I've written twice about AI on my LinkedIn account and on both occasions I deleted the post. So this will be my third-time lucky.
In the first post I described getting a prompt to replicate the view across me as I sit at my desk. The shot on the left is a photo; on the right is my attempt to replicate it in AI. Just using a text prompt I didn't do badly – but the process did get exasperating... This sort of thing I've found is much easier to achieve within node-based programmes.
In the second post I talked about this short by Akos Papp which was the first AI film I actually enjoyed. I segued into a spiel about how I don't see AI as "a tool" (a now generic description of its offering) - but instead like hiring a massive team of robots. I gave a nod to the idea that an animator in post-production is as close to a robot as you get.
Boosters, Traddies, and Geeks
Broadly, I see the relationships to AI falling into three camps:
1) There are Boosters who celebrate AI image and video and post their "slop". I've yet to come across writers using AI who would promote themselves in these terms.
2) There are Traddies who decry AI's copyright theft, its ecological footprint, and frequently dodgy aesthetics. They argue that it's a handcart to hell.
2) There are Traddies who decry AI's copyright theft, its ecological footprint, and frequently dodgy aesthetics. They argue that it's a handcart to hell.
3) And, because I work in video post-production, I also notice a smaller amount Geeks explaining how they are using AI to scale and streamline workflows and handle the grunt work involved in compositing, CG and motion graphics. This last group might also appear elsewhere: in coding, web design, or photography.
All three camps tout for clients: Boosters by presenting themselves as revolutionaries skilled with this new technology (more of which later), Traddies celebrate their handicraft, claim theirs is a superior product and antidote to the slop, and the Geeks profess to be able to harness AI to modernise production pipelines.
Why I chose to compare AI to having a team of robots at one's disposal is that its fundamental offering is to leverage machine power to reduce the time tasks take. Just as with Henry Ford's production line churning out the Model T, the amount of human labour required is less. This issue of labour is less obvious with photography (though photographers will be out of work), but with animation and post-production, which are massively labour-intensive (just look at the credits on a Marvel film), the impact of AI will be immense and is only just starting to be felt. Because – mainly – thus far the damage to the creative professions in marketing, part of the so-called Gen-X Career Meltdown, has been
owing to the way that data analysis at scale, the new dominance of online
advertising, and social media has threatened the traditional advertising
model.
Craftwork
In his survey "The Craftsman" (2008), in championing Linux workshops, Richard Sennett made the connection to digital craftsmanship. The post-production and animation business that I have worked in happily for thirty years is just such a craft trade. Often relying on teamwork, at industrial scale it is similar to old-fashioned boat-building; but in my own case, working alone usually, it's like stone-carving – time-consuming and requiring intense focus.
Even though mechanical reproduction wiped out a lot of traditional crafts, and while we shouldn't forget the developing world's sweatshops, where clothes are made by highly skilled manual labourers who are paid next to nothing, in many situations the craftsman has still remained the outlier in the field of relations
of capitalism. As a craftsman your manual labour gets paid better wages –
and there's been very little the boss can do about it.
I definitely think of myself in these terms, as a craftsman. Before I
started worked with Adobe After Effects in 1998 I drew comics, I made
stop-frame animation with plasticene, I did lino-cuts, and I went to art
school. I've actually been to art school twice, Camberwell and St Martins. I got into animation as a job through these analogue craft practices.
Kill Yourself
I've always thought that in this famous clip Bill Hicks – in which he invites all the people in the audience who work in advertising or marketing to kill themselves – is actually targeting all the creative people who ended up in marketing. Rather than, like him, becoming martyrs for their art, they took they easy path. As much as one can casually dismiss what he's saying (the central gag in the script being that casual dismissal...) many of us working in the field can guiltily acknowledge the truth: we're not really making the world a better place.
Certainly, there are people who are passionate about marketing and communicating
brand's messages; just as there are a lot of worthwhile brands. Over the years I've worked
with many people who were gifted enough that they might have been successful in
the purely creative world – but they've preferred the fun, drama, and social integration that came with a career in marketing. And the money.
However, equally, it is true that for decades if you were someone who aspired to survive in society plying a craft – perhaps an art student, budding musician, or an English literature graduate – the most common route was to go into marketing. This has especially been the case in the UK. Only the very brave, very talented, very rich, or very lucky have managed to make a living as an artist, musician, or author. However, if you had sufficient creative skills it has been possible to turn them to a perfectly decent career in marketing. It has nevertheless been funny coming across people in my reading, genuine mavericks like such as the Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards and self-sufficiency author John Seymour, who got jobs in advertising and, disgusted, quit by their first lunch break.
With AI this relationship between craft workers and marketing has been disrupted. Craftsmanship in the digital realm has been usurped. Trained illegally on photography, movies and books (but legally on advertising); AI is decimating the creative professions. In my case, in marketing, there has never been a premium on the product. In most cases a brand would prefer to pay less to have effective marketing rather than pay more for artistic marketing. Here AI is an easy shoe-in, a "no-brainer"...
Do the Flaws in AI Matter?
Gary Marcus points out in this excellent interview with Steve "The Big Short" Eisman that AI is no more than glorified AUTOCORRECT. It creates best guess probabilities on the digital material it has "scraped". There's no ghost in the machine that's ever going to create something original. Marcus does point out that AI may yet evolve into something more genuinely revolutionary. In spite of this, right now in the animation used in marketing, and indeed in almost all TV, video and film, AI does a perfectly satisfactory job.
Critically, the margin of error in AI can be tolerated in video. If these models make their inevitable mistakes in airplane flight paths, medical procedures, or military scenarios then that's unacceptable. Equally, in non-fiction, journalism, and education – there should be no tolerance for hallucinations. But, as much as I care about delivering a high-quality product, in my field of work it doesn't really matter if there are imperfections. No one is going to die if there are errors.
It makes no sense to claim, as I hear all the time suggested by AI protagonists the Boosters, that their genius at writing prompts gives them an edge over other workers in the field. And the more recent claims that some Boosters make of their superior, refined taste ring hollow. When you consider the insane level of skill and technical knowledge that people require to work with particle simulations in Houdini, do character animation in Maya, or manage the largest compositing workflows – where in each case there is a highly-evolved craft skill – then it's laughable to claim that anyone using AI, dragging a few nodes around and typing in a few prompts, has any kind of competitive advantage over anyone else.
The Future
When it comes to these three groups - in the absence of any competitive advantage the Boosters will be fighting over scraps as they are progressively undercut by their own kind. AI is currently subsidised, and because with video is difficult to render locally, they will find their margins squeezed as cloud providers seek profitability. Sadly, the Traddies, the original digital artisans, will quickly become extinct. The Geeks, those using AI to float above the fray will survive, but their number will be relatively tiny and shrink. This just as a modern industrial farmer using advanced technology can manage a thousand acres on their own.
As for people working in this field having been impelled by an urge to make things, in terms of their being craftsman and in getting pleasure from that, in the digital sphere that impulse will likely gravitate elsewhere, probably into the analogue realm and will become a hobby like photography, or a niche skill like oil painting. Because there's very little of that creative urge that can be satisfied by working with AI. A lot of people are going to need to find something else useful to do, and a different way to earn a living.