[HN Gopher] Meta Movie Gen
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Meta Movie Gen
        
       Author : brianjking
       Score  : 1044 points
       Date   : 2024-10-04 13:03 UTC (1 days 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/
        
           | KolmogorovComp wrote:
           | I don't think they will ever release it considering it's
           | likely much worse than flux.
        
         | 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.
        
               | WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
               | You're making an unverifiable claim. How are we supposed
               | to know that the undetected good AI exists at all?
               | Everything I've seen explicitly produced by any of these
               | models is in uncanny valley territory still, even the
               | "good" stuff.
        
               | kelseyfrog wrote:
               | Don't care. Every request for verification will
               | eventually reach the Munchhausen trilemma
        
               | WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
               | Okay. So you are a person who does not care if what they
               | are saying is true. Got it!
        
               | kelseyfrog wrote:
               | Verificationism[1] is a failed epistemology because it
               | breaks under the Munchhausen trilemma. It's pseudo-
               | scientific like astrology, four humors, and palm reading.
               | Use better epistemologies.
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verificationism
        
               | bbor wrote:
               | The core use case is as a small part of larger programs.
               | It's just computer vision but for words :)
        
               | 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.
        
             | mrandish wrote:
             | > AI systems offer high fidelity with weak control
             | 
             | You are spot on. I've been involved in creating
             | technologies used by film and video creators for decades,
             | so I have some understanding of what would be useful to
             | them. The best video AIs I've seen only seem capable of
             | replacing some stock video clip creation because, so far, I
             | haven't seen any ability to maintain robust consistency
             | from shot to shot and scene to scene. There's also no
             | granular control other than the text prompt. At first
             | glance, these demos are very impressive but when you try to
             | map the capability shown to a real production workflow for
             | a movie, TV show or commercial, they're not even close
             | because they aren't even trying to solve the problem.
             | 
             | To be clear, I think it's probably possible to create a
             | video AI that would be truly useful in a real production
             | workflow, it's just that I haven't seen anything working in
             | that direction yet.
        
               | chefandy wrote:
               | _> You are spot on. I 've been involved in creating
               | technologies used by film and video creators for decades,
               | so I have some understanding of what would be useful to
               | them. The best video AIs I've seen only seem capable of
               | replacing some stock video clip creation because, so far,
               | I haven't seen any ability to maintain robust consistency
               | from shot to shot and scene to scene. There's also no
               | granular control other than the text prompt. At first
               | glance, these demos are very impressive but when you try
               | to map the capability shown to a real production workflow
               | for a movie, TV show or commercial, they're not even
               | close because they aren't even trying to solve the
               | problem._
               | 
               | Yeah it's really hard to get across to a lot of folks
               | that are really amped up about these tools that what
               | they're focused on refining is not getting them any
               | closer to their imagined goal in most professional
               | workflows. This will be great right off the bat for what
               | most developers would need images for-- making a hero
               | image for a blog post, making a blurb of video for a
               | background, or a joke, or making assets for their video
               | game that would never cut it for a non-cheapo commercial
               | project but are better than what they'd have been able to
               | cobble together themselves. But those workflows are
               | fundamentally so different from the very first steps in
               | the process. It's a larger-scale version of trying to
               | explain to no-compromise FOSS zealots 20 years ago that
               | Gimp was nowhere near able to replace Photoshop in a
               | professional toolkit because they're completely
               | disinterested in taking feedback about professional use
               | cases, and that being able to write your own filters in
               | Perl doesn't really help graphic designers-- well 20
               | years later, the gap is as wide as it ever has been, and
               | there are even more people, almost exclusively FOSS nerds
               | with to professional visual work experience, that insist
               | it's _better_.
               | 
               | That said, it's nearly as hard to get this across to ADs
               | who are like "what do you mean this shot is going to take
               | you 3 days? I just made these stills which are like 70%
               | there in midjourney in 10 minutes."
               | 
               | > To be clear, I think it's probably possible to create a
               | video AI that would be truly useful in a real production
               | workflow, it's just that I haven't seen anything working
               | in that direction yet.
               | 
               | I think that neural networks, generally, are already
               | fantastically useful in tools like Nuke's Copycat node.
               | Nobody misses masking frame-by-frame if they don't have
               | to do it. But prompt-based tools? Nah. If even 200 words
               | in a prompt was enough information to convey work that
               | needed to be done, why do creative workflows need so many
               | revisions and why are there so many meetings with
               | sketches and mood boards and concept art among career
               | professionals? Text prompts are great for people that are
               | working with a medium they don't really know how to
               | create in because the real artistic decisions are already
               | made by the artists whose artwork was ingested into the
               | models. If you don't understand that level of nuance, you
               | don't see how unbelievably consequential it is to the
               | final product, and not having granular control of it
               | seems nearly inconsequential. Most professionals look at
               | it and see a toy because they know it will never be
               | capable of making what they want it to make.
        
               | mrandish wrote:
               | > neural networks, generally, are already fantastically
               | useful in tools
               | 
               | Yes, I agree. You've highlighted the distinction I should
               | have included of "prompt-based".
               | 
               | There's a vast gulf between these AI-researcher-based
               | concept demos on one side and the NN-based features
               | slowly getting implemented in real production tools. Like
               | you, I've found it challenging to have constructive
               | conversations about AI tooling with anyone not versed in
               | real production workflows. To anyone with real industry
               | experience it's obvious that so far these demos don't
               | represent a threat to real production workflows or the
               | skilled career professionals making a good living. It's
               | not that they're _not_ threatening, they 're just
               | threatening to replace a different type of job entirely.
               | If you're one of the poor souls in an off-shore locale
               | doing remote low-end piece-work like manning a stock
               | photo/video clip farm or doing >$100 per piece gigs on
               | Fivver - then, yeah, you should feel "threatened".
               | 
               | A meta-point I try to make in these conversations is
               | that, at least so far, every actual paying creative job
               | I've seen AI threaten are, IMHO, work I wouldn't wish on
               | my worst enemy. These are low-paid entry-level sweatshop
               | gigs and everyone doing them aspires to do something else
               | as soon as they can. The two analogies I use are: 1) How
               | the "threat" of robotics to jobs is actually playing out.
               | So far, in industrial applications robots are replacing
               | Amazon warehouse and manufacturing assembly line workers,
               | literally today's equivalent of 1920s sweatshop work.
               | Much like the heart-wrenching videos of children in
               | Calcutta earning pennies sifting through junk piles for
               | metal scraps, it'll be a better world when robots replace
               | those jobs and humans have jobs designing, installing,
               | programming and servicing the robots. Likewise in
               | consumer robotics applications, so far, the robots in our
               | house only vacuum the floors, change the cat litter box,
               | and wash the dishes/clothes. Growing up my family spent a
               | couple years living in Asia in the 1970s and we actually
               | had a "wash ama" who came twice a week and washed our
               | clothes manually with a washboard and a tub. Sounds
               | quaint but in reality it was grueling labor. She was a
               | lovely lady but I'm glad Maytag replaced that job.
               | 
               | The second analogy I often use is observing that self-
               | driving cars are mainly a threat to Uber and Lyft drivers
               | who often barely earn minimum wage and have no job
               | security to start with. Career professionals actually
               | working in real video and film production workflows feel
               | as "threatened" by prompt-based AIs as Formula 1 drivers
               | feel about self-driving cars. Why does current F1
               | champion Max Verstappen never get asked how he feels
               | about AI self-driving cars coming for his job? :-) As you
               | observed, anyone who understands the thousands of
               | creative choices which comprise any shot in a quality
               | film doesn't even see these prompt-based AI demos as
               | relevant. Once you've heard a skilled cinematographer,
               | colorist or director of photography spend over an hour
               | deconstructing and debating the creative choices made in
               | single shot or scene from a film, it's hard to even
               | imagine these demos as a threat to that level of creative
               | skill. But being able to crudely copy the traits of a
               | composite of a thousand exemplars of the craft without
               | understanding any of the interactions between those
               | thousands of creative choices does make for impressive
               | demos. Even though the _fidelity_ of the crude copy is
               | amazing, the fact is such shots are a random puree of a
               | thousand different creative choices pulled from a
               | thousand different great shots. That 's the root of what
               | unskilled people call the "AI-clip sheen". It won't be
               | easy to eliminate from prompt-based clip generators
               | because the nature of the NN is it doesn't understand the
               | interactions of all those subtle creative choices it's
               | aping. Mashing together one cinematographer's lens choice
               | from one shot with another cinematographer's filter
               | choice from another shot with a third cinematographer's
               | film stock choice from another film and a colorist's
               | palette from a fourth unrelated work and then training
               | the output filter only against broad criteria like "looks
               | good" or "like a high-quality art film" is not a strategy
               | that, IMHO, will ever produce a true threat to skilled
               | top-level production workflows.
               | 
               | At the same time, as you observed, NN's are already
               | delivering tremendous value eliminating labor-intensive,
               | repetitive manual production work like frame-by-frame
               | rotoscoping and animation tweening, work no one actually
               | in the industry is sorry to see humans being relieved of.
               | While I think NN-based features in production tools will
               | continue to expand the use cases they can assist, I'm not
               | sure AI tools will ever completely replace high-skill
               | production professionals. I've already mentioned the
               | technical challenges based on how NNs work but even if
               | these challenges are someday overcome, there's a more
               | fundamental limitation which is economic. Although
               | feature film, network-level television and high-end
               | commercials have massive cultural reach and are huge
               | industries, the overall economic value of the entire
               | technical production workflow and related tooling isn't
               | as large as most people imagine. From Panavision cameras,
               | Zeiss film lenses and Adobe Premiere to Chapman camera
               | cranes, Sachtler tripods and Kinoflow lights, it's a
               | relatively small industry with no unicorn-level startups.
               | Even assuming one could license all the necessary content
               | and manually tag it, it's hard to imagine a viable
               | business plan which justifies investing the hundreds of
               | millions required to recruit top-level AI researchers,
               | thousands of H100 GPUs, etc to create and train a tool
               | that could really replace the top 1000 career production
               | pros working in Hollywood. There are so many other
               | markets AI can target which are potentially far more
               | lucrative than high-end film and video production
               | workflows. Even the handful of blockbuster Summer tent
               | pole movies made each year that cost $200M to make only
               | spend somewhere around $10M or $20M on production labor
               | and tooling below the department head level. That's not
               | enough money to fund AI replacement anytime in the
               | foreseeable future. The total addressable market of high-
               | end film and video production just isn't big enough to be
               | an attractive target for investors to fund going after
               | it.
        
               | chefandy wrote:
               | I think the most vulnerable spots in the industry are in
               | concept art and matte painting, though I also think
               | companies are starting to realize it's not all its
               | cracked up to be. A colleague that also contracts for
               | _[big famous FX and animation house we all know and
               | love]_ said they fired their entire concept art
               | department last year and replaced them with prompt
               | jockeys.... for a few weeks. The prompters could bang out
               | a million  "great start" rough drafts in an hour, but
               | then when their boss came around and inevitably said "oh,
               | this one is the one to stick with. Just move this to the
               | right and that to the left and make this bigger and that
               | smaller and make this cloth purple" and they were cooked.
               | They didn't even have the comparatively basic photoshop
               | skills to do a hack job there, let alone make changes by
               | hand-- so they'd struggle with control nets and
               | inpainting and more prompts but the whole thing was one
               | gigantic failure and they were begging the centuries of
               | concept art expertise they unceremoniously booted out the
               | door for forgiveness. And those workflows don't require
               | anywhere near the control that, say, compositing does.
               | 
               | My biggest hope for the professional use of these things
               | is in post-render pre-comp polishing for simulations and
               | pyro. They're so good at understanding patterns and
               | having smooth transitions that they can make a nonsense,
               | physically absurd combination of images blend together
               | perfectly... one of my favorites was a background guy's
               | nose in a sepia toned video was neatly melded into a
               | distant oncoming train. I think that could be really
               | great for smoothing out volume textures and things like
               | that. Given, that probably has more to do with my
               | specialty than anything.
               | 
               | My main problem is that I'm just starting out my career
               | in this field after switching from a decade of python dev
               | work, and then doing some visual design before going to
               | art school where I graduated at the top of my program
               | having mostly concentrated in making cool shit at the
               | Houdini/UE confluence. Two years ago everyone was saying
               | "holy crap you've got the golden skillset," and now
               | everyone's like "oof... hang in there... I guess..." Even
               | aside from the strike aftermath, nobody in the market has
               | any idea what to do right now, especially with juniors,
               | let alone a really weird mixture of junior + senior dev
               | that I am with a few contracts under my belt and a ton of
               | really solid coding experience, but nothing really
               | impressive in the industry itself. Who fucking knows. I
               | think a lot of people in charge of hiring are waiting for
               | a moment where it's going to just be sort of obvious what
               | they need to do, and don't want to hire people into FTEs
               | that are going to be eliminated through ai efficiency
               | gains in 6 months. I don't have a lot of insight into the
               | hiring side of the business though.
        
         | 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.
        
               | araes wrote:
               | There's already rabbit holes of fake MMA fighting you can
               | fall into online? Even if you're a "fan" and relatively
               | aware of what to look for ... still difficult to spot?
               | Horribly, had the same sensation while watching UFC at a
               | bar. "Haven't I seen this match where they fall on the
               | ground and hug for hours before?" Mostly empty background
               | audience with limited reactions.
               | 
               | Somebody took AI video editing, and in a year or two,
               | we're already at entire MMA rabbit holes of fake videos.
               | 
               | Commenting mostly as a personal evidence reference of how
               | crazy the World Wide Web has gotten from anecdotal
               | sources.
        
               | 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.
        
               | valval wrote:
               | You spent a lot of words to conclude that energy is the
               | difference maker between modern western standards of
               | living and whatever else there is and has been.
        
               | atomic128 wrote:
               | Ok, too many words. Here's a summary:
               | 
               | Trial and error content-creation using generative AI,
               | whether or not it creates any real-world value, consumes
               | a lot of electricity.
               | 
               | This electricity demand is likely to translate into
               | demand for nuclear power.
               | 
               | When this demand for nuclear power meets the undersupply
               | of uranium post-Fukushima, higher uranium prices will
               | result.
        
               | defrost wrote:
               | Continuing that thought, higher uranium prices and real
               | demand will lead to unshuttering and exploiting _known
               | and proven_ deposits that are currently idle and increase
               | exploration activity of known resources to advance their
               | status to measured and modelled for economic feasiblity,
               | along with revisiting radiometric maps to flag raw
               | prospects for basic investigation.
               | 
               | More supply and lower prices will result.
               | 
               | Not unlike the recent few years in (say) lithium,
               | anticipated demand surged exploration and development,
               | actual demand didn't meet anticipated demand and a number
               | of developed economicly feasible resources were shuttered
               | .. still waiting in the wings for a future pickup in
               | demand.
        
               | atomic128 wrote:
               | Spend a few months studying existing demand (https://en.w
               | ikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...),
               | existing supply (mines in operation, mines in care and
               | maintenance, undeveloped mines), and the time it takes to
               | develop a mine. Once you know the facts we can talk
               | again.
               | 
               | Look at how long NexGen's Rook 1 Arrow is taking to
               | develop (https://s28.q4cdn.com/891672792/files/doc_downlo
               | ads/2022/03/...). Spend an hour listening to what Cameco
               | said in its most recent conference call. Look at
               | Kazatomprom's persistent inability to deliver the
               | promised pounds of uranium, their sulfuric acid shortages
               | and construction delays.
               | 
               | Uranium mining is slow and difficult. Existing demand and
               | existing supply are fully visible. There's a gap of 20-40
               | million pounds per year, with nothing to fill the gap.
               | New mines take a decade or more to develop.
               | 
               | It is not in the slightest like lithium.
        
               | defrost wrote:
               | > Spend a few months studying existing demand
               | 
               | Would two decades in global exploration geophysics and
               | being behind the original incarnation of
               | https://www.spglobal.com/market-
               | intelligence/en/industries/m... count?
               | 
               | > Once you know the facts we can talk again.
               | 
               | Gosh - that does come across badly.
        
               | atomic128 wrote:
               | Apologies.
               | 
               | When someone compares uranium to lithium, I know I'm not
               | talking to a uranium expert.
               | 
               | All the best to you, and I'll try to be more polite in
               | the future.
        
               | defrost wrote:
               | Weird .. and to think I spent several million line kms in
               | radiometric surveys, worked multiple uranium mines, made
               | bank on the 2007 price spike and that we published the
               | definite industry uranium resources maps in 2006-2010.
               | 
               | Clearly you're a better expert.
               | 
               | > when someone compares uranium to lithium, I know I'm
               | not talking to a uranium expert.
               | 
               | It's about boom bust and shuttering cycles that apply in
               | all resource exploration and production domains.
               | 
               | Perhaps you're a little too literal for analogies? Maybe
               | I'm thinking in longer time cycles than yourself and
               | don't a few years of lag as anything other than a few
               | years.
        
               | atomic128 wrote:
               | Once again, allow me to offer my sincere apologies.
               | 
               | You are well-prepared to familiarize yourself with the
               | current supply/demand situation. It's time to "make
               | bank", just like you did in 2007... only more so. The
               | 2007 spike was during an oversupplied uranium market and
               | mainly driven by financial actors.
               | 
               | I invite you to begin by listening to any recent
               | interview with Mike Alkin.
               | 
               | Good night and enjoy your weekend.
        
               | asveikau wrote:
               | I think it's unusual to assume they are based in the US
               | and employ/underpay foreigners. A lot of people making
               | the content are just from somewhere else.
        
               | 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.
        
               | mewpmewp2 wrote:
               | I thought it was just text to speech when I happen to saw
               | some of those videos. And it seems to have been
               | consistently similar since before ChatGPT etc. Why do you
               | think titles are AI generated?
               | 
               | I feel like it might actually be quite complex for AI to
               | pull up the perfect clips and edit them with the script,
               | including timing and everything. Maybe it could be made
               | automatic, but nonetheless it would be a complex process
               | and I don't think possible few years ago. I know Gemini
               | and possibly some others can analyze video if fed to
               | them, but I'm still skeptical that this channel in
               | particular would have done it, when they have always had
               | this frequency of uploads and similar tone.
               | 
               | Also I think there's far better TTS now with ElevenLabs
               | and others so it could be made much more human like.
        
               | 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.
        
               | wsintra2022 wrote:
               | Very interesting point. Wonder about the generation
               | before and what skills they had to share with their
               | parents who were most likely traumatised from a world war
               | or two. I remember setting the vcr clock and tuning the
               | new tv with the remote. I'm sure the adults could of
               | figured it out but they probably got more from seeing
               | their 'smart' kids figuring it out in time for the
               | cartoons!
        
               | driverdan wrote:
               | The parents of those of us who grew up in the 80's and
               | 90's invented the VCR, they could use it just fine.
        
               | WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
               | The Zoomers have the advantage that the bar is pretty low
               | these days.
        
           | 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.
        
               | lz400 wrote:
               | I was focused on counting. I counted very wrong, but
               | caught the gorilla right away.
        
               | gitaarik wrote:
               | Once you see it you can indeed not imagine how you
               | couldn't. Some people see it the first time, but it's a
               | small amount of people. This video just demonstrates how
               | humans can only focus at one thing at a time, and when
               | we're multitasking, we're actually doing little parts of
               | different tasks one at a time but very quickly after each
               | other, kind of like a single CPU core. And if we tightly
               | focus our attention to one point, we are not aware of
               | other things that might be relatively close to that
               | point.
               | 
               | That is also how magicians work, drawing your attention
               | to one particular thing, hiding the secret of the trick
               | from you, sometimes even in plain sight, like in the
               | video.
               | 
               | Or pickpockets, who might bump into you and picking your
               | pocket at the same time, where your attention is focussed
               | on the sudden impact, keeping your attention away from
               | your walled being taken.
        
             | 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?
        
               | gitaarik wrote:
               | Verifying what?
        
             | 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".
        
               | daemoens wrote:
               | Thousands of combatants are wearing bodycams, and pretty
               | regularly, there are videos released by Russians of a
               | dead Ukrainian's last moments taken from their corpse and
               | the same happens vice versa.
        
               | 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.
        
               | sufficer wrote:
               | I've shown my own videos I made in dcs world to idiots at
               | the bar in airports and they believed I was the ghost of
               | kiev lmao
        
               | baby wrote:
               | Dude I clicked on some random Youtube accounts that were
               | streaming the world cup live, and it took me a while to
               | realize that they were actually just streaming video
               | games replica of the actual game (at least, I think they
               | were simulating the actual game with a video game, but
               | I'm not sure as I didn't compare closely)
        
               | riffraff wrote:
               | I've seen that a bunch of times, there's CGI highlights
               | of most football matches.
               | 
               | I still don't know if it's autogenerated from the
               | original video or recreated manually but yeah it's pretty
               | realistic for the first few seconds.
        
               | jsheard wrote:
               | Someone once did the opposite - streamed a real pay-per-
               | view UFC match on Twitch and pretended it was a game he
               | was playing. It actually worked for a while before the
               | Twitch mods realized what was going on.
               | 
               | https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/4/16732912/ufc-video-
               | stream...
        
             | 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.
        
               | asveikau wrote:
               | Facebook is mostly this now too. Long comment threads of
               | boomers thanking AI images for their military service or
               | congratulating it on a long marriage.
        
             | 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
        
           | valval wrote:
           | The way I see it, it won't take long before human eyes won't
           | be able to distinguish AI generated content from original.
           | 
           | The only regret I have about that is losing video as a form
           | of evidence. CCTV footage and the like are a valuable tool
           | for solving crimes. That's going to be out the window soon.
        
             | akoboldfrying wrote:
             | Trust _can be_ preserved by adding PKI at the hardware
             | level. What you said about CCTV is true; once the market
             | realises and demand appears, camera manufacturers will
             | start making camera modules that, e.g., sign each frame
             | with the manufacturer 's private key, enabling Joe Public
             | to verify that that frame came from a camera made by that
             | manufacturer. Reputational risk makes the manufacturer
             | store the private key in the device in a secure, tamper-
             | proof way (like TPMs do now), which (mostly) prevents those
             | private keys from leaking.
             | 
             | Does this create difficulties if you want to _modify_ the
             | raw video data in any way? Yes it does, even if you just
             | want to save it in a different lossy compression level or
             | format. But these problems aren 't insurmountable.
             | Essentially, provenance info can be added for each
             | modification, signed by the entity that made the change,
             | and the end viewer can then decide if they trust the full
             | certificate chain (just as they do now with HTTPS).
        
               | gitaarik wrote:
               | Oh wow, that's a great idea. Isn't this already happening
               | maybe?
               | 
               | Recently someone said here that it's noticable that
               | videos from CCTV cameras are often filmed with a phone or
               | camera on a screen instead of using the original video,
               | and people were speculating that it might be hard or
               | impossible to get access to the original recording
               | because of bureaucracy or something, but that recording a
               | playback on a screen with a phone or camera or something
               | is then often allowed. Maybe they also do this partly so
               | that the original can't be easily messed with by other
               | people.
               | 
               | But yeah if you can verify that a certain video was
               | filmed at a certain time by a certain camera, that is
               | great. Of course the companies providing these cameras
               | should be trustworthy, and that the camera's are actually
               | really sending what they actually record, and that the
               | company itself doesn't mess with the original recordings.
        
               | akoboldfrying wrote:
               | >Isn't this already happening maybe?
               | 
               | I recall an article posted 1-2 years ago about a camera
               | company (Kodak? Can't remember) which was starting to
               | offer something along these lines.
               | 
               | >the companies providing these cameras should be
               | trustworthy, and that the camera's are actually really
               | sending what they actually record, and that the company
               | itself doesn't mess with the original recordings.
               | 
               | I agree. We can't guarantee any of these things, but on
               | the bright side, the incentives are pointing in the right
               | direction to make self-interested companies choose to
               | behave the right way.
               | 
               | It will complicate things and make the hardware more
               | expensive, so I doubt it will sweep through all consumer
               | camera tech unless the "Is this photo real?" question
               | becomes a crisis. There's also the fact that it would be
               | possible to give individual cameras different private
               | keys, with certificates signed by the manufacturer: This
               | would enable non-repudiation (you would not be able to
               | plausibly deny that you had taken a particular
               | photo/video), which has potentially big upsides but also
               | privacy downsides. I think that could be solved by giving
               | the user the option of signing with their unique camera
               | private key (when the user wants to prove to others that
               | they took the photo themselves) or with the
               | manufacturer's key (when they want to remain anonymous).
        
             | arcastroe wrote:
             | It's sad that almost AS SOON as we acquired the ability to
             | record real-life moments (with the promise of being able to
             | share undeniable evidence of events with one another), we
             | also acquired the ability to doctor it, negating that
             | promise.
        
               | jowea wrote:
               | I'm not sure we should have been trusting images for the
               | previous decades either. Photoshop has been a thing for a
               | long time already. I mean, there's those famous photos
               | that Stalin had people removed from.
        
               | acdha wrote:
               | Your mention of Stalin is I think stronger as an argument
               | that there's been a significant change. Those fakes took
               | lots of time by skilled humans and were notoriously
               | obvious - what made them effective was the crushing
               | political power preventing them from receiving critical
               | analysis in public.
               | 
               | Similarly, while Photoshop made it easier it happened at
               | a time where technical advances made the problem harder
               | because everyone's standards for photos went up
               | dramatically, and so producing a realistic fake was still
               | a slow process for a skilled worker.
               | 
               | Now, it's increasingly available to everyone and that
               | means that we're going to see a lot more scams and hoaxes
               | as people without artistic talent or willingness to
               | invest time can make realistic fakes even for minor
               | things. That availability is transformative enough to
               | merit the concern we've been seeing here.
        
               | jowea wrote:
               | The glass half-full in me feels that the advantage to
               | this is that in a few years the average person will know
               | better than to trust anything that could be faked like
               | that, instead of the old situation where someone who was
               | willing to put in that effort could actually trick a lot
               | of people.
        
               | acdha wrote:
               | I think that's true, but it's kind of like the trade offs
               | during the pandemic where we knew it would eventually
               | settle into a stable state but still wanted to reduce the
               | harm getting there. We basically need some large fraction
               | of the global population to level up in media literacy at
               | all once.
        
             | jowea wrote:
             | I don't think it goes out the window completely. You need
             | just the owner of the CCTV to stand up in court and say
             | "yes this is the CCTV footage I personally copied from
             | storage and I did not manipulate it".
        
           | mikehollinger wrote:
           | > compression mostly makes imperfections go away
           | 
           | The ultimate compression is to reduce the video clip to a
           | latent space vector representation to be rendered on device.
           | :)
           | 
           | Just give us a few more revs of Moore's law for that to be
           | reasonable.
           | 
           | edit: found a patent...
           | https://patents.google.com/patent/US11388416B2/en
        
         | 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.
        
           | wongarsu wrote:
           | The bubble released into the air is also pretty good until at
           | the end where bubbles appear out of thin air.
           | 
           | But overall the physics are surprisingly good. In the videos
           | from text we a person moving covered in a bedsheet, a mirror
           | doing vaguely mirror-like things, a monkey moving in water
           | and creating plausible waves, shadows moving over a 3d object
           | with the sloth in the pool and plausible fire. Those are all
           | classic topics to tackle in computer-generated graphics, all
           | casually handled by a model that isn't explicitly trained on
           | physical simulation.
           | 
           | In a twist of irony it's the simplest of those (the mirror)
           | that's the most obviously wrong.
        
         | programjames wrote:
         | I think that's because they're still using mean-squared error
         | in their loss function.
        
       | 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 :)
        
           | 123yawaworht456 wrote:
           | >Many companies have used LLMs to justify layoffs
           | 
           | they are not allowed to call the recession a recession until
           | January 20
        
         | 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.
        
               | bamboozled wrote:
               | Because some companies stumbled on this treasure first.
               | Need to milk immediately.
        
           | 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.
        
         | the_clarence wrote:
         | On the contrary I dont think theres anything special with their
         | examples. It probably represent well most output. Think of
         | image generation and the insane stuff people can produce with
         | it. There's no "oh yeah this is just cherry picked"
        
       | 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.
        
               | squarefoot wrote:
               | > Getting actors to act exactly how you want was never a
               | solved problem.
               | 
               | Also, some great lines in movies came from actors ad
               | libs. I hope there will always be some space for mild
               | hallucination; without improvisation we wouldn't even
               | have jazz.
        
               | mrandish wrote:
               | Yep. Including one of the best moments in one of the most
               | influential sci-fi films of all time.
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_rain_monologue
        
               | lloeki wrote:
               | "I know."
               | 
               | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harrison-ford-i-know/
        
               | lagadu wrote:
               | > Getting actors to act exactly how you want was never a
               | solved problem.
               | 
               | As a choreographer myself, that's not necessarily a
               | problem but rather a feature: it depends on how the
               | director creates. Often you want what's unique to the
               | performer, you don't want them to do something that's
               | exactly like what you envisioned but whatever their
               | interpretation/vision of it is, the "imperfectness" is
               | what makes it interesting and rich.
        
             | noch wrote:
             | > It will be a loong time before AI can produce lead actors
             | that are believable.
             | 
             | A "loong time" will be sooner that most of us think.
             | 
             | The way this is done currently is similar to motion capture
             | except that the tools are gradually becoming democratized:
             | A single actor can act all the roles you need (You could
             | even act the scenes and roles yourself). That footage is
             | then fed into a model that generates an actor with the
             | appearance and voice that you desire.
             | 
             | As a random on the internet, my prediction is that within a
             | year, you'll be able to produce lead actors that are
             | believable using movie generation plus smartphone footage
             | of yourself acting the scene.
             | 
             | Initially it will be expensive to make a feature length
             | film. But from 2025 onward, the cost will come down as the
             | tools improve. These will be a different type of movie for
             | sure, but every advancement in film technology has always
             | led to films that seem strange compared to what came
             | before.
        
               | XorNot wrote:
               | You're getting downvoted, but I agree with you except for
               | your timeline. This won't be possible in a year. What's
               | here is a concept demo, but the gulf between "that's
               | neat" and "you can make a decent 10 minute short film" is
               | pretty vast.
        
             | bboygravity wrote:
             | "long time" in LLM land = 2 years tops
        
               | gloflo wrote:
               | Anything is possible at zombo.com
        
               | mikae1 wrote:
               | Seems you drank way too much of the Altman cool aid. :-D
               | 
               | How has LLMs _actually_ developed in the last two years?
               | 
               | Have you noticed movies and TV series use multiple
               | cameras to capture a scene from different angles?
               | 
               | When it comes to video these things can't get consistency
               | between angles or scenes.
               | 
               | Add to that that the results are full of glitches and the
               | resolution is equivalent to a CRT screen in the year
               | 2000. Same resolution as s
               | 
               | Fixing these limitations would equate to a revolution
               | rather than a steady evolution.
               | 
               | And let's not forget that these systems are also hugely
               | unprofitable at this stage.
        
           | 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
        
           | redundantly wrote:
           | > Your limit is your creativity
           | 
           | And how many tokens you can afford.
        
             | gen3 wrote:
             | You're not wrong, but the comment somewhat misses the
             | point. A shot like that would require you to rent a stadium
             | (generally not cheap) along with paying for a believable
             | number of extras. That would put the shot out of budget for
             | most indie filmmakers. Spending $20 on tokens to get "good
             | enough" is totally worth it, and allows you to get shots
             | that were previously out of reach.
        
           | mrandish wrote:
           | > Your limit is your creativity
           | 
           | In the professional creative tools business, "Now the only
           | limit is your creativity" has been a popular marketing
           | tagline for decades, especially for products based on new
           | enabling technologies. It's common enough that a wry
           | corollary has developed in response, which goes:
           | "Unfortunately, for a lot of people that's a pretty big
           | limit."
        
           | jeltz wrote:
           | I personally expect a decrease in quality. Without limits
           | people tend to get less creative. Sure, there is some balance
           | here in that tools also enable new things to be done which
           | are not possible without tools but working around limits has
           | often inspired some of the most creative works.
        
             | fragmede wrote:
             | And without being forced to interact with other people. The
             | movie made by one creative and 100 automatons does not ai
             | all compare to the one where there are multiple brilliant
             | creatives butting heads and personalities and choosing
             | never to work with each other again but the show must go
             | on.
             | 
             | How many movie lines have been adlibbed but are absolute
             | classics? Sonofabitch, he stole my line!
        
               | XorNot wrote:
               | What a bizarre statement in an age when the phrase
               | "executive meddling" can describe the sameness of so much
               | content output, and most of the greatest flops have a
               | story which goes "yeah there were too many people
               | involved".
               | 
               | Like the second Avengers movie had this problem in
               | spades.
        
               | i-LINK wrote:
               | It's not a bizarre statement at all. An executive
               | meddling with something because X or Y element of a piece
               | of art doesn't align with A or B market trend is _not_
               | the same thing as people working together and sometimes
               | clashing due to creative differences. You 'll find that
               | most works that you, or other people, like weren't the
               | result of a sole individual's creative decisions going
               | completely unchallenged. Others suggested, or revised, or
               | fought. There can be too many cooks in the kitchen, of
               | course, but that's an entirely different issue from
               | executive meddling.
        
             | amelius wrote:
             | I don't think that is necessarily true. Right now movies
             | are so expensive that they can be created only by a few
             | handfuls of people. But those people might not be the most
             | creative people around. If thousands of people can create
             | movies, we might find out that some people we didn't know
             | of are far more creative.
             | 
             | Also "creation by committee" isn't a thing when somebody
             | can produce a movie in their basement.
             | 
             | Anyway, I look forward to people using this tech to create
             | alternative endings of existing movies.
        
               | fallous wrote:
               | So expensive? It has never been cheaper to create movies
               | thanks to digital cameras and non-linear editors, digital
               | audio workstations, etc. You are no longer encumbered by
               | the costs of film, development, renting an edit bay,
               | requiring an audio editing studio to mix audio and
               | maintain a tape library of special effects or hire foley
               | artists, no need for an optical printer to layer visual
               | effects, etc.
               | 
               | You already can produce a movie in your basement, many of
               | which can be found on YouTube.
        
               | williamcotton wrote:
               | Sure, the cost of making Clerks has dropped, but not the
               | cost of making Dune.
        
               | xoac wrote:
               | You aren't going to be making dune with this. Maybe a "we
               | have dune at home version"...
        
               | littlestymaar wrote:
               | If the results aren't cherry-picked it looks like more
               | than good enough to make any high budget movie from the
               | early 2010s if not Dune.
        
               | Com60Score wrote:
               | Like with all generative AI this comes down to how
               | specific you can get, and how consistent you can be. If
               | you can art direct each element of the frame, down to the
               | design of the individual props and scenic items, and have
               | those items remain consistent from shot to shot. Then do
               | the same with lighting, actors, camera characteristics
               | (eg lens, focus, position in the scene, framing), etc,
               | etc, etc, then maybe you've got a chance of making a
               | 'high budget movie from the early 2010s'. But I haven't
               | seen any generative ai that comes even close to this
               | level of control or consistency... They're closer to slot
               | machines than anything consistent...
        
             | golergka wrote:
             | The era of easily available game engines have brought to
             | live hundreds of thousands of garbage games, but that
             | doesn't matter. What matters are hundreds of really
             | innovative ones that we wouldn't get otherwise.
        
             | bbqfog wrote:
             | Using AI has all kinds of new and unusual limits. It's hard
             | to get exactly what you want and you often get unexpected
             | results along the way.
        
             | alickz wrote:
             | > Without limits people tend to get less creative
             | 
             | But lowering those limits allows for more people to get
             | creative
             | 
             | How many beautiful stories never left their author's head
             | because their author couldn't afford it? Either the
             | monetary cost or the opportunity cost
             | 
             | Considering how many movies come from one place in one
             | country (Hollywood), we haven't even scratched the surface
             | of human creativity
        
         | ErigmolCt wrote:
         | In some ways it opens up creative possibilities
        
       | 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?
        
           | thriwster wrote:
           | It is also an automated loom. But now we techno creatives are
           | the luddites.
        
             | sensanaty wrote:
             | The luddites wanted sane working conditions and to be
             | trained on the use of newly introduced, dangerous machinery
             | that was maiming and killing people and was meant to
             | replace swathes of them overnight to make some rich
             | capitalists richer.
             | 
             | The end result for them wanting humane conditions was
             | getting murdered by the machine owners & the state.
             | 
             | Perhaps the rabidly pro-AI people shouldn't be on the side
             | of the murderous psychopaths who wanted to extract maximum
             | profit by employing children and displacing thousands of
             | people if they don't want to be viewed as similarly
             | psychotic.
        
       | 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.
        
           | pennomi wrote:
           | Surely if you've watched an amazing show you're likely to
           | share it with a friend, no? I see this bringing likeminded
           | people together in tight, niche communities.
        
       | 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.
        
         | woodson wrote:
         | There are some approaches that use an LLM to generate "scripts"
         | (you can think of them as a DSL) for composing/arranging media,
         | essentially driving other models to generate parts of the
         | media. One example is WavJourney: https://audio-
         | agi.github.io/WavJourney_demopage/
        
       | 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!
        
         | oblio wrote:
         | It's only going to be worse and aggregators aka gatekeepers
         | will increase in value immensely.
        
       | 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.
        
               | spookie wrote:
               | Fair, I think the "magic" depends on other factors that
               | may or may not lead to neurodivergence. Those being:
               | 
               | - Life experience
               | 
               | - Exposure/education when young
               | 
               | Of course, these might lead to neurodivergence or might
               | not. The key thing is that the magic is a very unique,
               | personal thing. Human, one can say. Also, through
               | practice you come to understand new perspectives,
               | something that is perhaps lessened in your view.
               | 
               | Either way, I've missunderstood your take to a degree,
               | and had a much more radical interpretation of it.
        
               | 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.
        
               | hackable_sand wrote:
               | You spent your life in *your* lane. Why don't you stay
               | there and keep committing.
               | 
               | We'll be over here trying new things, making new art, and
               | expanding the horizon bye
        
             | 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.
        
               | maroonblazer wrote:
               | The analogy isn't quite right. The conductor and director
               | spend days collaborating with the symphony and the
               | actors/crew. Parent's example is them literally
               | _prompting_ - via a creative brief - the artist or
               | agency.
        
               | chefandy wrote:
               | The symphony conductor gets credit for being the
               | conductor-- not for being Beethoven. A film director has
               | a thousand times more influence on their final product
               | than a conductor has on theirs, and they still don't try
               | to take credit for the writing, costume, set design,
               | acting, score, special effects, etc. etc. etc. I've yet
               | to see stable diffusion spit out a list of credits after
               | generating an image.
        
             | 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.
        
               | mrandish wrote:
               | Very well said. Agree completely.
        
               | architango wrote:
               | Just keying on one comment here, which perhaps no one
               | will read:
               | 
               | I was, in fact, a paste-up man in the early 1990s,
               | slapping together copy and ads for a magazine. As such, I
               | was a ping-pong ball in the battle between account
               | management and creative arts - each of them wanted to be
               | the originator of the big and clever ideas. (This is
               | pretty widespread in the industry, and was even a
               | recurring theme in "Mad Men.")
               | 
               | The takeaway here is, people like to be creative. People
               | _need_ to be creative. There will always be an implacable
               | drive to create, one which DALL-E can never satisfy. Gen
               | AI is the artificial sweetener that might temporarily
               | satisfy those cravings, but ultimately artists want to
               | create something from nothing. There 's some hope to be
               | found in that, amid the tsunami of AI slop.
        
               | chefandy wrote:
               | Well I really hope that you were easily able to
               | transition out of paste-up because it kind of blows me
               | away how quickly that whole craft just got clobbered.
               | Just like my uncle that specialized in atlas publishing--
               | luckily he was able to hang on long enough to retire.
               | 
               | I agree that people do want to be creative, and I don't
               | think that people are going to let Gen AI supplant that
               | for them. However, the lower-end of the creative markets
               | doing the low-end high-volume work-- think folks
               | shotgunning out template-based logos on Fiverr-- are the
               | ones that have already been displaced in large numbers,
               | and there are far more of them. While they generally
               | don't have the right skillset to do the higher-end work,
               | their seeing that as the only viable career move is
               | majorly fucking up companies' ability to find workers and
               | vice versa, and for employers that don't know any better,
               | they think the market is saturated which is bringing down
               | wages.
               | 
               | Also, clueless executives just don't realize that having
               | a neural network generate a "80% right" version of your
               | work in a flat PNG file will take more effort to mold
               | into shape for higher-end work than starting from
               | scratch, so they've been making big cuts. A coworker on a
               | contract also works in an animation house that fired
               | their entire concept art department and replaced them
               | with prompt monkeys making half as much money-- the
               | problem was that standard art director changes-- e.g. I
               | want this same exact image and garment, just make those
               | lapels look a little fuller and softer but with sharper
               | angles at the end, and change the piping on that jacket
               | from green to purple-- might have been half an afternoon
               | for a professional concept artist but would be DAYS of
               | work to get art-director right using neural network
               | tools... if for no other reason that the prompt writers
               | just _don 't have the traditional visual art
               | sophistication to even realize when they've got an
               | appropriate solution, because learning that is a lot
               | harder than learning to draw, and you learn that when you
               | learn how to draw._ So all the time they saved on the
               | initial illustration was totally sucked up by art
               | directors not being able to iterate even a tenth as
               | quickly as they used to, and fast iteration was the major
               | selling point for Gen AI to begin with. It simply does
               | not do the task if you absolutely require specificity,
               | and having a raster non-layered png that looks like it
               | already went through post is a beast to edit, even for a
               | skilled post-prod person. Well, three months later, they
               | canned the prompt engineers and were begging their
               | concept artists to come back and work for them again.
               | What a waste of everything.
               | 
               | Why do I even bother torturing myself in forums like this
               | by giving a real-world creative industry counterpoint to
               | the tech crowd perspective, despite many of the most
               | vocal ones being smug, patronizing, and self-
               | aggrandizing? Maybe one executive out there will read
               | this stuff and say "Hmm... maybe I should actually talk
               | to people that work in this field that I trust to see if
               | it's really beneficial to replace our _[insert creative
               | department]_ rather than relying on software execs and
               | their marketing people say is feasible. "
        
           | 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.
        
               | danielbln wrote:
               | When I make 3D art I instruct a lot of things, how the
               | renderer is configured, lighting details, various systems
               | that need to be tweaked to get the final render to look
               | good.
               | 
               | Using the AI tool chains, you'd start with some
               | generation either via text or image input, then modify
               | various settingas, model, render steps, sampler, loras,
               | then a generative upscaling pass, control nets to extract
               | and apply depth, pose, outlines all etc. A colourful mix
               | of systems and config, not unlike working 3D tool chains.
               | 
               | Its also not unusual to mix and match, handcrafted
               | geometry but projection mapped generated textures and
               | then a final pass in Photoshop or what have you.
               | 
               | Typing "awesome art piece" into ChatGPT is like rendering
               | a donut.
        
             | 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.
        
           | nitwit005 wrote:
           | People find even randomly generated stuff artistic. I
           | remember the San Francisco Chronicle review of an art piece,
           | which was random cracks in rock caused by heating.
           | 
           | I sort of wondered how you could claim to be the creator of
           | the art when your kiln did all the work, but I suppose they
           | did the important labor of putting it in there.
        
           | wraptile wrote:
           | I feel the opposite. I don't care how the sausage was made as
           | long as it's a good sausage. Art was never about the creation
           | process. In fact, before the internet most would never see
           | the process at all. Just go to your local museum and you'll
           | never know how most of pieces were made and that's a good
           | thing. Art is all about the effect on the viewer.
        
             | nessbot wrote:
             | This requires such a shallow definition for the word "art."
             | I think you're more just talking about images. Art is about
             | more, including the process.
        
           | AuryGlenz 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.
           | 
           | I generate a lot of art using Stable Diffusion/Flux of my
           | spouse, kids, friends, etc. I was a professional photographer
           | for nearly 10 years - I quit just last year.
        
         | 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.
        
             | deisteve wrote:
             | There's a term to describe this: creative destruction,
             | literally.
             | 
             | We are at the cusp of a full scale commoditization stage of
             | generative AI that will impact all aspects of the
             | creative/software fields.
             | 
             | If you want to know what this creative destruction will
             | look like, look no further than previous centers of
             | innovation like Detroit, the emptying naval shipyards of
             | Busan, the zombie game studios around Osaka as a sign of
             | things to come.
             | 
             | TLDR: AI is going to destroy a lot of white collar, high
             | creativity, high intellect jobs that isn't protected by a
             | union or occupational collective associations which were
             | all created to counter against creative destructions from
             | taking people's livelihoods away.
             | 
             | Unfortunately, 10 years ago when I tried to create a union
             | organization for software engineers/designers and creative
             | workers, it was sabotaged by fellow software engineers who
             | seem highly susceptible to psyops much more than any other
             | group.
             | 
             | We might see a repeat of what happened in Japan after mid
             | 90s, when much of the country's stable and ample jobs
             | disappeared thanks to internet, globalized financiering
             | backed by authoritarian labour market.
             | 
             | Instead this time its not a communist country working
             | together with bankers rather its a small group of
             | technology companies pushing out bankers and creating a
             | sort of a dystopian AI dominated labour field where humans
             | no longer dumpster dive for wages but any remaining labour
             | industry that AI cannot infiltrate aka ppl literally
             | switching careers to stay employed because their old jobs
             | were outsourced to AI.
             | 
             | I didn't even talk about the impact on wages (spoiler: it
             | will enrich the 0.1% while shunning the 99.9% to temporary
             | gigs and unstable employment not unlike regions which have
             | experienced similar creative destruction back in the 90s
             | and early 2000s).
             | 
             | It's hard to see a future without some sort of universal
             | basic income and increased taxation on billionaires who
             | will no longer be able to hide their assets offshore
             | without facing serious headwinds not unlike how Chinese
             | billionaires fear the CCP.
        
           | pcurve wrote:
           | If the barrier to entry is low for high quality production
           | and anyone is able to make good looking videos, I wonder how
           | audience perception would evolve for judging and valuing what
           | is considered 'good'.
        
             | zoogeny wrote:
             | Keep in mind: one of the top selling games for children is
             | Roblox. Our perception of what is "good" is very open to
             | reinterpretation by the coming generations.
        
         | 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.
        
           | energy123 wrote:
           | Most creatives work in at-risk jobs like freelance writing,
           | SEO, digital advertising, logo design
        
         | hackable_sand wrote:
         | Are they gonna stay scared as adults? Lmao
         | 
         | Are you?
        
         | atleastoptimal wrote:
         | How would you know it's real? AI art could be portrayed as real
         | and most people wouldn't care if it has a stronger emotional
         | effect.
        
         | mlboss wrote:
         | It is easy to do really creative work now but it is even easier
         | to just browse instagram or tiktok. The real winner in the new
         | world will be people with discipline who can use these tech to
         | create stuff without too much capital or resources.
        
           | WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
           | Why would anybody create stuff that the AI companies are just
           | going to instantly subsume and reproduce far more cheaply?
           | There is not going to be a meaningful economy based on
           | creativity in the next 50 years, any more than there is one
           | now. And then it is going to be far worse. The actual
           | "winners" are just going to be the people who through
           | arbitrary processes like fortunate birth or lucky
           | circumstances are granted admission into elite institutions.
        
             | mlboss wrote:
             | That is a very pessimistic take. In my opinion things are
             | much more accessible now. Nobody cares about your
             | background on internet as long as you can provide value.
             | 
             | For example, you can build a wrapper over an LLM focussed
             | on a niche this weekend(using cursor/copilot) and launch it
             | over twitter. It is very much possible with the tools we
             | have. If you market it hard and provide value consumers
             | will line up. This kind of power was not available 50 years
             | back.
             | 
             | Things are easier if you want to hit big. But also it is
             | easy to just be a consumer of media and social media.
             | Depends on which side of the algorithm you are.
             | 
             | Also it does not help to think like a victim of your
             | circumstances. You need to start where you are and try to
             | keep pushing what is possible.
        
               | WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
               | I said 50 years from now.
               | 
               | People like you who think you're going to come out on top
               | of this by throwing everyone else under the bus, treating
               | them like consumers, are a huge part of the problem. That
               | kind of parasitic behavior is not "providing value"
               | except in the cynical way that it let's you devalue other
               | people's lives for your own gain.
        
         | wraptile wrote:
         | Recently I've been cutting back on TV in favor of non fiction
         | reading and I feel you have a point. Entertainment comes in
         | many forms and tbh all of them are interesting and rewarding in
         | their own ways so I'm not worried of AI ruining entertainment
         | for us. That's the least of our actual worries and I'm honestly
         | surprised people find this issue so important.
         | 
         | I guess visualizing AI doing political or social damage or AGI
         | mind control is a bit harder than your favorite show being
         | gone.
        
         | mvdtnz wrote:
         | I have yet to see any AI produce a single morsel of content of
         | any kind that I would class as even remotely entertaining. So
         | we'll see.
        
         | spaceman_2020 wrote:
         | It really bugs me that the first bits AI has targeted are the
         | parts people actually enjoy doing for fun.
         | 
         | As things stand, AI is okay at writing, art/photos, coding, and
         | now, videos.
         | 
         | These are all things people _like_ doing. Even coding is
         | something a lot of people get a ton of pleasure from.
        
       | 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.
        
         | danielbln wrote:
         | Previsband storyboarding will benefit tremendously from this,
         | though ultimately it will be usable for B-roll or second unit
         | stuff. And then? We'll see if this tech levels out or up.
        
       | 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.
        
               | hackable_sand wrote:
               | U good?
        
         | 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?!"
        
           | tavavex wrote:
           | > Don't expect people to profoundly connect to music that is
           | nothing more than a collection of regurgitated ideas.
           | 
           | Music is one of the worse examples to pick for claiming that
           | people don't regurgitate in art. Everything in music builds
           | off one another, and a lot of music (especially music that's
           | seen as lower quality) is described as being just collections
           | of cliches. The reason why "sad music" sounds sad isn't
           | because there's something about instrument choices, key,
           | chords, melody, tempo etc that is measurably intrinsically
           | "sad" - it's because these are stereotypes that the creator
           | has combined together to invoke a certain association in the
           | listeners. If you were extra cynical, you could describe the
           | entire musical field as people largely conditioning
           | themselves over generations to like certain qualities of
           | sound and hate others.
           | 
           | And that applies to almost all art. Basically everything
           | people make is based on stuff that came before that - and
           | it's frustrating to encounter hubris that assumes there's
           | some magical creative process going on inside human brains
           | that will never ever be even approximated by any other means.
        
             | changing1999 wrote:
             | > it's frustrating to encounter hubris that assumes there's
             | some magical creative process going on inside human brains
             | that will never ever be even approximated by any other
             | means
             | 
             | Maybe we will, maybe we won't. In the same way maybe we
             | will be able to create life artificially, maybe not. The AI
             | I am critiquing today is what Tamagotchi is to human life.
             | Sure, you can get attached to it and think it's expressing
             | real emotions and wonder why other people are being
             | "hubris" by not realizing how wonderful it is.
        
         | 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 and pick a genre.
               | 
               | 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
               | generate something 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.
        
               | joshstrange wrote:
               | That's just not true. I've used Suno to generate songs
               | where I have provided all the lyrics. Those lyrics came
               | from a combo of LLMs and my steering/direct edits and
               | then I ran the lyrics through Suno multiple times until I
               | got something I wanted.
               | 
               | I can agree that:
               | 
               | > "a sad rock song about a breakup"
               | 
               | Is probably not going to capture or express your ideas or
               | emotions because you haven't given it enough. In
               | contrast, writing the lyrics or giving the model a ton
               | more context can absolutely produce something that
               | captures and expresses your ideas and emotions.
               | 
               | At the end of the day I don't make music for the masses
               | (hell, I've only generated a handful of final songs that
               | I've liked) but the people I have made them for (or the
               | ones just for me) have enjoyed them quite a bit.
               | 
               | I'm not a songwriter nor am I a musician and I never will
               | be. That's not where my skills lie and it's not a
               | skillset I want to learn and hone. AI/LLM tools give me
               | the ability to express myself in a medium that previously
               | was effectively impossible and it makes people I care
               | about smile and that's good enough for me.
        
               | changing1999 wrote:
               | Providing lyrics is called "writing lyrics". If you think
               | that pasting lyrics into a prompt makes you somehow more
               | involved in the process of writing music I don't know
               | what to say.
               | 
               | > can absolutely produce something that captures and
               | expresses your ideas and emotions
               | 
               | The right analogy here is to imagine an infinite museum
               | where you can wander until you find a piece that
               | expresses your emotions. It has nothing to do with the
               | act of your expression, and everything to do with you
               | resonating with a piece produced by someone/something
               | else.
               | 
               | > At the end of the day I don't make music for the masses
               | 
               | Fair. But you also don't "make music" for yourself. At
               | most you write lyrics.
        
           | 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.
        
             | changing1999 wrote:
             | If by "structure" you mean "add a verse and a chorus" then
             | sure. Music composition goes _slightly_ beyond that.
        
           | 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
        
           | scudsworth wrote:
           | https://www.udio.com/creators/jcims
           | 
           | yeah its not surprising that you wouldn't volunteer this, man
        
       | 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?
        
         | 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
        
             | j0ej0ej0e wrote:
             | What's the maximum video dimensions your service can
             | output? with a 1024x1024 image it exports 512x512 on the
             | free plan.
        
             | zoogeny wrote:
             | Thanks - will look into this more deeply once I am ready to
             | start integrating generation into my tool.
             | 
             | Do you have an API that can be called? Are you interested
             | in reselling your technology through 3rd party tools?
        
           | dvngnt_ wrote:
           | GTA IV Real Life - Runway Gen 3 AI shows the potential to
           | turn low-fidelity source to something life-like
           | https://youtu.be/FGBSzSO8k6A it would be really cool to this
           | to work locally at playable rates
        
           | jonplackett wrote:
           | Kling's new one 1.5 model is WAY better than anything else
           | I've tried. Makes runway look terrible. Really good temporal
           | consistency and even gets hair and clothes and stuff right.
           | 
           | They also just added the ability to do lip sync to a moving
           | head and it gets the lighting right too - runways lip sync
           | breaks if there's any movement at all.
           | 
           | I'm gonna stop pumping Kling on this comment thread now -
           | until they start paying me to advertise!
        
         | 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/
         | 
         | Also interesting - blog post from someone who actually got to
         | use Sora https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/actually-using-
         | sora/
         | 
         | TLDR; it's still quite frustrating to use
        
       | 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.
        
         | sethammons wrote:
         | I imagine a movie maker where you say "use model A and put them
         | in scene 32f, add a crowd and zoom in on A. They should look
         | very worried." Then they can just play with it. Then save a
         | scene, onto the next. Since AI can continue an animation, I
         | don't see why it can't faithfully recreate given models with
         | more development
        
         | jkolio wrote:
         | There have been several AI short film festivals, as well as
         | several AI music videos that have been produced. The caveats
         | are that quality varies, the best ones simply employ solid
         | production in general (good editing, strong directorial vision,
         | etc), and I don't know that anything feature length is out or
         | even in the works.
        
         | DirkH wrote:
         | What'll happen in both industries is the same that will happen
         | everywhere else: adopt or die. The huge winners will be those
         | that creatively use this new tool without 100% relying on it to
         | do everything.
        
         | spaceman_2020 wrote:
         | the problem is that these stock footage companies are up
         | against the richest corporations to ever exist. Legal recourse
         | will take a monumental amount of money and time.
         | 
         | Hate to say this, but as things stand, tech companies stand to
         | become all pervasive and all powerful if AI keeps growing the
         | way it has
        
       | 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.
        
           | 999900000999 wrote:
           | Maybe maybe not. As is simple false journalism has caused
           | issues on Facebook in certain countries ( to put it lightly).
           | 
           | It's only going to look more realistic in time...
        
       | 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).
        
         | hcks wrote:
         | You're right, Meta shouldn't invest in a breakthrough
         | technology. They should focus on what really matters:
         | delivering short term value to shareholders
        
       | 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.
        
               | 93po wrote:
               | i mean it's in its infancy, if there's a critical need
               | for it, which i think there will be soon, i think it'll
               | get more popular
        
               | Andrex wrote:
               | US citizens still use paper Social Security Cards. The
               | point where there is a "critical need" recognized by the
               | relevant parties may be further off than you believe.
        
           | danlugo92 wrote:
           | I got into hiking.
        
           | sethammons wrote:
           | Your droids, they'll have to wait outside
        
           | the_gipsy wrote:
           | > 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.
           | 
           | Too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?
        
           | Aeolun wrote:
           | Humans will start to notice this shit. I used openai to help
           | me edit my stories originally, but then when I started
           | reading other stories it quickly became evident to me that
           | people just generated them entirely with AI.
           | 
           | ChatGPT is way too happy to overuse the word cacophony.
        
           | jowea wrote:
           | My hot take is that we will have some small obscure forums
           | with people, some social media flooded with AI content and
           | other social media where you need to register with government
           | ID and facescan.
        
             | shortrounddev2 wrote:
             | I am 10,000% ready for forums to make a comeback. The
             | internet hasn't been good since 2010
        
           | StefanBatory wrote:
           | Vetting people into groups will become much more common, I
           | think. Unless you can verify that person, ideally by knowing
           | them irl, don't talk to them online.
        
         | skywhopper wrote:
         | The only problem is that all the AI slop is not actually
         | entertaining either.
        
           | danielbln wrote:
           | Beware of sampling bias. Slop will always be slop.
        
         | chpatrick wrote:
         | I think it will just become the new baseline abd people will
         | still value anything better than that.
        
         | TiredOfLife wrote:
         | > The internet may become effectively unusable as a result for
         | anything other than entertainment.
         | 
         | That already happened, even without AI.
        
           | okdood64 wrote:
           | What was useful and usable about the internet before that
           | isn't now?
        
         | cedws wrote:
         | The Internet used to be a sort of hideaway for nerdy people to
         | hang out and have fun. Ever since the invention of the
         | smartphone, possibly before (see "Eternal September") it's gone
         | to shit. These days I would rather spend time offline.
         | 
         | Are there any other Internet-based hideaways to retreat to?
         | Somewhere where ads, clout chasing, and AI slop doesn't exist?
        
           | shortrounddev2 wrote:
           | IRC is more active than forums, but I miss forums
        
         | nl wrote:
         | Why should I care?
         | 
         | Have you seen what most humans say? If an AI says more
         | intelligent things I'm all for it.
        
           | nojs wrote:
           | Mission fucking accomplished?
           | 
           | https://xkcd.com/810/
        
           | jowea wrote:
           | AIs say what the people giving them orders tell them to.
           | 
           | And until we get AGI, AI talk will necessarily be some
           | combination of hallucinations, unintelligent, vapid, etc.
        
           | spaceman_2020 wrote:
           | There could be AI agents in this thread right now
           | 
           | And you wouldn't even know it
        
             | alickz wrote:
             | If you can't tell, does it matter?
        
         | solardev wrote:
         | Maybe that's a good thing. The internet never reached its
         | potential as being the connective fabric of humanity. Mostly
         | it's just marketing and spam. If the internet died and we all
         | went back to smaller communities, that really wouldn't be the
         | worst thing IMO. We're not really evolved for global
         | communications at scale anyway.
        
           | danielbln wrote:
           | We're not evolved for most things in modern life, that's not
           | really much of an argument.
        
             | solardev wrote:
             | Shrug. Maybe it's an argument to de-modernize more things
             | in order to bring daily life back to the environments we're
             | healthier and happier in.
             | 
             | Edit: In particular, I'm not convinced the internet was a
             | net positive. Running water and sewage systems, sure. But
             | what has 24/7 smartphone access actually done for our
             | societies? Most people today don't seem any better off than
             | they were in the 80s and 90s, and in many ways that
             | actually matter, they seem worse off. Sure, they have
             | access to way more information than our predecessors ever
             | did... but it's not like we built a better world off it.
             | Mostly the internet has accelerated the concentration of
             | wealth towards the top, increased anxiety across the world,
             | and significantly contributed to the global downfall of
             | representative democracies, to name a few. Sometimes
             | modernity can just be a collection of pathologies with a
             | few beneficial side effects.
        
         | shortrounddev2 wrote:
         | Would be nice if we were able to go to communities of human
         | verified users. Smaller in scope than social media
        
         | Andrex wrote:
         | Maybe we should abandon HTTP and create a new protocol just for
         | humans. HHTTP.
        
       | 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.
        
         | rolux wrote:
         | Having read the paper, I agree that this is an enormous effort,
         | but I didn't see anything that was particularly surprising from
         | a technical point of view - and nothing of Singularity-level
         | significance. The use of AI to train AI - as a source of
         | synthetic data, or as an evaluation tool - is absolutely
         | widespread. You will find similar examples in almost any AI
         | paper dealing with a system of comparable scale.
        
           | mike_hearn wrote:
           | Yeah I know, but you sometimes see posts on HN that talk as
           | if AI isn't already being used for self-improvement. I guess
           | the subtlety is that people tend to imagine some sort of
           | generic recursive self-improvement, and overlook the more
           | tightly focused ways it's being used.
        
       | 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.
        
               | hackable_sand wrote:
               | Nah u not wrong
               | 
               | Both unhealthy
        
             | 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.
        
           | osmsucks wrote:
           | Ah, the usual "if we don't do it, someone else will".
        
           | tivert wrote:
           | > but the reality is, it's inevitable whether we want it or
           | not.
           | 
           | The "inevitability" of it is mostly a function of the (self-
           | serving) _belief_ that it is inevitable.
           | 
           | Basically, you just cited a bunch of moral cop-outs.
        
             | kredd wrote:
             | What sort of actions do you think we can take where the
             | dangerous side effects (like creating deepfake pornography)
             | won't be as easily accessible as illegal streaming of TV
             | shows? Only let big private companies to train models? Make
             | open sourcing of weights illegal? Make usage of LLM tools
             | generally illegal? All those are as enforceable as
             | torrenting around the world.
        
         | 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?
        
           | intended wrote:
           | Hopefully this becomes the limiting factor, however
           | generating more power isn't that hard - and it doesn't solve
           | the rate of production issue.
        
         | 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.
        
           | intended wrote:
           | Everyone is focusing on photography.
           | 
           | 1) it's not the tech. It's the rate of production. You had
           | only 1 newspaper, no mass media, and boatloads of time in the
           | 1800s
           | 
           | 2) Before photography was created we lived in a world steeped
           | in superstition, inequality and ignorance. A tiny economy
           | compared to what we have today.
           | 
           | 3) humanity changed with the advent of photography. It
           | ushered in a new standard of proof that modern society
           | depends on to this day.
        
         | 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.
        
           | intended wrote:
           | We have seen it with manipulation of pictures.
           | 
           | Hell - look of the fate of the rest of the world online.
           | They're basically thrown to the fucking wolves.
           | 
           | Minorities are lynched around the world after viral forwards.
           | Autocrats are stronger than ever and authoritarian regimes
           | have flourished like never before.
           | 
           | Trust and safety tools are vastly stronger for English than
           | any other language. See the language resource gap (lost in
           | translation, Nicholas and Bhatia)
           | 
           | In America, the political divide has reached levels
           | unimaginable. People live in entirely different realities.
           | 
           | Images from democrats sides are dismissed as faked and lies
           | take so long to discredit that the issue has passed on,
           | tiring fact checkers and the public.
           | 
           | The original fake news problem of Romanian advert farms
           | focused entirely on conservative citizens.
        
       | 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...
        
             | elwell wrote:
             | Good point. Here's a patch:                   Math.random =
             | () => 1;
        
         | 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.
        
           | Y_Y wrote:
           | I have the same suspicion, though I wonder if they won't
           | immediately try to "cut open the golden goose" and decide
           | that misusing why about it trust for short term gain is
           | favorable (for the person making the decision, if not the
           | organization).
        
         | 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.
        
         | bamboozled wrote:
         | Sitting in my workshop drinking a cup of tea on a break from
         | making some new saw horses and reading these comments. I'm just
         | so grateful I can do something with my hands, I'm delighted,
         | couldn't be happier.
         | 
         | If the world ends tomorrow. I'm ok so long as I'm not wasting
         | it on Instagram shit post filled with fake content when it goes
         | down.
        
       | 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?
        
         | slashdave wrote:
         | The models produce a form of average video, but with artificial
         | sharpness added for a form of consistency. A truly and
         | consistently original image requires something these models do
         | not have, which is a world model.
        
       | 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.
        
         | deisteve wrote:
         | I'm not so sure how much that is relevant to Meta Movie Gen.
         | I've tried all the tools: Luma, Runway, Kling
         | 
         | Luma is by far the worst and relatively compared to Runway and
         | Kling by far produces the worst quality and unstable video.
         | Runway has that distinctive "photo in the foreground with
         | animated background" signature that turns many off.
         | 
         | Kling and Runway share that same "picture stability" issue that
         | is rampant requiring several prompts before getting something
         | usable (note I don't even include Luma because its output just
         | isn't competitive imho).
         | 
         | This Meta Movie Gen seems to make heavy usage of SAM2 model
         | which gets me super excited as I've always thought that would
         | bring about that spatiotemporal golden chalice we always
         | wanted, evident by the prompt based editing and tracking of
         | objects in the scene (incredible achievement btw).
         | 
         | Until I have the tool ready to try I will withhold any
         | prejudgements but from my own personal experiences with
         | generative video, this Meta movie gen is quite possibly SOTA.
         | 
         | I simply have not seen this level of stability and confidence
         | in output. Resolutional quality aside (which already Kling and
         | Runway are at top of the game), the sheer amount of training
         | data that Meta must have at disposal must be far more than what
         | Kling (scrapes almost the entirety of Western content,
         | copyrights be damned) and Runway can ever hope to acquire, plus
         | the top notch talented researchers and deep learning experts
         | they house and feed, makes me very optimistic that Meta and/or
         | Google will achieve SOTA across the board.
         | 
         | Microsoft on the other hand has been puttering along by going
         | all in on OpenAI (above, below and beside) which has been
         | largely disappointing in terms of deliverability and
         | performance and trying to stifle competition and protect its
         | feeble economic moat via the recently failed regulatory capture
         | attempt.
         | 
         | TLDR: this is quite possibly SOTA and Meta/Google have far more
         | training data then anybody in the existing space. Luma is
         | trash.
        
         | gitaarik wrote:
         | Which AI's allow you to keep training the model? Most are pre-
         | trained without you knowing how. If you use an open source LLM,
         | you could probably do it, but then you already need to have a
         | lot more understanding of it, and be more technical, and have
         | proper hardware. Most AI's I have seen and worked with don't
         | have an option to keep training it. You just use the model as-
         | is, possibly with a initial prompt to tell the AI in what kind
         | of fashion it should respond.
        
       | 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)
        
         | rolux wrote:
         | Stenography is writing in shorthand. What you mean is
         | steganography.
         | 
         | You can also watermark plain text by generating "invisible"
         | patterns.
         | 
         | Of course, in all these cases, the watermarks are trivial to
         | remove: just re-encode the output with an open model. Which is
         | why I hope there will be no federal law that tries to enforce
         | something that is categorically unenforceable.
        
           | sleepybrett wrote:
           | yes sorry, i think autocorrect got me when I wsn't looking.
           | 
           | If the feds catch you removing watermarks you go to prison.
           | Problem solved.
        
       | 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
        
           | qwery wrote:
           | It certainly wasn't my intent to trash the whole thing, so
           | I'm sorry it came across that way. They've done well. They
           | combined a whole bunch of techniques in a new way, or at
           | least in a better way than we've seen before. I don't think
           | you should be surprised to see these results today.
           | 
           | > This is _the worst that machines will ever be at this task_
           | 
           | This is wrong. We've seen worse and we've seen far, far worse
           | -- what I mean is that we've seen plenty of iterative
           | development in video generation. Even if you only consider
           | machine-learning based video from text prompts. Then consider
           | other generative systems as well as other video research and
           | technology like motion interpolation, depth map generation,
           | etc.. It's an extremely active field.
        
           | cageface wrote:
           | The fact that this is the worst machines are at something
           | doesn't necessarily imply they will eventually get much
           | better at it.
        
       | 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.
        
           | skywhopper wrote:
           | That's not how dictionaries work.
        
         | 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.
        
         | zyl1n wrote:
         | All the pieces are in place to create a primitive holodeck. I
         | hope meta continues to invest/burn billions in this space.
        
         | knicholes wrote:
         | Just wait until content is generated based on dopamine release
         | rates or brain signals instead of through text.
        
       | 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?
        
         | thriwster wrote:
         | Meta is not the open source AI company. LLaMa (or whatever
         | capitialization that was) was leaked. They ran with that
         | because hey it makes them stand out vs your "Open""AI" and
         | Anthropic etc. But if strategy changes they will happily close
         | the drawbridge. In other words it is a corporation and has no
         | inherent persistent ethics.
        
       | 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/inform a dinosaur?
        
       | terminatornet wrote:
       | does anyone have an example of an AI generated video that's more
       | than 10 seconds long that doesn't look like garbage? All of these
       | tools seem to generate a weirdly zooming shot of something that
       | turns a little bit and that's about it.
       | 
       | Anything longer than a single clip is just a bunch of these clips
       | stitched together.
        
       | famahar wrote:
       | I've kinda given up on the internet at this point. It's sad but
       | comforting. My social networks are just my friends and I've
       | started to get back into reading books and long form blogs. Don't
       | want to be exposed to this endless slop. Every day it gets harder
       | to find something that was so easy before. It's all being buried
       | by endless content. I'm hoping some non AI generative content
       | branch of the internet will be created. Don't know if something
       | like that is possible. Curation seems like the next best step.
        
         | vouaobrasil wrote:
         | I was thinking exactly that: a coalition of people who refuse
         | to use AI, and who refuse to interact with or support others
         | who do use AI. I actually work for Photography Life, and we
         | have already committed to 100% AI free: no generative AI for
         | articles and no gen AI for photos either. I also have a 100%
         | AI-free commmitment on my YouTube channel. Procreate for iPad
         | believes in no AI as well.
         | 
         | But we need more supporters. Place AI-free banners on your site
         | if you have one and send me the link. Encourage others to
         | declare their support against AI. Writing and art is about
         | communicating what humans make because it transmits experience!
         | We have to come together and refuse as much as possible to
         | support those who use AI! Feel free to contact me if you want
         | to collaborate!
        
           | deisteve wrote:
           | coalition makes it sound like its in the millions all
           | coordinating together like these guys :
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
        
             | vouaobrasil wrote:
             | I am happy to declare that I am myself, a Luddite in many
             | ways. No problem with that. I like lots of technology, not
             | gonna lie. I'm a programmer and have a PhD in math, but I
             | think it's gone too far in many respects. And if I have to
             | build a coalition into millions, I'll do it one step at a
             | time.
        
               | blibble wrote:
               | where do I sign up?
               | 
               | early 2000s style amish would do it for me...
        
               | floren wrote:
               | Where do I sign?
        
               | signatoremo wrote:
               | No problems with that. I don't even call you luddite. I
               | wouldn't look down on you and call what I don't like anti
               | art.
        
             | calvinmorrison wrote:
             | Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and
             | eventually the movement was suppressed by legal and
             | military force, which included execution and penal
             | transportation of accused and convicted Luddites.[5]
        
               | dmix wrote:
               | The outcome of the times. Likewise it is far more likely
               | harmless AI (like adding dumb AI stuff to a family video)
               | will have stronger suppression by current power systems
               | than society suppressing critics of generative AI. Mostly
               | because the latter boils down to cultural preferences and
               | protectionism, not the real sort of harm that would build
               | collective mass to threaten progress. And the former
               | because people are heavily motivated these days by
               | outrage and abstract future threats, well before the
               | tangible evidence exists of widespread harm.
        
           | underlipton wrote:
           | Turning it into a prohibition-style movement where using AI
           | taints you forever unless your confess your sins and pledge
           | total abstinence seems like the opposite for the group that
           | wants to present itself as a return to sanity and moderation.
           | It would be better to say, "Do what you want elsewhere, but
           | we don't do that here."
           | 
           | If you want to go full-radical, bombing a few data centers
           | would probably be more effective than being mean to randos
           | who used Midjourney a few times.
        
             | vouaobrasil wrote:
             | Hey, I am not trying to be mean to anyone. We all are
             | forced to use technology more than we could choose too.
             | Some friends and family of mine use AI and I am not mean to
             | them. I just gently talk about it. Even my Macbook has some
             | AI processor in it though I don't use it.
             | 
             | There's no condemnation whatsoever, except for some who are
             | really pushing AI.
        
               | underlipton wrote:
               | >who refuse to interact with
               | 
               | Zero-tolerance ostracization is mean. If you're not doing
               | that, and simply setting your boundaries - "I don't like
               | the technology, let's talk about something else" - that's
               | one thing. That's not what you were encouraging people to
               | do in GP. I think we should be concise in our rhetoric,
               | because it does have the potential to create needless
               | conflict.
               | 
               | "But you just said-"
               | 
               | I did. People keep saying that AI is an existential
               | threat requiring the most extreme action to stop. So...
               | do people really believe that? Or are they just saying
               | it? The treehuggers have a whole file on their
               | actions[1]; where are the luddites? Is there really
               | conviction, or just people letting off steam at
               | convenient targets.[2]
               | 
               | [1]: https://www.dhs.gov/archive/science-and-
               | technology/publicati...
               | 
               | [2]: I am not encouraging nor do I condone illegal or
               | destructive acts, I'm analogizing a similar movement and
               | its tactics.
        
               | vouaobrasil wrote:
               | I do think there has to be some responsibility taken,
               | rather than being "nice" all the time. And I was speaking
               | of a business sense. If someone uses AI in their own
               | work, I fully support not supporting them. That's not
               | social ostracization, that's just good business sense in
               | not supporting a technology that I don't believe in.
               | 
               | So yeah, let me be clear: I absolutely support boycotting
               | people who use AI when it comes to business decisions,
               | and I absolutely support an economic war of attrition
               | against them.
               | 
               | You know what's mean? Creating a technology that takes
               | other people's jobs en masse like AI. But refusing to do
               | business with those who use AI? I think that's fair play,
               | and if it is at all mean, then it's just karma.
        
           | martin82 wrote:
           | How do you protect your community from the inevitable arrival
           | of trolls who try to blend in and poison your photo
           | collections with AI generated ones, only so they can say
           | "see? it's so good, they don't even notice!"
        
             | vouaobrasil wrote:
             | The community has to be based on actually knowing people
             | and a progressive level of trust. Just like other things in
             | society: doctors and accreditations make sure that fake
             | doctors don't practice, keeping sensitive information is
             | based on trust, etc. An anti-AI community has to be a real
             | community that is based on knowing and actually working
             | with people, and not some online thing where anyone can
             | sign up.
             | 
             | In other words, it's not a social network or an amusing
             | website with a free account. Nor is it just about photo
             | collections. It's about supporting real people who do not
             | want to support or use AI.
        
         | mrcwinn wrote:
         | And yet here you are.
        
           | vouaobrasil wrote:
           | There's nothing wrong with using existing platforms to
           | declare the problems of said platforms. To me the "and yet
           | you are using the internet"-type replies sound rather
           | defensive and shallow. The truth is, sometimes it is possible
           | to dismantle the master's house using the master's tools. Do
           | we not complain about our governments using the countries we
           | live in or the tools provided by the government?
           | 
           | People who point out the deficiencies of technology sometimes
           | must use said technology. Nothing wrong with that.
        
           | latexr wrote:
           | Mr Gotcha strikes again.
           | 
           | https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
        
         | vagab0nd wrote:
         | Imagine a herd of AI agents, indistinguishable from real human,
         | are to interact with you and the content you create. Are you ok
         | with it? Would you even care that they are not real people? Or
         | maybe you'd even prefer them sometimes?
         | 
         | Because that's where we are headed.
        
           | chasd00 wrote:
           | If the AI agents are indistinguishable from humans then it
           | doesn't matter how you feel about them.
        
             | totallymike wrote:
             | But wouldn't you want to know that something you made
             | affected actual people in meaningful ways? I'd hate to have
             | LLM bots drown out real people with actual opinions and
             | experiences, and never know if I was actually reaching
             | anyone.
        
               | xkqd wrote:
               | I've heard similar equivalencies in the past and I don't
               | know what the root cause of someone feeling this way is?
               | Apathy?
               | 
               | I've heard coworkers argue that enjoyment from video
               | games is equally valuable to enjoying time with your
               | family or enjoying a walk. I'm a lifelong gamer and it's
               | still heartbreaking to hear people say the grass outside
               | is no more valuable to them than what's going on in a
               | digital world.
               | 
               | What is going on with us?
        
               | paulryanrogers wrote:
               | > I'm a lifelong gamer and it's still heartbreaking to
               | hear people say the grass outside is no more valuable to
               | them than what's going on in a digital world.
               | 
               | Digital is just another part of the human experience,
               | albeit much further removed from the surviving-in-the-
               | savannah experience most of our ancestors evolved in.
               | 
               | For folks with significant limitations, screen-based
               | experiences can be a huge enhancement and even a
               | lifeline. A balanced life is such a subjective concept.
               | IME it's easy and natural to judge, but not always fair
               | or productive.
               | 
               | By all means, let's encourage people to try a wide
               | variety of experiences in all available mediums. Yet
               | without scolding or pity when they make choices we don't
               | relate to.
        
               | rixed wrote:
               | Would you say the same about any other drug?
               | 
               | Not experiencing reality is a bit like dreaming no?
        
             | zakki wrote:
             | Anyhow ... All of us hate lie. Done by real human. But you
             | are okay that something pretend as a human is not a human?
        
             | itishappy wrote:
             | At least until you do something that distinguishes them
             | like try to sell merch or host a meetup.
        
             | pfortuny wrote:
             | Well, yes: I prefer interacting with a human person to
             | doing so with a machine. Simply because of the value I
             | assign to one and the other.
        
         | bko wrote:
         | It's just a technology. Much like you can still buy "hand made"
         | shoes, there will be people that create curated hand made
         | content. And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference,
         | does it really matter?
         | 
         | I really don't understand why there is so much negativity for a
         | new technology. It's never explained, just taken as a fact and
         | people bemoaning the new state of the world.
        
           | wilted-iris wrote:
           | Technology is not neutral.
        
           | latexr wrote:
           | > And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference, does
           | it really matter?
           | 
           | It does, yes. To use your own analogy, if one pays for an
           | artisanal product and is served something out of a production
           | line in a factory, that is fraud.
           | 
           | > It's never explained
           | 
           | You're not paying attention, it is _often_ explained. One
           | huge reason is that it devalues the work of artists who are
           | already struggling to make any money by using their own work
           | as a base without compensation. It's not hard to find
           | explanations if you really care to spend 5 seconds typing it
           | into a search engine. Heck, I bet that if you asked an LLM,
           | it'd tell you.
           | 
           | https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/zn2e3c/eli5_why_do.
           | ..
        
             | bko wrote:
             | Did washing machine devalue the work of people washing by
             | hand?
             | 
             | Did cameras devalue the work of portrait artists?
             | 
             | ATMs to bank tellers? Tractor to farmer? Car to horses?
             | 
             | Again, it's technology. I guess I shouldn't have said I
             | never heard an argument. I just never heard a good one that
             | can't be applied to pretty much any other technology that
             | came before.
        
               | mrkpdl wrote:
               | These are false equivalences, or whataboutisms. The hand
               | washers provided a very different 'thing'. To that of
               | artists. You mention things like getting clean clothes,
               | getting from a to b in a car or on a horse, getting cash
               | from an ATM instead from the teller at a bank branch.
               | These are all completely different to the work of an
               | artist or craftsperson that expresses something. So it's
               | very reasonable for people to seek
               | insight/inspiration/catharsis/etc from things that they
               | understand to be fully crafted by human minds and hands.
        
               | signatoremo wrote:
               | Do photographers express less than painters? Paint and
               | brush are technologies. They enhance paintings.
               | 
               | I expect there will be AI based art, not sure in which
               | form, and people will still find joy in it.
        
               | xkqd wrote:
               | Considering a significant portion of art appreciation
               | revolves around the artist themselves, the talent and
               | story they possess, and the level of effort and
               | expression that went into the piece... I don't know about
               | that.
               | 
               | There's plenty of visually impressive AI art out there
               | right now. No one is celebrating it.
        
               | zztop44 wrote:
               | Some is also conceptually interesting and celebrated, for
               | example the niceaunties project out of Singapore: https:/
               | /www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/19/auntie...
        
               | rossriley wrote:
               | This is awesome, thanks for the link.
        
               | iamacyborg wrote:
               | A quick glimpse and it seems wildly uninteresting,
               | conceptually and visually.
        
               | mrkpdl wrote:
               | > Do photographers express less than painters? Paint and
               | brush are technologies. They enhance paintings.
               | 
               | I didn't mean to imply artists don't use technology. And
               | certainly include photography in my definition of things
               | made by the hands and minds of craft people. I have a
               | degree in photography to back that up. But as with all
               | technologies individuals will choose where their line of
               | interest is drawn. There will be AI based art, and their
               | will also be an audience who don't want it.
        
               | dragonwriter wrote:
               | > These are all completely different to the work of an
               | artist or craftsperson that expresses something
               | 
               | The thing is, as was the case with many goods where
               | individual craftspeople were largely displaced by
               | industrialized mass production, the expression of the
               | individual artist or craftsperson was often _not_ what
               | the market was paying for anyway. They were paying for
               | something utilitarian, but limited by the available
               | methods of production.
        
               | farts_mckensy wrote:
               | Its not any different in principle than any other
               | technological innovation. Arguments to the contrary
               | amount to special pleading. The jobs of many, many
               | craftspeople were displaced in the wake of
               | industrialization and the digital revolution. We all buy
               | and consume things that are mass produced all the time
               | and don't bat an eye. Some artisianal version of these
               | things is available in many cases. You're free to buy the
               | mass produced version or the artisianal version.
               | Technological progress is the engine of capitalism.
               | History shows that you can't stop it, and slowing it just
               | enables competitors to swoop in and eat your lunch. But
               | Capitalism has a shelf life. Feudalism came to an end,
               | and so will the market system. In practice, the
               | implementation into all aspects of production will lead
               | to an insurmountable economic crisis. What comes after is
               | up to us.
        
               | shit_game wrote:
               | Things like washing machines and cars liberated people
               | from labor and saved their time, which they couldn then
               | use to persue other goals. For many, making art is their
               | goal - generative AI isn't liberating people from the
               | burden of making art, it's making art a non-viable
               | endeavour for millions of people.
        
               | echelon wrote:
               | Generative AI lets me make films from my desk instead of
               | 7 AM call times, steep bills at the rental houses, and
               | unreliable post editors who fail to meet deadlines.
               | 
               | This isn't just a net win, this puts power in my hand
               | I've never had before.
               | 
               | It's still work and art. No LLM is going to make a
               | compelling story or make the right artistic choices. I do
               | that. But now I get to control way more myself and I'm
               | empowered to see the entire vision though.
        
               | totallymike wrote:
               | I always felt that the beauty of film is in the
               | collaboration between all the people involved to create
               | something larger than themselves. Everybody in the
               | credits brings something irreplaceable to a film, and
               | together they transcend a singular vision to build a work
               | of art.
               | 
               | This generative stuff feels reductive to me. There are no
               | actors, no set designers, prop masters, musicians.
               | Nobody's bouncing ideas off a colleague or working with
               | three other departments to bring a scene together. It
               | feels less like art when it's a computer using models
               | based on real stolen art to generate content off of a
               | prompt.
        
               | oofdere wrote:
               | > But now I get to control way more myself
               | 
               | is this a good thing? to some extent sure but I feel like
               | limitations and collaboration leads to better art in many
               | instances
        
               | newprint wrote:
               | > But now I get to control way more myself.
               | 
               | You are not, the LLM makes bulk of work for you and will
               | choose a lot of things for you for the movie you are
               | making.
               | 
               | >I'm empowered to see the entire vision though.
               | 
               | I think you fail to grasp one important thing about art
               | in general - it is non-verbal by it's nature. You can't
               | go and explain in LLM input some famous painting, it not
               | how it works.
        
               | zztop44 wrote:
               | My partner is a graphic designer and now uses a lot of
               | generative AI in her work. It's very much an iterative
               | process. She would run hundreds (sometimes thousands) of
               | prompts over the course of compositing a single image.
               | There's huge amounts of editing involved, too. It doesn't
               | take less time than before when she was primarily an
               | illustrator. But it enables her to do different types of
               | artwork she wasn't previously able to.
               | 
               | It's definitely different. And has some bad sides for
               | sure. But professionals using LLMs for creative work
               | tends to be a lot more involved than just typing a
               | prompt.
        
               | cja wrote:
               | That's like how LLMs help me with software development. I
               | don't work less, instead I produce more and what I
               | produce is of greater benefit to my clients.
        
               | echelon wrote:
               | Diffusion models aren't LLMs and aren't necessarily text
               | promoted. You can paint with them.
               | 
               | > You can't go and explain in LLM input some famous
               | painting, it not how it works.
               | 
               | When directing a film, you're issuing verbal commands to
               | your team. It's actually quite similar to prompting. And
               | I almost never get what I envision. Diffusion in a way
               | gets me closer to what's in my head.
        
               | fragmede wrote:
               | I thought that was one of the problems with some of the
               | art models - that you could input the right sequence of
               | words and get exact copies of famous copyrighted images
               | out.
        
               | farts_mckensy wrote:
               | It's like saying that cameras take away oil painting as a
               | viable endeavor. You can still be an oil painter in
               | today's world. It's just a bit more niche, and not many
               | people can make a living doing it. Plenty of people are
               | still going to make art. They're just going to have to
               | get day jobs like the rest of us to support that
               | activity. Or they're going to have to figure out how to
               | do something so weird and unique that AI can't possibly
               | replicate it. Things like multimedia storytelling, ARGs,
               | and performance art could enter a golden age as TV and
               | movies become outmoded.
        
               | latexr wrote:
               | > Plenty of people are still going to make art. They're
               | just going to have to get day jobs like the rest of us to
               | support that activity.
               | 
               | You make it sound like producing art isn't a real job and
               | artists are just fucking around all day. Art takes work,
               | it _is_ a job. One where few can earn a living.
               | 
               | Most artists already have "day jobs like the rest of us".
               | What's happening now is that even fewer people can afford
               | to even begin to learn or improve their artistry, they
               | have to give up before they start. Which, by the way,
               | will in turn reduce what image generators can consume.
        
               | farts_mckensy wrote:
               | No, it's just that pursuing what you love as a job is a
               | rare privilege. That doesn't mean it isn't work. But it's
               | different from a day job, and if you expect me to believe
               | that pursuing art is not more fufilling than some
               | bullshit white collar job, thats laughable. It's kind of
               | a moot point, because these jobs are going to be
               | displaced. There's no sense in fighting technological
               | innovation; history shows you can't stop it. If you try,
               | some other joker is going to come in and take advantage
               | of the technology, putting you at a disadvantage. This is
               | how capitalism drives innovation, and historically, it's
               | one of the few good things about this particular economic
               | system.
               | 
               | It's a double edged sword, having what you love be tied
               | to a wage. Capitalism mediates the scope of what you are
               | allowed to depict. Market forces have created a scenario
               | where existing IP is a safer bet. Just get out of the
               | game. It rarely produces anything worthwhile anyway. Most
               | art is garbage in this system. Better to do independent
               | things on the side.
        
               | komali2 wrote:
               | My argument is this: technology has been driving down the
               | market value of human labor for the last century at
               | least, and soon the market value of human labor will be
               | pennies.
               | 
               | I specifically use market value because the market
               | valuation mechanism is irrational and its meaning of
               | "value" is different from what people often mean when
               | they talk about value. E.g. the contributions of a
               | fireman are far more valuable to a society than those of
               | a mutual fund manager, but the market value of the
               | fireman's labor is far lower.
               | 
               | Anyway I don't know when it'll happen but the cost of
               | doing many things with AI, automation, etc will soon be
               | very low, and having a human do the thing maybe worse
               | maybe better, will be prohibitively expensive. Even if
               | you argue that in the past new technologies have created
               | new jobs, one can look at the labor market value trend of
               | the last 70 years to see that it seems we've passed some
               | turning point where human labor market value in emerging
               | skillsets can't surpass the ability of technology to make
               | them redundant - by which I mean take a look at them
               | wages, they are slip sliding into oblivion.
               | 
               | Maybe not all jobs, but if even 20% of people can't
               | justify their existence under capitalism with labor in a
               | way that feeds and houses them, that's a historic
               | national crisis.
               | 
               | Stopping technological development probably isn't the
               | long term solution. Unions are great but also just a
               | bandaid on a broken system - don't we want to enjoy the
               | benefits of decreased scarcity?
               | 
               | It's time to start having real conversations about how to
               | organize our society as scarcity diminishes to near 0, or
               | if you don't like that, how to organize our societies
               | with the expectation that 20% of people or more simply
               | won't be able to justify their existence through labor.
               | 
               | If you can think of a way to make capitalism work in such
               | a way without enforcing artificial scarcity, I'm all
               | ears, but I'm skeptical. Probably we need to stop
               | requiring people to justify their existence with labor
               | and just let people have food, shelter, medical care etc
               | in return for nothing at all. We almost certainly already
               | have the resources to allow this, and if we don't today
               | we definitely will in 50 years.
        
               | intended wrote:
               | Human attention doesn't get freed up by creating more
               | content. It gets consumed.
               | 
               | In all your examples -
               | 
               | 1) Yes. It was a good thing
               | 
               | 2) Yes. It is now a thing done to learn how to draw, and
               | a niche skill
               | 
               | 3) Yes, yes, yes.
               | 
               | IF people are bemoaning the devaluing of certain
               | activity, yup it's true. It happens. There are fewer
               | horses than there were yesterday.
               | 
               | Certain forms of activity get devalued. They are replaced
               | by an alternative that creates surplus. But life goes on
               | to bigger things.
               | 
               | The same with GenAI. Content is increasingly easy to
               | create at scale. This reduced cost of production applies
               | for both useful content and pollution.
               | 
               | Except if finding valid information is made harder, -
               | then life becomes more complex and we _don't_ go on to
               | bigger and better things.
               | 
               | The abundance of fabricated content which is
               | indistinguishable from authentic content means that
               | authentic content is devalued, and that any content
               | consumed must now wait before it is verified.
               | 
               | It increases the cost of trusting information, which
               | reduces the overall value of the network. It's like the
               | cost of lemons for used cars.
               | 
               | This is the looming problem. Hopefully something appears
               | that mitigates the worst case scenarios, however the
               | medium case and even bad case are well and truly alive.
        
               | flamedoge wrote:
               | who's stopping you from Amish lifestyle? problem seems to
               | be that people want authentic, hand-made 'art' but with
               | price of a mass manufactured tech.
        
               | intended wrote:
               | For art - I can get the dissonance. It's inherently
               | subjective.
               | 
               | I'm concerned with facts and science.
               | 
               | I have to talk past a litany of falsehoods about mental
               | health with my dad before I can get to the actual science
               | that will help him.
               | 
               | I have to remind people about things they studied in the
               | 6th grade about history, to counter whatever hate group
               | BS that has whatsapped itself into their heads.
               | 
               | This is what I am concerned about.
               | 
               | If it was cheaper to create true content, and more
               | expensive to create non factual content, I wouldn't be
               | arguing about this with people who write code.
               | 
               | It's just cheaper to create content and more expensive to
               | identify content.
        
               | traceroute66 wrote:
               | > Did cameras devalue the work of portrait artists?
               | 
               | Actually yes.
               | 
               | Ask any professional photographer what they think of the
               | selfie generation.
               | 
               | Yes, you can argue "the best camera is the one you have
               | with you".
               | 
               | But ultimatley it has devalued the value of the
               | professional photographer.
               | 
               | I know photographers who, for example, spend their life
               | swatting away phone camera users who turn up behind them
               | at the spot where they've setup their camera etc. Its
               | like, I've taken the time to find the spot, the angle,
               | the light and you turn up and devalue all that....
        
               | Eisenstein wrote:
               | I don't understand. Why would people taking pictures for
               | themselves devalue the work of a professional
               | photographer?
        
               | latexr wrote:
               | Think of anything you can do well and with nuance. People
               | pay you to do it professionally and properly. Now imagine
               | there's a tool that kind of does what you do, for free
               | but sloppily. Suddenly people no longer pay you to do
               | what you did, and all around you see the output of that
               | subpar tool and the inferior result it produces. Your
               | work has been devalued. No one is paying for it and most
               | don't understand why it was better, despite the fact that
               | it was.
               | 
               | Have you ever seen those "graphic design is my passion"
               | memes? That's a good analogy. Effective graphic design
               | isn't just plastering some words on a page, it's
               | understanding where those words go, where to break the
               | lines, which font to use, what background is balanced...
               | All things the tool doesn't do for you _but that affect
               | the final result and how it's perceived at a subconscious
               | level_. There is a difference between a good and a bad
               | poster. Even if both have the same information, one of
               | them will be better at its job (e.g. making people pay
               | attention and pay for the concert ticket) even if the bad
               | designer doesn't understand what or why.
        
             | dragonwriter wrote:
             | > One huge reason is that it devalues the work of artists
             | who are already struggling to make any money by using their
             | own work as a base without compensation.
             | 
             | All productivity technology marginalizes sellers in the
             | same field that choose not to use it. And somehow, I don't
             | think the objections would be any less if models were
             | trained on exclusivelt material in the public domain.
        
             | seanmcdirmid wrote:
             | > It does, yes. To use your own analogy, if one pays for an
             | artisanal product and is served something out of a
             | production line in a factory, that is fraud.
             | 
             | Isn't this what happened to Etsy? You really can't tell, so
             | the artisanal goods became mostly factory produced in
             | China. But beyond the romantic and ethical concerns, I wish
             | there was real tangible advantage from buying from an
             | artisan rather than a factory. At least interior designers
             | and custom cabinets are impossible to mass produce...so
             | far.
        
             | kouru225 wrote:
             | Ngl I think many of those artists' work deserve to be
             | devalued. As someone involved in art, there's a huge amount
             | of art that's overly concerned with perfecting technique
             | like a robot.
             | 
             | Entire movies are made just to be "one single take without
             | any edits" and no one stops to ask themselves whether or
             | not that's actually the most impactful way to tell the
             | story. The vast majority of digital art was just filled
             | with all these people who mindlessly copied the same styles
             | of vaguely realistic characters in the same action hero
             | poses and then demanded praise/money for it. It's like I
             | was meant to praise the artistic talent of someone just
             | because their process was laborious... and the truth was it
             | wasn't ever good art.
             | 
             | IMO AI art is just forcing many of these artists to take a
             | look in the mirror, and they don't like what they see.
        
               | iamacyborg wrote:
               | > As someone involved in art, there's a huge amount of
               | art that's overly concerned with perfecting technique
               | like a robot.
               | 
               | >
               | 
               | > Entire movies are made just to be "one single take
               | without any edits" and no one stops to ask themselves
               | whether or not that's actually the most impactful way to
               | tell the story.
               | 
               | Yeah, craft is an important thing.
               | 
               | I don't want photorealistic tattoos, personally, but I
               | appreciate that people have the talent and ability to do
               | them.
        
           | javajosh wrote:
           | Subjectively, I find that the infusion of AI content makes
           | the general internet experience worse. Have you ever
           | researched something to find a video that is AI generated
           | with an AI generated voice? It is the SEO spam of video. I
           | think that platforms will go through several phases in their
           | relationship to AI: first, they will like the artificially
           | increased "content creator" numbers. Second, they will like
           | the increase in short term engagement. Third, they will very
           | much dislike the sharp decrease in long term engagement as
           | the market finds whoever can filter low-quality results the
           | best.
        
             | internet101010 wrote:
             | Pretty much any "top 10" product video on YouTube.
        
           | mxfh wrote:
           | It's that I can't be forced to care about stuff the people
           | that commissioned it, didn't even bother read, review or fact
           | check.
           | 
           | Everything feels like the laziest grind imaginable. For every
           | Harry Potter goes to Berghain, there is an infinite amount of
           | slop making it harder to find good content. Not even
           | mentioning the biases baked into the model and copyright/IP
           | issues and limitations.
           | 
           | To me generated content triggers the same cringy feelings,
           | like those unrequested flash holiday e-cards in your mailbox
           | in 2010. At least those wellmeaning people didn't know better
           | back then.
        
           | itishappy wrote:
           | I distinguish between _content_ and _high effort content_. I
           | like both! AI generated content is fine, whatever, but slap
           | an AI generated scene into a woodworking video and you bet it
           | matters to me.
           | 
           | I'm surprised you've never heard any explanations. Here are
           | my personal thoughts on the matter (har har):
           | 
           | https://chatgpt.com/share/6700aac4-8854-8004-b785-0784c6bfee.
           | ..
        
           | koe123 wrote:
           | I feel as though people are concerned over a hypothetical.
           | 
           | Can anyone show me AI generated content that has fully
           | replaced the alternative?
           | 
           | If this does exist, what exactly is the value that was lost
           | if the "real" thing was so easily replaced?
        
           | taytus wrote:
           | I'll tell you why. I think it's fair to say that most of the
           | people who visit this site are technologists.
           | 
           | Most of us love technology. So why are people reacting like
           | this?
           | 
           | Because we know how this will be used. We know of grifters
           | and quick-buck schemes. We know that, unfortunately, the web
           | as we know it is rapidly dying. We know of the scammers
           | calling you with your loved ones' cloned voices.
           | 
           | We know how powerful this tech is, how easy it is, and how it
           | will be misused.
        
             | jeltz wrote:
             | Yeah, I have done some grifting myself but quit doing it
             | but still know a lot of really creative grifters. I know
             | what a tool like this can do in their hands. These people
             | managed to ruin a lot of Google searches with just human
             | labour and some very basic automation. I know what evil
             | they can do with good generative AI.
        
           | huimang wrote:
           | > And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference, does
           | it really matter?
           | 
           | Yes. It devalues artists further (on top of only existing due
           | to grand scale theft of art). It also is slop devoid of
           | intention.
           | 
           | If that's not enough, it's ecologically devastating. I would
           | rather not waste millions of gallons of water on slop that
           | gets generated and thrown away.
        
             | intended wrote:
             | Human information networks are also an ecosystem. Having an
             | abundance of slop stops the flow of information and
             | knowledge.
             | 
             | You have to filter everything that is shared to make sure
             | you aren't being predated upon.
        
               | huimang wrote:
               | Precisely - the amount of damage that openai and llms
               | have done to human knowledge sharing and discourse is
               | incalculable. Now we not only have to deal with humans
               | manually writing junk due to perverse incentives, we also
               | have to deal with people passing off machine generated
               | junk at scale.
               | 
               | And we're destroying the environment through rapidly
               | increasing resource consumption to do so. This situation
               | is incredibly fucked.
        
           | jajko wrote:
           | You are saying reality and fake reality are alike, because
           | hey can you spot the difference?
           | 
           | Whole effin' Matrix movies premise was about that, remainder
           | of human civilization rather went to suicidal fight than go
           | back to more comfy fake illusion of reality.
           | 
           | When I watch videos from friends or generally people, I am
           | interested in their actual experiences, not lies they try to
           | push about how they wanted their experiences to look like.
           | That's frankly pathetic, you may of course not share the same
           | view but luckily its dominant view in this world.
           | 
           | When Mad max movies made most of their fights in real desert
           | and it showed, god damn I had huge respect for all involved,
           | thats an art. Green background just doesn't cut it.
           | 
           | You also recharge in same way looking at phone wallpaper (or
           | look at it in VR) of some mountains of forest, or actually
           | being there and touching the trees and rock? One is cheap
           | fake junk, another is proper awesome reality that makes you
           | feel alive like nothing. Can't grok why the fuck do I need to
           | even explain this to somebody, my 4 year old son gets it very
           | well.
        
           | jayd16 wrote:
           | Well ok, but there's plenty of crap knockoffs that you need
           | to worry about when buying shoes. It's not about being anti-
           | technology. It's about new content being lower quality. You
           | can tell but it takes effort that wasn't necessary before.
        
           | mejutoco wrote:
           | It is not about the technology being bad. IMO it is just a
           | tool. The problem is that tool enables the pollution of good
           | content because it makes so easy to spam everything. It feels
           | like it will undo all the progress of pagerank and original
           | google, and we will be back to altavista/internet portals
           | days with curation.
        
           | traceroute66 wrote:
           | > if they use AI and you can't tell the difference
           | 
           | Except you _can_ tell the difference and you will _always_ be
           | able to tell the difference. Its the nature of the beast.
           | 
           | Throwing a bunch of content at AI and telling it to curate it
           | is never going to be the same as a human that intimately
           | knows it.
           | 
           | Its the same with GPT coding. You can always tell the
           | difference between what the machine spat out in 20 seconds
           | and what a knowledgable human would produce.
           | 
           | Artifical Intelligence is by definition artificial.
        
           | andrepd wrote:
           | Yeah there's _literally no_ reason why anyone should be wary
           | at the harmful effects of social media and of AI slop.
        
           | unconed wrote:
           | Never before has there been a technology that allows one to
           | fake competency to this degree. This is occurring at a time
           | when some people are bemoaning the general state of
           | knowledge, the capacity for institutions to deliver on their
           | goals and their mission, and the overall intelligence of the
           | people supposedly in charge.
           | 
           | Along comes a tool that promises to take some of the hardest,
           | most challenging tasks, like photorealistic art, or high
           | quality code engineering, and replace them with slop.
           | 
           | Experts look at that slop and see garbage. Only people
           | without experience, without a trained eye, without taste in
           | code, will think it's great.
           | 
           | It represents a tyranny of juniors and entryists. Where "fake
           | it until you make it" will never even reach the second part
           | of that phrase.
           | 
           | The main thing that AI does, is make anything that comes out
           | of it worthless. Infinite supply with nobody curating it.
        
         | makeitdouble wrote:
         | > reading books
         | 
         | The harder part to me: "books" aren't great in average.
         | 
         | There's an ocean of garbage books basically mass produced by
         | ghost writers, solely targeted at milking a socially hot topic
         | or grifting.
         | 
         | There's an obesity epidemic ? Let's make 3000 new books
         | repackaging classic diets under new catchy titles and see which
         | sticks. AI is coming ? Let's throw money at anyone with a
         | vaguely related blog and expand their 3 hot takes into 300
         | pages with a nice title and cover.
         | 
         | At the end of the day what we get in long form is often a
         | stretched version of what was fitting into 3 tweets before they
         | tried to monetize it in a book deal.
        
           | oscillatingpie wrote:
           | There's more than a lifetime of good literature, good non-
           | fiction, good genre fiction to read. No one is making you
           | read dross.
        
             | makeitdouble wrote:
             | It's the same for every medium though: good stuff will be
             | good, dross will be dross. So why books in particular ?
        
           | beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
           | > The harder part to me: "books" aren't great in average.
           | 
           | If all you're looking for is _any_ book, then sure. But if
           | you have specific interests in mind, or you actually take the
           | time to get beyond an HBR listicle of the  "5 best books for
           | [x] topic", you can find so many good books. Too many too
           | read in a lifetime. It's just insane how many great books
           | there are given how many books there are already and are
           | published every year. Even just subscribing to a pub like the
           | NYRB or LRB and reading the reviews/essays has made my TBR
           | list explode with interesting books. Then you have the
           | smaller academic or niche presses that are publishing some
           | great, serious, academic or weirdo fiction stuff, stuff that
           | has no marketing whatsoever.
           | 
           | > At the end of the day what we get in long form is often a
           | stretched version of what was fitting into 3 tweets before
           | they tried to monetize it in a book deal.
           | 
           | Those books are very easy to spot. You can safely ignore 99%
           | of Business, Productivity, Nutrition (add fitness), and pop-
           | science, books, as you already noted. A lot of pre-internet
           | books on those topics _are_ fascinating, though, because they
           | 're usually written nothing at all like a blog post, and as
           | examples that there has been very little world-changing
           | written in those topics in the last 30-40 years.
        
             | makeitdouble wrote:
             | You're right. And then the same thing applies to any
             | generic medium: looking beyond the bulk of it and focusing
             | on the good parts will yield life changing discoveries.
             | 
             | I think the main points are whether there's an incentive
             | for communicate, and whether filtering mechanisms can
             | surface the interesting parts. For a long time, book deals
             | and publications were basically the only venue to monetize
             | ideas at scale.
             | 
             | Nowadays monetization can happen differently and more
             | diverse media. Also a well trained algorithm will often be
             | better than having only human curation, all biases
             | included.
             | 
             | All in all, I've learned more and read more research papers
             | starting from online videos and discussions in the last
             | decade than from any of the books I read in my entire life.
             | That's where I see obsessions on a single medium (books) to
             | miss the mark.
        
         | TacticalCoder wrote:
         | Forums linked to real-world activities, with people posting
         | real pictures, are doing fine. For example I'm on several car
         | forums and life is all good there.
         | 
         | Bonus when there are "verified members" zones: for example on a
         | car forum where another owner of a car of the same brand has to
         | vet you in, certifying he saw you in real-life with a car from
         | that brand.
         | 
         | > Curation seems like the next best step.
         | 
         | I don't disagree.
        
         | bongodongobob wrote:
         | The drama on this site regarding AI is absolutely hilarious.
         | You'd think this group would be excited about game changing
         | technology but well over half the crowd is crying over it. You
         | deciding the Internet is broken or whatever is a you thing. The
         | rest of humanity will continue to use, enjoy, and create new
         | interesting stuff with it. As if most shit on the Internet
         | hasn't been mostly trash to begin with. Even in the late 90s
         | most of it was useless. Learn to adapt or drop out and cry I
         | guess. Get a hobby. These tears over mind blowing tech is
         | pathetic.
        
           | phito wrote:
           | Sounds like they struck a nerve to make you this
           | aggressive... I think the tech is cool. I also think it's
           | making the web worse, because people use that tech to abuse
           | the system.
        
           | gitaarik wrote:
           | Indeed, seems like a lot of people are getting old and
           | conservative here ;)
        
           | bloqs wrote:
           | Please try to take a less aggressive tone on HN, lest this
           | become reddit
        
           | nocturnes wrote:
           | It's possible to accept that a new tool is incredibly
           | technically impressive while expressing concerns over how it
           | may be deployed. Now feels like the right time to be having
           | those conversations.
        
           | internet101010 wrote:
           | It's cool and I use it sometimes. But I am jaded and have
           | seen the next big thing come and go time and time again. I'll
           | partake but I'm not going to be the one that eats the
           | biscuit.
        
         | vachina wrote:
         | Focus on in real life experiences, stop consuming low effort
         | media.
        
         | WuxiFingerHold wrote:
         | That was unavoidable. Your (and mine, btw.) reaction is
         | healthy. I hope more people start to withdraw more from the
         | virtual world. Once they do, many will recognize that it's
         | become an addiction: The good feelings of discovering new
         | things on the internet is gone long ago. What is left is the
         | bad feeling, when we don't distract ourselves with it. A
         | typical sign for addiction.
         | 
         | Back to the topic: I'm still worried by the huge danger of mass
         | delusion. Commercially, but much more politically. How easy
         | will it be to create fake movies of war scenes. There've been
         | fake photos around for a long time. By setting up real
         | scenarios and of course by "photoshopping". Now, there's not
         | much left we can trust.
         | 
         | The good and only way out of this to learn to not trust
         | anything you see on the internet or television. We need new
         | ways of trusted communication.
        
           | the_gipsy wrote:
           | You're just getting old, man.
        
         | shinycode wrote:
         | I feel that there always will be people loving their craft.
         | Maybe their price will go higher but it also means they might
         | work on more interesting projects because the crap ones will be
         | generated by AI. It also means that commercials, ads will be
         | customized for each person with all the informations gathered
         | on that person, maybe every time. Dynamic video Ads, AI will
         | unlock this potential (and I hope AI will also unlock the
         | potential to definitely filter itself)
        
         | ur-whale wrote:
         | > I've started to get back into reading books and long form
         | blogs
         | 
         | How do you know the books and blogs you're reading weren't
         | generated by an AI?
        
           | famahar wrote:
           | Well there's countless books before AI, before the internet,
           | before the computer to read. Blogs are a bit tricky but I
           | just have to trust that the blogs I follow are writers that
           | love writing and don't care about making mass appeal content.
        
         | jongjong wrote:
         | Sadly, something I've realized is that, as the junk gets more
         | abundant, most people's taste seems to get worse.
         | 
         | It's not only because of AI, it was a pre-existing trend. Just
         | look at music, books, movies (can't really call them films
         | anymore). Humans are becoming as soulless as machines. The
         | machines are shaping us in their image, human consciousness
         | will be extinct long before humanity becomes extinct
         | physically.
        
           | danielbln wrote:
           | Is this a quote from Plato? Sure reads like something every
           | single generation that aged out of the prime time has said.
        
         | stroupwaffle wrote:
         | Yeah it's tough. Could get the people to curate the content.
         | Bookmarks used to be a sacred thing. I'm sure if we band
         | together, the best sites are already known to someone,
         | somewhere.
         | 
         | But yeah, read a book. Practice poetry. Go analog. It's very
         | rewarding!
        
         | ErigmolCt wrote:
         | We need a more thoughtful internet
        
         | andreasmetsala wrote:
         | > I'm hoping some non AI generative content branch of the
         | internet will be created.
         | 
         | Social media has been filled with disinformation and bot
         | generated slop for well over a decade. AI or not, the internet
         | is turning into shit until we come up with ways to filter it
         | out. Maybe we need to build a section of internet where we use
         | identity verification, the anonymous internet has all been
         | turned suspect by malicious actors.
        
       | petabyt wrote:
       | I'm sick of seeing this generative stuff. It's at least 50% of
       | the content I see online these days. At this point it's so
       | refreshing to see real photography and art, made by real humans.
       | I hope we never lose that.
        
         | ninetyninenine wrote:
         | You're not sick of it. Because 50 percent of the stuff you
         | think isn't generative actually is.
         | 
         | You love a lot of this generative stuff you just hate idea of
         | knowing it's generated.
        
           | petabyt wrote:
           | Sorry, but I've been doing photography for so many years I
           | can easily tell the difference. I don't care if you don't
           | believe me though. But yes, this is also about authenticity.
           | There's a big difference between something that happened and
           | something that didn't.
        
       | tracerbulletx wrote:
       | The most powerful example for me is actually the rain one because
       | it will probably be good enough for lower key effects shots like
       | that to replace a lot of jobs there. More complex generations
       | might look goofy for a while, but if it's good for sky
       | replacement, pyrotechnics, and other line of work effects shots
       | its going to be heavily disruptive.
        
       | woggy wrote:
       | It's already bad, but the amount of garbage that is going to
       | flood YouTube now is going to make it unusable.
        
         | cpill wrote:
         | oh yeah, YouTube is a pristine environment right now
        
           | oblio wrote:
           | Yeah, but it's going to become 100x worse.
           | 
           | And for the average person, 1000x worse.
        
             | rnewme wrote:
             | Depends on algo, not content. There s enough content even
             | without people gaming the algo.
        
         | bamboozled wrote:
         | I'm already sick of all the bullshit thumbnails to be honest.
         | It's at the point where I feel like giving up my premium
         | subscription.
        
           | gitaarik wrote:
           | You would maybe like this YouTube click-bait reducing browser
           | plugin:
           | 
           | https://dearrow.ajay.app/
        
         | bufferoverflow wrote:
         | No, it won't. Youtube is kind-of like Reddit or HN. "Good"
         | stuff floats to the top, "bad" stuff disappears into nothing.
        
           | coolandsmartrr wrote:
           | That quality filter may come from highly-tuned
           | personalization.
           | 
           | I remember seeing low-quality but viral content on YouTube,
           | so I kept telling it "Don't Recommend This" for quite a while
           | (month-ish). Now it's better, but the recommendation
           | algorithm needs a lot of samples labeled negative.
        
             | magicalhippo wrote:
             | I've never had to do this much, just a few cases. However
             | I'm also super-cautious not to view slop on my main
             | account, instead doing so in a private tab.
             | 
             | So not feeding the algorithm seems to work as well.
        
               | jeltz wrote:
               | Yeah, if you decide to check out slop once your feed will
               | be drowned in spam. Similar to how I looked at a couple
               | more pro-Russian videos to get s nuanced perspective and
               | then my whole feed was filled with conspiracy shit and
               | nazi stuff.
        
           | kristopolous wrote:
           | You sure about that?
           | 
           | https://m.youtube.com/feed/trending
        
           | presentation wrote:
           | In general this is true but I find the pandering that
           | creators do to please the algorithm to make them produce
           | worse videos, which is frustrating.
        
           | null0pointer wrote:
           | "Good" is not what "the algorithm" is selecting for.
        
         | pparanoidd wrote:
         | nobody is forcing you to subscribe to ai video channels. the
         | creators you currently enjoy won't just start making ai videos?
        
       | reneberlin wrote:
       | We humans are so excessively dependent on vision input and with
       | entertaining through visuals, too. But more and more all those
       | visuals become meaningless to me and it all just feels like fast-
       | food-junk to me.
       | 
       | As any pre-schooler will be able to produce anything (watch out
       | parents) imaginable in seconds doesn't make it better to me or is
       | of any real value.
       | 
       | Ok, i needed to edit it again to add: maybe this IS the value of
       | it. We can totally forget about phantasizing stories with visuals
       | (movies) because nobody will care anymore.
        
         | baby wrote:
         | Yeah I agree, I never understood the appeal of photography,
         | it's so easy, you don't need to paint for hours to produce
         | something original, you just need to buy a camera and click on
         | a button. That's it. And people pay for that, I don't get it.
        
           | lurking_swe wrote:
           | is it easy? i'm not a photographer but i enjoy taking
           | pictures as a hobby. Your opinion baffles me haha. People
           | always wonder why their iphone can't shoot photos that look
           | as good as the iphone camera reviews.
           | 
           | https://www.austinmann.com/trek/iphone-16-pro-camera-
           | review-...
           | 
           | Understanding why your camera performs well in certain
           | conditions and how to tweak the camera, is a mini-science all
           | of its own. Also i think the reason photography is
           | appreciated is because of composition.
           | 
           | Knowing where to position yourself, and at what moment, can
           | make photographs turn out magical. Your eyes are processing
           | millions of frames a second, but a photographer often gets
           | just ONE chance to capture some scenes. Some people
           | appreciate the "art" in that. :)
           | 
           | Here's a thought experiment. Do you consider all wedding
           | photographers to be of equal value? If not, why? Anyone can
           | do it according to you. just click a button. Something to
           | think about...
        
             | qup wrote:
             | It's sarcasm
        
               | amelius wrote:
               | Well to be honest I could have written that without
               | sarcasm.
        
               | qup wrote:
               | You don't understand why people pay for cameras?
        
             | NibblesMeKibble wrote:
             | > Knowing where to choose the right words, and at what
             | moment, can make video gen turn out magical. The AI is
             | processing millions of tokens a second, but a prompter
             | often finds just ONE perfect prompt to capture some scenes.
             | Some people appreciate the "art" in that. :)
             | 
             | I do. It can take hours to make the vision in your head be
             | replicated by the AI. Sure you can spit out generic scenes,
             | but the game changes when the goal is expressing a specific
             | vision with the prompt; choosing the right synonyms,
             | phrasing, etc to make it spit out the closest image.
             | 
             | Do I think I'm an artist for that? Not particularly. I like
             | to think of myself as a prompt engineer, a completely
             | different skill for sure, after all I do think overly
             | logical and practical in life in general so it meshes well
             | with my skills plus my artistic background.
        
               | jkolio wrote:
               | I dislike the term "prompt engineer," particularly if
               | you're not setting up systems on a technical level. And
               | it's still artistic, without necessarily making prompters
               | artists. Because the process is one closer to curation
               | rather than creation, I like to think of prompters as
               | "curators". You're reaching into latent space (a
               | collective visual history), pulling out a collapsed
               | possibility, and deciding if it fits your needs or not.
        
               | lurking_swe wrote:
               | there's a reason i put "art" in quotes. I don't mean the
               | traditional definition, but rather the less commonly used
               | definition from the dictionary:
               | 
               | "a skill at doing a specified thing, typically one
               | acquired through practice."
               | 
               | I agree that a photographer is not a true artist. It's
               | not hard to understand why people might appreciate their
               | skill and creativity though?
        
           | acjohnson55 wrote:
           | I honestly thought that, too, until I got my first digital
           | camera and started trying to take photos that I liked as much
           | as other ones I saw. Then I realized how much of a craft it
           | is and I gained a much deeper appreciation.
        
           | golergka wrote:
           | If this is sarcasm which aims to highlight the problem with
           | parent comment, I wholeheartedly agree.
        
         | ShrigmaMale wrote:
         | they're junk food-y visuals too. i don't know how to describe
         | it beyond looking like a cross between fisher-price and a light
         | dose of shrooms.
        
       | barumrho wrote:
       | Thinking about abuse potential, is there such a thing as
       | irreversible finger-printing of media generated like this? So
       | that even bad actors couldn't hide the fact that it was generated
       | by AI.
        
         | dragonwriter wrote:
         | > is there such a thing as irreversible finger-printing
         | 
         | No.
        
         | brenschluss wrote:
         | Here's an idea:
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39166038#39173769
        
       | gorgoiler wrote:
       | Photo sharing websites (including Facebook) used to be wrappers
       | around ImageMagick with extra features. I love how the backbone
       | of their training involves calling out to ffmpeg. It gives a
       | little hope to those of us who, too, are working on a smaller
       | scale but with similar techniques.
       | 
       | Scale? I have access to an H100. Meta trained their cat video
       | stuff on _six thousand_ H100s.
       | 
       | They mention that these consume 700W each. Do they pay domestic
       | rates for power? Is that really only $500 per hour of
       | electricity?
        
         | Culonavirus wrote:
         | They're all investing into their own sources of power. I'm sure
         | Zuck has a few deals in place too.
         | 
         | https://www.businessinsider.com/google-considering-nuclear-p...
         | 
         | > Both its competitors, Amazon and Microsoft, have already
         | announced electricity deals with nuclear power stations.
         | 
         | > In March, Amazon inked a $650 million deal to buy electricity
         | from the Susquehanna nuclear power station, per the Financial
         | Times.
         | 
         | > Then, in September, Microsoft signed a 20-year deal to
         | purchase energy from Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear
         | plant, the plant's owner, Constellation Energy, said in a
         | statement.
        
       | bamboozled wrote:
       | Seems like it mops the floor with Sora
        
       | _sys49152 wrote:
       | change style to pencil sketch = absolute gamechanger. (penguins
       | vid)
       | 
       | thats the most amenable approach to ai filmmaking ive seen
       | available yet.
       | 
       | id have to see wayyy more pencil sketch conversions to see
       | exactly whats going on....
       | 
       | ...but that right there is the easiest way to hack making movies
       | - with the most control.....so far...
        
       | anonzzzies wrote:
       | So can we try it? Announcements are no good.
        
       | nektro wrote:
       | everyone who worked on this should be ashamed
        
       | ribcage wrote:
       | AI destroying mankind has always been a theme, but it's probably
       | not going to be in the form of a physical war. This picture
       | generation will probably have a very negative impact on mankind.
       | Imagination is one of the driving forces of mankind, and so is
       | our desire to realize the things we desire. When these generators
       | become a common thing, human imagination and intelligence will
       | start inevitably degrading. Nobody will bother painting pictures,
       | making music, making video games or movies, when anyone can just
       | see and hear whatever they want instantly. And people will
       | brobably work all day long just so come home and pay to use these
       | generators. This has the potential to destroy mankind by
       | destryoing the human spirit.
        
         | lpapez wrote:
         | People have been saying the same thing about Internet streaming
         | of music for example.
         | 
         | It didn't destroy musicians, just changed how they make their
         | money.
         | 
         | Musicians today generally publish music for free, and make
         | money from concerts and merch sales instead (the publishing
         | platforms generate money from ads around the publishing).
         | 
         | Nothing will change about that with the onset of AI generated
         | music - most music is already free today, so you pay for
         | personal experience (i.e. a concert) instead.
        
           | ryukoposting wrote:
           | Music streaming didn't replace the _artist themself,_ only
           | the way their art was delivered. Music streaming also didn 't
           | posess the ability to interfere with democracy.
        
         | alex_suzuki wrote:
         | What about an endless supply of custom-tailored pr0n? Apart
         | from the spirit, might simply wipe out actual physical
         | reproduction.
        
       | ksynwa wrote:
       | Facebook is already flooded with very strange (to put it kindly)
       | AI boomer engagement bait AI images. I cannot help but think
       | about how much worse the problem could get with AI generated
       | videos. But they are not cheap to make right now.
        
       | Aeolun wrote:
       | Why are there so many websites that are essentially static HTML
       | that make my phone stutter?
       | 
       | The video's look cool, but I can't really enjoy reading about
       | them if my phone freezes every 2 seconds.
        
         | runeks wrote:
         | Which browser?
        
           | arendtio wrote:
           | And which device.
           | 
           | Over the years, adding many simultaneous videos to websites
           | has become quite common, and I have always marveled at how
           | well many devices can handle this.
           | 
           | Nevertheless, it is pretty demanding for the hardware, and
           | many smartphones are not made for such tasks.
        
         | _heimdall wrote:
         | I'm seeing weird bank on a Pixel 6a / chromium browser as well.
         | I'm on mobile so I can't check the source, but this can't just
         | be static HTML.
         | 
         | When I scroll the page, sections of text are missing then pop
         | in, randomly though not as a scroll driven animation. It almost
         | feels like something is blocking the browser's render loop and
         | it can't catch up to actually paint the text. That'd be an
         | insane bug on such a simple page, though I put nothing past
         | react these days if they used it here.
        
         | fasa99 wrote:
         | Q: Why are there so many websites that are essentially static
         | HTML that make my phone stutter?
         | 
         | A: because your phone is a potato
         | 
         | The first free tech support from HN is free, subsequent
         | questions will be $29.99 per.
        
           | baxuz wrote:
           | Took over 20s to settle on a Galaxy s21.
        
         | kosolam wrote:
         | Must be because Facebook use php
        
           | aDyslecticCrow wrote:
           | Your comment makes no sense
        
             | selbyk wrote:
             | I think that's the joke
        
           | Eikon wrote:
           | Your comment uses php.
        
         | rudasn wrote:
         | It's actually quite usable and fast if you turn javascript off.
        
         | Kailhus wrote:
         | Not so much stutter here but definitely some layout shifts as
         | images/video elements load :/
        
       | shortrounddev2 wrote:
       | I strongly believe this technology is bad
        
       | lozzo wrote:
       | When I was little I used to think it was a shame that I could not
       | show my dreams. I could tell my parents what I dreamt but not
       | show them what I saw (or thought I saw while dreaming). Getting
       | closer
        
       | brisky wrote:
       | Was this trained on personal facebook video data?
        
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