Comment by legitster
8 hours ago
I know that people get very up in arms about AI in creative industries - but I feel like people don't necessarily understand that even in creative industries there is a LOT of monotonous, exploitative grunt work.
For every person who gets to make creative decision, there are hundreds upon hundreds of people whose sole purpose is slavish adherence to those decisions. Miyazaki gets to design his beautiful characters - but the task of getting those characters to screen must be carried out by massive team of illustrators for whom "creative liberty" is a liability to their career.
(And this example is only for the creative aspects of film-making. There is a lot of normal corporate and logistical stuff that never even affects what you see)
That's not to say I'm looking forward to the wave of lazy AI-infused slop that is heading our way. But I also don't necessarily agree with the grandstanding that AI is inherently anti-creative or only destructive. I reserve the right to be open-minded.
The irony is that movies and TV themselves represented a cheaper, industrialized and commoditized alternative to theater. And theater is still around and just as good as it ever was.
>For every person who gets to make creative decision, there are hundreds upon hundreds of people whose sole purpose is slavish adherence to those decisions. Miyazaki gets to design his beautiful characters - but the task of getting those characters to screen must be carried out by massive team of illustrators for whom "creative liberty" is a liability to their career.
This is vastly oversimplifying and is misleading. Key animators have a highly creative role. The small decisions in the movements, the timings, the shapes, even scene layouts (Miyazaki didn't draw every layout in The Boy and the Heron), are creative decisions that Miyazaki handpicked his staff on the basis of. Miyazaki conceived of the opening scene [0] in that film with Shinya Ohira as the animator in mind [1]. Even in his early films, when he was known to exert more control, animator Yoshinori Kanada's signature style is evident in the movements and effects [2].
[0]: https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/260429
[1]: https://fullfrontal.moe/takeshi-honda-the-boy-and-the-heron-...
[2]: Search for "Kanada animated many sequences of the movie, but let’s just focus on the most famous one, the air battle scene." in https://animetudes.com/2021/05/15/directing-kanada/
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> For every person who gets to make creative decision, there are hundreds upon hundreds of people whose sole purpose is slavish adherence to those decisions.
Yes but at least those decisions come from some or one person not just an algorirhm
As an engineer and artist, I think a better comparison is painting -> photography. It took quite a while for photography to be considered an art, since it removed so much of the creative control from the artist. But it replaced them with new and different skills, particularly the value of curation.
Some skills, like framing, values, balance, etc. become even more important differentiators. Yes, it is much different. But as long as humans are in the loop, there is an opportunity for human communication.
As a software engineer you still make the hard decisions and let claude type them out for you. Isn't it similar?
I mean, yeah. No matter how you feel about AI and creativity, having AI make the creative choices is dumb and backwards.
What happens to the illustrators now?
They get to frolic on a farm upstate.
I'm curious if the parent poster thinks this is unique to film production, because I think you can make the same argument for pretty much any trade. Software engineering is 1% brilliance and 99% grunt work. This doesn't make that software engineers are going to enjoy a world where 99% of their job goes away.
Further, I'm not sure the customers will, because the fact that human labor is comparatively expensive puts some checks and balances in place. If content generation is free, the incentive is to produce higher-volume but lower-quality output, and it's a race to the bottom. In the same way, when content-farming and rage-baiting became a way to make money, all the mainstream "news" publishers converged on that.
Should we be optimising for a world that makes software engineers (or animators) in particular happy? The seen is the lost jobs but the unseen is that everyone else gets software (and animated entertainment) cheaper.
As it happens, I don't think "AI" is close to replacing many SEs or animators but in a world where it could, we should celebrate this huge boon to society.