Reid Southen@Rahll
AI 'filmmaking' is a shortcut and a trap, especially when speed is used as some kind of positive, attention grabbing metric.
In the mid-2000s, there was a trend called speedpainting that was popularized by extremely talented digital artists. They could whip up a nice painting in a very short amount of time, often 30 minutes to an hour, using custom brushes and workflows.
A lot of green artists, myself included, misunderstood the concept, and thought it was a technique unto itself and pursued it. It seems so quick and easy, why spend so much time on a painting when you could do it FAST? It didn't take long to realize my work wasn't very good and I didn't know what I was doing.
The bitter pill to swallow was that what I thought was a shortcut and quick ticket to success was in fact just highly skilled people working very quickly. They'd honed their abilities and process in a way to allow them to quicken the pace of certain types of work. But speed comes with skill, not the other way around, and sometimes you need to slow down to speed up.
I see AI filmmakers, and AI creators in general, falling for the same trap. They think they've found a shortcut in the form of a new, accessible technique, but because they largely don't understand filmmaking, and are attempting to skip to the end result as quickly as possible, what you get is the same thing we got in the mid-2000s with digital art... a lot of mediocre to bad work with no real vision or understanding of the medium or fundamentals that are required to engage with it effectively.
If you want to make movies and art, there is no magic button or shortcut, you actually have to put in some real effort. I knew an artist who didn't think they needed to learn perspective, they just used shortcuts and tricks, and it was always apparent that no matter how good their design or idea was, there were always blatant flaws across the image. Their refusal to learn essentially put them in artistic stasis, they never progressed past a certain point in that regard.
AI isn't your friend or some great equalizer, it's designed to put you in stasis so you have to rent your abilities from a server somewhere and hope the model doesn't change or disappear or become too expensive some day. Invest in real skills, invest in yourself, reject the automation of creativity and reject speedslop. Good things come with time, effort, and intention, not from speeding through checkpoints as quickly as possible.
