No Stupid Questions

No.

CGI partially replaced one part of media and was similartoo how films replaced a lot of stage plays. It was a step forward and allowed things to be done that couldn't before to increase immersion. The main complaints were that they took the jobs of one profession, and it didn't take all the jobs.

AI, as in LLMs and GenAI images and videos, are plagiarism machines implemented to deceive users with low quality slop and are primarily used to justify mass firings of the work force, promote misinformation, and vomit out such a tidal wave of shit that it is ruining the internet and how customers interact with businesses. It is also ruining the environment, wrecking the economy for everyone except the wealthy, and tons of other negative outcomes.

They are superficially similar technologies but not even close with the context of how they are being used and the scope of negative impacts.

Sort of but AI much much worse. CGI only affected a small group of people at first and was really just a shifting/retraining of the workforce, but still required a lot of skill, knowledge, and man power to create. AI is more low skill, low effort, easy entry, and intended to replace the workforce.

Not at all. The first use of CGI in movies is lauded as one of the greatest movies of all time, Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

The next big milestones for CGI was Westworld and then Tron. Both are celebrated for the use of CGI.

The gripe with early CGI was that it didn't look great. It was very easy to distinguish between CGI and real effects, and did not necessarily make for a coherent visual experience.

The gripe with AI is that it has no soul, steals from others, and accelerating the death of the planet.

The two do not really compare.

Not really, no. There's a LOT of gripes with what we colloquially call "Generative AI", and almost none of them are applicable to CGI. To name some of the most significant ones...

• They exist because they were trained on MASSIVE amounts of real human works, virtually none of which was given with the creator's consent.
• They aren't being built for the benefit of humanity, they're being monopolized by a very small set of powerful scumbags, looking toake a peofit and further cement their power in the world.
• They are exerting a VERY real and significant strain upon our collective resources, both economic and physically-necessary, to the point that they are causing suffering in the world, that will only get worse.

In terms of developing visual works, the difference is that AI is generally trained on images and videos that the companies have no license to. With CGI, it wasn't like they were just taking a bunch of other people's art, someone still had to do creative work.

It isn't so much that they're putting creatives out of work, but how they're doing it. These AI models wouldn't exist without art developed by humans.

Nobody griped about cgi when it was first used. There started to be backlash once the people in charge of making movies all treated cgi as a magic thing they didn't understand that meant they could refuse to give workers any time or money and let the cgi fix it (actually thousands of hours of unpaid labor), and they never had to trust professionals they could just re-do the cgi a million times until they got the kind of generic tasteless slop executives like.

With AI that happened immediately because the executives already knew they wanted this and were waiting for it.

CGI has an evident use to it in such that it can do things that are hard to pull off in real life, even with miniatures. It's a useful tool from the start.

AI has no real strong use case scenario for that to warrant the amount of money pouring into it. It's just another scam by silicon valley tech bros to make money.

Not exactly. CGI wasn't really taking jobs directly from people, it was making people more efficient and changing the paradigm of artistic works by people. AI is wholesale taking jobs that could be done by people, and making it far shittier.

I can't see how these are even remotely comparable. CGI may have pushed out traditional artists, but it required work and artistic understanding to use. If you look at behind the scenes footage from Cameron's Avatar movies, you can get an appreciation for how much work goes into good CGI. AI touches on much more than art and even a moron can get results the moron thinks are good.

In some ways yes, others no.
In what way are you thinking?

No

Great question! I think you are much better off asking this on Reddit's r/askhistorians for actual researched answers, you're only going to really get one take on here: AI bad.

Not even close.

Fundamentally yes, just on a different degree of magnitude as mentioned. Any time you automate processes you risk losing the knowledge of the way things were done before hand. With CGI this wasn't as such a big deal since it only affected things like movie and TV, but a lot was lost if you think about it, stop motion is all but dead, I guess no one knows how to do claymation anymore, I'm sure a lot of practical effects and stunt knowledge has been lost as well. Now, with AI we are replacing the sum of human knowledge. It's a hugely different scale. We are talking about replacing human cognition, which is actually a pretty radical proposal. (Not the good radical, imo.)

It's been about 20 years since the intro of the iPhone and most people are absolutely lost without their smart phone maps, because they have offloaded that part of their cognition to their phone. Now, imagine if they keep offloading other things, those faculties are not being used, your mind is not sharp because you are always deferring to something else. It will be interesting to see how things look after 20 years of AI usage, I guess, if we haven't been destroyed by it yet. (Joke, I don't think it would happen quite so fast, hopefully.)

I think the key is really the degree to which people rely on it. If it's the first go to for all the answers we're in trouble.

Use your head, it's for more than just holding your hat

Same as always.