Can GPT-3 generate good code from vague prompts? Yes, it's surprisingly, sometimes shockingly good at it. Is it ever going to be a replacement for programmers? No, probably not. Same here. This tool's great grandchild is never going to take a rough idea for a movie and churn out a blockbuster film. It'll certainly be a powerful tool in the toolbox of creators, especially the ones on a budget, but it won't make art generation obsolete.

What about the tool's nth child though? I think saying it will never do it is a bit much, given what we know about human ingenuity and economic incentives.

But ultimately these things copy other stuff. Artists are often trying to create something that is, at least a bit, new. New is where this approach falls over. By its nature, these things paint from examples. They can design Rococo things because they have seen many Rococo things and know what the word means. But they can't come up with a new style and use it consistently. "Make a video game with a fun and unique mechanic" is not something these things could ever do.

I think it's certainly possible, maybe inevitable, that some AI system in the distant future could do that, but it won't be based on this style of algorithm. An algorithm that can take "make a fun romantic comedy with themes of loneliness" and make something award worthy will be a lot closer to AGI than it will be to this stuff.

At that point, we’d have reached some kind of AI singularity and the disruption would be everywhere not just in the creative sphere

"Restyle that last scene, showing different mixtures of fear/concern/excitement on male lead's face. Try to evoke a little of Harrison Ford's expressions in his famous roles. Render me 20 alternate treatments."

[5 minutes later]

«Here are the 20 alternate takes you requested for ranking.»

"OK, combine take #7 up to the glance back, with #13 thereafter."

«Done.»

Like bloggers had the opportunity to compete with newspapers, the ability to generate videos will allow to compete with movies/marvel/netflix/disney & company.

Eventually, only high quality content will justify the need to pay for a ticket or a subscription, and there's going to be a lot of free content to watch, with 1000x more people able to publish their ideas, as many have been doing with code on github for a while now, disrupting the concept of closed source code.

Film production is already commoditized and anyone can make high end content.

Being able to automatically create that is a different argument than what you posit.

Can you quantify what you mean by "very, very far away"?

With the recent pace of advances, I could see feature-length script, storyboard, & video-scene generation occurring, from short prompts & interatively-applied refinement, as soon as 10y from now.

Barring some sort of civilizational stagnation/collapse, or technological-suppression policies, I'd expect such capabilities to arrive no further than 30y from now: within the lifetime, if not the prime career years, of most HN readers.

What's next that may be counterintuitive?

How long? Could be decades. But ultimately, yes.