Antoine Lhermitte’s Post

Let’s just start with this. I am wholly unimpressed with Sora. And I have to agree with the post below, having done video editing and game cinematics, the notion that an AI tool is affecting any professional work, at this stage or in the next few years is patently ridiculous. The people saying this are people who don’t know how to make videos at all. To them it’s a dark art. And anything that makes anything is exciting to them. Largely non-iterative, clumsy amateur work in video form will mostly be useful for the lowest common denominator of online advertisers in social media, and to some extent amateur content creators. Internet marketers that do the lowest common denominator of animation need to be worried about Sora. Nobody else does. It’s not going to make a feature film. It’s not going to make anything that will draw money. It’s not going to be used in games, animation, film, or TV, anywhere, professionally, except by amateurs that are trying to vaguely look like professionals. No one is going to buy a ticket to contribute to box office sales using anything from these tools. But it will appear in spam. It will appear in cheap online advertisements. Everywhere. It will be used by marketing from brands that have no budgets. It will be used by amateurs everywhere to create a deluge of video crap that you will wish you didn’t have to see. That’s the place for AI video. Cheap entries into social media content and advertising. Generally a space with low standards or no standards. Places with no budgets. Great. Like we really need more of that. AI tools will contribute to a flood of cheap crap and shitty that you will be trying to avoid. Let’s step back and look at this. People who do not do creative endeavors are impressed with anything that looks vaguely creative. The thing is that creative work should have iteration behind it. And that iteration is necessary to get it into the right final state for a client or audience. Iteration is intentional. There is no iteration on that level with AI tools.

AI is a tool, not something to fear. This post thoughtfully highlights some of the current limitations in Sora

I see people on LinkedIn, even professionals with experience in the industry, talking about Sora and panicking without reason, without analyzing and breaking down that AI. In 4 years, the same errors persist, and they always have. Because that's how AI works. It's just copy-paste without intelligence behind it. Just stupid algorithms. Yeah, because the algorithms don't have synapses, experience, empathy, or hard work. They're just algorithms. The same ones that ban you from Facebook for 30 days because they misunderstood a word. As I explained in a previous post, this crap is useless for any kind of production (overall NDA). It's good to show to friends if you're not in the industry. "Wow, look at what we have here in 2024!" But if you're a professional, instead of whining about some apocalyptic future where we'll all be replaced and spreading negativity and anxiety, take the time to break down all the videos of Sora and give feedback on them. This kind of post could create a better status for yourself and others, instead of posting mediocrity and saying "omg we are fucked!!" To put it more trivially, "Put your shit together and give yourself a better attitude." I'll be posting some feedback videos in the next few days.

On top of being unreliable and ethically dodgy, there is another issue in the creative space. The sheer tsunami of AI-generated images is crowding an already super-mega crowded attention economy. In an age where creatives have been pushed into working in the attention economy and in which our livelihoods depend on how well we do on social media platforms (Read the article "Everyone's a Sellout Now" by Rebecca Jennings), with ever diminishing slices of the pie, some of these very platforms we thought safe and specific for artists have made it impossible to build audiences or attention from lack of moderation, and ongoing enshittification. Behance, Instagram, DeviantArt, Twitter, ArtStation are all now much harder to garner any momentum in. For emerging talent and those just joining the industry, the game is ever harder, as the over saturation of AI images will slowly crowd us out.

While the reasoning below holds true to a degree for bigger budgets (for now), Sora and whatever follows, will certainly prove very disruptive for people working with smaller clients on lower budget projects. This is a huge sector of the industry that will be turned on its head. This in turn will result in higher competition for the big budget projects, which means that supply will outstrip demand, resulting in worse outcomes for every artist involved, including the ones that currently feel safe working on bigger budget productions. Let's also consider the fact that AI visuals have evolved rapidly in a space of just a few years, with leaps and bounds in visual quality taking place in just a few recent months. The pace is always accelerating. Sure there are issues with the video below, but these problems are highlighted by an artist, someone who has a trained eye for these things and years of experience. Show this to 90% of the rest of the population - they won't care or notice. And what would stop the Sora prompter to spit out another 1000 variations until it fits the vision of the client? Everyone should draw their own conclusions of course, but I think it'd be wise to at least start getting a little bit worried.

Here is an interesting article by Valentin ValDo Dornel for SUPAMONKS which gives us an overview of the use of Unreal Engine in studios and of AI applied to 3D animation.

AI FROM PICTURE TO VIDEO

Dive into the world of hyper-realistic #3DAnimation! We present to you a mechanical creature with spider legs that combines technical skill and creative vision. #3DModeling #Blender3D #CyclesRenderer #RobotDesign #Visualization #MechanicalEngineering #Research #VR #AR #Gaming By combining Modeling, Shading, Lighting, Rigging, and Camera Animation - inspired by the tutorial "Making a Mechanical Walking Creature in Blender" by Polyfjord - we have achieved a photo-realistic representation that blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy. #MechanicalCreature #PolyfjordTutorial #RoboticEngineering #Animation With #StableDiffusion, we expanded our creativity and used a series of generated images as design inspiration. See for yourself! #StableDiffusion #DesignInspiration #3DArtist #3DGeneralist #VisualizationDresden

Watch the first of the four latest Science on Screen Animations - ‘Nature Inspired Adhesion’: This animation was made by Brosna O'Donovan of Mighty Grays Studio in Sligo. The animation is based on a research project by Prof. Andreas Heise and Prof. Gerard Wall. The project outlines how researchers at CÚRAM are working to design a new hydrogel that can mimic the mucous layer which protects the colon in a healthy individual. Here’s what Professor Gerard Wall had to say about the animation and how it will help him with his work: “It's beautifully made - it tells the story really well. A lot better than me standing beside you and just describing what we do. I can meet you at a party - and I do - and describe my work. But this is elegant, nicely made, and much more understandable. And what I like about it too, is that it's not just the concept, you get a sense of the methodology as well. As scientists, we tend to sit in a lab and develop highly technical language, specific jargon that's completely impenetrable. And not just to the public, but to anybody who's not in your field. It becomes important for us to come out of the lab and explain to the public. If you're going to work in this field of bioscience, biomedicine, or bioengineering, and you're expecting the public to embrace and adapt and accept your developments and your devices and your medicines, then you've got to bring them along the journey with you. You've got to give them information in a relatable manner, so they can understand what you're doing.” All of these animations are available to watch on Ardán's YouTube channel and at CÚRAM's Superhuman exhibit at Galway City Museum Ireland. The Science on Screen programme partnership has been run by CÚRAM, SFI Research Centre for Medical Devices (the SFI Research Centre at University of Galway) & Ardán since 2016. The animations are the product of a new strand of CÚRAM and Ardan’s Science on Screen scheme which were launched in 2022 in association with the National Talent Academies for Animation. To find out about the next round of Science on Screen Animation Commissions subscribe to the Ardán newsletter and follow us and CÚRAM on social media. Send any questions to [email protected] #ScienceonScreen #STEMEducation #Animation #Superhuman

🚀 Exciting AI-powered animation! Just explored LivePortrait, developed by a talented team from Kuaishou Technology and top Chinese universities. This innovative framework transforms a single source image into dynamic portrait videos, pushing the boundaries of efficiency and controllability in animation. 🖼️ Whether it's transforming static images into lifelike videos or editing facial features with pinpoint accuracy, LivePortrait excels, delivering high-quality animations at lightning speed (12.8ms on an RTX 4090 GPU!). 🐾 Plus, it's not just for humans; this model can animate animals too, from cats to pandas, all driven by human actions. 👀 Check out a video I generated using this model on Hugging Face; the results are truly impressive. Dive into the future of digital animation and try LivePortrait yourself here: LivePortrait on Hugging Face. Create your own animation: https://lnkd.in/exZuZMUc #AI #Animation #DigitalArt #TechInnovation #LivePortrait #huggingface