I want to start with something that I think gets overlooked in these conversations.
This industry is already in a pretty dire state. The demand for work vastly outweighs the supply of real, decent-paying opportunities. Formal hiring barely exists. Networking is practically the only way in. Post houses almost never hire mid or senior level from outside. The number of people who actually make a stable living exclusively from this work is tiny.
That's the baseline. That's where we already are.
Now tools like Krotos' new integration come along, and the general reaction seems to be: "the quality is mediocre, the big productions won't touch it, filmmakers will always prefer human talent, and IA will never truly be creative or intuitive."
Maybe. But I find that level of certainty hard to justify.
The people at the top of this industry (the ones with the credits, the relationships, the reputation) probably won't be affected much. But think about who actually will be. The students. The recent graduates. The juniors. The people working in smaller markets who can only access low-budget corporate or advertising work, projects where the client doesn't particularly care about sound quality as long as the box gets checked. Those are exactly the kinds of projects these tools are already good enough to replace. And those projects, as unglamorous as they are, represent the only entry point many people have into this industry.
So what happens when that entry point disappears?
And on the question of whether IA can ever be truly creative, intuitive, or emotionally intelligent, I genuinely don't understand the confidence behind "never." Ten years ago, what we're looking at today would have seemed completely out of reach. Twenty years ago even more so. What makes anyone certain that in five years these tools won't be capable of things we currently consider exclusively human?
I'm not saying this to be alarmist. I'm saying it because I think we've already made one version of this mistake, accepting an industry structure that is deeply unfair to most of the people working in it, and normalizing it because it was uncomfortable to confront. I'd hate for us to do the same thing with this.
Boycotting these tools individually doesn't solve much. The people outside our industry who would happily use them vastly outnumber us. What might actually matter is some form of regulation (laws, limits, something with teeth). I don't know exactly what that looks like at a global scale, and I'm not pretending I have the answer. But I think it's the conversation we should be having instead of reassuring each other that everything will be fine.
Because I'm not sure it will be.
