I lived through the end of the beginning of computer becoming a primary tool for art, both in building DeviantART and also I was in the second cohort of the first ever digital imaging and technology program in Canada. It was super interesting, during college was the release of the Canon 300D, things moved really quickly after, my graduating year the pro film makers associations introduced a ban on digital work within the associations "club activities" (that lasted about 16 months) - it was funny tho you would see people judging professional salons (contests) zooming in to 30000% looking for signs of digital editing - I was ~20 and it was all very amusing to me, like why did all these old people hate digital art do much? We persisted, bunch of us graduated and started a studio, one day Canon called us, I was one of the first people in the world to use a Canon 5D Mk2 months before it was released, my ads ended up on TV, we won three technical emmy awards, made lots of money, had a great time etc. All the people I know who rode the wave had fantastic careers and worked on interesting stuff, made money etc.(and btw, the last ones standing after all was said and done in the "fuck digital camp"? curmudgeons!)
fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists, I am a business/technology person who happens to be decent at story telling and naturally not awful at picture making - I would have gotten crushed by what the technologies enabled as the abstractions and programatic features opened up film making to people who didn't want to or couldn't naturally grasp the physics/controls. I'm grateful past me was able to think about this clearly because it lead me to meeting Ben and Moisey and joining them to go on and build DigitalOcean, one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
>fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists
I'm not sure if that bet really paid off. I feel like the number or both "skilled artist" and "skilled storyteller" didn't really move. It just feels higher because the barrier to entry and validation is "how well can I market myself on social media?" Not "can I get into/create my own studio?" or any other metric a craftsman would use. I don't necessarily callel this a bad thing, and I'd even argue that it only magnified existing issues instead of creating new new ones. but it has obvious down sides.
Deviant art played a part in that, so kudos. Or perhaps, you've doomed us all? Hard to say, I always had a strange relationship with DeviantArt.
I think people are setting themselves up for failure if they index their happiness or sense of self satisfaction to their ability to discern what AI-generated content is or not.
Soon, we’ll have no idea what’s AI-generated or not. I care about good, tight story telling.
Part of watching films and animations was that seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself. When all they did was enter a prompt that takes some of the magic away.
If all you care about is just the story then maybe you personally will be satisfied but a lot of people cared about the animations, cinematography, etc, and all of the work that went into that.
I think digital effects still rarely look as good as the peak of Hollywood practical effects (call it… idk, Alien in 1979 through Independence Day in ‘96 or so, roughly, and yes I know ID4 also had computer fx in addition to lots of miniatures and models)
Having to do things for-real also kept things grounded. Modern action movies are often cartoon-like with supposedly human characters stringing together super-human moves that’d leave a real person with dislocated shoulders, broken bones, and brain damage, because they’re actually just CG, no human involved.
[EDIT] OMG, or take Bullitt (1968) versus, say, the later Fast and the Furious sequels (everything past Tokyo Drift). The latter are basically Pixar's Cars with more-realistic textures. They're cartoons with live-action talking segments. Very little actual driving is depicted. Bullitt may have used the movie-magic of editing, but someone did have to actually drive a car, for every shot of a car driving. Or at least they had to set up a car with a dummy to convincingly crash. What you're seeing is heightened, but basically within the realm of reality.
Or take A Bridge Too Far. It's a bit of a mess! Make it CG and it'd be outright bad. But ho-lee-shit do they blow up a lot of stuff, like, you cannot even believe how much. And look at all those tanks and armored vehicles they got! And planes! And extras! Those are all 100% real! AND ALL THE KABOOMS! And it all looks better than CG, to boot. The spectacle of it (plus some solid performances) saves the movie. Make all the FX CG and it'd be crap.
Imagine a Jackie Chan movie with CG stunts. What is even the point. It'd be trash.
This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real) vs Furiosa (a lot of CGI.)
But only bad CGI is visible. I guarantee you have watched CGI footage and not noticed. At all.
The problem over the last decade or so hasn't been the technical limits of CGI, but studio unwillingness to spend enough on it to make it good.
And directors have also become less creative. You can find UK newsreels from the 50s on YouTube, and some of the direction and editing are superb - a beautiful mix of abstraction, framing, and narrative.
Most modern directors don't have that kind of visual literacy. The emphasis is more on spectacle and trying to bludgeon audiences into submission, not on tastefulness and visual craft.
This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real)
Fury Road is pure wall to wall CGI. People keep pointing to it as some example of doing things with live action when the entire movie is soaked with CG and compositing.
It's a lot of CGI, but done in realistic ways. A lot of the examples from the article (which is a very good article, thank you for linking it) were mostly about paint-outs, color grading, or background elements.
There's a good chunk of modern blockbusters that will CGI everything in a scene except the lead actor's face - and sometimes that too.
Predates computers, they used to paint out wires and whatnot by hand and it usually looked just as good.
> Compositing
Predates computers. They've been doing it since forever with miniature overlays, matte paintings, chromakey, double exposures, and cutting up film negatives with exacto blades.
> color grading
Literal cancer which ruins movies every goddamn time. The fact that they shoot movies with this kind of manipulation in mind changes how they use lighting and makes everything flat with no shadows, no depth, everything now gets shot like a soap opera. This also applies to heavy use of compositing too. To make it cheaper to abuse compositing, mostly so the producers can "design by committee" the movie after all the filming is done, they've destroyed how they light and shoot scenes. Everything is close up on actors, blurred backgrounds, flat lighting, fast cuts to hide the lazy work. Cancer.
I'm talking about Fury Road too BTW. It's crap. Watch the original Mad Max, not Road Warrior, then watch Fury Road. The first is a real movie with heart and soul, the world it depicts feels real. The latter feels like a video game, except it somehow comes out looking even less inspired and creative than the actual mad max video game that came out at the same time.
But yeah, they made some real weird cars for the movie. That's fine I guess. The first movie didn't need weird cars, it had this thing called characters. Characters who felt like real people, not freaks from a comic book.
Exactly - they've been doing paint outs and composite shots forever! It doesn't feel fundamentally different to do it "on a computer," to me. They aren't using it to show off, just to make the scene look how you'd expect it to.
They've also been doing color grading forever - digital just makes it way cheaper and easier. Before, you'd have to do photochemical tricks to the film, and you would use different film for different vibes.
I'd argue that the ease of digital manipulation has led some studios to do what you say - postpone creativity until after the movie is mostly shot, which leads to that design-by-committee feeling. That sense of 'don't worry, we'll fix the lighting it the editing room' is the same sloppiness as 'and then the big gorilla will use his magic attack and it will look really cool,' without any thought given to it's actually going to look like. But that's not really a failure of CGI itself - that's a failure of vision, right? If you procrastinate making artistic decisioms for long enough, there's not actually going to be any art in the movie once it's done.
I have watched the original Mad Max, and it was pretty alright. If I had watched it at the right age, I probably would have imprinted on it.
It used to be the case that movies had to be made carefully, with the intended look in mind when they were shooting it. Compositing, etc aren't new, as we both know, but the way they're used has changed; they're used far more than ever before, with important design decisions about the look of the movie deferred to the very last minute ans everything up to that point done in such a way to facilitate making late last minute changes. This is absolute poison for cinematography as an art. Very few big budget movies made in recent years has any artistic merit for this reason. Producers now feel like they have the technology to make all the decisions that, by technical and logistic necessity, the directors/cinematographers would have to make themselves years ago. And the producers are just assholes with money, they cannot make art.
With respect to Mad Max, I think it aged like a fine wine. I didn't first see it when I was young, I saw Road Warrior first. But Road Warrior and everything after it is very camp. Mad Max is more grounded and feels like a commentary on our times, not pure fantasy spectacle. I think the best time to watch Mad Max was the 70s, and the second best time is probably today. In the 90s or 00s it wouldn't have hit right.
I'd argue that the ease of digital manipulation has led some studios to do what you say - postpone creativity until after the movie is mostly shot,
None of this is true. You can't shoot plates and do whatever you want later. Even basic effects shots take intricate planning. They were talking about cleaning up mistakes and small details.
which leads to that design-by-committee feeling
I'm not sure what this means in the context of a movie but it isn't how movies are made.
There are art directors, production designers and vfx supervisors and they answer to the director. Movies are the opposite of design by committee. It isn't a bunch of people compromising, it is the director making decisions and approving every step.
that sense of 'don't worry, we'll fix the lighting it the editing room'
This doesn't happen because it isn't how anything works. You can fix lighting in editing.
the same sloppiness as 'and then the big gorilla will use his magic attack and it will look really cool,' without any thought given to it's actually going to look like.
Enormous thought and planning is given to every stage. This idea of not liking lots of effects in fantasy or comic book movies and then attributing that to sloppiness or apathy simply does not happen in big budget movies. There are multiple stages of gathering reference, art direction and early tests, many times before any photography is shot.
If you procrastinate making artistic decisioms for long enough, there's not actually going to be any art in the movie once it's done.
Not only does this not happen, it doesn't make sense. Just because you don't like something that doesn't mean huge amounts of work and planning didn't go into it.
The person I replied to said it was "mostly real". Lots of CG is done in realistic ways but people pick and choose what they decide is good based on the movies they already like. Fury Road has somehow become an example of "doing things for real" when the whole movie is non stop CG shots.
A lot of the examples from the article (which is a very good article, thank you for linking it) were mostly about paint-outs, color grading, or background elements.
No they weren't, there are CG landscapes, CG mountains, CG canyons, CG crowds, CG storms, CG cars, CG arm replacements and many entirely CG shots. It's the whole movie.
Are you suggesting it's not noticeable in those movies? I found it distracting several times in I think every one of those (maybe the least in 1917? And I haven't seen Ford vs. Ferrari, but I have all the rest). A few entire scenes or sequences in TG:M look awful, and it's usually the mundane ones that wouldn't even have been effects in a pre-CG movie, not the aircraft action stuff. Alien: Romulus looks fake practically the whole movie (that one didn't ruin it for me or anything, but it had an effect like the Riddick movies, of being obviously mostly a cartoon, though of course not as awful about it as those were).
Well, I guess it wasn't exactly distracting in Barbie because that's practically a marionette movie a la Thunderbirds, so it's not really trying not to look off.
> Are you suggesting it's not noticeable in those movies
You can check the youtube link I posted. You'd be hard pressed to notice the good CGI in those movies.
> I found it distracting several times in I think every one of those
Honestly, I really doubt you noticed that much CGI. Well, unless you go in already primed to discount everything as CGI (whether or not it's actually CGI).
Current-era CGI is insanely good. The problem is that it's used and abused everywhere, often with very little consideration for whether it's needed, or if there's time to do all the VFX shots etc.
I think eliminating the need to think and work around reality is part of the trouble. Not that it ruins everything (people take HN posts as so maximalist even when they factually are not; see: the rest of this comment tree) but I think the lack of the odd limitation or need to think about how to solve a problem without resorting to “render it in a computer” causes significant harm to cinema overall. I’m not (see above parenthetical) claiming it’s net-negative, but there’s a kind of film-making skill and genius that was once on display pretty widely, and now is not.
I mean for fuck’s sake, they’d probably CG the paint buckets in Home Alone if they made it today. And we’d get some tasteless can-cam shot, because you don’t have to figure it out, you can just do it. And they’d look fake because they’d move too perfectly, lacking the kinds of little off-seeming movements that a real paint can in a real take might do. Never might the can obscure a few frames of face when the directors might choose otherwise, and the result will be obviously CG through its convenience if not due to outright flaws.
Excessive perfection and too many things moving the optimal way for the shot or exactly the way the viewer expects are under-appreciated tells of CG, and they’re deadly ones, present even in a lot of “perfect” CG (give it a few years, we thought the CG in Lord of the Rings was convincing and now it looks like trash). They need to start CGing their fake environments sometimes doing something slightly less than ideal to an actor’s jacket, or something, and not to call attention to it as a comedy relief moment, but because “that’s just what happened” (not really, but it’d make the effects more convincing)
> CG through its convenience if not due to outright flaws.
It's also over-reliance on this convenience. Bad shot? We'll fix it in post. Objects missing, or in wrong places, or too many of them? We'll fix it in post. Bad sound, camera position, actor unavailable? Believe it or not, post.
And many don't even think whether you should prepare the shot for post-production, or even give vfx teams more time to complete the work
This is just rose tinted nostalgia. You are remembering the things you loved which are much simpler and forgetting all the lemon shots and limitations of the day.
The movies and TV that can be made now without the limitations of the past are significantly different, from period movies to super hero movies and everything in between. Watch the 1970s superman or logan's run and see how they hold up.
The vast majority of CG is replicating stuff like set design or replacing a location shoot. We don’t usually call that an “effect” when it’s not done with a computer. And even then… it continues to deliver “bad matte painting” often enough that spotting such failures in the wild isn’t hard (nor was it hard with bad matte paintings!)
[edit] my point, anyway, isn’t that any given effect is better. It’s not even necessarily that the movies are better (The Passion of Joan of Arc barely had effects at all, and didn’t have synced sound, for god’s sake, an it’s incredible—of course CG-having movies can be great) but that I tend to find the overall effect of those movies better. Those “seamless” mundane CG effects shots of things like composited computer-generated rooms or streets rarely get the kind of attention a real set does, and the movies suffer for it. Nobody had to move around the space with their real body and think about it, and it usually (usually! Not every single time) shows, if not in anything wrong, exactly, then in the degree to which it’s perfectly forgettable and fails to contribute anything but filling screen space.
[edit edit] more to the point, peak practical wins at convincing effects in the Big Damn Action Moment. But only peak, and that was a tragically brief span. Point me to a CG sci-fantasy space fight that looks better and/or more like a real thing that’s happening than the battle above Endor in return of the Jedi (you’ll notice I didn’t pick the earlier two movies, as Jedi is where they really perfected it all—though even the first has some shots that are quite convincing!). Like truly if you know of one I’d love to see it. I never have. They all look plainly computer generated. I’m not saying every frame of those SFX shots in Jedi is perfect, but it looks overall more real than anything similar I’ve seen done in a computer. Like you’d think in about 40 years it’d have been surpassed multiple times, but no. They all look CG.
Or, like… put the best 50% of practical shots in Jurassic Park against the best 50% of CG-heavy dino action shots in any Jurassic Park from 3 on. They’re more convincing than any of the CG shots. (Some, from the field of all practical effects shots in the film, are not convincing! But a hell of a lot are, and not just better than the median CG effect in later JPs or something, but better than all). We struggle to touch the tippy-top peak of that craft with computer effects, still today.
The vast majority of CG is replicating stuff like set design or replacing a location shoot.
Says who?
We don’t usually call that an “effect”
Who is "we" ?
This is basically going from "CG is bad" to "not all CG" to "that's not an 'effect'". These arguments never hold up because any explanation ends up full of holes and inconsistencies.
Usually it just ends up being a variation of "I liked the movies I saw when I was a kid". Most of what you're saying here is just that you liked an old movie.
People have been making the argument of 'models look more real' since the 90s, but when it comes down to it, they don't know what is CG and what isn't and can't tell the difference. It's a combination of nostalgia and thinking they know better when they aren't actually being tested.
Then there is the fact that shots in modern movies can't be made without CG. You can't do the same things with models and have the camera freedom, long shots, wide shots etc, and that's just hard surfaces.
Saying "I love this black and white movie, therefore CG is over used" is an opinion that most people would never hold and a connection that doesn't make a lot of sense, but the a cold hard fact is that the same movies can't be made. Eventually seeing a half second jump scare of an alien is going to get old even if the man in the suit looks good.
> > The vast majority of CG is replicating stuff like set design or replacing a location shoot.
> Says who?
The people who are like "actually there's a ton of CG you don't notice!". They mean simple compositing, CG backdrops, painting in props, and stuff like that. (as if I'm not already aware of that stuff, LOL) That's where most of the CG is in movies for the last decade or so—they're right about that. It's replacing prop construction, set design & construction, and location shooting.
> This is basically going from "CG is bad" to "not all CG" to "that's not an 'effect'". These arguments never hold up because any explanation ends up full of holes and inconsistencies.
No, I'm just not impressed when CG successfully (I disagree it's successful as often as proponents say, and to them I say "give it ten years and a lot of this 'good' stuff will look awful to you", as it's the same ride we've been on with CG the entire time so far, the "look, CG's finally entirely convincing!" movie seems about as convincing as Jason and the Argonauts' stop motion a few years later) does something mundane that wouldn't even have been an effect before.
I mean, if we're counting that, and trying to compare the two, then just about every single time a location shoot was used where CG might have been today, classic "effects" win. That part's silly to compare.
> People have been making the argument of 'models look more real' since the 90s, but when it comes down to it, they don't know what is CG and what isn't and can't tell the difference. It's a combination of nostalgia and thinking they know better when they aren't actually being tested.
The best of the best just really do hold up better. It's a shame we didn't get more time with that style before CG took over, it was a pretty brief window between "you can always tell the model is a model" and "now it's all computers".
(This should irk you too: CG blood spatter harms every single action movie where it replaces squibs, the movie may survive the harm but that part is terrible every time)
The people who are like "actually there's a ton of CG you don't notice!". They mean simple compositing, CG backdrops, painting in props,
No, it's everything. Modern big budget movies could have 800-1200 vfx shots. You aren't able to guess at what is photography in every shot in a few seconds 800 times during a movie. You can make that claim, but even people who have been doing vfx for decades can't do it. People say these things because they want to believe it and they know they won't be tested to prove it.
I mean, if we're counting that, and trying to compare the two, then just about every single time a location shoot was used where CG might have been today, classic "effects" win. That part's silly to compare.
The best of the best just really do hold up better. It's a shame we didn't get more time with that style before CG took over
You say this but again, you don't know how every shot was done and every shot is different. This mostly comes from people wanting to think they are never 'fooled' and 'old ways are better'. This has been going on and repeated since the 90s.
The truth is that you aren't in a position to judge what is 'best' because you don't know how every shot was done in the first place.
I think this might be your nostalgia. The thing looks different in different scenes, and there's a scene that feels like it's a guy inside from the way it moves. So I disagree that Alien is peak special effects. (still peak over things. Peak ambience for sure)
I didn't pick perfect examples, I picked useful ones for bounding the rough time period. Both examples are transitional.
Alien nails it like 80% of the time (I've watched it twice in the last year, in 4k on a wall-size screen, so it's fresh for me). It's an early, major example of getting it damn near perfect pretty often. Not every shot's great—like, about two-thirds of the shots of the exterior of the landing craft look like a miniature, not as glaring as a Showa-era Godzilla or anything, but you can tell—but it's still a better average than modern computer-heavy movies. It's one of the earliest that's exhibiting the potential of peak pre-CG special effects, if not nailing it all the time. But, very few movies nail it all the time, including modern ones doing the computer graphics thing.
There’s an argument to be made that by watching higher image quality versions, you’re losing on the experience. I.e. the blurriness helped the effect. Their nostalgia and your (presumably) more recent viewing are then two different watching experiences.
That's very romantic. The golden age of both cinema and animation was an assembly line, often an exploitative one. Most frames were the by product of industrial labor, done by people with little autonomy, low wages, no creative input... the human element was already highly concentrated among a very small elite, and, the majority of the labor pool was treated as mechanical/replaceable input. "seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself." Sure, but, it's not reeeaaally “a human did it.” It is more “a small number of visible artists did it.”
But nevertheless, a human did still do it. How gruelling and exploitative the process was, or how many humans it took, is beside the point. The fact that the image existed meant that there was an attainable skill that a person could learn in order to do that same thing, and that was inspiring.
Since the days of cave paintings, that experience has been available to all humans. In the year 2025, it died, and I will never experience it again.
I get it, but it also doesn't matter. I liked anime when it was drawn by hand because I liked looking at all the things people could draw. But it doesn't matter what I like; virtually all anime is now rendered from 3d computer models, particularly any sort of machinery or whenever the camera rotates or transforms in space showing off the 3d structure of things. That stuff used to be drawn by hand but now nobody does that. It's not coming back.
Good film making is good film making. I am a creative. I incorporate AI into videos that I make subtly and with a huge amount of care. I know I put more time and care into my craft than most others.
Nobody knows what involved AI and what didn’t. At the end of the day, if you care about your work, it shows.
I can almost see your point, but there are two big problems:
1) To date, there has been no example of AI that is good. It's not even close.
And 2) Why should I be interested in a story nobody was interested in telling? If you don't want to make a video, or tell a story, or write a song, then...just don't. Why even have an AI do it?
It's wild that you would make this claim without taking a few seconds to drop a link. It's such a substantial, controversial claim, it really needs some kind of evidence.
What does a visualization being to the table over a book, if it's executed in the most generic way possible? The decisions made when adapting one medium to another are what does or doesn't make it worthwhile.
Unless your goal is purely to capture people who don't and won't read, as cheaply and cynically as possible.
there is a big difference between sending the story to the AI and saying "visualize this" vs carefully describing exactly how the visualization should look like and effectively only using the AI to render your vision.
well the question is rather, what is the difference of AI use vs say a 3D modelling application?
assuming you have the 3D assets already designed. you then take a model, and instruct the application that this model is to move from point A to point B, using a pathfinding algorithm while avoiding obstacles. once done, render the result in a video.
now do the same with AI. is the human contribution really that much different?
I think the objections with AI will change based on the quality of the AI generated work. What people don't want is to wade through a million gallons of poorly generated slop to see one good movie. They also don't want to have to deal with thousands of zero effort AI videos just to find one good video generated by a human being.
If the actual result of AI is an unlimited supply of adequate media personalized to our tastes, I don't foresee there being any objection. Right now, it's honestly just shovelware on a scale that hasn't been seen before. No one likes shovelware except maybe toddlers.
If we ever get to that point...im still ambivalent. I also get exposed to media to form community. And Ai very explicly wants to tear down communities and create a factory of slop. Even if we can get some good Ai storytelling, I'm not sure if a tree fighting the flood is enough. It's going to topple eventually as the roots get washed out
>In the case of this ad.. it’s okay?
I thought it was cute. I can nitpick, but it gave a feeling of family and community, and how you can't form that by devouring your peers.
The McDonald's ad meanwhile : "the world's going to shit, use McDonald's as your apocalypse bunker! (no loitering tho)". Heck, it feels like the kind of ad Fallout or Outer Worlds would make on an in-game TV.
You are framing it as "this technological advancement is being thought of as bad because we always think of new technological advancements as bad". AI is bad because of all the ways in which it is objectively bad.
You cold find plenty of people complaining about CGI up to earlier this year.
Computers are bad, unless used by exactly the necessary measure to add to the story. Then they are great. But most movies don't do that, and you can see the actors not reacting to the scenes they are in because they have no idea what's actually happening.
The same will probably happen to AI, with also most people overdoing it and making bad stuff. Forever.
It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out.
I may be wrong, but I get the sense that computer art was welcomed by people actually working in the field (did professionals criticize the computer graphics in Star Wars or Wrath of Khan?) and it was mostly the lay public that saw it as somehow not real. The opposite seems to be true for AI "art."
> It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out.
People at the time also said using a computer was fundamentally different from putting in a ton of work into building physical models.
A lot of tech adoption is motivated by economics, so the argument that "before it was more work, now it's less work" will almost always apply regardless of the specifics. I don't think it's a useful thing to focus on. It's almost a moral argument: I deserve it because I suffered for it, but he did it easy so he doesn't deserve it.
In fact, I would even go further. I would say it's part of the definition of technology. What is technology? Technology is a thing or an idea, created or discovered, that makes work easier and/or cheaper.
I agree that it's not useful if we're looking at practical stuff. It doesn't matter to me if my table was built with ten hours of human work, or ten seconds.
But for creative work? I think it matters a lot. You used the phrase "creating art." I don't think it counts as "creating" if there's no work going into it. Typing some words into a prompt box and getting a video out is not "creating," any more than doing an image search and printing out an image of a painting is creating a painting.
Printers are extremely useful devices, but they don't create art.
but there are subtle signs that the old ways made art different
people do more practical effects, they also miss the era of physical set filming[0], i personally am bored seeing the latest gpu able to create gazillions of whatever because i got the memo, gpu can do everything.. i get more magic seeing what people did with very few
don't get fooled by the "people reject evolution every time"
[0] technology can distort the focus onto the tool out of the art, films before had to arbitrate between various tricks to get a scene to work, now apparently people don't. they film bits and postprocess everything later, the tech allows infinite changes, but the cake has no taste
The core difference is in the amount of intentional decisions being made by the artist. A prompt, no matter how specific, still delegates a lot of work to what is essentially chance. Something like Blender does make it easier to do certain things, but you still have to actively choose to do them. This is why AI-slop, no matter how detailed, will always feel off. It lacks the deliberateness of a human artist who knows exactly what they're doing and why at every level.
Did the Wrath of Khan have any CGI? The only scenes I remember are the jarringly bad computer displays at various points on the Enterprise. If I recall correctly, the rest of the movie used traditional VFX: models, compositing, etc. I personally find the battle scenes in that movie-- particularly the nebula scene-- to be beautiful and one of the space battle scenes ever. Despite what others think, I also think that the first Star Trek movie is both a technical and narrative masterpiece, so YMMV.
Thanks, somehow I forgot about that scene. Pretty great by 1982 standards… a little lame by modern standards, although I could imagine that this is exactly the kind of snazzy but low-res simulation a scientist of the future might generate.
AI is threatening to remove humans from the whole equation except the very top. AI is an existential threat (not in the Terminator sense).
Especially for art, I'm an AI researcher myself (in bio for health), but I think that ppl are completely understandable for wanting to help artists make a living and want to consume something that someone cared about
Lisberger recounts. "We did all those effects in about seven months, which included inventing the techniques." "Tron," however, wasn't nominated for a special-effects Oscar. "The Academy thought we cheated by using computers," he scoffs.
Writer and director Steven Lisberger made that claim in interviews, so I wouldn't quite call it an urban myth.
As far as I know, any film can be submitted for Academy Award consideration in any category, then an executive committee determines the eligibility of each submission and chooses up to 20 films to move onto the nomination process.
I don't think this committee publishes anything about its decision-making process, so presumably Lisberger is just guessing based on his impression of industry sentiment at the time.
Wasn't it even Tron who didn't qualify for the special effects oscar because they "used computers"?
It's interesting that it's no longer "computer bad", now it's "AI bad".