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Hollywood has always been and continues to be formulaic. Occasionally some new things are introduced, like influences from New Wave or graphic novels, but then those aspects just become part of the palette of options.

Both can be innovative by doing things that diverge from what was already discovered to be "good", that's definitely true. The difference is that when AI deviates, it can't tell if the deviation is creative or just mediocre, because the only reference it has is how much the new thing matches the training data. If a human deviates, they can experience if it is good according to our own innate humanity. A human can experience something that is genuinely new, and can differentiate something mediocre from something amazing. The AI can only compare with the past. This is, I think, what great artists do. They try new stuff, and sometimes hit upon something that is new and good. This is the innovation.

Last time you checked, AI is in its infancy. ChatGPT, arguably our most sophisticated model, just turned 1 year old. However, already what you said is already incorrect. Learning models long ago invented their own languages. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/artificial-intelligence-develops-its-own-non-human-language/530436/. It is not what we call artistic, but these are very early models with extremely limited datasets compared to ours. My argument is that this is the same for humans. We build up prompts over the course of our lifetime. Billions of them. Every time someone told you, as a child, that you can't do something... that's a prompt that you remembered, and later tried to do. You telling me that AI can't create is a prompt that I am using to write this post. Every original idea that you have is based entirely on the experiences you have had in your life. Is that a statement that you disagree with? If so, can you explain where else your ideas come from? And if not, can you explain how your experiences lead you to more original ideas than machine learning models'? We do not have ideas in a vacuum. And obviously our ideas evolve over time as something is incrementally added. But you can't go back 200,000 years to the first humans and expect them to invent something analogous to Haiku's either.

That said... Long live 24p... AI will have to rip it from my cold, dead hands.

Last time I checked there is no ability to innovate. To leap forward. To get a joke. To understand innuendo. AI or computers can only be as good as their programming. They can write a Haiku because it has rules and logic. But they can’t invent “The Haiku”. They are only as good as the person prompting them based on what’s already been invented.

I agree 100%. Some people fail to understand that the human mind is just a very sophisticated electrochemical computer. There’s nothing magical about it that gives it an insurmountable advantage over non-organic computers, especially in the long run if we keep making improvements and breakthroughs at the rate we’ve been making them. The brain evolved over millions of years to give a survival advantage to humans. Art only came about when humans progressed beyond the stage where they needed all of their cognitive abilities just to stay alive.

..and the DigitalRev TV channel just reposted about 20 of the videos. Who knows what is happening at their end.

Of course no art is created in isolation. It’s always affected by what came before and what others are doing. AI though is inherently introverted. It can ONLY be based on what’s gone before. It inherently can only copy or emulate as mashup. And even then it can only do so through the right prompting. In traditional painting apprenticeships the students would copy the works of masters. Then they make new works. AI can’t do that. It can only copy paste and mash up.

It seems that all the original files for the videos magically appeared on Lok's hard drive...

I absolutely agree with @Ty Harper that with enough data it will be able to differentiate the movies that got nominated for an academy award from those that didn't, those that did well in the box office from those that didn't, etc. What it won't be able to do, or at least not by analysing only the finished film, is know that the difference between one movies success and the next one is that the director of one was connected in the industry and the second movie lacked that level of influence. But, if we give it access to enough data, it will know that too, and will tell a very uncomfortable story about how nepotism ranks highly in predicting individual successes... I also agree with @JulioD that the wisdom will be backwards-looking, but let's face it, how many of the Hollywood blockbusters are innovative? Sure, there is the odd tweak here or there that is enabled by modern production techniques, and the technology of the day changes the environment that stories are set in, but a good boy-meets-girl rom-com won't have changed much in its fundamentals because humans haven't changed in our fundamentals. Perhaps the only thing not mentioned is that while AI will be backwards looking, and only able to imitate / remix past creativity, humans inevitably use all the tools at their disposal, and like other tools before it, I think that AI will be used by a minority of people to provide inspiration for the creation of new things and new ideas, and also, it will give the creative amongst us the increased ability to realise our dreams. Take feature films for example. Lots of people set out to make their first feature film but the success rate is stunningly low for which ones get finished. Making a feature is incredibly difficult. Then how many that do get made are ever seen by anyone consequential? Likely only a small fraction too. Potentially these ideas might have been great, but those involved just couldn't get them finished, or get them seen. AI could give everyone access to this. It will give everyone else the ability to spew out mediocre dross, but that's the current state of the industry anyway isn't it? YT is full of absolute rubbish, so it's not like this will be a new challenge...

What it will be able to do is combine visions or auteurs... what if Kubrick made John Wick or what if Spielberg made ... What would naturally take a person with his/her own vision and craft will soon be realized by a soulless machine. Sad.

I'm not into conspiracy theories anymore really (for which I blame the chemtrails and 5G masts activating the molecular mind control devices implanted in my brain by Bill Gates through the COVID vaccine) but if I were then I'd consider whether there was any external influence to this. The Hong Kong of today is very much not the same carefree Hong Kong that is depicted in those videos so, whilst to its viewers these videos act as a time capsule of more innocent times of photography gear "reviews", there will be others viewing it as a time capsule of a far more liberal time that they would rather suppress. Of course, the videos are also a body of work for one of the presenters who fled Hong Kong for political reasons as he discusses here. The broader issue highlighted by these videos being removed from YouTube, in common with content on other streaming services, is that if you value a piece of work then get a physical copy of it. With that, I'm off to download and burn a DVD compilation of Max Yuryev's weightlifting style auto focus tests.