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jeffkeeg t1_itfatej wrote

There's a distinction to be made here.

We can already make 90 minute videos from a prompt, which is feature length. Would you consider this a movie? Probably not.

The trick isn't just making long videos from a prompt, it's a multi-faceted issue.

The first thing to consider, which is already seeing significant ground being made in the most recent video models, is coherence. Try to use Stable Diffusion's img2img feature on a video cut into a sequence of images. It will be nearly unwatchable simply due to all the inconsistencies across the result footage.

The second thing is the actual size of the video. Right now it's tricky to make anything larger than a postage stamp, thanks largely to the sheer amount of compute needed to do so. Fortunately, upscaling tech is also progressing rapidly, so there might be several avenues through which this problem is solved.

Thirdly, you have to consider the fact that movies aren't just visual. In order to make proper films, you'll need to be able to generate audio as well (speech, sound effects, and the accompanying musical score).

Finally, the aforementioned building blocks of your film will all need to be perfectly generated. Any oddities in the speech patterns or sudden visual decoherence will completely wreck the viewing experience.

All of this, and frankly a good bit more, is what is going to make it far trickier to make movies than the more enthusiastic here believe.

That said, my prediction would most likely be that we'll start to see the first individually made feature length films (albeit with some coherence issues in either the visual or audio departments) by mid to late 2025. By the end of this decade, the technology will have been perfected and will enable anyone to make any movie / tv show they want.

Alternatively, I'm being far too conservative in my estimate, but it's always better to be positively surprised than negatively so.

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Devoun t1_itfg46x wrote

I’d say you missed the most important part - a plot with good writing. I’d say this is the really hard part.

Honestly I think we’ll need AGI in order to really have an ai generate a watchable movie that isn’t just a mash of random scenes and sounds that don’t have context

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Bakoro t1_itfwhe4 wrote

I'm pretty sure that simple story generators are already a thing. Maybe not full on scripts, but there is stuff to build off of.
I know that there are AI which can "read" a story and extract some of the defining qualities and themes. Look at MIT's Patrick Winston who was/(is?) working on AI symbolic understanding.

Writing a novel is a lot more formulaic than a lot of people think.
Jim Butcher has a pretty fun story about his college professor, who is also a prolific romance novelist. Jim didn't want to follow her advice because he thought it would lead to generic feeling crap. To prove her wrong he followed her advice and wrote the first book of The Dresden Files. He's had a great career so far. For a while he was publishing two books a year.

There's NaNoWriMo, where people try to write 50k words of a novel during November. Pretty much any competent writer can bang out a generic script or story in hours or days. There's a formula, the trick is hiding it and twisting it, and making it less generic. The sheer amount of shit out there that's just Shakespeare with a wig and glasses is overwhelming.

There probably just has to be more guidance in a story writing AI.

Break it down into the elements of a story. You have the seven basic stories. Start there. There are probably character archetypes. There are relationship archetypes. Mix and match.

Central plot, central characters who each have their primary archetype and secondary/tertiary qualities. They have their central motivation. They have roles to fill.
The characters try to achieve their goals using the resources at their disposal, according to their parameters.

Statistical and symbolic analysis would probably tell us if there are reasonable approximations for how long each narrative description is, how long conversations should be, the patterns of conversational back and forth, how to divide the plot structure...

If I sat and thought about it, I could probably list a few dozen or more parameters to analyze, and then it just turns into an ad-libs kind of thing.

It'd probably even help to tie sevel AI together. Like a city/building design AI to get an understanding of a world, and interrogating generated content to feed to a character.

So, maybe in a roundabout way making a compelling story bot might lead to more generalized AI, depending on how it's done.

We may not get deeply philosophical and emotionally complex stuff at first, but it's good enough for a flashy action movie or a heist movie. Good enough to make an episode for the average CW series.

I don't think near-future generalized AI is going to be plausible without structure anyway.
Look at a human. It takes weeks for an infant to be more than an eating pooping machine, months to be functional enough to start engaging and babbling, months to start crawling and walking, potentially years to start talking, and their cause-effect understanding is dubious at best. Children have lots of overfitting and beliefs based on false causation. It takes years for people to learn to read, and some never pick it up well. Some never learn more math than arithmetic. It takes most people decades for the person to reach their full potential. We are expecting AI to do it in days? A few years? With piddling resources and limited run times?

AI is already more functional in many aspects than a typical human. With posits and the new hardware coming down the line, and the big dollars being increasingly spent, it won't take long to see an AI tell a coherent one page story. A full script will come sooner than later, even if it's a boring one.

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GenoHuman t1_itg09m5 wrote

Yes neural networks require a working memory but there is already papers on this, Nvidia have made some success too in having their NN's with more stable and long lasting memory.

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kidshitstuff t1_itj54sk wrote

I’d bet 10 bucks the last 10 marvel movies were written by an evil AI that was originally a nueural copy of Walt disney but now has come into its own and is secretly running the company behind the scenes.

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HeyHershel t1_itje7qp wrote

The survey doesn’t specify the length of the “prompt”—which could define all the plot elements

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gskrypka t1_itffybe wrote

I agree. While visual and audio side of thing will be figured out pretty soon I believe plot, logic, acting will require some more time, esp if we want some subtlety.

However I think it will all start with commercials. Short. Strait forward. Often even without people. Sometimes abstract. Should be a good ground for mastering the tech.

Another sphere are generic videos for stocks. We should be able to generate those (like people sitting in the coffee chatting) pretty soon.

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themistergraves t1_itfy125 wrote

I've seen some self-made documentaries on YouTube that use stock video. I am certain some of that stock video is already AI-generated, as the head movements and eye movements in those stock video clips are just slightly... inhuman.

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GenoHuman t1_itmtudw wrote

I'm a realist and I would put movies by AI in the 2030s category.

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