"Watching the fire from across the river in China

The Hollywood strike, which began on May 2, 2023, has been going on for two months and is growing in scale, making it the largest in the history of the U.S. film industry. The participants have expanded from the initial 11,000 writers to directors, actors and other unions, and have caused many popular shows and dramas to stop airing and filming.

Before Secret Invasion, some short films ("Rock Paper Scissors"), commercials (Coca-Cola, Paypal) and music videos also experimented with AI, but because people knew it was experimental, they all still took a wait-and-see attitude.

During this strike, the AI credits of Secret Invasion accidentally ignited the anger of the strikers and the audience who supported them. As a typical industrial product, this finished product demonstrated the possibility of integrating AI into a process of industrial production, which means that every future film has the potential to save manpower in this part of the process, and the result coincided with the strike theme.

A domestic case closer to this matter is probably Taobao's documentary "Where Did This Come From" made in conjunction with B-site. Its title animation has a clear AI style, that is, the main image remains the same while the details of the picture are shaking. Sources say that the credits were made earlier and technically used Stable Diffusion's predecessor Disco Diffusion.

In this regard, when the documentary was released, there was not much resistance to the sound, mainly to "cyberpunk style" praise.

This does reflect some of the cultural and social differences between the US and China.

Where there is a tradition of unionization and labor negotiations, any labor unrest will be met with widespread solidarity across industries. But in China, probably because we are used to so many "if you don't do it, someone else will", even before AI substitution, human substitution is commonplace. And the core creative talent of the film and television industry, generally in the country is easy to top the reputation of "2.08 million", but also not easy to trigger public resonance.

On the whole, we are more able to watch from the sidelines with an attitude of "watching the fire from across the river".

For example, illustrators were the first group to be affected by AI painting in China, but when they spontaneously resisted, some of them might have said something rash, such as AI painting is a "corpse collage" and so on. What they received was ridicule from other industries, not solidarity.

In other words, director Guo Fan said in our "First Shanghai Entertainment Science and Innovation Salon" that AIGC for film and TV production could "overtake Hollywood". One of the reasons this may indeed be true is that there may be a lack of "moral pressure" in China to hinder the evolution of AI.

The technology is not perfect, AI is only a "style" now

Let's go back to the original question: Disney can afford to use the labor to make the title, so why did they choose AI to make the title?

Ali Selim, the director of "Secret Invasion," told Variety that AI was used to create an "ominous" atmosphere:

"We can talk to the computer about ideas, themes, words (referring to the input prompt), and then it will do something. Then we can make some changes by changing the vocabulary (referring to the prompt) and it will change. It was exciting and unusual to be exploratory."

As of now, the problem of jitter caused by AI processing still frames is still difficult to completely eradicate, so when multiple still frames make up an animation, it actually creates a special art style that produces that slightly jittery image that conveys an unsettling and restless mood (for example, Spider-Man: Across the Universe, which is more familiar to domestic audiences).

This is actually a special "art style" caused by the different materials and media used in art. It is only expedient to call the accidental results that can only be obtained when technology fails to reach "style", as if:

When AI-generated video is still only a "style", using it can actually be a little less "replace human" moral panic, because people need a variety of artistic styles, it can only meet one or two of them at this time.

Art critic Chris Lambert argues that the choice to use AI to create and realize a certain art form is not entirely out of Disney's greed to "reduce costs and increase efficiency", but rather for artistic reasons.

Secret Invasion, based on the 2008-2009 Marvel comic book, is about a shape-shifting alien species called the Skrull that lurks on Earth to attack. This lurking relies on the Skrull's ability to mimic the appearance of others, but they are unable to perfectly reflect the personality of the person they are mimicking, so a careful observer may notice something amiss. One needs to try to figure out who is really human and who is a Skrull. this sense of paranoia, suspicion and speculation makes Secret Invasion a welcome story.

Similarly, AI is capable of generating amazing and high-quality artwork, but its work often carries a certain sense of unreality due to a lack of true perception and judgment, from the first six fingers, to the later hieroglyphs. As AI technology continues to improve, such factual errors are diminishing, but they can still give a hint of something wrong.

Thus, the AI-produced title animation is paired with the plot of Secret Invasion because they both involve a subtle and compelling interaction, a sense of unease. This echoes each other in artistic creation and is significant in achieving unity of form (the medium) and function (the subject of creation).

In fact, in contrast to works such as "Space Opera" or "Rock Paper Scissors", the title of "Secret Invasion" contains a lot of profound thoughts and intentions in the foreground before it is finally transformed into a prompt (cue word). Subject to technical limitations, the human staff also did a lot of closing work, such as the seamless transition between the various scenes of the screen.

AIGC will never stop here!

However, instead of just creating a new art style, AI generated video technology hopes to eventually quickly generate any art form that has existed throughout human history; especially when the style data of a different human artist is used in the training process, and when the name of that artist is entered, its painting style can be restored.

Even if we just look at the existing technology, stop-motion animation or motion comics in a particular "style" can actually be handed over to the AI to do it in a very similar way. In fact, we at Entertainment Capitalism (yes, we! Entertainment Capitalism! A media!) ) are also working on a project to use a combination of Stable Diffusion and Midjourney to work on film-quality animated shorts, and more information will be revealed in due course.

It's like:

The goal of technological development is threefold: good results, easy operation, low price, and finally, the spread of the technology from professionals to the general public. Several previous technological advances have finally achieved these goals simultaneously. In time, AIGC will do the same, the difference is only whether it takes 5 years or 20 years.

But that difference in time may determine the trajectory of some people's lives. If the replacement is gentle and gradual, he may be able to retire safely with a soft landing; if the replacement happens overnight, he will have to change careers.

The history of the entertainment and media industry has seen this "technology stack" turned upside down many times:

Can we manually pull the reins of technology forward?

How long did each of these processes of being replaced last? This question is determined by the three aforementioned dimensions of these technologies: how effective they are, how easy they are to operate, and, especially, how expensive they are.

In China, the "Macintosh" computer entered the advertising market in the first-tier cities and provincial capitals in the late 1980s, but until a decade later, the traditional scissor-cutting of art lettering on lightbox plaques and wall painting processes could still be seen in the vast majority of small towns and rural China. At the same time, the fineness of the airbrush machine is also advancing with the times, and the coarse-grained dot airbrush machine that was eliminated from the city a few years ago will trickle down to smaller cities.

Similarly, AIGC technology has a gradual process of decentralization. If someone mentioned ChatGPT in this year's college entrance exam essay question, rural kids would be unable to answer because they don't understand it. But the problem is that the film and television industry represented by Hollywood is an industry strictly limited to the first world, first-tier cities, and any new technology will be the first to be tested and applied in their place. Assuming that AI tools are going to have a downward conduction, the only thing that dabbles a bit is the earthy short video, which has little to do with what is being discussed.

In fact, if we follow the speed of development of these technologies in the past, then as of last year, the application of AI in the film and television industry has remained at a level that makes most practitioners very comfortable, such as face changing, voice acting, lip-synching, and changing lines. There was a demo video in March and April this year showing how an award-winning film used AI to block out profanity in it and modify its language to Japanese, at which point the actors' lip-synching would follow.

The people complaining about Secret Invasion now didn't panic when those cases came up. Behind every one of those jobs is also a drop in income for some people, or the loss of a single one that should have been, but it just seems so much more bearable than a full film AI straight out.

It can be said that AI now brings the speed of technology stack disruption, is indeed more than the psychological expectations of practitioners. This replacement process, if not incremental, will bring about industry upheaval. Therefore, they are banking on politically correct declarations to promote relevant regulations to slow down the progress of some already developed technologies being practically applied and to provide a respite for practitioners to transform. However, if a third country market like China does not synchronize the brakes, then Hollywood will instead lag behind in this regard.

With a little more effort from AI, is it impossible to translate a movie made by the Chinese into 29 languages, or to change the color of the actors? AIGC can do better automatic translation, and the face-changing technology is already mature, these are not visions, but things that can be done now. Now it is still quite troublesome to translate domestic movies to the sea. When the comprehensive cost of these jobs is low to a certain degree, the quantity and quality of films involved will usher in an explosion.

The elimination of language barriers will help Western audiences to approach the best inspirations from other cultures without a filter, rather than just accepting foreign language films that are clearly heterogeneous with an "exotic" mentality. Ultimately this will dilute Hollywood's grip on the head of the global film industry and further remove the scarcity that the strikers hold in their hands.

Challenging Hollywood's exclusive and special status in the film industry has long been a dream of the rest of the world's diverse cultures. History tells us that the easiest way to achieve this dream, from the bottom up, is to democratize creative capacity - just as outside of OpenAI and MJ, the most likely way to achieve the AIGC dream is open source.

"Watching the fire from across the river in China

The Hollywood strike, which began on May 2, 2023, has been going on for two months and is growing in scale, making it the largest in the history of the U.S. film industry. The participants have expanded from the initial 11,000 writers to directors, actors and other unions, and have caused many popular shows and dramas to stop airing and filming.

Before Secret Invasion, some short films ("Rock Paper Scissors"), commercials (Coca-Cola, Paypal) and music videos also experimented with AI, but because people knew it was experimental, they all still took a wait-and-see attitude.

During this strike, the AI credits of Secret Invasion accidentally ignited the anger of the strikers and the audience who supported them. As a typical industrial product, this finished product demonstrated the possibility of integrating AI into a process of industrial production, which means that every future film has the potential to save manpower in this part of the process, and the result coincided with the strike theme.

A domestic case closer to this matter is probably Taobao's documentary "Where Did This Come From" made in conjunction with B-site. Its title animation has a clear AI style, that is, the main image remains the same while the details of the picture are shaking. Sources say that the credits were made earlier and technically used Stable Diffusion's predecessor Disco Diffusion.

In this regard, when the documentary was released, there was not much resistance to the sound, mainly to "cyberpunk style" praise.

This does reflect some of the cultural and social differences between the US and China.

Where there is a tradition of unionization and labor negotiations, any labor unrest will be met with widespread solidarity across industries. But in China, probably because we are used to so many "if you don't do it, someone else will", even before AI substitution, human substitution is commonplace. And the core creative talent of the film and television industry, generally in the country is easy to top the reputation of "2.08 million", but also not easy to trigger public resonance.

On the whole, we are more able to watch from the sidelines with an attitude of "watching the fire from across the river".

For example, illustrators were the first group to be affected by AI painting in China, but when they spontaneously resisted, some of them might have said something rash, such as AI painting is a "corpse collage" and so on. What they received was ridicule from other industries, not solidarity.

In other words, director Guo Fan said in our "First Shanghai Entertainment Science and Innovation Salon" that AIGC for film and TV production could "overtake Hollywood". One of the reasons this may indeed be true is that there may be a lack of "moral pressure" in China to hinder the evolution of AI.

The technology is not perfect, AI is only a "style" now

Let's go back to the original question: Disney can afford to use the labor to make the title, so why did they choose AI to make the title?

Ali Selim, the director of "Secret Invasion," told Variety that AI was used to create an "ominous" atmosphere:

"We can talk to the computer about ideas, themes, words (referring to the input prompt), and then it will do something. Then we can make some changes by changing the vocabulary (referring to the prompt) and it will change. It was exciting and unusual to be exploratory."

As of now, the problem of jitter caused by AI processing still frames is still difficult to completely eradicate, so when multiple still frames make up an animation, it actually creates a special art style that produces that slightly jittery image that conveys an unsettling and restless mood (for example, Spider-Man: Across the Universe, which is more familiar to domestic audiences).

This is actually a special "art style" caused by the different materials and media used in art. It is only expedient to call the accidental results that can only be obtained when technology fails to reach "style", as if:

When AI-generated video is still only a "style", using it can actually be a little less "replace human" moral panic, because people need a variety of artistic styles, it can only meet one or two of them at this time.

Art critic Chris Lambert argues that the choice to use AI to create and realize a certain art form is not entirely out of Disney's greed to "reduce costs and increase efficiency", but rather for artistic reasons.

Secret Invasion, based on the 2008-2009 Marvel comic book, is about a shape-shifting alien species called the Skrull that lurks on Earth to attack. This lurking relies on the Skrull's ability to mimic the appearance of others, but they are unable to perfectly reflect the personality of the person they are mimicking, so a careful observer may notice something amiss. One needs to try to figure out who is really human and who is a Skrull. this sense of paranoia, suspicion and speculation makes Secret Invasion a welcome story.

Similarly, AI is capable of generating amazing and high-quality artwork, but its work often carries a certain sense of unreality due to a lack of true perception and judgment, from the first six fingers, to the later hieroglyphs. As AI technology continues to improve, such factual errors are diminishing, but they can still give a hint of something wrong.

Thus, the AI-produced title animation is paired with the plot of Secret Invasion because they both involve a subtle and compelling interaction, a sense of unease. This echoes each other in artistic creation and is significant in achieving unity of form (the medium) and function (the subject of creation).

In fact, in contrast to works such as "Space Opera" or "Rock Paper Scissors", the title of "Secret Invasion" contains a lot of profound thoughts and intentions in the foreground before it is finally transformed into a prompt (cue word). Subject to technical limitations, the human staff also did a lot of closing work, such as the seamless transition between the various scenes of the screen.

AIGC will never stop here!

However, instead of just creating a new art style, AI generated video technology hopes to eventually quickly generate any art form that has existed throughout human history; especially when the style data of a different human artist is used in the training process, and when the name of that artist is entered, its painting style can be restored.

Even if we just look at the existing technology, stop-motion animation or motion comics in a particular "style" can actually be handed over to the AI to do it in a very similar way. In fact, we at Entertainment Capitalism (yes, we! Entertainment Capitalism! A media!) ) are also working on a project to use a combination of Stable Diffusion and Midjourney to work on film-quality animated shorts, and more information will be revealed in due course.

It's like:

The goal of technological development is threefold: good results, easy operation, low price, and finally, the spread of the technology from professionals to the general public. Several previous technological advances have finally achieved these goals simultaneously. In time, AIGC will do the same, the difference is only whether it takes 5 years or 20 years.

But that difference in time may determine the trajectory of some people's lives. If the replacement is gentle and gradual, he may be able to retire safely with a soft landing; if the replacement happens overnight, he will have to change careers.

The history of the entertainment and media industry has seen this "technology stack" turned upside down many times:

Can we manually pull the reins of technology forward?

How long did each of these processes of being replaced last? This question is determined by the three aforementioned dimensions of these technologies: how effective they are, how easy they are to operate, and, especially, how expensive they are.

In China, the "Macintosh" computer entered the advertising market in the first-tier cities and provincial capitals in the late 1980s, but until a decade later, the traditional scissor-cutting of art lettering on lightbox plaques and wall painting processes could still be seen in the vast majority of small towns and rural China. At the same time, the fineness of the airbrush machine is also advancing with the times, and the coarse-grained dot airbrush machine that was eliminated from the city a few years ago will trickle down to smaller cities.

Similarly, AIGC technology has a gradual process of decentralization. If someone mentioned ChatGPT in this year's college entrance exam essay question, rural kids would be unable to answer because they don't understand it. But the problem is that the film and television industry represented by Hollywood is an industry strictly limited to the first world, first-tier cities, and any new technology will be the first to be tested and applied in their place. Assuming that AI tools are going to have a downward conduction, the only thing that dabbles a bit is the earthy short video, which has little to do with what is being discussed.

In fact, if we follow the speed of development of these technologies in the past, then as of last year, the application of AI in the film and television industry has remained at a level that makes most practitioners very comfortable, such as face changing, voice acting, lip-synching, and changing lines. There was a demo video in March and April this year showing how an award-winning film used AI to block out profanity in it and modify its language to Japanese, at which point the actors' lip-synching would follow.

The people complaining about Secret Invasion now didn't panic when those cases came up. Behind every one of those jobs is also a drop in income for some people, or the loss of a single one that should have been, but it just seems so much more bearable than a full film AI straight out.

It can be said that AI now brings the speed of technology stack disruption, is indeed more than the psychological expectations of practitioners. This replacement process, if not incremental, will bring about industry upheaval. Therefore, they are banking on politically correct declarations to promote relevant regulations to slow down the progress of some already developed technologies being practically applied and to provide a respite for practitioners to transform. However, if a third country market like China does not synchronize the brakes, then Hollywood will instead lag behind in this regard.

With a little more effort from AI, is it impossible to translate a movie made by the Chinese into 29 languages, or to change the color of the actors? AIGC can do better automatic translation, and the face-changing technology is already mature, these are not visions, but things that can be done now. Now it is still quite troublesome to translate domestic movies to the sea. When the comprehensive cost of these jobs is low to a certain degree, the quantity and quality of films involved will usher in an explosion.

The elimination of language barriers will help Western audiences to approach the best inspirations from other cultures without a filter, rather than just accepting foreign language films that are clearly heterogeneous with an "exotic" mentality. Ultimately this will dilute Hollywood's grip on the head of the global film industry and further remove the scarcity that the strikers hold in their hands.

Challenging Hollywood's exclusive and special status in the film industry has long been a dream of the rest of the world's diverse cultures. History tells us that the easiest way to achieve this dream, from the bottom up, is to democratize creative capacity - just as outside of OpenAI and MJ, the most likely way to achieve the AIGC dream is open source.