Val Kilmer's AI Return and What It Means for Film

10:56Addy:Okay, you want to hear my take on it? Yeah, let's go. This is going to fail atrociously. It's just going to hit the wall so hard. Here's why. When you take, let's say, there is a script of something happy and you take the input of a thousand improv actors expressing the happiness, what an AI model is going to do is more or less funnel it down into latent space of that And all of the minute expressions of each individual actors will basically get muddled down into one giant expression. And that giant expression of happiness is just going to be so over the top and cheesy that it'll be more distracting than what you originally intended.

11:37Addy:We talked about Val Kilmer. Like the reason Val Kilmer is who he is is because of the way he expresses happiness. It's different from the way Tom Cruise expresses happiness. And we identify those emotions with those actors. And there is a very strong vein of individuality to that. And when you are trying to like mash all that individual individuality into training models, you're not going to get it back.

12:02Joey:I mostly agree with you. I think I still don't think this would hit the level of like what a real performer brings and their interpretation to a script, a character, the subtle nuances. is i think sure this would help in just general text to video outputs and getting some better nuances out of like a single shot from a synthetic character you know i mean i also realize as you're talking through that we're thinking you know film use cases because that's our world but i was thinking when we're talking about when you were talking about it like it could you know we're trying to take talk video tiktok for one but even like gaming or like uh npcs if you're like playing a game and you're having this under the hood but you're having if you're having interaction with a character that is powered by ai but then having that character also be able to have better physical reactions that's a you know synthetic character in gaming that that could also be an application that makes sense or i think so i think you're right i think there there is room for

12:59Addy:uh lesser quality outputs and more of it and more sort of quantity over quality use cases if you will i do have to just say this because this is just silicon valley engineer thinking of trying to solve a problem with just the tools that they know they're like oh happiness oh yeah we can we fix that let's just let's just get data people being happy and then we got it yeah well no we're human beings we're highly like tuned to detect other people's emotions yeah and bringing our

13:28Joey:creative interpretation to how you read a line or deliver a line a million different ways i bet

13:34Addy:these are the same uh this is the same group that sort of i mean this is going into what uh cristobal runway ceo said which i totally disagree with was creativity is just um a controlled hallucination i think more or less that was his uh quote and i i couldn't disagree farther from that because creativity is not just the brain on drugs if you will like imagining stuff it's a it's a control craft and you build your creative skill set over decades yeah like a muscle like a muscle yeah exactly it's like okay i have this minutia of an idea but then it turns into this and i've built that muscle in my brain to turn that little thing into this thing and then now i can develop on that with character arches and environment builds and all of that stuff so like that's that is not controlled hallucination that's a craft you know um yeah and along the same lines i think this is the handshake guys are probably thinking like oh happiness those are just emotions like surely there's if enough data is available we can solve that right we just need more data or

14:38Joey:we need data of like yeah someone you know i mean i'm sure the improv data helps like here's a scenario what's the person's reaction how do we like you know cause and effect to have these pairings and train that and i'm sure this will help for some stuff but yeah i don't think this would ever hit the level or be something that we would want to replace like actual performers in a narrative fictional piece you know maybe on something where like the scale of having a performer like a game is unrealistic maybe it helps with that yeah like gta 6 you've got 3 000

15:08Addy:npcs you know you gotta just fill them all with uh we know the current jokes you know where the

15:13Joey:npcs right now are just like oh how you doing and people you know reenact them and make fun of them So like, yeah, if that interaction can feel more realistic, you know, because that would just physically be impossible to have some 3000 people on a motion, motion tracking simulator interacting with, with millions of users in real time, maybe it'll work there.

15:33Addy:Yeah.

15:34Joey:All right. What else we got the actor world? Okay. This was just in the weird. Why does this exist? Peacock is launching an AI generated version of Andy Cohen. Remind me who Andy Cohen is.

15:44Addy:His face looks familiar.

15:45Joey:He is the face of Bravo. he's uh watch what happens live and also co-host my favorite new year's eve countdown show with

15:54Addy:anderson cooper okay so he is ai generated for a bunch of bravo shows i don't know why it's this

16:00Joey:you're the bravo verse i mean i you know obviously he's like the you know their big bread of butter is the real housewives universe oh okay okay and then he has a talk show but a lot of the stuff on bravo you know is i think still real housewives is like the main thing yeah i just don't i don't know why is there a need for people who want to is there not enough andy cohen in the world like is he so busy he can't shoot all these things at once i don't know i don't know but i mean somehow i feel like we're gonna see a lot more of this i don't know if it's like an andy cohen chat bot and it's like hey i'm gonna get andy cohen to take obviously we know that exists in like meta and all their stuff with you know where you could ask what i forgot who they launched it with but like where you can you could chat with historical figures and chat they had that feature for a I think you could chat with like Abraham Lincoln for a bit.

16:49Joey:Who would want to do that? If you're a Civil War reenactor, then yes. No, if you're what's his name who built his own AI George Washington, Glenn Beck. If you're Glenn Beck. And did you see that? No. What? Yeah, I'm on the internet too much. Glenn Beck built his own AI George Washington and then had a podcast interview with him.

17:14Addy:That's interesting. okay that's interesting i mean okay but so is that is you think andy cohen thing is along the same lines where it's interactive and i think it's a chatbot i think it's okay okay you know

17:24Joey:it's just like hey i want to you know get uh andy cohen's as if i'm chatting to him or get his like

17:31Addy:take on on something are you looking up the glenn beck thing yeah got i gotta see some footage yeah can you put the volume up on that oh my god is george washington in a t-shirt yeah is george washington he's so robotic here he needs the handshake guys's emotion

17:49Joey:plug in oh my god yeah so um yeah that happened okay okay all right look i mean uh the bright

17:56Addy:side and the silver lining to all of this is the media companies are experimenting i mean without experimenting you're not going to hit on gold right so let them experiment yeah and look i

18:05Joey:mean we're making fun of this but i'm sure there is a i mean bravo is huge and real housewives is huge i'm sure there's like there is a market of people who would be like yeah i would like have a chat with andy cohen and people have ai girlfriends so that that's not it's not out of the realm of

18:20Addy:possibility yeah and then there's there's also probably that clientele who likes vertical dramas it's probably a big venn diagram of those kinds of people and uh yeah i think they would welcome a chatbot of some real high five characters and andy cohen and all that i was gonna skip this

18:35Joey:because i was thought like okay maybe it wasn't relevant here but because we just talked about ai george washington this is another this is probably a rising issue of weird stuff of like using ai to like feed a data based on a person and then quote interviewing them and then acting like you really had a conversation with them or that it's like

18:55Addy:this is so ridiculous is our show becoming a comedy show because this is all

19:01Joey:this is crazy stuff man we're just living in a weird universe but yeah okay so basically and this this was another story that vanity fair wanted to write a future story about dario uh ceo of whose last name i can't drop amodi amodi i don't even i never it's one of those things where i never say it out loud so i don't know how to pronounce his name dario he talks like this he's always such a new yorker somehow to be a c a ceo of like a big ai company you have to be the least charismatic person between him and Sam Altman. Oh my God. They're stand-ins for Silicon Valley. Anyways, back to the main thing of the story.

19:42Joey:Vanity Fair wanted to do a feature about him. He declined to do the interview. So then they just fed Claude a bunch of Dario interviews or stuff or info. And his book. And also sort of assumed because he created Claude, Claude should know him the best. and then interviewed Claude Dario and then wrote an article about this. Great. If you want to write a feature story about a dude and the dude turns you down, then you either kill the story or you source from other materials.

20:12Addy:It's a provocative piece. It's what Vanity Fair does. Ironically, I've just been reading clips about it online. I haven't actually read the article.

20:20Joey:Why would I want to read an article about your conversation with the chatbot making up impersonating a dude?

20:27Addy:I mean, if Vanity Fair interview does hit on the three or four main things that Dario screams from the rooftop about, which is AI is unsafe, chat GPT is the unsafest one, and use Claude instead of chat GPT, like, in that order. If the interview kind of covers that, then yeah, I guess it's done a good enough job.

20:48Joey:Yeah, but I mean, you could source that info from, like, doing actual journalism and research. Like, Dario's blog posts are, like, mini novels in themselves. He wrote like a, what was his last one about rising AI? It was like a 90 minute read. It's not like he's a secret. He writes a bunch of stuff. I don't know why you need a chatbot to do that. The bigger picture with this is just like slippery slope, especially in the nonfiction world when you're feeding the chatbots historical data and then getting new outputs and then treating that as fact.

21:18Addy:Yeah. You should never treat AI as ground truth or the hard truth. Yeah. That's just not, no bueno.

21:24Joey:Maybe it can synthesize ideas, bring up things to investigate, but also with the AI George Washington thing, it's just like, okay, maybe you didn't really interview George Washington.

21:35Addy:You know Glenn Beck was like, make George Washington more neocon.

21:42Joey:There's another tweet where it's like, wow, he made an AI George Washington that somehow miraculously agrees with everything he says. Exactly, yeah.

21:48Addy:You can totally do that. He's like, see, George Washington said it. And like, you built him from scratch.

21:54Joey:but he's trained on historical data. He agrees with me. That was our roundup of AI actor persona stuff. So I hope you like it, viewers.

22:04Addy:I mean, look, if this is all garbage,

22:06Joey:just skip forward. It's all good. Yeah, let us know what you think. All right, next up, some actual product stuff. Google on a roll again, little less in the video world, but the big one they launched this week is Google Stitch, a vibe design platform that basically can transform natural language or crappy sketches into high fidelity designs.

22:26Addy:Again, terrible naming from Google. Once again, Stitch, I just get the Stitch character from Disney. Yeah, from Lilo and Stitch. Like there was any other name you could have picked from, but okay, go on.

22:37Joey:I believe Figma took a little tumble after this news. But from the look at it, I mean, basically it is iterative, hash it out, vibe code design, but you would get the actual designs, not like an image mockup of a design, but like app mockups, a webpage designs, but like built in actual code and stuff that you could use elsewhere and edit.

23:01Addy:I think Figma was working on a version of this, but it sounds like Google beat them to it. I'm sure they are. Yeah.

23:07Joey:Yeah. I mean, you know, and it's still Google in their AI lab, in the Google world. I've always added my like caveat. I'm always like, not suspicious, but like hesitant to go all in on a google tool just because i've always been so burned from google killing experimental products right that i would like am hesitant to be like yeah this is gonna be our main new thing you mentioned that before yeah you seem really hurt by that i that decades man of being burned over over products over things i used a lot that got killed

23:41Addy:Well, you're going to have to turn off your Oculus goggles soon, too. I know. Yeah, I know.

23:47Joey:I said, yeah, the other meta that ironically renamed the company after the metaverse. It just goes to show nothing is permanent. It's shutting down the metaverse.

23:55Addy:Yeah, nothing's permanent. I mean, in one day, your Gmail might be obsolete. So start. No, don't, don't, don't, don't do that. Don't jinx it.

24:03Joey:Going to go back to my four megabyte Yahoo account. Hotmail, dude. Hotmail had two megabytes. Yahoo had four megabytes. Yahoo is where it was at. And then Google was like, we'll give you two gigabytes. And it was like, all right, bye.

24:19Addy:Yeah, the struggle was real.

24:21Joey:And then the other thing they launched was a sort of full stack vibe coding experience.

24:26Addy:So this is competing with cloud code and codex and all that stuff.

24:30Joey:But making it easy, I think a little bit more user friendly, because like cloud code and codex, you still kind of have to either run it a terminal or know a little bit about what you're doing. This one, I believe it's all web-based. It will automatically call up a database and some of the back-end stuff that you need to run these things if you are trying to VibeCode an app, it has it in a single platform for you. So you can have this web experience to kind of VibeCode an app. You have this new design tool that they built to help design it.

24:58Addy:So you have the front-end, which is the design tool, and then you also have back-end infrastructure capability, like you mentioned.

25:04Joey:Yeah, configuration of database connections and authentication flows. So it has a like Google sign in built in. So you can kind of add it quickly, database stuff. So you can add it quickly, stuff that you still have to kind of manually do a couple steps if you're using the other tools and kind of know what you're doing built into like one single platform. So it's definitely seems like it's a tool targeted at people who want to vibe code, but don't have coding experience and want a little bit simpler interface while still not giving up on the powerful features that you could vibe code, potentially.

25:37Addy:I don't know what this does to full-stack developers who are the most sought-after type of developers because they sort of know the architecture from the very bottom all the way to the top. There are so many people that make a living being freelance and contractor and project-based full-stack developers, right? I wonder what it does to them with this stuff coming out.

26:00Joey:I think it is a dangerous slope. And I think we talked about this before, of like what happens when you're a entry level or junior developer coming into the job market and if those roles get eliminated or a lot of them get eliminated but you still like these things are cool but it's like you still need a quote like an adult in the room that knows how this all works and comes together because i can vibe code all this stuff but like i don't know what's happening underneath it like i wouldn't trust that like it's not going to blow up or like you know something wrong is good something's going to derail like you still need people with this expertise knowledge but if we kind of replace the entry-level roles that would like feed up to being a senior developer where is that going to put us in 10 15 years how do you

26:48Addy:become a senior developer if you can't get your foot in in the right get your hands messy and

26:52Joey:doing this kind of like lower level coding work that you would have done that's going to being replaced by AI.

26:57Addy:I don't know if it was Dario, but one of the big CEOs just said that the class of 2022 coming out of college this year are going to basically more or less experience one-third unemployment rate. So 30 % or so. I don't remember who said that, but I did see that quote.

27:13Joey:Yeah, that's also grim and crazy.

27:16Addy:So crazy. Because when I graduated from college, there was more jobs than college grads. I graduated in like 08. So it was also a pretty shitty time. Yeah.

27:26Joey:Around the same time. Yeah. 08 was a pretty crappy time all around.

27:29Addy:Everyone was. Oh my. So I graduated like a couple of years before. Before the crash. Yeah. Okay.

27:35Joey:Everything was still optimistic.

27:38Addy:Damn. I didn't know you graduated in 08. No wonder you're in film. You're like, forget the job. Yeah. When I grabbed it, I was like, jobs.

27:46Joey:Like, nothing seems secure now. Like, might as well just freelance. Equally as secure.

27:51Addy:Might as well make content.

27:51Joey:trying to get a job. I don't know if you saw this quote from Sam Altman, this tweet. I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character by character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took. Thank you for getting us to this point.

28:05Addy:What an asshole. First of all, he's not a developer. He has no idea of what goes on in there. Yeah, he's like, thanks for the code.

28:12Joey:We'll take it from here. Thanks for all the hard work.

28:16Addy:We're going to automate this all. These guys wonder why nobody likes that. You know, it's stuff like this.

28:20Joey:oh like keep that to yourself man i mean not as bad as uh humans take up a lot of energy too

28:27Addy:yeah it's like oh uh yeah humans need food and shelter and they need about 20 years to become intelligent why can't we just have ai do all that humans have a soul ai has a soul .md file it's the same thing it's the same you can't dude non-fiction is way stranger than

28:48Joey:fiction right like what's the same the moral of all of everything we're talking about is um silicon valley needs a reboot that's pretty much the bottom line here i have a friend who was on

28:56Addy:the first season and um he's ready he's ready to be recast all right now kind of it will go

29:04Joey:power through this quick roundup of some new stuff this apple lido this is yours addy tell me about

29:10Addy:it yeah so apple not known for big llms and image models and video models right they're letting everybody else play that game what they're doing i think is really smart they also need to do more but what they're doing is they're making models that nobody else is making very niche very sort of bespoke and custom stuff so lito or lito is essentially a 3d latent space where you're generating a 3d object out of a prompt right let's say you know a camera the the issue with most 3d mesh generation is the texture is just atrocious because um the texture doesn't really follow the 3d object accurately it has no awareness of lighting um so when you when you see the mesh you're like oh this doesn't look like a camera i think i could use it and then you put the texture on it because without the texture it's kind of useless you're not going to retexture it yourself You're like, oh, now it looks low poly and crappy.

30:09Addy:So Apple has sort of resolved that by coming out of the latent space with a light, accurate 2D rendering as well as the 3D mesh itself. So it's combining both the look and feel of nice 2D generations with the versatility of 3D mesh. On the left, you have a much more accurate lighting and texturing of that Apple versus, yeah, on the right. This is what you generally get with automated AI mesh generation is it'll slap on a texture that's just totally not what the object really looks like. That's because it's using two different processes. It's using a 3D mesh generation, which is completely decoupled from the texture and the image generation here.

30:55Addy:This is all combined into one pipeline.

30:57Joey:It seems like everything at Apple does come out with machine learning or paper-wise is rooted in the Vision Pro application space. They had that other paper we talked about a month or two ago. I think it helped generate worlds. It was a VLM, right?

31:14Addy:Apple does have a local lightweight model that can look at the real world and identify. It's like the T2 Terminator.

31:22Joey:oh is that didn't they do something else that was um like 2d image to help expand to 3d images like 3d space or something something like that sure i could see that basically everything they've been coming out with is like in the seems like oh that could apply to vision pro in that yeah and

31:37Addy:and like they're they're making stuff nobody else is making which is really interesting yeah because they could really really i mean them being apple they have so many brilliant minds at work they can make anything they want and they're choosing to go after these very specific lanes and i know there is an internal strategy on why they're making these things i just i just wonder what

31:57Joey:that is right like what's the end game well i mean it's a vision pro now but then also obviously the you know the the holy grail is like a realistic augmented reality and so something that you could have you know project things in to the real world so like having objects that can and match the lighting of like our actual environment if it's being projected on our glasses and we have like i see this apple on the table here but then it looks real or like lighting seems like it fits my environment that that seems like the play down the line i wonder if they're feeling a little bit vindicated with the meta shutting the metaverse down because they're like we see ar vr but we don't they were never about like immersive worlds or metaverse type stuff they They were just like immersive headsets for work stuff, but not like a collaborative place.

32:45Addy:It's a functional approach to AR VR where metaverse meta as metaverse was more of an entertainment approach. I do wonder like what the future of the metaverse is in its entirety. If you take both Fortnite and Roblox into account, I know both of those platforms, although they have millions of daily active users, they're struggling with seeing growth year over year. and one of the big problems with both of them because they have young audience is that as they age out, as a gamer goes from like 12 years old to 15 to 18, they'll start to kind of attrition away from the platform and so there's a natural sort of fall off with the growth curve because you can't input enough young users at a faster enough rate than the older users leaving.

33:34Addy:So I think in about, I don't know, 10, 15 years, we'll see what the metaverse is and if it even soon around yeah and what that looks like i mean

33:43Joey:there's just a lot of technical limitations to have that that low latency real-time experience uh that was outlined everything apple yeah in that book behind you somewhere that i know is

33:53Addy:on the shelf behind you yes uh yeah it's actually behind you when you sit when i said there yeah

33:59Joey:which was a good book but basically the entire book was just like here are all the technical the limitations of like how something like the matrix like is physically not possible and might

34:09Addy:never be possible yeah shout out to matthew ball that's his book yeah okay other quick update

34:14Joey:announcement this was a teaser so we don't really know much about it but runway previewed a developer preview uh with nvidia that was a mostly realistic sub 100 millisecond video generation model dang

34:27Addy:That's good. That's really good.

34:30Joey:Fast still doesn't look like what we're seeing from Craya. So their demo is like type of text prompt. And as you're typing, the video is generating. And then, you know, you can redo the text prompt and the video changes, which is cool.

34:44Addy:It's near real time. It's not real time.

34:47Joey:Yeah. Not like Craya where you're like moving objects and your video is updating as you're moving the objects. or you can attach it to a webcam and your video is updating with the camera.

34:58Addy:So like, you know, I still think text inputs is like the weakest input. Yeah, if you compare like Creo to like Unreal where it's like instantaneous and real, this is more like a really high GPU execution of Arnold, like a traditional render that's mimicking a fast real-time response. But under the hood, it's probably just the same thing. It just has way more GPU. It's just the same thing, just running faster. i'm sure that it's light they lighten it down but underneath it i don't think anything is really real time ready and they're throwing the latest and greatest um nvidia gpu added which would naturally give it a you know a boost of speed and throw up all right other quick update

35:39Joey:let's see photoshop added rotate object to their beta which i tried this in illustrator first but yeah this is how does it work really give it a 2d image and then it'll turn it into a 3d object

35:51Addy:that you could rotate yeah so you're seeing on the video here yeah and then the last click was for harmonize yeah exactly i mean look for for most photoshop users out there this is a game changer because yeah that is the one you battle with the most is changing 2d perspectives of stuff

36:08Joey:yeah and it's in your photoshop tool which is already like has tons of powerful features and right is a powerful photo editor so like this is great for like really dialing in those first frames or anything, product shots, whatever.

36:21Addy:Yeah, if you want to change the color of the cat, you can then pick the cat and go into Photoshop Nana Banana and change the color of the cat. Like you have all of that at your disposal at the same time. Yeah, this is a good, this is a good, this is a really good update.

36:34Joey:And then last quick update, Firefly. Adobe's AI image generator can now be trained on your own art. I think we saw this in a preview, but it wasn't out yet.

36:43Addy:Yeah, if you go to the Firefly website, it just kind of says contact us.

36:46Joey:um that was that was i think like a custom firefly model that was like an enterprise thing this seems more like mid-journey s riffs where you can give it like or the mood board feature where you kind of give it like 20 images of like what you kind of like and then it kind of you know steers the output to look like that perhaps it's uh training a laura under the hood and then

37:10Addy:giving you like a weighting function to then influence your generation?

37:16Joey:Yeah, maybe.

37:18Addy:Okay, yeah, you were just there.

37:19Joey:No, that was the enterprise that you were talking about. This is their press release from yesterday.

37:24Addy:Expand a series of photos with the same look. That's cool. Explore character across different scenes.

37:30Joey:Custom models. Custom models are private design for commercial use. So, illustration status. Upload 10 to 30 JPEGs. Okay, so like this is a illustration style aim for score oh wow literally looks like it's true yeah like you said i think

37:45Addy:it looks like you're training to laura yeah but it's like so user-friendly yeah look how look how easy it is to visualize your data and then have like a score of how good your data is and then it's doing the training off offline sometime i guess it's going to tell you when it's ready

38:00Joey:now it does seem like all the demos they're showing are for like very specific illustration styles so you know i wonder how well this would work with something that's like a you know photorealistic or if you're trying to do um something photorealistic with like a certain type of cinematography kind of like our one battle challenge thing that we did but for

38:15Addy:illustration styles this looks great this is cool it's it's usable for a lot of a lot of sort of marketing social media campaign stuff i think yeah especially if you have a design you're like

38:25Joey:an aesthetic and you want to just make more stuff in that aesthetic this looks like a great use and yeah so this is consumer friendly accessible custom model training not the enterprise thing

38:35Addy:that they offer that is joey we were talking about references versus lauras this looks like a big

38:40Joey:laura thing what's up man i still think uh like i said they weren't showing photorealistic demos i still think still think photorealism you want that you're going for the reference okay all right

38:52Addy:well i want to get my hands on this you know the first thing i'm trying is the desert highway

38:58Joey:yeah with a dodge charger yeah all right good place to wrap it up so we had a couple of big

39:03Addy:videos if you didn't catch it yet watch the comfy ui ceo yolan getting interviewed by us as well as our coverage of the netflix acquisition of baniflex company interpositive we had a lot of comments and thumbs up and high points and we were partying and giving each other high fives just kidding joey and i still haven't seen each other in person but uh thank you for your support

39:26Joey:y 'all we really appreciate it did you see what the supposed price tag of interpositive was is it 600 million yeah but i wonder if that's part of the whole package deal of like for the

39:36Addy:movie the movies too i don't ted saranis is already spending that 2.8 billion that he earned

39:42Joey:he's already like yo yo you can have some you can have some he got that breakage fee he's like here you go man well thanks for everything we talked about at denoisepodcast.com thanks for watching we'll catch you in the next episode