What We Saw at AI on the Lot

0:00The main sort of thing here is, is AI going to help me be better and do more? Or is it just going to take my job away? And we, of course, want the first one.

0:13All right. Addy, we're here. We are at AI on the lot. Hey, Joey, how's your day going? I've been in this room a lot of the time. And I presented. I had a talk. You and Todd are the busiest people on this lot today. And Mike, who's also running behind the scenes. We'll give a shout out to Mike, who's been helping put this together. So I've been in here talking to some cool people, but I've not really been out at the events. You're going to have to fill me in. Yeah. First off, we're at AI on the lot in Culver City. Yeah. You've run into a couple of fans. Yeah, I'm really thankful because these fans are not crazy rabbit fans.

0:43They're professional M &E, you know, folks like us. And yeah, shout out to Bastion who left our first review. Just saw him briefly. Shout out to Ken. And then Mariana, my friend, who I had no idea listened to our podcast. And, you know, we tend to skew mail statistically. So I'm really thankful. We're really thankful that we have female listeners out there. We obviously make the show for everybody. We're into tech. If you're into tech, if you're into filmmaking, this is the show for you. And the response I got was really positive. They come to the show to catch up on everything going on. One of the big questions that somebody asked me was like, how do you do all the research for the show twice a week?

1:27How do you edit it? How do you cut? So I guess all that hard work is being consumed in the right way. People have seen it and appreciated it. Yeah. That's awesome to hear. I sort of met a fan. Yeah, tell me about your fan experience. And now I'm sorry because I'm blanking on your name. But going to throw back to, I think we were talking about like Craft Jet Set and Star Wars fan film that was made using it. And the behind the scenes footage had a very wrinkled green screen. And I think I commented that it was the worst green screen I've ever seen. And so he said, hey, you Joey from the podcast?

2:02Yeah. Yeah, he's like, I'm the guy who made the worst green screen you ever saw. I bet that as a compliment to the software because the green screen is very wrinkled, but the final composite looked pretty good. So I was impressed with the compositing job. Okay, well, there you go. If you're listening, I'm sure this person is going to listen to this episode. We thank you for your amazing composite job. Yeah. Remember when I negatively talked about the Star Wars AI film at TED Talk with Rob Brito? So I hope I don't run into him anytime soon. But I think the internet as a whole. I think we were helpful criticism and did not tear it apart as much as the internet did.

2:43Yeah, I don't think I'll be working on ILM anytime soon. Speaking of working, do you have an announcement? Yeah, yeah. I finally have, well, I'm back on the full-time side of things. So, you know, I did my freelance consulting gigs and those were a lot of fun. So I've joined Stability AI. Awesome, congrats. Thank you. And it's a very high-profile company. A lot of my friends who are here on A &M a lot gave me hugs, gave me congratulations. It's really good, positive feedback that I joined the right company. Having said that, I have to be in. Yeah, good. This is appropriate. Somebody said it the best.

3:17They're like, he actually needs to be here. We're just pretending. So I'm doing enterprise solutions, which is a fancy way of saying that I help big companies acclimate to ai solutions at scale so like it's not just about generating 10 images it's about generating millions of them right and so how do you do that the crazy behind the scenes stuff for like the real power is where the real money is being made right and right now the real money unfortunately is not on the vfx side just yet it's still on the brands agencies product photography virtual try-ons and those kinds of things yeah oh uh one caveat uh you and i love doing this show We've been doing it since January.

4:00We're still going to continue to do this show. And this is in no way related to Stability AI. They don't sponsor this. This is Addy and Joey doing our thing. Yeah, these are personal views, not company views. Your employer. Yeah, and obviously I'll have a little bit of bias towards our products at work. But, you know, I am fair to all of the other companies as well. I am actually very much excited about all the progress that I saw on the show here. and everything that's going on. So just from like a sheer passion of what's happening with AI, I am very happy to be here. Yeah. So what have you seen today outside of this room?

4:39Yeah, so let's take a step back and just really talk about the theme and sort of where the show is at today versus where it was at when it started three years ago. Third year, yeah. Look, we're at Culver Theater. This is not a cheap venue. And Todd and the team did an amazing job to elevate the show to where it is in just three years. We are seeing very, very top-level VFX executives walking around amongst us. I saw execs from Netflix. Some of them I recognize. Some of them I just said, oh, he's here. I saw some from Amazon. And of course, some that I didn't recognize, Asteria, the company that we talked about in the past.

5:18They have heavy presence here. Some of my friends, my colleagues from my last job right now at Asteria. It's really cool to see them. All in all, the show has elevated itself and I think is becoming more of a serious show. Some of the guests have flown in from around the world to just be here on panels. Yeah. Yeah, this always felt like kind of the most legitimate show for kind of talking about AI, but seriously in like a professional M &E pipeline and how it can be used at the highest level of media entertainment. And it makes sense that it's in LA, right? Yeah. I mean, you have the executives here.

5:55You have a lot of the thought leadership here. And if it was, you know, in Vegas, maybe a lot of these execs would not go over there to attend, right? So location-wise, it makes sense. The format is great. It's just two days each day. I don't know if they jump because last year it was just one day. In the past two years, it's been one day now. Right. Two days, multi-track programming. Two and a half days. There's like a phone screening on Friday, but a few full days of programming. So yeah, big leap. and then uh 1200 tickets they taught had limited and i think they completely sold out yeah i could definitely feel it because every talk that i attended if you're like five minutes late into the entrance you're standing or you're not finding a scene in the theaters yeah that's cool so i would say this is a good enough show to where if you're outside of la it's worth traveling to like if you have the disposable income and if you are pursuing a career in ai or thinking about switching over to ai this is the conference for you yeah because this is really the finger on the pulse yeah what you see okay so the uh i you know i you know me i like to chat i like to mingle uh i like my a lot of my friends are here so i had a hard time uh between just mingling and chatting on the hallway versus attending an actual conference.

7:13That's the issue with these events. So I did attend three or four of them. And the one that really moved me was the one moderated by our friend Jess with Kevin Bailey from iLine, co-founder of Wonder Dynamics and then the co-CEO of Flawless AI. It was about basically where AI is at today. And because these are the movers and players, some of the most high-profile movers and players in the industry, What are your thoughts on the future? So for one, I think the way they were viewing AI solutions, first of all, they all had something to say about the label, right? Like there's nothing intelligent about any of this.

7:55Why are we calling it artificial intelligence? We're still prompting. There's still a human operator behind it. So there was like a little bit of a label of AI. Yeah. Okay. Because I know we talked about like my issue has been just more of a classification of the different types of uses and AI is such a broad bucket term totally gets convoluted and with what you're actually doing yeah so i think uh the the four big players there had that same vein of thought and then the other thing was like why are we calling it generative because you're still not fully creating new things you're you know repurposing old things and turning into new things so taxidermy aside uh one of the big sort of ideas was ai can really right now in filmmaking go into two different directions on one hand you have prompt and fully synthetic generation, creating a human from scratch that's not a real human being, things like that.

8:47On the left, you are plugging AI into an existing workflow, existing pipeline, and making that pipeline far more efficient, far cheaper, and so on. It's the latter that a lot of the companies want to be associated with. I think ethically, it's easier to do the latter. Yeah. Financially, there's more money in the latter. And at the same time, some of the filmmakers who are here are using the fully synthetic route because you can totally do that, too. Yeah. I mean, I gave a talk when I did leave here. I gave a talk about that firmly sits in the second bucket. It was about AI assistant editing tools and kind of expanded on what I talked about and did at HPA.

9:33And I think that talk will be online. So I'm not going to go into like the details of what I talked about. But yeah, definitely the bucket of just like, how can we use these to speed up an existing process with a variety of tools? Yeah, there's a lot of kind of good questions afterwards dealing with large amounts of archival footage. If this would replace an assistant editor, which I didn't have a good answer to because I don't work on those big of productions that often. But that one, yeah, it stood out to me, though, because I would I would see is, well, for the professional editors that I do know, they don't touch the media like at all.

10:03They just cut. Yeah. So I think this would maybe replace a second assistant or kind of, or your regular assistant editor could just work more efficiently. Sure. But like, you know, I'm like, yeah, organizing and importing media and dealing with all that stuff. That's exactly it. You know, creator, you know, you just wear every hat. But like, you know, my friends that cut network TV and reality shows, you know, I'm like, I asked them about editing questions or do you host? He's like, I don't touch. He's like, I don't, I just cut. He's like, my assistant does that. Yeah. So I don't think on the highest level that type of stuff's going anywhere.

10:34Yeah. The main sort of thing here is, is AI going to help me be better and do more? Or is it just going to take my job away? And we, of course, want the first one. Yeah. I mean, I think that might just take a mindset shift or how you harness it. Yeah. Depending on what your job is or what you're trying to do. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, the common theme is, yes, it will enable you to do more if you take the initiative or if you, you know, move like half a project, you want to get off the ground, you can get that going. If you're looking to kind of just have a job, you know, in a gig economy kind of space, but like that has a defined role.

11:08Yeah. That defined role could get replaced. Absolutely. The other thing was a big presence by Asteria, who we've covered here before. So Paul Trillo was here on a panel with Michael Goy and a couple other people. You know, it was basically about like, yeah, it was a level setting talk about Michael Goy said it the best. He's like, the main thing is that we still consider the main thing to be the main thing. You know that? So he's basically saying if AI is a distraction, you're doing it wrong. Like the main thing is still filmmaking and telling a story. It doesn't matter about the technique. It doesn't matter about the tools.

11:46Don't let AI distract you. And I think that's my big takeaway here. Obviously, I work at an AI company now. It is a big deal. but having said that the fundamental aspects of our lives are not really going to change yeah so i mean i've been in here speaking to different people and uh david e bianca from growl studio we were talking and a lot of the stuff they're doing a whole variety of representing creators support work their own original ip work but you know the common thing that we kept coming back to was just like at the core of everything they're trying to do is just tell a good story and that's using these different tools yeah to tell a good story absolutely the other interesting take.

12:24I think this was Scott Mann from Flawless AI. He had such a sharp insight. Is AI going to take us into a world where it's a race to the bottom, both financially, but also quality wise? Like, are we just going to make cheaper and crappier stuff because it's just easier to do that? Or the AI slot bucket, is that bucket just going to get bigger and bigger? Or if AI is such an amazing tool are we now able to make even better films even stuff that we can't dream of today it's probably gonna be both i mean i think it's just the same i think it's the same issue or just same you know thing that happened with like the digital revolution yeah it's like okay yes it's way easier to make a video now you don't have to like go rent film and get a process to have like the technical knowledge bar has dropped a lot yeah there's a lot of crappy films there's a lot of just crappy content you know i mean youtube what's the crazy number like i've been making it up millions of hours hours per second yes like yeah day right no one's watching you know 99 99 99 99 they are watching the noise so yeah it's just taking that even further now sure anyone could just go to google or runway and just make a couple video shots and edit together yeah and upload it yeah is it gonna be great is anyone gonna watch it sure probably not yeah so yeah There'll be a lot more noisy slop, but it opens up opportunities for people who want to take advantage of it, like the same way DHS Digital opened up opportunities for people.

13:56I hope so. I hope. I mean, yeah. And it totally tracks with the way we saw the revolution with the Internet and being able to share videos. And then, of course, digital cameras, digital editing machines, where how quickly you can send up videos. The other important thing that was covered was, I think this was Kevin Bailey at iLine. And he said something to the effect of, you know, in the old days, you can judge a book by its cover because you can look at production quality of a film. And if it was obviously low in production quality, then, you know, it didn't get the funding that it deserved. So the story wasn't as good as it could be.

14:33So you kind of judge a book by its cover. If it's a cheap, crappy movie, it probably is not going to be great. Now, because of everything we have, right, access to high-level computer graphics tools, access to AI, access to nice cameras, production quality is almost invisible. You can't tell what's cheap and what's not. Yeah. So now it's really about the storytelling. Yeah. More than ever before. In some ways, tactics and how you structure it. I mean, this kind of reminds me and goes back to the YouTube and Netflix convergence. You know, YouTube is such a game.

15:08It's like, yeah, we got to like hook you and keep you engaged in the first like five to 10 seconds. Yeah. Give you a reason to keep watching in the same world with like Netflix, depending on the movie, depending on the Netflix show. But, you know, a lot of Netflix original shows, if you watch them, it's like, you know, starts on the crazy action scene or something. And then it's like three days earlier. But it's like something. Yeah. Because the quality on Netflix, everything's like, you know, good. So elevated. Yeah. So in this case of the AI, what's like, how do you keep people watching? Yeah.

15:33It's like restructuring your story or giving it another reason when the barrier for good technical quality is low. Interesting you say that. Netflix's representative said something to the effect of, you know, we don't really care about budget. To us, it's all about quality, right? Because quality enables filmmakers to tell a better story. It obviously, it benefits the company. You have more viewership and everything. All that. So it's really good about quality at the end of the day. One thing with the slop, though, that may be more worrying is what happens to the point though when it's slop but you like can't tell it's slop anymore so like you don't see the kangaroo the emotional support kangaroo video oh no do i have to it was posted on an ai account and clarified that it was ai when it first went around but it's like a cell phone looking video like a boarding an airplane where like the steward is telling like a woman she can't board with her emotional support kangaroo as a kangaroo with like a little vest like a dog like holding the plane ticket.

16:34But like it looks like at first glance, it looks like someone shot it on a cell phone. Like it looks pretty good. Yeah. And the post was clarified, you know, it's AI and a ha ha ha joke. But now I'm seeing this video go around. Yeah. Today, I think it was on X, it had like 500 ,000 likes. It had people fool 100%. The original post clarified like this is AI, but then people took the video and now other accounts have reposted it. Okay. It's like millions of views and no clarity that it is AI. And yes, we were showing the video. That looks pretty good. Yeah, it looks like an iPhone. This is the stuff that we're going to see a lot more of.

17:07This would be the stop bucket. I mean, we're all having a laugh, but we can't quite tell. Same with the pove. Yeah. In the white. Oh, in the white. Yeah, right. It's going to... It's the clicks. It's also that meme where it's like, ha ha, I can't, you know, I'm not seeing any more AI videos on the internet anymore. Ha ha. And then it's like the horrified look because it's like, oh, like you realize, it's because you can't tell. Yeah, everything's AI, dude. The co-founder of Wonder Dynamics, Nikola, said it the best. He's like, look, a lot of AI companies are building for one thing and one thing only, revenue.

17:37And most of the revenue does not come from film and TV. We're a tiny fraction of the market. Obviously, we know this. Most of the revenue is from social media. This is the world. It's the kangaroo videos because that's where a lot of the... And e-commerce. E-commerce, yeah. So because it's skewed that way, you are going to see more low-quality stuff, right? Like it's not about they have this high technical level. Yeah. And they don't even have a quality bar. Right. It's just about clicks. Yeah. Unfortunately, that is what's going to drive innovation. And that is hopefully is what's going to get us better tools on our end.

18:15Yeah. We're going to have to live through this. Hangry. Yeah. I mean, even I was watching a YouTube tutorial now and then I'm just like questioning the guy's movement and I'm like, is this an avatar? I'm sure. And then I think it was. I think it really was. them but i think it is ai now we might have an ai president next election cycle we won't even know it are you ai you're hearing a simulation right now you know i ran into tim moore our friend tim moore from view yeah so i did hear uh i didn't get to catch the talk i heard he was tag teaming up with uh brick champagne at nvidia yeah uh because they got a partnership right so So the Vue and Video partnership obviously has to do with AI and generative AI.

18:59Unfortunately, I missed that talk and I'm waiting to go back into the event after this pod and catch up with them. Okay, cool. Yeah, I will say I went down to Tampa and got a sneak peek at the next gen of the Vue studio. Right. They're building and rethinking of how that will create with AI. Yeah. So stay tuned for the video on the channel. Yeah, and it's a really interesting. Yeah, Vue went from a studio network provider to a hardware manufacturer to now AI software company. And Tim's been able to navigate all those things really well. So I'm really, you know, they build really slick products and really intuitive interfaces for just like very simple.

19:38Like using this powerful stuff on the back end, but like the user experience is like very streamlined. Very Apple-like, very easy. I would say that UX is probably best in the VP game. Yeah. Yeah. They have a little kiosk where you just be like, yeah, do, do, do, do, and just drag and drop and slide stuff around. I think even my mom can do it. The mom test. Yeah, one thing going back to in the panel that you were talking about, the bucket of the AI to assist. Yeah. The process and then the fully synthetic. Fully synthetic. What did you hear about in the fully synthetic realm? Yeah, I attended a 30-minute talk on character lauras.

20:14Lauras are, as you know, low-rank adaptation models. It's how you fine tune a large model. So how do you generate a Laura to have consistent characters throughout a short film or a feature film? And it was really insightful. So the training data for Laura's comes from volumetric data. So in order to train a Laura, they are actually feeding it real human data, consistent data. And then once the Laura is trained, then they're using it as a starting point and then putting VFX on top of that. So it's still not fully synthetic, but it's a very novel, very new way to create films. Yeah. I spoke with Kavan the Kid, who has a Phantom X AI generative studio and they had a film premiere yesterday.

21:04Okay. That was fully generative, but used SAG actors and was fully SAG approved. Wow. What does this mean? How did you pull this off? And so basically they casted SAG actors. They wanted, it was going to be fully generated, but they wanted the characters to have, be based on, you know, have the work of real people and be based on actors that are recognizable. And I believe they, I don't want to put words in my mouth. I don't think you specifically said Laura, but I'm assuming Laura. They train a model on them, on each actor, and then use that when they were generating, I believe it was just regular like that.

21:40Yeah, you could do both. So Laura is the easier, faster way, or you can fully retrain a giant model. It's called full-weight training. Would that be to just generate the person again, or would that be like... Everything about that person. Everything. When you were generating, if you were generating a shot with it, would that also include the environment too? Correct. So you'd have to train... You have to train it on the environment. So if like the movie's in Wakanda, you have to give it Wakanda. You got to cast the characters. Would they each need their own model or would they all be in these?

22:09I think you could train it all together. Okay. Yeah. So if it's like a cast of 10... But maybe this process. No, this is the way. And, you know, I was asking too about like hybrid filmmaking and sort of segmentation of like real actors and virtual backgrounds. But he was like, you know, for this process and where things are at now, it just looks better if it's all synthetic. Because if it's like real people and it's synthetic background, it's like right now it still just looks weird. It's jarring. Yeah. Because your brain knows what's real and what's not. Yeah. So it's like real people, their real likeness, trained.

22:37So the whole thing has that synthetic look. Yeah. So, yeah, I will have some clips. I'm curious. I take it back about Screen Actors Guild because I kind of crapped on them last time over the Darth Vader thing that they really should not give in Fortnite trouble because they did it the right way. And they're just doing it as a show of force that they are anti-AI. In this instance, it feels like they're very much in support of AI. They were, you know, curious. And they were, I mean, it was just like everything in the agreement just had to clarify like any training data. It's like it is just for this project.

23:10Yeah. And that makes sense. I mean, that's, you know, it's their canary in the coal mine for them because, you know, this won't be the last SAG actors in an AI film. If anything, this is the very first one of many. And I'm sure they won't understand it or just, you know, how are we going to navigate this in the future? So, yeah, I thought I thought that was interesting. And then also I was speaking to another Max Einhorn, who was with the creator of the Cinema Synthetica competition. But he created a production company that just focused on producing the Recrease for like documentary historical kind of, you know, Discovery Channel-ish kind of when they did documentaries, Discovery Channel-like programs.

23:46You know, but more for like also kind of foreign markets where they're like the budgets aren't great, you know, but they're doing these period things and they like always struggled with like getting budgets or doing something that looks good. yeah and gen ai has like fit the gap for oh into things smaller productions where they don't have options or budgets to do something that looks cool historically accurate um and just like elevates that totally makes sense videos yeah i would imagine like uh egypt video yeah you can't fly a crew to egypt yeah or even to recreate it would be hundreds or yeah or even if you green screen it and then composite that still costs money yeah so just stuff where that's like these are you know broadcast TV and other markets where there are not big budgets.

24:27So this fit. Oh, that's fantastic. Very interesting focused use case where it's like, yeah, that makes sense because a lot of times there's just no option any other way. Yeah. Generative AI is already plugging into some use cases as is. We don't have to wait for the future. It's already working now for X, Y, and Z. Yeah. Well, cool. So yeah, I mean, this is the end of day one. So we're still up all day two tomorrow. Yeah. I've got to get back to work. I won't be here tomorrow, but are you going to be here? I'll be around tomorrow. Make sure you catch the coconuts. Okay. You don't know about the coconuts?

24:57I don't know about the coconuts. All right. So where they set up the launch, there's a sponsored booth by a company called Cantina. It's an AI app that lets you talk to AI avatars as a friend. Like, you know, I don't know how I feel about it. Yeah, a male or a female friend. And in order to get this incredibly fresh coconut that they just cracked open and put a straw in. You have to download the app and show them the app. So I did that. And the coconut was... Is it a coconut? Yeah, it was really good. So get the coconut. That doesn't sell me because I don't like coconuts. The water? I don't like coconut water.

25:36Oh, man, it's the best. I tried every coconut water version because people were like, no, you got to try this one. Yeah. Every time it was like... I mean, the stuff in the bottle is like the equivalent of canned coffee versus fresh coffee. coffee you you gotta try fresh coconut from cantina they're not sponsoring the show they just gave me a free coconut damn it i'm already talking about this really you like the app yes i already had it on my phone i just showed it to the pro host you're advising me oh cool it was fun uh we can wrap it up here so uh yeah links for everything as usual at denoistpodcast.com and uh all the interviews and stuff that we're doing in between will be on the channel and AI on the Lots social channel.