Raw LLM Responses

VFX artist here. During 2020-2022, we had a MASSIVE spike in hiring throughout film, animation, commercial - pretty much anything that needed digital art. There were lots of underqualified people placed in roles they weren't ready to fill and money was cheap and loose. This industry, especially in the US, is very sensitive to interest rates. There were two long-lasting strikes in our industry that began to halt productions in 2023 and 2024 and we haven't really recovered from this, thought things are beginning to pick up again slowly. US and Canadian based tax credits have largely expired, moving a lot of work to the UK and elsewhere. (I realize this is a global accounting, but much of the over-hiring was in US and Canada as well). I have been fortunate enough to stay employed throughout this time, and I can say that AI has not made a meaningful impact to my studio's day-to-day. We are actively exploring how to use it, and we do see its usefulness in some areas, but this is mostly as a means to make a given task a little quicker or to "rough in" some work. There is not a single area of the pipeline where can confidently hand off work to AI in the way people use something like Sora. AI tools for film/tv work just aren't "art directable" - there are too many layers of abstraction between the creator and the software, and iterating on work is simply impossible. It's an interesting toy/tool to get a conversation going quickly, but I don't see many studios or directors adopting it as much as has been hyped.