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AI Art
The purpose of 2D AI Art and co-writing engines like Sudowrite is to reduce the amount of human effort needed to create. A logical extension of this into the future:
Let’s say you want to watch a movie.
You go to NetJourn-E and start entering the kind of movie you want to see, based on tags/prompts. The tags can be anything: found family, royalty, queer, fantasy, hurt/comfort, mystery, actor names, character names, actors playing characters: whatever you think sounds fun. You can get as specific as you want -- “leading man is Chris Evans acting in the style of Humphry Bogart as directed by Francis Ford Coppola.” Or you can be general: “leading man is handsome.”
In response, NetJourn-E gives you options. First, some existing content that matches some of your tags. This includes analytics: percentage match on your tags, number of viewers for the content, average rating for the content. You can adjust sliders to determine your results: maybe you only want to look at results that got a 90% or better rating, or have 10,000 or more views, or have 100 or fewer views, or have a 65% or better match, or various combinations of the above.
Another option: create a new movie based on all of your tags. If you pick this, NetJourn-E generates a handful of trailers for films that include all your tags. You browse through the trailers, maybe watching them through, or maybe just a few seconds if they don’t catch your eye.
You can pick a trailer that you like and tell NetJourn-E to generate the film. Or you can generate another batch of trailers from the same prompts. Or perhaps try some new prompts, or pick your favorite trailer from the batch and iterate on that with new prompts.
Maybe you want to get into the weeds. Maybe you generate the film but then you want a new ending, or you don’t like how some of the scenes flow. You can fine-tune them with new instructions. You can write your own dialogue and have the computer-generated actors speak those lines. Tell the actors how to speak those lines, maybe perform them yourself as a demonstration and have the computer mimic that performance using the avatars of your choice. Change the lighting. Change the appearance of actors. Substitute one actor for another. Change the angle on shots.
When you’re done, you can save your creation. You can also make it public on NetJourn-E, or share it with your friends who use the service. Perhaps NetJourn-E sells a Creator license, which allows you to share your creations on other platforms.
You probably can’t make much money by doing this. You do it for fun and for love. Pretty much everyone involved in entertainment in this future does it because they love it. There are a few rockstar influencer/creators who have huge followings and make real money by creating/curating. Maybe they lavish a hundred hours on each film, polishing and perfecting it to match their vision based on what the AI churned out from a prompt. Maybe they’re just curators, known for their discerning eye in picking out good films from the morass of AI-generated content.
But there’s no need to personally involve hundreds of humans in making a single film, no reason to spend hundreds of millions on two hours of entertainment. The AI can generate a polished, professional-looking film on its own. Everything humans add to it is to match their personal taste, not to make it “objectively better.”
There are still films made entirely by human crews working with human-written scripts and human directors and human actors. There’s no money in this, no film industry, no deep pockets backing them. It’s entirely a hobby, viewed almost exclusively by the tiny audience that prefers it. Most people pick films that match their tastes exactly. They don’t care if an AI made it or a person did. And the AI can make a million films in the time it takes a team of humans to generate just one. It’s not that AI is objectively better -- it’s that there’s so much more of it to choose from.
And this is great, right? It’s the democratization of creation. When you have an idea for a film, you can just make it. You don’t need to find actors or scriptwriters or get funding or anything else. You don’t need to learn how to tell a story, how to act, how to direct. Just go to NetJourn-E, type in your idea, and poof: it’s real! And if it’s not exactly what you want, well, you can try again. You can poke it and prod and reshape it.
Probably you wouldn’t spend too long getting it right, though. It’s just a hobby. Just entertainment. It’ll never match exactly what you had in your head. But that’s always been true: filmmakers have always run into constraints of time, money, the conflicting visions of everyone involved.
And isn’t this so much better than laboring for years to make your vision come to life? Who wants to spend thousands of hours refining their craft, only to be a small part of a single film? Wouldn’t it be so much better if we removed all those unnecessary barriers to entry? If anyone, with no experience, background, training, or time investment, could turn their idea into a beautiful, polished film?
This is great, right?
And it’s still human-created, really. Humans are still supplying the ideas, and that’s what counts. Humans have always been assisted by technology. It’s like actors learning how to act by watching films, artists using photo references for their paintings, Michelangelo studying the anatomy of corpses to use in his sculptures. It’s a natural extension of the continuum.
AI is not just for films, of course. The same sort of technology makes every creative act easier: painting, sculpting, architecture, video games, virtual reality, role-playing: it’s everywhere. It’s even in education, for people who are still interested in learning skills, for whatever reason. It makes everything so easy, so effortless. It’s exactly what humans have always wanted.
Right?
no subject
Like a wish-granting genie although it's a bit restricted in the wishes it'll grant. Or not as long as you're content to have them only granted in fiction.
no subject
Yeah.
It sounds amazing.
When I make one of my high-magic settings, like the Etheriums, or the sorcery in the Desire books, or the draconic magic in Silver Scales, I've always stopped short of saying "and you can use magic to create perfect art with no artistic training or effort."
It'd be amazing.
I don't know why I dislike the idea of it so much.
no subject
This one set of books -- Union Station, it's great fun, you should have a looksee sometimes -- gets around this with the supposition that a radically advanced alien union of multiple civilizations has collectively agreed that whatever can be done by 'ordinary sentients', should be, with the AIs gently nudging things along. In other words, they agreed (the advanced civilizations, the super-intelligent AIs) that it was better to increase sophont participation in the economy, rather than allow them to become simply consumers and marginalize their meaningful impact on life.
no subject
Though then there'd probably be a lot of (important and necessary) fuss about rights to use likenesses and what kinds of prompts they're used for. There is some legal structure for that already, thanks to advertising and videogames.
Your mention of Coppola made me think of Roman Polanski. I think there would certainly be some people who'd like to use his directing style without his heinous misdeeds. True separation of art from artist, at that point, I guess. Idk how to feel about that.
It's not necessarily a /good/ movie, but this reminds me of the movie S1m0ne (about an AI actress and a director who's the only one who knows she isn't real).