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.
What kind of backwards world has AI becoming animators and screenwriters while actual people slave away at jobs that slowly kill them?
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?
We all must have been proper asshats in a past life or something, because it’s getting ridiculous even by dystopia standards.
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.
“The reincarnation brain-drain and how it could cost you your job: Tonight at 9.”
Other dystopias be like:
That’s is a very Indian Caste system way of looking at things. The system the wealthy there use to exploit others.
It’s not just about wealth it’s pseudo racial and actually very interesting to look into, I’d highly recommend it.
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For companies that pump out crappy content maybe.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel the same way about modern music but I can’t tell if it’s the music or just me getting old.
Here’s why I think it’s not just us getting older: every generation in the past would look at new music and be freaked out and shocked… we’re bored.
You seem shocked by how boring it is, old man.
Get off my lawn!
I know this chain specified mainstream channels at the start, but I notice these kind of sentiments about modern music in general and I can’t help but disagree. There’s lots of really interesting modern music out there if you’re not just looking in wide appeal places. I also think it’s weird to use shock as a metric. Any internet generation is going to have a much higher threshold for being shocked. And even then it still does happen to some extent think Lil Nas X’s Montero or WAP.
Yeah, there is interesting music in certain areas, but not nearly as much as there used to be. I have to sift through a lot of nonsense to get to the good stuff.
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.
Maybe im weird then, because that pseudo stop motion looks like shit
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.
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.
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.
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?
As if the Hallmark Channel ever needed more than one script
Scripts could happen, but you’d need a hell of a lot more training data than we have now though. There are like 700,000-800,000 movies and maybe a few thousand of those are reasonably popular. You could probably make something that reasonably graded scripts without someone having to read all of them.
Animation is getting damn close. AI can generate the set completely and with the latest changes in image stability you can puppet ai art with generic actors. We’re still lacking style though. One of the strong pulls in animation are the particulars of a shows art style. You can see one frame of the simpsons, southpark, futurama or bobs burgers and know what you’re watching. it’s still a little early to ask AI to make a full cohesive piece frame to frame
Yeah, I really doubt the scripts are gonna happen. Well…quality scripts. 100% gonna have shitty ai sitcoms and movies. It’s unavoidable.
But yeah…we aren’t anywhere near there yet for animation but this shit is going SO FUCKING FAST. three years from now like the guy in the article said? I could easily see high quality animation being cranked out by AI in that time.
Crappy content still employs people.
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).
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.
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.
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
The back door around that is the consulting agencies. You just work for Deloitte or McKinley for five years, making spreadsheets about databases, and then you’ve got the experience to fake it in through the back door. Alternatively, a lot of firms do actually have new hire crash courses. I worked at a firm that would hire virtually anyone with a bachelor’s degree and put them through a six week coding boot camp. The… quality of the product was… not great. But the volume of people coming through the system and getting “years of experience” was notable.
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…
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).
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”
You joke, but as a cgi animator I’m kind of worried. It is evolving so fast and has gotten many people I know out of their jobs (concept art, photography, illustration) and it seems like is just a matter of time for the techbros to perfect these tools for animation and video.
I’m really really hoping to be wrong.
It’s going to remove MOST people from most jobs. The focus isn’t on maintaining jobs, but instead getting rid of capitalism, setting up a UBI, and public ownership of all AI productivity gains taxed at 100%.
Then you say fuck your job and you animate what you want. IF, you still want to do that.
You are NOT alone in this boat snd neither are artists. Truck drivers, pilots, data analysts, most finance sector jobs, most copy writers, and on and on. Many large corporate farms these days run on tractors that go by GPS and drive themselves…
Bottom line, it’s jobs that are in trouble, which is why capitalism can no longer be allowed to exist.
For the record adding UBI alone is still capitalism, just where people don’t start at 0 currency income.
I know it’s not the actual definition but, to me, capitalism is literally “rule by capital”. Every move we can make that reduces the leverage of the wealthy is progress away from capitalism. Universal single payer healthcare and a significant UBI would be powerful in that regard.
Def. ;) I was just throwing out easy low hanging fruit on a thread.
It wouldn’t stop the system from being capitalist, but it would reduce the power they have over the non-ownership class.
With a UBI people would be better able to say no to their boss and move to another place for another job (if wanted).
Generally I agree, but I seriously doubt the engineering capabilities of those in AI to automate jobs. Show me an AI robot with arms that can fold a wide variety of clothes, or an AI SUV that can safely navigate a wide variety of roads with a bunch of crawling babies and fallen elderly people on the streets and then I’ll be impressed.
But let’s assume I’m wrong, which I’m sure many do, and AI engineers manage to achieve this. I also doubt the plan is to get rid of capitalism. When food scarcity could have easily been solved back in the 70s, capitalists instead created food deserts. When the internet threatened nearly every social infrastructure by breaking down the barriers to information and discourse, capitalists created walled gardens in which only certain kinds of discourse could take place.
The argument amongst tech evangelists and capitalists is that more jobs will always be created out of these new technologies. And i would concur, a bunch of bullshit, non creative, easily automated away jobs will be created, and you WILL be constantly reminded how easily replaceable you are, how worthless you are, by capitalists.
No, there will be more wage slaves, and no middle class, in the future, and there will be no time for creative pursuits.
And you’ll like it too, you’ll embrace Toxic Positivity as the corporate mantra right up until the oceans acidify and the billionaires have long gone underground into their bunkers hoping to repopulate the Earth once the rest if us have all eaten each other.
The Age of Moloch is upon us. All hail our technocrat overlords.
General purpose AI robots will take manual labor, and specialized AI machinery. It already does in many manufacturing plants, just b/c the robots running algorithms and using machine learning don’t look like human arms doesn’t mean they’re not already there and taking jobs.
The current capitalists do NOT plan to get rid of capitalism. They think they’re going to get hundreds of percent productivity gains while cutting the workforce by 90%+. It is society as a whole, and all of us who aren’t the 1% that are going to have to get rid of capitalism. It will have to be French Revolution style.
There won’t be MORE wage slaves, not when there’s no need to pay people at all. That’s rather the point. Capitalism literally can’t work without wage slaves–that’s its end state (where we are now). All the wealth concentrated into the hands of the feudal lords, the peasants toil and the lords take all the spoils. But in this case you’re going to have robotic peasants, and a whole group of have nothings, who are also unemployed with no prospects–usually that equals civil war. Though there’s a chance that you could get the militarized tech and actually win against a peasant revolt now. Huge population reduction, still maintain the quality of life for the lords, and maximum dystopia.
And you’ll like it too, you’ll embrace Toxic Positivity as the corporate mantra right up until the oceans acidify and the billionaires have long gone underground into their bunkers hoping to repopulate the Earth once the rest if us have all eaten each other.
I don’t think you really mean to talk for me. But I can tell you that it’s EVERY survivor’s duty to bury the rich in their bunkers when they go scurry off. ;)
This will be a unique turning point because we’re about to get to where you don’t need the people who normally revolt and fight a civil war to be alive. The capitalists are eyeballing a future without the need for the bulk of the population. I hope we don’t let them get there.
seems like is just a matter of time for the techbros to perfect these tools
Techbros don’t understand art and they are never going to figure it out. These tools will be perfected by artists who choose to embrace them.
Anyone who doesn’t embrace it… yeah those people are in trouble. AI can already do this:
Nobody is going to pay wardrobe, make up, set design, special effects (oh, and not to mention a child. Man are they a headache to work with on a photo set) to create something like that now hat it’s possible to do it quickly and cheaply.
The tech isn’t there yet, but it will be soon. In particular when AI is combined with software like RenderMan which is the current state of the art in photorealistic computer generated graphics. Tom Cruise didn’t fly a jet in Top Gun Mavericks - they rendered all of that in RenderMan.
It’s just so wonderful that we decided that what we really needed to automate away was the creative work people were doing.
Truly a phenomenal turning point.
I mean, we didn’t choose it directly - it just turns out that’s what AI seems to be really good at. Companies firing people because it is ‘cheaper’ this way(despite the fact, that the tech is still not perfect), is another story tho.
Is it what AI is good at, or is it just that the image generation stuff is where the focus has been because it’s more accessible to non-tech literate?
Interesting thought, maybe it’s a mix of both of those factors? I mean, I remember using AI to work with images a few years back when I was still studying. It was mostly detection and segmentation though. But generation seems like a natural next step.
But definitely improving image generation doesn’t suffer a lack of funding and resources nowadays.
You are right in saying that all studios who can work for less money will do. That is the scary part for thousands of people working in animation and film.
Tech people doesn’t know about art, well I’m not sure, but that is irrelevant as AI are trained on existing top of the line art made by the best artistis in the world.
On the renderman subject, that is not correct. Renderman is a render engine for 3d softwares. AI doesn’t need a render engine at all as it produces images by itself. And for movies like topgun a number of different engines are used, renderman, vray, Arnold, redshift, unreal, etc.
You wouldn’t use renderman when ai can just spit out something that looks like it was rendered with renderman
And it still breaks a box office record
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”
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.
In three years, 90% of animated films are going to be generic crap churned out for a quick buck.
Very optimistic to think ten times more animated films will be good in just three years.
Unlike Frozen 3, Toy Story 5, Shrek 3, Kung Fu Panda 4 and live action Lion King we have today. So creative.
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…
All the more reason to cancel streaming subscriptions.
Ghibli >> Disney
Getting closer to a world where people don’t need to work and can just enjoy life.
Progress is good, but not without issues.
Nah, we’re getting close to Elysium
I believe this is the case in USA. EU still regularly stands to protect their citizens against corporations Europeans also have better understanding of the role of government and social policies. I’m not sure EU can win this fight but I’m pretty sure they will at least try.
Good.
