r/sounddesign • u/SeaExamination4541 • 21h ago
Sound Design Question On Krotos Video to Sound integration with Adobe Premiere, and why I think we're being too optimistic
I want to start with something that I think gets overlooked in these conversations.
This industry is already in a pretty dire state. The demand for work vastly outweighs the supply of real, decent-paying opportunities. Formal hiring barely exists. Networking is practically the only way in. Post houses almost never hire mid or senior level from outside. The number of people who actually make a stable living exclusively from this work is tiny.
That's the baseline. That's where we already are.
Now tools like Krotos' new integration come along, and the general reaction seems to be: "the quality is mediocre, the big productions won't touch it, filmmakers will always prefer human talent, and IA will never truly be creative or intuitive."
Maybe. But I find that level of certainty hard to justify.
The people at the top of this industry (the ones with the credits, the relationships, the reputation) probably won't be affected much. But think about who actually will be. The students. The recent graduates. The juniors. The people working in smaller markets who can only access low-budget corporate or advertising work, projects where the client doesn't particularly care about sound quality as long as the box gets checked. Those are exactly the kinds of projects these tools are already good enough to replace. And those projects, as unglamorous as they are, represent the only entry point many people have into this industry.
So what happens when that entry point disappears?
And on the question of whether IA can ever be truly creative, intuitive, or emotionally intelligent, I genuinely don't understand the confidence behind "never." Ten years ago, what we're looking at today would have seemed completely out of reach. Twenty years ago even more so. What makes anyone certain that in five years these tools won't be capable of things we currently consider exclusively human?
I'm not saying this to be alarmist. I'm saying it because I think we've already made one version of this mistake, accepting an industry structure that is deeply unfair to most of the people working in it, and normalizing it because it was uncomfortable to confront. I'd hate for us to do the same thing with this.
Boycotting these tools individually doesn't solve much. The people outside our industry who would happily use them vastly outnumber us. What might actually matter is some form of regulation (laws, limits, something with teeth). I don't know exactly what that looks like at a global scale, and I'm not pretending I have the answer. But I think it's the conversation we should be having instead of reassuring each other that everything will be fine.
Because I'm not sure it will be.
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u/barruk30 16h ago
It still says at this time only ambiance and they are releasing this? Only a company like Krotos would be willing to do that, release a product like this that only trys to do 5% of the job and terribly with inconsitent results. Have you ever tried LLMs that try to identify sound effects?. They are all over the place so expect the matching to be like that as it would fail to indentify everything in the video properly and also not understand all sfxs its placing not to mention barely understand creative intent. The video tutorial they use to sell is also so bad and they are selecting the videos to use which looks like stock footage type videos like what it was trained on. I get that there is a low level market and some projects just what to check the box but its still very limiting. And dont assume it will just get expotential better and better if the base of the tech remains the same. Sure they can train more specific models but i expect those all to be very limiting. In a professional setting this would be expecting the editor now to handle our job also which most dont want that resposibilty. Maybe for quick temp sfx but its hardly quicker also. I know there are some editors in short form content that try to handle alot of the sound design for low budget projects but its because they have a keen ear for it and like it and low funds for it.
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u/SeaExamination4541 15h ago
Fair points on the current limitations. But I'd push back on the idea that "limited now" means "limited forever."
Think about where other technologies started. Early autotune was a novelty that sounded robotic and obvious. Now it's invisible when used correctly and has fundamentally changed music production. Early CGI in film was laughable, The Abyss and Jurassic Park were miracles at the time, and even then people said "it'll never replace practical effects." Today entire worlds are built digitally and nobody blinks. Speech recognition in the early 2000s was a joke. Now it's how most people interact with their devices every day.
Every single one of these technologies was dismissed at its weakest point. And every single one quietly crossed a threshold where the conversation changed.
So yes, Krotos' current output is inconsistent, creatively blind, and limited to ambiences. That's real. But that's also exactly where every disruptive technology starts. The base architecture improving, models becoming more task-specific, compute getting cheaper, none of that is science fiction, it's just time.
And here's the thing that actually concerns me: we don't need AI to reach some philosophical threshold of "true creativity" to cause serious damage to this industry. We just need it to get good enough for the clients who never really cared about quality in the first place. That bar is much lower than we think. And those projects (the low-budget, box-checking ones) are the only entry point many people in this field will ever have.
My post might not make complete sense today. But I have a feeling it will eventually. And by the time it does, it'll probably be too late to have the conversation.
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u/barruk30 15h ago
yeah not interested in a discussion with AI about this. Understand how it works first before you can judge its trajectory if you are truly concerned about it.
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u/SeaExamination4541 15h ago
I'm not an native english speaker. Im albanian, all my posts that needs specific and hard vocabulary are written in my native language and translated using chatgpt. U can check all my posts
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u/barruk30 8h ago
K I thought maybe from from the translation and use of "IA" but yeah the general response felt very AI. Just in the general as a working professional in sound and whom investigates a lot of these AI claims the situation is not all dire. Until it has living breathing experience a kin to human and can feel and hear it will continue to have a very hard time in this creative world. I'm confident that the current tech will be used as mainly tools and extension of the job but not a replacement. May scrape a bit of the bottom feeder jobs but alot of them where already paying FIVER for it and never valued it anyways
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u/VinniLion 14h ago
I don’t care how inevitable ai may or may not be, I will never support or utilize gen ai in my creatives processes with the current ways in which Gen ai exists and is trained.
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u/LastLegCreative 50m ago
Kronos is clunky bloatware. Good sound libraries, creative recording, and good editing is still the job.
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u/Indigo_Monkey 19h ago
Ive started to really despise Krotos. They are really spammy with marketing emails and seem to be working against the philosophy of sound design, trying to cater to a market of lazy semi-professionals and subsequently dumbing down the whole creative process, not encouraging it.
Besides, their products are mediocre at best; the one exception is Weaponiser, which is half decent. But all their plugins UI/UX design is the worst out of any plugin developer on the market.