I, for one, would like to tell an epic sci-fi adventure story without needing Disney's budget. I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on indie film production and it's incredibly expensive and time consuming.
While I don't have time to learn Blender, I do know how I want my explosions to look. Why should I have to outsource to someone else to do the VFX? Someone that might not deliver my work in time? (Read: waiting on post has been a serious hang-up for me in the past and caused me to miss several festival deadlines.)
> There’s already a hundred year history of this happening, despite the tools having always been accessible to everyone.
No, the reason this happens is because large budget films are predictably bankable and wind up eating up all of the screen distribution real estate. There's a reason you don't want to launch your movie opposite The Avengers or another tent pole feature.
The most ROI comes from breakout low budget successes, but those are harder to gamble on.
> I work in this field
Same.
> But where is the line between having accessible tools, and putting time and effort into your craft to make something that’s high quality, or telling a story with images that are personal and new?
Why not let the users and the artists show us what they'll make rather than predicting they can't do a good job? I know dozens of artists, myself included, using these tools incredibly effectively.
> being able to express your ideas effortlessly
This is probably the source of our disagreement. An effortless tool doesn't mean works of art don't take effort.
> stealing the means to do that from artists who had to put it effort to produce the content that trained the AI
This argument will be moot soon. Adobe has full rights to all of their training data. Soon we'll have enormous synthetic datasets from Unreal Engine and mechanized turn table photo rooms. Other organizations will follow.
Hehehe, the industry does not think otherwise, Jeffrey Katzenberg is just trying to sell you AI in that article, he’s raising funds for his AI startup. He wants you to believe you can make your own movie so you buy his startup’s software. Of course he’s exaggerating, his quotes in that article are silly and he knows it, so don’t believe everything you read. I’ve worked for Jeffrey Katzenberg making movies, and you don’t have to believe me, but I’m telling you: they will NEVER get significantly cheaper, regardless of what AI can do. There are several very good reasons why, and one of them is because it doesn’t make sense to spend 1 million on production and 50 million on marketing, another is because the studio next door will make a better movie spending more money. Music licensing and celebrity salaries are yet more reasons. It might take some industry experience to understand this, but people made the exact same claims about CG 30 years ago that effects would cut production budgets, and the exact opposite has happened: they use more effects and higher quality effects, but movie budgets have only gone steadily up, not down.
It’s true not everyone has the skills to make a movie. Why “should” they? You didn’t answer the question. I don’t expect people without any skills and without the will to learn to do anything, and that includes not expecting them to make movies. I don’t follow your point about 640K and the DoD, nobody is talking about making tools artificially difficult. Modern tools still require years of learning to paint or make movies, AI hasn’t changed that yet, and even if it does it will only raise the bar such that people with skills continue to produce things much better than people without skills, low effort art is going to remain crappy, same as it ever was.
"You can make a movie on your phone, create a song, edit images."
These are 2010-era tools. We're modernizing.
You wouldn't ask musicians today to stick to only pre-synthesizer, pre-DAW era tools to make their music. You wouldn't ask illustrators to ditch their tablets force them to mix their own cerulean unless that's what they wanted to do.
The tools that are coming are going to be fantastic and they're going to enable artists to do wild new things. That isn't subtractive, it's additive. There's more space to explore.
New tools don't even prevent folks from making music and media the old fashioned way: there are still people shooting on film to this day. And there's a vibrant community that embraces anachronistic tools to make new art.
I'm looking forward to a world where teenagers cut their teeth on making their own Marvel movies instead of just watching them. We'll have so many young Scorseses before they even graduate.
Current generative AI isn't additive. It's generative. That's about half of the problem. DAWs don't revert your changes back to means, but genAI always do, being a statistical model. The roughly other half is that the output is inexplicably bad, not always noticeable to everyone but often obvious to artists and connoisseurs, so connoisseurs can't promote themselves into artists by use of AI.
The almost violent anti-AI sentiment seen among art cohort is sometimes hard to understand to subgroups of tech literates without enough training epochs in human generative image data(especially the kind prevalent on the Internet), and I would understand that without grasp of rather subjective quality issues it could indeed look like an artificially incited luddite conspiracy.
Once someone makes an AI that would be additive and outputs entertainment worthy, then the "luddites" will change, they must. Until then, it's just a technically remarkable white noise generator.
Everyone should have the means of being able to express the ideas in their heads visually in front of others. It shouldn't require arcane and difficult to use tools. Nor should it cost millions of dollars and require a studio apparatus to tell stories to an audience.
Pretty soon creating worlds, filming movies, and sculpting images and three dimensional forms will be accessible to everyone.