Speaker 1: All Zone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline as usual.
Speaker 1: I'm your host ed zitron. A few months ago, open
Speaker 1: Ai showed off Sora, a product that can generate videos
Speaker 1: based on a short text prompt, kind of like chat
Speaker 1: ebt does for text or Daali does for images. These videos,
Speaker 1: which are usually no more than sixty seconds long, can
Speaker 1: at times seem impressive until you notice a little detail
Speaker 1: that breaks the entire facade, like in a video where
Speaker 1: a cat wakes up its owner, but the owner's arm
Speaker 1: appears to be part the cushion and the cat's poor
Speaker 1: explodes out of its arm like an ameba. Reactions to
Speaker 1: Sora's Ai generated videos, and indeed the existence of the
Speaker 1: model itself, have ranged from kind of a breathless hype
Speaker 1: to genuine fear that this will be used to replace
Speaker 1: video producers, in that it can create reality adjacent videos
Speaker 1: that for a few seconds kind of seem real, especially
Speaker 1: in the case in some of open Aye's hand pick
Speaker 1: demo videos. Yet even in these handpicked Sora outputs, you'll
Speaker 1: find these weird little things that immediately shatter the illusion,
Speaker 1: like one where a woman's legs awkwardly shuffle, then somehow
Speaker 1: switch sides as she walks around, or blobs of people
Speaker 1: merging in the background of images. These are, on some
Speaker 1: level genuinely remarkable technological achievements, until you consider that what
Speaker 1: they are and what they might do, and that there
Speaker 1: are problems in them that run through the entire fabric
Speaker 1: of artificial intelligence. A little over a month after SAW
Speaker 1: was announced, open AI would debut a series of short films,
Speaker 1: including one called Airhead, where filmmakers Shy Kids told the
Speaker 1: story of a man with a balloon for a head,
Speaker 1: and because this is AI said, balloon changes sizes twenty three,
Speaker 1: twenty four, twenty six, twenty seven, twenty nine, thirty two,
Speaker 1: thirty four, thirty nine, forty one, forty two, forty three,
Speaker 1: and forty five seconds into the piece, at which point
Speaker 1: I stopped counting because it got boring and I really
Speaker 1: don't want to be mean to shy kids, as this
Speaker 1: really isn't their fault. The very nature of filmmaking is
Speaker 1: that you take different shots of the same thing. Something
Speaker 1: that I anticipated SAA was incapable of doing. Is each
Speaker 1: shot is generated fresh a saura itself. Much like all
Speaker 1: generative AI does not actually know anything when one asks
Speaker 1: for a man with a yellow balloon as his head.
Speaker 1: SAURA must then look at the parameters spawn during its
Speaker 1: training process and create an output guessing what a man
Speaker 1: looks like, what a balloon looks like, what a man's
Speaker 1: features are on his body, what color yellow is, what
Speaker 1: the man's doing, and so on and so forth. This
Speaker 1: becomes extremely problematic when you're working in film or television,
Speaker 1: where viewers are far more likely to see when something
Speaker 1: just doesn't look right, a problem exacerbated by moving images,
Speaker 1: high resolution footage, and big television screens which are now ubiquitous.
Speaker 1: Yet the press, as usual, credulously accepted Saura's quote stunning
Speaker 1: videos that were amazing and scary, suggesting to the public
Speaker 1: that we were on the verge of some sort of
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence takeover of the film industry, helping boy Sam Altman,
Speaker 1: their CEO, and his dumbast attempts to convince Hollywood that
Speaker 1: SURRA won't destroy the movie business. These stories only serve
Speaker 1: to help Sam Orman, who desperately needs you to believe
Speaker 1: that Hollywood is scared of Surer and even more scared
Speaker 1: of Generative AI, because the more you talk about fear
Speaker 1: and lost jobs and the machines taking over the less.
Speaker 1: You ask a very very simple question, does any of
Speaker 1: this shit actually work? The answer, it turns out, is
Speaker 1: not very well. In a piece for FX Guide, Mike
Speaker 1: Seymour sat down with Shy Kids, the people behind Airhead,
Speaker 1: and revealed how SORAW is in many ways a little
Speaker 1: bit useless for making films. SAURA takes ten to twenty
Speaker 1: minutes to generate a single three to twenty second shot,
Speaker 1: something that isn't really a problem until you realize that
Speaker 1: until the shot is rendered, you really have absolutely no
Speaker 1: idea what the hell it's going to spit out. Soa
Speaker 1: has no mechanism to connect one shot to another. Even
Speaker 1: with hyperdescriptive prompts. It hallucinates extra features when you haven't
Speaker 1: asked for them. And Shy Kids were shocked by how
Speaker 1: surprised open Ay's researchers were when they requested the ability
Speaker 1: to use a prompt to request a particular angle in
Speaker 1: a shot, a feature that was initially unavailable. It took
Speaker 1: this is what kind of drives me crazy here and
Speaker 1: you'll hear this in the interview with him later. These
Speaker 1: people that are open AI people, and they were making
Speaker 1: this tool for making visual images for making moving images.
Speaker 1: They didn't think that people might want different shots. I'm
Speaker 1: so glad these are the people who were in control
Speaker 1: of the future. Anyway, to quote the piece, it took
Speaker 1: hundreds of generations at ten to twenty seconds a piece
Speaker 1: to make a minute and nineteen second long film. And
Speaker 1: what's really fun about this is that the movie's fine.
Speaker 1: I it was kind of fine. I just I have
Speaker 1: nothing really to say about it. It's a minute and
Speaker 1: twenty seconds long, but it's it kind of works. But also,
Speaker 1: the balloon looks different in every other shot. This isn't
Speaker 1: shy Kids's fault. But also this isn't gonna get better.
Speaker 1: And I will get into why as we go along.
Speaker 1: These tiny little problems I've mentioned, though, they all lead
Speaker 1: to one overwhelming issue that Sora isn't so much a
Speaker 1: tool to make movies as it is a big, fat
Speaker 1: slot machine that spits out footage that may or may
Speaker 1: not be of any use at all. Almost all of
Speaker 1: the footage in Airhead was graded, treated, stabilized, the nutscaled,
Speaker 1: and that ten to twenty second lead time on generations
Speaker 1: was for four hundred and eightp resolution footage, meaning that
Speaker 1: even useful footage needed significant post production work to look
Speaker 1: good enough, and just to give you an idea for
Speaker 1: the non technical members of the audience, and this is fair.
Speaker 1: The video you see on YouTube is usually somewhere between
Speaker 1: seven TWENTYP, ten ADP or four K. The TV shows
Speaker 1: you watch usually ten AP four K or upscale ten ADP.
Speaker 1: These are all lots of numbers. What I'm saying is
Speaker 1: the stuff that SAA spits out, that takes burning a
Speaker 1: small zoo to spit out, is incredibly low resolution. On
Speaker 1: top of not being specific, look to put it as
Speaker 1: plainly as possible, every single time that shy kids wanted
Speaker 1: to generate a shot, even a three second long shot,
Speaker 1: they would give SA a text prompt and then they
Speaker 1: would wait at least ten minutes to find out if
Speaker 1: it was right, and they'd have to accept footage that
Speaker 1: was subprime or inaccurate. And there's a really good example
Speaker 1: of this. If you watch Airhead, a lot of the
Speaker 1: shots are in slow motion, and you may think, no,
Speaker 1: this is a cinematic choice, right, because you kind of
Speaker 1: just admiring this man with a balloon for a head
Speaker 1: going about his business. No, no, no, no no. They
Speaker 1: found that this was just what Sora wanted to give
Speaker 1: them when they asked for it. This was, in and
Speaker 1: of itself a hallucination, in the same way that chat
Speaker 1: GBT will authoritatively tell you that something is true that
Speaker 1: is not sorrow will spit out a man running in
Speaker 1: slow motion despite you not asking for that, And it's
Speaker 1: so weird. They had to quote them do quite a
Speaker 1: bit of adjusting to keep the whole thing from feeling
Speaker 1: like a big slow mode project, and it still kind
Speaker 1: of does. And that's rough. That's really rough. But you know,
Speaker 1: I'm a curious little critter, So I decided to sit
Speaker 1: down with Shy Kids's Walter Woodman to talk about his
Speaker 1: experience with Sora and have him delve a little daper
Speaker 1: into his experience with the product. And I'd say he
Speaker 1: had a far more utopian experience and perspective on the
Speaker 1: whole thing than I excted. Now, some of you might
Speaker 1: critique Walter for being so positive about it, but I
Speaker 1: actually caution you to just listen to what he's saying,
Speaker 1: because Walter's perspective is interesting. He sees this as a tool,
Speaker 1: he doesn't see it as a replacement, and I think
Speaker 1: it's a valid perspective to come at SAA with. I
Speaker 1: also think it's a perspective that kind of accepts a
Speaker 1: conceit of open AI's marketing strategy, that these things will
Speaker 1: get better if they do. Perhaps Walter is right, perhaps
Speaker 1: this will be an essential tool in filmmaking, even though
Speaker 1: he didn't say essential. Don't want to put words in
Speaker 1: the man's mouth, but I don't think that's the case.
Speaker 1: Let me talk to him. You decide for yourself, all right.
Speaker 1: So how did the relationship between Shy Kids and open
Speaker 1: AYE actually begin.
Speaker 2: The relationship between Shy Kids and Open AI began when
Speaker 2: we made an installation for a film called dolly Land,
Speaker 2: which was premiering at Toronto International Film Festival, and we
Speaker 2: were the only people that our friends at Pressman Film
Speaker 2: knew in Toronto, and so we made an installation that
Speaker 2: looked like Salvador Dali's like studio inside of the basement
Speaker 2: of the Saint Regis, which is where he lived and
Speaker 2: made work out of, And inside of that installation we
Speaker 2: made a like you could make your own surrealist painting,
Speaker 2: and the way that you could make that was using
Speaker 2: DOLLI the Open AI program, and so the open AI
Speaker 2: people came to visit and check out the like what
Speaker 2: we were working on, and making sure that it was
Speaker 2: like something that they wanted to be a part of.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 2: They met our producer Sydney, who they loved. She's easy
Speaker 2: to love.
Speaker 3: And they.
Speaker 2: We sent them our previous work and so from there
Speaker 2: they asked us to join this artist group. And then
Speaker 2: when Sora came out, we saw it at the same
Speaker 2: time as everyone else and we yeah, we got tapped
Speaker 2: on the shoulder and said, hey, would you like to
Speaker 2: check this out and try this out? And we said,
Speaker 2: of course, that's how it came to be.
Speaker 1: So how did you on board? Were you just given access?
Speaker 1: Did they give you instructions? Did they physically come to you?
Speaker 2: What was that like it was a top secret. They
Speaker 2: gave us a briefcase and in a cloudy room.
Speaker 3: No, it was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was a very simple onboarding process where they
Speaker 2: walked us through the technology as well as some of
Speaker 2: its features, and yeah, it was pretty. It was pretty.
Speaker 2: And then from there they gave us access to begin
Speaker 2: using it and making.
Speaker 1: Things and you were allowed to use it without their presence.
Speaker 1: You had direct access.
Speaker 3: Yep, yep.
Speaker 1: So okay, did you get instructions on how to write
Speaker 1: effective prompts or did you just kind of do trial.
Speaker 3: And err, no, nothing like that.
Speaker 2: I mean in the artist group itself, there's a lot
Speaker 2: of really amazing and thoughtful creative people who kind of
Speaker 2: show their work and show how they got to make
Speaker 2: the things that they did. But no, not, there was
Speaker 2: no real engineering of our prompts. They were very much
Speaker 2: just play kind of see see what comes out of you.
Speaker 2: You're creative people that we trust, Why don't.
Speaker 3: You just see what works through spaghetti at the wall?
Speaker 1: That's cool. So during the in the piece of mathx
Speaker 1: guide in the interview, some more from shi Kids said
Speaker 1: the Open Eyes researchers they were surprised when they were
Speaker 1: asked about being able to say specific shots. What happened there?
Speaker 1: Was it just that you tried to ask Saora to
Speaker 1: do specific shots and it didn't work, or was it
Speaker 1: just not a feature?
Speaker 2: I think that's maybe taken a little bit out of context.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 2: More so it's just people come from distant, different disciplines.
Speaker 3: And when.
Speaker 2: I say a wide shot on a one hundred and
Speaker 2: thirty millimeter lens, people from my area of expertise know
Speaker 2: sort of immediately what I'm talking about.
Speaker 3: Whereas the researchers, they are.
Speaker 2: More invested in sort of other other things, and so
Speaker 2: it's it's not so much that they didn't understand or
Speaker 2: that sort of didn't understand. It's more so just there's
Speaker 2: all these terms in films.
Speaker 3: Like a zollie or like a.
Speaker 2: Hitchcock zoom or all of these different things that are
Speaker 2: very understandable, but even when you go from set to set,
Speaker 2: they mean something different. So I think it's about trying
Speaker 2: to create a lingua franca between all of these sort
Speaker 2: of different, very different people and very different ways of
Speaker 2: using a tool. What I may call a zoom, you
Speaker 2: may call a dolly shot, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: So so that feels like a training date, a challenge.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's about trying to figure out how
Speaker 2: and yeah, exactly what to what to train on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so tell me what was the interface like? Was
Speaker 1: it a chat box? Did you have have? Like? Just
Speaker 1: tell me about what I actually look like.
Speaker 2: Sure, there's limitations of what I can say about things
Speaker 2: like that, but I think the way that I've described
Speaker 2: it to people without giving too much away is I
Speaker 2: think if you're familiar with using something like the Adobe Suite.
Speaker 2: I think that there's some commonalities whether you're using after
Speaker 2: Effects or Premiere or whatever illustrator, there's like commonalities and
Speaker 2: if you can use one, you can sort of flu's
Speaker 2: your way around the others. I would say it's very
Speaker 2: similar like that with open.
Speaker 3: Ayes tools and models that if you are.
Speaker 2: Used to things like chat, GPT and Dolly and those
Speaker 2: types of models, I think you will find it find
Speaker 2: an ease of use in using Zora.
Speaker 1: So within that article they mentioned that there was like
Speaker 1: a three hundred to one shooting ratio, which correct me
Speaker 1: if I'm wrong, means like three hundred seconds of material
Speaker 1: each second of usable material. How does that compare to
Speaker 1: conventional filmmaking in your experience, it.
Speaker 2: Would be even more seconds than that. I would say,
Speaker 2: just three hundred shots at probably ten to twenty seconds apiece.
Speaker 2: So whatever the math is on that, I would say
Speaker 2: that that's pretty common with shooting. You know, when you
Speaker 2: are shooting a fiction film or like even a documentary
Speaker 2: is even crazier for that you shoot all day and
Speaker 2: all day and from We shot a documentary recently and
Speaker 2: I actually had to go back and watch all the dailies,
Speaker 2: we counted about ninety hours of footage that we had,
Speaker 2: and from that nineties hours, you're making an hour and
Speaker 2: a half movie, So you.
Speaker 3: Know, you are really trimming things down.
Speaker 2: And I think also it's like you are getting the
Speaker 2: five seconds that work or the you know, the section
Speaker 2: of that shot that works. And I would say that's
Speaker 2: pretty common to filmmaking.
Speaker 1: How about narrative filmmaking, because I know documentary you have
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff, But I'm just wondering what the
Speaker 1: burden of selection is like compared to the amount of
Speaker 1: shots you take in just a regular movie or regular
Speaker 1: short film.
Speaker 3: Even again, I would.
Speaker 2: Say, at least I can only speak for the way
Speaker 2: that I shoot films. You know, if you had it's subjective.
Speaker 2: It's subjective for sure. If you're David Fincher, you're shooting
Speaker 2: eight hundred takes of like someone picking up a pencil,
Speaker 2: or Stanley Kubrick, you know, is like famous for a
Speaker 2: thousand takes. I would say that the burn rate was
Speaker 2: very similar. I would say that the challenges with Sora
Speaker 2: are like it's unbelievable at making these images that are
Speaker 2: unbelievable and so interesting to look at, But.
Speaker 3: At its current state, it.
Speaker 2: Can sometimes be difficult to do things that in traditional
Speaker 2: shooting would be much easier, where you say, hey, can.
Speaker 3: That guy go over here?
Speaker 2: Or can that person move from one side of the
Speaker 2: screen to the other. Things like that are are more difficult.
Speaker 2: But again this is baby steps. We are in like
Speaker 2: the toddler phase, so I assume that those things will
Speaker 2: get better.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned well shike, it's mentioned in the interview
Speaker 1: the by default it tries to prevent you from creating
Speaker 1: videos that violate copyright law existing copyrights. Did you accidentally
Speaker 1: bump into this regularly or was this something that just
Speaker 1: you didn't really bother you.
Speaker 2: No, you couldn't generate things that So when I was
Speaker 2: mentioning like a Hitchcock zoom, you couldn't mention Hitchcock, So
Speaker 2: you had to find a different way to describe that
Speaker 2: as opposed to like using public figures, anything that would
Speaker 2: have a public figure or a title you would not
Speaker 2: be allowed to generate. From my experience, there wasn't too
Speaker 2: many logos or brands or anything like that, and any
Speaker 2: of the things that I generated, and.
Speaker 1: But something copyright. Did you generate anything that looked copyright?
Speaker 3: No? Not to my not to my eye.
Speaker 1: That's fine. So well, I know you don't know how
Speaker 1: much Sorrow will cost, and we don't know that don't
Speaker 1: even know when it will launch. Can you talk about
Speaker 1: how much you'd be willing to pay for it? What
Speaker 1: do you think it's worth? And I realized that this
Speaker 1: is a vague question.
Speaker 3: For sure.
Speaker 2: I think that there is this illusion that Sora will
Speaker 2: be this solution to all problems, and I don't think
Speaker 2: that that is the case. I think Sora is a
Speaker 2: tool amongst many tools, and for certain things it will
Speaker 2: be very valuable.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 2: In terms of value, it's like, well, how much is
Speaker 2: a glass of water? Well, yes, if a glass of
Speaker 2: water is just like right now in my kitchen, I.
Speaker 3: Wouldn't like to pay that high for it.
Speaker 2: If a glass of water is for a person in
Speaker 2: the desert who desperately needs that glass of water, you
Speaker 2: can really name your price. And I would say that
Speaker 2: for some projects, I think that the usage of Sora
Speaker 2: would be absolutely invaluable, and.
Speaker 3: I would I would.
Speaker 2: I don't know how much exactly that would be, would
Speaker 2: depend on the budget, would depend on the limits and
Speaker 2: the scales, but I would say that there's other projects
Speaker 2: where I think it would be like totally inappropriate or
Speaker 2: like just not worth like what, well, just when I
Speaker 2: think of studio ghibli films that are hand drawn, and
Speaker 2: I think the reason that those films work is because
Speaker 2: of the way that they're made, or I think that
Speaker 2: when you think of art man animation, it's like I
Speaker 2: feel that you could feel the fingerprints in that clay,
Speaker 2: and so I don't think maybe for those types of
Speaker 2: films that it would be appropriate, But I think for
Speaker 2: other types of films like Airhead or others, I think
Speaker 2: it would be extremely appropriate. I think it's up to
Speaker 2: the artists sort of discretion how much they think that
Speaker 2: that tool is needed.
Speaker 1: It's doesn't the inconsistency of shots make this deeply impractical,
Speaker 1: because that's the thing I kept coming back to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, depends on what project you're working on.
Speaker 2: And again, I think that this is like early days.
Speaker 2: I think that these are kinks and bugs that are
Speaker 2: going to be changed, and already from day one where
Speaker 2: we started using it to where we are today, massive
Speaker 2: improvements have happened, and actually improvements where they've listened to
Speaker 2: things that we have suggested and things that we'd like
Speaker 2: to see and tools we'd.
Speaker 3: Like to see.
Speaker 2: So I think that, for example, for Airhead, the inconsistency
Speaker 2: of having a protagonist, having a protagonist that stays true
Speaker 2: through all these different shots, that's the reason why we
Speaker 2: put a balloon in front of their head, Because while
Speaker 2: different bodies can sort of be accepted, a different face
Speaker 2: and a different head is going to be a little
Speaker 2: bit difficult. And so we turned the limitation into our
Speaker 2: sort of main attribute. And I would say that again,
Speaker 2: that works for that story. But I don't think that
Speaker 2: all stories are going to find this valuable. And I
Speaker 2: also don't think every single shot needs to come from Sora.
Speaker 3: I think that there's a world where it can be.
Speaker 2: An addition, or it can be the start of a
Speaker 2: story where instead of just brainstorming and just having a script,
Speaker 2: you make a sort of moving mood board or a
Speaker 2: trailer or so. I think that there's like tons of
Speaker 2: stages along the pipeline that it would be extremely valuable
Speaker 2: and help elucidate concepts and bring them to life.
Speaker 1: So thematic question, so you avoided filming locations and all
Speaker 1: of this, but you spend a lot of time writing
Speaker 1: prompts and you're waiting for Sora to generate clips, then
Speaker 1: up skating and all that. Do you think you could
Speaker 1: make airhead assuming you could get around the balloon head thing?
Speaker 1: Do you think you could make it quicker in real life?
Speaker 1: Them was soa kind of essential to get it done
Speaker 1: in the timeline you did, because it's like a week
Speaker 1: and a half two weeks, I.
Speaker 2: Think, Yeah, I don't know, that's an interesting question. I mean,
Speaker 2: we definitely wouldn't be able to fly around the world
Speaker 2: and yes, get the shots at the car race and
Speaker 2: all of those things, so.
Speaker 3: I think it would probably be shorter.
Speaker 2: But I think in general, the conversations about like time
Speaker 2: and money are like super reductive in a way in
Speaker 2: that I think that without Sora, this wouldn't exist, And
Speaker 2: I think that that is the more interesting conversation. As
Speaker 2: a director, most directors I know have a folder of
Speaker 2: unrealized ideas, and I think that my hope is that
Speaker 2: Sora will allow us to dust off those folders and
Speaker 2: breathe new life life into concepts, and when people see
Speaker 2: what those concepts could be, my hope is that it
Speaker 2: gives a lot more people opportunities to have their ideas illuminated.
Speaker 2: And whether that means to go and shoot it now
Speaker 2: traditionally or some hybrid. I think that that, to me
Speaker 2: is what's most exciting.
Speaker 1: So where do you see SORA going. I know you're
Speaker 1: considering looking at it as kind of a complementary tool,
Speaker 1: but do you think that that's its use case or
Speaker 1: do you think it'll ever do end to end filmmaking.
Speaker 2: I think I think let a thousand flowers bloom, you know.
Speaker 2: I think that there is people who are going to
Speaker 2: just use it for small complementary things to maybe help
Speaker 2: with in the same way we use stock footage.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: I think some people are going to use it as
Speaker 2: a way, say you are from a commune unity that
Speaker 2: has maybe a little bit of a less established film community,
Speaker 2: and it's a way to have you compete with the
Speaker 2: big boys in terms of special effects and usage. And again,
Speaker 2: I don't just think it's as easy as bleep blue
Speaker 2: block type in the prompt here comes the thing, but
Speaker 2: rather it allows you to just have a really powerful
Speaker 2: collaborator that you can help make maybe larger concepts and
Speaker 2: bigger ideas. And then yeah, I think that there's some
Speaker 2: people end to end who are going to make things
Speaker 2: that are completely generated or most of the shots in
Speaker 2: it are generated or things like that. In general, the
Speaker 2: thing that feels interesting to me is like helping to
Speaker 2: deepen humanity, Whereas the more you sort of simplify the process,
Speaker 2: I think that that is like, I don't know, it's
Speaker 2: never a simple process. So anytime you hear about something
Speaker 2: that is going to make it all easy and make
Speaker 2: all your troubles go away, I'd be very wary of that.
Speaker 3: I think film is.
Speaker 2: Going to always be difficult and a challenge, and I
Speaker 2: think the benefit of SORA will be to help lead
Speaker 2: us into new pasts and lead us into new directions.
Speaker 2: If I were to tell you, hey, we made this
Speaker 2: film called Lord of the Rings and it uses CGI
Speaker 2: orcs and it makes massive orc fights. You know, if
Speaker 2: I told you that in the nineteen thirties, you'd probably gasp.
Speaker 2: Or if I told you that CGI is going to
Speaker 2: be a predominant way in which we make films in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four, I think you would go, ah, that's
Speaker 2: not real filmmaking.
Speaker 1: And I don't think I think you kind of saw
Speaker 1: that in the nineties.
Speaker 2: Really yeah, I don't think history is too kind to
Speaker 2: those people that go, this is not gonna work This
Speaker 2: is not art. This technology is not the way I
Speaker 2: just think it's it depends on the artist, and it
Speaker 2: depends what they want to bring to it. I think
Speaker 2: that's the key X factor here.
Speaker 1: One final question, with that all in mind, do you
Speaker 1: think that SRA is going to hurt filmmakers? Do you
Speaker 1: think it's going to replace people?
Speaker 2: I mean, I hope not. I mean that's my job,
Speaker 2: so I would very hope not.
Speaker 1: No. I very much.
Speaker 2: Understand people's fears, and I think that you know, I'm
Speaker 2: a student of history, so when I look back in
Speaker 2: history and the camera obscura comes out, painters are talking
Speaker 2: about how we aren't going to need painters anymore, because
Speaker 2: now we can capture reality, why do you need a
Speaker 2: painter to go and paint it? And it's a very
Speaker 2: valid point, But painters didn't go away. And then there
Speaker 2: was this whole new industry called photography, and then after photography,
Speaker 2: there was this whole new industry called film. And then
Speaker 2: after film, there was this whole new industry called home video.
Speaker 2: And then after home video, there was this whole new
Speaker 2: industry called cell phone video. And then there was this
Speaker 2: whole new industry called tiktoks and vines, and I just
Speaker 2: think that when people don't come in contacts with things
Speaker 2: they're immediate. As humans, our immediate reaction is fear, and
Speaker 2: we're worried about things that are new because we do
Speaker 2: not yet understand them. And I think that for us,
Speaker 2: we like to face those things face on. And I
Speaker 2: think that the other side of that coin is that
Speaker 2: there's some kid right now in rural Bangladesh who has
Speaker 2: this amazing, big idea and maybe doesn't have all the
Speaker 2: resources that everyone else has, and with these types of technologies,
Speaker 2: it may level the playing field for kids like that
Speaker 2: to compete with the avatars of the world, compete with
Speaker 2: the Marvels of the world, And then I think we're
Speaker 2: going to all be on this level playing field, and
Speaker 2: what's going to matter is not just who has the
Speaker 2: highest budgets and who has the most resources, but who
Speaker 2: has the best stories. And for me, that's the exciting part.
Speaker 2: We work with groups of collaborators that we love and respect,
Speaker 2: and our hope is never let's work with them less.
Speaker 2: Our hope is always let's enrich those relationships and hopefully
Speaker 2: grow them and hopefully bring more people into our collective
Speaker 2: and more people into our process. So that's our hope.
Speaker 2: Maybe I'm utopic, maybe I'm wrong, but that's the that's
Speaker 2: the choice, that that's the way we're choosing to look
Speaker 2: at this.
Speaker 1: In Woodman's mind, Surra is a tool, an extension of
Speaker 1: creatives methods rather than a replacement of filmographers or actors,
Speaker 1: what have you. And that very much lines up with
Speaker 1: sam Ortman an open AI's sales pitch for Sura, his
Speaker 1: utopian perspective, his words, not mine. It's predicated on both
Speaker 1: film studios acting with integrity, something they've proven to never do,
Speaker 1: an open Ai being able to make Sura a significantly
Speaker 1: better tool, something that's going to require masses more training,
Speaker 1: data and compute that I think is actually in existence.
Speaker 1: Paul Trillo, an LA based artist and filmmaker, speaking to
Speaker 1: Business Insider in April, described Saura as a research project
Speaker 1: in Alpha, mentioning that it was a little confusing who
Speaker 1: the market was for the service, and I think that
Speaker 1: jails with another problem that Woodman raised, that what might
Speaker 1: be a zoom out shot for you would be a
Speaker 1: completely different term for someone else, which in turn would
Speaker 1: require open ai to have both the right training data
Speaker 1: of a zoom shot and many, many, many of them,
Speaker 1: to be clear, But they need to know the multitudes
Speaker 1: of different terminologies that go into filmmaking. Now, if they
Speaker 1: don't give a shit, maybe that's a completely different story.
Speaker 1: In short, SAUA faces both the intractable problems of AI
Speaker 1: that I've mentioned in the previous episode, PKI go and
Speaker 1: listen to it, but also a few of its own,
Speaker 1: namely that generating moving images isn't just about ingesting a
Speaker 1: bunch of footage, but it's about understanding said footage well
Speaker 1: enough to generate something else based on a multitude of
Speaker 1: different perspectives, descriptions, and cultural contexts. I'm not sure that
Speaker 1: open AI really Most people realize how complex even the
Speaker 1: simplest movie is, how much work goes into making a film,
Speaker 1: and I think that that's actually what excites people about this,
Speaker 1: because making films can be inefficient, it can be extremely taxing,
Speaker 1: it can be extremely expensive. But the problem here, I'll
Speaker 1: get into the other ones as well, is that SAURA
Speaker 1: is being sold to film studios. That is who Sam
Speaker 1: Mortman is going to, and thus it's going to be
Speaker 1: built for people who don't make movies. I'm actually really
Speaker 1: happy to hear that shy kids and other artists are involved,
Speaker 1: so it'll actually be tuned to be somewhat useful. But
Speaker 1: I don't think people realize how gigantine the task is
Speaker 1: that SRA is going after, and how I think it's
Speaker 1: impossible it can go any further. But I digress. I
Speaker 1: just don't believe that SORA actually works if you're making
Speaker 1: a movie. While pixel movies may take years to render,
Speaker 1: they've got supercomputers and specialized hardware, and more importantly, the
Speaker 1: ability to actually design and move characters in the three
Speaker 1: D space. If you are putting something in Saura, what
Speaker 1: are you designing? If you put a character in this
Speaker 1: in again, you cannot have consistency between these things. That
Speaker 1: is a problem across all generative AI. You can not
Speaker 1: do that unless, of course, using copyrighted footage, mister Oltman.
Speaker 1: But seriously, though, with no consistency cross shots, what the
Speaker 1: hell are you doing? While there are unexpected things that
Speaker 1: might happen in a three D animated movie or a
Speaker 1: CGI situation, you still have complete control over the thing
Speaker 1: you are putting on there, the thing you are animated.
Speaker 1: You can make subtle tweaks to him that doesn't seem
Speaker 1: to be the case with Sora. You can adjust what
Speaker 1: on the screen. But even though this is AI generated,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have the benefits of regular generative stuff like CGI,
Speaker 1: which stands of course for a computer generated image. I believe,
Speaker 1: and if I'm wrong, you're gonna yell at me in
Speaker 1: the emails. But seriously, though the practical use cases for SURA,
Speaker 1: they're just kind of not there. Sora's attempts to replace filmmakers,
Speaker 1: if that is open ayes goal, and I really believe
Speaker 1: it is, they're dead on arrival because it's an impractical
Speaker 1: and ineffective solution and the problems it's solving are really
Speaker 1: only ones created by Hollywood executives. The AI hype bubble,
Speaker 1: as I have noted repeatedly, is one entirely reliant on
Speaker 1: us accepting the idea of what these companies will do,
Speaker 1: rather than interrogating their ability to actually do it. Sourra,
Speaker 1: much like all generative AI, suffers from an imprecision and
Speaker 1: an unreliability caused by hallucinations, an unavoidable result of your
Speaker 1: using mathematics to generate things, and the massive power and
Speaker 1: compute requirements are just prohibitively expensive. If this is going
Speaker 1: to end up as a VFX tool, or a productivity tool,
Speaker 1: or as a fill in tool. It's going to need
Speaker 1: to be a lot cheaper than it is to run.
Speaker 1: Generative AI is already unprofitable to make, soa any kind
Speaker 1: of useful open ay will have to find a way
Speaker 1: to dramatically increase the precision of the prompts, reduce hallucinations
Speaker 1: to pretty much nothing, and vastly increase processing power across
Speaker 1: the board. Sora hasn't even been launched save for, of course,
Speaker 1: these handpicked companies that got to test it, meaning that
Speaker 1: this ten to twenty minute weight between generations of moving
Speaker 1: images that's likely to increase once people use the product.
Speaker 1: And that's before you consider how expensive it's going to
Speaker 1: be to run the bloody thing. This is a significantly
Speaker 1: more complex model than chat GPT, which is already unprofitable.
Speaker 1: Sam Moltman can make money, but can he make profit?
Speaker 1: I severely bloody doubt it. He hasn't before, and I
Speaker 1: don't think he's going to in the future. He's still
Speaker 1: begging Daddy Satchia over at Microsoft to give him a
Speaker 1: supercomputer so his things can fart out things more profitably.
Speaker 1: It's just drives me a little insane. And these things
Speaker 1: I've talked about their intractable problems that open aiy has
Speaker 1: failed to solve. They've failed to make a more efficient
Speaker 1: model for Microsoft last year in twenty twenty three, their
Speaker 1: Arakis model Jesus Christ. And while GPT five is meant
Speaker 1: to be materially better, to quote mister Altman, it isn't
Speaker 1: obvious what better means when GPT four performs worse at
Speaker 1: some tasks than its predecessor. I do believe Sam Mortman
Speaker 1: is telling the truth when he says that the future
Speaker 1: of AI requires an energy breakthrough. But the thing I
Speaker 1: think he's leaving out is that it may take an
Speaker 1: energy breakthrough and indeed more chips for generative AI to
Speaker 1: approach any level of ness. And he's hoping that people
Speaker 1: will buy the hype without asking too many annoying questions
Speaker 1: like what does this stuff actually do? Or is this useful?
Speaker 1: Or does this actually help me? Or will this be
Speaker 1: around in ten years? To be clear, Sam Altman is
Speaker 1: the single most well connected and well funded man in AI,
Speaker 1: with a direct connection to Microsoft, a multi trillion dollar
Speaker 1: tech company, and a rollodexter includes effectively every major founder
Speaker 1: of the last decade, and he still can't get past
Speaker 1: any of these problems, partly because he is not technical
Speaker 1: and thus can't really solve the problems himself, and partly
Speaker 1: because the problems he's facing are burdened by the laws
Speaker 1: of maths and physics. Generative AI hallucinates because it doesn't
Speaker 1: have a consciousness or any ability to learn or know anything.
Speaker 1: It's extremely expensive because even the simplest prompts require GPT
Speaker 1: four to run highly complex mathematical equations on graphics processing
Speaker 1: units that cost upwards of ten thousand dollars apiece. Even
Speaker 1: if generative AI were cheaper or more efficient or required
Speaker 1: less power, it would still be a process that generates
Speaker 1: answers based on the extremely complex process of ingesting an
Speaker 1: increasingly dwindling amount of training data. These problems are significantly
Speaker 1: compounded when you consider the complexity, size, and massive legal
Speaker 1: ramifications of training a model on videos. A problem that
Speaker 1: nobody has seem fit to push Altmnormorti or anyone else
Speaker 1: at Open AI about what's a pisstake really seems like
Speaker 1: an obvious one, like, hey man, you need a bunch
Speaker 1: of training data to train chat GPT, which does words
Speaker 1: how are you getting all these videos again? Big credit
Speaker 1: to Joanna Stern who asked mirror Murati, CTO of open Ai,
Speaker 1: whether Sawer was trained on YouTube videos, and then Mirrormorati
Speaker 1: of course made that incredible face. Go look up that video.
Speaker 1: I'll link it in the notes. That's how moately the
Speaker 1: problem with the current bubble. So much of its success
Speaker 1: requires us to tolerate and applaud these half fast, half
Speaker 1: finished tools that only sort of kind of do the
Speaker 1: things they're meant to do, and we're meant to nod
Speaker 1: and smile and clap and say great job, Sammy, like
Speaker 1: we're talking to a bloody child rather than a startup
Speaker 1: with thirteen billion dollars in funding with a CEO that
Speaker 1: has the backing of goddamn Microsoft and soa is the
Speaker 1: ugliest messiest problem of them all. It's videos, while superficially impressive,
Speaker 1: are still deeply, deeply flawed. They take way too long
Speaker 1: to generate a problem that's only going to get worse,
Speaker 1: and they're just far too inconsistent, which is a problem
Speaker 1: created by the nature of how generative AI works and
Speaker 1: its approach to generating things using mathematics, and if it's
Speaker 1: planning to be a VFX tool, if it's planning to
Speaker 1: be a sidearm for filmographers, it's going to have to
Speaker 1: be a lot cheaper than it's really practical to make it. Again,
Speaker 1: nothing open Ai makes is profitable. They may make over
Speaker 1: a billion dollars of revenue, but everything is burning money.
Speaker 1: It's just very frustrating. It's all very frustrating. Sora seems
Speaker 1: kind of cool, but when you take away the cool
Speaker 1: side and you just look at it for what it is,
Speaker 1: it's just another con from Sam Altman. It's just another
Speaker 1: unfinished product that is not able to fit the task.
Speaker 1: It's just another thing that you look at and you say, oh,
Speaker 1: if that was just a bit better, it'd be really good.
Speaker 1: Except in this case it would be a lot better. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all the press writes about it's incredible, it's amazing, and
Speaker 1: you can separate the technological achievement of using maths to
Speaker 1: generate a visual moving image that's genuinely cool. But you
Speaker 1: gotta stop for a second and say, as cool as
Speaker 1: this is, the people in the back of their shot,
Speaker 1: they're molding into each other. It's like the thing, it's disgusting. Hey,
Speaker 1: that monkey's got like five arms. That's weird. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I just feel like normal people don't get this much leniency.
Speaker 1: You and I don't get people saying great job when
Speaker 1: we do kind of a shitty job. And if we
Speaker 1: brought something to someone that was insanely expensive only really
Speaker 1: did ten percent of the job, you needed it too,
Speaker 1: And also the things that created took forever and looked horrifying.
Speaker 1: I don't think we'd get told great job. I think
Speaker 1: we'd be told we'd wasted a lot of money and
Speaker 1: that someone was quite mad at us. I'm tired of this.
Speaker 1: I'm tired of these companies announcing these half completed products
Speaker 1: and having the media dance around and act like they've
Speaker 1: delivered something truly incredible. I'm tired of the public being
Speaker 1: expected to do the mental and emotional labor for Sam
Speaker 1: Moultman and other AI companies, saying it's remarkable that they're
Speaker 1: even able to do this, and assume and give them
Speaker 1: credit for some inevitable future where all of thesebms are gone,
Speaker 1: despite little proof that such a thing is possible and
Speaker 1: plenty of proof that it isn't. And as I've suggested,
Speaker 1: I really don't think it is. I think Sora is
Speaker 1: dead on arrival. I think it's too expensive, too imprecise,
Speaker 1: and there is no fixing those problems. You can iterate
Speaker 1: on them, you can improve them, but without some kind
Speaker 1: of energy or chips breakthrough, they're not even going to
Speaker 1: have the compute or really the money to build this
Speaker 1: thing into anything even half functional. And I'm calling on
Speaker 1: the press to push back on these companies. I'm calling
Speaker 1: on them to refuse to declare this quasi functional software
Speaker 1: as complete. I'm tired of seeing the media back these
Speaker 1: companies and do marketing work for them when they're not done.
Speaker 1: They don't deserve the credit, and I'm demanding that people
Speaker 1: like Sam Altman actually change the world before anyone says
Speaker 1: that they're doing.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and
Speaker 1: composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You
Speaker 1: can check out more of his music and audio projects
Speaker 1: at Mattasowski dot com M A T T O. S
Speaker 1: O W s KI dot com. You can email me
Speaker 1: at easy at Better Offline dot com, or visit Better
Speaker 1: Offline dot com to find more podcast links and of course,
Speaker 1: my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat
Speaker 1: dot Where's youreed dot at to visit the discord, and
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Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a
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