Oh, I'm not diminishing it, it's a huge leap forward for cinema. For that matter it's a huge leap forward for youtube. Ultimately though, I doubt it's more than a decade before everything in the film can be generated from an animatic. That's what I've been working on, and since control net came out, 500 new guys are all doing the same thing all the sudden. No question that one of us will create what will become synthfilm. That's a big win for indies when it happens. I don't know what the studios will do. It will more than decimate their financial advantage in terms of production quality.
That still leaves the advertising though, and that's a problem. Right now smaller shows still have a chance because not everyone could always find something they liked on tv. What's already started to happen though is that the pool is exponentially more diluted than before, meaning people are starting to have more options than they can handle. They will seek simplicity, sign up to a streaming service, and watch what disneycorp tells them to watch. Once AI does democratize film, and it will, sooner rather than later, we'll have solved one problem and created another.
For example, if you are a fan of standard fare anime, this has kind of already happened. There are so many nearly identical shows following the same template, that even someone very enthusiastic about the genre (which I am not) probably has a hard time deciding which of the 10,000 spiky black haired protagonists they want to watch swing a sword at a demon next to a computer.
As far as my saying that people were getting blown away by smaller things, that wasn't really directed at you personally. As you know I study this exact area every day of the week, and this last week, probably several hundred videos with titles like "NEW MIND BLOWING AI DOES WHAT????" and then goes on to describe some new mod that builds of some adjunct of existing software.
My point was that we're all missing the forest for the trees. Within a decade or two at the most, the entire system of creative value will collapse completely. It's basically started happening over the last few years, and when the full scale AI arrives, that will be like throwing gasoline on a fire.
An interesting question is, do we actually need stars, or to be stars? Entertainment won't go away, it will get drastically better. What will likely go away is the idea that there is only one city in the world that can make a good movie. It's probably for the best. I just hope that some of the other AI scenarios don't have such terrible effects that it nullifies the good it does. Ultimately, this is a way for the rich to buy intellect, one 22,000 nvidia card at a time. This could quickly accelerate the wealth gap to a breaking point (again, kind of already happening) and result in the collapse of multiple empires that currently seem etched in stone.
That Silicon Valley bank collapse was scary to watch. The news report started out like this "on wednsday evening, it was just another day at the office, but by monday, the entire empire had collapsed" You just don't think of things that big, that were that stable for that long collapsing in a matter of days, but there it was, a tiny scale model of what could happen to America. I bought a 2 liter of pinapple soda at the store, and it was 3.79. That's up from 99c 5 years ago.