I don't think using GenAI to storyboard and pitch is inherently bad. There's long historical precedent for folks using existing film and music in demo reels to explain the feeling and tone they're going for (e.g. WW2 footage for Star Wars storyboarding reels IIRC). In isolation what you explained sounds fine, there may even be some argument that parts of this fall under fair use which may diffuse certain training attribution copyright challenges. Where things start to fall apart for me would be if your story/script and resulting prompts start to rely on GenAI upstream. And as you say, when the end product itself starts to lean on this tech as a shortcut.

Thanks for name dropping this video, I hadn't heard of it. Maybe I'm just getting old but this felt as empty to me as most other GenAI stuff does. The tech is getting better but I'd still prefer a no-budget fan film that looks worse but has heart (and visual consistency) to something like this. I can meet halfway and say that perhaps this is a modern version of someone being able to play with their action figures and micromachines and show others what they were imagining and that lowering barriers to sharing such things should be celebrated. To mirror my youtube comment though, I'm worried that this sort of thing will stop being a tool to storyboard and play around and will just become the final product for studios who could do so much more.

This was already the direction for studios though... Improvements to CGI and vault filming have cut costs dramatically relying on tech.

The clip mentioned likely took a few green screen segments, a lot of training data and many tries to get the clips needed for that sohrt story. B it's a lot more work at current state of the tech than just entering a single prompt.

One of the biggest features of this game for me as a youngin' wasn't that I could play dial-up co-op multiplayer with the neighbors down the way, but that the soundtrack audio was Redbook format on the cd-rom and I could pop the game disk itself into my CD player to listen to the what I still consider to be an amazing soundtrack. That Orc'ish harpsichord still lives rent free in my head.

What if we converted some of these office buildings into housing? (Along with dying ng/dead shopping malls?)

They did that to our former HQ and converted it to flats - took them longer and cost more than simply blowing it up and starting from scratch.

The entire building was gutted down to only it's outer frame, the support structure - the concrete slab floors and outer support pillars.

I guess getting planning permission for this was easier to obtain than demolition and building from scratch in that area.

Pretty much. I used my keurig this way for a few years until i realized I'm really not using pods and am only using it for hot water to make tea (via normal steeping). If you brew coffee and then use it for something right after I don't recall there being much coffee taste, but you could probably run a small cup setting to flush things in the pod area a bit if needed.

I've since switched to a Zojirushi water boiler which I adore, especially after learning my keurig wasn't getting hot enough to really brew the tea well.

Randomly saw a youtube video on Devil's Gardens in Rainforests, where ants use formic acid to destroy non-symbiotic/competing plants in given areas. Makes me wonder if this could be something similar.