Is it smart to pick a path that's probably not going to be appreciated anymore? One that's probably going to lead to unemployment?

> It's perfectly possible for an engineer to be both a fantastic engineer, and bad at using AI

In this era, AI native skills are the major factor, alongside system design, which define who's fantastic. As an example, deep programming language or framework knowledge is a commodity now and not meaningful as a skill difference.

That entirely the wrong point to take away from my comment.

I think Hollywood is in for a rough era. The disruption is happening at break neck speeds.

Hollywood is already in a rough era but it’s because they can’t create original human stories any more.

This tech won’t change anything.

Yeah, during most blockbuster movies lately all I can think is: "All pixels, no plot."

Project Hail Mary was largely real sets and a puppet.

They used a puppet to play Rocky? Was not sure how they did it, don’t think I would really care, but that’s cool.

They used a puppet on-set for in-camera reference but most of what you saw on-screen in most shots was CGI. I wrote more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48198851

Did they film on location, tho?

Was it? Hollywood has been caught lying about that to seem more authentic before. https://www.redsharknews.com/why-do-movies-still-insist-ther...

There are tons of behind the scenes pictures and video of the Rocky puppet being used on set, and Andy Weir talks in interviews about how almost no CG was used to enhance the puppet. I guess it's possible to fake all that, but it's a lot of lie to cover up.

Andy Weir is a wonderful novelist and was truthfully relating his understanding but he's not a VFX person.

I didn't see the quote you did but he probably confused the fact that PHM used physical elements in place of some CGI in certain scenes and the separate fact that a realistic physical puppet was used on set for reference. Some parts of that puppet are seen on-screen in some shots but most of the creature in most shots was CGI or CG enhanced (which looked great thanks to the ideal in-camera puppet reference it replaced). I explained more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48198851

They were caught editing the behind the scenes videos themselves to remove bluescreens. You can't trust BTS footage to be 100% real anymore.

I agree PHM was great (and I loved the book before the movie). But as a VFX person, please be careful not to buy into the currently popular studio PR line: "it's all real, almost no CGI". Media and influencers love this line and often unknowingly muddle the studio's very carefully crafted press release wording into outright lies by paraphrasing and making assumptions. The problem is these aren't just white lies, they deprive some very talented VFX artists from getting credit for amazing work.

About the misunderstood puppet: A real Rocky puppet was indeed used on set (actually a few different puppets) and some of the puppet is sometimes seen on camera. But most of the puppet was digitally replaced with CGI or CGI-enhanced in most of the scenes. However, using a much more realistic puppet on set is indeed notable but not because the character wasn't CGI. The puppet is worth talking about because it directly enabled the final mostly-CGI character be really good CGI. It's good because shooting the physical puppet gave the VFX character animators an ideal reference that's "grounded" in the physical reality of the set, camera and lens. The subtle interplay of light, shadow, texture and specularity in the CGI are all grounded in reality. The puppet also let the actor interact with something closer to reality. It's a wonderful technique and should be celebrated instead of obfuscated to promote a "No CGI!" falsehood that trends well on social media.

Also, PHM did use real sets (like most movies) and they were able to avoid using green screen for some of the ship exteriors but those backgrounds were still digitally replaced with CGI rendered elements, they just didn't use green screen to pull the matte. But on social media, "No green screen" (true) was conflated into "No CGI" (false). Instead of green screen they used a black backdrop with careful lighting and some hand rotoscoping to extract the digital mattes. Doing it this way had the advantage of not needing to digitally remove green spill on reflective surfaces by hand and it saved money over doing a StageCraft virtual volume at that size. Done well, a green screen could have produced the exact same shot but it would have cost more and taken longer.

But influencers and media are unintentionally perpetuating "No CGI" myths instead of focusing on the actually interesting, more nuanced reality. Using more and better physically grounded references on-set IS a breakthrough that helps turn bad CGI into great CGI. Another example is Top Gun where "artfully misleading but technically true wording" in studio press releases grew into outright falsehoods online. Tom Cruise was truthful in saying that he was flown in a jet right alongside other REAL jets doing simulated dog-fighting. The lost nuance is that all the other jets Cruise flew with in those dog fight scenes were old Soviet trainer jets that look quite different and are much smaller than real MIGs. So the trainer jets were entirely replaced by CGI MIGs in post and are never seen in the final film. And we couldn't tell because the digitally removed jets provided ideal grounded reference for the CGI pixels that replaced them. And that's how we ended up with several famous YouTubers proclaiming "These are REAL jets, not CGI!" while showing 100% CGI jets. Same with Wicked and the CGI tulips. The fact that Wicked used thousands of specially grown tulips on-set (true) was confused into proclaiming "ALL these tulips are real, no CGI!" (false) while showing a scene where >90% of the tulips were CGI.

Theres a Steve Jobs quote about this

At one point the only way to know if something is real or by a major US tech company is nudity.

you would watch a movie generated with the sterility of an LLM?

AI is already in a bunch of creative workflows. Just look at modern Photoshop. Selecting and hitting delete has AI infill for the background replacement.

Creates can these video gen AI in various ways. There are some youtube channels of people using these in creative workflows that are really impressive, from mocap replacement, character insertion, background replacement, changing camera angle in post, animating/inserting characters from character boards, animated between stills generated in traditional methods, etc. It's not just "prompt and generate". It can be, because it's easy, but it also doesn't have to be. It's a tool.

I do wonder how studios are working around consistent human faces, it's a problem on almost every discussion forum I have read for AI videos and not something that seems to be solved yet.

Do you have any examples of those creative workflows that have made it into Hollywood for example?

i do photo restoration as part of my research (bizarre place to be for a math undergrad), so i do think AI is a lifesaver for very small adjustments that would be tedious or subpar otherwise. i just disagree that its creative output is of value (which isn't the case you made, anyway).

I think Hollywood's obsession with unnecessary sex scenes[0] is the #1 reason I have been watching less and less movies. So yeah, probably.

[0] e.g. Don't Look Up

> Don't Look Up

That was just a bad, mildy entertaining movie.

Weirdly phrased, but yes, I would watch a movie generated with an LLM by a person passionate about the movie they're creating.

I am for decades watching movies generated with the sterility of CGI

Sure; why not? It has to be better than some of the absolute garbage that's out on the various streaming services today; right?

god help us if we have to choose between the two );

I’m willing to condition long duration copyright on streamers being able to implement mature content edits.

Have you seen the past dozen or so Marvel movies?

i've tried not to

Me? No. My kids? I think they already have. I don’t allow YouTube in our house, but they for sure watch slop with friends.

At the moment the duration of each shot is a major limitation. When that limitation gets solved is when we'll see actual disruption.

Average shot length is down to something like 3 seconds in modern cinema. That's a pretty low bar.

Hollywood is using this tech already. Storyboarding and previs work has already fully become driven by AI tools.

It sounds like you're championing labor using ai. But capital will also use it and leverage it more.

There's no mechanism for only labor to exploit a technology, apart from common ownership at a world level. Achieving this is left as an exercise to the ambitious.

Putting it politely, I think you may have xenophobic tendency. And for all your buster, I suggest you work on having a more sane world view.

Some people are playing the global optimization game; a world where anyone can have any (production grade) software they want.

AI "disciplining" is arguably much simpler, easier and cheaper.

Low pay, to be fair.

I'm seeing this in some teams I am aware of. It is usually a 3-4 people team working very closely. They're not using gas-town or such, but are typically creating abstraction after abstraction for reviews and assimilating changes (usually with a claude 20x account). They are human in the loop until the system stabilizes and needs no further AI.

It was like science fiction becoming aware of this pattern, but as the OP says, this is indeed happening. Going to change the shape of tech careers for sure. my 2c.

BTW the skill to develop to direct your career towards this: build deep understanding of one part of a domain, develop thinking in abstractions and systems, follow TDD in all agentic dev (converts probabilistic to deterministic).

Do not get hung up? Sounds like English ESL rewrote some insights for language. Content > Form.

At this point its much more polite to write badly than use an LLM to rewrite your content. The form tells me you do not care to interact with me in a genuine way.

I am going to ignore the form comments -- I guess I am not sure how I feel about being called an LLM (good or bad ?), not sure only time will tell. If LLMs turn out to be the turd of the universe -- bad or maybe good ? -- Emphasis on the '--' for comic interlude