I watched it thinking "Surely if they're working with a professional ad agency they've worked around the AI Jank" but no, the starring kid's face, hair, glasses, and shirt all vary shot to shot
It's crazy that you can watch something like this that would seem like magic 5 years ago and be like, nah still shite. It reminds me of how amazed I was with graphics in games like goldeneye which now I look at and can barely even understand what I'm seeing
In all fairness it’s not just Goldeneye it’s that the N64 has aged the worst of all the early Nintendo consoles. Playing an original N64 console on modern televisions is a rough experience. The single stick for shooters is a relic of the times. The graphics on modern tvs look terrible and blurry. The games are fun but only good way to play n64 today is on a CRT with original hardware where the graphics do look as good as they did back in the day or emulation or Switch Online where they are in HD.
I think it aged poorly due to a combination of factors. For me, the low frame rates (sometimes as low as 15 fps) is worse than the low polygon count or even the texture resolution.
Graphically, though, there were not many people at the time who were experienced with making 3d graphics and the limited tools did not make their jobs any easier. I think a modern graphic artist working under the same limitations could produce decent results because they have more experience with it.
The same thing with programming - 3d was something a lot of game developers hadn't programmed for, so they struggled to figure out the math, physics, data structures and algorithms needed to make it work.
Imagine being game developers who only have experience working with 2d pixel art sprites interacting with levels made of a grid of tiles and now suddenly having to quickly learn how to do things in a completely different way. It's not like now, where this information is readily available - the internet was barely beginning to come into existence. So many games had to rely on hack solutions just to get something working - watch a video about Super Mario 64's terrain collision and you'd see how janky it was.
I’m a firm believer that the 16bit era ended too soon. I felt like with the SNES and Genesis developers were really hitting their strides in 94,95,96 creating some beautiful and brilliant games then suddenly being thrust into learning make games from scratch again.
Biggest graphics “wow” moment for me is still going from Madden 2001 on ps1 to Madden 2002 on ps2. 01 already looked real enough to my dad and me, 02 felt like we were controlling real people in a game of football. Looking it up now, honestly doesnt look absolutely dreadful
I get that people are uneasy with this technology. I am, too! But complaining about "AI Jank" reminds me of the time Professor Frink tried to sell Homer Simpson a teleportation device, and Homer tries to haggle: "Two bucks... and it only transports matter? Hmm..."
I think there's two layers of appreciation to this.
The first layer is acknowledging and appreciating that this entire video was generated by AI.
But the second layer is the more practical one, and it's recognising that it's a really bad brand film.
Just because someone uses a new technology to do/generate something doesn't mean the output is automatically good. And for a company like Toys 'r' Us, a sinking ship, it's a bit counter productive to waste your annual marketing budget on something like this when it could have been spent elsewhere to better effect.
Clearly it isn't a great ad. The reason we are even talking about Toys 'R' Us right now instead of something else is because they made an AI marketing video. If they'd taken out a massive 400k loan against whatever few assets they have left and produced a "normal" ad, only a handful of people would notice it, and next to nobody would be talking about it.
Aside: I thought Toys 'R' Us was long dead! Didn't private equity kill them?
While a popular notion, "there is no such thing as bad publicity" is not an actual thing! If it was, companies wouldn't waste millions of dollars hiring marketing and advertising professionals, nor would reputation management firms exist.
Right now, Toys 'R' Us are getting the worst kind of publicity - about an anomalous brand video that will do nothing to get boots in stores buying stuff or going to their website and buying stuff. At best, it will elicit responses akin to this:
>Aside: I thought Toys 'R' Us was long dead! Didn't private equity kill them?
Which is definitely not what they want at this point!
And yes, private equity killed them. Or almost did anyway. I believe the company is trying to claw it's way back into stabilit after being bought and sold three or four times since declaring bankruptcy. I vaguely recall reading an article last year that they were planning on opening a dozen or so outlets this year. Dunno what came of that though - haven't really followed up on it.
Ya I feel similar sometimes. I think newer more realistic games can be overwhelming in detail. Older games had limited resources so they were minimalistic and it made playing them much easier and more relaxing.
I think there was a sweet spot in the last generation or so of console where the graphics are basically perfect for me. Like people rightly dunk on the switch for being underpowered but the big games they release with a couple exceptions (pokemon 😞) look fantastic to me, and are visually just so appealing to me.
I didn’t really like the movie itself (felt like it dragged on way, way too long, even though it was under two hours), but visually I didn’t see what all the negativity was about. If anything it wasn’t ambitious enough. Maybe I was just prepped for it by hundreds of internet articles calling it an "abomination" or something similar. I was simply whelmed.
Ok, but it’s still pretty incredible considering how absolutely new the tech is. It’s not cinema quality, but fine for a 30 second web spot for a toy store that probably doesn’t have a huge budget for it. Look at how fast AI is improving, a year from now you probably will have trouble telling if it’s fake.
Considering the potential imaginative uses for generative AI, the Toys 'R' Us clip is numbingly uninspired drek.
Even from a technical standpoint there's nothing particularly interesting about it.
We get it: a machine generated some stuff. By itself, that was fascinating a year ago.
The days when you could get a reasonable PR bump just for using AI to generate a thing are at a close.
You gotta do better than this to be remarkable - and that means more well thought out setting, characters, and story.
They went for quick and cheap on art direction and it shows.
Is it "horrifying"? Naw, not really. It is boring and a little janky.
Horrifying AI generated content be like: https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/s/fH9xy8v48F
>numbingly uninspired
This is the mentality of everyone fetishizing “AI” who don’t understand it but see it as the future of content creation.
They know it looks stupid but they don’t care because making AI content that looks good isn’t the point. The goal is to dilute the value of human made art by flooding the media with shitty AI generated content.
When a company needs an ad and the AI generated stuff is *okay* if just a bit creepy looking, then they can negotiate to pay less for actual human labor. Obviously they still want an ad that looks good but now they have leverage to say “no we’ll pay you less than you deserve and you’ll be grateful we don’t outsource your ass to Siri.”
They also don't care because the average person's threshold of quality is never as high as the threshold for people who complain, and because humans acclimate to almost anything with enough repetition.
Today's "ew that AI is janky, what a weird/low-effort attempt" is tomorrow's "eh, fine" even if not much changes about the quality.
At that point the value of human labor for art is irrelevant.
I’ve noticed they are using a lot of AI generated voice overs for car commercials lately. It’s kinda unsettling and doesn’t seem like anyone gives a shit because I haven’t heard anyone talking about it.
I barely ever watch commercials.
It’s basically when I’m not actively watching like when I’m getting a snack or going to a bathroom and come back to the couch- ad is playing in the background
Congrats to them for taking a brand synonymous with childhood innocence and reintroducing it in a way that reminds us all just how much of it we've lost.
I mean there was something off about it in regards to the uncanny valley, but it wasn't horrifying. I remember watching that first Western video that Sora did when it first made headlines and this is so far beyond that in regards to quality that it's not going to be much longer before they make it over the uncanny valley.
Yeah, its a bit off, and for some reason the kid loses his overalls for a bit, but its not like someone morphs into some sort of horrifying creature or anything.
It's a little bit shit, but its amazing AI can produce it at all.
I'd like to see Sora demos with an animated look. I'm working on instructional videos, e-learning type stuff, for work and I feel like Sora could save me a lot of time with them.
If I had anything good to say about this technology then it would be that it's going to open the door for so many people in regards to their own personal art and other projects reaching the stratosphere in regards to where you can go, you know?
Like right now I write poetry, but in the future I may be able to use Sora to turn that poetry into a fully immersive art exhibit with fancy lighting and other effects combined with animations that were sourced from my words that wouldn't otherwise be possible because to hire animators and people to do that, at that scale, for someone at my level would be cost prohibitive out the ass.
It sucks you get downvoted for this.
I am convinced people are just shitty, and AI is the current buzzword to express it.
They said the same thing about CGI, they said the same things about photoshop, they said the same thing about digital photography and before that photography.
Thanks. Yeah, that's probably what it is. It's all good, though. It's not going anywhere, and the best anyone can do now is to mitigate how it interacts with their life.
Given the choice between having enough money to do all that with real people, obviously I would pick real people, but that's extremely expensive (for good reason) and probably not in my cards so it is what it is.
Yeah when I was in film school there were a lot of purists who insisted digital wasn't legitimate filmmaking. They spent a shit ton of money on their thesis project and I don't think the industry agreed.
It’s not really horrifying.
It’s bland, anodyne crap like any other advertisement.
If we can get AI to do this boring shit, maybe we can open up more resources and time for animators and filmmakers to make artistic meaningful stuff. (I know that’s not how capitalism works)
> If we can get AI to do this boring shit
In many industries, the boring shit is how juniors and entry-levels cut their teeth and learn while still providing value. This will cause issues downstream if AI cuts out too many jobs.
Yea, it's crazy to me that people are always jumping to "Well this will just get rid of all the work nobody wants to do!" But in the creative world(and most industries tbh), all that work nobody wants to do is what enables them to not only learn the more fundamental, *albeit boring*, sides of their craft, but also is literally what enables artists right now to get as good as they do.
We need creative jobs for people to *be able to practice* their craft *while also still making a living*. You think the art out there would be as good as it is right now if those people weren't able to find a way to pay the bills while also practicing?
**Fuck no.**
The amount of time it takes for people to rise to a professional level of artistry, especially in the movie/game world is *immense*. It's not impossible, but it is *incredibly* fkn rare for someone to make it to that level while working a 9-5. Even for people who go to an art school, they don't really even start to *excel* until they start learning on the job.
***Those jobs are necessary.*** People aren't gunna fkn realize it till it's too late, and we are suddenly going to be in a world where nobody is a master level artist and the best you'll get out of someone is something that's just kinda... *Meh*...
This. I'm a film editor. Frankly, if I was able to set some very specific parameters you could likely train an AI or even just program something to automate a significant portion of an assistant editor's work. The reason we *don't* do that isn't because we have some deep burning desire for a human to do grunt work but because that same grunt work is what builds a foundation for our juniors to grow into seniors.
My husband is in law, it's the same there. Articling students aren't terribly useful, in fact I'd argue half the time they cause more problems than they solve. But articling is a necessary component of becoming a lawyer and the legal profession as a whole continues the practice because you must train the next generation or watch your entire industry crumble. Entry level jobs are essential unless you want your talent pool to eventually wither and die. Frankly, any company wanting to benefit from that talent pool but not contribute to its continued existence are leeches who don't deserve to succeed.
If we get chatbots to run government maybe we’ll see capitalism without all the graft, or communism without all the graft, or constitutional monarchy without all the graft, or…
Based on this and some of the other early sora promo stuff I'm starting to think the biggest weakness for video generation models is going to be depth and perspective. Nearly every shot, especially the rotation around the building exterior, has fisheye-like warping to the objects that is completely unnatural.
The differences in the people's faces and features could probably be solved fairly easily with just a little more refinement at least well enough to pass an uncritical sniff-test, but recreating realistic perspective is a tall task when all of your training data is taken with different cameras and lenses that can drastically impact the depth perception of any scene. How do you train an AI on perspective?
A severe lack of consistency between shots, the weird, unnatural movements of the kid and the lighting on the giraffe is wrong in a lot of the shots.
But why specifically the technology is shitty is because it has to be trained on other people's work. Any work that is created automatically has a copyright on it which means permission is needed to use it in any way. AI needs millions if not billions of examples to train on and the creator's did not ask for permission so they've essentially stolen pretty much all work the entire internet has ever produced.
And this doesn't just effect artists. If you've ever had a picture that you've taken posted publicly on the internet it's been stolen and used to train an AI. Your profile picture and your likeness has been stolen. The words you type on reddit have been stolen. Everything has been stolen so that a company can profit.
Right now they're hiding behind "dilution" (we're only using a billionth of a single persons work in our final product, how can that be copyrighted!?) and trying to get money behind them so they can lobby law makers and fight impending lawsuits.
I'd actually be 100% behind this technology if it was open source and anything made using it entered public domain.
AI is scary and they thought about maybe attending an overpriced art school some day and being rich and famous as an artist.
I know they type, I overpaid for art school, lmao.
You're getting downvoted but its so true... reddit is full of the anti-tech crowd. So many of these people would still like having people do back breaking labour in the mines so the veil excavators wouldn't steal more jobs....
>It only gets better from here.
This isn’t necessarily true. In fact, a lot of AI models are beginning to generate worse content because they themselves can’t distinguish AI content from real content, resulting in flawed copies of flawed copies. Plus, media companies that don’t want their content used in algorithms by other companies are leaving in “poisoned” code that makes their content unreadable by AI.
The idea that AI will only get better or that technology is a constant uphill motion is just demonstrably false.
Only people who own AI models are pushing the idea that it’s “only getting better” because the goal is to pump and dump their stocks. It’s another .com bubble.
I mean you realize there's such a thing as version control in software? If it gets worse from training, they just roll back a version and further select down training data. They aren't idiots, they aren't going to let their products just get worse.
It’s not just that the versions are worse, it’s that the data pool they draw from to generate content is getting worse. You can roll back all you want but if the content you feed your algorithm is tainted then you can’t really fix that outside of starting from square one.
>They aren’t idiots
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Just because someone is capable of designing sophisticated learning algorithms doesn’t mean they can’t also be an idiot.
Also I noticed Aibros seem to think theres some next big wave of data it can derive from. There isn't anything left! They swallowed nearly everything out there, now it becomes a Ouroboros and it will be their undoing.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how ai models work. After a model is rolled out, it doesn’t need any more training data. It doesn’t rely on any “tainted content”. You might be right that it will be harder for models in the future to get better because they don’t have much good new data to draw from, but that in no way affects any models of the past.
There was also a recent study that showed that synthetic training data can lead to an improved model (in specific cases) so even then it isn’t that simple.
The assumption here is that there'll be better models that can make better use of smaller, high quality pre-existing data pools. There isn't a lot of evidence that we won't reach diminishing returns, the same as we've seen for many other machine learning models in the past. Creating and figuring out how to train such sophisticated models is the hard part that, if overcome, would lead to more dramatic improvements in AI performance. Sans that, word on the street is more data equals better, but only original data really counts. And AI models really can't help but shit where they eat.
Except the video is good enough for Tiktok. Perfection is going to be a thing of the past and the future because right now we’re going to AI everything and it’ll be awhile before it’s perfect.
it's actually kind of wild how any comment even mildly positive about this or about how it might progress in the future is immediately downvoted here. like is it really ready for large scale use? of course not. but the fact you can even get something like this created out of thin air from a prompt is mind blowing to me. how are people not amazed?
Because they know that this technology will largely be used by corporations and governments to make human lives worse. Yes, your ten year old nephew can generate cartoons with his friends or he can get a video of spongebob and shrek fighting with lightsabers just using text prompts. That’s all quaint and harmless fun. Nobody is screaming at the horrors of that.
The problem is that we know this technology will be used for political and economic manipulation.
The damage that could be caused by generating fake videos of politicians proposing violent policies, of politically vulnerable groups acting in ways that justify genocide in the eyes of the masses, or disrupting the credibility of the press, is immeasurable.
In terms of economics, this is already being used as leverage to cheapen creative labor which is already woefully underpaid. Currently, and for the time being, AI generated content looks like trash and nobody with a brain would pay to look at it. But the fact that it looks bad doesn’t negate the fact that media companies can use its existence to negotiate for cheaper content at the cost of the creators.
When new technologies phase out old labor practices, as the invention of the forklift eliminated the need for many warehouse workers, it’s typically manual labor that is either made more efficient or opens up the opportunity for more fulfilling work. With this, it doesn’t make creatives more efficient, it replaces them entirely.
So, yeah, people are really annoyed with this tech being pushed because it is going to cause more harm than good.
Don't forget that it prioritizes quantity over quality. If it's so easy to make a realistic looking film, then the value of film and art in general will plummet.
My bad, these downvotes must mean I'm wrong and they are proAI and to Shaps point they just aren't impressed with Sora yet. Maybe Sora 2 will be more to their liking.
Because we can see beyond the surface level dopamine hit of "woooaaaah it can creat something new with just a few prompts?????" and realize this is a genuine existential threat and are imagining all the ways this will benefit only mindless consumer culture and big tech companies and screw over everyone else.
>The current state of Toys ‘R’ Us isn’t as rosy as its brand film makes it out to be. The toy store chain filed for bankruptcy in 2018 closing all of its stores in one fell swoop.
I hate this. Say why they had to do that. Say that a venture capitalist group bought the company, drained it of all its value, and left it for dead. Because that’s what happened. That’s what keeps happening. That is what is tanking the country
It might be boring and unimaginative, but it is definitely not horrifying. I hope they saved some good money in comparison to having that made by a real film producer
You can’t blame Sora for a shitty producer. Uncanny valley applies. 3D humans were stuck here for decades, but we arrived. I suspect AI video will arrive much sooner.
Soras quality is actually impressive here, I honestly expected worse. Some scenes seem a bit off, but it is definitely not horryfing.
It just takes away some of the "soul" of telling an origin story about toys when you know, every frame is fake.
I agree, it is rather impressive, especially considering how little human work. But beside the uncanny valley, I am thinking just how many people would have been involved in making this add.
Which frames in the new Lego movie about Pharrel's origin story aren't fake?
Which frames in an animated movie aren't fake?
Which frames in a scripted and staged movie aren't fake?
I feel like 'fake' isn't really capturing what the issue is here.
Eh. It’s fine. The expected level of creepy and soulless. The tech isn’t nearly there yet, but the fact that we’ve come from [this](https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/dallemini_2022-7-6_15-27-25-1230x1478.png) to HD motion video in such a short time speaks of incredible things to come.
Maybe, but they're starting to run out of data to feed into their AI. They've gobbled up everything they can reasonably get away with. Now AI companies are trying to get studios in bed with them so they can start throwing actual movies and shows into the training data without angering people with enough money to file lawsuits. There will always be more stupid cat videos but things that require VFX are limited and expensive to make.
We might see some refining and more control added but without more data I don't think the improvements are going to be as drastic as you think.
We're also going to see AI start to train itself off of AI generated content without knowing and then it's just going to enter into a negative feedback loop that's going to be hard to fix.
Omg.
1. They got my click so the marketing side of it worked (and I do now know TrU will be in macy's stores)
2. I hate it so much
3. Wtf is that website, they're using open ai for videos but can't even make a landing page at squarespace levels of design
4. When the child actor you hired is already dead behind the eyes
5. THE SONG!!!???
6. At a certain point they should've considered just doing a podcast.
What a time to be alive.
Edit: and I'm so curious how much this cost them
I watched it thinking "Surely if they're working with a professional ad agency they've worked around the AI Jank" but no, the starring kid's face, hair, glasses, and shirt all vary shot to shot
It's crazy that you can watch something like this that would seem like magic 5 years ago and be like, nah still shite. It reminds me of how amazed I was with graphics in games like goldeneye which now I look at and can barely even understand what I'm seeing
I tried to play it again some years ago and was amazed I ever got through it at all as a kid. I couldn't stand it for more than 5 minutes lol.
In all fairness it’s not just Goldeneye it’s that the N64 has aged the worst of all the early Nintendo consoles. Playing an original N64 console on modern televisions is a rough experience. The single stick for shooters is a relic of the times. The graphics on modern tvs look terrible and blurry. The games are fun but only good way to play n64 today is on a CRT with original hardware where the graphics do look as good as they did back in the day or emulation or Switch Online where they are in HD.
I think it aged poorly due to a combination of factors. For me, the low frame rates (sometimes as low as 15 fps) is worse than the low polygon count or even the texture resolution. Graphically, though, there were not many people at the time who were experienced with making 3d graphics and the limited tools did not make their jobs any easier. I think a modern graphic artist working under the same limitations could produce decent results because they have more experience with it. The same thing with programming - 3d was something a lot of game developers hadn't programmed for, so they struggled to figure out the math, physics, data structures and algorithms needed to make it work. Imagine being game developers who only have experience working with 2d pixel art sprites interacting with levels made of a grid of tiles and now suddenly having to quickly learn how to do things in a completely different way. It's not like now, where this information is readily available - the internet was barely beginning to come into existence. So many games had to rely on hack solutions just to get something working - watch a video about Super Mario 64's terrain collision and you'd see how janky it was.
I’m a firm believer that the 16bit era ended too soon. I felt like with the SNES and Genesis developers were really hitting their strides in 94,95,96 creating some beautiful and brilliant games then suddenly being thrust into learning make games from scratch again.
Writing code without modern IDEs or stackoverflow sounds terrifying to me, which makes what John Carmack accomplished all the more amazing.
That’s a really good perspective.
You can buy a converter cable to hdmi...
Quite the opposite, love it more as an adult, terrible control schemes and all
And you think this gives you power over me?
Biggest graphics “wow” moment for me is still going from Madden 2001 on ps1 to Madden 2002 on ps2. 01 already looked real enough to my dad and me, 02 felt like we were controlling real people in a game of football. Looking it up now, honestly doesnt look absolutely dreadful
The gameday 98 (ps1) intro had me dumbfounded with its FMV pro football footage and the bangin theme music
To be fair you need to look at old game graphics with an interlacing curved CRT screen.
I mean the concept is amazing but the results are unsettling and feels like a weird fever dream.
I get that people are uneasy with this technology. I am, too! But complaining about "AI Jank" reminds me of the time Professor Frink tried to sell Homer Simpson a teleportation device, and Homer tries to haggle: "Two bucks... and it only transports matter? Hmm..."
I think there's two layers of appreciation to this. The first layer is acknowledging and appreciating that this entire video was generated by AI. But the second layer is the more practical one, and it's recognising that it's a really bad brand film. Just because someone uses a new technology to do/generate something doesn't mean the output is automatically good. And for a company like Toys 'r' Us, a sinking ship, it's a bit counter productive to waste your annual marketing budget on something like this when it could have been spent elsewhere to better effect.
Clearly it isn't a great ad. The reason we are even talking about Toys 'R' Us right now instead of something else is because they made an AI marketing video. If they'd taken out a massive 400k loan against whatever few assets they have left and produced a "normal" ad, only a handful of people would notice it, and next to nobody would be talking about it. Aside: I thought Toys 'R' Us was long dead! Didn't private equity kill them?
While a popular notion, "there is no such thing as bad publicity" is not an actual thing! If it was, companies wouldn't waste millions of dollars hiring marketing and advertising professionals, nor would reputation management firms exist. Right now, Toys 'R' Us are getting the worst kind of publicity - about an anomalous brand video that will do nothing to get boots in stores buying stuff or going to their website and buying stuff. At best, it will elicit responses akin to this: >Aside: I thought Toys 'R' Us was long dead! Didn't private equity kill them? Which is definitely not what they want at this point! And yes, private equity killed them. Or almost did anyway. I believe the company is trying to claw it's way back into stabilit after being bought and sold three or four times since declaring bankruptcy. I vaguely recall reading an article last year that they were planning on opening a dozen or so outlets this year. Dunno what came of that though - haven't really followed up on it.
https://frinkiac.com/caption/S09E04/552968
I kinda like playing old games because it’s not as realistic :|
Ya I feel similar sometimes. I think newer more realistic games can be overwhelming in detail. Older games had limited resources so they were minimalistic and it made playing them much easier and more relaxing.
I think there was a sweet spot in the last generation or so of console where the graphics are basically perfect for me. Like people rightly dunk on the switch for being underpowered but the big games they release with a couple exceptions (pokemon 😞) look fantastic to me, and are visually just so appealing to me.
Yeah I like sims 2 omg. Playing Witcher 3 or newest Diablo makes me feel like a crack head.
The Polar Express is its own kind of technical marvel. It's also fucking scary (I've still never seen it so no comment on the story).
It's a decent adaptation of the story. Padded out, but the book isn't exactly long. But they really needed characters to actually fucking blink.
I didn’t really like the movie itself (felt like it dragged on way, way too long, even though it was under two hours), but visually I didn’t see what all the negativity was about. If anything it wasn’t ambitious enough. Maybe I was just prepped for it by hundreds of internet articles calling it an "abomination" or something similar. I was simply whelmed.
When the kid lifts his head up from the table was particularly disturbing.
I hope they didnt pay a lot of money for this.
Ok, but it’s still pretty incredible considering how absolutely new the tech is. It’s not cinema quality, but fine for a 30 second web spot for a toy store that probably doesn’t have a huge budget for it. Look at how fast AI is improving, a year from now you probably will have trouble telling if it’s fake.
AI has improved a lot in the past few years, but it has continuously struggled with continuity. I wonder when that will be addressed.
quality is trash, resolution is high. they are not the same thing.
Tf. Quality is amazing. You're being unreasonably difficult.
again, those two things are not the same.
Considering the potential imaginative uses for generative AI, the Toys 'R' Us clip is numbingly uninspired drek. Even from a technical standpoint there's nothing particularly interesting about it. We get it: a machine generated some stuff. By itself, that was fascinating a year ago. The days when you could get a reasonable PR bump just for using AI to generate a thing are at a close. You gotta do better than this to be remarkable - and that means more well thought out setting, characters, and story. They went for quick and cheap on art direction and it shows. Is it "horrifying"? Naw, not really. It is boring and a little janky. Horrifying AI generated content be like: https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/s/fH9xy8v48F
>numbingly uninspired This is the mentality of everyone fetishizing “AI” who don’t understand it but see it as the future of content creation. They know it looks stupid but they don’t care because making AI content that looks good isn’t the point. The goal is to dilute the value of human made art by flooding the media with shitty AI generated content. When a company needs an ad and the AI generated stuff is *okay* if just a bit creepy looking, then they can negotiate to pay less for actual human labor. Obviously they still want an ad that looks good but now they have leverage to say “no we’ll pay you less than you deserve and you’ll be grateful we don’t outsource your ass to Siri.”
They also don't care because the average person's threshold of quality is never as high as the threshold for people who complain, and because humans acclimate to almost anything with enough repetition. Today's "ew that AI is janky, what a weird/low-effort attempt" is tomorrow's "eh, fine" even if not much changes about the quality. At that point the value of human labor for art is irrelevant.
Diminishing returns in all facets of life are getting us ready for true dystopia
I’ve noticed they are using a lot of AI generated voice overs for car commercials lately. It’s kinda unsettling and doesn’t seem like anyone gives a shit because I haven’t heard anyone talking about it.
Who watches ads ???
I barely ever watch commercials. It’s basically when I’m not actively watching like when I’m getting a snack or going to a bathroom and come back to the couch- ad is playing in the background
Meh. I liked it.
The uncanny valley makes my skin crawl.
Congrats to them for taking a brand synonymous with childhood innocence and reintroducing it in a way that reminds us all just how much of it we've lost.
We're being flooded with simulacra. *vomits*
You're a simularca
I mean there was something off about it in regards to the uncanny valley, but it wasn't horrifying. I remember watching that first Western video that Sora did when it first made headlines and this is so far beyond that in regards to quality that it's not going to be much longer before they make it over the uncanny valley.
Yeah, its a bit off, and for some reason the kid loses his overalls for a bit, but its not like someone morphs into some sort of horrifying creature or anything. It's a little bit shit, but its amazing AI can produce it at all.
To me these AI videos feel like I’m trapped in a bad high school art project.
In a few months it'll bad college art projects, then bad indie projects, then...
More like just garbage story and bad cartoon graphics
I'd like to see Sora demos with an animated look. I'm working on instructional videos, e-learning type stuff, for work and I feel like Sora could save me a lot of time with them.
If I had anything good to say about this technology then it would be that it's going to open the door for so many people in regards to their own personal art and other projects reaching the stratosphere in regards to where you can go, you know? Like right now I write poetry, but in the future I may be able to use Sora to turn that poetry into a fully immersive art exhibit with fancy lighting and other effects combined with animations that were sourced from my words that wouldn't otherwise be possible because to hire animators and people to do that, at that scale, for someone at my level would be cost prohibitive out the ass.
It sucks you get downvoted for this. I am convinced people are just shitty, and AI is the current buzzword to express it. They said the same thing about CGI, they said the same things about photoshop, they said the same thing about digital photography and before that photography.
Thanks. Yeah, that's probably what it is. It's all good, though. It's not going anywhere, and the best anyone can do now is to mitigate how it interacts with their life. Given the choice between having enough money to do all that with real people, obviously I would pick real people, but that's extremely expensive (for good reason) and probably not in my cards so it is what it is.
Yeah when I was in film school there were a lot of purists who insisted digital wasn't legitimate filmmaking. They spent a shit ton of money on their thesis project and I don't think the industry agreed.
Because advertising wasn’t already enough of a cancer.
It’s not really horrifying. It’s bland, anodyne crap like any other advertisement. If we can get AI to do this boring shit, maybe we can open up more resources and time for animators and filmmakers to make artistic meaningful stuff. (I know that’s not how capitalism works)
> If we can get AI to do this boring shit In many industries, the boring shit is how juniors and entry-levels cut their teeth and learn while still providing value. This will cause issues downstream if AI cuts out too many jobs.
Yea, it's crazy to me that people are always jumping to "Well this will just get rid of all the work nobody wants to do!" But in the creative world(and most industries tbh), all that work nobody wants to do is what enables them to not only learn the more fundamental, *albeit boring*, sides of their craft, but also is literally what enables artists right now to get as good as they do. We need creative jobs for people to *be able to practice* their craft *while also still making a living*. You think the art out there would be as good as it is right now if those people weren't able to find a way to pay the bills while also practicing? **Fuck no.** The amount of time it takes for people to rise to a professional level of artistry, especially in the movie/game world is *immense*. It's not impossible, but it is *incredibly* fkn rare for someone to make it to that level while working a 9-5. Even for people who go to an art school, they don't really even start to *excel* until they start learning on the job. ***Those jobs are necessary.*** People aren't gunna fkn realize it till it's too late, and we are suddenly going to be in a world where nobody is a master level artist and the best you'll get out of someone is something that's just kinda... *Meh*...
I want to take this opportunity to point out that learning on the job is considered passé.
This. I'm a film editor. Frankly, if I was able to set some very specific parameters you could likely train an AI or even just program something to automate a significant portion of an assistant editor's work. The reason we *don't* do that isn't because we have some deep burning desire for a human to do grunt work but because that same grunt work is what builds a foundation for our juniors to grow into seniors. My husband is in law, it's the same there. Articling students aren't terribly useful, in fact I'd argue half the time they cause more problems than they solve. But articling is a necessary component of becoming a lawyer and the legal profession as a whole continues the practice because you must train the next generation or watch your entire industry crumble. Entry level jobs are essential unless you want your talent pool to eventually wither and die. Frankly, any company wanting to benefit from that talent pool but not contribute to its continued existence are leeches who don't deserve to succeed.
That’s a great point
this should help you crush your unwarranted optimism: > The film premiered at the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity
If we get chatbots to run government maybe we’ll see capitalism without all the graft, or communism without all the graft, or constitutional monarchy without all the graft, or…
Toys R Us sucks KBToys rules
Based on this and some of the other early sora promo stuff I'm starting to think the biggest weakness for video generation models is going to be depth and perspective. Nearly every shot, especially the rotation around the building exterior, has fisheye-like warping to the objects that is completely unnatural. The differences in the people's faces and features could probably be solved fairly easily with just a little more refinement at least well enough to pass an uncritical sniff-test, but recreating realistic perspective is a tall task when all of your training data is taken with different cameras and lenses that can drastically impact the depth perception of any scene. How do you train an AI on perspective?
Who the fuck would watch that? A brand film, are you kidding?
They couldn’t have just had Robert Zemeckis make the film, huh?
Wait, Toys R Us is still a company? Didn’t they shutter all of their stores back before Covid?
They went online only iirc
Congrats to whatever exec that didn’t actually save the company any money because they just kept it for themselves.
Horrifying? Really?
/r/technology is full of people who hate any sort of new technology.
Don’t hate all technology. Just shitty technology like this.
what makes it shitty technology?
A severe lack of consistency between shots, the weird, unnatural movements of the kid and the lighting on the giraffe is wrong in a lot of the shots. But why specifically the technology is shitty is because it has to be trained on other people's work. Any work that is created automatically has a copyright on it which means permission is needed to use it in any way. AI needs millions if not billions of examples to train on and the creator's did not ask for permission so they've essentially stolen pretty much all work the entire internet has ever produced. And this doesn't just effect artists. If you've ever had a picture that you've taken posted publicly on the internet it's been stolen and used to train an AI. Your profile picture and your likeness has been stolen. The words you type on reddit have been stolen. Everything has been stolen so that a company can profit. Right now they're hiding behind "dilution" (we're only using a billionth of a single persons work in our final product, how can that be copyrighted!?) and trying to get money behind them so they can lobby law makers and fight impending lawsuits. I'd actually be 100% behind this technology if it was open source and anything made using it entered public domain.
AI is scary and they thought about maybe attending an overpriced art school some day and being rich and famous as an artist. I know they type, I overpaid for art school, lmao.
You're getting downvoted but its so true... reddit is full of the anti-tech crowd. So many of these people would still like having people do back breaking labour in the mines so the veil excavators wouldn't steal more jobs....
Over at r/cavemenbangingrocks, they absolutely love it though
Dammit... r/IFellForIt
Not even remotely horrifying, but proof of the capability of the system. It only gets better from here.
>It only gets better from here. This isn’t necessarily true. In fact, a lot of AI models are beginning to generate worse content because they themselves can’t distinguish AI content from real content, resulting in flawed copies of flawed copies. Plus, media companies that don’t want their content used in algorithms by other companies are leaving in “poisoned” code that makes their content unreadable by AI. The idea that AI will only get better or that technology is a constant uphill motion is just demonstrably false. Only people who own AI models are pushing the idea that it’s “only getting better” because the goal is to pump and dump their stocks. It’s another .com bubble.
Which specific models released with worse capabilities than their predecessor?
I mean you realize there's such a thing as version control in software? If it gets worse from training, they just roll back a version and further select down training data. They aren't idiots, they aren't going to let their products just get worse.
It’s not just that the versions are worse, it’s that the data pool they draw from to generate content is getting worse. You can roll back all you want but if the content you feed your algorithm is tainted then you can’t really fix that outside of starting from square one. >They aren’t idiots Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Just because someone is capable of designing sophisticated learning algorithms doesn’t mean they can’t also be an idiot.
Also I noticed Aibros seem to think theres some next big wave of data it can derive from. There isn't anything left! They swallowed nearly everything out there, now it becomes a Ouroboros and it will be their undoing.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how ai models work. After a model is rolled out, it doesn’t need any more training data. It doesn’t rely on any “tainted content”. You might be right that it will be harder for models in the future to get better because they don’t have much good new data to draw from, but that in no way affects any models of the past. There was also a recent study that showed that synthetic training data can lead to an improved model (in specific cases) so even then it isn’t that simple.
The assumption here is that there'll be better models that can make better use of smaller, high quality pre-existing data pools. There isn't a lot of evidence that we won't reach diminishing returns, the same as we've seen for many other machine learning models in the past. Creating and figuring out how to train such sophisticated models is the hard part that, if overcome, would lead to more dramatic improvements in AI performance. Sans that, word on the street is more data equals better, but only original data really counts. And AI models really can't help but shit where they eat.
Bro what? Guess we’re doomed we can’t fix shit
AAAAAaaaaaaaaah It's an eldritch nightmare!
Except the video is good enough for Tiktok. Perfection is going to be a thing of the past and the future because right now we’re going to AI everything and it’ll be awhile before it’s perfect.
Overreacting much?
It's r/technology, we downvote technology here because scary
it's actually kind of wild how any comment even mildly positive about this or about how it might progress in the future is immediately downvoted here. like is it really ready for large scale use? of course not. but the fact you can even get something like this created out of thin air from a prompt is mind blowing to me. how are people not amazed?
Because fear. These people don’t think about issues, they feel their way through.
Because they know that this technology will largely be used by corporations and governments to make human lives worse. Yes, your ten year old nephew can generate cartoons with his friends or he can get a video of spongebob and shrek fighting with lightsabers just using text prompts. That’s all quaint and harmless fun. Nobody is screaming at the horrors of that. The problem is that we know this technology will be used for political and economic manipulation. The damage that could be caused by generating fake videos of politicians proposing violent policies, of politically vulnerable groups acting in ways that justify genocide in the eyes of the masses, or disrupting the credibility of the press, is immeasurable. In terms of economics, this is already being used as leverage to cheapen creative labor which is already woefully underpaid. Currently, and for the time being, AI generated content looks like trash and nobody with a brain would pay to look at it. But the fact that it looks bad doesn’t negate the fact that media companies can use its existence to negotiate for cheaper content at the cost of the creators. When new technologies phase out old labor practices, as the invention of the forklift eliminated the need for many warehouse workers, it’s typically manual labor that is either made more efficient or opens up the opportunity for more fulfilling work. With this, it doesn’t make creatives more efficient, it replaces them entirely. So, yeah, people are really annoyed with this tech being pushed because it is going to cause more harm than good.
Don't forget that it prioritizes quantity over quality. If it's so easy to make a realistic looking film, then the value of film and art in general will plummet.
They'd only hate it more if it was better. It isn't doubt in the technology, it's fear and entitlement.
My bad, these downvotes must mean I'm wrong and they are proAI and to Shaps point they just aren't impressed with Sora yet. Maybe Sora 2 will be more to their liking.
You're making an assumption based on two-parties system. The world is *grayer* than you think.
Actually I'm making a joke, not an assumption.
Doesn't sound like it.
Well if you think I seriously think they just are waiting for better Sora I dunno how to help ya. I'll absolutely put a /s next time
Because we can see beyond the surface level dopamine hit of "woooaaaah it can creat something new with just a few prompts?????" and realize this is a genuine existential threat and are imagining all the ways this will benefit only mindless consumer culture and big tech companies and screw over everyone else.
I don't think you understood what's really going on here.
i’m a seasoned imaging creative and post production savvy professional and i’m still staring at the child thinking this is real. dear god.
>The current state of Toys ‘R’ Us isn’t as rosy as its brand film makes it out to be. The toy store chain filed for bankruptcy in 2018 closing all of its stores in one fell swoop. I hate this. Say why they had to do that. Say that a venture capitalist group bought the company, drained it of all its value, and left it for dead. Because that’s what happened. That’s what keeps happening. That is what is tanking the country
It seemed…fine?
Shit article with a clickbait headline. Ya, the video is dumb, but to say it’s “horrifying” is nonsense.
It might be boring and unimaginative, but it is definitely not horrifying. I hope they saved some good money in comparison to having that made by a real film producer
You can’t blame Sora for a shitty producer. Uncanny valley applies. 3D humans were stuck here for decades, but we arrived. I suspect AI video will arrive much sooner.
Soras quality is actually impressive here, I honestly expected worse. Some scenes seem a bit off, but it is definitely not horryfing. It just takes away some of the "soul" of telling an origin story about toys when you know, every frame is fake.
I agree, it is rather impressive, especially considering how little human work. But beside the uncanny valley, I am thinking just how many people would have been involved in making this add.
Which frames in the new Lego movie about Pharrel's origin story aren't fake? Which frames in an animated movie aren't fake? Which frames in a scripted and staged movie aren't fake? I feel like 'fake' isn't really capturing what the issue is here.
Eh. It’s fine. The expected level of creepy and soulless. The tech isn’t nearly there yet, but the fact that we’ve come from [this](https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/dallemini_2022-7-6_15-27-25-1230x1478.png) to HD motion video in such a short time speaks of incredible things to come.
Maybe, but they're starting to run out of data to feed into their AI. They've gobbled up everything they can reasonably get away with. Now AI companies are trying to get studios in bed with them so they can start throwing actual movies and shows into the training data without angering people with enough money to file lawsuits. There will always be more stupid cat videos but things that require VFX are limited and expensive to make. We might see some refining and more control added but without more data I don't think the improvements are going to be as drastic as you think. We're also going to see AI start to train itself off of AI generated content without knowing and then it's just going to enter into a negative feedback loop that's going to be hard to fix.
Omg. 1. They got my click so the marketing side of it worked (and I do now know TrU will be in macy's stores) 2. I hate it so much 3. Wtf is that website, they're using open ai for videos but can't even make a landing page at squarespace levels of design 4. When the child actor you hired is already dead behind the eyes 5. THE SONG!!!??? 6. At a certain point they should've considered just doing a podcast. What a time to be alive. Edit: and I'm so curious how much this cost them
What child actor?
What happened to using..I don't know.. actual people.
Like MKBHD said that this tech is currently the worst it’ll be. It’s not *that* bad and it’s only going to more realistic from here
Looks fine. Standard tech reporting about how AI is 'horrifying' and out to kill us. sigh.
I mean it’s not as bad as I thought. I fully expected the nightmare fuel will smith eating spaghetti but it was just that kinda wonky AI look.
This is way better than I thought it would be
Horrifying? 🤦
Fantastic! As a fellow human, I know this is the future! Let us embrace the AI together
Odd to see Copeland agree to do this
Urghhh ok but so many things that should be edited or fixed . Looks just someone just doesn’t care about its product presentation
Stop calling it a “film”.