is AI gonna take our jobs?
- Thread starter DBP
- Start date
Do you have a Sora subscription plan?
ahalpert
Major Contributor
What's funny is that OpenAI started crying about copyright and accusing DeepSeek of stealing their IP. Copyright for me but not for thee
ahalpert
Major Contributor
I'm not surprised at all. The whole industry was built this way. If memory serves me, Zuckerberg hacked a student database at Harvard to fill Facebook with its initial dataset. SV companies steal left and right. We've all assumed that they're scraping YouTube for video training data.
Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean they're making copyright violations. Even when the websites they scrape specifically state that their content may not be used to train AI, it may be fair game. It depends. The case for fair use is probably something like they're just reading the content and learning from it like a human artist who watches movies and gets inspired and makes something new based on that inspiration.
I happen to believe that that's not a good analogy for what's happening. What's happening is much closer to reproducing or remixing the original source material, even if the methods are concealed. But I think that if you looked at the portion of the training data that is used for any given prompt, you would essentially see mechanical duplication or remixing.
That doesn't mean a judge will rule against them. Judges can do whatever they want. Even at the supreme court level you see rulings made and them overturned decades later.
One crucial difference between this type of theft and the earlier rule-breaking is that it's ongoing. Facebook no longer hacks university databases to stay afloat. But with every prompt that AI generates, they're probably violating copyright anew.
ahalpert
Major Contributor
That's a good and frightening question. But I've also heard people say that these massive investments may just be the cost of continuing their monopolies. In other words, they might not be making SkyNet. They might just be trying to hold on to the markets they already have in the face of start-up competition.
ahalpert
Major Contributor
I did the $200/mo subscription for a month and played with it a lot. I ended up using 1 shot briefly in an edit. It was a video animation of a still photo that I fed into the program. So, the photo was of a storefront on a Manhattan street. Sora added walking pedestrians and passing cars and made the banner wave. Which is very cool. But in the 5-second clip that it generated, a pedestrian appeared out of thin air and 2 pedestrians entered the frame about 1 second apart wearing the identical outfit. Odd. But I only needed 1 second of footage so it worked out.
I then asked the program to change the white taxi it generated in the shot into a yellow NYC cab. I can't remember if it did that but it changed everything else about the shot too, turning the Barnes & noble store in frame into a different store with nonsense letters. Unusable.
There was 1 other Sora shot that was in the edit until a late round of notes. It was an animation of an ampersand sort of breaking into pieces and flying in different directions across the frame. Not quite what I asked for, but it was kinda cool and something I can't do on my own.
Then the client asked me to change the font of the ampersand. Ouch. Couldn't get the program to replace it for me. Couldn't generate the same type of animation when feeding in the new ampersand image and the same prompt as before. So I had to roto out the old ampersand and roto in the new ampersand into the beginning of the animation. Not perfect, but close enough to keep the shot and not have to admit to my producers that I didn't have control of the technology.
We ended up cutting the animation for style reasons.
I also put 2 other sora-generated shots in the rough cut but my producers bounced them immediately, saying they looked too much like stock footage. (I hadn't told them they were Sora.)
I ran at least another 50 prompts for that project and got nothing worth using.
Now I have the $20/month account with chatgpt which lets me feed Sora the occasional prompt to see if I could get something useful from it. So far nothing yet.
But I use voice clones frequently. I use Adobe photoshop generative fill and generative expand all the time. I ask chatgpt things from time to time although I've found that I still use Google instead for most things. I've tried generating AI music a few times and it's always crap. I just tried an AI audio sweetener plug-in and was not impressed. But there's a web-based AI audio background noise remover that gives me great results. I'll give everything a try even if I think they're breaking the law. Gotta stay in business.
It's also worth noting that the time you spend messing with these things really adds up. Aside from the $200 subscription cost, I must have spent at least a half day of editing trying to get it to give me what I wanted.
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Ouch+1 on the ampersand, and whew for not getting busted! I assumed there would have been a lot of wasted time spent with ask redo's.
rob norton
Veteran
I don't want to open a can of worms, but I worked on a promo film that was as close as possible (on purpose) to a huge global brand campaign. It was beyond inspiration, it was striving for a 1:1 match. I think many small production companies "just borrow" from massive campaigns, doing their version, which of course is within the safety net grey area of different cities, different enough edit etc. But there's no inspiration, it's more like thanks for doing the entire creative. I'm opposed to agency gouging if it means the production company suffers, but I'm also against boutique production companies only being able to offer better pricing because they're stealing an overwhelming majority of the mini campaign they're "pitching". It's such a shame too because if it were more frowned upon, we'd see more creative promotional material vs. trying to follow trends as plan A.
In addition to humans policing AI as much as possible in attempt to keep things fair, could we leverage AI to also keep humans more accountable?
ahalpert
Major Contributor
You mean could we use AI to search for copyright violations elsewhere on the web? In a way that would be great. The truth is I have no idea. Probably? I mean, at least you should be able to feed it a video and tell it to search for possible style/content matches, although it would have a ton of searching to do. I also don't know what constitutes an IP violation. In music copyright cases, the musical influences can be quite vague and still count as a violation. Or it can seem like a clear rip-off and pass muster.
Here's a list of famous music copyright infringement cases. Some of these were successfully defended. I think the first 2 were dismissed, the next 2 were settled, and in the final one the jury ruled that it was copyright infringement.
Also, I recently edited a spot for a company (icon.me) that is offering the exact service you describe -- pick a big brand commercial you like, and the AI will copy it shot for shot with a mix of shots you have on hand plus generated material. *supposedly* it can do this or will be able to do this.
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ahalpert
Major Contributor
"James Cameron will reportedly open Avatar 3 with a title card saying no generative AI was used to make the movie"
James Cameron will reportedly open Avatar 3 with a title card saying no generative AI was used to make the movie
Avatar: Fire and Ash releases later this year
Dante Yze
Member
I guess that in 2-year time with the development of AI the work market will change greatly. Hybrid schedules got desks playing hide-and-seek, half the time ghosted, half the time fought over like the last slice of pizza. UnSpot’s the chill fix, a desk-booking vibe that lets your squad lock in their spot from any screen, snagging seats next to their ride-or-dies for epic collabs. The weekly dashboard’s straight fire — shows who’s rolling through and where they’re posted, so no one’s left guessing. It syncs with Slack and Zoom like they’re dropping a beat together, and you’ll catch the hang of it in ten minutes — quicker than a TikTok trend. Real talk: it crams 80% more peeps into your spot, keeping the rent bill from hitting savage mode. Plans kick off at $50 for the crew or $10 a head. Slide over to https://unspot.com/workplaces/ Your workplace’ll go from hot mess to straight flexin’—all vibes, no stress.
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rob norton
Veteran
Thanks for the link, and wow, diabolical!
ahalpert
Major Contributor
I think the issue is worker solidarity. A lot of people were upset when they found out that The Brutalist used generative AI to do dialogue replacement and fix the Romanian pronunciation of the main characters. I didn't really care, especially since it was an arthouse movie with a small budget.
The main question is will there by some ongoing penalty to pay with audiences if you use generative AI. Will disclaimers like this one become standard and create pressure not to use generative AI.
I'm guessing that that will not happen. But it would be the most significant development that could come from this title card.
Personally, I'm much more motivated to give Cameron my ticket money as a show of support for this stand, even if it's just an opportunistic statement made out of convenience.
ahalpert
Major Contributor
"Activision Finally Admits It Uses Generative AI for Some Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Assets After Backlash Following 'AI Slop' Zombie Santa Loading Screen"
www.ign.com
A few other AI-related hits:
A comparison of a few AI video generators. The Chinese company Minimax's client, "Hailuo," seems to do the best with the prompt. Of course, that doesn't mean that it can do other tasks the best or that it can do a good job with easier tasks:
UK newspapers united against AI:
This is sort of interesting. Claims to be an animated visualization of the calculations of an LLM:
Activision Finally Admits It Uses Generative AI for Some Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Assets After Backlash Following 'AI Slop' Zombie Santa Loading Screen - IGN
Call of Duty maker Activision has finally admitted to using generative AI in the development of Black Ops 6, nearly three months after fans had accused the company of creating an “AI slop” Zombie Santa loading screen.
A few other AI-related hits:
A comparison of a few AI video generators. The Chinese company Minimax's client, "Hailuo," seems to do the best with the prompt. Of course, that doesn't mean that it can do other tasks the best or that it can do a good job with easier tasks:
UK newspapers united against AI:
This is sort of interesting. Claims to be an animated visualization of the calculations of an LLM:
I'm guessing you are correct that it will not happen, but if it did don't just stop with AI, include CGI. Although it's well know that Tom Cruise performs many of his own incredibly dangerous stunts, I don't remember it ever being a point of disclosure on the movie itself that he did.
ahalpert
Major Contributor
Are you joking? The marketing for all of Cruise's movies focuses on the fact that he performs his own stunts. It's part of the draw. Because authenticity is highly desirable.
I mean, on one level I agree with you. Especially as a former drummer (never professional) -- kill all the drum machines!
Regardless of how AI plays out for our specific jobs, I think one thing is clear: it will lead us further down the path of declining cultural quality in service of increasing corporate profit margins.
People like to point out how much the quality of CGI has declined in Hollywood films (James Cameron's work excepted):
Basically, studios are incredibly aggressive in pursuing the lowest possible bid for the work. The quality suffers as a result. At the end of the day, it may drive down the profitability of Marvel films. Who knows? And to a film-lover like me, it's just sad.
Here's an article about how Pinterest is becoming polluted with AI-generated spam. Apparently this is a profitable enterprise for the spammers. But it kills the quality of the site. Maybe it will eventually kill the site entirely. And, of course, as AI is increasingly trained on AI-generated material, the quality of the AI slop itself will decrease.
Pinterest Is Being Strangled by AI Slop
Pinterest is drowning in a torrent of slick-looking AI slop. Users are frustrated — while SEO spammers fueling the problem are celebrating.
futurism.com
I think the point below is essentially correct. Everything I've learned about AI has taught me that it doesn't actually generate anything new. It just recycles. To be fair, recycling and remixing play a large role in the creation of art. But it has to be more than that.
Another way of looking at it: I bet there are many hugely influential artists who never would have had a career in a landscape distorted by AI economics.
To change the subject for a moment, look at the music industry -- I don't think that rappers and DJs are necessarily in higher demand than rock bands and larger ensembles. But the economics are hugely in the favor of the solo artist and therefore it's easier for them to begin and sustain a career.
Imagine a world where the marketplace is flooded with AI slop; none of the companies and industries that have traditionally supported artists and artisans want to pay them anymore; and copyright protections have been gutted for the sake of AI corporations. How will artists, particularly up-and-coming artists, eke out a living when it was already a precarious existence pre-AI? And then what happens to the growth and development of our Arts and Entertainment in the long-run?
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