Speaker 1: Media. All right, Matt, I've read the YouTube comments and
Speaker 1: this time I want it so you do not cut
Speaker 1: me off with the music too fast. Okay, good right,
Speaker 1: all right, let's go. This is this week's Better Offline monologue.
Speaker 1: And I'm ed Zich. A lot of you have been
Speaker 1: saying you want me to do something about Sora, and
Speaker 1: if I'm honest, I haven't wanted to because I fund
Speaker 1: the whole thing is so utterly pathetic. A few weeks ago,
Speaker 1: open ai launched a half baked social networking app attached
Speaker 1: to a compute intensive video and audio generator, and people
Speaker 1: immediately began to do two things free count and generate
Speaker 1: as many copyright violations as humanly possible, all because of
Speaker 1: open AI's original plan was to ask copyright holders to
Speaker 1: opt out of having their content presented in these videos.
Speaker 1: Sora spent several days covered in Nazi spongebobs and pickagews
Speaker 1: with guns before multiple Hollywood talent agents. He's, along with
Speaker 1: the estate of Martin Luther King Junior, intervened the complained,
Speaker 1: leading to open ai creating, to quote MPR an opt
Speaker 1: in policy allowing all artists, performers, and individuals the right
Speaker 1: to determine how and whether they can be simulated with
Speaker 1: open AI, blocking the generation of well known characters on
Speaker 1: its public feed and offering to take down material not
Speaker 1: in compliance. It's unclear what happened with nintender, but I
Speaker 1: imagine one of their seventy million lawyers attacked. And now
Speaker 1: we've got that out of the way, let's talk about
Speaker 1: SORA itself. I understand a lot of the people who
Speaker 1: listen in film and TV they're kind of scared. And
Speaker 1: I understand that you've seen a few clips that look
Speaker 1: kind of sort of realistic, and that this, especially if
Speaker 1: you're in the creative arts, is quite terrifying because your
Speaker 1: mind naturally assumes that these clips can be strung together
Speaker 1: into some sort of coherent whole. This isn't the case.
Speaker 1: Every single good, and I use the term loosely, SARA
Speaker 1: video is cherry picked for many, many, many terrible generations.
Speaker 1: Every time you use SORA is random. It doesn't matter
Speaker 1: how specific your prompt is or however many times you've
Speaker 1: used it. SAA is effectively a giant video and audio slot.
Speaker 1: You can never ever guarantee that Sorrow will generate something useful,
Speaker 1: and as a result, can never really budget for using it.
Speaker 1: The human eye is remarkably demanding and little visual inconsistencies
Speaker 1: between scenes will make people feel weird and uncomfortable. Imagine
Speaker 1: that extrapolated to ten or fifteen seconds at a time,
Speaker 1: and how difficult it will be to get something that
Speaker 1: makes visual sense before you have to think about things
Speaker 1: like does this connect to the rest of the footage
Speaker 1: I'm using? Okay, So the majority of actual professionals who
Speaker 1: would use Sura would not be using the app. They'll
Speaker 1: be connecting directly to the model on open ais API.
Speaker 1: It's just it's not done via a classical app interface. Now,
Speaker 1: then there's the problem of cost. This is where you
Speaker 1: really need to start worrying if you're building things with Sourer.
Speaker 1: So let's start off with the first problem. Cost. So
Speaker 1: open ai offers two different Saur models. Sorra two, which
Speaker 1: they say is designed for speed and flexibility and is
Speaker 1: ideal for the exploration phase, and that costs ten cents
Speaker 1: per second, and then there's Sora two pro, which is
Speaker 1: either thirty cents or fifty cents a second depending on resolution,
Speaker 1: and I quote it's the thing you go to for
Speaker 1: production quality outputs. So you're either spending one, three, or
Speaker 1: five dollars for every ten seconds of footage. And like
Speaker 1: every generative model, the longer you generate, the higher the
Speaker 1: likelihood of hallucinations, which in the case of Soro, means
Speaker 1: bizarre animations, inconsistent details, or just flat out useless crap.
Speaker 1: Then there's the problem of time. Open AI's own documentation
Speaker 1: says that a single render may takes several minutes. At
Speaker 1: the end of those several minutes, out pops a video
Speaker 1: that may or may not be of any use. Open
Speaker 1: Ai allows you to remix using more prompts, which allows
Speaker 1: some iterative development, but these remixes also cost money and
Speaker 1: also take several minutes. So let me walk you through
Speaker 1: a scenario. You're making a short film. Let's just say
Speaker 1: it's fifteen minutes long, which is nine hundred seconds. You
Speaker 1: ask Zora to generate a man putting on a hat.
Speaker 1: Your first eight generations each taking four minutes and five
Speaker 1: dollars apiece, which takes about thirty two minutes and forty dollars.
Speaker 1: I don't really do the job, so you do two more,
Speaker 1: taking another four minutes apiece and ten more dollars. You
Speaker 1: finally on the next try get something kind of useful,
Speaker 1: which cost you another five dollars, and then you realize
Speaker 1: you wanted him to wear a specific kind of hat.
Speaker 1: This happens all the time when directing stuff. There are
Speaker 1: minor changes you make that you realize when you're finally
Speaker 1: in the moment, would look or sound or be better. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that doesn't go so well with probabilistic models. So shit, fuck,
Speaker 1: you gotta do something, so you remix in another four minutes,
Speaker 1: another five dollars. Fuck. Wrong hat, four minutes five dollars. Right,
Speaker 1: hat is hand blends through it for some reason. Okay,
Speaker 1: four minutes, five dollars. The hat's right, but when he
Speaker 1: puts it on, his eye blinks. One of his eyes
Speaker 1: just blinks three times for some reason, so you can't
Speaker 1: really use that. Okay, four minutes five dollars. Looks kind
Speaker 1: of good. Different hat again, four minutes, five dollars. Hmmm,
Speaker 1: you've now spent eighty dollars in over an hour generating
Speaker 1: a man trying to put on a hat. You're not
Speaker 1: really much closer to having useful footage. And because as
Speaker 1: you remix it again and again, keeps making these little errors,
Speaker 1: because that's how these models go, it's impossible to tell
Speaker 1: whether the next generation will be the one that works
Speaker 1: or whether sorrow will spit out some new little fuck up.
Speaker 1: So the more intricate something is, the more expensive it gets.
Speaker 1: But you know what, you can find money places you
Speaker 1: can't find more goddamn time. I guess you could have
Speaker 1: a separate computer running more, but that's still gonna cost
Speaker 1: a bunch of money. How many of these slot machines
Speaker 1: are you gonna run at once? How many times are
Speaker 1: you going to allow them to edit? How can you
Speaker 1: have a coherent vision when you've got multiple people generating things?
Speaker 1: You can't. But you know what, perhaps perhaps the next
Speaker 1: generation will be great, or perhaps it will be dogshit.
Speaker 1: You have no way to know, because that's the magic
Speaker 1: of generative AI. Yet these problems compound aggressively once you
Speaker 1: need any kind of visual consistency. The man now has
Speaker 1: to put the hat on and leave the house. How
Speaker 1: does the house look? Is the hat the same? Does
Speaker 1: he have wallpaper on his walls? Is there anyone else
Speaker 1: in the house? What kind of table? Two chairs, one chair,
Speaker 1: five chairs? How do you possibly keep all of these
Speaker 1: things consistent? You don't, You can't. That's part of what
Speaker 1: makes SAURA so goddamn awful. It's built specifically to make
Speaker 1: you scared of them, to create superficially impressive clips, so
Speaker 1: that brain dead Hollywood executives can claim it's the future.
Speaker 1: Yet in a practical sense, it's impossible to budget, or
Speaker 1: plan or guarantee anything about what SAURA might do. And
Speaker 1: this is pretty much across the board for these generative
Speaker 1: models making video and audio. Now, I've heard from a
Speaker 1: few people that SAA is cheaper because it doesn't involve labor,
Speaker 1: which is something you could say only if you believed
Speaker 1: SAURA would give consistent outputs. And really, the only thing
Speaker 1: that a probabilistic model like SAURA can do is guarantee inconsistency,
Speaker 1: even by Hollywood accounting standards. A generative tool that will
Speaker 1: cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to generate ten seconds
Speaker 1: of shitty footage that is impossible to coherently connect to
Speaker 1: more footage is a really terrible idea and also very
Speaker 1: inconsistent in its costs too. And like I said earlier,
Speaker 1: there's the issue of time. Every single entertainment product requires
Speaker 1: some sort of time budgeting, and it's impossible to say
Speaker 1: how long it will take SAURAW to generate something. Open
Speaker 1: Eye doesn't even specify what several minutes means, meaning you
Speaker 1: can't really plan a production using it. SARA isn't cheaper,
Speaker 1: SAWRA isn't easier, and SARA certainly isn't more efficient. But
Speaker 1: you need to remember also that generative video models have
Speaker 1: been around for over a year and they're not really
Speaker 1: seeing mass use now. If this thing were capable of
Speaker 1: making anything truly useful, you'd see it everywhere right now.
Speaker 1: But you are seeing a little bit of it. And
Speaker 1: I do want to address that you probably saw cal
Speaker 1: She's ad and heard that it costs two thousand dollars
Speaker 1: to make and took only a few days, But I
Speaker 1: really encourage you to look at the actual commercial itself.
Speaker 1: It's completely incoherent nonsense. Each shot completely disconnected with weird
Speaker 1: glitches and animations in the crowds, and one point towards
Speaker 1: the end, a woman is meant to say okay, see,
Speaker 1: but the sea part does not map to her mouth.
Speaker 1: It looks really bad and the only way you could
Speaker 1: get away with something like this is having these quick
Speaker 1: hit shots. And also please go and view the comments
Speaker 1: about this that people just rip the fuck out of
Speaker 1: this thing. But nevertheless, it was made using VO three,
Speaker 1: Google's generative video model, and it apparently took three hundred
Speaker 1: to four hundred clips to get fifteen usable shots stitched
Speaker 1: together using traditional editing tools. Now, the reason this costs
Speaker 1: two grand is that it sucked. And the reason you're
Speaker 1: not seeing more advertisers do this is because it's impossible
Speaker 1: to make a coherent video out of this footage. I
Speaker 1: realize most commercials you see on TV may feel chaotic
Speaker 1: or kind of bland, but they're remarkably precise, and the
Speaker 1: generative shots used for the Cawshi commercial are chaotic and
Speaker 1: failed to convey any real meaning beyond a person yelling
Speaker 1: Indiana or OKC. The only reason it cost so little
Speaker 1: was one guy put several days of prompting it to
Speaker 1: it and the end result was shitting cow. She didn't
Speaker 1: mind because this was a publicity move. Cow. She put
Speaker 1: out the commercials specifically so the media would write it up,
Speaker 1: and they succeeded because the media loves to feed on
Speaker 1: scary stories like AI is going to replace human actors.
Speaker 1: Since the calshe ads pjas who made it has made
Speaker 1: a few others a Popeyes wrap one where again go
Speaker 1: and look at the comments. I'm not linking to it,
Speaker 1: by the way, I don't want to send them any
Speaker 1: fucking traffic. But the Pope is one. People are just
Speaker 1: responding saying, this looks like shit, what is this? It's incoherent,
Speaker 1: it's inconsistent. But the funniest one I found was David
Speaker 1: Beckham's iomate health supplement ad, which ends with a shot
Speaker 1: of the bottle of the product with a bunch of
Speaker 1: garbled generative texts. It does not appear that PJAS has
Speaker 1: got a ton more work than this, probably because the
Speaker 1: outputs kind of suck and brands really do not like
Speaker 1: inconsistent things. And also a fucking health supplement from David Beckham.
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ just say it's a private equity film anyway.
Speaker 1: To conclude, I also want to be clear that the
Speaker 1: rates for these videos are heavily subsidized by big tech,
Speaker 1: just like every other generative AI product or saw a
Speaker 1: might cost thirty or fifty cents a second right now.
Speaker 1: Once the AI bubble burst, these prices who will either
Speaker 1: skyrocket or these models will cease to exist for public consumption.
Speaker 1: The biggest clue I can give you is Google only
Speaker 1: allows you to generate four or five VO three videos
Speaker 1: a day on their two hundred and fifty dollars a
Speaker 1: month Gemini ultra plan. That suggests that Google's video costs
Speaker 1: a brutal and the open aiye is burning money by
Speaker 1: the bucket for to let you fuck around on the
Speaker 1: sau app. I don't recommend you do that, but if
Speaker 1: you have just no, you're burning a hole in Clammy
Speaker 1: Sammy's pocket. I will add that you may worry about
Speaker 1: these models getting better. While they might be more nuanced
Speaker 1: than their ability to generate video in five or ten
Speaker 1: second bursts, their ability to generate longer or consistent videos
Speaker 1: is inherently impossible due to the probabilistic nature of transformer
Speaker 1: based models. In simple terms, these things are rolling the
Speaker 1: dice every time. The way you prompt them is what
Speaker 1: makes them generate, and they don't have minds or thoughts.
Speaker 1: They're just rolling the dice every time on whatever you
Speaker 1: say and trying to interpret what you mean. Human beings,
Speaker 1: by the way, are extremely magical. I think you really
Speaker 1: underestimate how amazing people are. When we direct someone on
Speaker 1: a film set, even like an assistant director. That person
Speaker 1: keeps the product moving and make sure everyone gets what
Speaker 1: they need and pushes back in a director when something
Speaker 1: might be impractical. A director is a visionary, but also
Speaker 1: an actor is someone that takes interpretation and then is
Speaker 1: directed to do different things. But that direction is not
Speaker 1: a fucking prompt move your elbow, look look at this way,
Speaker 1: look that way. The things that operate on a film
Speaker 1: or TV set are inherently different to just plugging words
Speaker 1: into a fucking model, and I get them. I get
Speaker 1: everyone in Hollywood who's scared right now. I get everyone
Speaker 1: in creatives, in creative arts even who is scared right now.
Speaker 1: I feel for you. These people are losing. These people
Speaker 1: are losing. This stuff does not work, it's inconsistent, it's
Speaker 1: incredibly expensive on subsidized rates, and in the end, I
Speaker 1: really really believe that once the bubble pops, these things
Speaker 1: are going away. Thank you so much for listening. Reach
Speaker 1: out if you have any thoughts. I always love to
Speaker 1: hear from people. E Z at better offline dot com.
Speaker 1: I love getting your emails. I love getting your your
Speaker 1: weird little missives on Reddit. I really am I'm truly blessed,
Speaker 1: and I love you all. I love how many of
Speaker 1: you listener. I love how communicative you are. It's been
Speaker 1: a big week with the Anthropic exclusive, and yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna have already a better offline next week as well. Crap,
Speaker 1: I've got a good do an episode. Shit damn. Oh well,
Speaker 1: I have the best job in the world anyway, Thank
Speaker 1: you for listening.