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Jeffrey Katzenberg: AI Will Take 90% of Artist Jobs on Animated Films In Just Three Years::Former DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg said AI will take 90 percent of the artist jobs on animated movies within three years.

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[–] agitatedpotato@lemmy.world 79 points 10 months ago (2 children)

What kind of backwards world has AI becoming animators and screenwriters while actual people slave away at jobs that slowly kill them?

[–] Pxtl@lemmy.ca 96 points 10 months ago (1 children)

How did we end up in a future where robots create the art and tell the stories while I still have to fold my own laundry?

[–] agitatedpotato@lemmy.world 32 points 10 months ago (2 children)

We all must have been proper asshats in a past life or something, because it's getting ridiculous even by dystopia standards.

[–] z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I mean if you consider those that don't reincarnate are those that achieved enlightenment (and didn't choose to come back to teach how to become enlightened), then only the unenlightened remain in the next generation.

Reincarnation is the flow of consciousness, enlightenment is a filter.

[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

"The reincarnation brain-drain and how it could cost you your job: Tonight at 9."

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)
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[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 55 points 10 months ago (5 children)

For companies that pump out crappy content maybe.

[–] CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.world 35 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, but this is basically what the biggest studios will do, and they will be successful at it with certain audiences. It will become the Kraft cheese or Oscar Meyer hotdog of the movie industry: processed shit that is barely what it says it is on paper, but somehow highly consumable to millions.

Avant garde, indie, extreme low budget, etc will all find a surge, tho, since a lot of people will want "nicer", less processed movies.

This is all highly speculative, ofc.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yea.

I think it's helpful to look out for the ways in which this sort of AI disruption won't actually be a disruption but instead a continuation of a trend and impetus that already exists.

Spitting out crappy cookie cutter films that are optimised to sell tickets as cheaply as possible without giving a fuck about the industry ... that's so much of Hollywood. Why wouldn't they give it a shot with AI. Same with the music industry.

[–] balancedchaos@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Music has been predominantly bland for 20 years or more, in the mainstream channels. It's depressing.

And I want to say I just got older and so mainstream music isn't for me, but... it's bland. I'm not like older people aghast over Marilyn Manson. I'm older and fucking bored with how lame music is now.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That captures the difference so well.

It used to be that older people thought new music was evil or monstrous or too abrasive to count as music.

Now, they find it too boring to listen too.

If you didn’t see it, Beato did a nice video on how the music industry went to shit starting in the 90s once all the stations were monopolised leading to everything trying to appease only a few people’s tastes.

[–] balancedchaos@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

Oh yeah. I haven't seen that video and thanks for the recommendation, but I lived through Clear Channel and the rest scarfing up all my local radio stations and turning them to shit just as the internet was beginning to really catch on. They made it easy for the iPod revolution to happen, playing the same garbage on every station.

[–] QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

I’m not sure this is true. IIRC the majority of frames in Across the Spider-Verse were AI generated, and that movie is hailed as the pinnacle of animation right now.

[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

A lot of work in animation is drudgery. Sure, this probably won't replace your writers, storyboard artists, model developers, background designers, etc. But VFX, in betweeners, post processing? Just look at the progress in the last year.

I've been using DALLE 3 for the last couple of months to do character Illustrations for my tabletop campaign. Sure, a lot of the results aren't great, but it takes me 10 minutes of fiddling with prompts and 5 minutes tops of post-processing to get really good results that would take a professional artist hours, if not days. I've seen some pretty impressive forays into animation as well on the research side of things.

3 years is a really long time in this field. I won't be surprised if all a studio needs at that point is a handful of artists to design models, backgrounds, and key frames to flesh out a script, then another handful to refine and polish.

[–] Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Yes! AI subtools added to existing creative suites will be a huge part of the problem once they get good enough. What currently takes a varied team will be done by one artist, with AI filling in the gaps and adding the polish that the others would have covered.

For example, that recent AI art scandal with Magic the Gathering was apparently due to the artist using Photoshop's generative fill to speed up the process, which is why Wizards denied it was AI art at first.

[–] M500@lemmy.ml 3 points 10 months ago

I think big companies will have a mix of both.

I think a big job for the remaining artists will be to tweak or improve what the ai makes and then iterate on it.

[–] tsonfeir@lemm.ee 1 points 10 months ago

Crappy content still employs people.

[–] EdibleFriend@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Scripts? Yeah. I doubt AI is ever gonna crank out a good script.

Animation? Look where we are already with AI. You really think we are that far off from quality animation from prompts?

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

As if the Hallmark Channel ever needed more than one script

[–] neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 33 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Read the article.

Machine learning and interpretative output are tools; just like the automobile, the spreadsheet and photoshop.

The introduction of new tools means there will be fewer people manually doing the things that machines can do more efficiently. The introduction of digital spreadsheets decimated the market for paper bookkeepers, but the need for accountants (people who could utilize the new tools) exploded.

I don’t know enough about modern animation production to speak authoritatively about this, but I’m imagining Katzenberg is talking about jobs like inbetweeners and other kinds of admittedly skilled labor that can be lazily farted out by machines. No QA for lazy productions, QA and varying levels of tweaks for high production value work, and all-by-hand for only the most rare auteur works. And most animated works are in that “lazy production” category. It’s gonna look like shit, everyone who cares will notice, but most of the people buying won’t care.

What this also means is that money will stop flowing to high-manual-effort works. The real creative, ground breaking stuff is going to come from either people utilizing the new tools in new ways, or old established artists who refuse to change (Miyazaki, Bill Plympton, Yuri Norstein & Francheska Yarbusova, etc).

[–] curiousaur@reddthat.com 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm seeing this in my field heavily right now. I'm a software engineer, and using the AI tools, each senior engineer is essentially acting like an entire engineering team now. The tasks that would be delegated to junior engineers are being done faster and more cheaply by the AI, enabling me to focus more on the big picture architecture and actual business logic.

Who this is really hurting is anyone trying to break into the field right now, or was a recently laid off junior engineer.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Who this is really hurting is anyone trying to break into the field right now, or was a recently laid off junior engineer.

In the long term, this is going to impact the industry as a whole. Firing all your junior reps and making every job a managerial position that requires 15 years of experience means you're going to run out of qualified professionals inside a decade.

The WGA Strikers had this complaint wrt "Mini-Rooms" for script writing. Parsing the script writing process from the production process and reducing the team to a single script editor means you lose all those junior talents who are supposed to matriculate into production and direction and senior writer positions over time. It represents the death of the industry, by way of films like "Rebel Moon" that are just vague jumbled composites of other movies.

Using AI is akin to dosing your firm in a strong acid, dissolving the integrity of the thing you're supposed to be facilitating in hopes of making it lighter and faster.

[–] curiousaur@reddthat.com 4 points 10 months ago

You're absolutely correct. The same issue will arise in every industry AI is used in. It's going to make the barrier to entry even larger than it was before AI, and folks were already joking about entry level jobs requiring 5 years experience. In software it's starting to look like someone will need to get to today's senior engineer level of skill before they can land a job. Good thing our schools are keeping up. /s

[–] thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

if any of those names survive long enough to be relevant for all that. the lag on corporate adaptation of new tech is getting faster, but it's still going to be a number a years i think until we start to see any real saturation of this tech in that space. i doubt Miyazaki can wait that long...

[–] neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 10 months ago

That’s a fair point. I was invoking those names as contemporary examples of that caliber of creator. I feel like we’re always going to have a rolling cadre of seasoned top tier talent with the clout to make “we’re doing it THIS WAY” choices. I like Masaaki Yuasa for the next generation of those folks (even if he never really makes anything else himself anymore and just and guides Science Saru).

[–] rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world 29 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I look forward to the movie in which Shrek has eight fingers on one hand and four on the other, two completely different and incompatible ears, and three rows of teeth while the title screen says "SHROOEOORSHWZECL"

[–] turkalino@lemmy.yachts 18 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Real Headline: "Billionaire who Previously Led Massive Failure Wants AI to take 90% of Movie Production Jobs so that he can Have More Money to Spend on Massive Failures"

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

You're going to see more movies like "The Sound of Freedom" take over the box office, entirely because the alternative is some goopy AI-generated schlock film about a fish that clips through walls and talks in Michael Jackson voice-snippets.

[–] luthis@lemmy.nz 16 points 10 months ago (2 children)

In three years, 90% of animated films are going to be generic crap churned out for a quick buck.

[–] porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 17 points 10 months ago

Very optimistic to think ten times more animated films will be good in just three years.

[–] ExLisper@linux.community 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Unlike Frozen 3, Toy Story 5, Shrek 3, Kung Fu Panda 4 and live action Lion King we have today. So creative.

[–] luthis@lemmy.nz 4 points 10 months ago

Toy Story 5

There's a Toy Story 5?? I haven't even seen the third one yet. Or any of the other ones you mentioned..

[–] zipzoopaboop@lemmynsfw.com 9 points 10 months ago

People still listen to Mr quibi?

[–] gardylou@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

Ghibli >> Disney

[–] JettisonJoe@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

All the more reason to cancel streaming subscriptions.