Grabs Popcorn
“In October 19, 1878, Scientific American published a series of pictures depicting a horse in full gallop, along with instructions to view them through the zoetrope. The photos were taken by an English photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, to settle a bet between California businessman Leland Stanford and his colleagues. Stanford contended that at some point in a horse’s stride, all four hooves were off the ground. He enlisted Muybridge to take photographs of the positions of a horse’s hooves in rapid succession. Muybridge’s 12 pictures showed that Stanford had won the bet.” I’m always disappointed when Stanford wins, but this piece of motion picture history—known as The Horse in Motion—is worth noting as we gallop toward a new form of video powered by AI. It would have been hard for anyone who saw the limited horsepower of that early example of motion pictures to envision our bufferless era of Netflix and chill. Hell, even the founders of Netflix didn’t envision that when they first started mailing out DVDs. So grab your popcorn and find your seat, because today’s examples of AI-created video are already hard to believe, and we’re not even through the opening credits. There will be a lot of cool uses for this technology. But if we want the cool stuff to have a greater impact than the bad stuff, we’re gonna need a bigger horseshoe. WaPo (Gift Article) with a look at the trailer for our cinematic future. The future of AI video is here, super weird flaws and all. Yes, some of the flaws are weird (especially the smoking scene). But this is early and they’ll be ironed out and we’re gonna have to figure out how to deal with directors who want to use this tech to create an alternate reality for nefarious ends. (Maybe I’m just projecting.)
+ Action Cut: Tyler Perry announced he was stopping an $800 million expansion on his Atlanta studio after one look at the new OpenAI software Sora.