As Breitbart News reported last week, legendary Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese announced he has embraced artificial intelligence (AI), and as Breitbart News predicted, the Luddites are whining about it.
“The Art Directors Guild is not happy with Martin Scorsese’s promotion of an AI tool for storyboarding,” reports the far-left Hollywood Reporter.
“The Studio City-based crew union clapped back at the Killers of the Flower Moon director on Tuesday for a recent ad he filmed with startup Black Forest Labs,” the report adds. “In the video spot, Scorsese — an advisor to the company — creates a storyboard featuring a medieval street with the use of the company’s FLUX technology and lauds the model’s display of ‘cinematic intelligence.’”
If I might digress for a bit… What serious news organization uses that stupid, childish, Millennial-internet phrase “clapped back?” Just stop. Be adults.
Naturally, the Art Directors Guild (ADG) has a dog in this fight. It represents storyboard artists. Here’s part of their crybaby statement:
Oscar winning director Martin Scorsese is turning his back on the human artists who throughout his career have helped him create his most memorable works. Generative AI is only capable of producing this type of “cinematic intelligence” by ingesting large swaths of copyrighted work, likely scraped from the internet without consent, credit, compensation, or transparency. To think their professional contributions can be mimicked or outshone by generative AI, which is built on work likely stolen from them and many other artists from around the world, is a betrayal of the collaborative nature of cinema.
Blah, blah, blah…
If it can be done cheaper, it’s going to be done that way. That’s been a fact of life since time began, since the bow and arrow sidelined the rock-throwers.
Whining helps no one. AI is happening, it will continue to happen, and nothing is going to stop any industry — including those that employ oh-so precious artists — from a technology that does it cheaper, faster, or both.
Who should be the one who decides which jobs are protected from technology and which jobs should be automated into oblivion?
What would the ADG have said when talking pictures put a whole generation of actors out of work, or when CGI replaced the need for location scouts, set decorators, and set designers?
What about all the musicians put out of work by electronic music?
What about all the adding machine repairmen, the guys who delivered ice and coal, the people who manufactured vacuum tubes?
Do you see how stupid this argument is?
AI will never replace the human inspiration and ideas that create art, but AI can make it faster, cheaper, and easier to create that art.
How many great stories remain untold because the storyteller could not bring his story to realization due to the cost, due to the Hollywood gatekeepers, due to the impossibility of making it happen on your own?
Now we will see those stories, and that’s a very, very good thing.
Like computer graphics, AI is a tool for the artist, a tool that democratizes the visual arts. All I see is upside — and I say all of this as someone whose job (professional internet strategic shitposter — or PISS) is supposedly threatened by this new technology.