An agenda? I just give a shit about the creative people (indie filmmakers, photographers, artists, actors, models) I know, and I fail to see what AI brings them that their creativity does not already; special effects are such a tiny part of filmmaking, for example.

I don’t mean to say I don’t think there are any uses but I think the main misunderstanding here is that what holds indie filmmakers back isn’t access to technology, generally.

Well, at least I assume that currently indie movies are also somewhat defined by budget and technical limitations. With GenAI you will be able to film an action scene with your smartphone in an empty warehouse that will later look like an authentic full street in Medieval Bagdad. GenAI will remove constraints. Constraints that may have led to creativity by themselves, but those constraints also led to constraints in audience and artistic outcome. Imagination will be the limit. And I don't think we will need labels like "organic" to make collaborative efforts with actual actors more accepted than AI only productions, because good actors bring more to the table than just their face and stature.

> GenAI will remove constraints.

I think this really hits on the difference in our understanding because constraints are what cause actual creativity and art to happen.

A lack of constraints is why big-budget movies are so tedious. Lower budget movies are better because of their constraints.

I totally see that. But I think it's time for new constraints that are less tied to money and more to the imagination of the creators.

It will hopefully lead to a democratization of previously expensive settings (e.g. historic, fantastical, large scale events) etc. Many indie movies still have huge budgets and need some kind of sponsor. Now we will hopefully see a wonderful mix of hobbyist, semi-professional and professional fully independent setups that tell stories without worrying about financial risks that are connected to certain forms of artistic expression.

I don't think it is helpful to gatekeep movie making with arbitrary requirements regarding AI usage nor do I believe that the requirement for patrons or state sponsorships that is prevalent in indie movie making are a good thing regarding the current neo-feudal and authoritarian currents.

> I don't think it is helpful to gatekeep movie making with arbitrary requirements regarding AI usage

I am not gatekeeping at all; I don't understand this argument that this could ever be perceived as gatekeeping. I'm just saying that in my own experience, indie creators tend to perceive generative AI as bullshit, not as liberation.

Artists who tell you that AI is not helping art are not gatekeeping either.

Of course, but AI shouldn't hinder art either. I can understand the sentiment, but if GenAI can help somewhere, it is creative endeavors.

Jaws is an iconic horror film partly because the mechanical shark kept breaking, forcing them to do more with atmosphere and less with animatronics.

Yes.

A more obvious example is The Blair Witch Project, which cost less than a million dollars even after all the marketing was done (and cost essentially nothing to make).

The original Halloween was a very low-budget movie considering how long it took to shoot.

Vin Diesel's career was established by his own movie, Strays, which cost less than $50K. Which is zero budget, essentially, for a film that opened at Sundance.

Away from films there are many, many examples of massively popular albums and songs that were made essentially for nothing off the back of simple constraints and creativity.

In the long run, the only way artists will use AI effectively is by deciding on constraints that limit its use.

Because as soon as you don't limit its use, anyone can do what you can do.

So I tend towards thinking that AI won't really move the needle in terms of human creativity. It may reframe it. But nobody is going to be liberated creatively by it.

Tech people, I suspect, tend to assume that AI brings "full creative freedom" to artists the same way a patron does when they say "you can have full creative freedom".

It's not the same kind of freedom.

> Tech people, I suspect, tend to assume that AI brings "full creative freedom" to artists the same way a patron does when they say "you can have full creative freedom".

I think you introduce a rather arbitrary separation here. I spoke of the artistic communities in the sense of a normative force which establishes cultural acceptance and means of valuation for AI in artistic processes. Similar to what happened to photography and computer graphics.

Do you really think there is a distinct arch type of a tech person and an art person? If so, I would consider myself as an art person. I am by no means a professional artist, but I am a creative person who sees powerful tools emerge.

I work on video games as a hobbyist since I am 10. But I am not a good artist in the sense that my imagination and feature creep lead me to failure. These new emerging tools might bring me the freedom to pursue more of my ideas. When I started, I learned DirectX programming in pursuit of artistic freedom, now there is Unity3D and other engines that could have made the difference for me in what I would have become.

I am sure there are many more like me, who lost themselves in unattainable visions, and also many professional artists, who have ideas in the back of their heads which seem unrealistic to pursue.

Gen AI will hopefully enable many of those previously unattainable visions to come true.