ChatGPT's Crazy Image Upgrade (Plus Reve & Ideogram 3.0), Hollywood's Global Shift, and Roblox Goes Generative

0:00In this episode of the DeNoise podcast, we've got a ton of new AI image generation updates. The Death of Hollywood, a debate between celebrities. And Roblox is now in the generative 3D space. Let's get into it.

0:15Welcome back, dude. Yeah, good to be here. Good to see you. Good to see you. We got so much stuff to cover. Yeah, Studio Ghibli. Studio Ghibli everywhere. And you are blessed that you're not on X because my entire feed has been Studio Ghiblified. Well, I'm glad you're on it. You didn't know what I was talking about when I mentioned this. You are my source for all things X. So what's going on over there? Yeah, because I'm chronically online. A timeline of updates this week, you know, AI space is crazy. And this has been a crazy week of new image models coming out and everyone trying to one up each other.

0:46Yeah. For me, the week started with a brand new company image model that came out called Reeve or Rev, R-E-V-E. And the demo is coming out of that. And it's open for like a preview beta where they train their own model and very photorealistic, highly accurate looking images from their own model. It's similar to in the kind of mid journey space, their own private model. So I don't really know what they trained on. Of course, I weekend that whole question. But is it an American company? I believe it's an American company. Okay. So putting that aside, the outputs have been really impressive and the quality has been impressive.

1:15And the other thing that it did do really well is text. And so text has always been a tricky thing. Absolutely. From image generation. And I talked about how ideograms always been my favorite, because they've been the best at honoring text and replicating it. If you give it a text in the prompt of spitting it out accurately. And so they were handling text really well as well. So it's a lot of demos from Rev of text outputs. So that was going around, I don't know, Monday, Tuesday, that was, you know, that was the hot topic of the internet of X. And then shortly after that, I believe on Wednesday, not to be outdone, ChatGPT, they did a live stream with Sam Altman and some other developers and announced a new image update in their 4.0 model, 4.0 image generation for, you know, that was that was huge news.

1:53Even, you know, I heard of it on LinkedIn, It was all over YouTube. And the overall consensus was that, dude, this is great. Same chat interface you're used to, and you can prompt it and give it high quality image outputs. And let's go with the good things we've seen first. So I've seen impressive examples. One from Jan on X was he pointed out that he uploaded a 3D model of a dragon and told it to put a wireframe on it. And it accurately 3D mapped the wireframe, which gives his understanding that has spatial understanding. understanding on a 2D image. On a 2D image. Crazy. Impressive. That's a big leap.

2:30I've seen tons of other examples of people giving it just photo, like a shot of a room and then some texture of some wood and like an object and be like, make the wall, you know, this wood panel color and like add this lamp on the table. Yeah. And boom, does it, adds it, looks really accurate. For like an interior designer who's trying to vision spaces. Yeah. Or, you know, mood boards or production design planning. John Finger just posted an update this morning in a test where he hand drew a storyboard sketch of like a clown holding up a bank and a couple police officers like pointing guns at him.

3:02I saw that. And gave it an image of a clown and then said, turn this into a photorealistic image. And it like accurately honored the geography of his hand drawn sketch, turned it into a photorealistic image with the image of the clown. Pretty accurate. I mean, this is like really advanced control net stuff where you can guide the inference and you're doing it with just basic prompting and yeah this is right no one needs to have any technical knowledge like this is like complicated UI anymore yeah I mean there's a level where it's like you want that control you want that detail but for most people or if you're just looking to just kind of create a vibe yeah a chat interface I mean chat interface is still not my favorite thing but I mean what's easier you don't have to get prompt fancy with it yeah and I mean you don't need to be a clever prompter I tested it out gave us some very basic prompts to try to generate a split screen yeah 3d rendering thing and it did it pretty accurately and i told it to modify it and it did the modification pretty accurately so far everybody seems to be happy nobody can like find an extra thumb or like some kind of hallucination yeah i mean i'm sure you'll hit the yeah the border you know if you are a graphic designer more in the weeds where you're like you know it still does not do the control yeah that i want so yeah it goes back to what i said a few episodes ago comfy ui workflows are still like six months ahead of where the big industry is, you know, big AI, if you will.

4:20And so ChatGPT has caught up to what some of the workflows were around for six months. So now let's look at the AI influencer space and see what they're working on, because that's probably what the big companies will release six months from now. It felt like a slightly more advanced, higher quality version of what Google AI studio came out with a week or two ago. It's in their AI playground area. It's tricky to find, but in their Gemini 2 image chat generation, where you could upload an image, kind of have a conversation with modifications. It's a very similar experience to that, but the outputs I found with ChatGPT was higher quality.

4:56So it sounds like you use both. I mean, what are your thoughts? I have dabbled a little bit with both. And the Gemini, when I messed with it, I just had to modify some pictures of friends to meme them and send them jokes. And it did a pretty good job but it was still a little fuzzy and you know kind of that like ai like like warpiness yeah yeah a little soft i did try to see if i could use it for some like thumbnail generation for youtube so i gave it a photo of myself and then i gave it a like a scanner because we have coming out with a video about that soon and i was like make me hold the scanner and then it did give me an error saying that i'm a real person and it won't change the scene because i'm a real person so like a protection against so there is yeah there is built-in protection against manipulating existing images of people.

5:38I can't generate the image requested because it involves placing a real person's likeness into a new context, which goes against our content policy. Perfect. I mean, that guardrail is so necessary for this product to be mainstream accepted. Because deepfake is a big issue. Yeah. And that's, you know, you can go on something that sort of has zero or very little guardrails like Grok, which has sort of leaned heavily into you could deepfake and meme real life people as much as you want. Elon said that there is an unhinged version of Grok where it just starts, you know, dropping the F-bomb and like doing all types of stuff.

6:12Yeah. Not surprised. Obviously behind it because they will like retweet and repost AI memes of themselves that other people shared. So they're full behind that. ChatGPT has gone the other direction, which is awesome for them. So, you know, different options. They're really buttoning up and formalizing the software. Yeah. And I mean, that probably also ties into their push that we talked about in the last episode, where they want to have the copyright laws a little bit loosened or the interpretation of fair use loosened to include their training data that would fall under fair use. Right. So the flip side is sort of, I don't know, it depends if I look at this downside.

6:50But anyways, the thing that has covered my feed is for some weird reason, everyone decided to Studio Ghiblify every single image known to man and post it on X. And it's so ironic because Miyazaki is like one of the staunch opponents of AI. Yes. So Studio Ghibli is a very distinct style. Miyazaki, there was a clip that I remember that happened a few years ago and now it is recirculating because someone had gave him a presentation of AI. And do you want to read one of the first quotes. Yeah, let me pull this up. The quotes from Miyazaki are so much fun that I think we should just go back and forth a little bit.

7:27So I'll start with the first one. This is a presentation of an artificial intelligence model which learned certain movements. Miyazaki's reply, I am utterly disgusted. Miyazaki continues, I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself. And there you have it. I don't think he likes the AI. And now his style is all over the internet right now. A little bit of that track, I said, I'm not entirely sure. I think I do know why. So when the live stream, when Sam Altman and some of the developers had a live stream and posted this, what the image generation could do, they took a picture of themselves and then said, make it anime style.

8:04And then it came out looking very Studio Ghibli-like. And then Sam Altman changed his X profile photo to a picture of himself in the Studio Ghibli style. And I don't know if I just gave everyone the idea to let's run with Studio Ghibli. I don't because that's the only thing I think of because I don't know why everyone did it and everyone yeah I don't know why everyone suddenly decided this is the style we're going to like hammer down on. I gotta say culturally that's not a good move on his part because that is it's a middle finger to a lot of artists. Yeah and it's a that is a very specific style we've talked about this before where it's like you use these things make up your own style.

8:36Yes. Like and you know the issue with like making it using Pixar in the prompt or something that is like a very distinct style and that you could argue is all the thousands and thousands of hours of animators animating the studio ghibli movies you know and now it just distills down to meme generation like come on yeah i mean this is the the flavor of the week the internet moved on from uh i know you're not going to know the saratoga water and bananas um you have no idea what i'm talking about but um wow you're on x man i'm on linkedin you're on x yeah maybe saratoga water will make its way to linkedin uh two weeks from now.

9:12Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're two weeks ahead for sure. Yeah, it is a distinct style. And then obviously, it fuels the, you know, AI slop and the just like, it just gets more fuel to the like never AI people or the like, very like knee jerk reaction and AI people without getting into the subtleties and benefits of this like stuff we see from john finger where it's like, Oh, I can like, hand draw storyboard and like, turn it into a photorealistic image. Yeah. For my planning process or for other stage steps of the process. I mean, a hundred percent in the next few years, we're going to see a major film that is predominantly built on all of these tools.

9:47Yeah. And the question will be which studio wants to be the first to distribute it and handle it. Yeah. That'll be another question. Yeah. Because the style works so well and ChatGPT4O is able to generate it so well. It does look really good. The, yeah. Yeah. For better or worse, all of the images I've seen, it's like, it looks very, there's no, I can't really see much weirdness and how it interpreted the style and it yeah but theoretically you can take just hand sketches frame by frame by frame and do like a 12 frames per second output and then just in between it you know just like how they do 2d animation and you can make a movie this way using like a team of like three or four people i think that's a good process for a good use of ai and process of you still hand create the keyframes yeah and that's a feature that runway was pushing and they released, they have, they're the only ones, I was talking to someone about this yesterday, the only ones that we could think of that have a middle frame option.

10:41Like a lot of the image generation models, either first frame or last and or both. And you're kind of up to, you know, it's up to the AI how it interprets that. But Runway has an option where you can give it first, last and middle. So you can further guide the AI. And it's not that different from a process from, you know, nearly a hundred years ago in the early days of animation, you would have your good artist draw the main frames the poses right and then you have your junior um artists do the in betweener frames yeah they go flip back and forth yeah i mean look we saw flow this year when the oscar uh team that used blender and i think it was like 20 people from latvia something like that give it a few years you're gonna see a team of five people with one million dollars make something that's oscar worthy with tools yeah and at the end of the day it still always comes back to like yes, it'll be easier to make this stuff, but it comes back to story and it comes back to how good is the story and like what you're going to do.

11:32Again, I feel like it's similar to the DV revolution when, you know, it was easy for everyone to grab a camera or the iPhone and it's a lot easier for people to shoot stuff. Yeah. So we do have a lot more noise. Yeah. But you know, if the story sucks, like, yeah, no, you know, it's just more noise and it's not like it's going to drown everything out. It's just, yeah, but more, you know, only the good stuff will surface to the top. I got to say with all the sort of image revolutions of the past, like when Photoshop and some of the early image manipulation devices came out and then real-time game engines and then renderers like it was still difficult for the average person to download it on their computer and do stuff with it and output it because it's so easy now i think that's why you're seeing so much more slop and so much more noise but it goes back to hijacks on someone else's ip like student ghibli or we've talked about this before right you know using a batman example or using the pixar example when And it's hijacking someone else's creative identity or creative work or signature.

12:29Yeah, that's a big no-no. Yeah, leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth. Yeah, like when I produced that short film that's out now, that was not a big effort on my part, but I still hold that movie so close to my heart. And so if someone went in and just started copying that movie for stuff in AI, I would feel a different opinion about it, for sure. I could totally see it. you don't feel like uh imitation is the greatest form of flattery up to a point duplication is once they profit from it and make their career based on my work or the other artist yeah when it's too much of a copy not enough of a remix yes yeah that's when it that's a problem crosses the line yeah one other big advantage with uh 4io before i forgot to mention and moving on to ideogram huge improvement with text and text adherence and i've seen examples of people give it like large amounts of text.

13:18You have to create a kind of like a board and accurately spitting out the text, putting it, not jumbling it up, which is always an issue before. That's such a huge advantage because motion graphics is still something that we're having a lot of difficulty with finding artists and just generating motion graphics. So this stuff, you know, you can just composite a bunch of motion graphics on top of your YouTube videos. Yeah. I mean, what I would love to see because this is a wall we have hit and trying to speed up some of the uh the graphics work is if you start giving images with text to the video generators like runway or cling they're past a certain point of like how small the text gets it jumbles it and even bigger text it'll jumble it so the video generators maintaining and honoring the text and keeping it sharp pretty bad okay yeah i just say you do it frame by frame so then we're animating i mean there there's some There's some automation tool out there.

14:11Like ask those guys from the AI hackathon. Oh, for like repeatedly inserting a frame every 10 seconds. Yeah, you probably have to segment it and like do your, and we're doing this manually anyway. It's like, okay, well, let's take out the text, animate the stuff, and then go back and composite the text back on, which is sort of the process with a lot of these AI tools. Under the hood, when you get to the higher level of like trying to make a high quality images, it still ends up being like you're taking elements from different outputs and compositing them together They're using traditional compositing elements like After Effects or Fusion.

14:43Nuke. Yeah, that's heavy. That's too heavy for me, but yes. I do love me some Nuke, yep. And then last one that came out, not to be outdone, Ideogram, which I've enjoyed. I use them a lot for image generation. They were always the best at text adherence, but now there's text adherence competition, but they released a new model version 3.0. And the gist of the updates with that is just more that you can kind of feed to different styles and have it adhere to the styles across different images, a lot more use cases for creative brand graphics and creative graphic design work, logos and stuff like that.

15:17Yeah, it's more geared for illustrators and people. Yeah, they had a good interface too, because when you're using their interface, they go a little bit beyond just the text prompt and they have options where it's like, are you trying to make something realistic? Are you trying to make something that style like an animated? Are you trying to make a graphic design? So they had a lot of good buttons to to not have to prompt it yourself, but to kind of guide the AI of like what you're trying to create. Dude, you sold me. I'm going to try it right after this podcast. I've been a big fan of IdaGram.

15:46Yeah, I've liked them. I'm looking at it here. They have a new bass generation feature, which is kind of like what I was talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unsupervised, just give it a ton of stuff and let it just churn. They'll use your credits happily. Yes, give us your CSV of all the stuff you want us to make. Yes. Crazy, I remember I think, what was it, Monday? We were like, well, we'll see what happens this week. if there's a, you know, we had some story ideas that we could sit on and then like as the weekend going, it was like ChatGPT, Rev, Ideagram, new image thing. Crazy. Yeah. It's so hard to keep up and I did a LinkedIn post a couple of days ago where I said, Joey and I wait a few hours before every episode because there is just so much news and coverage and today is a very typical day.

16:29Yeah, I try to think about it the day before but sometimes like this morning, I'm just like, let's get it all together because like it's anything new. I check Twitter X or two. I'm like, anything new happened like last night that we should talk about before? Yeah. And I see the John Finger video and it's like, okay, there's stuff that there's even more stuff, new stuff that people have been experimenting with. Yeah. And yeah, that's what we're trying to gather up for you. All right. So if you have any other models that we haven't covered, send us a comment and we'll get it on the next episode.

16:57Yeah. All right. Next story, going back to our, is Hollywood dead? California's not even in the top five. Remember that episode? Yeah. I remember that one. So yeah, there were a couple of stories and we were sharing them back and forth. And the first one was a clip that's been circulating. Adam Scott was on Rob Lowe's podcast and they were talking about production. And it came up because Rob Lowe, one of his game show that he's hosting, is a very American looking game show that shoots in Dublin, Ireland. No way. I did not even realize that. Well, from what I hear, Ireland is like really hot right now with production.

17:30Because they just have 40 % tax credits. Right. I don't know. And North Ireland is supposed to take some of that action, but it's mostly South Ireland. Oh, really? Like Dublin. Yeah. So it's not going up to Belfast just yet. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So he shoots there and yeah, they're just talking about, he says, quote, it's cheaper to bring in a hundred American people to Ireland than to walk across the lot to Fox and shoot in LA. Damn. It's crazy. Damn. There's so much truth to that. He's right, right? Yeah. And they're talking about if they're having to shoot Parks and Rec today, they're like, we'd shoot in Budapest.

18:03Like, they wouldn't let us shoot in LA. We'd force us to shoot somewhere else. Imagine the cost of flying Rob Lowe and Adam Scott to Ireland for 100 days. And yeah, Adam Scott was talking about it too because he was about to shoot a movie in Ireland. He's like, yeah, I'm going to be in Ireland for a few months because we're shooting a movie there. Like, these guys are not staying at Holiday Inn. You got to put them up in nice places and give them staff and accounting for all that. It's still cheaper than just bringing LA people to an LA stage. Yeah. I mean, that the tax credits yeah it's just that's just crazy and even with the you know talk of bumping up whatever it's 300 something million now and bumping it up to 750 million bucket yeah these places don't have a cap georgia doesn't have a cap we talked about that in our in our tax episode yeah yeah so just how do you how do you compete with that and you know talking about putting them up i believe it was uh trilla studios in atlanta where they shoot a lot of the marvel movies they have a whole separate not backlot area but like a separate residential area on the lot with little mini houses that are, you know, nice little mini houses, but are designed to put up your A-list actors or your like above the line talent, because they're going to be camping out there for like months or a year or so.

19:08Yeah, it's big for these big films, and they don't live in Atlanta. Trillith is such a good example of where the other cities are going, because Atlanta was one of the OGs of tax incentives, right? So Trillith was probably built out like decade, two decades ago, just when this stuff was happening. And in its early infancy, we're going to see Trillith like stages in Ireland, in Austria, in Australia. It's not just the stage, but it's the infrastructure to house this out of country, out of town crew. Yeah, and so many places already have it. Like New Jersey already has it. Vegas is working on building one.

19:40It's the devaluation of production out of Hollywood. I think it also ties into the devaluation of celebrity status. Let me explain what I mean. So like both Adam Scott and Rob Lowe are sort of part of the A-list Hollywood talent. In the past, all the films were shot in LA and you had maybe 50 to 100 celebrities who were really powerful. They kind of held the key to everything. Fast forward to today, almost nothing shot in LA. Things are being shot everywhere. And on top of that, you have the creator economy. So you have YouTubers and TikTokers who are probably just as big as Rob Lowe as far as audience size goes.

20:22they're doing shoots in unconventional ways and they're questioning is this the only way to make content the way Halia does it yeah I mean I guess going off that like up-and-coming creators where it's like you know they're used to they don't need a crew of 10 20 people to pull something off they can do it with five six people or we talked about Emma Chamberlain and Mr. Beast yeah or even like Michelle Carey was an example I've gone back to a few times because like the stuff she makes on YouTube is like network quality could be, you know, her stuff's like 40 minutes long and had like narrative structure, you know, and she does it with whatever team is like five, six people and has been approached by traditional production companies be like, Hey, let's turn this into a show, you know, bigger crew and more money.

21:04And it didn't fit with like the way she makes stuff. Yeah. And that goes, that ties into what Mr. Beast once said, like he hired some executives from Disney on a senior team. And he was like, well, I had to get rid of them because they were just taking things and kind of blowing them out of proportion a little bit. And we're way more lean than that. Yeah. And I think that's a symptom of a lot of things that, you know, need to be rethought or changed in the way things used to be done in the Hollywood system. Yeah. Like what the new reality is. And that was a lot of what Michael Cione talked about too in his HPA talk that's now on YouTube.

21:33And we've mentioned that a few times and we'll link to it. But yeah, a lot of it's just like, you know, what got us here now is like not going to get us to the next stage. And like, unless we change things. We certainly won't go back to the way things were. The question is, what is that new format of production, new format of celebrity status, new format of decision making. And I mean, it's crazy in LA too, because it's not like in these other new areas where it's like, oh, now we got to build up the infrastructure. We got to build up the stages. It exists here. It's just like something needs to change to make it not crazy expensive to shoot here.

22:02Yeah. And I got to say like the void that's been left by a lot of the productions going overseas is being filled by the creator economy here in LA. Like some of the lots are busy with, you know shootings some youtuber content and then you know maybe it's not a team of 100 maybe it's a team of 20 people but there is like a secondary economy kind of picking up that vacuum yeah another example uh movie coming out luckiest man in america a good friend of mine produced it and good film i saw it the other day so i would highly recommend also 90 minute film which i feel like you don't see a just a good solid 90 minute movie anymore there was like two three hours so yeah a plus for that.

22:39Is it a comedy? Yeah, it's a comedy suspense. I mean, not a suspense, but it's about it's based on a true story. Do you remember Press Your Luck, the game show from like the 80s? No whammies, no whammies. It was like sounds familiar. Yeah, the no whammies was like the signature thing. It was like a board with like a bunch of lights would come up and you'd have to like hit stop. And you know, either you win some money and then you can keep going. Or if you hit a whammy, you like bankrupt and there's like a little whammy character. So it was one of those classic 80s games to watch game show network as a kid yeah i vaguely remember 80s la as a kid like if i close my eyes enough uh it was so different yeah so there was a guy who memorized the patterns of the it wasn't really it wasn't random he like recorded everything and memorized the patterns and then got on the show and then started taking them for a ride just schooling them yeah and so it was about his story and kind of their interpretation of what happened you know in between tapings and stuff of like that's such a good story yeah it's a good story and it was like it's shot in la right it takes place in la oh no the entire film was shot in columbia like south america south america that's crazy yeah i mean most of it was in a studio so it wasn't like and there were a couple wide shots of la and they were vfx shots which you know if they did shoot here they would have had to do anyways because you have to make it look like 80s la not today la so more smog and yeah i mean columbia tax benefits um pretty much you know same reason that we've seen elsewhere it just we could probably have feasible for you know moving small just was not feasible to shoot in la i didn't realize columbia was a part of the overseas game yeah i don't hear about that as much but i think similar benefits like ireland or you know going there yeah same tax incentives you know go back to the rob lowe thing i'm thinking too like you know you you did mention oh it's cheaper to fly 100 people over there probably not as many because one of the things usually with these tax credits is you have to hire a certain amount of local crew.

24:33That's why they do this. Yes, that's in the contract, I'm sure. To boost their local economy. So usually with most of these productions, like the BTL crew, the camera team, and lighting and everything's going to be local and your cinematographer, director. Kind of a counterpoint to what Rob Lowe and Adam Scott were saying. So Seth Rogen was on the Howard Stern show. I think he's promoting his new show on Apple TV+. I am very much looking forward to this show because I've heard nothing but great things about it. It's like the studio. Really how, you know, how messy productions is inside of studio walls.

25:03So he was saying something to the effect of, hey, it's not dead. We're just one or two big hits away from changing everybody's opinions on this town. Yeah. Because I was like, well, you know, come on. The theater experience is dead. Hollywood's dead. Just like own up to it. And he's like, nah. No. Like, not really. And then he had a really interesting point. He was like, look, when Barbie and Oppenheimer came out the same. I mean, we all remember how massive. And then Hollywood made$100 plus million at the box office with those two movies combined. And everybody thought the theaters were back.

25:36Big grand filmmaking was back. And then we were talking about IMAX and 70mm at the same time. And then he says, look, everybody that's game changer in Hollywood has had their signature impact on Hollywood. Like Ted Sarandos at Netflix to Greta Gerwig to James Cameron. James Campbell. Like they're all changing it and moving it. Lucas Gilbert, yeah. Yeah. And he said, it's going to continue to change, but don't count it out. You know, it's just a matter of a big hit or two. And he referenced something too, and I actually heard this from someone else yesterday that I didn't realize or connect where he was like, you know, people were in the 60s were saying Hollywood was dead.

26:12Right. And what he was alluding to was when so many, when Westerns were like the big genre. Spaghetti Westerns. Yeah. But they were like the kind of big, like the marvels of the day. Yes. And then, you know, they were just churning out Westerns, these like kind of big grand epic films. Yep. And I'm presuming like people got tired of that. Yeah. And they just made too many. Yeah. It's got been like a lot of Marvel and Star Wars films. And it was kind of like, okay, people kind of got tired of that. Yeah. And same sentiment, you know, Hollywood's dead, you know, theater experience. Yeah. This was in the 60s.