> 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.
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.
[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1563853/the-640k-quote...
[2] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/jeffrey-k...