The "filmmaking artifact" Sora turns out to be a director and screenwriter. Will he be unemployed in the later period?
Film and television practitioners: Replacement does not come so quickly
Recently, OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence research company, released its first Vincent video model, Sora, which can use text commands to generate 1-minute high-definition videos, which immediately attracted widespread attention and shock. Musk lamented that "human beings admit defeat", and many people even said that "directors and post-production workers will be unemployed." After all, the advent of this model, known as the "filmmaking artifact", means that perhaps everyone who uses it Ordinary people can realize their "director's dream". Many people are already imagining using ChatGPT to generate creative copy and scripts, and then using Sora to generate cool few-minute advertising blockbusters from the text.
How will the emergence of Sora affect the video industry? Will it have a "disruptive impact"? Will the jobs of film and television production practitioners gradually be replaced by them? Recently, reporters talked with many industry professionals and scholars.
When Sora comes out, will the special effects company die?
Practitioner: It’s a bit difficult to “liberate” the film and television post-production period
As soon as Sora came out, many people believed that the film and television industry would be the first to be affected, especially film and television post-production.
After learning about the release of Sora's video, Yu Gang, co-founder of Time Matrix, said that his mentality was "both ice and fire": On the one hand, the first reaction of "Is the special effects company going to die?" made him want to use what he had learned in the past. The special effects tools were "buried"; but from another perspective, he was very happy. He felt that shooting videos, making special effects and putting them on the screen, which is the most expensive dynamic preview link, can completely achieve cost savings through AI.
However, regarding Yu Gang's second point of view, Mr. Zhou, a film and television post-production practitioner, is conservatively optimistic. He told reporters that it is difficult to rely on Sora to "liberate" the post-production period of film and television: "Because people are social beings, they have a lot of creativity and ideas, and they have to face thousands of demands." Mr. Zhou believes that Sora will become a Auxiliary tools. At the same time, he also questioned that the generated video is not like the text or image-generated works, and it is not convenient to manually complete the "last mile" reprocessing.
Mr. Zhou further explained that the film and television post-production industry is not a "mechanized operation" like many people's stereotypes. When designing, it is not enough to only fulfill Party A's needs. It also needs to guide Party A's thinking and add its own ideas. "Design Whether software or Sora, they are just tools, and the advancement of hardware and software only improves efficiency. Post-production is a large scope, involving shooting, editing, packaging, color correction, and 3D. These tasks can also be subdivided. It is difficult for a program to understand such a huge amount of knowledge clearly," Mr. Zhou said.
Can Sora have a "disruptive" impact?
Expert: Many links in the video industry are difficult to replace
In fact, Vincent Video Large Model is not a new track, and OpenAI is not the only pioneer on the track. In June 2023, Google-backed artificial intelligence startup Runway released the large model Gen-2, which can generate movie-level videos of a few seconds long; in November of the same year, the animation video generation company Pika launched a model that can generate minute-level high-quality animation videos. product.
Despite this, Sora can quickly produce high-quality videos of up to 1 minute, making "subversive technology" and "subversive industry" become hotly discussed keywords in the industry. Du Xiaomeng, an assistant researcher at the National School of Development at Peking University and deputy dean of BiMBA Business School, said that compared with the previous large video models Pika and Runway, Sora has indeed greatly improved its effect. But Sora is an incremental breakthrough in technology, not particularly revolutionary, and it does not change the nature of productivity and production relations.
Du Xiaomeng believes that this is a tool and efficiency improvement. It does not need to be done frame by frame, but it does not mean that people are no longer needed. She said that the improvement of efficiency will bring about two options: the compression of personnel, or the expansion of workload. "If you choose to reduce costs, then the work that used to be done by 10 people can now be done by 2 people. But what I see more often is that because of using this tool, I can take on more work. So. I think companies that use this tool will compete with companies that don’t use this tool.” In addition, Du Xiaomeng also pointed out that there are still many links in the video industry that cannot be replaced, such as creativity.
Famous screenwriter predicts:
In the future, AI may be able to replace “70 or 80% creation”
"This is what we want. Especially for text workers like me, videos can be generated directly from text." Wang Hailin, a well-known screenwriter, said that in his opinion, Sora does not involve challenges to screenwriters for the time being, but is responsible for producing pictures. The director and actors really had a big impact.
Regarding the sudden emergence of Sora, Wang Hailin boldly predicts that in the future, artificial intelligence will be able to replace 90% of directors and film crews, as well as 70% to 80% of their creative and less creative work. "What can be replaced are those creations that can score 70 or 80 points. Those that are particularly high cannot be replaced, and there is no need to replace those that are particularly low." Nonetheless, in Wang Hailin's view, artificial filming has its humanistic value and may better reflect the Human spiritual attributes, just like after machine products occupy the market, handmade products are still respected. He guessed that in the future, film and television works produced entirely by humans will become a niche market with a narrow audience, just like small theater plays that are only watched by a few dozen people at a time.
According to Guan Yadi, a senior filmmaker and host of the video podcast "Open Dialogue", front-line practitioners in the film industry will not panic because the core charm of movies is actually the exchange of culture and emotions, which is irreplaceable, at least for now. Artificial intelligence does not yet have this ability. But before AI develops the ability to drive the world, humans and AI can coexist together.
“Replacement doesn’t come so quickly”
There are still many difficulties in Sora's commercialization
As a screenwriter, Wang Hailin admitted frankly that the screenwriting industry is indeed facing challenges from ChatGPT. In fact, last year’s super general strike by Hollywood actors and screenwriters in the United States targeted artificial intelligence. Wang Hailin pointed out that after the emergence of new technologies such as ChatGPT, many creative workers are afraid that their jobs may be replaced; but after a period of time, it seems that it is not that fast yet, and what is replaced is often low-level, simple labor. "I originally thought it would be very soon, but after a few years, some of the things I worried about at the time have not materialized."
Mr. Zhou pointed out that the emergence of CG technology once panicked the film and television industry, and it has also become a major contributor to visual effects blockbusters. However, everyone has found that it cannot replace the effects of real shooting. At present, film and television still mainly rely on real shooting, only when it cannot be actually presented or CG is used only to save money, and some directors advocate complete real-life shooting without using CG.
Wang Hailin said that technical problems are always more than just technical problems. At present, the problems of laws, regulations and industry support have not yet been solved. This is also a problem that Du Xiaomeng believes Sora needs to solve to move towards real commercial applications - a single technology requires the support of a series of technologies. At present, it seems that Sora, like ChatGPT, can be implemented in limited scenarios. In her view, the metaverse simulation scene is very promising, but whether this scene can have a relatively large development depends on, in addition to itself, breakthroughs in hardware technologies such as VR and MR related technologies, headsets, and glasses. In combination, a single technology has limitations; if related technologies produce a better synergy, in addition to the metaverse scene, the game and pan-video industries will bring about greater breakthroughs, including advertising, media, film and television, and self-media. . According to Red Star News
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Sora lets the capital market smell opportunities for new wealth creation
The emerging AI (artificial intelligence) giant OpenAI launched the Vincent video model Sora, allowing the capital market to smell new opportunities for wealth creation. Benefiting from the Sora concept, in the two trading days after the Spring Festival of the Year of the Dragon, five major theme ETFs related to artificial intelligence, namely cloud computing theme, AI theme, big data theme, 5G theme and communication theme, as well as two major industries related to artificial intelligence ETFs, namely the game animation industry and the film and television media industry, all showed varying degrees of growth. According to statistics, among the top ten ETF funds with the highest increase in the two trading days after the holiday, ETFs related to the Sora concept have occupied six places. Specifically, as of the close of trading on February 20, Cathay CSI All-Index Communications Equipment ETF, Xinhua CSI Cloud Computing 50 ETF, China AMC Animation and Game ETF, Cathay CSI Animation and Game ETF, Harvest National Securities Communications ETF, Huatai-Berry The cumulative gains of the CSI Animation Game ETF in the two trading days were 8.12%, 7.30%, 6.92%, 6.86%, 6.73%, and 6.70%.
It is worth mentioning that reporters found that many fund managers have already heavily invested in multiple Sora concept stocks in the fourth quarter of 2023. Among them, three products under the management of Zhou Weiwen, the fund manager of China Europe Fund, have increased their holdings of Zhongji InnoLight; all six products managed by Mo Haibo, the fund manager of Vanguard Fund, have bought Xinyi Sheng into the top ten stocks for the first time; China International Finance Corporation The SIFC Quantitative Multi-Strategy under Ma Fang, deputy general manager of the Fund's Quantitative Investment Division, has become the public offering product with the most heavy holdings on 360; the top ten holdings of the Noah Fund's return mix, managed by Liu Huiying, are almost all CPO core concept stocks.
Under the Sora craze, which sub-sectors are expected to become investment hot spots in the Year of the Dragon? How big is the future development space in the field of artificial intelligence? Luo Guoqing, fund manager of GF China Securities Media ETF, believes that Sora will have a profound impact on the media creative industry. IP+AI tools may greatly improve the monetization efficiency of the media industry, enhance commercial value potential, and better improve the film and television industry that has always been considered Criticized business model. In downstream fields such as short videos, creation tools, and games, AI-native products such as Sora are expected to be integrated into workflows, enhance user experience, lower user barriers, further reduce creation costs, and greatly expand the boundaries of creators' capabilities. Zhu Chenzhe, fund manager of Minsheng Canada Fund, believes that with the involution of the AI industry, the core demand for computing power and storage will gradually expand. First, AI chips are the carrier of computing power and an important criterion for measuring the development level of artificial intelligence. On the other hand, while the AI chip processes a large amount of data, the optical module achieves higher bandwidth and longer transmission distance through optical fiber transmission. The combination of the two achieves high-speed data transmission. According to The Paper
(Chongqing Morning News)