Jeffrey Katzenberg: AI Will Take 90% of Artist Jobs on Animated Films In Just Three Years::Former DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg said AI will take 90 percent of the artist jobs on animated movies within three years.
Real Headline: “Billionaire who Previously Led Massive Failure Wants AI to take 90% of Movie Production Jobs so that he can Have More Money to Spend on Massive Failures”
You’re going to see more movies like “The Sound of Freedom” take over the box office, entirely because the alternative is some goopy AI-generated schlock film about a fish that clips through walls and talks in Michael Jackson voice-snippets.
Read the article.
Machine learning and interpretative output are tools; just like the automobile, the spreadsheet and photoshop.
The introduction of new tools means there will be fewer people manually doing the things that machines can do more efficiently. The introduction of digital spreadsheets decimated the market for paper bookkeepers, but the need for accountants (people who could utilize the new tools) exploded.
I don’t know enough about modern animation production to speak authoritatively about this, but I’m imagining Katzenberg is talking about jobs like inbetweeners and other kinds of admittedly skilled labor that can be lazily farted out by machines. No QA for lazy productions, QA and varying levels of tweaks for high production value work, and all-by-hand for only the most rare auteur works. And most animated works are in that “lazy production” category. It’s gonna look like shit, everyone who cares will notice, but most of the people buying won’t care.
What this also means is that money will stop flowing to high-manual-effort works. The real creative, ground breaking stuff is going to come from either people utilizing the new tools in new ways, or old established artists who refuse to change (Miyazaki, Bill Plympton, Yuri Norstein & Francheska Yarbusova, etc).
I’m seeing this in my field heavily right now. I’m a software engineer, and using the AI tools, each senior engineer is essentially acting like an entire engineering team now. The tasks that would be delegated to junior engineers are being done faster and more cheaply by the AI, enabling me to focus more on the big picture architecture and actual business logic.
Who this is really hurting is anyone trying to break into the field right now, or was a recently laid off junior engineer.
Who this is really hurting is anyone trying to break into the field right now, or was a recently laid off junior engineer.
In the long term, this is going to impact the industry as a whole. Firing all your junior reps and making every job a managerial position that requires 15 years of experience means you’re going to run out of qualified professionals inside a decade.
The WGA Strikers had this complaint wrt “Mini-Rooms” for script writing. Parsing the script writing process from the production process and reducing the team to a single script editor means you lose all those junior talents who are supposed to matriculate into production and direction and senior writer positions over time. It represents the death of the industry, by way of films like “Rebel Moon” that are just vague jumbled composites of other movies.
Using AI is akin to dosing your firm in a strong acid, dissolving the integrity of the thing you’re supposed to be facilitating in hopes of making it lighter and faster.
You’re absolutely correct. The same issue will arise in every industry AI is used in. It’s going to make the barrier to entry even larger than it was before AI, and folks were already joking about entry level jobs requiring 5 years experience. In software it’s starting to look like someone will need to get to today’s senior engineer level of skill before they can land a job. Good thing our schools are keeping up. /s
The back door around that is the consulting agencies. You just work for Deloitte or McKinley for five years, making spreadsheets about databases, and then you’ve got the experience to fake it in through the back door. Alternatively, a lot of firms do actually have new hire crash courses. I worked at a firm that would hire virtually anyone with a bachelor’s degree and put them through a six week coding boot camp. The… quality of the product was… not great. But the volume of people coming through the system and getting “years of experience” was notable.
Ghibli >> Disney
In three years, 90% of animated films are going to be generic crap churned out for a quick buck.
Unlike Frozen 3, Toy Story 5, Shrek 3, Kung Fu Panda 4 and live action Lion King we have today. So creative.
Toy Story 5
There’s a Toy Story 5?? I haven’t even seen the third one yet. Or any of the other ones you mentioned…
Very optimistic to think ten times more animated films will be good in just three years.
People still listen to Mr quibi?
Getting closer to a world where people don’t need to work and can just enjoy life.
Progress is good, but not without issues.
Nah, we’re getting close to Elysium
I believe this is the case in USA. EU still regularly stands to protect their citizens against corporations Europeans also have better understanding of the role of government and social policies. I’m not sure EU can win this fight but I’m pretty sure they will at least try.
