Industrial Light and Magic was once the best - also only - game in town for your big-budget Hollywood effects. Some studios did a pretty good in-house job, and many did a job that might be good enough, but in the 20th century all your best world-changing stuff came out of George Lucas' companies.

In the 1990s "CGI" was a pejorative, with some movies blending practical and digital elements (like Jurassic Park) in a way that made everybody happy. CG spaceships were largely pretty good and adopted quickly, greatly reducing the need for model makers in some cases. Miniature sets would still be composited in a lot of shots, and a lot of other things would still be made by hand while we saw a big transition to increasingly digital effects.

But shareholders like AI, investors like AI, people want to know what everybody is doing with AI. It could have been blockchain, but people seem to be getting over that.  I'm always interested to hear and see what people are doing with it, but Apple's image makers and some Chat GPT reports I've seen look better than what I could draw, but not better than what I could research (or just plain know) on some topics.   There's a bright future for fact-checking.

It is interesting to see what they are doing - but I don't know that this is going to do much to hurt the jobs of special effects professionals working today just yet.  But what do I know? I'd love to see movies with more puppets in them.  Everything is a stepping stone to something else, techniques get refined all the time, and you never know what's going to work out for the rest of us.  Six years ago we were all in awe of The Mandalorian using giant video walls for sets, and today Nathan Fielder's using something similar on The Rehearsal - that's pretty amazing, and quick.

They can keep the pink iguanas, though.