2024 12 23
The sun setting on my photographic career. St Germain, Wisconsin. July, 2024. © Clayton Hauck
While at a holiday party a few nights back, the subject of Ai came up and sent me off into a dark headspace. My animator/editor friend had just seen some new examples of Google’s Ai video capabilities and it sent her spiraling into doom, declaring her job was now dead and gone. Sadly, I largely agree with her, tho of course it’s more complicated and won’t happen overnight. I’ve been largely ignoring (avoiding) checking in on Ai advancements over the last six months because I know it will only bum me out, and I’ve been too busy anyway, thus had been feeling more optimistic about the state of our creative industry. That moment at the party was like pouring cold water over my head.
This morning, I awoke to a post showcasing a fully-Ai-generated short film (see below). All of the sound, music and editing was done by a human but the visuals are fairly impressive, considering they were made by typing commands into a computer (I’d love to know how much time he spent repeating commands over and over before throwing his computer out the window). Surely, this will only get much better in the coming months. That said, I’m still not fully convinced Ai will ever become so good that it replaces all human-made visuals. Art is in the choices, and outsourcing a majority of your decisions to a computer will dilute your art and/or take lots of time to perfect, thus minimizing the advantage it provides in the first place. Also, while impressive for what it is, the film is kind of shit.
Last week, I hosted a Filmmaker Fridays event at my studio and the topic was film festivals. Two panelists were invited to talk about their roles in choosing which films are accepted to the festivals they work for. My broad takeaway from the event was that there is such a robust and enthusiastic demand for filmmaking generally, that I can’t even imagine a world in which the art form is completely outsourced to automation, regardless of how profitable it may become to do so (I’m not convinced this will be the case, either!). That said, Ai will surely transform the industry in ways comparable or even greater than the recent mega-change from film to digital. That change ushered in an explosion of new participants (myself included) and content is now so plentiful it’s impossible to watch even a small percentage of what is made annually. Sundance supposedly sees fourteen-thousand submissions each year, of which they likely don’t even view many of the entrants’ films because there’s just not enough time to do so.
At the event, I ran into the younger brother of a friend who I hadn’t seen in over a decade. He mentioned that he wrapped a feature horror film which he made for $3,000 and premiered to a sold-out audience at The Music Box. Check out the trailer below. It’s laughable how much better it is when compared to the Ai-made video above.
None of us have any clue what’s next. Nuclear war or impending alien invasion may soon make all of this a moot subject. While I will surely still go through periods of depression about how my job is about to be replaced by robots, I’m choosing to largely disregard these dark proclamations and barrel ahead with a positive mental attitude and the understanding that things will change, perhaps quite dramatically, but the world has a need to remain more or less in balance in order for anything to get accomplished.
-Clayton
