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Jeffrey Katzenberg: AI Will Take 90% of Artist Jobs on Animated Films In Just Three Years
(www.indiewire.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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).
That is the whole goal with automation right? I don't think that is how is going to pan out. With all the extra money guys like zuckerberg are going to feed their cows with nuts and beer.
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.
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.
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