Looks like I'm still good for my bet with some friends that before 2028 a team of 5-10 people will create a blockbuster style movie that today costs 100+ million USD on a shoestring budget and we won't be able to tell.
Back in the mid 90s to 2010 or so, graphical improvements were hailed as photorealistic only to be improved upon with each subsequent blockbuster game.
I think we're in a similar phase with AI[0]: every new release in $category is better, gets hailed as super fantastic world changing, is improved upon in the subsequent Two Minute Papers video on $category, and the cycle repeats.
[0] all of them: LLMs, image generators, cars, robots, voice recognition and synthesis, scientific research, …
Yup, that castle flyby, those reflections. I remember being mesmerised by the sequence as a teenager.
Big quality improvement over Marathon 2 on a mid-90s Mac, which itself was a substantial boost over the Commodore 64 and NES I'd been playing on before that.
> Even today, I'm not sure there's a single game that I would say has photo-realistic graphics.
Looking just at the videos (because I don't have time to play the latest games any more and even if I did it's unreleased), I think that "Unrecord" is also something I can't distinguish from a filmed cinematic experience[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2381520/Unrecord/
Though there are still caveats even there, as the pixelated faces are almost certainly necessary given the state of the art; and because cinematic experiences are themselves fake, I can't tell if the guns are "really-real" or "Hollywood".
Buuuuut… I thought much the same about Myst back in the day, and even the bits that stayed impressive for years (the fancy bedroom in the Stoneship age), don't stand out any more. Riven was better, but even that's not really realistic now. I think I did manage to fool my GCSE art teacher at the time with a printed screenshot from Riven, but that might just have been because printers were bad at everything.
IMO, though, the lighting in the indoor scenes is just not quite right. There's something uncanny valley about it to me. When the flashlight shines, it's clearly still a computer render to my eyes.
The outdoor shots, though, definitely look flawless.
I'm imagining more of an AI that takes a standard movie screenplay and a sidecar file, similar to a CSS file for the web and generates the movie. This sidecar file would contain the "director" of the movie, with camera angles, shot length and speed, color grading, etc. Don't like how the new Dune movie looks? Edit the stylesheet and make it your own. Personalized remixed blockbusters.
On a more serious note, I don't think Roger Deakins has anything to worry about right now. Or maybe ever. We've been here before. DAWs opened up an entire world of audio production to people that could afford a laptop and some basic gear. But we certainly do not have a thousand Beatles out there. It still requires talent and effort.
I'm pumped for this future, but I'm not sure that I buy your optimistic timeline. If the history of AI has taught us anything, it is that the last 1% of of progress is the hardest half. And given the unforgiving nature of the uncanny valley, the video produced by such a system will be worthless until it is damn-near perfect. That's a tall order!
The first full-length AI generated movie will be an important milestone for sure, and will probably become a "required watch" for future AI history classes. I wonder what the Rotten Tomatoes page will look like.
