AI generated video has been receiving a lot of hype lately as a tool that will supposedly revolutionize Hollywood. But Craig Good, a former animator at Pixar who worked on classics like Toy story And Find NemoHe is not convinced. Good believes there’s one big problem with AI video software that immediately frustrates anyone working on a film: it’s currently impossible to make small changes using just AI.
Artificial intelligence tools allow users to create images and videos with just a few text prompts. And that is very impressive when you want to create something out of “nothing,” so to speak. However, none of these tools allow you to make the kind of iterative changes required when creating a movie.
Good made this point in a video recorded by one of his students at the California College of the Arts, where he is currently an assistant professor, as the two discussed videos that were posted publicly Sora from OpenAI.
“When I try to use this in a production context, my first question is: How do I refactor this? For example, if I say, “I hate everything that happens to the background. Can we do this exact thing again, but with a blocked off background or a different one?” Well says in the Video.
Sora hasn’t been released publicly yet, meaning we’ve only seen examples of artists getting early access to the tool. And honestly, at this point we don’t know much about the options Sora could offer artists. However, there is currently no indication that minor changes are possible, and Good seems to have a very valid point.
One of the Sora videos that Good and his student saw is an animation of a cute fluffy monster that appears to be in love with a candle. Good praised the video, but pointed out that the frame was a bit tight and the “flame doesn’t really do anything there.” What would it take to capture the exact same scene, but with the camera pulled back and the candle flickering more? That seems to be the biggest hurdle at the moment.
“Filmmaking is all about iteration. It’s an iteration. And if you can’t iterate on one of those, I don’t know how you would possibly use it in production,” says Good.
“I mean, I spent decades at Pixar making little changes to the shots. The director will make some pretty specific notes that the animator and artist will interpret and then show the revised work the next day and then have to make more notes on it. I don’t know how you would use it in production if you can’t iterate in a controlled way,” he continued.
Well, you’re not the only one who thinks like that. A tweet went viral last week this is meant to highlight the exact same issue. And although we can’t confirm the veracity of the story, it all sounds very plausible.
Essentially the post is supposed to come from an art director at a major studio. They say studio bosses hired AI people to work on a film and it didn’t work out. The director says that the AI videos produced weren’t really bad, but whenever they wanted changes, like a new camera angle or a different color somewhere in the scene, they couldn’t implement them. In fact, they get angry when you ask them to change things because it doesn’t work that way.
“The one who can actually use Photoshop hasn’t developed the eye to spot his mistakes and ends up getting mad at me because I don’t understand that he can’t make certain changes,” the viral post reads. “The girl, whose background was a little photography, gave me 40 progressively worse pictures each time, with increasingly wild errors. The project has been running for four days.”
Again, it is impossible to verify the claims made in this anonymous post. But they are completely consistent with what we know about these AI tools. And while Good seems to think such a tool would be great for user-generated TikTok videos, it’s not yet ready for serious film production.
However, Good is quick to point out in the video that things could change. These tools could get much better in the future, and he even compared generative AI tools like Sora to that first demonstrations of computer animation In the early 1980s at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference.
“This reminds me of the early days at SIGGRAPH when we saw a movie with a walking mechanical ant,” Good said. “And we were all crazy about it. Because wow, we see a walking mechanical ant, right? A big robot ant, you know, in 1984.”
And Good is right. Nobody knows what the future will bring. But these tools won’t be truly useful until directors can make the small changes that really bring their stories to life.