Hollywood resists AI "Secret Invasion", an opportunity for China's entertainment industry to overtake?

Source: Entertainment Capital, by James

A few days ago, Disney's Marvel released the new film "Secret Invasion", which was slammed by online public opinion because of its opening title generated by AI tools.

Critics believe that, as a studio with deep pockets, Marvel should hire real people to complete the process, but using AI to save costs, especially during the strike of Hollywood directors and screenwriters, is even more inappropriate. Some people also criticized the shoddy title after learning that it was made by AI. It is one of the ugliest titles in Marvel history.

Shizhi Future, a subsidiary of Entertainment Capital, believes that:

• Standing on the world view that the film itself wants to express, the style embodied by AI complements each other
• But the questioning of this title stems from the ongoing strike in Hollywood, so it bears a lot of controversy and infamy that does not belong to itself.
• Due to technical limitations, AI paintings and generated videos can only present a certain "special style" at present. There is nothing wrong with applying "AI style" to the appropriate occasion.
• After technological breakthroughs, the content generated by AI will become more and more refined and diverse, and more and more parts that can replace human labor will become more and more. From the perspective of effect, ease of use and cost, the speed of AI popularization will be faster than previous new technologies.
• There is little point in resisting AI purely emotionally. It will change the "tech stack" for new practitioners, and people will either retrain or be laid off. This is not much different from the past, but it may not be gradual, but sudden, thus causing relatively large turmoil.

"Watching the fire from the other side" of China

The Hollywood strike that started on May 2, 2023 has persisted for two months, and has continued to expand in scale, making it the largest in the history of the American film industry. The number of participants has expanded from the initial 11,000 screenwriters to directors, actors and other labor unions, which has caused many popular programs and series to be suspended and filmed.

Before "Secret Invasion", some short films ("Rock Paper Scissors"), commercials (Coca-Cola, Alipay) and MVs also used AI experimentally, but because people knew it was experimental, they all took a wait-and-see attitude.

During the strike, the AI credits for "Secret Invasion" accidentally ignited the anger of the strikers and the audience who supported them. As a typical industrialized product, this finished product shows the possibility of integrating AI into a process of industrialized production, which means that every film in the future may save manpower in this link, and the result is different from the strike theme. Coincidentally.

A domestic case that is closer to this matter may be the documentary "Where did this product come from" co-produced by Taobao and Station B. Its title animation has an obvious AI style, that is, the details of the picture are shaking while the main image remains unchanged. It is reported that the opening title was done relatively early, technically using Disco Diffusion, the predecessor of Stable Diffusion.

In this regard, there was not much resistance when the documentary was released, and the praise of "cyberpunk style" was the main one.

This does reflect some cultural and social differences between China and the United States.

Where there is a tradition of unions and collective bargaining, any strikes will find general solidarity across industries. In China, it is probably because we are used to too much "you don't do it, some people do it". Even before AI is replaced, the replacement between people is commonplace. Moreover, the core creative talents in the film and television industry are generally easy to bear the reputation of "2.08 million" in China, and it is not easy to resonate with the public.

In general, we are more able to watch from the sidelines with an attitude of "watching the fire from the other side".

For example, illustrators were the first groups in China to be impacted by AI painting, but when they spontaneously resisted, some people may have said some hasty words, such as AI painting is "collage of corpse parts". Instead of solidarity, they received ridicule from other industries.

In other words, Director Guo Fan said at our "First Shanghai Cultural and Entertainment Science and Technology Innovation Salon" that AIGC can "overtake Hollywood on a bend" when used in film and television production. One of the reasons why this may indeed come true is that there may be a lack of "moral pressure" in China that hinders the evolution of AI.

Technology is not yet perfect, AI is just a "painting style" now

Let's go back to the original question: Why did Disney choose AI to make this title when Disney can afford the labor involved?

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

"We can talk to the computer about ideas, topics, words (referring to input), and it will do certain things. Then we can make some modifications by changing the words (referring to), and it will change. This exploratory It’s exciting and unusual.”

Up to now, the jitter problem caused by AI processing still frames is still difficult to completely cure. Therefore, when multiple still frames are composed of animations, a special artistic style is actually formed, that is, a slightly jittery picture will be produced, and the transmission A restless and restless mood (such as "Spider-Man: Across the Universe", which is more familiar to domestic audiences).

This is actually a special "artistic style" caused by different materials and media for artistic realization. It is only a stopgap measure to call the accidental results that can only be obtained when the technology is not up to date "style", as if:

When AI-generated video is only a "style", using it can actually reduce the moral panic of "replacing humans", because people need a variety of artistic styles, and it can only satisfy one of them at this time. two kinds.

Art critic Chris Lambert believes that choosing to use AI to create and realize a certain art form is not entirely out of Disney's greed of "reducing costs and increasing efficiency", but has its artistic reasons.

Based on the 2008-2009 Marvel comics, Secret Invasion follows a shape-shifting alien species known as the Skrull that lurks on Earth to attack. This latency relies on the Skrull's ability to imitate the appearance of other people, but they cannot perfectly reflect the personality of the person they imitate, so careful observers may notice something is wrong. People need to try to figure out who is really human and who is Skrull. This sense of paranoia, doubt, and speculation makes "Secret Invasion" a welcome story.

Similarly, AI can generate amazing and high-quality works of art, but due to the lack of real perception and judgment, its works often have a sense of unreality, from the initial six fingers to the later pictographs. As AI technology continues to improve, this kind of factual error is becoming less and less, but it may still make people feel slightly wrong.

So, pairing the AI-generated intro animation with The Invasion's plot is because they both involve a subtle but compelling interrelationship, a sense of unease. This echoes each other in artistic creation and is of great significance, realizing the unity of form (medium) and function (creative theme).

In fact, compared with works such as "Space Opera House" or "Rock Paper Scissors", the opening title of "Secret Invasion" contains a lot of deep thinking and ideas before it is finally transformed into (prompt words). Due to technical limitations, human employees also did a lot of finishing work, such as seamless transitions between scenes.

AIGC will never stop here

However, AI-generated video technology is not just to create a new art style, but hopes to eventually quickly generate any art form that has existed in human history; especially when the style data of different human artists is used in the training process , enter the name of the artist to restore his style of painting.

Even if you only look at the existing technology, stop-motion animation or dynamic comics with a specific "painting style" can actually be handed over to AI. In fact, we at Entertainment Capital (yes, we! Entertainment Capital! A media!) are also working on a project that uses Stable Diffusion and Midjourney to participate in the production of film-level animation short films, and will disclose more information in due course.

It's like:

There are three goals for technological development: good effect, simple operation, low price, and finally complete the popularization from professionals to the public. Multiple previous technological advances ended up achieving these goals simultaneously. In time, AIGC will do the same, the only difference is whether it will take 5 years or 20 years.

However, this difference in timing 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 it happens overnight, he will have to switch careers.

This kind of "technology stack" has been completely subverted many times in the history of the entertainment media industry:

**Can we manually hold the reins of technological advancement? **

How long did each of these replaced processes last? This problem is determined by the above three dimensions of these technologies: whether the effect is good, whether the operation is simple, and especially the price.

In China, "Macintosh" computers entered the advertising market in first-tier cities and provincial capitals in the late 1980s, but until ten years later, the vast number of small towns and rural areas in China can still see traditional scissors-cut light boxes with artistic words on plaques, and wall painting. At the same time, the fineness of inkjet printing machines is also advancing with the times, and the coarse-grain dot inkjet printing that was eliminated in the city a few years ago will spread to smaller cities.

Similarly, AIGC technology also has a process of gradual decentralization. If someone mentions ChatGPT in this year's college entrance examination composition questions, rural children will not be able to answer it because they don't understand it. But the problem is that the film and television industry represented by Hollywood is strictly limited to the first-world and first-tier cities, and any new technology will be tested and applied here in the first place. Assuming that AI tools need to have a downward transmission, the only thing that touches the edge is short videos with earthy flavors, which have little to do with the things we are discussing now.

In fact, according to the development speed of these technologies in the past, as of last year, the application of AI in the film and television industry has remained at a level that makes most practitioners feel at ease, such as changing faces, dubbing, lip-syncing, and changing lines. In March and April of this year, there was a demonstration video showing how an award-winning film used AI to block the swear words and change its language to Japanese, while the actors' mouth shapes would change accordingly.

People who complain about Secret Invasion now, didn't panic when those cases arose. Behind each of these jobs, there are also some people whose income has dropped, or lost an order that they should have, but it seems that it is much better than going straight out of the whole film AI.

It can be said that the speed at which AI brings technology stack disruption has indeed exceeded the psychological expectations of practitioners. This replacement process, if not gradual, would have created upheaval in the industry. Therefore, they hope to use politically correct declarations to promote relevant laws and regulations to delay the progress of some developed technologies from being practically applied, and to provide a breathing space for practitioners to transform. However, if third-country markets like China don't brake in tandem, then Hollywood will fall behind in this regard.

After AI puts a little more effort into it, can the movies made by the Chinese not be translated into 29 languages, or can it be impossible to change the skin color of the actors? Can't it be transported to YouTube, or can't organize professional film reviews? AIGC can achieve better automatic translation, and face-changing technology is already very mature. These are not visions, but things that can be done now. Now it is quite troublesome to translate and dub domestic films overseas. When the overall cost of these tasks is low enough, the number and quality of the films involved will usher in an explosion.

The elimination of language barriers will help Western audiences treat excellent inspirations from other cultural regions without filters, instead of accepting foreign language films with obvious heterogeneity with an "exotic" mentality. Ultimately, this dilutes Hollywood's grip on the global film industry, further removing the scarcity that strikers hold.

Challenging Hollywood's exclusive place in the film industry has been a long-held dream of the rest of the world's diverse cultures. History tells us that the easiest way to realize this dream is from the bottom up, which is the democratization of creative ability—just like outside of OpenAI and MJ, the most likely way to realize AIGC's dream is open source.

Write at the end

In the comments quoted above, Lambert lamented that artistic critique of AI-generated content was overlooked because of the "big right and wrong" issues during the strike. He hopes that future generations will have the opportunity to view these works in a more objective manner.

Perhaps it’s because “it’s none of your business”, when we examine the artistry of the opening title of “Secret Invasion”, we can take off a layer of “colored glasses”, so that we don’t look down on the painting just because we know the author is AI. Despite this, in small art circles, such as poetry writing posts, Douban groups, and forums where painters gather, there will still be prejudices similar to those in Hollywood.

As early as 2018-19, a certain AI team experimentally posted AI-generated ancient poems, modern poems, abstract paintings, etc. to discussion groups where humans gathered, pretending to be humans to post, and harvesting other people's serious art comments. Sometimes after they voluntarily disclose their identities, they will receive some angry insults. The technology was certainly not as mature and more threatening then as it is now.

Like the urinal named "Fountain" or the banana named "Harlequin," the judgment of whether a work of art is good or bad is often not directly linked to the amount of human labor contained in it. For works of art clearly created by humans, the evaluation system is diverse and tolerant.

We believe that over time, some people whose current jobs are potentially affected by AI will gradually complete retraining or divert new opportunities. When people are more "indifferent to themselves", such irrational resistance voices will become less and less. Everyone can discuss the matter as it stands, and treat the works and products generated by AI equally.