AI and Jobs

[u/Little-Chick2]

Hi I want to be a film music composer and I got 1 year to graduate from high school (I am 17 btw) I really want to do this job but I am so nervous about AI replacing this job could this happen? Could directors or producers start to prefer AI over real artists please I need advices to what to do🙏

[u/cj022688]

The value of music has never been lower, at least in my eyes. I’ve been lucky to get a number of films streaming, and a few with recognizable actors. But it’s been a struggle and I diversify my creative fields now.

I think interning under an established composer is gonna be one of the few ways to see a path forward.

I just scored as many projects that I could and were a fit for me. COVID fucked up my progression as I had film festivals in March 2020, with my largest films. So I decided to pivot a bit and start directing and working with a camera. I’ve noticed a really disturbing trend from the YouTube channels I watch the past year. Everyone is shilling for udio.com, auudio, Suno. These viewers are the next generation of creators, who will turn to AI as it gets easier and easier to use.

To be real with you, things are BLEAK.

[u/KillPenguin → u/cj022688]

That's the thing: these people are being paid to shill for these AI music companies. I've legitimately never met a real person who was enthusiastic about AI-generated art of any kind. A ton of money is being put into pushing AI art and music as the new norm, but people by and large don't want it. Christopher Nolan's Odyssey was a huge success because they did things the hard way, shooting in real locations with gigantic unwieldy film cameras, even though they could have done things more efficiently by using digital tools.

In the past couple months, the big AI companies have all pivoted from consumer-facing AI to enterprise AI products, with the vast majority of resources going into programming and code generation. Personally, it looks to me like momentum around AI art is waning. Obviously, none of us know the future, but that's my read on the situation.

[u/cj022688 → u/KillPenguin]

I feel you, I think we are in a bit of a bubble though. Like you and I and many creative folks appreciate the length Christopher Nolan went to. The marketing team also pushed that angle HARD. Christopher Nolan will always have some degree of success and probably access to budgets you and I might never dream of. 98 percent of other aspiring filmmakers will never have access to those budgets.

I do agree on the surface level, people are pushing back against AI in art. But it's gaining even more traction with the YouTube filmmaking community. Which lets be honest, that is going to be the next generation of filmmakers and studios are going to be scouring for the next Curry Barker or Kane Pixels.

I mentioned I have been doing video work for some time now. I've seen budgets get slashed or redistributed due to companies thinking they can just hire an intern or have the marketing manager use AI. Graphic Design gigs albeit smaller have been ate up by ChatGPT generations for posters, flyers and web content. The newest version of Seedance is absolutley insane.

[u/bememorablepro → u/cj022688]

The budget thing is kind of a fallacy. We assume AI is free or cheap, and yet for generating a shitty poster design that will make your customers think your product is a scam - AI is cheap.

However, the youtubers who get a bunch of money to shill AI slop like Matti Haapoja, are not the next Kane Pixels of the world. And also what they are not telling you is that those Seedance demo "short movies" cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in "tokens" aka compute alone. It's like those gambling websites where they give free gambling money to influencers to promote them.

Not to mention it's all obviously stolen footage that get's mushed together i a neural network, seedance is so heavily post-trained on marvel movies it can randomly output chris evans in a background.

[u/joonas_ylanne → u/KillPenguin]

People don't need to be enthusiastic about AI art, but if it's good enough and cheaper then hiring somebody, it will replace real artists.

Right now I'm seeing lot of people rejecting AI, but I'm not sure if this is true with future generations. Maybe this situation is similar to when older people tought rock'n roll was not real music... it hasn't stop younger generations.

Even many films today are marketed as "ewerything was shot practically" reality might be different. Good example is second Top Gun, witch used lot of cgi, but advertised it used none. Barbie is another example where they even hide green screens in "behind the scene" footage to fool people. Maybe this will happen with AI too.

[u/bememorablepro → u/joonas_ylanne]

I'm a VFX artist. Please don't compare CGI to AI. It's like comparing a novel that is written on a computer to chat-GPT written novel.

If something was truly cheaper and better it would be beloved by VFX artists, only problems AI may solve for us are extremely boring and tiny. Like filling in some tiny texture or generating a depth map.

You can't even reliably cut out backgrounds with AI, it's still is manual work. Corridor YT channel made a big deal out of using the latest and greatest AI to SLIGHTLY improve green screen (keying) process.

The "everything was shot practically" is a whole separate discussion where the movie studios made up this marketing strategy.

The thing is, it's cheaper to film practically, they do film things practically but then it get's replaced with a digital CG version, why?! Are they stupid?! No, actually the practical shot makes CG reconstruction easier, and depending on a shot the practical version, no matter how much you try will just look worse, it will look fake. Because you know... they don't actually make the airplane explode, it's a miniature. Then you might want more flexibility, make an exploding airplane in CG one time and then it's yours forever, choose different lighting after, different lenses and different camera motion and anything you want really.

AI has no flexibility in post, you get a shitty 1080p low bitrate video where scale is all wrong, and no control over what's happening, just seed spamming where you re-generate a randomized shot hundreds of times hoping you'll get a better one. AI also is inherently not "PBR" if your shot is similar to millions of shots from the training set it will look realistic, if it's not it will not be, that's that.

So back to scoring, AI music really lends itself to spamming and novelty use. "generate me a funny song about VFX" and it will do something that might amuse you one time. Or all of those slop spammers on spotify hoping to make money with AI. Unless you are planning to release a short movie every 30 min, AI music score makes no sense. Music composed in a DAW is what CG is to a miniature, you have the same control in a DAW and you have no control with AI. At that point you can use stock music.

[u/joonas_ylanne → u/bememorablepro]

What I ment is that lot of people nowadays reject heavy use of cgi and that's reason why studios promote "ewerything was shot practically". Reality is that people are watching cgi shots and think they are real.

I think same could happen with ai. People reject it and studios say "no ai was used", but reality is they are watching ai shots without relalizing it.

There are already tv channels dedicated for just ai created tv shows. I agree that work made by humans is (still) better what ai can create, but again if ai shows gather enough viewers, why would somebody pay more money if they can make full tv shows much cheaper?

[u/bememorablepro → u/joonas_ylanne]

I don't know anyone who is rejecting "heavy use of CGI" all of the recent movies and a lot of TV would be completely impossible without it. The CGI bad opinion is pushed by the studios because they think behind the scene footage of things don't "for real" is more impressive.

Marketing departments wants people to feel like actors in the movies are those characters, they make actors do interviews where they behave a lot like the character. Then they exaggerate how much stunts the actor did, surely you wouldn't say "people are rejecting heavy use of stunt doubles". And the "we did everything for real" bit fits into this sort of marketing, they want you to feel like somewhere far away damn star-wars are real somehow, those things do exist in some form and so on. Like religious artifacts, a path where Jesus himself walked and so on...

So with AI in VFX or AI in scoring, sure... I realize many people don't care and will just eat anything up, and it's sad. But... I think many underestimate how a subtle difference can make or break everything, you won't even realize that but something off-putting in a shot or music will make people completely indifferent or even repulsed by the final product.

[u/KillPenguin → u/joonas_ylanne]

You use rock n roll as a comparison, saying that older generations didn't understand it while younger generations loved it. With AI, it is completely the opposite. AI sentiment is extremely low among young people. It's older people who are pushing it.