by echelon | 2026-01-11 15:38:24+00:00
> More of this, less AI

The comment was great without this part.

I'm sorry I'm going to go on a rant, but seeing this day in and day out really gets to me.

I'm a filmmaker. AI is an incredible tool that is making VFX affordable to those of us with budgets.

My friends and I are already using it in roto/comp workflows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj-dJvGVb-w

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m6eUR5V55QXA9p6SLuCM8LdFMBq... (NSFW, bloody/gory - the effects look bad because we did this for a "film hackathon" and had an extremely short amount of time with no chance to fix the editing, script, lack of locations, etc. Under four hours for the VFX work.)

Corridor Crew are making incredible stuff and teaching people how to do it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSRrSO7QhXY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT3WUa-48Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq5JaG53dho

There's so much use by actual artists. I don't have a list in front of me, but I'll start compiling that to share next time this comes up.

I am really salty about this because I am receiving hate and death threats because of this. I've had a film of mine booed in a live theater because I worked on a Blender + Mocap + AnimateDiff short film. I'm deep in the Atlanta film scene. I know a lot of the people that were in the audience personally. This was fresh off of the strikes, and the looming AI fears had people worried, so I understood the apprehension. But it still sucks to have your hard work and labor shunned like that in person. In any case, I won an award for that film. A year later, I did the same thing and everyone clapped. (It's not in my portfolio. I left a link in one of my previous comments if you care to dig.)

It's super easy to say "AI sucks", "AI bros", "kill AI artist", etc., but it misses all of the hard work being done by those using the tools.

I one day hope to have our small studio making high fantasy and science fiction films. I covet the art direction of Denis Villeneuve and Peter Jackson. I always have. My director friends that went to film school hoped to make films like that when they were younger, as I did I. The industry is very pyramid shaped, and unless you get really lucky or have nepo baby connections, you'll never get the chance to helm a project like that.

Tens of thousands of students go to film school every year, yet most of their dreams wither on the vine. That's incredibly sad. We only get a small slice of human creativity, and what we do see is usually pretty generic.

We have our Arris - that part has been democratized for a while. We have distribution. But we could never afford a $100 million VFX budget. AI changes the game and gives us so much hope that we can finally tell the stories we really want to tell in the way that we want to tell them.

Instead of thinking of AI as "just prompting", think of it as an exoskeleton for practitioners. One analogy is that cameras can be used by anyone to make all kinds of junk - selfies, food pics, "butt dialed" accidental shots. Yet professional photographers are capable of making incredibly captivating art and immortalizing Pulitzer Prize winning moments.

There are AI coding assistants for people who can't code (and I think this is awesome for accessibility and letting people act on their dreams - it's a gateway!), and there are AI coding models for full-time engineers. It's a lot like that.

I've made a lot of experiments in this space. Huge ComfyUI workflows, custom trained models frankensteined from stitched together modules, a lot of Unreal and Blender-inspired work.

I'm currently working on this [1] to enhance my own work. My desire right now is making it really fast to visually mold starting frames (which are like a director and DP blocking out scenes before shooting) and to precisely get the image you want before generating it.

This year I'm going to make full AI animations as well as a bunch of rotoscoped human + AI films this year. This stuff is going to be amazing for horror, sci-fi, and fantasy with live human actors. Those low-budget Blumhouse films are about to get real, and we're going to start seeing Lovecraftian horrors and actually good dinosaur movies soon. I'm really excited for this.

So I guess to return to my point, please please please don't hate all AI or especially insult people using it. This technology isn't distributed evenly, and in some pockets it's literally the most magical thing to have happened to the space. I wish I had this when I was much younger - my career would have looked a lot different. I'm really happy for the kids that get to grow up using this.

--

Anyway, I came to this article because I love Smash. It's a fantastic article and the author did an amazing job compiling this. I mostly play "no items", but I did see these on rare occasions. It's funny how nostalgia can be triggered by low resolution billboard textures from Melee.

Sakurai, director of the game, is bullish on AI for game development [2]. I think he's thinking the same way we are - this is a creative exoskeleton letting us do more and achieve more of our vision against the friction of constraints.

Invariably the comments (probably from non-artist consumers?) is full of hate. Many artists want to use this, yet we're bullied and hated for it.

This one, jeez:

> Dude's a hack and hasn't made a good game since Melee.

This is the same bullshit I'm getting on a daily basis.
The hate we get online is unreal. You have to see it to believe it. I'm talking death threats on a regularly recurring basis. I should blog about it.

So please internalize this plea. Whenever you see attacks like this, please say something to remind the other person that we're all human and that real artists are using these tools to make real art.

[1] https://github.com/storytold/artcraft

[2] https://www.resetera.com/threads/masahiro-sakurai-believes-g...