[HN Gopher] Meta Movie Gen
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Meta Movie Gen
        
       Author : brianjking
       Score  : 710 points
       Date   : 2024-10-04 13:03 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ai.meta.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ai.meta.com)
        
       | brianjking wrote:
       | Additional Links:
       | https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/1842188252541043075
       | https://ai.meta.com/static-resource/movie-gen-research-paper
       | 
       | From Twitter/X:
       | 
       | Today we're premiering Meta Movie Gen: the most advanced media
       | foundation models to-date.
       | 
       | Developed by AI research teams at Meta, Movie Gen delivers state-
       | of-the-art results across a range of capabilities. We're excited
       | for the potential of this line of research to usher in entirely
       | new possibilities for casual creators and creative professionals
       | alike.
       | 
       | More details and examples of what Movie Gen can do
       | https://go.fb.me/kx1nqm
       | 
       | Movie Gen models and capabilities Movie Gen Video: 30B parameter
       | transformer model that can generate high-quality and high-
       | definition images and videos from a single text prompt.
       | 
       | Movie Gen Audio: A 13B parameter transformer model that can take
       | a video input along with optional text prompts for
       | controllability to generate high-fidelity audio synced to the
       | video. It can generate ambient sound, instrumental background
       | music and foley sound -- delivering state-of-the-art results in
       | audio quality, video-to-audio alignment and text-to-audio
       | alignment.
       | 
       | Precise video editing: Using a generated or existing video and
       | accompanying text instructions as an input it can perform
       | localized edits such as adding, removing or replacing elements --
       | or global changes like background or style changes.
       | 
       | Personalized videos: Using an image of a person and a text
       | prompt, the model can generate a video with state-of-the-art
       | results on character preservation and natural movement in video.
       | 
       | We're continuing to work closely with creative professionals from
       | across the field to integrate their feedback as we work towards a
       | potential release. We look forward to sharing more on this work
       | and the creative possibilities it will enable in the future.
        
       | msp26 wrote:
       | Any chance of this being released open weights? Or is the risk of
       | bad PR too high (especially near a US election)?
       | 
       | It being 30B gives me hope.
        
         | thawab wrote:
         | Meta text to image model cm3leon[0], was announced july 2023.
         | It wasn't released yet, I think this one might take a while.
         | 
         | [0] https://ai.meta.com/blog/generative-ai-text-images-cm3leon/
        
         | diggan wrote:
         | > Any chance of this being released open weights?
         | 
         | Considering that Facebook/Meta releases blog posts titled "Open
         | Source AI Is the Path Forward" but then refuses to actually
         | release any Open Source AI, I'm guessing the answer is a hard
         | "No".
         | 
         | They might release it under usage restrictions though, like
         | they did with Llama, although probably only the smaller
         | versions, to limit the output quality.
        
           | causal wrote:
           | They have released a ton of open source? Llama 3 includes
           | open training code, datasets, and models. Not to mention
           | open-sourcing the foundation of most AI research today,
           | pytorch.
        
             | diggan wrote:
             | Llama 3 is licensed under "Llama 3 Community License
             | Agreement" which includes restrictions on usage, clearly
             | not "Open Source" as we traditionally know it.
             | 
             | Just because pytorch is Open Source doesn't mean everything
             | Meta AI releases is Open Source, not sure how that would
             | make sense.
             | 
             | Datasets for Llama 3 is "A new mix of publicly available
             | online data.", not exactly open or even very descriptive.
             | That could be anything.
             | 
             | And no, the training code for Llama 3 isn't available,
             | response from a Meta employee was: "However, at the moment-
             | we haven't open sourced the pre-training scripts".
        
               | causal wrote:
               | Sure, the Llama 3 Community License agreement isn't one
               | of the standard open licenses and sucks that you can't
               | use it for free if you're an entity the size of Google.
               | 
               | Here is the Llama source code, you can start training
               | more epochs with it today if you like:
               | https://github.com/meta-
               | llama/llama3/blob/main/llama/model.p...
               | 
               | It's rumored Llama 3 used FineWeb, but you're right that
               | they at least haven't been transparent about that:
               | https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb
               | 
               | For models I prefer the term "open weight", but to assert
               | they haven't open sourced models at all is plainly
               | incorrect.
        
               | diggan wrote:
               | > Here is the Llama source code
               | 
               | Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the code for doing
               | inference?
               | 
               | Meta employee told me just the other day: "However, at
               | the moment-we haven't open sourced the pre-training
               | scripts", can't imagine they would be wrong about it?
               | 
               | https://github.com/meta-llama/llama-recipes/issues/693
               | 
               | > For models I prefer the term "open weight"
               | 
               | Personally, "Open" implies I can download them without
               | signing an agreement with LLama, and I can do whatever I
               | want with it. But I understand the community seems to
               | think otherwise, especially considering the messaging
               | Meta has around Llama, and how little the community is
               | pushing back on it.
               | 
               | So Meta doesn't allow downloading the Llama weights
               | without accepting the terms from them, doesn't allow
               | unrestricted usage of those weights, doesn't share the
               | training scripts nor the training data for creating the
               | model.
               | 
               | The only thing that could be considered "open" would be
               | that I can download the weights after signing the terms.
               | Personally I wouldn't make the case that that's "open" as
               | much as "possible to download", but again, I understand
               | others understand it differently.
        
               | causal wrote:
               | The source I linked is the PyTorch model, should be all
               | you need to run some epochs. IDK what the pretraining
               | scripts are.
        
               | diggan wrote:
               | Doesn't the training script need to have a training loop
               | at least? Loss calculation? A optimizer? The script you
               | linked contains neither, pretty sure that's for inference
               | only
        
               | causal wrote:
               | Oof you're right - no loss function or optimizer in
               | place, so you'd need add that plus pull in data +
               | tokenizer to get a training loop going.
               | 
               | Apologies - you are right and I was wrong. I would edit
               | my comments but they're past the edit window, will leave
               | a comment accordingly.
        
             | causal wrote:
             | Past the edit window - want it to be higher up that only
             | the model architecture is shared, no training scripts, as
             | diggan correctly points out.
        
         | imjonse wrote:
         | That and the NFSW finetunes that will inevitably follow; unlike
         | the text-gen finetunes these could really cause trouble with
         | deepfakes.
        
           | littlestymaar wrote:
           | Deepfakes are already a reality, the technology is already
           | there and good enough for harm, the genie is not going back
           | to the bottle.
           | 
           | In fact, the more realistic the deepfakes become, the less
           | harmful actual revenge porn and stolen sex videos can be,
           | because of plausible deniability.
        
             | mrguyorama wrote:
             | We live in a world where you can just say dumb bullshit
             | about Haitians and millions of people will insist it's
             | real.
             | 
             | This "good deepfakes will prevent harm because of plausible
             | deniability" is absurd copium, and utterly divorced from
             | reality.
             | 
             | Speak to victims some time. You are not helping them.
        
       | happyraul wrote:
       | Hippos can't actually swim though.
        
         | diggan wrote:
         | Was my first reaction too when seeing the video at the top. But
         | then after thinking about it, it makes sense as an example, you
         | want to showcase things that aren't real but look realistic. A
         | hippo swimming looks real, but it isn't as they don't swim.
        
         | elpocko wrote:
         | I have watched some films recently, and they are full of weird
         | mistakes. A bunch of balloons can't lift your house into the
         | air. DeLoreans can't actually travel through time. Gamma rays
         | don't give you superhuman strength. A 6502 CPU couldn't power
         | an advanced AI for killer robots from the future. So
         | unrealistic.
        
         | awfulneutral wrote:
         | Haha, this is the first thing I thought of too. I knew adult
         | hippos walk on the bottom, but from looking at existing videos
         | it looks like small (baby/pygmy) hippos do too, they don't
         | float at the surface like this.
        
       | TrackerFF wrote:
       | All the vids have that instantly recognizable GenAI "sheen", for
       | the lack of a better word. Also, I think the most obvious
       | giveaway are all the micro-variations that happen along the
       | edges, which give a fuzzy artifact.
        
         | Rinzler89 wrote:
         | _> All the vids have that instantly recognizable GenAI "sheen"_
         | 
         | That's something that can be fixed in a future release or you
         | can fix it right now with some filters in post in your
         | pipeline.
        
           | surfingdino wrote:
           | > "That's something that can be easily fixed in a future
           | release (...)"
           | 
           | This has been the default excuse for the last 5+ years. I
           | won't hold my breath.
        
             | ekianjo wrote:
             | You had AI videos 5 years ago?
        
               | surfingdino wrote:
               | AI in general.
        
               | bbor wrote:
               | ...I mean, it was advancing slowly for linguistic tasks
               | until late 2022, that's fair. That's why we're in such a
               | crazy unexpected rollercoaster of an era - we
               | accidentally cracked intuitive computing while trying to
               | build the best text autocomplete.
               | 
               | AI in general is from 1950, or more generally from
               | whenever the abacus was invented. This very website runs
               | on AI, and always has. I would implore us to speak more
               | exactly if we're criticizing stuff; "LLMs" came around
               | (in force) in 2023, both for coherent language use
               | (ChatGPT 3.5) and image use (DALLE2). The predecessors
               | were an order of magnitude less capable, and going back 5
               | years puts us back in the era of "chatbots", aka dumb
               | toys that can barely string together a Reddit comment on
               | /r/subredditsimulator.
        
               | surfingdino wrote:
               | AI so far has given us ability to mass produce shit
               | content of no use to anybody and the next iteration of
               | customer support phone menu trees that sound more
               | convincingly yet remain just as useless. That and another
               | round of IP theft and mass surveillance in the name of
               | progress.
        
               | kelseyfrog wrote:
               | This is a consequence of a type of cognitive bias - bad
               | examples of AI are more easily detectable than good
               | examples of AI. Subsequently, when we recall examples of
               | AI content, bad examples are more easily accessible. This
               | leads to the faulty conclusion that.
               | 
               | > AI so far has given us ability to mass produce shit
               | content of no use to anybody
               | 
               | Good AI goes largely undetected, for the simple reason
               | that it closely matches the distribution of non-AI
               | content.
               | 
               | Controversial aside: This is same bias that results in
               | non-passing trans people being representative of the
               | whole. Passing trans folk simply blend in.
        
               | airstrike wrote:
               | We don't have AI in general today
        
             | Rinzler89 wrote:
             | 5 years ago there were no AI videos. A bit over a year ago
             | the best AI videos were hilarious hallucinations of Will
             | Smith eating spaghetti.
             | 
             | Today we have these realistic videos that are still in the
             | uncanny valley. That's insane progress in the span of a
             | year. Who knows what it will be like in another year.
             | 
             | Let'em cook.
        
               | authorfly wrote:
               | Disco Diffusion was a (bad) thing in 2021 that lead to
               | the spaghetti video / weird Burger Kind Ads level
               | quality. But it ran on consumer GPUs / in Jupyter
               | notebook.
               | 
               | 2 years ago we had decent video generation for clips
               | 
               | 7 months ago we have Sora
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39393252 (still
               | silence since then)
               | 
               | With these things, like DALL-E 1 and GPT-3, the original
               | release of the game changer often comes ca. 2 years
               | before people can actually use it. I think that's what
               | we're looking at.
               | 
               | I.e. it's not as fast as you think.
        
               | bbor wrote:
               | What video generation was decent 2 years ago? _Will smith
               | eating spaghetti_ was barely coherent and clearly broken,
               | and that was March 2023
               | (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ai-will-smith-eating-
               | spaghett...).
               | 
               | And isn't this model open source...? So we get access to
               | it, like, momentarily? Or did I miss something?
        
               | AJ007 wrote:
               | The subtle "errors" are all low hanging fruit. It reminds
               | me of going to SIGGRAPH years back and realizing most of
               | the presentations were covering things which were almost
               | imperceptible when looking at the slides in front. The
               | math and the tech was impressively, but qualitatively it
               | might have not even mattered.
               | 
               | The only interesting questions now have nothing to do
               | with capability but with economics and raw resources.
               | 
               | In a few years, or less, clearly we'll be able to take
               | our favorite books and watch unabridged, word-for-word
               | copies. The quality, acting, and cinematography will
               | rival the biggest budget Hollywood films. The "special
               | effects" won't look remotely CG like all of the newest
               | Disney/Marvel movies -- unless you want them to. If
               | publishers put up some sort of legal firewall to prevent
               | it, their authors, characters, and stories will all be
               | forgotten.
               | 
               | And if we can spend $100 of compute and get something I
               | described above, why wouldn't Disney et al throw $500m at
               | something to get even more out of it, and charge everyone
               | $50? Or maybe we'll all just be zoo animals soon (Or the
               | zoo animals will have neuralink implants and human level
               | intelligence, then what?)
        
               | surfingdino wrote:
               | > "In a few years, or less, clearly we'll be able to take
               | our favorite books and watch unabridged, word-for-word
               | copies."
               | 
               | That would be a boring movie.
        
               | lancesells wrote:
               | > In a few years, or less, clearly we'll be able to take
               | our favorite books and watch unabridged, word-for-word
               | copies. The quality, acting, and cinematography will
               | rival the biggest budget Hollywood films. The "special
               | effects" won't look remotely CG like all of the newest
               | Disney/Marvel movies -- unless you want them to. If
               | publishers put up some sort of legal firewall to prevent
               | it, their authors, characters, and stories will all be
               | forgotten.
               | 
               | I don't think so at all. You're thinking a movie is just
               | the end result that we watch in theaters. Good directing
               | is not a text prompt, good editing is not a text prompt,
               | good acting is not a text prompt. What you'll see in a
               | few years is more ads. Lots of ads. People who make
               | movies aren't salivating at this stuff but advertising
               | agencies are because it's just bullshit content meant to
               | distract and be replaced by more distractions.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | Indeed, adverts come first.
               | 
               | But at the same time, while it is indeed true that the
               | end result is far more than simply just making good
               | images, LLMs are weird interns at everything -- with all
               | the negative that implies as well as the positive, so
               | they're not likely to produce genuinely award winning
               | content all by themselves even though they can do better
               | by asking them for something "award winning" -- so it's
               | certainly conceivable that we'll see AI indeed do all
               | these things competently at some point.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | > In a few years, or less, clearly we'll be able to take
               | our favorite books and watch unabridged, word-for-word
               | copies. The quality, acting, and cinematography will
               | rival the biggest budget Hollywood films. The "special
               | effects" won't look remotely CG like all of the newest
               | Disney/Marvel movies -- unless you want them to. If
               | publishers put up some sort of legal firewall to prevent
               | it, their authors, characters, and stories will all be
               | forgotten.
               | 
               | I'm also expecting, before 2030, that video game
               | pipelines will be replaced entirely. No more polygons and
               | textures, not as we understand the concepts now, just
               | directly rendering any style you want, perfectly, on top
               | of whatever the gameplay logic provided.
               | 
               | I might even get that photorealistic re-imagining of
               | _Marathon 2_ that I 've been wanting since 1997 or so.
        
           | atrus wrote:
           | I think the big blind spot people have with these models is
           | that the release pages only show _just_ the AI output. But
           | anyone competently using these AI _tools_ will be using them
           | in step X of a hundred step creative process. And it 's only
           | going to get worse as both the AI tools improve and people
           | find better ways to integrate them into their workflow.
        
             | Rinzler89 wrote:
             | Yeah exactly. Video pipelines that go into productions we
             | only see the end results of have a lot of steps to them
             | beyond just the raw video output/capture. Even
             | Netflix/Hollywood productions without VFX have a lot of
             | retouching and post processing to them.
        
           | derefr wrote:
           | Not even filters; every _text2image_ model ever created
           | thusfar, can be very easily nudged with a few keywords into
           | generating outputs in a specific visual style (e.g. artwork
           | matching the signature style of any artist it has seen the
           | some works from.)
           | 
           | This isn't an intentional "feature" of these models; rather,
           | it's kind of an inherent part of how such models work -- they
           | learn associations between tokens and structural details of
           | images. Artists' names are tokens like any other, and
           | artists' styles are structural details like any other.
           | 
           | So, unless the architecture and training of this model are
           | very unusual, it's gonna at least be able to give you
           | something that looks like e.g. a "pencil illustration."
        
         | DebtDeflation wrote:
         | At least all the humans in these videos seem to have the
         | correct number of fingers, so that's progress. And Moo Deng
         | seems to have a natural sheen for some reason so can't hold
         | that against them. But your point about the edges is still a
         | major issue.
        
         | dageshi wrote:
         | Yeah but... it's good enough?
         | 
         | There were movies with horrible VFX that still sold perfectly
         | well at the time.
        
           | jsheard wrote:
           | An important contrast is that early VFX offered strong
           | control with weak fidelity, and these prompt-based AI systems
           | offer high fidelity with weak control. Intent matters if you
           | want to make something more than a tech demo or throwaway
           | B-roll and you can't communicate much intent in a 30 word
           | prompt, assuming the model even follows the prompt
           | accurately.
        
             | Ajedi32 wrote:
             | Just need to wait for someone to develop a version of
             | ControlNet that works with this system.
        
             | marcosdumay wrote:
             | This is such an important problem of the entire genAI idea.
             | It's absurd that people keep focusing on quality instead of
             | talking about it.
             | 
             | But then, a lot of people have financial reasons to ignore
             | the problem. What's too bad, because it's hindering the
             | creation of stuff that are actually useful.
        
             | dageshi wrote:
             | Yeah, that's a fair point.
        
             | blueblisters wrote:
             | Yeah controlnet-style conditioning doesn't solve for
             | consistent assets, or lighting, framing etc. Maybe its
             | early but it seems hard to get around traditional 3D assets
             | + rendering, at least for serious use-cases.
             | 
             | These models do seem like they could be great
             | photorealism/stylization shaders. And they are also pretty
             | good at stuff like realistic explosions, fluid renders etc.
             | That stuff is really hard with CG.
        
         | blargey wrote:
         | I wonder how much RLHF or other human tweaking of the models
         | contributes to this sort of overstauration / excess contrast in
         | the first place. The average consumer seems to prefer such
         | features when comparing images/video, and use it as a heuristic
         | for quality. And there have been some text-to-image comparisons
         | of older gen models to newer gen, purporting that the older,
         | more hands-off models didn't skew towards kitschy and overblown
         | output the way newer ones do.
        
         | jensensbutton wrote:
         | I don't think that's a bug. I think that helps us separate
         | truth from fiction as we navigate the transition to this new
         | world.
        
           | ffsm8 wrote:
           | Ever heard of post processing? Because no, you can't trust
           | these signals to always exist with AI content.
        
         | lopis wrote:
         | I assure you that's not enough. These are high quality videos.
         | Once they get uploaded to social media, compression mostly
         | makes imperfections go away. And it's been shown that when
         | people are not expecting AI content, they are much less likely
         | to realize they are looking at AI. I would 100% believe most of
         | these videos were real if caught off guard.
        
           | ddtaylor wrote:
           | I regularly catch my kids watching AI generated content and
           | they don't know it.
        
             | throwup238 wrote:
             | A surprising amount of it is really popular too. I recently
             | figured out that the Movie Recaps channel was all AI when
             | the generated voice slipped and mispronounced a word in a
             | really unnatural way. They post videos almost daily and
             | they get millions of views. Must be making bank.
        
               | inkcapmushroom wrote:
               | I was watching UFC recaps on Youtube and the algorithm
               | got me onto AI generated MMA content, I watched for a
               | while before realizing it. They were using old videos
               | which were "enhanced" using AI and had an AI narrator. I
               | only realized it when the fight footage got so old, and
               | the AI had to do so much work to touch it up, that
               | artifacts started appearing in the video. Once I realized
               | it I rewatched the earlier clips in the video and could
               | see the artifacts there too, but not until I was looking
               | for them.
        
               | Twisell wrote:
               | Most probably they employ overseas, underpaid workers
               | with non-standard English accents and so they include
               | text-to-speach in the production process to smoothen the
               | end result.
               | 
               | I won't argue wether text to speech qualifies as an AI
               | but I agree they must be making bank.
        
               | derefr wrote:
               | > Most probably they employ overseas, underpaid workers
               | with non-standard English accents and so they include
               | text-to-speach in the production process to smoothen the
               | end result.
               | 
               | Might also be an AI voice-changer (i.e. speech2speech)
               | model.
               | 
               | These models are most well-known for being used to create
               | "if [famous singer] performed [famous song not by them]"
               | covers -- you sing the song yourself, then run your
               | recording through the model to convert the recording into
               | an equivalent performance in the singer's voice; and then
               | you composite that onto a vocal-less version of the
               | track.
               | 
               | But you can just as well use such a model to have
               | overseas workers read a script, and then convert that
               | recording into an "equivalent performance" in a fluent
               | English speaker's voice.
               | 
               | Such models just slip up when they hit input phonemes
               | they can't quite understand the meaning of.
               | 
               | (If you were setting this up for your own personal use,
               | you could fine-tune the speech2speech model like a
               | translation model, so it understands how your specific
               | accent should map to the target. [I.e., take a bunch of
               | known sample outputs, and create paired inputs by
               | recording your own performances of them.] This wouldn't
               | be tenable for a big low-cost operation, of course, as
               | the recordings would come from temp workers all over the
               | world with high churn.)
        
               | spywaregorilla wrote:
               | Can you identify any of these models?
        
               | bee_rider wrote:
               | I wonder if they are making bank. Seems like a race to
               | the bottom, there's no barrier to entry, right?
        
               | atomic128 wrote:
               | Right, content creators are in a race to the bottom.
               | 
               | But the people who position themselves to profit from the
               | energy consumption of the hardware will profit from all
               | of it: the LLMs, the image generators, the video
               | generators, etc. See discussion yesterday:
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41733311
               | 
               | Imagine the number of worthless images being generated as
               | people try to find one they like. Slop content creators
               | iterate on a prompt, or maybe create hundreds of video
               | clips hoping to find one that gets views. This is a
               | compute-intensive process that consumes an enormous
               | amount of energy.
               | 
               | The market for chips will fragment, margins will shrink.
               | It's just matrix multiplication and the user interface is
               | PyTorch or similar. Nvidia will keep some of its
               | business, Google's TPUs will capture some, other players
               | like Tenstorrent
               | (https://tenstorrent.com/hardware/grayskull) and Groq and
               | Cerebras will capture some, etc.
               | 
               | But at the root of it all is the electricity demand.
               | That's where the money will be made. Data centers need
               | baseload power, preferably clean baseload power.
               | 
               | Unless hydro is available, the only clean baseload power
               | source is nuclear fission. As we emerge from the
               | Fukushima bear market where many uranium mining companies
               | went out of business, the bottleneck is the fuel:
               | uranium.
        
               | mystifyingpoi wrote:
               | But it uses AI only for audio, right? Script for the vid
               | seems to be written by human, given the unusual humor
               | type of this channel. I started watching this channel
               | some time ago.
        
               | throwup238 wrote:
               | It's hard to tell whether they use AI for script
               | generation. After having seen enough of those recaps, the
               | humor seems to be rather mechanical and basic humor is
               | relatively easy to get from an LLM if prompted correctly.
               | The video titles also seem as if they were generated.
               | 
               | That said, this channel has been producing videos well
               | before ChatGPT3.5/4 so at the very least they _probably_
               | started with human written scripts.
        
               | the_af wrote:
               | A group I follow about hobby/miniatures (as in wargaming
               | miniatures and dioramas) recently shared an "awesome"
               | image of a diorama from another "hobby" group.
               | 
               | The image had all the telltale signs of being AI
               | generated (too much detail, the lights & shadows were the
               | wrong scale, the focus of the lens was odd for the kind
               | of photo, etc). I checked that other group, and sure
               | enough, they claim to be about sharing "miniature
               | dioramas" but all they share is AI-generated crap.
               | 
               | And in the original group, which I'm a member of and is
               | full of people who actually create dioramas -- let's say
               | they are "subject matter experts" -- nobody suspected
               | anything! To them, who are unfamiliar with AI art, the
               | photo was of a real hand-made diorama.
        
             | dham wrote:
             | It's kind of an interesting phenomenon. I read something on
             | this. Basically being born between ~1980 and ~1990 is a
             | huge advantage in tech.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | The only generation that ever knew how to set the clock
               | on a VCR: our parents needed our help; our kids won't
               | have even seen a VCR outside of a museum, much less used
               | one.
        
           | mikae1 wrote:
           | _> it 's been shown that when people are not expecting AI
           | content, they are much less likely to realize they are
           | looking at AI._
           | 
           | At this point, looking at a big tech SoMe feed I would expect
           | that _everything_ is, or at least could be, gen AI content.
        
           | jetrink wrote:
           | A friend who lives in North Carolina sent me a video of the
           | raging floodwaters in his state- at least that's what the
           | superimposed text claimed it was. When I looked closer, it
           | was clearly an Indian city filled with Indian people and
           | Indian cars. He hadn't noticed anything except the flood
           | water. It reminded me of that famous selective attention test
           | video[1]. I won't ruin it for those who haven't seen it, but
           | it's amazing what details we can miss when we aren't looking
           | for them. I suspect this is made even worse when we're
           | casually viewing videos in a disjointed way as on social
           | media and we're not even giving one part of the video our
           | full attention.
           | 
           | 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
        
             | itslennysfault wrote:
             | hmmm... Maybe it's because I knew it was testing me, but I
             | noticed it right away and counted the right count.
             | 
             | I could see it being pretty shocking if I hadn't, but I
             | honestly can't imagine how I'd miss that.
        
               | firebaze wrote:
               | > hmmm... Maybe it's because I knew it was testing me,
               | but I noticed it right away and counted the right count.
               | 
               | > I could see it being pretty shocking if I hadn't, but I
               | honestly can't imagine how I'd miss that.
               | 
               | The point of the video wasn't to count correctly, but to
               | see the gorilla
        
               | yunwal wrote:
               | cool, he noticed it right away
        
               | andrewinardeer wrote:
               | I believe them. Why would people lie on the internet?
        
               | bee_rider wrote:
               | 99% the person was playing along for the rest of us, so
               | we get a chance to enjoy the video as intended.
        
               | xsmasher wrote:
               | > I noticed it right away
        
               | jetrink wrote:
               | It probably doesn't work if you're primed to look for
               | hidden details. I took the test along with my Psychology
               | 101 class of about 30 people and no one noticed anything
               | amiss.
        
             | hackernewds wrote:
             | I do not see how the examples you mentioned are related to
             | the topic? What does selective attention have to do with
             | the video looking AI generated in all the frames?
        
               | CSSer wrote:
               | Their argument is that if someone is affected by
               | confirmation bias, they likely won't notice these kinds
               | of details.
               | 
               | Essentially, send me a video of something I care about
               | and I will only look for that thing. Most people are not
               | detectives, and even most would-be detectives aren't yet
               | experts.
        
             | scotty79 wrote:
             | If you see a text accompanying some content you can de-
             | prime yourself by saying "nuh-uh, that's exactly what it's
             | fscking not."
        
             | szundi wrote:
             | probably people will soon develop a habit of verifying
             | every detail in videos of interest haha
        
               | szvsw wrote:
               | Cause people are well known for verifying every detail in
               | most other forms of media already right?
        
             | jsheard wrote:
             | For the entire duration of the Russia/Ukraine war "combat
             | footage" that is actually from the video game ARMA 3 has
             | gone viral fairly regularly, and now exactly the same thing
             | is happening with Israel/Iran.
        
               | aguaviva wrote:
               | And which YouTube happily promotes straight to the top,
               | of course -- thanks to the efforts of its rocket-science
               | algorithm team. (Not sure whether the ones I've been
               | seeing were generated by that particular platform, but YT
               | does seem to promote obviously fake and deceptively
               | labelled "combat" footage with depressing regularity).
        
               | ynniv wrote:
               | The willingness of people to believe that combatants are
               | wearing cinematic body cams for no tactical reason can
               | only be matched by their willingness to assume people
               | meticulously record every minute of their lives just so
               | they can post a once-in-a-lifetime event on TikTok.
               | 
               | Who even needs AI generated videos when you can just act
               | out absurdity and pretend it's real?
        
               | Seanambers wrote:
               | As far as I know, most of the viral stuff has been active
               | air defence CWIS and the like which can be hard to
               | discern.
               | 
               | There's a morbid path from the grainy Iraq war and
               | earlier shaky footage, through IS propaganda which at the
               | time had basically the most intense combat footage ever
               | released to the Ukraine war. Which took it to the morbid
               | end conclusion of endless drone video deaths and edited
               | clips 30+ mins long with day long engagements and
               | defending.
               | 
               | And yes, to answer your belief that there is none - there
               | is loads of "cinematic body cam footage out there now".
        
               | stavros wrote:
               | It's kind of sad that we don't even need AI to create
               | misinformation, the bar for what people will fall for is
               | really low.
        
             | fossuser wrote:
             | People believe false things easily if it confirms their
             | priors. Confirmation bias is strong.
             | 
             | Fake images play into that, but they don't need to be AI
             | generated for that to be true, it's been true forever.
        
             | paul7986 wrote:
             | Indeed watching Reels or Tiktok videos is an exercise in
             | testing your bullshit meter and commenting accordingly to
             | let the uninformed know hey this is most likely fake.
        
             | wpietri wrote:
             | And let's not forget the paper that goes with the video,
             | which has a stellar title:
             | http://www.chabris.com/Simons1999.pdf
        
         | newaccount74 wrote:
         | I thought the movements were off. The little girl on the beach
         | moves like an adult, the painter looks like a puppet, and
         | everything is in slow motion?
        
           | declan_roberts wrote:
           | They look like some commercial promo video, which makes sense
           | since that's probably what they were trained on.
        
           | the_af wrote:
           | To me they seem off, but off in the same sense real humans in
           | ads always seem off. E.g. the fake smile of the smiling girl.
           | That's what people look like in ads.
        
         | Workaccount2 wrote:
         | It's my understanding that the AI sheen is done on purpose to
         | give people a "tell". It is totally possible right now to at
         | least generate images with no discernible tell.
        
           | spookie wrote:
           | > It is totally possible right now to at least generate
           | images with no discernible tell.
           | 
           | I have yet to find examples of this
        
             | grumbel wrote:
             | There are numerous tricks and LORAs to make realistic
             | images without the overpolish you get by default:
             | 
             | * https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1fvs0e1
             | 
             | * https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1fak0jl
             | /fi...
        
               | daedrdev wrote:
               | Haha, I think I can maybe tell on like one or two of
               | those
        
             | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
             | In the linked webpage, the following _videos_ would be good
             | enough to trick me:
             | 
             | - The monkey in hotspring video, if not for its weird
             | beard...
             | 
             | - The koala video I would have mistaken for hollywood-
             | quality studio CGI (although I would know it's not _real_
             | because koalas don 't surf... do they?)
             | 
             | - The pumpkin video if played at 1/4 resolution and 2x
             | speed
             | 
             | - The dog-at-Versailles video edit
             | 
             | If the videos are that good, I'm sure I already can't
             | distinguish between real photos and the best AI images. For
             | example, ThisPersonDoesNotExist isn't even very recent, but
             | I wouldn't be able to tell whether most of its output is
             | real or not, although it's limited to a certain style of
             | close-up portrait photography.
             | 
             | https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/en
        
               | lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
               | > limited to a certain style of close-up portrait
               | photography
               | 
               | Not to take away from your point but it's more limited
               | than one might think from this phrase. As an exercise,
               | open that page and scroll so the full image is on your
               | screen, then hover your mouse cursor within the iris of
               | one of the eyes, refresh and scroll again. (Edit: I just
               | noticed there's a delayed refresh button on the page, so
               | one can click that and then move their mouse over the eye
               | to skip a full page refresh.) I've yet to see a case
               | where my mouse cursor is not still in line with the iris
               | of the next not-person.
        
         | hoosieree wrote:
         | Video autotune.
        
         | dekhn wrote:
         | That sheen looks (to me) like some of the filters that are used
         | by people who copy videos from TV and movie and post them on
         | (for example) facebook reels.
         | 
         | There's an entire pattern of reels that are basically just
         | ripped-off-content with enough added noise to (I presume) avoid
         | content detection filters. Then the comments have links to scam
         | sites (but are labelled as "the IMDB page for this content").
        
           | CSSer wrote:
           | The idea that Meta's effectively stolen content is tainted by
           | a requirement to avoid collecting stolen content is laughably
           | ironic.
        
             | kylebenzle wrote:
             | Yes, but thats just a hypothesis, have we seen any evidence
             | that shows the cause of the "AI sheen" is bad training
             | data, or more likly, just a shortcomming of generating
             | realistic photos from text at this early stage.
        
         | alana314 wrote:
         | I'm thankful to be able to recognize that sheen, though I think
         | it will go away soon enough
        
         | demaga wrote:
         | It is maybe recognizable in most cases, but definitely not
         | instantly nor easily. I could definitely see nobody noticing
         | one of those clips used in an otherwise non-AI video
         | production.
        
         | forgetfulness wrote:
         | A lot look like CGI, but I wouldn't be able to tell that they
         | weren't created by an actual animator.
        
         | sixothree wrote:
         | I did some images generation and found a LORA for VHS footage.
         | It's amazing what "taking away the sheen" can do to make an
         | image look strikingly real.
        
         | Loughla wrote:
         | The ATV turning in mid air was a giveaway as well. Physics
         | seems to be a basic problem for these type of videos.
        
       | jsheard wrote:
       | If nothing else it will produce some amazing material for this
       | account, once the content farms get their hands on it:
       | https://x.com/FacebookAIslop
        
       | niles wrote:
       | Crashes Firefox mobile. Looks pretty impressive on Chrome!
       | Apparently hosted only
        
       | lwansbrough wrote:
       | This is really something. The spatial and temporal coherence is
       | unbelievable.
        
       | sourraspberry wrote:
       | Impressive.
       | 
       | Always important to bear in mind that the examples they show are
       | likely the _best_ examples they were able to produce.
       | 
       | Many times over the past few years a new AI release has "wowed"
       | me, but none of them resulted in any sudden overnight changes to
       | the world as we know it.
       | 
       | VFX artists: You can sleep well tonight, just keep an eye on
       | things!
        
         | bbor wrote:
         | Tbf, the biggest private infrastructure project in the history
         | of humanity is now underway (Microsoft GPU centers), the
         | fastest app to reach #1 on the App Store was released
         | (ChatGPT), and it's dominating online discourse. Many companies
         | have used LLMs to justify layoffs, and /r/writers and many,
         | many fanart subreddits already talk of significant changes to
         | their niches. All of this was basically at 0 in 2022, and 100
         | by early 2023. It's not normal.
         | 
         | Everyone should sleep well tonight, but only because we'll look
         | out for each other and fight for just distribution of
         | resources, not because the current job market is stable. IMO :)
        
         | chucky_z wrote:
         | VFX artists cannot sleep well, they're already being displaced
         | with AI or being forced to use it to massively increase their
         | output.
         | 
         | Here's an example thread:
         | https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/1e4zdj7/in_the_climate...
         | 
         | I am not trying to be negative, however it is the reality that
         | ML/LLM has eliminated entire industries. Medical transcription
         | for example is essentially gone.
        
           | sionisrecur wrote:
           | I don't see it as that much of a problem. It's like washing
           | machines taking away people's job of washing clothes, what
           | are they gonna do with their time now? Maybe something more
           | productive.
        
             | cubefox wrote:
             | We really have a problem once there are no more jobs left
             | for us humans, and only the people who own capital (stocks,
             | real estate etc) will be able to earn money from dividends.
        
               | ddtaylor wrote:
               | > We really have a problem once there are no more jobs
               | left for us humans
               | 
               | What is the required amount of labor humans should have
               | to do?
        
               | krapp wrote:
               | The amount required to pay rent on their continued
               | survival, which in a capitalist society, and excluding
               | members of the capitalist class, will never be zero.
        
             | chucky_z wrote:
             | ... something more productive than art?
             | 
             | that's quite a productive thing. art has tremendous value
             | to society.
             | 
             | why don't we automate the washing machine more instead of
             | automating the artist?
        
               | echoangle wrote:
               | Well we already automated all the easy stuff (washing
               | machines for example), and now we're automating more
               | stuff as we get better at it.
        
               | whiplash451 wrote:
               | Washing machines and roombas were the low hanging fruits
               | in the real world.
               | 
               | Automating more in the real world is much (much) harder
               | than grabbing the low-hanging fruits in the digital
               | world.
        
           | dagmx wrote:
           | That thread you linked doesn't seem to align at all with your
           | claims though? The majority of comments do not make the claim
           | that they're using any GenAI elements.
           | 
           | As someone who's worked in the industry previously and am
           | quite involved still, very few studios are using it because
           | of the lack of direction it can take and the copyright
           | quagmire. There are lots of uses of ML in VFX but those
           | aren't necessarily GenAI.
           | 
           | GenAI hasn't had an effect on the industry yet. It's unlikely
           | it will for a while longer. Bad business moves from clients
           | are the bigger drain, including not negotiating with unions
           | and a marked decline in streaming to cover lost profits.
        
         | burkaman wrote:
         | Yes, and like pretty much every AI release I've seen, even
         | these cherry-picked examples mostly do not quite match the
         | given prompt. The outputs are genuinely incredible, but if you
         | imagine actually trying to use this for work, it would be very
         | frustrating. A few examples from this page:
         | 
         | Pumpkin patch - Not sitting on the grass, not wearing a scarf,
         | no rows of pumpkins the way most people would imagine.
         | 
         | Sloth - that's not really a tropical drink, and we can't see
         | enough of the background to call it a "tropical world".
         | 
         | Fire spinner - not wearing a green cloth around his waist
         | 
         | Ghost - Not facing the mirror, obviously not reflected the way
         | the prompter intended. No old beams, no cloth-covered
         | furniture, not what I would call "cool and natural light". This
         | is probably the most impressively realistic-looking example,
         | but it almost certainly doesn't come close to matching what the
         | prompter was imagining.
         | 
         | Monkey - boat doesn't have a rudder, no trees or lush greenery
         | 
         | Science lab - no rainbow wallpaper
         | 
         | This seems like nitpicking, and again I can't underestimate how
         | unbelievable the technology is, but the process of making any
         | kind of video or movie involves translating a very specific
         | vision from your brain to reality. I can't think of many
         | applications where "anything that looks good and vaguely
         | matches the assignment" is the goal. I guess stock footage
         | videographers should be concerned.
         | 
         | This all matches my experience using any kind of AI tool. Once
         | I get past my astonishment at the quality of the results, I
         | find it's almost always impossible to get the output I'm
         | looking for. The details matter, and in most cases they are the
         | only thing that matters.
        
           | psb217 wrote:
           | The one thing that immediately stood out to me in the ghost
           | example was how the face of the ghost had "wobbly geometry"
           | and didn't appear physically coupled to the sheet. This and
           | the way the fruit in the sloth's drink magically rested on
           | top of the drink without being wedged onto the edge of the
           | glass as that would require were actually some of the more
           | immediate "this isn't real" moments for me.
        
             | burkaman wrote:
             | I think those types of visual glitches can probably be
             | fixed with more or better training, and I have no doubt
             | that future versions of this type of system will produce
             | outputs that are indistinguishable from real videos.
             | 
             | But better training can't fix the more general problem that
             | I'm describing. Perfect-looking videos aren't useful if you
             | can't get it to follow your instructions.
        
             | elcomet wrote:
             | The ghost is insanely impressive, it's the example that
             | gave me a "wow" effect. The cloth physic looks stunning, I
             | never thought we would reach such a level of temporal
             | coherence so fast.
        
       | syntaxing wrote:
       | I find the edit video with text the most fascinating aspect. I
       | can see this being used for indie films that doesn't have a CGI
       | budget. Like the scene with the movie theater, you can film them
       | on lounge chairs first and then edit it to seem like a movie
       | theater.
        
         | ForHackernews wrote:
         | Why bother? Actors cost money and scheduling is difficult. Do
         | the whole thing in AI - the model will be trained on better
         | actors than your indie cast, anyway.
        
           | M4v3R wrote:
           | It will be a loong time before AI can produce lead actors
           | that are believable, act exactly the way you as a director
           | want and tell the story you want to tell, so I think at least
           | for now you'll still need the actors for the lead roles. But
           | I can totally this being used for generating people/stuff in
           | the background of certain shots in a low budget movie.
        
             | ipaddr wrote:
             | Isn't that a core problem now. Getting actors to act
             | exactly how you want was never a solved problem.
             | 
             | But this limits promotion where actors do interviews and
             | sell the movie to the public. It also limits an actor doing
             | something crazy that tanks a movie like a tweet.
        
               | l33tbro wrote:
               | The answer is that it depends on the director. For David
               | Fincher or the Coen brothers, having this level of
               | exactitude and precision is what their craft is all
               | about.
               | 
               | But for plenty of other masters - think Cassavetes, Mike
               | Leigh, even PTA - the actor's outstanding talent and
               | instincts bring something to the script and vision that
               | is outside of their prescriptive powers. Their focus is
               | essentially setting up a framework for magic to happen
               | inside of.
        
           | zappchance wrote:
           | Consistentency between scenes is one possible reason.
        
         | gen3 wrote:
         | 100% agree, the background replace that puts the guy into a
         | stadium would be fully usable as a cut in a movie/tv show, and
         | the background is believable enough that no one would bat an
         | eye. If you use it properly, I expect a quality uplift on indie
         | films/shorts. Your limit is your creativity
        
       | quest88 wrote:
       | That's very impressive.
        
       | Jean-Papoulos wrote:
       | Website doesn't work on Firefox and videos don't play on Edge.
       | They should consider asking the AI to make a correct website
       | before having it make hippos swim.
        
         | loufe wrote:
         | The entire page load is completely broken on Edge for me.
         | Bizarre
        
           | littlestymaar wrote:
           | It works fine for me on Firefox on Linux, weird.
        
             | adrian_b wrote:
             | Also Firefox 127.0.1 on Linux, works perfectly (using an
             | NVIDIA GPU).
        
               | chinathrow wrote:
               | That's a bit old, isn't it?
        
               | adrian_b wrote:
               | It is only a little more than 3 months old, so I would
               | not call that old.
               | 
               | I avoid updating to each new Firefox version, because
               | from time to time they break some features important for
               | me.
        
           | aphit wrote:
           | All works fine for me here in Edge, odd.
        
         | bob1029 wrote:
         | Not working in Safari on my MBP either.
        
         | HelloMcFly wrote:
         | I use Edge at work: the videos played without issue (version
         | 129.0.2792.65 on Windows).
         | 
         | I use Firefox on my personal device: the website worked fine
         | though took an extra "hiccup" to load compared to Edge (version
         | 131.0 on Windows).
        
         | chillingeffect wrote:
         | Yeah it doesn't play the video for me on S10+. I can't imagine
         | what they're doing to break that. It's just another disposable
         | consumerist craze anyway.
        
       | voidUpdate wrote:
       | Some of these look really obviously bad, like the guy spinning
       | the fire and the girl running along the beach. And it completely
       | failed at the bubbles
        
         | Quarrelsome wrote:
         | doesn't need to be movie quality, just needs to be tiktok
         | quality and this totally passes the bar.
         | 
         | Are you ready to become a penguin in all of your posts to
         | maximise aquatic engagement? I am.
        
           | voidUpdate wrote:
           | I've become a robot and a demon to maximise engagement, its
           | called being a vtuber
        
         | nsagent wrote:
         | Interesting perspective, considering a paper ByteDance just
         | released yesterday [1] has much worse video quality. If your
         | comparison is to real videos, then for sure the quality isn't
         | great. If instead you compare to other released research, the
         | this model is one of the best released thus far.
         | 
         | [1]: https://epiphqny.github.io/Loong-video/
        
           | add-sub-mul-div wrote:
           | Okay, let's give it a participation trophy for being the best
           | of the slop category.
        
         | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
         | Yeah, some were impressive, but others looked quite bad. The
         | guy running in the desert looked like a guy floating over the
         | ground only sporadically making contact with the sand. The
         | footfalls in a lot of these videos look pretty janky or "soft".
         | 
         | The clothing changes also have pretty rough edges, or just look
         | like they're floating over the original model. The 3D glasses
         | one looked atrocious. The lighting changes are also pretty
         | lacking.
        
         | Bloedcoins wrote:
         | I have not had the same feeling as you and i do look at ai art
         | for quite. awhile.
         | 
         | Are you still impressed though?
        
         | tiborsaas wrote:
         | The spinning fire was one that could easily fool me if a 0.5
         | shot was in a music video. Context is everything.
        
       | cs702 wrote:
       | _Impressive._
       | 
       | It's only going to get better, faster, cheaper, easier.[a]
       | 
       | Sooner than anyone could have expected, we'll be able to ask the
       | machines: "Turn this book into a two-hour movie with the likeness
       | of [your favorite actor/actress] in the lead role."
       | 
       | Sooner than anyone could have expected, we'll be able to have
       | immersive VR experiences that are crafted to each person.
       | 
       | Sooner than anyone could have expected, we won't be able to
       | identify deepfakes anymore.
       | 
       | We sure live in interesting times!
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | [a] With apologies to Daft Punk:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAjR4_CbPpQ
        
         | mywacaday wrote:
         | Are we only a few years away from one person/small group made
         | movies where the dialog, acting, location and special effects
         | can be tweaked endlessly for a relatively low cost. If I was a
         | studio exec I'd be worried.
        
           | Workaccount2 wrote:
           | If I was a human I'd be worried.
        
             | edgyquant wrote:
             | These are tools by and for humans
        
               | ceejayoz wrote:
               | So are nukes.
        
               | Workaccount2 wrote:
               | I guess cats probably think we are tools for feeding
               | them...
        
           | adamc wrote:
           | I wouldn't be. How is any of this going to lead to meaningful
           | art?
           | 
           | I don't think you get "The Green Mile" from something like
           | this.
        
             | meiraleal wrote:
             | > I wouldn't be. How is any of this going to lead to
             | meaningful art?
             | 
             | Local art, local actors, local animations telling stories
             | about local culture. A netflix for every city, even
             | neighborhoods. That's going to be crazy fun.
        
             | CuriouslyC wrote:
             | There are plenty of great outsider storytellers and
             | artists. Youtube is proof of this. People mostly do comedy
             | on youtube because that's what the medium supports on a low
             | budget, but AI is going to change that.
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | I'm really not seeing how that would happen from these
               | examples. It would seem like achieving an adequate,
               | directorial level of control would require writing a
               | novel -- or, anyway, more than a conventional screenplay
               | -- to get the AI to make the movie you wanted.
               | 
               | There is so much that has to be conveyed in making a
               | film, if you want it to say something particular.
        
               | meiraleal wrote:
               | > It would seem like achieving an adequate, directorial
               | level of control would require writing a novel -- or,
               | anyway, more than a conventional screenplay -- to get the
               | AI to make the movie you wanted.
               | 
               | And? What's the problem with that? You seem to be locked
               | in a "prompt to get a movie" mindset.
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | Those are the examples provided. When they deliver pro
               | tools for generating movie clips, I will be more
               | convinced, but that hasn't remotely happened yet.
        
             | spacebanana7 wrote:
             | I'd love to see what'd happen if someone dumped the entire
             | text of the Silmarillion or the Hobbit into one of these
             | models. Assuming context windows and output capacity become
             | large enough.
        
               | bnj wrote:
               | Especially primed by all the lord of the rings movies,
               | for example; I could see the studio taking all the
               | archived footage, camera angles, all the extra data that
               | was generated in the creation of the films and feeding
               | that into something like this model to create all kinds
               | of interesting additional material.
        
             | Hrun0 wrote:
             | > I don't think you get "The Green Mile" from something
             | like this.
             | 
             | ...yet
        
             | vundercind wrote:
             | Extremely-heavily-CG movies already mostly look like shit
             | compared to ones where they build sets and have props and
             | location shoot, even if somewhat assisted by computer
             | compositing and such (everything is, nowadays). [edit: I
             | don't even mean that the graphics look bad, but the
             | creative and artistic choices tend to be poor]
             | 
             | The limitations of reality seem to have a positive effect
             | on the overall process of film making, for whatever reason.
             | I expect generative AI film will be at least as bad. Gonna
             | be hard to get an entire _well-crafted_ film out of them.
        
             | ben_w wrote:
             | You're unlikely to get an AI that wins accolades for the
             | same reason that's unlikely with humans: they represent the
             | absolute pinnacle of achievement.
             | 
             | The same AI can still raise the minimum bar for quality. Or
             | replace YouTubers and similar while they're still learning
             | how to be good in the first place.
             | 
             | No idea where we are in this whole process yet, but it's a
             | continuum not a boolean.
        
               | observationist wrote:
               | What accolades? The Hollywood self-congratulatory
               | conspicuous consumption festivals they use to show how
               | good they are at producing "art" every year? The film
               | festivals where billions of dollars are spent on clothing
               | and jewelry to show off the "class" of everyone
               | attending, which people like Weinstein used to pick
               | victims, and everyone else uses as conspicuous
               | consumption and "marketing" media?
               | 
               | Pinnacle is not the word I'd use. Race to the bottom,
               | least possible effort, plausibly deniable quality, gross
               | exploitation, capitalist bottom line - those are all
               | things I'd use to describe current "art" awards like
               | Grammy, Oscars, Cannes, etc.
               | 
               | The media industry is run by exploiting artists for
               | licensing rights. The middle men and publishers add
               | absolutely nothing to the mix. Google or Spotify or
               | platforms arguably add value by surfacing, searching,
               | categorizing, and so on, but not anywhere near the level
               | of revenue capture they rationalize as their due.
               | 
               | When anyone and everyone can produce a film series or set
               | of stories or song or artistic image that matches their
               | inner artistic vision, and they're given the tools to do
               | so without restriction or being beholden to anyone, then
               | we're going to see high quality art and media that
               | couldn't possibly be made in the grotesquely commercial
               | environment we have now. These tools are as raw and rough
               | and bad performing as they ever will be, and are only
               | going to get better.
               | 
               | Shared universes of prompts and storylines and media
               | styles and things that bring generative art and
               | storytelling together to allow coherent social sharing
               | and interactive media will be a thing. Kids in 10 years
               | will be able to click and create their own cartoons and
               | stories. Parents will be able to engage by establishing
               | cultural parameters and maybe sneak in educational,
               | ethical, and moral content designed around what they
               | think is important. Artists are going to be able to
               | produce every form of digital media and tune and tweak
               | their vision using sophisticated tools and processes, and
               | they're not going to be limited by budgets, politics,
               | studio constraints, State Department limitations,
               | wink/nod geopolitical agreements with nation states, and
               | so on.
               | 
               | Art's going to get weird, and censorship will be nigh on
               | impossible. People will create a lot of garbage, a lot of
               | spam, low effort gifs and video memes, but more artists
               | will be empowered than ever before, and I'm here for it.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | > What accolades?
               | 
               | Any accolades, be that professional groups, people's
               | awards, rotten tomatoes or IMDB ratings.
               | 
               | > Race to the bottom, least possible effort, plausibly
               | deniable quality, gross exploitation, capitalist bottom
               | line - those are all things I'd use to describe current
               | "art" awards like Grammy, Oscars, Cannes, etc.
               | 
               | I find them ridiculous in many ways, but no, one thing
               | they're definitely not is a race to the bottom.
               | 
               | If you want to see what a race to the bottom looks like,
               | _The Room_ has a reputation for being generally terrible,
               | "bad movie nights" are a thing, and _Mystery Science
               | Theater 3000_ 's schtick is to poke fun at bad movies.
               | 
               | > The media industry is run by exploiting artists for
               | licensing rights.
               | 
               | Yes
               | 
               | > The middle men and publishers add absolutely nothing to
               | the mix. Google or Spotify or platforms arguably add
               | value by surfacing, searching, categorizing, and so on,
               | but not anywhere near the level of revenue capture they
               | rationalize as their due.
               | 
               | I disagree. I think that every tech since a medium became
               | subject to mass reproduction (different for video and
               | audio, as early films were famously silent) has pushed
               | things _from_ a position close to egalitarianism
               | _towards_ a winner-takes-all. This includes Google:
               | already-popular things become more popular, because
               | Google knows you 're more likely to engage with the more
               | popular thing than the less popular thing. This dynamic
               | also means that while anyone will be free to _make_ their
               | own personal vision (although most of us will have all
               | the artistic talent of an inexperienced Tommy Wiseau),
               | almost everyone will still only watch a handful of them.
               | 
               | > Art's going to get weird, and censorship will be nigh
               | on impossible.
               | 
               | Bad news there, I'm afraid. AI you can run on your
               | personal device, is quite capable of being used by the
               | state to drive censorship at the level of your screen or
               | your headphones.
        
             | mathgeek wrote:
             | We already exist in a world where most of the revenue for
             | film companies comes from formulaic productions. Studio
             | execs certainly worry about how they are going to create
             | profits in addition to any concerns about the qualitative
             | cultural value of the films.
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | Even formulaic movies from hollywood have directors and
               | actors doing a million things the AI will do randomly
               | unless you tell it otherwise.
        
             | riskable wrote:
             | > How is any of this going to lead to meaningful art?
             | 
             | Nearly _all_ the movies that go to theaters aren 't
             | "meaningful art". Not only that but what's meaningful _to
             | you_ isn 't necessarily what's meaningful to others.
             | 
             | If someone can get their own personal "Godzilla VS The Iron
             | Giant" crossover made into a feature-length film it will be
             | meaningful _to them_.
        
               | ToucanLoucan wrote:
               | > Nearly all the movies that go to theaters aren't
               | "meaningful art".
               | 
               | No but what they are is expensive, flashy, impressive
               | productions which is the only reason people are
               | comfortable paying upwards of $25 each to see them. And
               | there's no way in the world that an AI movie is going to
               | come anywhere close to the production quality of Godzilla
               | vs Kong.
               | 
               | And like, yeah, their example videos at the posted link
               | are impressive. How many attempts did those take? Are
               | they going to be able to maintain continuity of a
               | character's appearance from one shot to the next to form
               | a coherent visual structure? How long can these shots be
               | before the AI starts tripping over itself and forgetting
               | how arms work?
        
               | wavemode wrote:
               | My suspicion is that, if AI moviemaking actually becomes
               | common, there will be a younger generation of folks who
               | will grow up on it and become used to its peculiarities.
               | 
               | We will be the old ones going "back in my day, you had to
               | actually shoot movies on a camera! And background objects
               | had perfect continuity!" And they will roll their eyes at
               | us and retort that nobody pays attention to background
               | objects anyway.
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | Shades of autotune.
               | 
               | But I have faith that people will notice the difference.
               | The current generation may not care about autotune, but
               | that doesn't mean another generation won't. People
               | rediscover differences and decide what matters to them.
               | 
               | When superhero movies were new, almost everyone loved
               | them. I was entranced. After being saturated with them...
               | the audience dropped off. We started being dissatisfied
               | with witty one-liners and meaningless action. Can you
               | still sell a super-hero movie? Sure. Like all action
               | movies, they internationalize well. But the domestic
               | audiences are declining. It makes me think of Westerns.
               | At one time, they were a hollywood staple. Now, not so
               | much. Yes, they still make them, and a good one will do
               | fine, but a mediocre one... maybe not.
        
               | ToucanLoucan wrote:
               | > The current generation may not care about autotune
               | 
               | The previous generation's care about autotune was also
               | flatly wrong. Autotune was used by a few prominent
               | artists then and is more widely used now _as an aesthetic
               | choice,_ for the sound it creates which is distinctly not
               | natural singing, as the effect was performed by running
               | the autotune plugin at a much, much higher setting than
               | was expected in regular use.
               | 
               | Tone correction occurs in basically every song production
               | now, and you never hear it. Hell, newer tech can perform
               | tone correction on the fly for live performances, and the
               | actual singing being done on the stage can be swapped out
               | on the fly with pre-recorded singing to let the performer
               | rest, or even just lipsync the entire thing but still
               | allow the performer to jump in when they want to and ad-
               | lib or tweak delivery of certain parts of songs.
               | 
               | The autotune controversey was just wrong from end to end.
               | When audio engineers don't want you to hear them
               | correcting vocals, you don't hear it. I'd be willing to
               | buy another engineer being able to hear tone correction
               | in music, but if a layman says they do, sorry but I
               | assume that person's full of shit.
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | There are a bunch of videos (e.g., Wings of Pegasus) on
               | youtube that cover pitch-correction, and there are plenty
               | of examples you can hear.
        
               | ToucanLoucan wrote:
               | My suspicion (and fear) is that _poor_ members of the
               | younger generation are going to grow up reading AI kids
               | books and watching AI TV shows, and playing AI generated
               | iPad games, and be less literate, less experienced, less
               | rounded and interesting people as a result. This is
               | _already_ kind of a problem where under-served kids
               | access less, experience less, and are able to do less and
               | I see AI doing nothing but absolutely slamming the gas on
               | that process and causing already under-served kids to be
               | _even more under-served._ That human created art will be
               | yet another luxury only afforded to the children of the
               | advantaged classes.
               | 
               | And maybe they won't have a problem with it, like you
               | say, maybe that'll just be their "normal" but that seems
               | so fucking sad to me.
        
               | philipkglass wrote:
               | If poor kids of the future grow up reading AI book-slop
               | instead of classic books that's going to be due to
               | complicated factors of culture and habit rather than
               | economic necessity. Most of the traditional Western canon
               | of "great literature" is already in the public domain,
               | available for free.
               | 
               | https://standardebooks.org/
               | 
               | For newer in-copyright works, public libraries commonly
               | offer Libby:
               | 
               | https://company.overdrive.com/2023/01/25/public-
               | libraries-le...
               | 
               | It gives anyone with a participating-system library card
               | free electronic access to books and magazines. And it's
               | unlikely that librarians themselves will be adding AI
               | book-slop to the title selection.
        
               | ToucanLoucan wrote:
               | > If poor kids of the future grow up reading AI book-slop
               | instead of classic books that's going to be due to
               | complicated factors of culture and habit rather than
               | economic necessity.
               | 
               | To be clear, I'm not talking great literature. I'm
               | talking Clifford the Big Red Dog type stuff.
               | 
               | That said I still have a number of problems with this
               | assertion:
               | 
               | It will absolutely be down, in part, to economic
               | necessity. Amazon's platform is already dealing with a
               | glut of shitty AI books and the key way they get ahead in
               | rankings is being cheaper than human-created
               | alternatives, and they can be cheaper because having an
               | AI slop something out is way less expensive and time
               | consuming than someone writing/illustrating a kid's book.
               | 
               | Moreover, our economy runs on the notion that the easier
               | something is to do, the more likely people are to do it
               | at scale, and vetting your kids media is hard and
               | annoying as a parent at the best of times: if you come
               | home from working your second job and are ready to
               | collapse, are you going to prepare a nutritious meal for
               | your child and set them up with insightful, interesting
               | media? No you're going to heat up chicken nuggets and put
               | them in front of the iPad. That's not good, but like,
               | what do you expect poor parents to do here? Invent more
               | time in the day so they can better raise their child
               | while they're in the societal fuckbarrel?
               | 
               | And yes, before it goes into that direction, yes this is
               | all down to the choices of these parents, both to have
               | children they don't really have the resources to raise
               | (though recent changes to US law complicates that choice
               | but that's a whole other can of worms) and them not
               | taking the time to do it and all the rest, yes, all of
               | these parents could and arguably should be making better
               | choices. But ALSO, I do not see how it is a positive for
               | our society to let people be fucked over like this
               | constantly. What do we GAIN from this? As far as I can
               | tell, the only people who gain anything from the
               | exhausted-lower-classes-industrial-complex are the same
               | rich assholes who gain from everything else being
               | terrible, and I dunno, maybe they could just take one for
               | the team? Maybe we build a society focused on helping
               | people instead of giving the rich yet another leg up they
               | don't need?
        
               | philipkglass wrote:
               | _...if you come home from working your second job and are
               | ready to collapse, are you going to prepare a nutritious
               | meal for your child and set them up with insightful,
               | interesting media? No you 're going to heat up chicken
               | nuggets and put them in front of the iPad._
               | 
               | This is what I mean by "complicated factors of culture
               | and habit." An iPad costs more than an assortment of
               | paper books. Frozen chicken nuggets cost more than basic
               | ingredients. But the iPad and nuggets _are_ faster and
               | more convenient. The kids-get-iPad-and-nuggets habit is
               | popular with middle-income American families too, not
               | just poor families where parents work two jobs. The
               | economic explanation is too reductive.
               | 
               | I'm not trying to say that this is the "fault" of parents
               | or of anyone in particular. When the iPad came out I
               | doubt that Apple engineers or executives thought "now
               | parents can spend less time engaging with children" or
               | that parents thought of it as "a way to keep the kids
               | quiet while I browse Pinterest" but here we are.
        
               | ToucanLoucan wrote:
               | I mean, that's the thing though. We now have had kids
               | parked in front of iPads for a good amount of time, along
               | with other technical innovations like social media, and
               | we have documented scientific proof of the harms they do
               | to children's self-esteem, focus and mental acuity. I
               | don't think the designers of the iPad or even the
               | engineers at Facebook set out to cause these issues,
               | _but. they. did._ And now we have a fresh technology in
               | the form of AI that whole swathes of  "entrepreneurs" are
               | ready to toss into more children's brains as these
               | previous ones were.
               | 
               | Is it too much to ask for a hint of _caution_ with regard
               | to our most vulnerable populations brains?
        
               | kridsdale3 wrote:
               | As a former iPad (OS) designer, and former Facebook feed
               | engineer, of course we're upset about what happened. Most
               | of us fought valiantly, with awareness, against what
               | became the dark forces and antisocial antipatterns. But
               | the promo-culture performance incentive system instituted
               | by HR being based on growth metrics at all costs made all
               | of us powerless to stop it. Do something good for the
               | world, miss your promo or get fired.
               | 
               | Circa 2020 a huge number of fed-up good-intentioned
               | engineers and designers quit. It had no effect, at all.
        
               | ToucanLoucan wrote:
               | I'm genuinely sorry that happened to you. That had to be
               | an absolute nightmare of an experience.
               | 
               | To be clear: I am not saying that engineers need to be
               | better at preventing this stuff. I am saying regulators
               | need to _demand_ that companies be careful, and study how
               | this stuff is going to affect people, not just yeet it
               | into the culture and see what happens.
        
               | kridsdale3 wrote:
               | I was there (Apple) at the time. Absolutely did NOT
               | expect this thing that Steve thought was a neat way to
               | see the whole NYT front page at once, was going to be the
               | defining MacGuffin of an entire generation of children.
        
               | aenvoker wrote:
               | There's already conversation in AI art about how "Y'all
               | will miss all these weird AI glitches when they're gone!"
               | It will become the new tape hiss. Something people will
               | nostalgically simulate in later media that doesn't have
               | it naturally.
        
               | StevenNunez wrote:
               | Looking forward to watching this post age like milk.
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | They are art compared to getting uncontrolled choices.
               | Who decides what the actors look like? How they move?
               | What emotions their faces are to convey? How the blocking
               | works for a scene? What the color scheme is for the
               | movie? How each shot is taken? Etc.
               | 
               | There is a vast difference between a formulaic hollywood
               | movie and some guy with a camera. If I say "Godzilla vs.
               | The Iron Giant" what is the plot? Who is the good guy?
               | Why does the conflict take place?
               | 
               | AI will come up with something. Will it be compelling
               | even to the audience of one?
               | 
               | As a toy, maybe. As an artistic experience... not
               | convinced.
        
               | stale2002 wrote:
               | > Who decides
               | 
               | You still aren't getting it. Movie directors aren't
               | making these decisions either.
               | 
               | What they are doing, is listening to market focus groups
               | and checking off boxes based on the data from that.
               | 
               | A market focus group driven decisions for a movie is just
               | as much, if not more so, of an "algorithm" than when a
               | literal computer makes the decision.
               | 
               | Thats not art. Its the same as if a human manually did an
               | algorithm by hand and used that to make a movie.
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | Some of it is done that way, but by no means all of it.
               | You can easily see the differences, because, say, Wes
               | Anderson movies are not the same as Martin Scorsese
               | movies.
               | 
               | If it were really all just market decisions, directors
               | would have no influence. This is not remotely the case.
               | Nor are they paid as though that were true.
        
               | chefandy wrote:
               | This is a common perspective among people that don't
               | realize how much goes into making a movie. That stuff
               | informs which movies get _approved_ and it certainly can
               | inform broader _script changes_ , _casting changes_ , and
               | in some cases _editing decisions_ , but there's a
               | UNIVERSE of other artistic decisions that need to be
               | made. Implying that the people involved are mere
               | technicians implementing a marketing strategy is
               | exponentially more reductive than saying developers and
               | designers aren't relevant to making software because
               | marketing surveys dictate the feature development
               | timeline. A developer's input is far more fungible than
               | an artist working on a feature film.
               | 
               | I assure you, they don't do surveys on the punchiness and
               | strategy used by foley artists; the slope and toe of the
               | film stock chosen for cut scenes by the DP or that those
               | cut scenes should be shot like cut scenes instead of
               | dream sequences; the kind of cars they use; how energetic
               | the explosions are; clothing selection and how the
               | costumes change situationally or throughout the film;
               | indescribably nuanced changes in the actor's delivery;
               | what fonts go on the signs; which props they use in all
               | of the sets and the strategies they use to weather
               | things; what specific locations they shoot at within an
               | area and which direction they point the camera, how the
               | grading might change the mood and imply thematic
               | connections, subtle symbolism used, the specifics of
               | camera movements, focus, and depth of field, and then
               | there's the deeeep world of lighting... All of those
               | things and a million others are contributions from
               | individual artists contributing their own art in one big
               | collaborative project.
        
               | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
               | You'll never be able to talk to your friends about it.
               | Culture wouldn't be a shared experience. We would all
               | watch our own unique AI generated things.
        
               | sroussey wrote:
               | More likely there will be cliches.
        
             | IanCal wrote:
             | But what they're describing is a case where someone with
             | the storytelling ability but not the money or technical
             | skills could create something that looks solid.
             | 
             | You're imagining "pls write film" but the case of being
             | able to film something and then adjust and tweak it, easily
             | change backdrops etc could lead to much higher polish on
             | creations from smaller producers.
             | 
             | Would the green mile be any less hard hitting if the lights
             | flickering were caused by an AI alteration to a scene? If
             | the mouse was created purely by a machine?
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | I don't have a problem with adjusting small elements of
               | the film, but that isn't going to make it a tool for
               | youtubers (or home users off the grid) to tell their own
               | stories.
        
             | cjenkins wrote:
             | Looking back on history I think this will lead to
             | meaningful art (and tons and tons of absolute garbage!).
             | 
             | The printing press led to publishing works being reachable
             | by more people so we got tons of garbage but we also got
             | those few individual geniuses that previously wouldn't have
             | been able to get their works out.
             | 
             | I see similarities in indie video/PC games recently too.
             | Once the tech got to the point that an individual or small
             | group could create a game, we got tons of absolute garbage
             | but also games like Cave Story and Stardew Valley (both
             | single creators IIRC).
             | 
             | Anything that pushes the bar down on the money and effort
             | needed to make something will result in way more of it
             | being made. It also hopefully makes it possible for those
             | rare geniuses to give us their output without the dilution
             | of having to go through bigger groups first.
             | 
             | I'm also excited from the perspective that this decouples
             | skills in the creative process. There have to be people out
             | there with tremendous story telling and movie making skills
             | who don't have the resources/connections to produce what
             | they're capable of.
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | The printing press enabled the artistic visions of single
               | individuals (the writers) to find a wide audience.
               | 
               | To do something similar, this has to allow the director
               | (or whomever is prompting the AI) to control all
               | meaningful choices so that they get more or less the
               | movie the intend. That seems far away from what is
               | demonstrated.
        
             | parsimo2010 wrote:
             | You don't get "The Green Mile" from this, because it's a
             | tool. You get "The Green Mile" with artistic vision. The
             | tool has to be told what to do. But now a director can
             | shoot a film with actors who don't match the physical
             | description of a character in a story, and then correct
             | their race/gender/figure/whatever with AI. That probably
             | means they save money on casting. A director can shoot a
             | scene inside a blank set and turn it into a palace with AI.
             | That saves money from shooting on location or saves money
             | from having to pay for expensive sets.
             | 
             | So now a director with a limited budget but with a good
             | vision and understanding of the tools available has a
             | better chance to realize their vision. There will be tons
             | of crap put out by this tool as well. But I think/hope that
             | at least one person uses it well.
             | 
             | But because it will make shooting a movie more accessible
             | to people with limited budgets, the movie studios, who
             | literally gatekeep access to their sets and moviemaking
             | equipment, are going to have a smaller moat. The
             | distribution channels will still need to select good films
             | to show in theaters, TV, and streaming, but the industry
             | will probably be changing in a few years if this
             | development keeps pace.
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | This is the best answer I've seen, but I think what was
               | demonstrated is miles away from this. A lot would need to
               | be able to be specified (and honored) from the prompts,
               | far more than any examples have demonstrated.
               | 
               | I'm not against tools for directors, but the thing is,
               | directors tell actors things and get results. Directors
               | hire cinematographers and work with them to get the shots
               | they want. Etc. How does that happen here?
               | 
               | Also, as someone else mentioned, there is the general
               | problem that heavily CG movies tend to look... fake and
               | uncompelling. The real world is somehow just realer than
               | CG. So that also has to be factored into this.
        
               | wrsh07 wrote:
               | I think it starts simple. Have you ever been watching a
               | movie or tv show, and it shows the people walking up to
               | the helicopter or Lamborghini and then cut to "they've
               | arrived at their destination no transportation in sight"?
               | 
               | It will start out with more believable green screen
               | backgrounds and b roll. Used judiciously, it will improve
               | immersion and cost <$10 instead of thousands. The actors
               | and normal shots will still be the focus, but the
               | elements that make things more believable will be cheaper
               | to add.
               | 
               | Have you ever noticed that explosions look good? Even in
               | hobby films? At some point it became easy to add a
               | surprisingly good looking explosion in post. The same
               | thing will happen here, but for an increasing amount of
               | stuff.
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | That I could believe, although... there is quite a bit of
               | commentary from film buffs that lots of the stuff done in
               | post doesn't quite look right, compared to older films.
               | 
               | Which doesn't mean it won't keep happening (economics),
               | but it doesn't necessarily mean any improvement in movie
               | quality.
        
               | frumper wrote:
               | It doesn't look right in a lot of older films either.
               | Plenty of entertaining films were poor quality yet still
               | make money and attract audiences.
        
               | nonameiguess wrote:
               | Interesting that you pick that example in particular. Due
               | to the sheer depth of behinds the scenes takes HBO has
               | provided for Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, it
               | seems to be the consensus view among effects folks that
               | CG fire and explosions are nearly impossible to get right
               | and real fire is still the way to go.
        
               | quuxplusone wrote:
               | "Why is it so hard to make fire look good in movies?"
               | (New York magazine, October 2023)
               | 
               | https://www.vulture.com/article/movies-fire-computer-
               | generat...
               | 
               | https://archive.is/u8Ugr
        
               | takinola wrote:
               | My guess is the art form will evolve. When YouTube
               | started, some people thought it would not be able to
               | compete with heavily produced video content. Instead,
               | YouTube spawned a different type of "movie". It was
               | short-form, filmed on phone cameras, lightly scripted,
               | etc. The medium changed the content. I suspect we will
               | see new genres of video content show up once this tech is
               | widely available.
        
               | DaemonAlchemist wrote:
               | The first real movies made 100 years ago looked like
               | something someone today could put together in their
               | garage on a shoestring budget. AI-generated movies have
               | existed for just two years, and are only going to get
               | better. This is bleeding edge research, and I haven't
               | seen any sign yet of AI models hitting a quality ceiling.
        
             | JeremyNT wrote:
             | > I don't think you get "The Green Mile" from something
             | like this.
             | 
             | But maybe you do get _Deadpool & Wolverine 3_
             | 
             | Guess where the money is?
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | If it becomes easy to make "Deadpool & Wolverine", it
               | will no longer be where the money is. Everything that
               | becomes a commodity attracts competition and ceases to be
               | special. (You can see some of that in super-hero movies,
               | which have started to be generic and lost some of their
               | audience.)
               | 
               | But, in reality, even making that kind of film is miles
               | away from these examples.
        
               | JeremyNT wrote:
               | > _If it becomes easy to make "Deadpool & Wolverine", it
               | will no longer be where the money is. Everything that
               | becomes a commodity attracts competition and ceases to be
               | special. (You can see some of that in super-hero movies,
               | which have started to be generic and lost some of their
               | audience.)_
               | 
               | Well, given the studios still hold the copyright, they
               | can severely constrain supply to keep profits up.
               | 
               | My suspicion is that this kind of stuff gradually reduces
               | some of the labor involved in making films and allows
               | studios to continue padding their margins.
        
             | xnx wrote:
             | > How is any of this going to lead to meaningful art?
             | 
             | It's a powerful tool. A painting isn't better because the
             | artist made their own paint. A movie made with IRL camera
             | may not be better than one made with an AI camera.
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | No, what makes art are choices (and execution). But the
               | examples given were too general and didn't exercise much
               | control over the choices.
        
               | aenvoker wrote:
               | The examples given aren't trying to be artistic. They're
               | demonstrating technical capabilities as simply as
               | possible.
        
             | atmavatar wrote:
             | From this and other comments, I get the impression that
             | most on HN assume the tool will be used exclusively by
             | people without any sort of artistic talent, either
             | plagiarizing existing works and/or producing absolute
             | dreck.
             | 
             | However, I see an interesting middle ground appear: a
             | talented writer could utilize the AI tooling to produce a
             | movie based upon their own works without having to involve
             | Hollywood, both giving more writers a chance to put their
             | works in front of an audience as well as ensuring what's
             | produced more closely matches their material (for better or
             | worse).
        
             | stale2002 wrote:
             | Who says even a majority of the content you see online is
             | meaningful art?
             | 
             | The algorithms and people making content for the algorithm
             | were trends that have dominated for years already.
             | 
             | None of that is "real" art, when you are just making
             | something optimized for an algorithm.
        
             | denisvlr wrote:
             | Shameless plug: I just created a short AI film (1) and
             | tried to tell an actual story and trigger emotions. I spent
             | countless hours crafting the script, choosing the shots,
             | refining my prompts, generating images, animating images,
             | generating music, sounds, and so on... For me AI tools are
             | just that - tools. True, you have to yield them some
             | "control", but at the end of the day you are still the one
             | guiding and directing them.
             | 
             | Similarily, a film director "just" gives guidance to a
             | bunch of people: actors, camera operator, etc. Do you
             | consider the movie is his creation, even if he didn't
             | directly perform any action? A photographer just has to
             | push a button and the camera captures an image. Is the
             | output still considered his creation? Yes and Yes, so I
             | think we should consider the same with AI assisted art
             | forms. Maybe the real topic is the level of depth and
             | sophistication in the art (just like the difference between
             | your iPhone pictures and a professional photographer's) but
             | in my opinion this is orthogonal to it being human or AI
             | generated.
             | 
             | To be honest so far we have mostly seen AI video demos
             | which were indeed quite uninteresting and shallow, but now
             | filmmakers are busy learning how to harness these tools, so
             | my prediction is that in no time you will see high quality
             | and captivating AI generated films.
             | 
             | (1) https://artefact-ai-film-festival.com/golden-
             | hours-66f869b36... Please consider liking it!
        
               | herval wrote:
               | this is an excellent example that despite all the
               | technical limitations (the ugly image artifacts, the lack
               | of exact image consistency, etc), it's _already possible_
               | to create something that connects. The "format purists"
               | currently dismiss AI tooling the same way they used to
               | dismiss computer graphics animation back when Toy Story 1
               | came out.
               | 
               | Excellent work!
        
               | wanderingbit wrote:
               | I have a newborn daughter, so watching this made me cry a
               | little bit, alone at my desk.
               | 
               | If yall needed evidence of these tools giving everyday
               | people the ability to make emotion-tugging creations,
               | I'll send you a picture of the tears!
               | 
               | Now I'm thinking I can finally make the (IMO) dope music
               | videos that come to me sometimes when I'm listening to a
               | song I really love.
        
               | kridsdale3 wrote:
               | I got to the scene where there is a doctor visit (halfway
               | though) and though "NOPE, I'm not going through this[1]
               | again" and closed it.
               | 
               | [1] The first minutes of UP
        
               | cbsks wrote:
               | Very well done! I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried.
        
               | scudsworth wrote:
               | a shameless plug deserves an honest review: this is dog
               | shit
        
               | genewitch wrote:
               | I, uh, gave some more nuance because i had some free time
               | as a sibling comment to this. I hope we don't get
               | downvoted because someone has to call a spade a spade.
        
               | scudsworth wrote:
               | good comment, haha. agree with those points and would
               | add, since im thinking about it again now, that the
               | entire work feels like a fairly (deeply) shallow riff on
               | the opening sequence in pixar's "up". but of course with
               | no stakes or emotional impact whatsoever.
        
               | nuancebydefault wrote:
               | That's not a review. It's an (probably honest) opinion
               | stated like a fact.
               | 
               | I liked it.
        
               | scudsworth wrote:
               | sure it is. that's my critical evaluation of this work.
               | if you liked it, i highly recommend the hallmark channel,
               | lifetime, family channel originals, the netflix straight-
               | to-vod swimlane, and a frontal lobotomy.
        
               | genewitch wrote:
               | I'm in agreement with scudsworth here, but i have a
               | little more nuance, i think. I know how long this took,
               | and how many compromises were made. The only reason this
               | works, at all, is because humans have a massive list of
               | cultural memes and tropes that shorthand "experience" for
               | us. it has the "AI can only generate 2-5 seconds of video
               | before it goes completely off the rails" vibe; which
               | allows it to fit in with the ADHD nature of most video
               | production of the last 30 years - something a lot of
               | people _do not like_. For an example where this was
               | jarring in the video, when they 're drawing or painting,
               | you cut the scene slightly too late, you can see the AI
               | was about to do some wild nonsense.
               | 
               | What happened to the mom? Why does the kid get older and
               | younger looking? why does the city flicker in the
               | beginning? which kid is his in the ballet performance?
               | why do they randomly have "lazy eye"? i could keep going
               | but i think we all get my point.
               | 
               | I can intuit the tropes used by the AI to convey meaning,
               | and i'd be willing to list them all with relevant links
               | for the paltry sum of $50. Be warned, it will be a very
               | large list. Tropes and "memes" are doing 100% of the
               | heavy lifting of this "art".
               | 
               | Sorry, human. As someone who stopped creating art on a
               | daily basis due to market dilution (read: it's too hard
               | to build a fanbase that i care about), i am very critical
               | of most "art" produced anyhow.
               | 
               | this is dogshit.
        
               | adamc wrote:
               | I will take a look. Good to hear.
        
           | lairv wrote:
           | I'm not sure, I see a common pattern with autonomous vehicle,
           | text to image, llms: the last 10% are hard to achieve
        
             | zeroonetwothree wrote:
             | It's true of everything
        
             | ActionHank wrote:
             | Yet VCs are sold that last 10% and an additional 10% on
             | top. No idea why they keep throwing their money into the
             | fire.
        
               | LordDragonfang wrote:
               | Because VCs are compulsive gamblers, and they're
               | convinced the payout if they "win" is enormous
        
               | herval wrote:
               | to be fair, that's exactly what the asset class EXISTS
               | for - betting on huge outcomes, no matter the odds.
               | People misunderstand that due to how much of tech is "VC
               | funded" when building stuff that would fare better as a
               | bootstrapped company (or funded by other means)
        
               | darepublic wrote:
               | I'm grateful for this
        
             | Mistletoe wrote:
             | If we judge from AI writing, we can extrapolate what an AI
             | movie would be like. I cannot imagine reading an AI book.
             | It would look and smell like a book but nothing of value or
             | new insight would be inside. Michael Bay might be very
             | interested.
        
               | bovermyer wrote:
               | Michael Bay has said that he doesn't like AI.
        
               | Mistletoe wrote:
               | I stand corrected. I should have remembered that
               | organisms that occupy the same niche have the strongest
               | competition.
        
               | blululu wrote:
               | You look back at old movies, and on a technical level
               | they really aren't as good as contemporary trash
               | productions. But they knew how to weave the camera and a
               | script into something amazing back then even if they
               | didn't have resolve and aftereffects to polish every
               | shot. A good script writer, editor and cinematographer
               | have a huge impact on the quality of a movie. But these
               | roles are only a small portion of the operating budget of
               | a movie. Filming every single scene is an exhausting
               | undertaking and this constitutes the bulk of a movie
               | production's budget. If you can get good quality footage
               | without leaving your garage then you can have a small
               | team make a great movie. Maybe not the extent where you
               | simply click a button but to the level that you would
               | launch straight to a streaming service.
        
               | bee_rider wrote:
               | Yes, AI will probably fail miserably for a while at
               | least, at making the sort of well written artistic,
               | clever movie that nobody watches. The only ones that need
               | to be worried are the studios making churning out massive
               | blockbusters...
        
             | wrsh07 wrote:
             | Self driving cars are quite safe and ubiquitous if you're
             | in the right cities
        
             | psychoslave wrote:
             | I don't know, for a car the last 10% has a direct relation
             | with "people die" that is obvious to everyone. With the
             | movie made in anyone basement, the risks are far less
             | likely to create such a vivid perception of dramatic end
             | result.
             | 
             | Not that cyber-bullying and usurpation schemes escalating a
             | whole new level being less of a concern in the aftermaths,
             | to be clear.
        
               | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
               | Less about risk parallels and more about control
               | parallels. The last 10% of fine grained control over a
               | system is hard. Like every time I've done text to image
               | prompting and it gives me a great starting point, but
               | cannot get certain details i want, no matter how i ask.
        
             | snovv_crash wrote:
             | If you look at the majority of their catalogue these days,
             | they really aren't trying to squeeze that last 10% out of
             | the movie quality these days anyways, so I doubt it will
             | matter.
        
             | llmthrow102 wrote:
             | The average person spends 9-11 hours per day consuming
             | media depending on what source you look at. When people are
             | playing games or browsing social media at the same time
             | that they have the latest Netflix show on their TV, you
             | can't tell me that this is really valuable time spent to
             | deepen one's understanding of the human experience; it's a
             | replacement for the human experience.
             | 
             | Most people will not notice if the soundtrack to a new TV
             | show is made by a 5 word AI prompt of "exciting build-up
             | suspense scene music" while they're playing pouring money
             | into their mobile gacha game to get the "cute girl, anime,
             | {color} {outfit}" prompt picture that is SSS rank.
             | 
             | You or I might not care for AI slop, but it's a lot cheaper
             | to produce for Netflix or Zinga or Spotify or whatever, and
             | if they go this route, they don't have to pay for writers,
             | actors, illustrators, songwriters, or licensing for someone
             | else's product. They'll just put their own AI content on
             | autoplay after what you're currently watching, and hope
             | most people don't care enough to stop it and choose
             | something else.
        
             | bee_rider wrote:
             | A 90% approximation of what somebody wants might be more
             | interesting to that person, than a 99% approximation of
             | what some studio exec wants.
        
           | ActionHank wrote:
           | I doubt it and if we were no one would be earning money
           | anymore and wouldn't have cash to pay for the cost to run
           | these services.
        
           | void-pointer wrote:
           | Or this is the top, and the only thing AI will be able to
           | generate is boring and uninspiring clips.
           | 
           | Ever notice how they never show anyone moving quickly in
           | these clips?
        
           | cle wrote:
           | Studio execs don't do any of that stuff anyway. It's the long
           | list of people in the movie credits who should be worried.
        
           | sangnoir wrote:
           | > If I was a studio exec I'd be worried
           | 
           | Counterpoint: home "studio" recording has been feasible for
           | decades, but music execs are not ruffled. Sure, you get a
           | Billie Eilish debut album once a generation, but the other
           | 99.99% of charting music is from the old guard. The
           | media/entertainment machine is so much bigger than just
           | creating raw material.
        
         | kingofthehill98 wrote:
         | But mostly just porn.
        
           | spacebanana7 wrote:
           | I think AI porn is overhyped. We've had the ability to create
           | realistic photos and short vids for over a year now and
           | onlyfans creators are still doing fine. AI porn is just a
           | niche for stuff that humans don't want to perform.
        
             | candiddevmike wrote:
             | I think AI porn is chocked full of fascinating moral
             | quandaries. It kind of transcends all other types of GenAI
             | for the amount of hard questions it asks society.
             | 
             | As they say, porn is always the leading spear of
             | technology. It's something to keep an eye on (no pun
             | intended) to understand how society will accept/integrate
             | generated content.
        
               | spacebanana7 wrote:
               | It's definitely interesting from a moral and tech
               | perspective.
               | 
               | However, commercially it seems like a niche within the
               | existing structures of porn. Mostly competing with the
               | market for animated stuff. At least that's where it is
               | right now, and its already at photorealistic parity with
               | human content creators.
        
             | Bloedcoins wrote:
             | 'still'
             | 
             | We have not had the ability to create interesting ai porn
             | vids yet. How would we? Meta just showed movie gen.
             | 
             | But i'm pretty sure the short images of moving woman very
             | subtle might gotten the one or other of. Just wait a little
             | bit until you can really create wat you are looking for.
        
               | spacebanana7 wrote:
               | HN doesn't feel like right place to share links, but have
               | a look at what's available on fanvue.
               | 
               | I'm not sure exactly what models the account owners use,
               | but I think it's a mix of Stable diffusion video touched
               | up with adobe tooling.
        
               | Der_Einzige wrote:
               | You obviously have not spent any time on civit.ai if
               | you're saying that.
               | 
               | What scares me most is that in my opinion, by far the
               | best prompt writers are the ones who are deeply
               | "motivated" and "experienced" with prompting. Often the
               | best prompters have only one hand on the keyboard at a
               | time.
        
             | Der_Einzige wrote:
             | You have no idea how much butthurt their is from
             | specifically artists who draw at the AI NSFW models which
             | exist.
             | 
             | I can trivially fine-tune and create more art from certain
             | artists in an hour than they have produced themselves in
             | their whole careers. This makes a lot of people very upset.
        
         | mon_in_the_moon wrote:
         | You sound like two minute papers.
        
           | ben_w wrote:
           | In enthusiasm perhaps, but when I play that in my own head
           | with the voice of Dr. Karoly Zsolnai-Feher, he doesn't script
           | his videos like that. I can't recall a single instance of him
           | using triple repetition like that.
        
           | throwawayk7h wrote:
           | what a time to be alive.
        
         | keiferski wrote:
         | This sounds gimmicky and worth watching once or twice, then
         | forgetting about. Worthwhile art will continue to be created
         | from a specific person's/group's vision, not an algorithmically
         | generated sum of personal preferences.
        
           | dyauspitr wrote:
           | You'll never be able to tell them apart.
        
             | williamcotton wrote:
             | You will if you go see someone pick on a guitar at an open
             | mic!
        
             | keiferski wrote:
             | _" Turn this book into a two-hour movie with the likeness
             | of [your favorite actor/actress] in the lead role."_
             | 
             | This sounds marginally above fanfiction, so I do think
             | it'll be very easy to tell them apart. "Terminator, except
             | with Adam Sandler and set on Mars" is a cute, gimmicky
             | idea, not a competitor to serious work.
        
               | gedy wrote:
               | Maybe, but I guarantee you this is going to get banned in
               | the US for "safety" or "misinformation" reasons
               | eventually (with large backing from Hollywood).
        
               | aenvoker wrote:
               | Well, yeah. If you explicitly try to come up with a cute,
               | gimmicky idea, it's not going to be serious. Taste still
               | matters regardless of paint, cameras or computers.
        
             | consteval wrote:
             | It depends on how shallow your understanding of media is.
             | 
             | I'm sure this can be used to create entertaining movies
             | that are fun and wacky. I don't think it can create
             | impactful movies.
        
               | dyauspitr wrote:
               | I think that's an extremely short sited perspective.
               | There isn't much that separates a "fun and wacky" movie
               | from something impactful from a cinematography
               | perspective. With the right music, ambience and script
               | you could absolutely do any genre of movie you wish to.
        
               | consteval wrote:
               | I disagree, I believe your perspective is short-sighted.
               | If you really think what makes a movie "impactful" is the
               | music, ambience, and script then I don't think you have
               | much media literacy.
               | 
               | It's no more ridiculous than saying what makes a painting
               | impactful is the brush strokes. But if I copy Picasso's
               | work stroke for stroke, why am I not Picasso? After all,
               | the dumbass paints like a child, admittedly! How could
               | someone like him ever be considered a great painter?
        
               | heurist wrote:
               | You forget that there's a human behind the prompt,
               | stitching frames and dialogue together.
        
               | consteval wrote:
               | If they are stitching then I would consider that a form
               | of art.
               | 
               | However, merely describing something is not doing the
               | thing. Otherwise, the business analysists at my company
               | would be software engineers. No, I make the software, and
               | they describe it.
               | 
               | The end-goal here is humanless automation, no? Then I'm
               | not sure your assumption holds up. If there's no human, I
               | question the value.
        
               | dyauspitr wrote:
               | > If there's no human, I question the value.
               | 
               | You may question the value but if it's anything like rugs
               | you won't be in the majority. People pay a significant
               | premium for artisanal handmade rugs but that being said,
               | more than 95% of the rugs people use are machine made
               | because they're essentially indistinguishable from a
               | handmade one and are much, much cheaper and just as
               | functional.
        
               | gedy wrote:
               | I don't agree. While "just" audio, I've made a few AI
               | songs that have made people tear up and trigger strong
               | emotions.
               | 
               | I think you can do this with video too, just more
               | challenging right now.
        
               | consteval wrote:
               | I'm sure eventually you can, but I don't think triggering
               | emotions is the correct "KPI" so to speak.
               | 
               | On social media platforms, typically the most popular
               | content triggers the strongest emotions. It's rage-bait
               | however, or sadness bait, or any other kind of emotional
               | manipulation. It tricks the human mind and drives up
               | engagement, but I don't think that is indicative of its
               | value.
               | 
               | To be clear, I'm certain that's not what you're doing,
               | and the music is good. But I think it's complicated
               | enough that triggering emotions isn't enough data to
               | ascertain value.
               | 
               | I don't know, exactly, what combination of measurements
               | are needed to ascertain value. But I'm confident human-
               | ness is part of the equation. I think if people are even
               | aware of the fact a human didn't make something they lose
               | interest. That makes the future of AI in entertainment
               | dicey, and I think that's what fuels the constant
               | dishonesty around AI we're seeing right now. Art is funny
               | in how it works because, I think, intention does matter.
               | And knowledge about the intention matters, too. It maybe
               | doesn't make much sense, but that's how I see it.
        
               | aenvoker wrote:
               | Right now there is a ton of stigma around AI art. That
               | stigma fuels a ton of poorly-informed rhetoric against
               | it. There is also tons and tons of casual use of AI art
               | being shitposted for funsies everywhere that reinforces
               | that rhetoric that AI art means "Push button. Receive
               | crap. Repeat."
               | 
               | Meanwhile, as someone who has been engaged with the AI
               | art community for years, and spent years volunteering
               | part-time as a content moderator for Midjourney, the
               | process of creating art via AI _with intentionality_ is
               | deeply human.
               | 
               | As an MJ mod, I have seeeeeeen things.... It's like
               | browsing though people's psyche. Even in public
               | portfolios people bare their souls because they assume no
               | one will bother to look. People use AI to process the
               | world, their lives, their desires, their trauma. So much
               | of it is straight-up self-directed art therapy. Pages and
               | pages, thousands of images stretching over weeks,
               | sometimes months, of digging into the depths of their
               | selves.
               | 
               | Now go through that process to make something you intend
               | to speak publicly from the depth of your own soul. You
               | don't see much of that day to day because it is
               | difficult. It's risky at a deeply personal level to
               | expose yourself like that.
               | 
               | But, be honest: How much deeply personal art do you see
               | day to day? You see tons of ads and memes. But, to find
               | "real art" you have to explicitly dig for it. Shitposting
               | AI images is as fun and easy as shitposting images from
               | meme generators. So, no surprise you see floods of
               | shitposts everywhere. But, when was the last time you
               | explicitly searched out meaningful AI art?
        
               | consteval wrote:
               | > But, be honest: How much deeply personal art do you see
               | day to day?
               | 
               | You bring up a good point - very little. But, to be fair,
               | those people aren't necessarily trying to convince me
               | it's art.
               | 
               | I think you're mostly right but I am a little caught up
               | on the details. I think it's mostly a thing of where the
               | process is so different, and involves no physical strokes
               | or manipulation, that I doubt it. And maybe that's
               | incorrect.
               | 
               | However, I will also see a lot of people who don't know
               | how to do art pretending like they've figured it all out.
               | I also see the problem with that. It wouldn't be such a
               | problem if people didn't take such an overly-confident
               | stance in their abilities. I mean, it's a little
               | offensive for that guy mucking around for an hour to act
               | like he's DiVinci. And maybe he's a minority, I wouldn't
               | know, I don't have that kind of visibility into the
               | space.
               | 
               | I think a lot of the friction comes from that. Shitposts
               | are shitposts, but I mean... we call them shitposts, you
               | know? They, the people that make them, call them
               | shitposts. There's a level of humility there I haven't
               | necessarily seen with "AI Bros".
               | 
               | I think, if you really love art, AI can be a means to
               | create a product but it can also be a starting point to
               | explore the space. Explore styles, explore technique,
               | explore the history. And I think that might be missing in
               | some cases.
               | 
               | For a personal example, I'm really into fashion and
               | style. I love clothes and always have. But it's really
               | been an inspiration to me to create clothes, to sew. I've
               | done hand sewing, many machine stitches too. And I don't
               | need to - I could explore this in a more "high-level"
               | context, and just curate clothing. But I think there's
               | value in learning the smaller actions, including the
               | obsolete ones.
        
               | aenvoker wrote:
               | Check out
               | 
               | https://x.com/ClaireSilver12
               | 
               | https://www.clairesilver.com/collections
               | 
               | from the POV of fashion illustration. Her "corpo|real"
               | collection took something like 9 months to create and was
               | published nine months ago.
        
           | sionisrecur wrote:
           | Isn't a specific person's vision basically their personal
           | preferences?
        
             | keiferski wrote:
             | Not really. A vision implies a particular kind of project,
             | presumably created by someone with expertise and some well-
             | thought through ideas about what it ought to be. Personal
             | preferences just mean that someone likes X qualities.
             | 
             | To use a real-world example: if the Renaissance-era patrons
             | had merely written down their preferences and had work made
             | to match those preferences, it's highly unlikely that you'd
             | have gotten the _Mona Lisa_ or _David._
             | 
             | Which is to say that, there will definitely be some
             | interesting and compelling art made with AI tools. But it
             | will be made by a specific person with an artistic vision
             | in mind, and not merely an algorithm checking boxes.
        
           | heurist wrote:
           | I rarely watch movies or read books twice anymore. There's
           | too much content already. The challenge with purely human art
           | at this point is that it will be silenced by the perpetual
           | flood of half-assed generated work. There will be room in
           | elite art circles for more, but at some point the generated
           | stuff will be so ubiquitous (and even meaningful) that anyone
           | without connections is going to have a tough time building an
           | audience for their handcrafted work, unless it happens to be
           | particularly controversial or 'difficult' to make. The demand
           | for visual stimulus will be satisfied by hypertuned AI
           | models. Generative AI is not there quite yet but there's no
           | reason to think it won't be better than 90%+ of purely human
           | content within a decade given the pace of development over
           | the last few years.
        
             | keiferski wrote:
             | I don't buy this narrative at all. People like people and
             | increasingly follow artists because of their personality
             | and overall "brand." No one cares about generated AI art or
             | its creator(s), because it's not interesting. It's also not
             | sharable with other humans; see, for example, the frenzy
             | around going to a Taylor Swift concert. The mass appeal and
             | shared interest is part of the draw.
             | 
             | At best, you'll get something like a generic sitcom. The
             | idea that "all visual stimulus will be satisfied by
             | hypertuned AI models" doesn't line up with how people
             | experience the arts, at all.
        
               | whilenot-dev wrote:
               | I fully agree here. I want to be part of an audience, and
               | as part of that audience I always look at the human
               | development of the things to share - artifacts in the
               | case of fine art, or experiences in the case of
               | performative art. The artist will always be more
               | important than their work to me.
               | 
               | I don't want to carry mechanical solutions labelled
               | culture - deterministic enough, despite hallucinations -
               | into the next generation that follows my own. It's an
               | impressive advancement for automation, sure, but just not
               | a value worth sharing as human development.
               | 
               | That being said, I think GenAI could be a valuable
               | addition in any blueprint-/prototype-/wireframing phase.
               | But, ironically, it positions itself in stark contrast to
               | what I would consider my standards to contemporary
               | brainstorming, considering the current Zeitgeist:
               | - truthful to history and research (GenAI is marketing
               | and propaganda)       - aware of resources (GenAI is
               | wasteful computing)       - materialistic beyond mere
               | capitalistic gains (GenAI produces short-lived digital
               | data output and isn't really worth anything)
        
               | heurist wrote:
               | That may be the case today but kids are starting to grow
               | up with this stuff as part of their lives, and I don't
               | think we can anticipate the reaction as both they and the
               | models grow in tandem. I think human creativity is much
               | deeper than LLMs, but that is from my human perspective
               | and I can't fully rule out that the LLMs may become
               | better at it at some point in the future. I actually
               | think they're already smarter and more creative than most
               | people (though not more than the potential of any given
               | human if they practiced/trained thoroughly).
        
           | javier123454321 wrote:
           | Exactly, there will be a lower barrier to entry, but making
           | content that stands out will require the same (or more)
           | effort.
        
         | ajkjk wrote:
         | "we will be able to" -> "someone with a financial interest in
         | my believing them says that we will be able to"
        
         | indigoabstract wrote:
         | It looks _impressive_ , yet I'm not feeling very impressed. If
         | only I could get as high as you do from watching those demo
         | reels.
         | 
         | Out of curiosity, what is it that people do with these things?
         | Do they put them on TikTok?
        
           | sangnoir wrote:
           | > It looks impressive, yet I'm not feeling very impressed.
           | 
           | The demos was made by nerds (said with love) with a limited
           | time window. Wait until the creatives get a hold of the tool.
        
         | ratedgene wrote:
         | We are super cooked! I love the future!!!!
        
         | nakedrobot2 wrote:
         | that sounds awful. we need to start asking ourselves just
         | because we _can_ , do we need to fulfill all of our prurient
         | desires?
        
         | animanoir wrote:
         | this user is a prime example of "consoooooooooooooom!!!!!!!!!!"
        
         | conductr wrote:
         | > Sooner than anyone could have expected, we'll be able to ask
         | the machines: "Turn this book into a two-hour movie with the
         | likeness of [your favorite actor/actress] in the lead role."
         | 
         | I've been doing this with ChatGPT, except it's more of a "turn
         | into a screenplay" then "create a graphic of each scene" and
         | telling it how I want each character to look. It's works pretty
         | well but results in more of a graphic novel than a movie. I'm
         | definitely been waiting for the video version to be available!
        
         | sensanaty wrote:
         | Does anyone other than PMs when thinking up user stories do
         | shit like this or finds this kinda stuff desirable? It just
         | sounds like a business person who doesn't have a life other
         | than selling their product trying to think up "real user"
         | usecases every time.
        
           | bakugo wrote:
           | Nope. This is just like when cryptobros would regularly
           | insist that cryptocurrencies would replace banks by the end
           | of the decade. It's safe to assume that anyone who makes such
           | wild predictions is a bagholder who stands to gain
           | financially from said wild predictions coming true, even
           | though they never will.
        
           | thunderbird120 wrote:
           | Frankly, yes.
           | 
           | Many creative works these days require the effort and input
           | of so many people, so much time, and so much money that they
           | can't have a specific creative vision. Mediums like book,
           | comics, indie movies, and very low budget indie games, where
           | the the end product was created by the smallest number of
           | people, have the most potential to be interesting and
           | creative. They can take risks. This doesn't mean they will be
           | good, most aren't, but it means that the range of quality is
           | much broader, with some having a chance to shine in ways
           | which big budget projects just can't. The issue with small
           | teams and small budgets is that they are inherently limited
           | in what they can create. Better tools allows smaller groups
           | of people to make things that previously would have required
           | an entire studio but without diluting the creative vision.
           | 
           | Will this also result in a tidal wave of low effort garbage?
           | Of course it will. But that can be ignored.
        
       | indymike wrote:
       | The giant crab-like thing in the background of the Hippo swimming
       | (if a hippo could swim) is the stuff of nightmares.
        
       | bbor wrote:
       | Incredible, simply incredible. You know a paper is seminal when
       | all the methods seem obvious in hindsight! Though I'm not caught
       | up on SOTA, so maybe some of this is obvious in normal-sight,
       | too.
       | 
       | RIP Pika and ElevenLabs... tho I guess they always can offer
       | convenience and top tier UX. Still, gotta imagine they're
       | panicking this morning!                 Upload an image of
       | yourself and transform it into a personalized video. Movie Gen's
       | cutting-edge model lets you create personalized videos that
       | preserve human identity and motion.
       | 
       | Given how effective the still images of Trump saving people in
       | floodwater and fixing electrical poles have been despite being
       | identifiable as AI if you look closely (or think...), this is
       | going to be nuts. 16 seconds is more than enough to convince
       | people, I'm guessing the average video watch time is much less
       | than that on social media.
       | 
       | Also, YouTube shorts (and whatever Meta's version is) is about to
       | get even worse, yet also probably more addicting! It would be
       | hard to explain to an alien why we got so unreasonably good at
       | optimal content to keep people scrolling. Imagine an automated
       | YouTube channel running 24/7 A/B experiments for some set of
       | audiences...
        
       | nanna wrote:
       | Absolutely terrifying. Please stop.
        
         | vouaobrasil wrote:
         | Absolutely agree. It's very terrifying and will likely cause
         | mass disruption because it will disintegrate the social fabric
         | that is held together by people needing other people for stuff.
        
           | Sgt_Apone wrote:
           | Absolutely. What's even the purpose of this thing? Who is it
           | really serving?
        
       | clvx wrote:
       | Off topic but some day you could live off grid with your own
       | solar fusion mini reactor powering your own hardware that enables
       | creating your own stories, movies and tales. No more need of
       | streaming services. Internet would be to obtain news, goods and
       | buy greatest and latest (or not) data to update your models.
       | Decentralization could be for once not as painful as it is now;
       | however, I still believe every single hardware vendor would try
       | to hook to the internet and make you install an app. Looking
       | forward to this AI revolution for sure.
        
         | adamc wrote:
         | I'm not. The likelihood that such movies (for example) would
         | have anything significant to say about being human seems very
         | low.
         | 
         | If one watches movies, reads books, etc. just to pass the time,
         | maybe this would be some kind of boon. But for those of us
         | looking for meaningful commentary on life, looking to connect
         | with other human beings, this would be some circle of hell.
         | It's some kind of solipsism.
        
           | CuriouslyC wrote:
           | That doesn't follow at all. If I come up with a meaningful
           | story and use AI to generate clips and stich them together to
           | tell it, that's real art.
           | 
           | If you disagree with that, you're basically saying La Jetee
           | isn't art, which would be a hard sell.
        
             | adamc wrote:
             | I don't have anything against stitching together clips to
             | tell your story, but I'm unconvinced that these demonstrate
             | anything like that. As I said in another comment, it seems
             | like you'd need to write a screenplay PLUS all the
             | information the director, cinematographer, etc. use to
             | create an actual movie -- everything from direction for how
             | actors portray scenes to decisions on exactly how shots are
             | constructed, to blocking for multiple actors in a scene, to
             | color schemes...
             | 
             | There are a LOT of choices in making a movie, and if you
             | just let the AI make them, you are getting "random"
             | (uncontrolled) choices. I don't think that is going to
             | compare favorably to the real thing.
             | 
             | If you can specify all that, then it's just a tool. Cool.
             | But it's still going to take pro-level skills to use it.
        
             | rolux wrote:
             | If La Jetee was just some photos stitched together plus
             | meaningful narration, then of course, you could use AI-
             | generated photos.
             | 
             | But would AI be able to quote Vertigo, like La Jetee does?
             | Doesn't art, at least to some degree, require intent
             | (including all intentional subversions of that intent
             | dogma, of course)?
        
           | zarzavat wrote:
           | I wouldn't be so sure. AI can ingest far more information
           | about humans than a human ever could. It has read our stories
           | and understands our languages. AI might have more to say
           | about humans than we do ourselves.
           | 
           | Of course AI can never truly experience being human, it has
           | no emotions, but it is excellent at mimicry and it can
           | certainly provide a meaningful outside perspective.
           | 
           | Is there anything to say about humanity that is not in the
           | training corpus already?
        
             | adamc wrote:
             | Every new novel of any merit shows that there is. And the
             | world keeps changing. The experience of being human keeps
             | changing.
             | 
             | Nothing AI has yet done has demonstrated anything at the
             | level of art or mastery. I guess I'm unconvinced that
             | throwing a million stories into the blender and
             | synthesizing is going to produce a compelling one.
        
               | schmorptron wrote:
               | Maybe people with good story literacy and cultural
               | comprehension will be able to tell the difference for
               | much longer, maybe even indefinitely. But the majority of
               | people, and I dread that includes me, won't, at some
               | point. I've already fallen for some AI generated music
               | and thought "hey, that sounds pretty good, I'll bookmark
               | it". It's genuinely scary.
        
           | 93po wrote:
           | 95% of television and movies, to me, are completely
           | uninteresting and not worth watching. the property of being
           | human-made has a pretty low success rate for basically anyone
        
         | diego_sandoval wrote:
         | They used to say that the Internet would make people smarter
         | and more knowledgeable.
         | 
         | That prediction became true for like 5% of the population,
         | everyone else is probably stupider than they were before,
         | thanks to social media.
         | 
         | Similarly, I think your prediction will apply to a small subset
         | of humanity.
        
         | TranquilMarmot wrote:
         | To me, this feels like a very dystopian take. I watch movies,
         | read books, and listen to music because they are a way to
         | _connect_ with fellow human beings. Taking the human out of the
         | equation also removes any meaning for me.
         | 
         | I get that this is kind of a fundamental line in the sand for
         | most of the "AI art" going around, and it seems like most
         | people fall on one side or the other. "I consume art for
         | entertainment" vs "I interact with art to experience the human
         | condition".
         | 
         | I also don't want to say that AI Art has _no_ value, because I
         | think as a tool to help artists realize their vision it can be
         | very useful! I just don 't think that art entirely made by AI
         | is interesting.
        
       | codeduck wrote:
       | those penguins are incredibly buoyant.
        
       | thinkingemote wrote:
       | Are any image / video generation tools giving just the output or
       | the layers, timelines, transitions, audio as things to work with
       | in our old fashioned toolsets?
       | 
       | The problem: In my limited playing of these tools they don't
       | quite make the mark and I would easily be able to tweak something
       | if I had all the layers used. I imagine in the future products
       | could be used to tweak this to match what I think the output
       | should be....
       | 
       | At least the code generation tools are providing source code.
       | Imagine them only giving compiled bytecode.
        
         | swatcoder wrote:
         | Keep in mind that these technologies produce more stuff like
         | what they've been trained on, and they need tremendous amounts
         | of training data to pull that off.
         | 
         | It so happens that there are innumerable samples of prose and
         | source code and _rendered_ songs and videos and images to use
         | as this training data.
         | 
         | But that's not so much the case for professional workflows
         | (outside of software development).
         | 
         | If the tools can evolve to generating usefully detailed and
         | coherent media _projects_ instead of just perceptually
         | convincing media _assets_ , it's going to be a while before
         | they get there.
        
         | botanical76 wrote:
         | They definitely do not give you an Adobe After Effects project.
         | This is because of the way they are trained. I suspect a vast
         | proportion of its training data is not annotated with the
         | corresponding layers, timelines, etc so the model is unable to
         | reproduce it like that. You basically just get video AFAIK.
        
         | vunderba wrote:
         | If you have experience as a graphic designer, you can get very
         | far with any layer based graphic tools like Krita or Affinity
         | in conjunction with proper inpainting against generative image
         | models - in fact that's InvokeAI's entire target user base.
        
       | 39896880 wrote:
       | They all have dead eyes. It's creepy.
        
       | tempusalaria wrote:
       | We live in the future. I just hope we consumers get easy access
       | to these video tools at some point. I want to make personal
       | movies from my favorite books
        
       | HumblyTossed wrote:
       | I'm not impressed with the quality. Did they mean to make it look
       | so cartoony?
        
         | brokensegue wrote:
         | A lot of them don't look cartoony to me. Better then previous
         | video generators
        
       | Hard_Space wrote:
       | Yet another one-shot, single-clip Instagram machine that can't do
       | a follow-on shot natively.
       | 
       | As it stands, the only chance you have of depicting a consistent
       | story across a series of shots is image-to-video, presuming you
       | can use LoRAs or similar techniques to get the seed photos
       | consistent in themselves.
        
       | skerit wrote:
       | I made a silly 1-hour long movie with friends +/- 20 years ago,
       | on DV tape. I would love to use this to actually be able to
       | implement all the things we wanted to achieve back then
        
       | tikkun wrote:
       | FAQs I found:
       | 
       | Is it available for use now? Nope
       | 
       | When will it be available for use? On FB, IG and WhatsApp in 2025
       | 
       | Will it be open sourced? Maybe
       | 
       | What are they doing before releasing it? Working with filmmakers,
       | improving video quality, reducing inference time
        
       | kleiba wrote:
       | To all the folks with negative opinions of this work: you guys
       | are nuts! This work is _incredible_. Is it the end of the line
       | yet? Of course not, but come on! This is unbelievably cool, and
       | who of you would have predicted any of this ten years ago?
        
         | KevinGlass wrote:
         | It's incredible in the same way an AK-47 is incredible. This
         | sort of thing is going to uproot all of culture and god knows
         | what happens after that.
        
         | vouaobrasil wrote:
         | For me, peace in society, a nice world where humans can share
         | what they create, and nature outside and preserved are all much
         | better than "cool", and this "cool" tool threatens all of the
         | above.
        
       | wiseowise wrote:
       | So I'm probably going to be too closed minded about this: but who
       | the f*ck asked for this and did anyone consider consequences of
       | easily accessible AI slop generation?
       | 
       | It's already nearly impossible to find quality content on the
       | internet if you don't know where to look at.
        
         | tiborsaas wrote:
         | I did and I'm quite happy that this is happening :) It's
         | unleashing a new computing era when you just have to lean back,
         | close your eyes and your vision can materialize without a
         | Hollywood production crew.
        
           | NexRebular wrote:
           | And it's great as anyone can use it in whichever way they
           | want since machine generated content does not have copyright
           | protections.
           | 
           | We will finally achieve the dream of everything being in
           | public domain!
        
       | nthdesign wrote:
       | My kids both have creative hearts, and they are terrified that
       | A.I. will prevent them from earning a living through creativity.
       | Very recently, I've had an alternate thought. We've spent decades
       | improving the technology of entertainment, spending billions
       | (trillions?) of dollars in the process. When A.I. can generate
       | any entertainment you can imagine, we might start finding this
       | kind of entertainment boring. Maybe, at that point, we decide
       | that exploring space, stretching our knowledge of physics and
       | chemistry, and combating disease are far more interesting because
       | they are _real_. And, through the same lens, maybe human-created
       | art is more interesting because it is _real_.
        
         | solaris152000 wrote:
         | I had a similar thought. I knew someone who lived a life of
         | crime, for a long time he was very poor like most criminals,
         | but for a while made it big. He could buy anything he wanted,
         | he always liked suits so bought very nice suits. But they meant
         | nothing to him, he couldn't enjoy them, as he didn't _earn_
         | then.
         | 
         | I wonder if it will be the same with AI. When you can have
         | anything for nothing, it has no value. So the digital world
         | will have little meaning.
        
           | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
           | That's my optimistic belief as well but I've also been
           | disappointed at every turn. The future feels like a
           | nihilistic joke constantly competing to plot the most
           | disappointing course forward.
           | 
           | More likely the average person will happily lap up AI
           | generated slop.
        
           | dyauspitr wrote:
           | He might be an exception because most people would have no
           | problems riding around in a million dollar car whether they
           | earned it or not.
        
             | jprete wrote:
             | Nobody cares about driving around in a million-dollar car.
             | They want the money/power/status of the person who owns the
             | million-dollar car. An unearned million-dollar car is
             | practically a liability instead of an asset.
        
         | jppittma wrote:
         | Or maybe, the limiting factor in one's ability to create art
         | will be... creativity rather than the technical skills
         | necessary to make movies, draw, or pluck strings.
        
           | judge2020 wrote:
           | The issue is that the human performance of those things is
           | precisely how creativity is expressed. You can tell an AI to
           | write a story you envision but if there's nothing unique in
           | the presentation (or it copies the presentation from existing
           | media to a large extent) you still end up with boring output.
        
           | ativzzz wrote:
           | A lot of creativity is generated by spending countless hours
           | sharpening
           | 
           | > the technical skills necessary to make movies, draw, or
           | pluck strings
           | 
           | AI will (hopefully) be an accelerator for the people still
           | putting in the hours. At least it is for coding
        
           | vouaobrasil wrote:
           | Nah, creativity cannot be separated from the means. "The
           | medium is the message". It is precisely the interaction of
           | technical skill and the mind that creates something truly
           | wonderful.
        
             | farts_mckensy wrote:
             | That's not exactly what McLuhan meant by that statement.
             | "The medium is the message" refers more to how the medium
             | itself influences the way a message is perceived by an
             | audience. It is not an assessment of the creative process
             | itself. It's not as though I disagree entirely with what
             | you're saying though. There are certainly ways in which the
             | medium is highly influential over the process of creating
             | something. But it's a mixed bag, and technical skill is not
             | something to be celebrated in all cases. A technically
             | accurate painting is oftentimes quite dull and uninspired.
             | One could argue that creativity isn't just the interaction
             | of skill and mind, but rather the ability to think beyond
             | the medium, to embrace accidents, imperfections, and
             | impulsive decisions.
        
           | sonofhans wrote:
           | Creativity isn't magic, it's a skill. There is no creativity
           | without the application of it. By definition creativity
           | produces something. Without skills it's not possible to
           | produce anything.
           | 
           | The act of creating teaches you to be better at creating, in
           | that way and in that context. This is why people with
           | practice and expertise (e.g., professional artists, like
           | screenwriters and musicians) can reliably create new things.
        
             | farts_mckensy wrote:
             | I'm not sure I completely agree. In some ways, developing
             | technical skills can drill creativity out of you and
             | condition you to think in ways that are really quite rigid
             | and formulaic.
        
             | consteval wrote:
             | > Creativity isn't magic, it's a skill
             | 
             | I don't agree. There's some skill, some theory, behind it.
             | But mastering this alone is almost worthless.
             | 
             | There's a huge overlap between creatives and mental
             | illness, particularly bipolar disorder. It seems perfectly
             | mentally stable people lack that edge and insight. To me,
             | that signals there is some magic behind it.
             | 
             | And it's magic because then it must not be rationale and it
             | must not make sense, because the neurotypical can't see it.
             | 
             | I think it's sort of like how you can beat professional
             | poker players with an algorithm that's nonsensical. They're
             | professionals so they're only looking at rationale moves;
             | they don't consider the nonsensical.
        
               | spookie wrote:
               | All artists I have known have spent most of their lives
               | practicing. Just as I have practiced programming.
               | 
               | That's the biggest edge, commitment.
               | 
               | To think that you _need_ to be neurodivergent to be an
               | artist is non-sensical and stating mastering the craft
               | itself is worthless is indicative of a lack of respect
               | for their work.
               | 
               | I'm baffled by this type of comment here in all honesty.
               | Really, broaden your horizons.
        
               | consteval wrote:
               | > To think that you _need_ to be neurodivergent to be an
               | artist
               | 
               | You will notice I never said this.
               | 
               | All I said, and is true, is there is a correlation
               | between being an artist and being neurodivergent.
               | 
               | > stating mastering the craft itself is worthless
               | 
               | Where did I say this too?
               | 
               | It appears you're having an argument with a ghost. You're
               | correct, that argument is baffling! I wonder then why you
               | made it up if you're just gonna get baffled by it? Seems
               | like a waste of time, no?
               | 
               | Look, art is two things: perspective and skill. One
               | without the other is worthless.
               | 
               | I can have near perfect skill and recreate amazing works
               | of art. And I will get nowhere. Or, I can have a unique
               | and profound perspective but no skill, and then nobody
               | will be able to decipher my perspective!
        
               | spookie wrote:
               | I'm sorry if I misunderstood, but please clarify how this
               | two quotes don't align with what I said?
               | 
               | > But mastering this alone is almost worthless.
               | 
               | > And it's magic because then it must not be rationale
               | and it must not make sense, because the neurotypical
               | can't see it.
               | 
               | Not trying to take them out of context, but specifying
               | them. You mention, from my understanding, that mastering
               | is almost worthless without the magic, and the magic only
               | being there if you're neurodivergent.
               | 
               | This implies one cannot be a proper artist if not
               | neurodivergent. Now, I could be misinterpreting it, so I
               | apologize in advance.
        
               | consteval wrote:
               | I never said the magic is "only" there if you're
               | neurodivergent, I said it seems to me neurodivergent
               | people seem to be more likely to have the magic.
               | 
               | > There's a huge overlap between creatives and mental
               | illness
               | 
               | Keyword overlap, but I don't think it's 100%
               | 
               | Magic is maybe not the right word here, but I do think
               | it's indescribable. It's some sort of perspective.
               | 
               | But I stand by this: > that mastering is almost worthless
               | without the magic
               | 
               | How, exactly, you obtain the magic is kind of unknown.
               | But I do think you need it. Because skill alone is just
               | not worth much outside of economics. You can make great
               | corporate art, but you're not gonna be a great artist.
               | 
               | I think if you're perfectly rationally minded, you're
               | going to struggle a lot to find that magic. I shouldn't
               | say it's impossible, but I think it's close to.
        
               | psychoslave wrote:
               | Certainly, life-long commitment to some discipline is not
               | something that is in the middle of the bell curve.
               | 
               | I don't know if neurodivergence might have any overlap,
               | but I wouldn't be surprise that a study reveals it to be
               | as correlated as the fact that most rich people were born
               | in wealthy families.
        
             | jppittma wrote:
             | To an extent. Take cooking for example though- I don't
             | doubt that writing recipes and trying them builds ones
             | creative muscle, on the other hand, I don't think being
             | we'd be at a loss for great chefs if we were to automate
             | the cutting of onions, the poaching of eggs, and the
             | stirring of risotto.
        
               | sonofhans wrote:
               | Of course we would. That's my entire point.
               | 
               | Take poaching eggs for example. Let's say you automate
               | that 100% so as a human you never need to do it again.
               | Well, how good are your omelettes then? It's a similar
               | activity -- keeping eggs at the right temperature and
               | agitation for the right amount of time. Every new thing
               | you learn to do with eggs -- poaching, scrambling,
               | omelettes, soft-cooking for ramen -- will teach you more
               | about eggs and how to work with them.
               | 
               | So the more you automate your cooking with eggs the worse
               | you get at all egg-related things. The KitchenBot-9000
               | poaches and scrambles perfect eggs, so why bother? And
               | you lose the knowledge of how to do it, how to tell the
               | 30-second difference between "not enough" and "too much."
        
           | mattgreenrocks wrote:
           | The discipline and care to get good at it are what the things
           | that spur creativity.
        
           | adventured wrote:
           | 99% of humanity have very little interest in creating.
           | They're mimics, they're fine with copying, hitting repost, et
           | al. You see this across all social media without exception
           | (TikTok being the most obvious mimic example, but it's the
           | same on Reddit as well). You see it in day to day life. You
           | see it in how people spend their time. You see it in how
           | people spend their money. And none of this is new.
           | 
           | The public can create vast amounts of spectacular original
           | content right now using Dalle, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion -
           | they have very little interest in doing so. Only a tiny
           | fraction of the population has demonstrated that it cares
           | what-so-ever about generative media. It's a passing curiosity
           | for a flicker of an instant for the masses.
           | 
           | The hilariously fantastical premise of: if we just give
           | people massive amounts of time, they'll dedicate their brains
           | to creativity and exploration and live exceptionally
           | fulfilling lives - we already know that's a lie for the
           | masses. That is not what they do at all if you give them
           | enormous amounts of time, they sit around doing nothing much
           | at all (and if you give them enormous amounts of money to go
           | with it, they do really dumb things with it, mostly focused
           | on rampant consumerism). The reason it doesn't work is
           | because all people are not created equal, all people are not
           | the same, all brains are not wired the same, the masses are
           | mimics, they are unable & unwilling to originate as a prime
           | focus (and nothing can change that).
        
             | farts_mckensy wrote:
             | That's simply untrue. Children have a natural inclination
             | to create art. It is slowly drilled out of them by various
             | factors, in large part, economic pressures. One of my best
             | friends has a natural talent for drawing. He even made a
             | children's book. Guess what? He became a cop because being
             | a graphic artist is too precarious. If we alleviate the
             | pressures that cause people to become closed off to the
             | possibility of creating art, more people will be open to
             | it.
        
           | jancsika wrote:
           | You: escape the oppressive technical limitations of scoring a
           | piece for an orchestra through novel use of _technology_.
           | 
           | Csound: To make a sine tone, we'll describe the oscillator in
           | a textfile as if it were a musical instrument. You can think
           | of this textfile as a blueprint for a kind of digital
           | _orchestra_. Later we 'll specify how to "play" this
           | orchestra using another text file, called the _score_.
        
           | Fricken wrote:
           | You don't need any special technical skills to write the next
           | great American novel. Few people actually do it. Talent and
           | dedication are as elusive as ever.
        
         | Animats wrote:
         | _" And, through the same lens, maybe human-created art is more
         | interesting because it is real."_
         | 
         | Most human-created art is rather bad. I used to go to a lot of
         | art openings, and we'd look at some works and ask "will this
         | have been tossed in five years?"
        
           | causal wrote:
           | Being pleasing to the eye is often not the point. Technical
           | ability is a small part of the art experience. That's one
           | reason a lot of people hate calling image gens "art" - it's
           | so flashy without substance. But it's also a reason I don't
           | think generative AI is much of a threat to the human practice
           | of art-making.
           | 
           | That said, AI is probably a threat to roles in the
           | entertainment industry. But it's also worth noting that much
           | of the creativity was being sucked out of entertainment well
           | before AI arrived.
        
         | teaearlgraycold wrote:
         | Unless we have god-like robotics I don't see AI making physical
         | art any time soon. We can print out photos but people still buy
         | paintings. We can 3D print but people still buy sculptures.
         | People are paid to design and build beautiful buildings and
         | interiors.
         | 
         | And of course if you can combine skills with sculpture with
         | graphic design you're getting more specialized and are more
         | likely to make a living - even if the field of graphic design
         | is decimated by AI. That's generally how I feel about my skills
         | as a programmer. I'm not _just_ a programmer. So even if AI
         | does most of the work with coding I can still write code for
         | income as long as it 's not the only reason I'm getting paid.
        
         | CooCooCaCha wrote:
         | The idea that we won't care about art is frankly strange. But I
         | think people will still need to make interesting art regardless
         | of the tools.
         | 
         | So far AI doesn't seem very good at the creative element.
        
         | sk11001 wrote:
         | Earning a living through creativity doesn't work for the
         | majority of people anyway even without AI in the picture.
         | Creative expression is a thing that exists for its own sake,
         | the people who make a living out of it are lucky outliers.
        
           | vouaobrasil wrote:
           | And so what if they are outliers? It is precisely the
           | outliers that spice up our artistic wealth to make it truly
           | interesting.
        
             | bigstrat2003 wrote:
             | "So what" is that OP's children shouldn't be terrified
             | about the prospects of an artistic career because of AI. It
             | is not going from "good career choice" to "long shot", more
             | like "long shot" to "somewhat longer shot".
        
         | briandear wrote:
         | We heard this same argument when cameras were invented. Yet
         | some of the most valuable paintings in the world were created
         | in the 20th century.
         | 
         | We heard it again when electronic music started becoming a
         | thing.
         | 
         | Formula 1 wouldn't exist if the blacksmiths had their way.
         | 
         | The unknown scares people because they are afraid of their
         | known paradigms being shattered. But the new things ahead are
         | often beyond anything of which we could ever dream.
         | 
         | Be optimistic.
        
           | vouaobrasil wrote:
           | One must not use analogy to analyze individual technologies.
           | People were afraid of the camera, yes, but the camera does
           | _not_ attempt to replace painting. AI attempts to replace
           | photography, painting, and all sorts of art with something
           | that looks like the real thing. Photography never tried to do
           | that, as photographs don 't look anything like paintings.
        
             | ToValueFunfetti wrote:
             | When the camera was invented, it did replace what paintings
             | were used for at the time. Photographs don't look like
             | paintings, but up until the camera paintings were trying to
             | look like photographs. It's no coincidence that
             | impressionism arrived at the same time as the camera.
        
               | vouaobrasil wrote:
               | There is a difference between replacing usage and
               | replacing the exact art and the people who make it. Yes,
               | the camera influenced painting, but it did not destroy
               | it. AI attempts to destroy natural human expression.
        
             | hindsightbias wrote:
             | Is anyone working on a painting robot that would use
             | colors, strokes and textures based off of great painters?
        
         | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
         | > And, through the same lens, maybe human-created art is more
         | interesting because it is real.
         | 
         | Conversations I have with people _in real life_ almost always
         | come back to this point. Most people find AI stuff novel, but
         | few find it particularly interesting _on an artistic_ level. I
         | only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online,
         | by people who are, for lack of a better term, _really_ online,
         | and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make
         | art themselves.
         | 
         | I always find the breathless joy that some people express at
         | this stuff with confusion. To me, the very instant someone
         | mentions "AI generated" I just instantly find it un-interesting
         | artistically. It's not the same as photoshop or using digital
         | art suites. It's AI generated. Insisting on the bare minimum
         | human involvement _as a feature_ is just a non-starter for me
         | if something is presented as art.
         | 
         | I'll wait to see if the utopian vision people have for this
         | stuff comes to fruition. But I have enough years of seeing
         | breathless positivity for some new tech curdle into resignation
         | that it's ended up as ad focused, bland, MBA driven, slop, that
         | I'm not very optimistic.
        
           | vouaobrasil wrote:
           | I think the main point is that art is interesting _precisely_
           | because it can transmit human experience. It 's communication
           | from another human being. AI "media" completely lacks that.
           | It's more of an expression of the machine-soul, which is
           | tempting us to continue its development until it takes over.
        
             | polishdude20 wrote:
             | For me, art is more interesting, moving, soul connecting
             | the more it is made by less and less people. Art by one
             | person gives me a unique perspective to the artists mind.
             | AI generated art is the opposite of being created by one
             | person. It's an amalgamation of millions or billions of
             | people's input. To me that's uninteresting, not novel and
             | not mind-expanding at all.
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | > Insisting on the bare minimum human involvement as a
           | feature is just a non starter for me if something is
           | presented as art
           | 
           | You can make the guidance as superficial or detailed as you
           | like. Input detailed descriptions, use real images as
           | reference, you can spend a minute or a day on it. If you
           | prompt "cute dog" you should expect generic outputs. If you
           | write half a screen with detailed instructions, you can
           | expect it to be mostly your contribution. It's the old
           | "you're holding it wrong" problem.
           | 
           | BTW, try to input an image in chatGPT or Claude and ask for a
           | description, you will be amazed how detailed it can get.
        
             | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
             | You need an image for an ad. You write a brief and send it
             | to an artist who follows your brief and makes the image for
             | you. You make more detailed briefs, or you make generic
             | briefs. You receive an image. Regardless, did you make that
             | image or just get a response to your brief?
             | 
             | You want a painting of your dog. You send the painter
             | dozens of photos of your dog. You describe your dog in
             | rapturous, incredible, detail. You receive a painting in
             | response. Did you make that painting? Were you the artist
             | in any normal parlance?
             | 
             | When you use chatGPT or Claude you're signing up to
             | _getting_ / _receiving_ the image generated as a response
             | to your prompt, not _creating_ that image. You 're
             | involvement is always lessened.
             | 
             | You might claim you made that image, but then you would be
             | like a company claiming they made the response to their
             | brief, or the dog owner insisting they were the painter,
             | which everyone would consider nonsensical if not plain
             | wrong. Are they collaborators? Maybe. But the degree of
             | collaboration _in making the image_ is very very small.
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | > Did you make that painting? Were you the artist in any
               | normal parlance?
               | 
               | The symphony conductor just waves her hands reading the
               | score, does she make music? The orchestra makes all the
               | sounds. She just prompts them. Same for movie director.
        
             | chefandy wrote:
             | It's still very different. What you describe is _exactly_
             | what an art director does, which is creative and
             | difficult-- there 's a good reason many commercial artists
             | end their careers as art directors but none start there.
             | Anybody that says making things that look good _and_
             | interesting using generative AI is easy or doesn 't require
             | genuine creativity is just being a naysayer. However, at
             | most, the art director is credited with the compilation of
             | other people's work. In no situation would they claim
             | authorship over any of the pieces that other people made no
             | matter how much influence they had on them. This
             | distinction might seem like a paperwork difference to
             | people outside of the process, but it's not. Every stroke
             | of the pen or stylus or brush, scissor snip, or pixel
             | pushed is specifically informed by that artist's unique
             | perspective based on their experience, internal state,
             | minute physical differences, and any number of other non-
             | quantifiable factors; there's no way even an identical twin
             | that went to the same school and had the same work
             | experience would have done it exactly the same way with the
             | same outcome. Even using tools like Photoshop, which in
             | professional blank-canvas art creation context use little
             | to no automation (compared to finishing work for
             | photography and such that use more of it.) And furthermore,
             | you can almost guarantee that there's enough consistency in
             | their distinctions that a knowledgeable observer could
             | consistently tell which one made which piece. That's an
             | artistic perspective-- it's what makes a piece that
             | artist's own piece. It's what makes something someone's
             | take on the mona lisa rather than a forgery (or, copy I
             | guess if they weren't trying to hide it) of the mona lisa.
             | It's also what NN image generators take from artists.
             | Artists don't learn how to do that-- they learn broad
             | techniques-- their perspective is their humanity showing
             | through in that process. That's what makes NN image
             | generators learning process different from humans, and why
             | it's can make a polaroid look like a Picasso in his
             | synthetic cubist phase but gets confused about the upper
             | limit for human limb counts. I think generative AI could be
             | used to make statements with visual language, closer to
             | design than art. I definitely think it could be used to
             | make art by making images and then physically or digitally
             | cutting pieces out and assembling them. But no matter how
             | detailed you get in those prompts, there aren't enough
             | words to express real artistic perspective and no matter
             | what, your still working with other people's borrowed
             | humanity usefully pureed and reformed by a machine. These
             | tools are fundamentally completely different than tools
             | like Photoshop. In art school I worked with both physical
             | media and electronic media and the fundamental processes
             | are exactly the same. Things like typography in graphic
             | design are much easier, but you're still doing the same
             | exact process and reasoning about the same exact things on
             | a computer that you do working on paper and sending it to a
             | "paste up man," as they did until the 80s/90s. People
             | aren't just being sour pusses about this amazing new art
             | tool-- it's taking and reselling their humanity. I actually
             | think these image generators are super neat -- I use them
             | to make more boards and references all the time. But no
             | matter how specific I get with those prompts, I didn't make
             | any of that. I asked a computer and that computer made it
             | for me out of _other people 's art._ A lot of people who
             | are taken by their newfound ability to make polished images
             | on command refuse to believe it, but it's true. It's a
             | fundamentally different activity.
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | > your still working with other people's borrowed
               | humanity usefully pureed and reformed by a machine
               | 
               | Exactly, isn't it amazing? You can travel the latent
               | space of human culture in any direction. It's an endless
               | mirror house where you can explore. I find it an
               | inspiring experience, it's like a microscope that allows
               | zooming into anything.
        
               | chefandy wrote:
               | Sure it's a lot of fun. I also find it very useful for
               | some things like references and mood boards. No matter
               | how granular you get with control nets or LORAs and how
               | good the models get, you just can't get the specificity
               | needed for professional work and the forms it gives you
               | are just too onerous to mold into a useful shape using
               | professional tools. It's still, fundamentally, asking
               | another thing to make it for you, like work for hire or a
               | commission. Software like Nuke's copycat tool or Adobe's
               | background remover or content-aware fill were
               | professionally useful right off the bat because they were
               | designed for professional use cases. Even then, text
               | prompt image generators are more useful than not in low-
               | effort, high-volume use cases where the extremely
               | granular per-pixel nuance doesn't really matter. I doubt
               | they'll ever be useful enough for anything higher-level
               | than that. It's just fundamentally the wrong interface
               | for this work. It's like saying a bus driver on a
               | specific route with a bus is equally useful to a cab
               | driver with a cab. There are obviously instances where
               | that's true, but no matter how many great things you can
               | show are on that bus route, and no matter how many people
               | it's perfectly suited for, there's just no way a FedEx
               | driver could use it to replace their van.
        
           | schmidtleonard wrote:
           | > "AI generated" I just instantly find it un-interesting
           | artistically
           | 
           | How familiar are you with what is possible and how much human
           | effort goes towards achieving it?
           | 
           | https://civitai.com/images
           | 
           | Photography, digital painting, 3D rendering -- these all went
           | through a phase of being panned as "not real art" before they
           | were accepted, but they were all eventually accepted and they
           | all turned out to have their own type of merit. It will be
           | the same for AI tools.
        
             | jsheard wrote:
             | If I were trying to convince people that AI art is
             | interesting and creative then I would not choose to
             | highlight the site dedicated to strip-mining the creativity
             | of non-AI artists, to produce models which regurgitate
             | their ideas ad infinitum.
        
               | spookie wrote:
               | Not to mention extremely suspicious checkpoints that
               | produce imagery of extremely young women. Or in others
               | words women with extremely child like features in ways
               | kids should not be presented.
        
             | consteval wrote:
             | I would say the difference here is with these:
             | 
             | > Photography, digital painting, 3D rendering
             | 
             | You still make these. You sit down and form the art.
             | 
             | When you use AI you don't make anything, you ask someone
             | else to make it, i.e. you've commissioned it. It doesn't
             | really matter if I sit down for a portrait and describe in
             | excruciating detail what I want, I'm still not a painter.
             | 
             | It doesn't even matter, in my eyes, how good or how shit
             | the art is. It can be the best art ever, but the only
             | reason art, as a whole, has value is because of the human
             | aspect.
             | 
             | Picasso famously said he spent his childhood learning how
             | to paint professionally, and then spent the rest of his
             | life learning how to paint like a child. And I think that
             | really encapsulates the meaning of art. It's not so much
             | about the end product, it's about the author's intention to
             | get there. Anybody can paint like a child, very few have
             | the inclination and inspiration to think of that.
             | 
             | You can see this a lot in contemporary art. People say it
             | looks really easy. Sure, it looks easy now, because you've
             | already seen it and didn't come up with it. The coming up
             | with it part is the art, not the thing.
        
               | schmidtleonard wrote:
               | > You still make these. You sit down and form the art.
               | 
               | When you use a camera you don't make anything. You press
               | a button and the camera makes it. You haven't even
               | described it.
               | 
               | When you use photoshop you don't make anything. You press
               | buttons and the software just draws the pixels for you.
               | It doesn't make you a painter.
               | 
               | When you use 3D rendering software you don't make
               | anything. You tell the computer about the scene and the
               | computer makes it. You've barely commissioned it.
               | 
               | It's easy to be super reductive. Easy but wrong.
        
               | consteval wrote:
               | Sorry, I don't think it's the same because making
               | physical specifications via modifying pixels, or 3D art,
               | or forming a shot is something you do.
               | 
               | It's the difference between making a house with wood and
               | making a house by telling someone to make a house. One is
               | making a house, one isn't.
               | 
               | The problem with AI is that it's natural language. So
               | there's no skill there, you're describing something,
               | you're commissioning it. When I do photoshop, I'm not
               | describing anything, I'm modifying pixels. When I do 3D
               | modeling, I'm not describing anything, I'm doing
               | modeling.
               | 
               | You can say that those more formal specifications is the
               | same as a description. But it's not. Because then why
               | aren't the business folks programmers? Why aren't the
               | people who come up with the requirements software
               | engineers? Why are YOU the engineer and not them?
               | 
               | Because you made it formally, they just described it. So
               | you're the engineer, they're the business analysts.
               | 
               | Also, as a side note, it's not at all reductive to say
               | people who use AI just describe what they want. That is
               | literally, actually, what they do. There's no more secret
               | sauce than that - that is where the process begins and
               | ends. If that makes it seem really uninspired then that's
               | a clue, not an indicator that my reasoning is broken.
               | 
               | You can get into prompt engineering and whatever, I don't
               | care. You can be a prompt engineer then, but not an
               | artist. To me it seems plainly obvious nobody has any
               | trouble applying this to everyone else, but suddenly when
               | it's AI it's like everyone's prior human experience
               | evaporates and they're saying novel things.
        
               | aenvoker wrote:
               | Try it sometime. Don't just type one prompt and declare
               | the job done. Try to make something that invokes a
               | reaction in yourself.
               | 
               | AI makes it easy to generate ten thousand random images.
               | Making something of interest still requires a lot of
               | digging in the tools and in your self.
        
               | consteval wrote:
               | Right, it can require describing and refining over and
               | over. I still don't think that means you did the thing.
               | Otherwise, the business analysts who have to constantly
               | describe requirements would be software engineers, but
               | they're not.
               | 
               | Not that that isn't a skill in it of itself. I just don't
               | think it's a creationary skill. What you're creating is
               | the description, not the product.
        
               | aenvoker wrote:
               | Best reply I can give ya I already typed up for someone
               | else here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41743680
        
               | ipaddr wrote:
               | You are creating the product but have to go through an
               | unclear layer and through trial and error you try to
               | reach your original vision. No different from painting a
               | picture for an amateur.
               | 
               | The better you get the closer you can get to your
               | original vision.
        
             | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
             | I'll be blunt, all of those images look comically generic
             | and extremely "AI".
             | 
             | > Photography, digital painting, 3D rendering
             | 
             | Those are not the same as AI. Using AI is akin to standing
             | beside a great pianist and whispering into his ear that you
             | want "something sad and slow" and then waiting for him to
             | play your request. You might continue to give him _prompts_
             | but you 're just doing that. In time, you might be called a
             | "collaborator" but your involvement begins at bare minimum
             | and you have to justify that you're more involved --- the
             | pianist doesn't, the pianist is _making_ the music.
             | 
             | You could record the song and do more to the recording, or
             | improv along with your own instrument. But just taking the
             | raw output again and again is simply getting a response to
             | your prompt again and again.
             | 
             | The prompt themselves are actually _more_ artistic as they
             | venture into surrealist poetry and prose, but the images
             | are almost always much less interesting artistically than
             | the prompts would suggest.
        
               | schmidtleonard wrote:
               | > I'll be blunt, all of those images look comically
               | generic and extremely "AI".
               | 
               | Ok, now I know you're watching through hate goggles.
               | Fortunately, not everyone will bring those to the party.
               | 
               | > Using AI is akin... [goes on to describe a clueless
               | iterative prompting process that wouldn't get within a
               | mile of the front page]
               | 
               | You've really outed yourself here. If you think it's all
               | just iterative prompting, you are about 3 years behind
               | the tools and workflows that allow the level of quality
               | and consistency you see in the best AI work.
        
               | blargey wrote:
               | I scrolled through and...have to agree with their
               | impression. I'm confused as to what you thought is being
               | demonstrated by images on https://civitai.com/images of
               | all things, since it's all very high-concept/low-
               | intentionality, to put it nicely. Did you mix it up with
               | a different link?
        
               | Nadya wrote:
               | My litmus test is to simply lie. It weeds out the people
               | hating AI simply because they know or think it is AI. If
               | you link directly to an AI site they're already going to
               | say they hate it or that it all "looks like AI slop". You
               | won't get anywhere trying to meet them at a middle ground
               | because they simply aren't interested in any kind of a
               | middle ground.
               | 
               | > https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/zq91wm/anon
               | s_dis...
               | 
               | Which is exactly the opposite of what the artists claim
               | to want. But god is it hilarious following the anti-AI
               | artists on Twitter who end up having to apologize for
               | liking an AI-generated artwork pretty much as a daily
               | occurrence. I just grab my popcorn and enjoy the show.
               | 
               | Every passing day the technologies making all of this
               | possible get a little bit better and every single day
               | continues to be the worst it will ever be. They'll point
               | to today's imperfections or flaws as evidence of
               | something being AI-generated and those imperfections will
               | be trained out with fine tuning or LoRA models until
               | there is no longer any way to tell.
               | 
               | E: A lot of them also don't realize that besides text-to-
               | image there is image-to-image for more control over
               | composition as well as ControlNet for controlling poses.
               | More LoRA models than you can imagine for controlling the
               | style. Their imagination is limited to strictly text-to-
               | image prompts with no human input afterwards.
               | 
               | AI is a tool not much different than Photoshop was back
               | when "digital artists aren't real artists" was the
               | argument. And in case anyone has forgotten: "You can't
               | Ctrl+Z real art".
               | 
               | Ask any fractal artists the names they were called for
               | "adjusting a few settings" in Apophysis.
               | 
               | E2:
               | 
               | We need more tests such as this. The vast majority of
               | people can't identify AI nearly as well as they think
               | they can identify AI - even people familiar with AI who
               | "know what to look for".
               | 
               | https://www.tidio.com/blog/ai-test/
               | 
               | Artworks (3/4) | Photos (6/7) | Texts (3/4) | Memes (2/2)
               | 
               | Fun excerpt by the way:
               | 
               | > Respondents who felt confident about their answers had
               | worse results than those who weren't so sure
               | 
               | > Survey respondents who believed they answered most
               | questions correctly had worse results than those with
               | doubts. Over 78% of respondents who thought their score
               | is very likely to be high got less than half of the
               | answers right. In comparison, those who were most
               | pessimistic did significantly better, with the majority
               | of them scoring above the average.
        
             | TranquilMarmot wrote:
             | Sorry, but there's nothing interesting or unique about the
             | images on that site.
        
           | xanderlewis wrote:
           | > I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI
           | online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really
           | online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability,
           | to make art themselves.
           | 
           | Well put. This is also my experience. And I'm no AI doom-
           | monger or neo-Luddite.
        
           | mattgreenrocks wrote:
           | > I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI
           | online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really
           | online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability,
           | to make art themselves.
           | 
           | Yes, I've noticed this. The people who are excited about it
           | usually come off as opportunistic (hence the "breathless
           | joy"), and not really interested in letting whatever
           | art/craft they want to make deeply change them. They just
           | want the recognition of being able to make the thing without
           | the formative work. (I hesitate to point this out,
           | anticipating allegations of elitism.)
           | 
           | Plus, _really_ online people tend to dominate online
           | discussions, giving the impression that the public will be
           | happy to consume only AI generated things. Then again, the
           | public is happy to consume social media engagement crap, so I
           | 'm very curious what the revealed preference is here.
           | 
           | The value in learning this stuff is that it changes you. I'll
           | be forever indebted to my guitar teacher partially because he
           | teaches me to do the work, and that evidence of doing the
           | work is manifest readily, and to play the long, long game.
        
           | aliasxneo wrote:
           | I think a key piece here is that I often consume art from the
           | mindset of, "What was the creator thinking?" What is their
           | worldview? What social situations pushed them to express
           | things in this way?
           | 
           | For video, it's possible AI can feed into the overall
           | creative pipeline, but I don't see it replacing the human
           | touch. If anything, it opens up the industry to less-
           | technical people who can spend more time focusing on the
           | human touch. Even if the next big film has AI generation in
           | it, if it came from someone with a fascinating story and
           | creative insight, I'll still likely appreciate it.
        
         | phainopepla2 wrote:
         | I suspect the demand for human creative output will shrink, as
         | AI generated content will be so cheap and prevalent, even as it
         | will only ever be an imitation of human art. The same way that
         | most people eat terrible, flavorless tomatoes from the
         | supermarket, instead of the harder to grow heirloom varieties.
         | 
         | But I don't think human creativity is going anywhere. Unless
         | there is some breakthrough that moves it far beyond anything
         | we've seen so far, AI will always be trailing behind us. Human
         | creativity might become a more boutique product, like heirloom
         | tomatoes, but there will always be people who value it.
        
           | throwaway2203 wrote:
           | There might be more creating it than there are those valuing
           | it
        
         | GaggiX wrote:
         | Most of my entertainment is watching dudes sitting in their
         | chairs talking into a microphone. I find it more entertaining
         | than the billion dollar entertainment industry.
        
         | batch12 wrote:
         | I think there will be a body that certifies artistic content as
         | organic similar to food. This will create a premium offering
         | for organic content and a lower tier AI /uncertified level.
        
         | mrtksn wrote:
         | AI content is already very dull, the text is dull the music is
         | dull the images and videos are also dull. No one is interested
         | in AI Seinfeld or this short movie that AI created. Their only
         | audience is just people admiring what the machines come to be
         | able to do.
         | 
         | Any AI content that's good, and there are a few of them,
         | actually has plenty of human creativity in it.
         | 
         | There are some AI artist that begin to emerge or there are some
         | AI generated personas out there who are interesting but they
         | are interesting only because the people behind it made it
         | interesting.
         | 
         | I am not fatalistic at all for the creatives. AI is going to
         | wipe out the producers and integrators(people that specialize
         | in putting things together, like coders who code when tasked,
         | painters who paint when commissioned, musicians that play once
         | provided with the score), not the creatives.
         | 
         | The GOTCHA, IMHO, will be people not developing skills because
         | the machine can do it but I guess maybe they will the skills
         | that make the machine sing.
        
         | righthand wrote:
         | So we'll automate away entertainment jobs but none of the cool
         | science jobs will be automated? I don't understand how this
         | proposed world will have an available work for scientists but
         | not entertainers.
        
           | supriyo-biswas wrote:
           | At least for Meta, this has implications for keeping people
           | engaged in their metaverse.
        
         | farts_mckensy wrote:
         | Science is never going to supplant art. They serve two very
         | different functions in society. What I hope is that performance
         | art and experiences that can't be easily replicated by AI
         | become more mainstream. Things like ARGs and multimedia
         | storytelling, where there is a back and forth participatory
         | sort of process between the audience and the creator.
        
         | Fluorescence wrote:
         | Cheaper more effective entertainment is likely to only cause
         | more problems: it will be more addictive, better at hijacking
         | our brains and attention, better at pushing the propaganda
         | goals of the author, better at filling traditional "human
         | needs" of relationships that forever separates us from each
         | other into a civilisation of Hikikomori.
         | 
         | I have little faith in an optimistic view of human nature where
         | we voluntarily turn more toward more intellectual or worthy
         | pursuits.
         | 
         | On one hand, entertainment has often been the seed that drives
         | us to make the imagined real, but the adjacent possible of
         | rewarding adventure/discovery/invention only seems to get more
         | unaffordable and out of reach. Intellectual revolutions are
         | like gold rushes. They require discovery, that initial nugget
         | in a stream, the novel idea that opens a door to new
         | opportunities that draws in the prospectors. Without fresh
         | opportunity, there is no enthusiasm and we stew in our juices.
         | 
         | I suspect the only thing that might save us from total
         | solipsistic brain-in-vat immersion in entertainment... is
         | something like glp-1 type antagonists. If they can help us
         | resist a plate of Danish maybe they can protect us from
         | barrages of Infinite Jest brain missiles from Netflix about
         | incestuous cat wizards or whatever. Who knows what alternatives
         | this new permanently medicated society, Pharma-Sapiens, might
         | pursue instead though.
        
           | petesergeant wrote:
           | We'll be able to start fuzz testing the human brain. A horror
           | film that uses bio-feedback to really push the bits that are
           | actually terrifying you, in real-time. Campaign videos that
           | lean in to the bit that your lizard brain is responding to.
        
             | slavik81 wrote:
             | The Onion was ahead of the curve with "New Live Poll Lets
             | Punits Pander To Viewers In Real Time".
             | https://youtu.be/uFpK_r-jEXg
        
           | schmorptron wrote:
           | I believe you're right too. The internet and smartphones are
           | great technology in general, and can do pretty great things
           | but what they've ended up doing was screwing with the reward
           | mechanisms in my brain since I was a teenager. Most optimized
           | use case.
           | 
           | Reading these threads sometimes feels like a bad idea,
           | because you just get new sad ideas on how things will almost
           | certainly be used to make it worse than just the ones you can
           | come up on your own.
        
         | hindsightbias wrote:
         | They will be creating for a very small crowd. It will be nice
         | for me, because I can't stand all the blockbuster movies that
         | prioritize stretching physics with unrealistic special effects
         | over plot and dialog.
         | 
         | I think the musicians that are barely hanging on at this point
         | would prefer to create over having to slog around on tours to
         | pay their health insurance. But nobody is paying for creation.
        
         | Alex-Programs wrote:
         | > Maybe, at that point, we decide that exploring space,
         | stretching our knowledge of physics and chemistry, and
         | combating disease are far more interesting because they are
         | real.
         | 
         | It's a compelling thought - we all like hope - and I think it
         | might be realistic if all of humanity were made up of the same
         | kind of people who read hacker news.
         | 
         | But is this not what the early adopters of the internet
         | thought? I wasn't there - this is all second hand - but as far
         | as I know people felt that, once everyone gained the ability to
         | learn anything and talk to anyone, anywhere, humanity would be
         | more knowledgeable, more thoughtful, and more compassionate.
         | Once everyone could effortlessly access information, ignorance
         | would be eliminated.
         | 
         | After all, that's what it was like for the early adopters.
         | 
         | But it wasn't so in practice.
         | 
         | I worry that hopeful visions of the future have an aspect of
         | projecting ourselves onto humanity.
        
         | kypro wrote:
         | Why would humans explore space when AIs are more intelligent
         | and more physically able to?
         | 
         | Seems more likely we'll just plug ourselves into ever more
         | addicting dopamine machines. That's certainly the trend so far
         | anyway.
        
         | hcarvalhoalves wrote:
         | Art and entertainment are different things.
        
         | earth_walker wrote:
         | Paint didn't replace charcoal. Photography didn't replace
         | drawings. Digital art didn't replace physical media. Random
         | game level generation didn't replace architecture.
         | 
         | AI generated works will find a place beside human generated
         | works.
         | 
         | It may even improve the market for 'artsy' films and great
         | acting by highlighting the difference a little human talent can
         | make.
         | 
         | It's not the art that's at risk, it's the grunt work. What will
         | shift is the volume of human-created drek that employed
         | millions to AI-created drek that employs tens.
        
         | boogieknite wrote:
         | Im hopeful US will have some subsidy for real creative works
         | like ive seen in europe.
         | 
         | My limited understanding is that AI could generate Netflix top
         | 10 hits that mostly recycle familiar jokes. The creators made a
         | great product, but i expect anyone who attended film school
         | would rather try something new, only issue is Netflix wont foot
         | the bill (i know, they take a few oscar swings a year now).
         | 
         | Recent examples: TV Glow, Challengers, Strange Darling. All
         | movies with specific, unique perspectives, visuals, acting
         | choices, scripts, shots, etc. Think about the perspective in
         | The Wire, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm. There is plenty
         | of great work that obviously is nearly impossible to reproduce
         | by an AI and i hope that AI "art" is taxed in a way that funds
         | human projects.
        
         | zoogeny wrote:
         | Consider another angle.
         | 
         | I follow a lot of the new AI gen crowd on Twitter. This
         | community is made up of a lot of creative industry people. One
         | guy who worked in commercials shared a recent job he was on for
         | a name brand. They had a soundstage, actors, sound people,
         | makeup, lighting, etc. setup for 3 days for the shoot.
         | Something like 25 people working for 3 days. But behind that
         | was about 3 months of effort if one includes pre-production and
         | post-production. Think about editing, color correction, sound
         | editing, music, etc.
         | 
         | Your creative children may live in a world where they can
         | achieve a similar result themselves. Perhaps as a small team,
         | one person working on characters, one person doing audio, one
         | person writing a script. Instead of needing tens of thousands
         | of dollars of rented equipment and 25 experts, they will be
         | able to take ideas from their own head and realize them with
         | persistence and AI generation.
         | 
         | I honestly believe these new tools will unlock potential beyond
         | what we can currently imagine.
        
           | Miraste wrote:
           | That will be the end of creative work. Marketing and
           | promotion is already the most difficult part of any creative
           | endeavor. With literally unlimited trash being produced,
           | it'll become impossible.
        
         | echoangle wrote:
         | If I imagine a random person on the street, they certainly
         | aren't enjoying fine human arts because it's made by a real
         | person. They are scrolling TikTok and don't care if it's AI
         | generated or not, if they even notice. The people actually
         | caring about art because it is art are maybe 20% of the
         | population.
        
           | alex_suzuki wrote:
           | I think 20% is being generous... more like 2%.
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | Creativity is about having original ideas. So far, AI isn't
         | that good at that, and neither at maintaining a consistent idea
         | throughout a production. Will AI be able to come up with a
         | compelling novel series, music album, video game, movie or TV
         | series in ten years? Possibly, but there's also a good chance
         | that it won't.
        
           | elwell wrote:
           | The same can be said about plain old I.
        
       | sroerick wrote:
       | I haven't had any luck being able to effectively generate
       | compositions with text to image / text to video. Prompts like
       | "subject in the lower third of the frame" have thus far
       | completely failed me. I'm sure this will change in the future but
       | this seems pretty fundamental for any 'AI Powered Film' to
       | function the way a film director would.
       | 
       | Curious if anybody has a solution or if this works for that
        
       | Animats wrote:
       | Likely results:
       | 
       | - Every script in Hollywood will now be submitted with a previs
       | movie.
       | 
       | - Manga to anime converters.
       | 
       | - Online commercials for far more products.
        
         | sroussey wrote:
         | Scripts with AI low quality "movie" with blocking etc is an
         | interesting concept.
         | 
         | Manga to anime already exists.
         | 
         | Commercials, particularly for social/online, already happening
         | as well.
        
       | wseqyrku wrote:
       | Looking at bolt.new I think all the Studio/IDE type of apps are
       | going to look like that. Could be video or code or docs etc.
       | 
       | I can see myself paying a little too much to have a local setup
       | for this.
        
       | jcims wrote:
       | One thing I've noticed with the set of music generation tools (eg
       | Udio, Suno) is that there's a sort of profound attachment to
       | songs that you create. I've never made music the old fashioned
       | way so I'm guessing the same could be true for that as well, but
       | there are songs I've made on Udio that I personally think are
       | amazing but nobody else really responds to. Conversely I can see
       | similar levels of pride and attachment from others for songs they
       | have created that don't do anything for me.
       | 
       | It's going to be interesting to see how that plays out when you
       | can make just about any kind of media you wish. (Especially when
       | you can mix this as a form of 'embodiment' to realize
       | relationships with virtual agents operated by LLMs.)
        
         | SamBorick wrote:
         | > I've never made music the old fashioned way so I'm guessing
         | the same could be true for that as well
         | 
         | Yes, it is. You should try it.
        
           | grepfru_it wrote:
           | It's the same feeling. No different from rebuilding that
           | crazy synth you made one night, succeeding, and then being
           | able to improv/vamp with it during a live session. It is a
           | creative process and I urge anyone who finds the high level
           | aspect of music creation to pursue the lower levels
        
         | corytheboyd wrote:
         | > I personally think are amazing but nobody else really
         | responds to.
         | 
         | Welcome to making music lol. Since there is so much of it, you
         | have to make the absolute best to even be considered. And then,
         | because so many people make the absolute best, people only care
         | about the persona making the music (as great as you are, you
         | aren't Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Damon Albarn). Your
         | friends will never care about your music just because you are
         | friends, don't fall into that trap. Also nobody cares about
         | music without good lyrics, because again, there is just so much
         | instrumental content out there that sounds the same, lyrics
         | differentiate it with a human, emotional element.
         | 
         | Just make stuff for fun. Listen to it every now and then and
         | feel the magic of "hehe I made that"
        
           | changing1999 wrote:
           | > Also nobody cares about music without good lyrics
           | 
           | Well, that's an exaggeration if I've ever seen one. Firstly,
           | so much of current chart music has atrocious lyrics. And
           | secondly, instrumental music is _very_ popular.
        
             | corytheboyd wrote:
             | You got me, I exaggerated on the internet. Sorry.
        
         | changing1999 wrote:
         | "Music is about communication" (John Lennon, IIRC). Don't
         | expect people to profoundly connect to music that is nothing
         | more than a collection of regurgitated ideas.
         | 
         | Not to sound too crass, but a parallel could be drawn to
         | smelling one's own farts and wondering why no one else
         | appreciates the smell.
        
           | TranquilMarmot wrote:
           | "I microwaved this frozen pizza while I was desperately
           | craving pizza, so it was perfect to me. Why does my friend
           | who usually eats hand-crafted pizza not think it's as good?!"
        
         | vunderba wrote:
         | _One thing I 've noticed with the set of music generation tools
         | (eg Udio, Suno) is that there's a sort of profound attachment
         | to songs that you create._
         | 
         | With all due respect, how could there be when at the click of a
         | button you can generate entire songs? You didn't come up with
         | the chord progression, the structure, the melodic motifs, or
         | the lyrics.
         | 
         | My attachment to my works is _directly proportional_ to the
         | amount of effort it took to create them.
        
           | s3p wrote:
           | I think OP is saying they really enjoy the song. Not that
           | they feel it is their magnum opus.
        
           | wantsanagent wrote:
           | Imagine you've had an idea bouncing around in your head, or
           | even an emotion, for a long time and you've never been able
           | to express it. Then one day you push a button and a piece of
           | art captures what you've been feeling perfectly.
           | 
           | It's not the craft that drives attachment in this case but
           | the emotional resonance of something that you think _should_
           | exist finally existing.
        
             | changing1999 wrote:
             | AI mentioned above is not at the level of capturing and
             | expressing ideas or emotions beyond "a sad rock song about
             | a breakup". Try guiding it to express any clearly formed
             | musical idea.
             | 
             | Author's attachment is to a large degree based on the false
             | notion that they somehow contributed to the creation
             | process.
             | 
             | The generic, frigid, un-interesting "product" that is
             | produced by said AI is why no one other than the prompter
             | is moved by the result.
        
               | jcims wrote:
               | This is a tad overwrought. There _is_ a creative process,
               | but it's much more akin to simple producing rather than
               | composing.
               | 
               | My point wasn't to debate the merit of generated music,
               | it was simply to highlight the effect I described.
        
               | changing1999 wrote:
               | It's not closer to producing that it is to composing. In
               | fact, I would say it's closer to composing in the sense
               | that you can at least add lyrics.
               | 
               | Production requires specifying very precise requirements,
               | which the current gen AI is unable to follow. Even at the
               | most fuzzy production level like "a song with strings and
               | a choir", Suno will generate something completely
               | irrelevant. And if you will try to go deeper -- use a
               | classic Moog synth line in the chorus -- don't expect to
               | get anything meaningful.
               | 
               | I won't argue that in the most broad sense, prompt
               | engineering is a creative process. Picking which shoes to
               | wear to work is also a creative process. My argument is
               | that this has barely anything to do with the process of
               | music composition or production. You can literally reuse
               | the same prompt to generate an image or a poem.
        
           | throwup238 wrote:
           | _> You didn 't come up with the chord progression, the
           | structure, the melodic motifs, or the lyrics._
           | 
           | Both Suno and Udio allow paid subscribers to upload their own
           | clips to extend from. It works for setting up a beat or
           | extending a full composition from a DAW.
           | 
           | Suno's is more basic than Udio's which allows in painting and
           | can create intros as well as extensions, but the tools are
           | becoming more and more powerful for existing musicians. With
           | Udio you can remix the uploaded clip so you can create the
           | cord progression and melody using one set of instruments or
           | styles (or hum it) and transform it into another.
           | 
           | I also use this feature all the time to move compositions
           | from one service to the other. Suno is better at generating
           | intros and interesting melodies while Udio is better at the
           | editing afterwards.
        
           | GrantS wrote:
           | You can absolutely specify your own lyrics and structure to
           | Suno.
        
           | takinola wrote:
           | I can imagine a painter two hundred years ago saying the same
           | thing about photographs. How can you feel attachment to a
           | picture when you did not make each brush stroke?
        
           | jcims wrote:
           | I have no explanation.
           | 
           | It's not a sense of pride or accomplishment. I don't know
           | what it is. Maybe a small amount of pride. It's hard to say.
           | But there is a definite connection that feels different
           | listening to songs i requested vs those that other people
           | have.
        
         | Kiro wrote:
         | This is not unique to AI. People simply don't care about your
         | stuff. Ask any regular artist or game developer.
        
         | scudsworth wrote:
         | link a song you prompted that you personally think is amazing
        
       | dpcan wrote:
       | You know it's going to happen:
       | 
       | "I want a funny road trip movie staring Jim Carey and Chris
       | Farley, based in Europe, in the fall, where they have to rescue
       | their mom played by Lucille ball from making the mistake of
       | marrying a character played by an older Steve Martin."
       | 
       | 10 minutes later your movie is generated.
       | 
       | If you like it, you save it, share it, etc.
       | 
       | You have a queue of movies shared by your friends that they
       | liked.
       | 
       | Content will be endless and generated.
        
         | adventured wrote:
         | It'll require tens to hundreds of hours to script the flow of
         | the AI content, to edit, make adjustments, clean it up, make
         | the scenes link together smoothly, fix small glitches. Even
         | with far more advanced AI, it won't come together like a movie
         | people would enjoy watching, without vast human labor involved.
         | 
         | Sub one percent of people are going to be willing to put in the
         | hours to do it.
         | 
         | The bulk of the spammed created content will be: the masses
         | very briefly playing with the generative capabilities,
         | producing low quality garbage that after five minutes nobody is
         | interested in and then the masses will move on to the next
         | thing to occupy a moment of their time. See: generative image
         | media today. So few people care about the crazy image creation
         | abilities of MidJourney or Flux, that you'd think it didn't
         | exist at all (other than the occasional related headline about
         | deepfakes and or politics).
        
           | halyax7 wrote:
           | Much of those editing steps could be streamlined and/or
           | straight up automated so that estimate will come way down
           | over time
        
         | candiddevmike wrote:
         | The content bubble apocalypse, where no one is ever watching
         | the same thing and we lose all cultural connections to each
         | other. At least until someone figures out an algorithm/prompt
         | to influence the content, yvan eht nioj style.
        
           | adventured wrote:
           | The opposite will occur. Very little will change from how
           | people consume content today. There won't be endless amounts
           | of quality content, there will still be very little high
           | quality content. There will be brief bursts of large amounts
           | of garbage that nobody pays attention to (as a small
           | percentage of people flirt with generative media and quickly
           | lose interest; and the vast majority never bother at all).
           | 
           | The extreme majority will all watch the same things just as
           | they do today. High quality AI content will be difficult to
           | produce and will be nearly as limited in the future as any
           | type of high quality content is today. The masses will stick
           | to the limited, high quality media and disregard that piles
           | of garbage. Celebrity will also remain a pull for content,
           | nothing about that will ever change (and celebrity will
           | remain scarce, which will assist in limiting what the masses
           | are interested in).
           | 
           | By and large people only want to go where other people are
           | at. Nothing about AI will change that, it's a trait that is
           | core to humanity. The way that applies to content is just the
           | same as it does a restaurant: content is a mental (and
           | sometimes physical) destination experience just as a
           | restaurant or vacation trip is.
        
             | imiric wrote:
             | I think both things will be true. We will enjoy common
             | media that everyone else enjoys, not because of its high
             | quality, but because it's shared shared within our social
             | circles. And we will also generate highly personalized
             | media for our own enjoyment, because we will have full
             | control over it. The quality of this media won't
             | necessarily be "garbage", and will likely be on par with
             | professional productions. It will just be much more
             | personal than anything a professional team could create for
             | us.
             | 
             | Though a reason we would gravitate towards common media
             | more is if what someone brought up in the comments here
             | comes to pass, and celebrities/actors license their
             | likeness to studios only, and amateur tools are not
             | licensed to use them. Though I think there will always be
             | crafty/illegal ways around this. Also, likeness probably
             | won't be worth much, if we can generate any type of
             | character we like anyway. I, for one, couldn't be happier
             | for celebrities and the cultural obsession around them to
             | disappear.
        
             | intended wrote:
             | Rich people will afford the subscription costs for curated
             | and verifiable content.
             | 
             | Plebs will get the mass produced stuff, just like it has
             | been for junk food.
             | 
             | In the information case, even if you wanted to sell good
             | quality, verifiable content, how are you going to keep up
             | with the verification costs, or pay people when someone can
             | just dupe your content and automate its variations?
             | 
             | People who are poor dont have the luxury of time, and
             | verifications cannot be automated.
             | 
             | Most people dont work in infosec or Trust and safety, so
             | this discussion wont go anywhere, but please just know - we
             | dont have the human bandwidth to handle these outcomes.
             | 
             | Bad actors are more prolific and effective than good,
             | because they dont have to give a shit about your rules or
             | assumptions.
        
         | birracerveza wrote:
         | Rick & Morty introduced the concept of interdimensional cable
         | in 2014. Ten years later, it's a reality. Crazy stuff.
        
         | ActionHank wrote:
         | I don't know about you, but my friends and family are boring
         | af. I wouldn't want to watch their queue of noise.
         | 
         | I do hope that more talented people will have more leverage to
         | create without the traditional gatekeeping, but I also doubt
         | this will happen as the gatekeepers are all funding AI tooling
         | as well.
        
         | chankstein38 wrote:
         | My girlfriend and I already sometimes use Suno like this for
         | music. Just generate a bunch of songs under a specific genre
         | (our favorite right now is nordic folk, dubstep) and just
         | listen through. If we want to learn about or remember
         | something, we make a Suno song about it. The songs are almost
         | all bangers too so it's not even a chore to listen through!
        
         | heurist wrote:
         | > Generation failed: I'm sorry, but I cannot generate videos of
         | real people. Please try another prompt.
        
           | 7734128 wrote:
           | Also no violence, or alluding to conspiracies, or historical
           | events.
        
       | oulipo wrote:
       | Impressive, yet more burning GPUs and pushing CO2 in the
       | atmosphere just for stupid stuff that is only of interest to rich
       | western people...
       | 
       | I'd rather have those people work on climate change solutions
        
         | dyauspitr wrote:
         | No thank you, I not going to let my beloved progressives be
         | dragged into Luddism just so you can feel a little better about
         | yourself through insignificant changes without a meaningful
         | impact on the environment. Anything with true lasting effects
         | will have to be top down like renewable resources/energy, EVs,
         | viable alternatives to plastic, nuclear energy etc.
         | 
         | The argument should never be about reducing energy usage,
         | rather it should be about how we generate that energy in a
         | clean, renewable way.
        
         | dievskiy wrote:
         | > Impressive, yet more burning GPUs and pushing CO2 in the
         | atmosphere just for stupid stuff that is only of interest to
         | rich western people
         | 
         | Better to spend 10x amount of energy on humans that will give
         | the same result?
        
         | throwaway38543 wrote:
         | Spoken like a true Frenchman. I suppose it's a good thing you
         | don't have any say in what people research. Perhaps Mistral
         | should be training weather models instead of silly chatbots for
         | ERP?
        
         | Bloedcoins wrote:
         | At least companies are behind it which can actually put the
         | money were its needed and compensate it.
         | 
         | At least microsoft and google are on a co2 neutral race.
         | 
         | And all of these clusters doing something can also do research
         | and partially do.
         | 
         | Its valid critisism, but we need to stop co2 production on a
         | lot of other industries before we do that for datacenters.
         | Datacenters save a lot more co2 (just think about not having to
         | drive to a bank to do bank business).
        
         | kkielhofner wrote:
         | > burning GPUs and pushing CO2 in the atmosphere
         | 
         | My startup develops AI for the nuclear power industry to drive
         | process, documentation, and regulatory efficiency. We like to
         | say "AI needs nuclear and nuclear needs AI".
         | 
         | Big tech has finally realized/gone public that casually saying
         | things like "we're building our next 1GW datacenter" is uhh,
         | problematic[0].
         | 
         | For some time now there has been significant interest/activity
         | in wiring up entire datacenters to nuclear reactors (existing
         | Gen 2, SMRs, etc):
         | 
         | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-huang-says-nuclear-pow...
         | 
         | https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpow...
         | 
         | https://www.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-signs-groundbreaking-en...
         | 
         | https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/10/oracle-is-designing-a-data-c...
         | 
         | https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4913714-google-ceo-eye...
         | 
         | [0] - https://www.npr.org/2024/07/12/g-s1-9545/ai-brings-
         | soaring-e...
        
         | Zpalmtree wrote:
         | utter loser mentality
        
       | joshdavham wrote:
       | I wonder if one day we'll have generative recommender systems
       | where, instead of finding videos the algorithm thinks you'll
       | like, it just generates them on the spot.
        
       | turblety wrote:
       | Why do these video generation ones never become usable to the
       | public. Is it just they had to create millions of videos and
       | cherry pick only a handful of decent generations? Or is it just
       | so expensive there's no business model for it?
       | 
       | My mind instantly assumes it a money thing and they're just
       | wanting to charge millions for it, therefore out of reach for the
       | general public. But then with Meta's whole stance on open ai
       | models, that doesn't seem to ring true.
        
         | FileSorter wrote:
         | There are usable ones
         | 
         | runwayml.com
         | 
         | pika.art
         | 
         | hailuoai.com
        
           | grumbel wrote:
           | klingai.com
           | 
           | lumalabs.ai
        
             | Apocryphon wrote:
             | When I see lists of URLs like that I can only wonder what a
             | future post archeologist, coming upon this long dusty
             | thread half a decade from now, will find when they try to
             | go to those sites.
        
         | causal wrote:
         | I'd guess 1 in 10 model demos turn out to be useful product, at
         | best.
         | 
         | This and Sora are particularly annoying, though, for how they
         | put together these huge flashy showcases like they're
         | announcing some kind of product launch and then... nothing.
         | Apparently there's value in just flexing your AI-making muscle
         | now and then.
        
           | 93po wrote:
           | to be fair, Sora was one of the most mind blowing technology
           | showcases of my life, and openai is successful at raising
           | tons of money
        
         | ActionHank wrote:
         | Cost vs profitability is a big factor and those that don't have
         | a product on the market are heavily cherry picking their demos.
        
         | zoogeny wrote:
         | There are a few available to the public. runway.ai and kling
         | are a couple that I see heavily used on Twitter.
         | 
         | I pay for runway right now for experiments and it works. The
         | problem is that maybe 1 out of 10 prompts result in something
         | useable. And when I say useable I have pretty low standards.
         | Since the model pumps out 5 or 10 second clips you have to be
         | pretty creative since the models still struggle with keeping
         | any kind of consistency between shots. Things like lighting,
         | locations, characters can all morph within/between cips.
         | 
         | The issue isn't quality exactly, it is like 80% there. When it
         | works, it is capable of blowing your mind. You can get
         | something that looks like it is a bonafide Hollywood shot. But
         | that is a single 5 second or 10 second clip. So far there is no
         | easy way to reliably piece those together to make even a 1
         | minute long TikTok.
         | 
         | The real problem is the cost. Since you have to sometimes do 10
         | prompts to get a single acceptable shot it is like a 10x
         | multiplier on the cost per second of video. That can get very
         | expensive for even short experiments.
        
           | hackernewds wrote:
           | How much do you pay? Imagine if they could charge premium
           | prices to studio's like $100k/user
           | 
           | that's probably where the quality is, but not the billions
        
           | yurylifshits wrote:
           | Hi zoogeny (and anyone else here) -- you can try our new app
           | Nim to address the Runway problems you describe
           | https://alpha.nim.video
           | 
           | We offer both image-to-video (same situation as Runway, need
           | a few attempts to make something awesome) and video-to-video
           | (under the name "Restyle 2.0") - this is our newest tool and
           | is highly reliable, i.e. you can get complex motion (kissing,
           | handshakes, boxing, skateboarding, etc) with controllable
           | changes to input video (changing outfits, characters,
           | backgrounds, styles).
           | 
           | Unlike Runway and Kling, we currently offer a smiple
           | UNLIMITED plan for just $10/mo. Check it out!
           | https://alpha.nim.video
        
         | chankstein38 wrote:
         | Came here to say this... These companies all want patted on the
         | back for how cool their video models are but we're still
         | waiting on Sora since like last year. More and more publish
         | these "look at us" papers but don't publish the models or even
         | give us access to them.
         | 
         | They do exist, Luma AI DreamMachine is pretty cool. As well as
         | Kling, Minimax, etc. But they aren't anything like Sora or this
         | appear to be. They work but these, while likely cherry-picked,
         | are still a whole new breed of video generation. But who knows
         | if we'll ever actually get to use them or if we're just
         | supposed to reflect on them and think about how cool and
         | impressive Facebook and OpenAI are.
        
         | ddtaylor wrote:
         | I'm confused the demo let me press a button and generate a
         | video, was it not supposed to?
        
           | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
           | I didn't see a button for that. Just "download paper". Did I
           | miss it?
        
         | altairprime wrote:
         | At "the public" Internet scale, if a hundred million people
         | click Generate, imagine if Meta ends up paying a million
         | dollars instantaneously.
         | 
         | - How many clicks of Generate are budgeted for?
         | 
         | - How many clicks should each user's quota be?
         | 
         | - How much advertising revenue will be earned per click?
         | 
         | - Why should they give away a million dollars?
         | 
         | Right now, AI costs for this are so high that offering this
         | feature 'for free' would bankrupt a small country in a matter
         | of days, if everyone on Meta used it once. It doesn't
         | particularly matter what the exact cost is: it's simply not
         | tolerable to anyone who owes payment for the services provided.
         | 
         | This is also why the AI industry is trying to figure out how to
         | shift as much AI processing as possible to devices _without_
         | letting users copy their models to profit off of the training
         | research spend.
        
           | tqi wrote:
           | Meta owns their data centers, so I don't think that framing
           | is quite right. Increased traffic might cost marginally more
           | in terms of electricity usage, but I think mostly what would
           | happen is the service would degrade.
        
             | yojo wrote:
             | The hardware serving web requests on Facebook is very
             | different from the hardware used to generate these videos.
             | It's different kit, that is currently quite expensive and
             | power intensive.
             | 
             | Facebook absolutely does not have a fleet of GPUs idling
             | that could suddenly spring into action to generate a
             | billion of these videos, nor do they have power stations on
             | standby ready to handle the electricity load.
        
               | tqi wrote:
               | Right, my point is that "paying a million dollars
               | instantaneously" isn't something that Meta would face the
               | way a company with a public cloud infra would, and as a
               | result their motivations / concerns are probably more
               | along the lines of bad user experiences (due to
               | performance bottlenecks) hurting public perception rather
               | than runaway costs bankrupting the company.
        
               | altairprime wrote:
               | Having recently seen cost analysis for hosted enterprise
               | generative AI, we'll continue to disagree on this point.
               | You certainly are describing valid concerns but Meta
               | never struck me as being particularly worried about how
               | people think of them; and, I am certain this doesn't have
               | the 'degrade' capability at the billion users scale -- it
               | would have work queue lengths measured in weeks or more,
               | which is useless for social media.
        
           | afh1 wrote:
           | Just release the model and anyone can run locally, there is
           | no cost except for the end user. Meta has the cash flow to do
           | this if they wanted.
        
             | roywiggins wrote:
             | Meta probably doesn't want people generating porn (and
             | worse) with their models or derivations of their models,
             | for obvious reputational reasons.
        
               | ipaddr wrote:
               | They are in the wrong business if that's the main concern
               | and will get overshadowed by others as tike goes on.
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | Consistency and continuity is the main problem. Take a look at
         | the "Super Panavision" AI videos on YouTube.
         | 
         | Those videos are a good measure for monitoring AI video
         | improvement.
        
         | jonplackett wrote:
         | KlingAI is pretty good - but only 5 second clips for their v
         | 1.5 model which is much better than 1.0
         | 
         | I made this with it (after training a Flux Lora on myself)
         | 
         | https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGdJ6uSh1/
        
       | nephy wrote:
       | McDonald's art.
        
       | deng wrote:
       | These are not movies, these are clips. The stock photo/clip
       | industry is surely worried about this, and probably will sue
       | because 100% these models were trained on their work. If this
       | technology ever makes movies, it'll be exactly like all the
       | texts, images and music these models create: an average of
       | everything ever created, so incredibly mediocre.
        
       | devonsolomon wrote:
       | I've long ago heard it said that the two drivers of technology
       | innovation are the military and porn. And, welp, I don't see any
       | use of this to the military.
        
       | Krei-se wrote:
       | This is totally awesome - the tech is out there and whether you
       | use it to make videos or solve long human / world problems is up
       | to you.
       | 
       | Yeah, we might get the bad killer robots. But it's more likely
       | this will make it unnecessary to wonder where on this blue planet
       | you can still live when we power the deserts with solar and go to
       | space. Getting clean nutrition and environment will be within
       | reach. I think that's great.
       | 
       | As with all technology: Yes a car is faster than you. And you can
       | buy or rent one. But it's still great to be healthy and able to
       | jog. So keep your brains folks and get some skills :)
        
         | whiplash451 wrote:
         | << out there >> is slightly optimistic.
         | 
         | The model is not released and probably won't be for a while.
         | 
         | And it probably costs Meta-scale infra to fine-tune to your
         | needs.
        
       | idunnoman1222 wrote:
       | It will be as interesting as our dreams. So maybe personally
       | interesting, like for a small group sitting around a table and
       | taking the piss. But it's not gonna make a global sensation.
        
       | Jiahang wrote:
       | student here ,i learn cs and management. And i really Puzzled
       | what i learn now can help me have better life in this era of
       | rapid development of technology.
        
       | karel-3d wrote:
       | Why don't videos like this ever trend?
       | 
       | #cabincrew
       | 
       | #scarletjohanson
       | 
       | #amen
        
       | 999900000999 wrote:
       | Very cool.
       | 
       | But I'm worried about this tech being used for propaganda and dis
       | information.
       | 
       | Someone with a 1K computer and enough effort can generate a video
       | that looks real enough. Add some effects to make it look like it
       | was captured by a CCTV or another low res camera.
       | 
       | This is what we know about, who knows what's behind NDAs or
       | security clearances.
        
         | nuz wrote:
         | Same was thought to happen about images but it hasn't. People
         | quickly debunk AI generated content presented as real in
         | replies or community notes. Not a real issue.
        
       | FrequentLurker wrote:
       | They didn't post any examples where it fails?
        
       | smusamashah wrote:
       | I was looking for that landslide effect (as seen even in Sora and
       | Kling) where land seems moving very disproportionally to
       | everything else. It makes me motion sick. I have not seen those
       | Sora demo videos a second time for that reason.
       | 
       | These are smooth, consistent, no landslide (except sloth floating
       | in water, the stones on right are moving at much higher rate than
       | the dock coming closer), no things appearing out of nowhere.
       | Editing seems not as high quality (the candle to bubble example).
       | 
       | To me, these didn't induce nausea while being very high quality
       | makes it best among current video generators.
        
       | pookha wrote:
       | Facebook just spent 40 billion dollars on their AI
       | infrastructure. Can they recoup those costs with stuff like this
       | (especially after the VI debacle)? I doubt it. AI has been a wild
       | ass jagged wasteland of economic failure since the 1950's and
       | should be used with extreme caution by these companies...Like is
       | it worth peoples time to spend ten\fifteen dollars (they have to
       | eventually charge for this) to let AI create a, to be freank,
       | half-assed valley of the uncanny movie? I respect the technology
       | and what they're trying to accomplish but this just seems like
       | they're going completely all in on an industry that's laid waste
       | to smarter people than Mark.
        
         | crakhamster01 wrote:
         | In Facebook's case they have more to gain than just nifty gen
         | AI features - better ads, content recommendations, etc. The
         | investment in AI infra is a moat, and is why FB's ad platform
         | has proven to be much more resilient to tracking changes than
         | their competitors (e.g. Snap).
        
       | heurist wrote:
       | I've been saying for years that generated content is an impending
       | tsunami that's going to drown out all real human voices online.
       | The internet may become effectively unusable as a result for
       | anything other than entertainment.
        
         | boogieknite wrote:
         | This is interesting and i see some of this now. Even here on HN
         | and other forums i thought were mostly "human". Even one of my
         | group chats i can tell one of my friends is using ai responses,
         | but one of the other members cant tell and replies earnestly.
         | 
         | I am grossed out by this. my instinct is to avoid ai slop. The
         | interesting part to me is: What next? Where do we go? Will it
         | be that "human" forums are pushed further into obscurity of the
         | internet? Or will go so far as that we all start preferring
         | meeting in person? Im clueless here
        
           | whiplash451 wrote:
           | Cryptography-secured/signed generated content / interactions?
        
             | 93po wrote:
             | worldcoin project solves a lot of this when combined with
             | web of trust, however everyone's knee jerk reaction to
             | worldcoin is pretty bad and so it's annoying to even
             | mention it
        
               | whiplash451 wrote:
               | I'm not knowledgeable in crypto/worldcoin.
               | 
               | I was rather thinking classical cryptography baked into
               | generative networks.
        
               | tim333 wrote:
               | Worldcoin was intended to solve it but in practice it's
               | not being used that way. Not enough adoption by users or
               | websites.
               | 
               | Maybe in the future?
               | 
               | I'm a worldcoiner but so far it's just been free money.
        
       | mike_hearn wrote:
       | The paper that comes with this is nearly as crazy as the videos
       | themselves. At a cool 92 pages it's closer to a small book than a
       | normal scientific publication. There's nearly 10 pages of
       | citations alone. I'll have to work through this in the coming
       | days, but here's a few interesting points from the first few
       | sections.
       | 
       | For a long time people have speculated about The Singularity.
       | What happens when AI is used to improve AI in a virtuous circle
       | of productivity? Well, that day has come. To generate videos from
       | text you need video+text pairs to train on. They get that text
       | from more AI. They trained a special Llama3 model that knows how
       | to write detailed captions from images/video and used it to
       | consistently annotate their database of approx 100M videos and 1B
       | images. This is only one of many ways in which they deployed AI
       | to help them train this new AI.
       | 
       | They do a lot of pre-filtering on the videos to ensure training
       | on high quality inputs only. This is a big recent trend in model
       | training: scaling up data works but you can do even better by
       | training on less data after dumping the noise. Things they filter
       | out: portrait videos (landscape videos tend to be higher quality,
       | presumably because it gets rid of most low effort phone cam
       | vids), videos without motion, videos with too much jittery
       | motion, videos with bars, videos with too much text, video with
       | special motion effects like slideshows, perceptual duplicates
       | etc. Then they work out the "concepts" in the videos and re-
       | balance the training set to ensure there are no dominant
       | concepts.
       | 
       | You can control the camera because they trained a dedicated
       | camera motion classifier and ran that over all the inputs, the
       | outputs are then added to the text captions.
       | 
       | The text embeddings they mix in are actually a concatenation of
       | several models. There's MetaCLIP providing the usual
       | understanding of what's in the request, but they also mix in a
       | model trained on character-level text so you can request specific
       | spellings of words too.
       | 
       | The AI sheen mentioned in other comments mostly isn't to do with
       | it being AI but rather because they fine-tune the model on videos
       | selected for being "cinematic" or "aesthetic" in some way. It
       | looks how they want it to look. For instance they select for
       | natural lighting, absence of too many small objects (clutter),
       | vivid colors, interesting motion and absence of overlay text.
       | What remains of the sheen is probable due to the AI upsampling
       | they do, which lets them render videos at a smaller scale
       | followed by a regular bilinear upsample + a "computer, enhance!"
       | step.
       | 
       | They just casually toss in some GPU cluster management
       | improvements along the way for training.
       | 
       | Because the MovieGen was trained on Llama3 generated captions,
       | it's expecting much more detailed and high effort captions than
       | users normally provide. To bridge the gap they use a modified
       | Llama3 to rewrite people's prompts to become higher detail and
       | more consistent with the training set. They dedicated a few
       | paragraphs to this step, but it nonetheless involves a ton of
       | effort with distillation for efficiency, human evals to ensure
       | rewrite quality etc.
       | 
       | I can't even begin to imagine how big of a project this must have
       | been.
        
       | gcr wrote:
       | > Upload an image of yourself and transform it         > into a
       | personalized video. Movie Gen's         > cutting-edge model lets
       | you create personalized         > videos that preserve human
       | identity and motion.
       | 
       | A stalker's dream! I'm sure my ex is going to love all the videos
       | I'm going to make of her!
       | 
       | Jokes aside, it's a little bizarre to me that they treat identity
       | preservation as a feature while competitors treat that as a bug,
       | explicitly trying not to preserve identity of generated content
       | to minimize deepfake reputation risk.
       | 
       | Any woman could have flagged this as an issue before this hit the
       | public.
        
         | PhearTheCeal wrote:
         | When I read that text my first thought was making some videos
         | of my mom that passed away, since so few videos of her exist
         | and pictures don't capture her personality
        
           | schlick wrote:
           | This is a Black Mirror episode:
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
        
           | garrettgarcia wrote:
           | The fact that your first thought was how you could use this
           | amazing tech to remember a lost family member who you love,
           | and OP's first thought was that it could be used for evil so
           | it shouldn't exist says a ton about each of you.
        
             | allturtles wrote:
             | Well I think the second use sounds creepy, too. I'm sure
             | that says a ton about me.
        
             | Barrin92 wrote:
             | If you put a piece of technology into the world you should
             | spend more time on what consequences that has for the
             | living in the future, not the dead.
             | 
             | As someone who has worked on payments infrastructure
             | before, it's probably nice if your first thought is what
             | great things an aunt can buy for her niece, but you're
             | better off asking what bad actors can do with your
             | software, or you're in for a bad surprise.
        
           | thwarted wrote:
           | How would videos created from photos, photos that didn't
           | capture her personality, show her personality?
        
         | dagmx wrote:
         | Meta aren't exactly known for responsible use of technology.
         | 
         | I would expect nothing less of Zuck than to imbue a culture of
         | "tech superiority at all costs" and only focus on the
         | responsible aspect when it can be a sales element.
        
         | typeofhuman wrote:
         | I'm surprised this hasn't already been done (or I'm not aware
         | of it)...
         | 
         | Step 1. Train AI on pornographic videos
         | 
         | Step 2. Feed AI images of your ex
         | 
         | Step 3. Profit
        
           | azinman2 wrote:
           | https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/08/technology/deepfake-ai-
           | nu...
        
           | bozhark wrote:
           | why be weird and use real people for reference?
           | 
           | why be extra weird and use a personal reference?
        
           | roywiggins wrote:
           | it very much has been done
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake_pornography
        
         | kredd wrote:
         | Pretty much anyone that I've talked to that somewhat works in
         | AI industry, the attitude is "let it rip right now, and deal
         | with the consequences as it's going to happen one way or
         | another". I'm not sure where I stand on this issue, but the
         | reality is, it's inevitable whether we want it or not.
        
         | lostmsu wrote:
         | Your dream $11.99 kitchen knife! Perfect for stabbing! IT IS
         | REAL!
         | 
         | * product made without use of AI or any unnatural components.
         | pure mountain iron
        
         | meiraleal wrote:
         | One positive aspect of it is that at some point people will
         | just not care about nudes. Which is better for the victims of
         | rageporn, not worse.
        
       | darepublic wrote:
       | The problem with gen AI right now is it still feels fairly
       | obvious. There are numerous YouTube channels that primarily rely
       | on gpt for the visuals. And I don't like them.
        
         | AzzyHN wrote:
         | Obvious to many, but not most, if Facebook is anything to go by
        
         | tiborsaas wrote:
         | I know people who use it day to day in their production
         | workflow for ads and installations. You'd never know if they
         | wouldn't break it down for you. Imagine 1 second scenes which
         | happens so fast your bran just accepts it as "hand made" or
         | professional job. 90% of it was generative AI, but the "good
         | news" is that it still required a human editor who just
         | happened to save a ton of time to make something that wasn't
         | commercially viable because the client wouldn't paid for it
         | otherwise.
        
       | animanoir wrote:
       | wow more useless tech
        
       | smusamashah wrote:
       | One extra clip on their blog post
       | 
       | https://ai.meta.com/blog/movie-gen-media-foundation-models-g...
        
       | zoogeny wrote:
       | I wonder how they will package this as a product. I mean, there
       | is some advantage to keeping the tool proprietary and wrapping it
       | in a consumer product for Instagram/Facebook.
       | 
       | What I hope (since I am building a story telling front-end for AI
       | generated video) is that they consider b2c and selling this as a
       | bulk service over an api.
        
         | takinola wrote:
         | The obvious use case for Meta is content generation. They
         | provide the tools to content creators who create new content to
         | post on Facebook/Instagram which increases Meta's ad inventory
        
       | alexawarrior4 wrote:
       | It is important to note, no matching audio dialog, or even an
       | attempt at something like dialog. This seems to be way beyond
       | current full video generation models.
        
       | modeless wrote:
       | Did I miss it or did they not say anything about letting people
       | actually use these models, let alone open sourcing them?
        
       | intended wrote:
       | Man, everyone is happy with these advancements, and they are
       | impressive.
       | 
       | I'm here looking at users and wondering - the content pipelines
       | are broader, but the exit points of attention and human brains
       | are constant. How the heck are you supposed to know if your
       | content is valid?
       | 
       | During a recent apple event, someone on YT had an AI generated
       | video of Tim Cook announcing a crypto collaboration; it had a
       | 100k users before it was taken down.
       | 
       | Right now, all the videos of rockets falling on Israel can be
       | faked. Heck, the responses on the communities are already
       | populated by swathes of bots.
       | 
       | It's simply cheaper to create content and overwhelm society level
       | filters we inherited from an era of more expensive content
       | creation.
       | 
       | Before anyone throws the sink at me for being a Luddite or
       | raining on the parade - I'm coming from the side where you deal
       | with the humans who consume content, and then decide to target
       | your user base.
       | 
       | Yes, the vast majority of this is going to be used to create
       | lovely cat memes and other great stuff.
       | 
       | At the same time, it takes just 1 post to act as a lightning rod
       | and blow up things.
       | 
       | Edit:
       | 
       | From where I sit, there are 3 levels of issues.
       | 
       | 1) Day to day arguments - this is organic normal human stuff
       | 
       | 2) Bad actors - this is spammers, hate groups, hackers.
       | 
       | 3) REALLY Bad actors - this is nation states conducting
       | information warfare. This is countries seeding African user bases
       | with faked stories, then using that as a basis for global
       | interventions.
       | 
       | This is fake videos of war crimes, which incense their base and
       | overshadow the harder won evidence of actual war crimes.
       | 
       | This doesn't seem real, but political forces are about
       | perception, not science and evidence.
        
         | yieldcrv wrote:
         | I only care about being able to express myself more easily
         | 
         | Maybe get a job where interviewers are biased against my actual
         | look and pedigree
         | 
         | Just ignore everyone else's use of the tool
        
           | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
           | > Just ignore everyone else's use of the tool
           | 
           | That's precisely the hard part!
        
         | AyyEye wrote:
         | The Information Bomb. There's a reason military types and
         | spooks are joining the boards of OpenAI and friends.
         | 
         | https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203092.The_Information_B...
         | 
         | > After the era of the atomic bomb, Virilio posits an era of
         | genetic and information bombs which replace the apocalyptic
         | bang of nuclear death with the whimper of a subliminally
         | reinforced eugenics. We are entering the age of euthanasia.
        
           | BizarroLand wrote:
           | There is some credence to the idea that the third reich was
           | only possible due to mass media. Radio, television, and movie
           | theatres broadcasting and rebroadcasting information onto a
           | populace that did not have experience with media overload and
           | therefore had no resistance to it.
           | 
           | Not attempting to justify their actions or the outcomes, just
           | that media itself is and has been long known to be a powerful
           | weapon, like the fabled story of a city besieged by a greater
           | army, who opened their gates to the invaders knowing that the
           | invaders were lead by a brilliant strategist.
           | 
           | The invader strategist, seeing the gates open, deduced that
           | there must be a giant army laying in wait and that the gates
           | being open were a trap, and so they turned and left.
           | 
           | Had they entered they would have won easily, but the medium
           | of communication, an open gate before an advancing horde, was
           | enough in and of itself to turn the tide of a pitched battle.
           | 
           | When we reach the point where we can never believe what we
           | see or hear or think on our own, how will we ever fight?
        
         | coldcode wrote:
         | Also, cost. How many do you have to generate to get something
         | you want? Does it take 1 or a 100 attempts to get something
         | reasonable, and what does it cost for each attempt? Might not
         | affect Hollywood, but someone has to pay for this to be
         | profitable for Meta. How many 5-Gigawatt power stations will be
         | required (what OpenAI wants to build all over the country) if
         | lots of people use this?
        
         | paganel wrote:
         | A State-actor could have already done that manipulation using
         | CGI or something. The answer is not to trust the people and
         | persons who one sees as not to be trusted. As per your Israel
         | example, I don't personality trust them because I have low
         | levels of trust in genocidal regimes, so even if IDF-asset Gal
         | Gadot were to come to my door and tell me that I won a million
         | dollars I would just slam-shut the door in her face, never mind
         | her and her ilk trying to convince me and people like me
         | through videos posted on the internet of whatever it is they
         | are trying to convince people of.
         | 
         | Again, plain common sense just works, most of the times.
        
         | csomar wrote:
         | The solution to that is to make models both open weight and
         | open source. That will equalize the level playing field.
        
           | rolisz wrote:
           | How will that help? How will uncle Joe be able to tell fake
           | videos better with an open source model?
        
             | ein0p wrote:
             | Uncle Joe will just stop assuming that just because there's
             | a video it is real. That hasn't been the case for decades.
             | About time uncle Joe caught on.
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | So what's the plan to level the playing field in that case?
           | Give everybody an equal amount of compute and ask them what
           | sort of propaganda they'd like to have theirs contribute to?
        
         | tsimionescu wrote:
         | We are at a crossroads of technology, where we're still used to
         | the idea that audio and video are decent proof that something
         | happened, in a way in which we don't generally trust written
         | descriptions of an event. Generative AI will be a significant
         | problem for a while, but this assumption that audio/video is
         | inherently trustable will relatively soon (in the grand scheme
         | of things) go away, and we'll return to the historical medium.
         | 
         | We've basically been living in a privileged and brief time in
         | human history for the last 100-200 years, where you could
         | mostly trust your eyes and years to learn about events that you
         | didn't directly witness. This didn't exist before photography
         | and phonograms: if you didn't witness an event personally, you
         | could only rely on trust in other human beings that told you
         | about it to know of it actually happened. The same will soon
         | start to be true again, if it isn't already: a million videos
         | from random anonymous strangers showing something happening
         | will mean nothing, just like a million comments describing it
         | mean nothing today.
         | 
         | This is not a brave new world of post-truth such as the world
         | has never seen before. It is going back to basically the world
         | we had before photo, video, and sound recordings.
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | That's an interesting thought.
           | 
           | I think I would not like to live in a world in which
           | democracy isn't the predominant form of government. The
           | ability of the typical person to understand and form their
           | own opinions about the world is quite important to democracy,
           | and journalism does help with that. But I guess the modern
           | version of image and video heavy journalism wasn't the only
           | thing we had the whole time; even as recent as the 90's (I'm
           | pretty sure; I was just a kid), newspapers were a major
           | source. And somehow America was invented before
           | photojournalism, but of course that form of democracy would
           | be hard for us to recognize nowadays...
           | 
           | It is only when we got these portable video screens that
           | stuff like YouTube and TikTok became really important news
           | sources (for better or worse; worse I would say). And anyway,
           | people already manage to take misleading or out of context
           | videos, so it isn't like the situation is very good.
           | 
           | Maybe AI video will be a blessing in disguise. At some point
           | we'll have to give up on believe something just because we
           | saw it. I guess we'll have to rely on people attesting to
           | information, that sort of thing. With modern cryptography I
           | guess we could do that fairly well.
           | 
           | Edit: Another way of looking at it: basically no modern
           | journalist or politician has a reputation better than an
           | inanimate object, a photos or video. That's a really bizarre
           | situation! We're used to consulting people on hard decisions,
           | right? Not figuring out everything by direct observation.
        
           | dguest wrote:
           | It's not all the way back as long as solid encryption exists:
           | Tim Cook could digitally sign his announcements, and assuming
           | we can establish his signature (we had signatures and stamps
           | 200 years ago) video proof still works.
           | 
           | So we're not going all the way back, but the era of believing
           | strangers because they have photographic or video proof is
           | drawing to a close.
        
             | tsimionescu wrote:
             | Cryptography is nice here, but the base idea remains the
             | same: you need to trust the person publishing the video to
             | believe the video. Cryptography doesn't help for most
             | interesting cases here, though it can help with another
             | level, that of impersonation.
             | 
             | Sure, Tim Cook can sign a video so I know he is the one who
             | published it - though watching it on https://apple.com does
             | more or less the same thing. But if the video is showing
             | some rockets hitting an air base, the cryptography doesn't
             | do anything to tell you if these were real rockets or its
             | an AI-generated video. It's your trust in Tim Cook (or lack
             | thereof) that determines if you believe the video or not.
        
               | squigz wrote:
               | All this talk of trust speaks to the larger issue here
               | too - that we've lost so much trust in governments and
               | other important institutions. I'm not saying it was
               | undeserved, but it's still an issue we need to fix.
        
             | intended wrote:
             | This is too much work for the human use case.
             | 
             | Practically speaking, no one is going yo check provenance
             | when scrolling through Reddit sitting on the pot.
        
           | kurthr wrote:
           | I'd argue it's a step or two more manipulative. Not only do
           | bad actors have the ability to generate moving images which
           | are default believed by many, they also have the ability to
           | measure the response over large populations, which lets them
           | tune for the effect they want. One step more is building
           | response models for target groups so that each can receive
           | tailored distraction/outrage materials targeted to them.
           | Further, the ability to replicate speech patterns and voice
           | for each of your trusted humans with fabricated material is
           | already commonplace.
           | 
           | True endstage adtech will require attention modeling of
           | individuals so that you can predict target response before
           | presenting optimized material.
           | 
           | It's not just a step back, it's a step into black. Each
           | person has to maintain an encrypted web of trust and hope
           | nobody in their trust ring is compromised. Once they are,
           | it's not clear even in person conversations aren't
           | contaminated.
        
             | tsimionescu wrote:
             | > Further, the ability to replicate speech patterns and
             | voice for each of your trusted humans with fabricated
             | material is already commonplace.
             | 
             | Just like the ability to emulate the writing style of your
             | trusted humans was (somewhat) commonplace in the time in
             | which you'd only talk to distant friends over letters.
             | 
             | > Once they are, it's not clear even in person
             | conversations aren't contaminated.
             | 
             | How exactly could any current or even somewhat close
             | technology alter my perception of what someone I'm talking
             | to in-person is saying?
             | 
             | Otherwise, the points about targeting are fair -
             | PR/propaganda has already advanced considerably compared to
             | even 50 years ago, and more personalized propaganda will be
             | a considerable problem, regardless of medium.
        
               | intended wrote:
               | The difference between artisanal work, vs mass production
               | is enough to make it separate products.
               | 
               | The rate of production is the incomparable, no matter
               | what the parallels may seem.
        
           | whiplash451 wrote:
           | Interesting thought. An alternative is a world where we can
           | securely sign captured medium.
        
           | ixtli wrote:
           | I feel as though i am honor-bound to say that this isn't new
           | and we havent really been living in a place where we can
           | trust in the way you claim. Its simply that every year it
           | rapidly becomes more and more clear that there is no
           | "original". you're not wrong i just think its important for
           | people who care about such things to realize this the result
           | of a historical process which has been going on longer than
           | we've all been alive. in fact, it likely started at the
           | beginning of the 100-200 year period you're talking about,
           | but its origins are much much older than that.
           | 
           | read simulacra and simulation:
           | https://0ducks.wordpress.com/wp-
           | content/uploads/2014/12/simu...
           | 
           | or this essay from pre-war germany https://en.wikipedia.org/w
           | iki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
        
           | intended wrote:
           | Which was the era of insular beliefs, rank superstition and
           | dramatically less use of human potential.
           | 
           | I feel that it's not appreciated, that we are (were) part of
           | an information ecosystem / market, and this looks like the
           | dawn of industrial scale information pollution. Like firms
           | just dumping fertilizer into the waterways with no care to
           | the downstream impacts, just a concern for the bottom line.
        
         | stann wrote:
         | Yeah... African users... oh poor infantile, gullible,
         | creatures... so incapable of discerning truth from falsehood
         | are the ones to be fooled by generative AI...I get the gist
        
         | smallerize wrote:
         | It's just something to put ads next to. Selling ad spots is the
         | business, and investors demand an increase even if they already
         | have 3.5 billion pairs of eyeballs.
         | https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/
        
         | echoangle wrote:
         | This will just lead to people not taking videos as evidence
         | anymore. Just like images of war crime aren't irrefutable
         | evidence due to staging and photoshop, videos will lose their
         | worth as evidence. Which is actually a good thing in some
         | instances. If someone blackmails you with nudes/explicit
         | videos, you can just ignore it and claim it's fake.
        
         | staticman2 wrote:
         | Before photography was invented, mass communications was all
         | just words on paper, right?
         | 
         | How would you know that the British burned down the white house
         | in 1812? Anyone could fake a paper document saying it so.
         | (Except many people were illiterate.)
         | 
         | As far as I can see you need institutions you can trust.
        
         | baxtr wrote:
         | If this was true, why haven't we seen it with manipulated
         | pictures?
         | 
         | Maybe I'm not well informed but there seem to be no example for
         | the issues you describe with photos.
         | 
         | I believe it's actually worse than you think. People believe in
         | narratives, in stories, in ideas. These spread.
         | 
         | It has been like this forever. Text, pictures, videos are
         | merely ways to proliferate narratives. We dismiss even clear
         | evidence if it doesn't fit our beliefs and we actively look for
         | proof for what we think is the truth.
         | 
         | If you want to "fight" back you need to start on the narrative
         | level, not on the artifact level.
        
       | pk-protect-ai wrote:
       | It is really amazing how consistent this model is in demo videos
       | about world object details over time. This spatial comprehension
       | is really spooky and super amazing at the same time. I hope Meta
       | will release this model with open weights and open code, as they
       | have done for the LLaMA models.
        
         | ein0p wrote:
         | Problem is, the moment they release weights someone will fine
         | tune it to generate porn, including CP. So I wouldn't hold my
         | breath for the weights release - no legal dept will sign off on
         | something with this much fallout potential.
        
       | chasing wrote:
       | Periodic generative AI reminder:
       | 
       | It will not make you creative. It will not give you taste or
       | talent. It is a technical tool that will mostly be used to
       | produce cheap garbage unless you develop the skills to use it as
       | a part of your creative toolkit -- which should also include
       | many, many other things.
        
       | Juliate wrote:
       | Impressive but meh.
       | 
       | Impressive on the relative quality of the output. And of the
       | productivity gains, sure.
       | 
       | But meh on the substance of it. It may be a dream for (financial)
       | producers. For the direct customers as well (advertisement
       | obviously, again). But for creators themselves (who are to be
       | their own producers at some point, for some)?
       | 
       | On the maker side, art/work you don't sweat upon has little
       | interest and emotional appeal. You shape it about as much as it
       | shapes you.
       | 
       | On the viewer side, art that's not directed and produced by a
       | human has little interest, connection and appeal as well. You
       | can't be moved by something that's been produced by someone or
       | something you can't relate to. Especially not a machine. It may
       | have some accidental aesthetic interest, much like generative art
       | had in the past. But uninhabited by someone's intent, it's just
       | void of anything.
       | 
       | I know it's not the mainstream opinion, but Generative AI every
       | day sounds more and more like cryptocurrencies and NFTs and these
       | kinds of technologies that did not find _yet_ their defining
       | problem to which they could be a solution.
        
       | azinman2 wrote:
       | Unless I'm missing something, this technology's harmful potential
       | outweighs the good. What is the great outcome from it that makes
       | society better? MORE content? TikTok already shows that you can
       | out-influence Hollywood/governments in 10 seconds with your
       | smartphone. Heck, you can cause riots through forwarding text
       | messages on WhatsApp [1]. Not everything that can be done should
       | be done, and I think this is just too harmful for people to work
       | on. I wish we'd globally ban it.
       | 
       | [1] https://www.dw.com/en/whatsapp-in-india-scourge-of-
       | violence-...
        
         | paul7986 wrote:
         | I agree with Neil Degrasse Tyson AI will kill the Internet
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAuDmBYwLq4
         | 
         | Though maybe there's hope if..
         | 
         | 1. All deepfake image & video tech are enforced to add
         | watermark labels & all websites that publish are force to label
         | fake too.
         | 
         | 2. Crazy idea but a govt issued Internet ID (ID.me is closest
         | to that now with having to use to file taxes with the IRS)
         | where your personal repuation and credit score are affected by
         | publishing fake/scam/spam crap on the Internet ..affectively
         | helping to destroy it. I want good actors on the web not ones
         | that are out for a buck and in turn destroying it.
        
           | echoangle wrote:
           | 1. will never happen, it's way too interesting that people
           | won't try to make an open source version where the watermark
           | can easily be removed by users. Unless you actually
           | criminalize it and put people in jail multiple years for
           | building anything close to deepfakes, you won't be able to
           | prevent that.
        
             | paul7986 wrote:
             | That's why websites uploaders need to read the meta data
             | and found out how it was originally generated then publish
             | / label it ..AI generated it its first creation was such.
        
               | echoangle wrote:
               | And how would you actually enforce that? What would
               | happen if I as a private person AI-generated something on
               | my computer and upload it without the metadata? Would I
               | go to prison?
        
               | paul7986 wrote:
               | governments need to enforce that into all upload(ing)
               | tech (web browser builders, apple's iphone sdk, androids,
               | etc) and require all websites/apps to publish/label the
               | metadata showing AI generated or not.
        
         | edmundsauto wrote:
         | > TikTok already shows that you can out-influence
         | Hollywood/governments in 10 seconds with your smartphone
         | 
         | I can accept the premise that TikTok is _trying_ to do this. Do
         | we have any objective measurement on how effective it has been?
        
           | azinman2 wrote:
           | There's literally non stop article and studies on
           | misinformation of every category. The evidence is beyond
           | abundant.
           | 
           | I'm not suggesting TikTok themselves is trying to do this,
           | but it (and twitter, instagram, facebook, etc etc) is shaping
           | people's world views.
        
             | edmundsauto wrote:
             | My sense is that there is abundant evidence of something,
             | but I'm unable to judge the holistic effect size and
             | direction.
             | 
             | My default perspective is that because humans are so
             | adaptable, every technology shapes our world views. TikTok
             | and Instagram impact us, but so does the plow and shovel.
             | We have research that shows IG harming self-image in some
             | segments of teen girls; what I have not seen evaluated much
             | is how Youtube DIY videos bring self-esteem through
             | teaching people skills on how to make things. These
             | platforms also connect people - my wife had a very serious
             | but rare complication in pregnancy, and her mental health
             | was massively improved by being able to connect with a
             | group of women who had been through/were going through
             | something similar.
             | 
             | My overall point is that it's not very interesting to me to
             | say that technology shapes our world views. Which views? In
             | which way, to what extent? Is it universal, or a
             | subpopulation? Are there prior indications, or does it
             | incept these views? Which views? How much good or harm? How
             | do we balance that?
             | 
             | But what we are left with is a very small view through the
             | keyhole of a door into a massive room that is illuminated
             | with a flickering flashlight. We then glom onto whatever
             | evidence supports our biases and preconceptions, ignoring
             | that which is unstated, unpopular, or violates our sense of
             | the world.
        
       | moomoo11 wrote:
       | This is great. Honestly imagine we get to a point this technology
       | makes most things so demystified we move on to things that are
       | more difficult.
       | 
       | Like cool a movie doesn't need to cost $200 million or whatever.
       | 
       | Imagine if those creative types were freed up to do something
       | different. What would we see? Better architecture and factories?
       | Maybe better hospitals?
        
       | tyjen wrote:
       | While we're still a fair distance away from creating polished
       | products capable of replacing Hollywood gatekeeping; the bursting
       | of the creative dam is on the horizon and it's exciting! I'm
       | looking forward to when you can write a script and effectively
       | make your own series or movie. Tweaking it as you go to fit your
       | vision without the exhausting a large amount of resources,
       | capital, and human networking to produce similar products pre-AI.
        
       | ramshanker wrote:
       | It feels like in the field of AI, a major advancement happens
       | every month now!
        
       | benabbott wrote:
       | Things are about to get weird. We can't control this at any
       | level:
       | 
       | At the level of image/video synthesis: Some leading companies
       | have suggested they put watermarks in the content they create.
       | Nice thought, but open source will always be an option, and
       | people will always be able to build un-watermarked tools.
       | 
       | At the level of law: You could attempt to pass a law banning
       | image/video generation entirely, or those without watermarks, but
       | same issue as before- you can't stop someone from building this
       | tech in their garage with open-source software.
       | 
       | At the level of social media platforms: If you know how GANs
       | work, you already know this isn't possible. Half of image
       | generation AI is an AI image detector itself. The detectors will
       | always be just about as good as the generators- that's how the
       | generators are able to improve themselves. It is, I will not
       | mince words, IMPOSSIBLE to build an AI detector that works
       | longterm. Because as soon as you have a great AI content
       | classifier, it's used to make a better generator that outsmarts
       | the classifier.
       | 
       | So... smash the looms..?
        
         | dinfinity wrote:
         | The challenge is to determine what is real, not what is fake.
         | 
         | I think cryptographic signing and the classic web of trust
         | approaches are going to prove the most valuable tools in doing
         | so, even if they're definitely not a panacea.
        
           | lytedev wrote:
           | This comes up a lot. Because synthesis is so generally
           | feasible plus the existence of very powerful editing tools
           | for things like movies and whatnot, I'm guessing that it will
           | simply become the norm to assume that any image, sound,
           | movie, or whatever may be fake. I expect there won't be a way
           | to verify something was synthesised or "real-synthesized"
           | (since images and videos are ultimately synthesized
           | themselves, just from reality instead of other synthesized
           | content). Even with signing and web of trust we can only
           | verify who is publishing something, but not the method of
           | synthesis.
        
             | tintor wrote:
             | It can be verified if resulting video contains signed
             | metadata with all intermediate steps needed to produce the
             | video from original recording (which is digitally signed by
             | camera).
             | 
             | Downside is that large original video assets would need to
             | be published, for such verification to work.
        
             | nonameiguess wrote:
             | You won't be able, as some average person, to trust that
             | what you gets to Twitter, Instagram, or whatever image and
             | video hosting platform gets popular in the future, is real,
             | but 1) I'm not sure you can today anyway, 2) plenty of
             | people don't consume anything from these platforms and get
             | by fine, and 3) what are you even relying on this
             | information for?
             | 
             | Are you concerned about predicting the direction or "real"
             | state of your national economy? Videos aren't going to give
             | you that. Largely, you can't know. Heavily curated
             | statistical reports compiled and published by national
             | agencies can only give you a clear view in retrospect. Are
             | you concerned that a hurricane might be heading your way
             | and you need to leave? Don't listen to videos on social
             | media. Listen to your local weather authority. Are you
             | concerned about whether X candidate for some national
             | office really said a thing? Why? Are any of these people's
             | characters or policy positions really that unclear that the
             | reality or unreality of two seconds worth of words coming
             | out of their mouths are going to sway your overall opinion
             | one way or another?
             | 
             | Things you should actually care about:
             | 
             | - How are you family and friends doing? Ask them directly.
             | If you can't trust the information you get back, you didn't
             | trust them to begin with.
             | 
             | - How should you live your life? Stick with the classics
             | here, man. Some combination of Aristotle, Ben Graham, and
             | the basic AHA guidelines on diet and exercise will get you
             | 95% of the way there.
             | 
             | - How do you fix or clean or operate some equipment or item
             | X that you own? Get that information from the manufacturer.
             | 
             | Things you shouldn't care about:
             | 
             | - Is the IDF or Hamas committing more atrocities?
             | 
             | - Does Kamala Harris really support sex changes for
             | convicted felons serving prison sentences funded by public
             | money?
             | 
             | - Can Koalas actually surf?
             | 
             | Accept at some point that you can't know everything at all
             | times and that's fine. You can know the things that matter.
             | Get information from sources you actually trust, as in
             | individual people or specific organizations you know and
             | trust, not anonymous creators of text on Reddit. If you
             | happen to be a national strategic decision maker that
             | actually needs to know current world events, you're in
             | luck. You have spy agencies and militaries that fully
             | control the entire chain of custody from data collection to
             | report compilation. If they're using AI to show you lies,
             | you've got bigger problems anyway.
        
             | dinfinity wrote:
             | Trusted entities could vouch for the veracity (or other
             | aspects) of things, especially if they are close to the
             | source.
             | 
             | We already implicitly do this: if a news outlet we trust
             | publishes a photo and does not state that they are unsure
             | of its veracity we assume that it is an authentic photo.
             | Using cryptographic signing that news outlet could
             | explicitly state that they have determined the photo to be
             | real. They could add any type of signed statement to any
             | bit of information, really. Even signing something as being
             | fake could be done, with the resulting signed information
             | being shareable (although one would imagine that any
             | unsigned information would be extremely suspect anyway).
             | 
             | The web of trust approach is to have a distributed system
             | of trust that allows for less institutional parties to be
             | able to earn trust and provide 'trusted' information, but
             | there are also plenty downsides to it. A similar
             | distributed system that determines trustworthiness in a
             | more robust way would be preferable, but I am not aware of
             | one.
        
           | williamcotton wrote:
           | The web of trust doesn't seem to scale! All of the online
           | social platforms trend towards centralization for identify
           | verification.
           | 
           | In my (historically unpopular) opinion we have two optional
           | choices outside of but still allowing for this anonymous
           | free-for-all:
           | 
           | A private company like Facebook uses a privileged system of
           | identification and authentication based on login/password/2FA
           | and relying on state-issued identification verification,
           | 
           | OR, what I feel is better, a public institution that uses a
           | common system based on PKI and state-issued identification,
           | eg, the DMV issuing DoD Common Access Cards.
           | 
           | Trusting districts and nation-states could sign each other's
           | issuing authorities.
           | 
           | The benefits are multifaceted! It helps authenticate the
           | source of deep fakes. It helps fight astroturfing, foreign or
           | otherwise. It helps to remove private companies fueled by
           | advertising revenue from being in a privileged position of
           | identification, etc, etc.
           | 
           | I totally understand any downvotes but I would prefer if you
           | instead engaged me in this conversation if you disagree.
           | 
           | I'd love to have this picked apart instead of just feeling
           | bummed out.
        
         | farleykr wrote:
         | I think pretty soon we will get to the point where there's some
         | sort of significant boundary at all levels between online and
         | real life because the only way to be sure you're seeing
         | something real is to be interacting with it in real life. The
         | internet will not be something you visit on a web browser to
         | get information but will become a place you go where you will
         | simply have to acknowledge that nothing is real. Obviously
         | that's a concern now but I wonder if we'll get to a point where
         | it's taken for granted at large that whatever you see on the
         | internet just isn't real. And I wonder what implications that
         | will have.
        
         | afro88 wrote:
         | > It is, I will not mince words, IMPOSSIBLE to build an AI
         | detector that works longterm
         | 
         | Like pretty much any tool involving detection of / protection
         | from erroneous things, it's forever a cat and mouse game. There
         | will always be new viruses, jailbreaks, banned content, 0-days
         | etc. AI detection is no different.
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | Just stop taking any video you see at face value? People
         | managed without videos before video cameras were available, and
         | the written word was never reliable to start with. Maybe the
         | future won't be that different?
        
           | slg wrote:
           | Except that time "before video cameras" didn't coincide with
           | a time in which everyone had a magic device in our pocket
           | that allowed anyone to send a firehose of propaganda our way.
           | 
           | If yellow newspapers were able to push us to war despite us
           | knowing that "the written word was never reliable to start
           | with", what will be the impact of the combination of this
           | technology and the internet used against a population that
           | has been conditioned over generations to trust video.
        
             | layer8 wrote:
             | If "fake news" is anything to go by, the population will
             | quickly be de-conditioned from trusting video.
        
               | hombre_fatal wrote:
               | Absolutely not. You can just go to Twitter or Reddit,
               | like https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/, to see an image with
               | a (e.g. political) caption that purports something to be
               | true and thousands of people will take it onboard as
               | truth. Nobody asks for a source, or they are admonished
               | when they do for apparently disagreeing with the
               | political claim.
               | 
               | You can go on Youtube to see charlatans peddle all sorts
               | of convenient truths with no evidence.
               | 
               | You don't even need AI. The bug is in the human wetware.
        
           | hoten wrote:
           | good advice for internet citizens (too bad the uptake will be
           | too slow). but doesn't address how courts and law should
           | function.
        
           | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
           | So this is basically a regression to a 19th-century level in
           | terms of being able to trust and understand reporting on the
           | world beyond our own front door. People managed before
           | photographic and video evidence was a thing; you could use
           | eyewitness reports from trusted friends and news on the
           | official telegraphs, to the extent that those were
           | trustworthy. But it's certainly still a big step backward
           | from the 20th century, that brief window of time where it was
           | much easier to record physical evidence of an event than to
           | fake it.
        
             | afh1 wrote:
             | Photographic evidence has been subject to manipulation
             | before computers were even a thing, more so after Photoshop
             | became widely available. There has always been forensics
             | for that, which will continue to evolve.
             | 
             | I think the issue with trust is rooted elsewhere - in
             | social relations, politics, and not in AI generated
             | content.
        
               | maxwell wrote:
               | What remaining institutions still command any trust?
        
               | educasean wrote:
               | ... Most of them?
               | 
               | Do you read the news at all? If you can't trust any of
               | them, then why even bother?
        
               | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
               | It has, but it used to take a lot more skill to
               | manipulate a photo than to take a photo, and convincing
               | video manipulation was even harder. I'm also skeptical
               | that forensics will be able to keep up, because of the
               | basic principle of antagonistic training -- any technique
               | forensics can use can be applied back into improving the
               | pipeline that generates the image, defeating the forensic
               | tool. That certainly wasn't the case in the 20th century.
        
         | mikeshi42 wrote:
         | I agree the cat is out of the bag, but GANs do not work like
         | that. One of the common failure modes in training a GAN is that
         | the discriminator gets too powerful too quickly and the
         | generator then can no longer learn.
         | 
         | Hard to say anything is impossible off of one point - but
         | discrimination afaik is generally seen as the easier problem of
         | the two, given you only need to give a binary output as opposed
         | to a continuous one.
        
         | elwell wrote:
         | > IMPOSSIBLE to build an AI detector that works longterm
         | return Math.random() < Math.pow(0.5, (new Date()).getFullYear()
         | - 2023) ? "Not AI" : "AI";
         | 
         | This should increase in accuracy over time.
        
           | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
           | It turns out that "return 'AI'" is a better strategy when the
           | probability is above 50%:
           | https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/msJA6B9ZjiiZxT6EZ/lawful-
           | unc...
        
         | tintor wrote:
         | Possible option is for cameras to digitally sign the original
         | video as it is being recorded.
        
           | mistercheph wrote:
           | Oi mate, you 'ave a license for producing cryptographic
           | signatures to embed on that footage?
        
         | cloverich wrote:
         | My favorite idea that nobody is talking about is how news
         | organizations are about to get a second life. As soon as it
         | becomes actually impossible to distinguish AI content from
         | human content, news organizations will have the opportunity to
         | provide that layer of analysis in a way that potentially can't
         | be (easily) automated. They are ironically against it but IDK
         | maybe they should be excited about it. Would love someone to
         | poke holes in this.
        
         | sleepybrett wrote:
         | > Nice thought, but open source will always be an option, and
         | people will always be able to build un-watermarked tools.
         | 
         | Thats why you make it punishable by potential prison time if
         | you create/disseminate an non watermarked video generated in
         | this way.
        
       | bitbasher wrote:
       | If social media was the scourge of the last decade, the next
       | decade's scourge will be artificial content.
       | 
       | Digital minimalism is looking more and more attractive.
        
       | rootedbox wrote:
       | Did this website kill anyone else's phone?
        
       | mucle6 wrote:
       | The text to modify a video looks so cool
        
       | tomw1808 wrote:
       | Why does it look ... fake?
       | 
       | Before you downvote, don't get this as a belittling the effort
       | and all the results, they are stunning, but as a sincere
       | question.
       | 
       | I do plenty of photography, I do a lot of videography. I know my
       | way around Premiere Pro, Lightroom and After Effects. I also know
       | a decent amount about computer vision and cg.
       | 
       | If I look at the "edited" videos, they look fake. Immediately.
       | And not a little bit. They look like they were put through a
       | washing machine full of effects: too contrasty, too much gamma,
       | too much clarity, too low levels, like a baby playing with the
       | effect controls. Can't exactly put my fingers on, but comparing
       | the "original" videos to the ones that simply change one element,
       | like the "add blue pom poms to his hands", it changes the whole
       | video, and makes the whole video a bit cartooney, for lack of a
       | better word.
       | 
       | I am simply wondering why?!
       | 
       | Is that a change in general through the model that processes the
       | video? Is that something that is easy to get rid of in future
       | versions, or inherently baked into how the model transforms the
       | video?
        
       | davedx wrote:
       | This is just the landing page for a research paper? It's hard to
       | understand what the actual production capabilities of this are.
        
       | jmakov wrote:
       | Wonder what a AI generated movie from the same script as original
       | would look like.
        
       | yorozu wrote:
       | (commented on wrong thread somehow)
        
         | mistercheph wrote:
         | Wrong thread :)
        
       | phkahler wrote:
       | The kids kite is flying backwards....
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | I can finally watch Star Wars the Smurfs edition
        
       | greybox wrote:
       | At what point did someone look at this and think: "Ah yes, this
       | will be good for humanity right now" ?
        
         | oblio wrote:
         | That person would have been fired :-(
        
         | afh1 wrote:
         | Seems to have great potential in the VFX industry, for one
         | thing.
        
         | tim333 wrote:
         | I don't think it works like that. It's more "Hey! This tech can
         | make funky videos"
        
       | tqi wrote:
       | A lot of folks in this thread have mentioned that the problem
       | with the current generation of models is that only 1 in (?)
       | prompts returns something useful. Isn't that exactly what a
       | reward model is supposed to help improve? I'm not an ML person by
       | any means so the entire concept of reward models feels like
       | creating something from nothing, so very curious to understand
       | more.
        
         | jprete wrote:
         | Bear in mind these systems have already been through the
         | reward-based training, and these are the results that are good
         | enough to show in public.
        
       | sleepybrett wrote:
       | It should be federal law that any video created with GenAI should
       | be watermarked both stenographically and visually. (Same goes for
       | images and audio.. not sure what can be done about ascii)
        
       | qwery wrote:
       | What can you even say about this stuff? It's another incremental
       | improvement, good job Mark. These new video clips of yours are
       | certainly something. I don't know how you do it. Round of
       | applause for Mark!
       | 
       | I will now review some of the standout clips.
       | 
       | That alien thing in the water is horrifying. The background fish
       | look pretty convincing, except for the really flamboyant one in
       | the dark.
       | 
       | I guess I should be impressed that the kite string seems to be
       | rendered every frame and appears to be connected between the hand
       | and the kite most of the time. The whole thing is really
       | stressful though.
       | 
       |  _drunk sloth with weirdly crisp shadow_ should take the top slot
       | from _girl in danger of being stolen by kite_.
       | 
       |  _man demonstrates novel chain sword fire stick with four or five
       | dimensions_ might be better off in the bin...
       | 
       | > The camera is behind a man. The man is shirtless, wearing a
       | green cloth around his waist. He is barefoot. With a fiery object
       | in each hand, he creates wide circular motions. A calm sea is in
       | the background. The atmosphere is mesmerizing, with the fire
       | dance.
       | 
       | This just reads like slightly clumsy lyrics to a lost Ween song.
        
         | hcks wrote:
         | Round of applause for this useless unsubstantiated comment
        
         | chaos_emergent wrote:
         | it's totally wild that your first response is shitting on flaws
         | rather than having your jaw drop at machines producing coherent
         | videos from text.
         | 
         | This is _the worst that machines will ever be at this task_,
         | and most of the improvements that need to be made are a matter
         | of engineering ingenuity, which can be translated to research
         | dollars.
        
           | salmonet wrote:
           | This is Hacker News. That comment was way more positive than
           | I expected for something like this and so I assumed this must
           | be pretty awesome
        
       | mempko wrote:
       | Hippos can't swim. Things are about to get weird where people
       | will start believing strange things. We already have people
       | believing Trump helped people during the hurricane, with images
       | of him wading through water (that are clearly AI generated if you
       | look close enough). We are going to get a form of model collapse
       | at not just the AI level, but societal one.
        
       | garrettgarcia wrote:
       | Harry Potter-style moving pictures are now a reality.
        
       | swayvil wrote:
       | Just feed it a book?
        
       | throw310822 wrote:
       | The porntential is immense.
       | 
       | Seriously though. This is the company that is betting hard on VR
       | goggles. And these are engines that can produce real time dreams,
       | 3d, photographic quality, obedient to our commands. No 3d models
       | needed, no physics simulations, no ray tracing, no prebuilt
       | environments and avatars. All simply dreamed up in real time, as
       | requested by the user in natural language. It might be one of the
       | most addictive technologies ever invented.
        
         | afh1 wrote:
         | Or a multi billion dollar fluke like the Metaverse. Time will
         | tell.
        
         | complianceowl wrote:
         | Hahahaha. I think Websters Dictionary may be interested in
         | hiring you.
        
         | jiggawatts wrote:
         | Did you just pornify a word?
        
         | jsyang00 wrote:
         | Meta is already a target for regulators - they are going to
         | have to be very careful around this. I think this is why the
         | "metaverse" is still more likely to be decentralized than
         | created by a tech giant. Even if Meta wanted to take a
         | libertarian, "dream whatever you want", stance or even a "dream
         | whatever you want so long as it is more or less legal" stance,
         | they would see a regulatory deluge come pouring down on them.
         | There is no way VR will be able to go mainstream without a
         | drawn out fight over content prohibitions. I think the early
         | internet was a bit of a historical outlier in this sense, where
         | it happened to come about when a relatively laissez-faire
         | attitude towards censorship was prevailing and people did not
         | realize the full impact it would have. That is not the case
         | now. People understand on all sides that this technology has
         | the potential to revolutionize our systems of social relations
         | once again, and I suspect that they will be fighting tooth and
         | nail to shape that outcome as they most desire.
        
           | throw310822 wrote:
           | > There is no way VR will be able to go mainstream without a
           | drawn out fight over content prohibitions
           | 
           | Could be, but it's a bit dystopian to imagine that the
           | government would have a say on the images you can generate-
           | locally and in realtime- and send straight to your own eyes,
           | don't you think? Dystopian and very difficult to enforce,
           | too.
        
         | TranquilMarmot wrote:
         | Sorry, but it's probably just going to be used for ads.
        
       | sanj wrote:
       | Hippos don't float.
        
       | zamadatix wrote:
       | When the comments range from "it's the demise of the world" to
       | "it doesn't look quite right" (and everything in-between) you get
       | a sense of just how early we are into this decade's "big new tech
       | thing".
        
       | lucasyvas wrote:
       | Well I wouldn't have called it, but I think Meta is in the lead.
       | They beat Apple to AR and affordable VR. Their AI tooling has
       | basically caught up to OpenAI and at this rate will pass them -
       | is anyone else even playing? Maybe their work culture is just
       | better suited to realizing these technologies than the others.
       | 
       | They're not really showing signs of slowing down either. Hey,
       | Zuck, always thought you were kind of lame in the past. But maybe
       | you weren't a one trick pony after all.
        
         | the8472 wrote:
         | > is anyone else even playing?
         | 
         | Deepmind. Protein folding and solving math problems is just
         | less sexy.
        
       | TranquilMarmot wrote:
       | Most of the comments here talking about bad actors using this for
       | misinformation, but they're ignoring what Meta does- _it collects
       | your information_ and _it sells ads_.
       | 
       | Especially based on the examples on this site, it's not a far
       | reach to say that they will start to generate video ads of you
       | (yes, YOU! your face! You've already uploaded hundreds of photos
       | for them to reference!) using a specific product and showing how
       | happy you are because you bought it. Imagine scrolling Instagram
       | and seeing your own face smelling some laundry detergent or
       | laughing because you took some prescription medicine.
        
       | bilekas wrote:
       | This just seems to serpent eating its own tail and distopian to
       | me, Facebook, a company where people share their own content like
       | videos and pictures now generating content from nothing but AI.
       | To what end?
        
       | bhouston wrote:
       | Where can I download this model? Meta is the open source AI
       | company right?
        
       | eth0up wrote:
       | Alright, I may or may not be a moron, but none of my versions of
       | Firefox can connect to this site because 'some HSTS shit'.
       | 
       | Anyone able to update a dinosaur?
        
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