A friend of mine who’s a special effects wizard tipped me off to Runway’s Aleph, yet another offering from the world of Artificial Intelligence. At first, I was amused. But the deeper I delved was the more I found its implications fascinating. Check it out for yourself:
https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-runway-aleph
For anyone who might’ve spent the past few years prone beneath a beer tap, AI-assisted or -originated filmmaking is not on its way, it’s here. And with the speed at which it’s developing and being applied, it’s not unreasonable to say that traditional methods of motion picture production are living on borrowed time. At the current pace, I suspect that one day soon we’ll wake up to a profession in which nothing is the same as it was twenty-four hours earlier. It reminds me of the exchange between characters Bill Gorton and Mike Campbell in Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, and then suddenly.”
It’s inevitable that things will change, radically. Going bankrupt – in the sense of keeping one’s head in the sand – is not.
Well put.