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AI is ruining my hobby

One of my hobbies is making videos.

The process of making a video, for YouTube or just for my own archives, is multi-faceted and every step comes with its own challenges and rewards. It is perhaps the diversity of skills and knowledge required and acquired that makes it such a fun thing to do.

To make a good video you have to know about story telling, lighting, sound, how to configure and properly use a camera, how to edit the files that camera produces, how to colour-grade the footage and how to add effects (also known as FX) to the footage so as to improve the final result.

In the past, the art of video-making has been just that, very much an art.

Sure, there are some basic rules and strategies that will help along the way but even if all the right techniques are employed, someone without the artistic flare will never produce as good a result as the true artist.

Sadly, I'm not a "true artist" but more of a labourer with good intentions. That however, does not stop me from enjoying the entire process.

Unfortunately, it looks as if there is something that may significantly detract from the enjoyment I get from making videos.

Yes, that something is AI.

How can this be? Surely AI is just another tool that I can throw in my video-making toolkit so as to lift my game and produce an even better result?

Well there is some truth to that but I fear that to be happy with that would be to ignore the truth that, at least in my case, it's not so much the destination that's important as it is the journey.

For me, the reward is also proportional to the effort expended and AI has the potential to significantly reduce that effort.

I'm already a little peeved with YouTube as a platform because it asks me to declare when a video contains things that may not have actually happened. One could easily think that this is so they can perhaps later flag AI-generated content for demotion or promotion but this simplistic declaration completely ignores the hard work that I sometimes put into creating visual effects by hand.

When I use video compositing software such as Black Magic's Fusion to insert elements into a video that were not actually there at the time of filming or to in some way create an onscreen illusion, there's no AI involved. Sometimes it's just hours of meticulous planning and editing complicated node-trees in the Fusion software to create those illusions.

It is this skill and hard work that has made VFX good artists so sought-after and well paid in the movie industry. Not only that but it's a hell of a lot of fun.

YouTube however, makes no distinction between the hard work and skill of manually created VFX and stuff spat out in seconds by an AI agent. That is unfair, IMHO.

The appearance of video effects AI agents such as Runway Aleph also removes a lot of the joy that I used to get from doing things the hard way, by hand.

It's a real piss-off to spend a day creating a clever bit of VFX, only to have someone use a tool like Runway Aleph to create a much better result by simply uploading some footage and typing in a few prompts.

I also suspect that there will be a huge number of "pretty average" VFX artists who'll be looking for a new career within a year or so.

The very best VFX artists will still find work because sometimes directors and producers will demand, at any cost, the highest levels of results that AI still can't quite deliver. However, the average VFX artist who has been able to earny a healthy living by being "good enough" may well find that their roles are being replaced by AI very quickly. Even if mid-tier VFX artists aren't replaced completely, their numbers will suffer huge attrition because a single worker who uses AI to do 90 percent of the job can replace 10 of their peers.

It's a bit of a shame that so many of the really cool, interesting, fun jobs are going to be all but replaced by AI in the near future. Sure, if you're picking up litter for the council or digging drains then your job is probably safe for the time being -- but those aren't the sort of jobs that people look forward to every Monday morning, are they?

Maybe, if we're lucky, we'll soon see an AI-burnout; the situation where people have had enough of faceless AI entities without soul. Perhaps then, just like me, people will prefer to watch old movies with real models instead of computer-generated graphics whenever something cool has to be portrayed. Hell, I've already rediscovered The Thunderbirds and being able to spot the strings that animate the puppets is half the fun!

Where to from here?

Carpe Diem folks!

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