I came across this video a few days ago that blew my mind:

Obviously $200 million may or may not be accurate, but the result is still impressive.

I knew it was only a matter of time before AI actors become at least passable, and I think we’re at that stage. It just happened a lot faster than I thought it would.

AI is getting better every day, in every domain.

It’s moving so quickly that things that weren’t possible a month ago are possible today. That’s why you need to tinker on the edge of technology.

I’ve had this idea in my head for a while:

I want to film an actor standing in front of a green screen or gray backdrop, and then use AI in post-production to put them anywhere I want without changing their performance.

Places like a Paris rooftop, or the beach at sunset, or in a movie theater, all without the background looking really cheesy and bad.

The biggest obstacle to this is lighting. Because when you change an environment, you also change the source and direction of light that would hit your subject.

And our eyes and brains are really good at picking up those kinds of lighting inconsistencies. It can take you out of the “suspension of disbelief” great cinema gives us.

So, one thing I do a lot for ideas like this is just ask ChatGPT if it can build the solution for me.

Build an app that can change the lighting on an actor’s face to match a new environment, without changing the performance.

ChatGPT said it was possible. Over the course of my convo with it, I noticed that it kept mentioning this app called Beeble as an important part of this app’s workflow.

Well, it turns out Beeble can do exactly what I’m looking for…

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I loaded up a few clips into Beeble just to see what it could do. And it blew me away.

Here’s the original clip I pulled from a sketch Tara and I did:

And here’s what I managed to do with Beeble after a few test runs:

Pretty wild, right? It relights the scene to capture how the light would fall in a movie theater, without changing the acting or destroying our faces or anything like that.

And you know what’s crazy? There are probably hundreds of apps like this that I don’t even know about that are doing things I wish I could do.

And this is the worst this technology is ever going to be.

If you’re going to stay relevant in your job, or career, or creative life, I suggest you start playing with AI just to see what it can do.

If you played with it once a couple of months ago and it didn’t impress you, TRY AGAIN. A couple of months is HUGE in AI time, and the only way to really know what it’s capable of is to play with it.

If you’re not testing what AI can do for you at least once a week, you’re probably falling behind.

I’m not saying this to scare you, but to inspire you. It’s a brand new world and there’s no point fighting the inevitable. Instead, embrace it and figure out how to use it to get whatever it is you want out of life.

Now, knowing what to want out of life in the first place is an article for another day :)

Thanks for reading.

-Thomas

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