I've stopped watching movies and shows since CGI is so obviously worse than it was 10-15 years ago. In the moment you notice AI slop everywhere and the void of any human touch, it's impossible to enjoy it anymore.
I'm not going to talk about the fact that half of the actors have hideous aesthetic interventions, wigs, makeup, and so on. Now it's normal for me to watch something again that came out before 2010.
Maybe this is relevant? I worked in animation and VFX for an Academy Award winning VFX studio and several well known animation / game studios, starting around '90. I formally left the industry around '04 to work on my own tech startup. When I left, there was a lot of R&D work surrounding the huge amounts of data that an animation studio generates and works with; I was one of those people creating early deep learning systems for production forecasting.
Anyway, right around '10 the industry was really stressed. The financial crash was 2 years in, and the recovery was more propaganda than reality. The productions were chasing a Hollywood market that the population did not have the disposable income to support. Then in all that stress, the Me-Too movement starts. Rumors and murmurs at first, but soon a tsunami of women from the entertainment industry sharing their institutional abuse and choosing to leave the industry entirely. My wife was one, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, famous for children's media.
That line in time of Hollywood films going bad? It is when the women that were silent in their abuse chose to leave the industry enmasse. What replaced them were clueless men and women okay with the abuse, and the reduced quality of Hollywood is a reflection of the quality of their intellects.
I share your feelings, but the title is confusing... this is actually about people using gig AI training platforms for extra income (instead of bussing tables like they used to). Not building AI for cinema.
I mostly skip triple A hollywood movies, but the bulk of movies being made nowadays don't make use of any of that, mostly because it makes no sense in their genres.
Many european countries are constantly releasing movies with low budget but far better in terms of character work, plot, etc.
Asia is killing it as well, with south korea having golden era hollywood quality, Japan being consistently decent and China starting to develop a world-friendly industry...
American productions constantly feel like they think their audience are idiots these days. It's nice to watch a European production where they don't assume their viewers are going to also be doom-scrolling and feel the need to summarize what's going on by having a character say the summary out loud every episode.
Much like everything else in the US, products suffer and sink in quality for being sidelined by individual interests.
Marketing needs 4 second jokes to put in the trailer; sales needs a cute pet to sell toys; an actor demands dramatic moments aiming for an Oscar; market research needs a love story, a diverse character, and a specific geographic location to widen the audience; early screenings show that attention drops so story is simplified...
All of these roles should be working to support a product, but they should never interfere with its creation. Instead, they're the main creators. People in the industry genuinely believe that the plot is just an excuse to do all the above, and results show.
There's so many indie movies without much cgi, or good old movies that you'll never live long enough to watch. Writing off a whole art form is a bit weird.
> half of the actors have hideous aesthetic interventions, wigs, makeup, and so on
I mean, I understand and somewhat share some of the criticism, but it has to be said that Hollywood used "wigs, makeup, and so on" from its very beginning. Movie stars were always supposed to be "more" than everyday mortals. The only real aberrations of modern hollywood are plastic surgery and deeply unnatural body types (stick-thin women and dehydrated steroid-pumped men), mostly because they are abused to the point of absurdity.
>Each week we will be crowning a "wig of the week" from The Americans, FX's wonderful show about Russian spies who happen to wear a variety of insane wigs when doing their spy duties.
>Wig of the Week: As you might have already been able to tell, we've diverged from the theme a little this week to focus on double agent Nina Sergeevna.
>Why This Wig: There were some good wigs in this episode. Elizabeth pulled out her sophisticated blonde number to meet with Andrew Larrick, the dangerous Navy captain the Soviets are using. Philip, to bug the ARPANET, pulls out a Rust Cohle sort of look, which only makes him more horrifying when he murders an innocent who happened to get in his way.
You can stop watching big budget productions, but you shouldn't skip out on your local independent cinema scene. If you're in or around a large metro area, there will be local(ish) folks out there making interesting stuff. Might not be super fancy CGI or incredible sound design, but it will be humans telling human stories, which is the heart of cinema.
I, however, do look forward to a time when we can prompt our own TV shows. That second season that ruined your favorite show? Fix it. The second season that never happened? Create it. Of course AI needs to get better still for that to be bearable for many of us, but I'm still excited at the idea!
Isn't the scenario you are describing the ultimate collapse of art and culture as we know it?
If everyone sits at home and creates the content that they want, what do we talk about? How do we engage in shared culture if there is nothing to experience together?
Well, that was a recent invention anyway - at least in Europe where I live. TVs did not really reach most of the households until late '70s and the shared pop culture based on movies (mostly from US), cartoons (mix from Japan and US), advertisements (usually national) was created quite fast.
On top of that, I wonder if it wouldn't be for the better. 100 years ago many regions had distinct cultures. 200 years ago pretty much each village had a wee different culture. With slightly different fairy tales or songs and so on. Nowadays the culture gets standardised at a massive pace. If generative AI could put a stop on it... That'd definitely be an improvement.
Maybe you have a point there.
An optimistic outlook would be that AI allows people to create content that can compete with the polished, mass-produced, standardized stuff without the prohibitive budget requirements.
The pessimistic view is that it leads to more isolation, where everyone only "creates" for themselves.
I don't think it would be worse isolation than consuming standardized mass-produced content. Even a simple prompt, thinking what you want and so on is already the beginning of a creativity. Turning on TV/Netflix/whatever is not.
Unless the problem is people isolation in way, that people would not consume standardized content that also, to some extent, standardize their mind. But in that case it's an isolation problem even without AI when people check out from mass culture and entertain themselves. Wether entirely solo or in small fringe subcultures. Which is kinda isolation if you look from 19th/20th century point-of-view when name of the game was to normalise all the regional cultures into bigger bodies of people. But is such isolation the wrong or a good kind of isolation? I'd lean towards the later.
Welcome to the life of fringe subcultures. Of course subcultures, even most fringe ones, still have some community. But even in generated content world, some people would end up with similar taste and that generated content being similar. They may even share that content and watch some of each other's content! And oh boy the joy of meeting that rare human who has similar taste! E.g. knowing some fringe band that created a demo tape 2 decades ago that you found in some strange torrent tracker.
But yes, mass/pop culture as we know it would be dead. And IMO the world would be better off.
I agree with other comments that may lead to people staying inside their comfort zone. But I think it's question of time when good portion of people would start sharing that content with other people. Expanding each others' imagination. And few that don't... Well, existing pop culture is not exactly good at expanding mind as well. And such decentralized content creation may be less prone to propaganda and other social control efforts.
This + NFT integration will be the real game changer. Like it's Breaking Bad, except Walter White is decked out like one of your Slonks. Or it's Indiana Jones stealing a Bored Ape instead of the idol. Possibilities are endless.
I bought a 3k M3 Max mbp just a couple months away from the Tahoe and liquid glass announcement which I am a little miffed about, but it's still an awesome machine I enjoy using while it's on Sequoia. I am really hoping macOS 27 will be this decade's Snow Leopard
Yes, nothing says Marxism like shilling for the most valuable corporation in history. That's definitely the reason why I'm talking about cool new features in Tahoe.
A lot of people are over romanticizing on Hetzner. The hard truth is that Hetzner is a great provider for bare metal machines and extremely competitive pricing, but it's extremely demanding to run production workloads there without a dedicated infra guy. Claude won't wake up in the middle of the night solving the things helped you provision in an acceptable timeframe. If you are serious about your product SLOs, hyperscales shine, and you can only accept the "cloud tax".
Hetzner is a very particular product. They openly cop to being "overly cautious" with even letting people open accounts because they're playing with razor thin margins: I wouldn't engage with an organization like that for serious production workloads.
At least, where "serious" is defined as making enough money that paying AWS $200 a month for $20 a month worth of compute is worth it in exchange for an actual SLA*, paid support, and knowing that even if you drop of the face of the Earth, the account will probably run unfunded months before your users even notice.
I've been bitten by using "quirky" tier-3 providers for savings on projects that really should have just ate the cost of a bigger provider.
(* Yes an SLA is not a magic uptime guarantee, but it creates an expectation which is a lot better than nothing.)
I regret dearly the upgrade as well. I've turned a beautiful $3500 hardware into a close to Windows Vista machine that frustrates me daily. Just looking at it kills my productivity instantly, I just use full screen for all my apps now.
Maybe. Nature hates vacuum. I personally suspect that something new will emerge. For better or worse, some humans work best when weird restrictions are imposed. That said, yes, then wild 90s net is dead. It probably was for a while, but were all mourning.
There are still small pockets with actual humans to be found. The small web exists. Some forums keep on going, im still shitposting on Something Awful after twenty years and it’s still quite active. Bluesky has its faults but it also has for example an active community of scholars you can follow and interact with.
Not quite dead yet. For me the rise of LLMs and BigTech has helped me turn more away from it. The more I find Ads or AI injected into my life, the more accounts I close, or sites I ignore. I've now removed most of my BigTech 'fixes', and find myself with time to explore the fun side of hacking again.
I dug out my old PinePhone and decided to write a toy OS for it. The project has just the right level of challenge and reward for me, and feels more like early days hacking/programming where we relied more on documentation and experimentation than regurgitated LLM slop.
Nothing beats that special feeling when a hack suddenly works. Today was just a proximity sensor reading displayed, but it invloved a lot of SoC hacking to get that far.
I know there are others hacking hard in obscure corners of tech, and I love this site for promoting them.
I'm not sure. Okay, lots of companies will use these automated blog generators that charge a few to automate content and posting. Fine. But who'll read that? Nobody. So I think the internet will eventually balance back to favouring actual human work, curated lists, etc.
100%. I miss trackers and napster. I miss newgrounds. This mobile AI bullshit is not the same. I don't know why, but I hate AI. I consider myself just as good as the best at using it. I can make it do my programming. It does a great job. It's just not enjoyable anymore.
