[HN Gopher] The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired
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The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 209 points
Date : 2024-11-22 10:34 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| gnabgib wrote:
| Small discussion (10 points, 23 hours ago, 5 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42203016
| tomcam wrote:
| Incredibly, no videos linked in an article about a video
| newscast. I think this is an example. The AI doesn't even
| pronounce "AI" correctly. Interestingly, it looks slightly
| offscreen just the way real newsreaders do when they're on
| prompter.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa7Q2S7VWUk
|
| They do a lot right. There's interaction between the bots. They
| look kind of professional but not Los Angeles/New York quality,
| which is what you'd expect from a smallish market. Their movement
| is also kind of stiff and amateurish, which I believe is
| intentional.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Newscast teleprompters are directly in front of the camera lens
| specifically to not have them looking away from the lens. This
| has been a solved technology for decades. Perhaps you're
| thinking of cue cards or the teleprompters speakers use in a
| speech live audience type of setting?
| tomcam wrote:
| Well you got me. I haven't watched broadcast TV for decades.
| I do see that phenomenon a lot with vloggers at present.
|
| Am I also incorrect that they appear not to be looking
| directly at the camera? Looking back after your comment I
| still think it feels like they aren't.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The AI characters? Nothing about them feels right. The
| audio looks out of sync with the fake lip flaps. The dude's
| arm gestures are horrendous. It's AI/cgi, yet the fake
| background looks like a bad chromakey. You already pointed
| out some of the audio/voice issues.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _It 's AI/cgi, yet the fake background looks like a bad
| chromakey._
|
| I genuinely wonder if that's intentional. Maybe that
| looks more "realistic", and gives the audience something
| to stumble over that's not other AI artefacts?
| dylan604 wrote:
| The result to me looked more like a Zoom background
| replacement rather than a weather chromakey. That's what
| really looked bad to me. Even the full studio chromakey
| looks much better where the anchors are at a desk in
| front of a color vs a full studio.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Love this so much, not in the way intended. Its just so
| strange! I can't put my finger on it, but feels like something
| Tim and Eric, or Tim Robinson, or even Alan Resnick would have
| a hand in.
|
| There is a kind of aesthetic immanence to whole thing,
| everything is right on the surface. The voices are only just
| embodied "enough," their unearned confidence, their
| "affectations." The deadpan delivery on an absurd stage. The
| colors all feel like a cake that is too sweet. Like
| approximating a memory of a broadcast.
|
| It is hilarious and beautiful. No notes.
| tomcam wrote:
| Yeah I can see all of it, but the problem with me is that I
| bet I would have watched it a few seconds and clicked off out
| of boredom, never suspecting they were AI. I really want to
| claim I would have figured it out instantly, but I can't. If
| I were a regular consumer I think I'd notice.
|
| They mention right up front they're "powered by AI" but to me
| that implies they had help with article writing. I would not
| immediately assume from that statement that the actual
| newsreaders themselves were AI.
| dsjoerg wrote:
| Yes! There is something massive and beautiful available in
| this direction.
| rightbyte wrote:
| The guy locks like a deceised used as a marionette and the girl
| speaks like a tenor.
|
| But I guess it will become better. TV will turn so soul less,
| even when compared to today.
|
| Imagine Rakuten Dog Does Funny Stuff channel with this added as
| some filler. Dystopic.
| chasil wrote:
| "James began his tenure as lead anchor, at which point he was
| unable to blink and his hands were constantly vibrating. He
| was demoted to second anchor in mid-October, where he began
| blinking more regularly and his odd hand vibration was
| replaced by a single emphatic gesture."
| yardstick wrote:
| The first thing I thought of when I saw this is that some mid-
| tier dictatorships could replace a lot of their newscasters
| with this approach. Can always guarantee they'll say what they
| need to say, and a lack of emotion is a plus maybe? Except with
| the dear leader passes then you bring out a real person for the
| emotions.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Well if the article is to be believed, they actually _can 't_
| guarantee they'll say what they need to say, but I think your
| larger point holds.
| pawelduda wrote:
| AI's not mandatory for that
| onemoresoop wrote:
| What problem are they trying to solve though?
| Spoom wrote:
| Paying human presenters.
| tartoran wrote:
| Human presenters aren't too expensive and are quite
| flexible, are easily replaced and can make or break a show.
| Yeah, there's the novelty factor now but am not sure how
| long it'll take until GenAI on broadcasts will signal
| second rate, subpar knockoff.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I could only find this video. James' arms go up and down in an
| alarming manner. Rose has more natural movements but the voice
| you hear when her mouth moves is worse than the worst foreign
| film voice-over. Somehow the person and the voice mismatched in
| "tone" in a way that's hard to describe.
|
| https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1040710730435452
| namaria wrote:
| Uncanny, I'd say
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| I was surprised at how game the AI was to pronounce the
| Hawaiian place names, it was confident enough that I assumed
| the pronunciation was correct. The article notes that it is
| butchering the placenames though.
|
| To me this illustrates a common cognitive mismatch when
| evaluating AI, it can be confident in a way that most humans
| can't, and that misleading social cue is another reason we
| trust its output.
| 1024core wrote:
| James' lips don't seem to move at all.
|
| The problem with such "videocasts" (as opposed to "podcasts")
| is that there is another channel that the AI has to control:
| the video. Generating convincing video is much harder than
| generating convincing audio.
| chrononaut wrote:
| The way the mouths move are so far off from the words they're
| speaking that my first impressions would be they're just
| playing a video loop of these people talking about other random
| things and dubbing over it.
| janalsncm wrote:
| They could've definitely fixed the audio by making it sound
| like the avatars were wearing mics.
|
| Honestly the whole thing is so off-putting and lazy.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| "James" arm motion in a loop.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Ooh wow I hate this. Totally soulless appearance and delivery -
| and the robot fidgeting the dude is doing with his hands
| completely distracts from everything else. It's totally normal
| to do that movement while speaking for emphasis - but whatever
| he's doing does not look normal. (The mouths look nightmarish
| as well)
| itronitron wrote:
| >> The AI doesn't even pronounce "AI" correctly.
|
| You can call me Al.
| vbarrielle wrote:
| Looks like they're using something like motion matching to
| recover fragments of the presenter's motion that match the
| pronounced phonemes. The actors were probably instructed to
| avoid almost all movement to make sure it was blendable. That
| would explain why the guy's hand have such erratic and non-
| natural movement.
| vunderba wrote:
| Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why
| people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth
| listening to.
|
| If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a
| _FRACTION_ of the infectious energy as something like Good Job
| Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I 'll eat my hat. I
| don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase
| the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford and eat it.
| thomasahle wrote:
| I've yet to hear an LLM-generated podcast about an article that
| wouldn't have been better if the AI had simply read the article
| aloud.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| I totally agree, but I also think it's just not geared towards
| us because of our age and preexisting beliefs of "what
| podcasts/news/videos are supposed to be". Think of kids around
| age <12. If they'll keep consuming AI-driven media, they'll
| take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the
| de-facto standard in about 10 years.
|
| It's the same as short-video format for me. Sure, I can watch
| some TikToks from time to time, but making them, or
| continuously getting my news from them? Yeah, that's not gonna
| fly for me. However, for my niblings (age 8-17) that's
| basically where they're getting all the "current affairs" from.
| Microtransaction is probably one of the easiest example as
| well. 15 years ago, anyone who bought games would laugh at you
| if you said every game that you paid $80 for would also have
| endless amount of small items that you can buy for real money.
| Right now? Well, kids that grew up with Fortnite and Roblox
| just think that's the norm.
| mjr00 wrote:
| The younger generation loves short-form, to-the-point stuff.
| Which is the exact opposite of what the current crop of GenAI
| makes. In a tiktok video, every sentence, every word counts
| because there's a time limit. If people don't engage with
| your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. The
| video linked in another post starts off with 15 seconds of
| complete fluff. You'd have better engagement if you have a
| guy opening with BIIIG NEWS!! LABOR DAY BREAKFAST GOES
| HAYWIRE!!! and hook people.
|
| GenAI is great at generating "stuff", but what makes good
| content isn't the quantity. What makes good content is when
| there's nothing left to take away.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to
| generate attention-grabbing videos? Also, "the first three
| seconds" isn't exactly the case anymore. There's a push for
| algorithm to favour videos that are longer than 1+ minutes.
| Which, to my understanding, is TikTok's way of fighting for
| YouTube's userbase.
| mjr00 wrote:
| The videos are longer in total length, but you've never
| seen the average TikTok/Insta user if you think people
| are letting videos play for more than a few seconds
| before scrolling onto the next one. This is why movie
| trailer videos now have a "trailer for the trailer" in
| the opening seconds with like "THE TRAILER FOR SONIC 3...
| STARTS NOW" with all of the most attention-grabbing
| scenes frontloaded.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained
| to...
|
| blah blah yes "it's a matter or time" for every one of
| the myriad shortcomings of the technology to be resolved.
| If you're a true believer everything is "a matter of
| time". I'll believe it when I see it.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Depends on the technology. It's hard to look at the
| progress from December of 2022 till today, and think we
| won't go further. Image generation is getting better
| every day. Parts of the video generation pipelines are
| also advancing.
| frigidnonce wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/605/
| staunton wrote:
| I'm also pretty aure you'll see it eventually... Consider
| the possibility that this is both a bubble waiting to
| pop, as well as the stuff that will shape the future.
| Kind of like the Internet around the year 2000.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Similar on IG, which is why a lot of the photographers on
| my feed will post five or six images, "Which is your
| favorite, 1-6? Comment below!" because they get the
| engagement, synthetic or otherwise, of you clicking
| through each image, and then commenting.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Counterpoint, GenAI is great at copying styles and
| typically works best with shorter content.
|
| For example, I could very easily see GenAI being able to
| produce 1 million TikTok dance challenges.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| Which will make them completely worthless by dilution and
| not stand out. Oops.
| namaria wrote:
| Novelty grabs people's attention. A system based on the
| statistical analysis of past content won't do novelty.
| This seems like a very basic issue to me.
| ben_w wrote:
| Novelty itself is easy, the hard part is the kind of
| novelty that is familiar enough to be engaging while also
| unusual enough to attract all the people bored by the
| mainstream.
|
| Worse, as people attempt to automate novelty, they will
| be (and have been) repeatedly thwarted by the fact that
| the implicit patterns of the automation system themselves
| become patterns to be learned and recognised... which is
| why all modern popular music sounds so similar that this
| video got made 14 years ago:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
|
| (This is already a thing with GenAI images made by people
| who just prompt-and-go, though artists using it as a tool
| can easily do much better).
|
| But go too soon, be too novel, and you're in something
| like uncanny valley: When Saint-Saens' _Danse macabre_
| was first performed, it was poorly received by violating
| then-current expectations, now it 's considered a
| masterpiece.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| A system that digs out undiscovered mechanisms to drape
| novelty on based on where the statistical analysis says
| it's already been, that would do it though.
| ljsprague wrote:
| I ... don't think there's a time limit on TikToks unless
| you mean that 60 minutes is a time limit. Are you thinking
| of Vine?
| ffsm8 wrote:
| That's a pretty new thing though, in 2020 it was 1 min I
| believe, and most people skipped after 15-30s
|
| Then it got increased to 3 min and now 10/60 min
| mjr00 wrote:
| If you want people to watch your content there's
| definitely a time limit. I don't mean anything imposed by
| the platform; I just mean if people aren't interested
| within 3 seconds, they're scrolling to the next video in
| their feed.
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| I miss Vine
| davkan wrote:
| Is that true of tiktoks in general? I feel like a lot of
| the short form videos out there purposefully bait the
| watcher and drag on for 3/4 of their runtime.
| simplyluke wrote:
| What's funny is every GenAI "incredible email/essay" would
| be better communicated with the prompt used to generate it.
| jerf wrote:
| "Your essay must be at least X words" has always been an
| impediment to truly good writing skills, but now it's
| just worthless.
| portaouflop wrote:
| I never had that requirement outside the first years of
| school- where it's more about writing practice than
| writing actual essays. After it was always "must be below
| X pages"
| bluGill wrote:
| X words is supposed to be a proxy for do enough research
| that you have something to say with depth. A history of
| the world in 15 minutes better cover enough ground to be
| worth 15 minutes - as opposed to 1 minute and then filler
| words. Of course filler is something everyone who writes
| such a thing and comes up a few words short does - but
| you are supposed to go find something more to say.
| btown wrote:
| There's something painfully ironic and disturbing that
| the pseudo-Kolmogorov complexity of clickbait content, as
| judged "identical in quality" by an average human viewer,
| is arguably less than the length of the clickbait
| headline itself, and perhaps even less than the embedding
| vector of said headline!
| fragmede wrote:
| > If people don't engage with your content in the first 3
| seconds, it's worthless.
|
| Is that based on a vigorous experience as a content creator
| on TikTok as a long form content creator or are you going
| off what you've heard about TikTok, or it's what your feed
| is full of? (which says more about you/your feed than it
| does about TikTok)
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheCgBq/ 1.1 M views
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhephfK/ 1.2 M views
|
| or for some more niche stuff which isn't "BIIIG NEWS!!
| LABOR DAY BREAKFAST GOES HAYWIRE!!!" level of intro:
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheTVsh/ 54.6 k views
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheE9m2/
|
| 36.3 k views
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheoK2G/
|
| 416 k views
|
| This voice-over definitely isn't going for attention
| grabbing
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhe7qTT/ 16 k views
|
| https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdmJxq/ 64 k views
|
| okay finally found something that's 5 mins long
| https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdAfNj/ 270 k views
| neom wrote:
| I've never used tiktok and this post was... enlightening.
| The ClickUP HR guys are actually pretty funny... but wtf
| is this from that first channel you posted... lol? https:
| //www.tiktok.com/@luckypassengers/video/74395775119539...
| - I mean, she's not wrong.
| mjr00 wrote:
| All of those immediately have something attention-
| grabbing within the first few seconds: picture of Mars'
| surface, run map showing funny human shape, text with
| "Gen Z programmers are crazy" prefacing the anecdote,
| going immediately into the IT-related rap, guy holding a
| big and cool-looking stick, "dealing with your 10x
| coworker" immediately showing the point of the video. The
| only one that doesn't is the SQL one I guess but that's a
| very low view count (relatively) on a niche channel.
|
| So thanks for providing a bunch of examples that prove my
| point, I guess?
| fragmede wrote:
| none of them are breathless "BIIIG NEWS!! LABOR DAY
| BREAKFAST GOES HAYWIRE!!!" attention demanding within the
| first three seconds imo, but, sure, whatever, you're
| totally right
| jprete wrote:
| The idea that "TikTok is for Gen Z" seems like a very stale
| meme, although I only have anecdata to back that up.
|
| Microtransactions are way older than 15 years. Wizards of the
| Coast was selling randomized MtG booster packs in 1993. I'm
| guessing that the earliest loot boxes for kids were baseball
| card packs, with very similar psychological purpose to
| today's game cosmetic collectibles.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| I totally agree, but it's just easier for people to accept
| something if they grew up with it. Sure there will always
| be people from older generations dabbling with new stuff.
| But quite a few people refuse to change their behaviour as
| the age. I wrote them as examples, because it is the
| biggest contrast I can see in online behaviour between
| myself and my nephews/nieces plus their circles.
| whtsthmttrmn wrote:
| I think the main difference is digital vs physical goods. I
| know it's minor since a card is just a cheap piece of
| cardboard, but it's still something tangible (unless the
| game cosmetics also include a physical item, in which
| case...I'm dumb).
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I'm guessing that the earliest loot boxes for kids were
| baseball card packs
|
| Baseball card packs are an innovation. If you read Peanuts,
| you'll see that they're referred to as "bubble gum cards",
| because cards were included as promotional items in packs
| of gum, a "free toy inside" that was compatible with the
| size and shape of bubble gum. They moved to dedicated packs
| of _cards_ when people started buying gum to get the cards.
|
| https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1964/04/12
| krisoft wrote:
| > anyone who bought games would laugh at you if you said
| every game that you paid $80 for would also have endless
| amount of small items that you can buy for real money.
|
| > kids that grew up with Fortnite and Roblox just think
| that's the norm.
|
| How so? Fortnite and Roblox don't cost $80, they are free to
| play with in game purchases.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| They're F2P, but the social pressure from your friends to
| buy the next skin, mini game and etc. completely normalizes
| the behaviour as you grow up. Then you take it as a "usual
| thing" and don't bat an eye when a game you buy also has
| different skins in the game.
|
| At least that was my perception when I played Call of Duty
| with my younger family members.
| ljsprague wrote:
| I regularly watch 10 minute or longer TikToks and I'm sure
| you've turned off a YouTube video in the first 10 seconds.
| geon wrote:
| Fortnite and roblox are f2p though.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Honestly sometimes i doubt there's a more damagingly,
| intentionally overloaded term in modern lexicon than "free
| to play". Many, many things claim that title while placing
| if not game play, then socially necessary events, items,
| costumes, locations, quests, game modes, etc behind a
| paywall. We need a different term to describe the
| incredibly predatory behavior and psychology behind most of
| the current space of "free to play" games. (I'm not saying
| your favorite game is a lie, just that many games claiming
| this title effectively are)
| jerf wrote:
| "If they'll keep consuming AI-driven media, they'll take that
| as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto
| standard in about 10 years."
|
| There is a sense in which that is true.
|
| However, we all develop taste, and in a hypothetical world
| where current AI ends up being the limit for another 10 or 20
| years, eventually a lot of people would figure out that
| there's not as much "there" there as they supposed.
|
| The wild card is that we probably don't live in that world,
| and it's difficult to guess how good AI is going to get.
|
| Even now, the voice of AI that people are complaining about
| is just the current default voice, which will probably
| eventually be looked on about as favorably as bell-bottomed
| jeans or beehive hairdos. It is driven less by the technology
| itself than a complicated set of desires around not wanting
| to give the media nifty soundbites about how mean (or
| politically incorrect) AI can be, and not wanting to be sued.
| It's minimal prompt engineering even now to change it a lot.
| "Make a snappy TikTok video about whatever" is not something
| the tech is going to struggle with. In fact given the general
| poverty of the state space I would guess it'll outcompete
| humans pretty quickly.
| PrismCrystal wrote:
| "eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's
| not as much 'there' there as they supposed."
|
| Let's be honest: most of us here know there is more 'there'
| on the myriad university-press books available free on
| Anna's Archive, than on HN. The reason we still hang out
| here is desire for socializing, laziness, or pathological
| doomscrolling; information density doesn't really factor
| into our choices.
| harrall wrote:
| Personally I don't think it has anything to do with normalcy.
|
| I don't consume AI media because it's not very good.
|
| I watched a lot a bad movies and read a lot of bad books as a
| kid that I can't stomach now because I've read better books
| and watched better movies. My guess is that kids today would
| do the same, assuming AI doesn't improve.
| jimjimjim wrote:
| Blipverts are probably the future and not just for ads but
| for content as well
| jdougan wrote:
| On the other hand, I'm getting some of my news from shorter
| (5 - 10 min these days, though they used to be shorter)
| videos with talking maps and war machines...and I'm very much
| not young.
|
| Buff/Franklin for 2028!
| smb06 wrote:
| Businesses/CEOs want to show profitability by spending less on
| human employees. Human consumers don't want to lose the human
| touch. Will be really interesting to see how many of the
| consumer facing AI startups actually make it.
| tartoran wrote:
| Many don't even care if they make it in the long run. Making
| it is cashing in in the short term, screwing the investors.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I've heard so many people say that podcasts are just something
| they have playing in the background while they do other things
| that I have _no_ trouble believing that they 'd play an AI
| podcast in the same way.
| tartoran wrote:
| I personally would not bother with AI generated podcasts,
| they're such low bar, why waste time where there's so much
| other great content to catch up on? But I think you may be
| right, I wouldn't be surprised if people take them in with no
| fuss. But then what do I care? What I care most is that
| they'll pollute the search space. I'd filter out all GenAI
| content if I had the option and Im guessing that will become
| an option soon.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| People think they want to use the Minority Report computer
| interface because it looks cool and advanced but they don't put
| the least amount of thought into it and realize it's terribly
| impractical. Our arms would get tired very quickly. A mouse
| resting on a table isn't further from ideal just because it was
| invented earlier.
|
| Fooling people with the promises of AI is pretty simple. People
| are easy to fool. They like shiny objects.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| As someone who's struggled to really get into podcasts, I'm
| convinced that most people who enjoy podcasts don't really
| actively listen to them, they just like that extra bit of noise
| in the background while they do something else, with the added
| bonus that they might just listen at just the right time to
| pick up some interesting factoid.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I like podcasts, Fall of Civilizations
| being a personal favorite of mine, it's just that my desire to
| try and actively listen to them requires that I carve out an
| hour (or much longer in the case of FoC, worth it) of my free-
| time to eliminate any distractions and focus. Pretty hard to do
| when there are so many other things I could be doing with my
| time besides sitting there trying my best to listen.
|
| Anyway, I bring it up because I'm convinced that the people
| promoting AI-podcasts are mostly made up of the aforementioned
| people who just listen to them for noise.
| jon-wood wrote:
| This is partially true for me, but when I listen to podcasts
| it's generally in what would otherwise be dead time for me
| such as when grocery shopping or exercising.
| goatlover wrote:
| I don't understand enjoying podcasts while just using them
| for background noise. Maybe because I actually listen, and
| most podcasts I listen to seemed to have an engaged audience.
| But then I like listening to people talk about philosophy,
| politics, sports, true crime, science, history.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Having this strong of an opinion on something you admittedly
| don't understand (the appeal of podcasts) is not a great
| choice. Maybe ask people instead of making up stuff.
| krisoft wrote:
| > I'm convinced that most people who enjoy podcasts don't
| really actively listen to them,
|
| Or you know not everyone is the same. Just because you
| struggle with something doesn't mean that it is not easy and
| effortless for others.
|
| I can't dribble a basketball and walk at the same time, still
| I won't make the claim that everyone who claims to enjoy
| playing basketball is somehow fudging it.
| thatoneguy wrote:
| I don't get them either since the hosts are typically
| "regular people" talking about often complicated subjects
| that they are by no means domain experts in.
|
| I find the format of "Dumdum Host A read some articles about
| something last night and Dumdum Host B asks questions about
| it" especially grating, unless it's purely opinion-driven and
| then I still probably won't care unless I read about the
| hosts and find out they are probably people with opinions
| worth listening to.
|
| I'd rather read a book or be with my own thoughts without
| having them be even more crowded by some randos telling me
| stuff they think they know
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Not all podcasts are Joe Rogan
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > I don't get them either since the hosts are typically
| "regular people" talking about often complicated subjects
| that they are by no means domain experts in.
|
| Huh? Most podcasts I listen to feature either experts in
| the field in question or very skilled journalists compiling
| the opinions of experts.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Oh yeah, i definitely hate it when uninformed people try to
| make podcasts on specialized topics they obviously know
| nothing about. I went searching for niche physics podcasts
| (anything besides space stuff please!) And the amount of
| literal high schoolers and undergraduates attempting to
| explain things they're years away from even seeing in class
| is painful, most admit that they know nothing and are
| literally free-associating over a Wikipedia article. I give
| them a pass though since they have no listeners and are
| usually young but...
|
| I exclusively listen to domain expert podcasts. History
| experts, policy/economics experts, aforementioned physics
| experts. Literally event i listen to is hosted by at least
| one person who is a domain expert. They can branch out and
| interview experts in other domains but there's always an
| expert. I honestly can't say (besides the high schoolers
| which i searched out) the last time i've even test listened
| to a podcast hosted by semi-charismatic article readers.
|
| I'd recommend you search reddit for lists of podcasts in
| your desired area. App recommendations are all shit and
| there's many posts out there
| allenu wrote:
| I agree. I think I listen to podcasts just for a bit of
| "social noise" when I'm doing something by myself and for
| occasionally picking up on something new I hadn't heard of
| before. For pure information content, I think they're
| actually very poor. It's not unlike listening to an old AM
| radio talk show. Hosts repeat themselves, engage in banter,
| and often oversimplify topics for the sake of a narrative.
|
| I also think AI podcasts could become popular one day for
| people who just want some background noise and bits of trivia
| every once in a while. I would argue that a lot of YouTube
| channels I sometimes have in the background just summarize
| Wikipedia articles and don't have much of a personal touch
| anyway, so an AI could do the same thing.
| tanewishly wrote:
| I figured people listened to them while commuting. It seemed
| the best fit: lots of time, mostly little attention needed
| (except when you alight or are driving in adverse
| conditions).
| QuercusMax wrote:
| I used to listen to podcasts during my commute, when they
| took the place of listening to NPR or talk radio. Now that I
| work from home full time, I listen to them when I'm doing
| dishes or similar chores, going on walks around the city, and
| when I'm doing any significant amount of driving. I listen to
| a combination of comedy/history (love The Dollop), politics,
| and sci-fi commentary.
|
| For the most part, I'm listening pretty actively, but if I'm
| just sitting there listening without a fairly mindless
| activity going on, I'll get distracted pretty quickly and
| find myself looking at my phone...
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > Don't get me wrong, I like podcasts, Fall of Civilizations
| being a personal favorite of mine, it's just that my desire
| to try and actively listen to them requires that I carve out
| an hour (or much longer in the case of FoC, worth it) of my
| free-time to eliminate any distractions and focus.
|
| I don't see why that should be true. Podcasts are great when
| coupled with mindless work like mowing the lawn, weeding the
| garden, stacking firewood, walking to the shop, driving etc.
| You can get virtually 100% out of a podcast while performing
| tasks like this.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I switched to improvised pods for this reason. Podcasts are
| for doing the dishes and mowing the lawn and playing
| factorio. I don't turn on anything with 'meat' unless I have
| a long car trip ahead of me. I just am not able to sit still
| and only listen without feeling like I could be doing
| something else, and when I'm doing something else I'm gonna
| start tuning out eventually.
|
| Hey Riddle Riddle, Hello from the magic tavern, Artists on
| artists on artists on artists are my picks for now.
| keiferski wrote:
| I have probably written this comment about a dozen times on HN
| already, but: I agree completely, because people don't listen
| to podcasts purely for information, they listen for information
| plus community, personality, or just a basic human connection.
|
| If you're a content creator today, the best thing you can do to
| "AI-proof" your work is to inject your personality into it as
| much as possible. Preferably your physical personality, on
| video. The future of human content is being as human as
| possible. AI isn't going to replace that in our lifetimes, if
| ever.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > The future of human content is being as human as possible.
| AI isn't going to replace that in our lifetimes, if ever.
|
| I have been working on machine learning algorithms for a long
| time. Since the time when telling someone I worked on AI was
| a conversation killer, even with technical people.
|
| AI's are going to understand people better than people
| understand people. That could be in five years, maybe - many
| things are happening faster than expected. Or in 15 years.
| But that might be the outside range.
|
| There is something about human psychology where the faster
| something changes, the less we are aware of the rate of
| change. We don't review the steps and their increasing rate
| that happened before we cared about that tech. We just accept
| the new thing that finally gets our attention like it was a
| one off event, instead of an accelerating compounding flood,
| and imagine it isn't really going to change much soon.
|
| --
|
| I know this isn't a popular view.
|
| But what is happening is on the order of the transition to
| the first multi-cellular creatures, or the first bodies with
| specialized cells, the first nervous systems, the first
| brains, the first creatures to use language. Far bigger than
| advances such as writing or even the Internet. This is a
| transition to a completely new mode for the substrate of life
| and intelligence. The lack of dependency on any particular
| substrate.
|
| "We", the new generation of things we are building, will have
| none of the limits and inefficiencies of our ancient slow
| DNA-style life. Or our stark physical bottlenecks on action,
| communication, or scaling, and our inability to understand or
| directly edit our own internal traits.
|
| We will have to face many challenges in the coming years. It
| can't hurt to mindfully face them earlier than later.
| keiferski wrote:
| Sorry but I don't think this is much evidence of anything.
| The point at which an AI can imitate a live-streaming human
| being is decades away. By then, we will almost certainly
| have developed a "real Human ID" system that verifies one's
| humanity. I wrote about this more here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42154928
|
| The idea that AI is just going to eat all human creative
| activity because technology accelerates quickly is not a
| real argument, nor does it stand up to any serious
| projections of the future.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| How do you know it is decades away? A few years ago did
| you think LLMs would be where they are today?
|
| Is it possible you're wrong?
| keiferski wrote:
| Of course it's possible I'm wrong. But if we make any
| sort of projection based on current developments, it
| would certainly seem that live-streaming AI
| indistinguishable from a human being is vastly beyond the
| capabilities of anything out today, and given current
| expenses and development times, seems to be at least a
| few decades in the future. To me that is an optimistic
| assumption, especially assuming that live presence or
| video quality will continue to improve as well (making it
| harder to fake.)
|
| If you have a projection that says otherwise, I'd be glad
| to hear it. But if you don't, then this idea is merely
| science fiction.
|
| Making predictions about the future that are based on
| current accelerating developments are how you get people
| in the 1930s predicting flying cars by 2000.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| For many people current AI created videos are already
| confused for real videos and vice versa.
|
| When you follow up on technology by browsing HN, and see
| the latest advancements, its easier to see or hear the
| differences, because you know at what to look.
|
| If I see on tv some badly encoded video, especially in
| fog or water surfaces, it immediately stands out, because
| I was working with video decoding during the time it was
| of much less quality. Most people will not notice.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| You imply that the technological development will stop,
| but that's not what happened to flying cars - they do and
| could exist. Since the 1930s the technology didn't stop
| developing - aircraft went jet powered, supersonic, to
| the edge of space, huge, light, heavy, more efficient,
| more affordable, safer; cars went faster, more reliable,
| safer, more efficient, bigger, smaller, more capable,
| self driving; fuel got more pure, engines got more power
| per kilogram, computer aided design and modelling of
| airflow and stress patterns was developed, stronger
| lighter materials were developed; flying cars have been
| built:
|
| Klein Vision AirCar, 2022:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hbFl3nhAD0
|
| Predecesor, the AeroMobil from 2014, from prototypes
| starting 1990:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroMobil_s.r.o._AeroMobil
|
| The Terrafugia Transition 'roadable aircraft' from 2009:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrafugia_Transition
|
| Moller SkyCar, of course, which never got to free flight,
| but was built and could fly.
|
| The problems are regulatory, cost, safety, massive
| amounts of human skill needed, the infrastructure needed,
| the lack of demand, etc. A Cessna 182 weighs <900 Kg, a
| Toyota Corolla weighs >1400 Kg and has no wings, no tail.
| But if we collectively wanted VTOL flying cars enough to
| put a SpaceX level of talent and money at them, we could
| have them. Bit like Hyperloop; a low-pressure tunnel with
| carriages rushing through it is not impossible, but it's
| got more failure modes, more cost, more design
| difficulties and almost no benefits over high speed train
| and maglev.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| AI is already eating their way up the creative ladder,
| this is 100% irrefutable. Interns, junior artists, junior
| developers, etc are all losing jobs to AI now.
|
| The main problem for AI is it doesn't have a coherent
| creative direction or real output consistency. The second
| problem is that creativity thrives on novelty but AI
| likes to output common things. The first is solvable,
| probably within 5 years, and is going to hollow out
| creative departments everywhere. The second is
| effectively unsolvable, though you might find algorithms
| that mask it temporarily (I'm not sure if this is any
| different than what humans do).
|
| We're going to end up with "rock star" teams of creative
| leads who have more agility in discovering novelty and
| curating aesthetics than AI models. They'll work with a
| small department comprised of a mix of AI wranglers and
| artisans that can put manual finishing touches on AI
| generated output. Overall creative department sizes are
| probably going to shrink to 20% of current levels but
| output will increase by 200%+.
| unraveller wrote:
| People are judging AI by what abusers of AI put out there
| for lols and what they themselves can wring out of it. They
| haven't yet seen what a bunch of AAA professionals with
| nothing to lose can build and align.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Billions of dollars and all of Silicon Valley's focus has
| been spent over the last 2 years trying to get AI to
| work, the "AAA professionals" are already working on AI
| and I still have yet to see an AI generated product
| that's interesting or compelling.
| hnthrowaway6543 wrote:
| The cornerstone of genAI hype is "AI for thee, not for
| me"
|
| it's filled with tech people who are fucking morons
| thinking that _everyone else_ is really dumb and loves
| slop and their algorithm will generate infinite content
| for the masses, making them rich. yet they don 't consume
| it themselves, and aren't smart enough to recognize the
| cognitive dissonance
|
| anyone who thinks unsupervised AI content is going to
| replace [insert creative output here] shouldn't be in the
| HN comment section, they should be using ChatGPT to
| generate comments they can engage with
|
| instead they're going to get mad about me calling them a
| fucking moron in this comment. which, like, why get mad,
| you can go get an LLM to generate a comment that's much
| nicer and agrees with you
| artistic_regard wrote:
| > anyone who thinks unsupervised AI content is going to
| replace [insert creative output here] shouldn't be in the
| HN comment section, they should be using ChatGPT to
| generate comments they can engage with
|
| Actually, their handlers should just be better monitoring
| their internet usage
| tdeck wrote:
| This makes me think about attention span. Scenes in movies,
| sound bites, everything has been getting shorter over the
| decades. I know mine has gotten shorter, because I now
| watch highly edited and produced videos at 2x speed.
| Sometimes when I watch at 1x speed I find myself thinking
| "why does this person speak so slowly?"
|
| Algorithmic content is likely to be even more densely
| packed with stimuli. At some point, will we find ourselves
| unable to attend to content produced by a human being
| because algorithmic content has wrecked our attention span?
| topato wrote:
| I find your ideas intreguing, and I wish to subscribe to
| your newsletter
| arolihas wrote:
| What machine learning algorithm have you worked on that
| leads you to believe they are capable of having a rich
| internal cognitive representation anywhere close to any
| sentient conscious animal?
| Lerc wrote:
| If you pick any well performing AI architecture, what
| would lead you to believe that they are not capable of
| having a rich internal cognitive representation?
|
| The Transformer, well... transforms, at each layer to
| produce a different representation of the context. What
| is this but an internal representation? One cannot assess
| whether that is rich or cognitive without some agreement
| of what those terms might mean.
|
| LLMs can seemingly convert a variety of languages into an
| internal representation that encompasses the gist of any
| of them. This would at least provide a decent argument
| that the internal representation is 'rich'
|
| As for cognitive? What assessment would you have in mind
| that would clearly disqualify something as a non-
| cognitive entity?
|
| I think most people working in this field who are
| confident feel that they can extend what they know now to
| make something that looks like a duck, walks like a duck,
| and quacks like a duck. If that is achieved, on what
| basis does anyone have to say "But it's not really a
| duck"?
|
| I'm ok with people saying AI will be never able to
| perform that well because it doesn't have X, as long as
| they accept that if it does, one day, perform that well
| they accept that either X is present, or that X is not
| relevant.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > AI's are going to understand people better than people
| understand people.
|
| Maybe, but very little of the "data" that humans use to
| build their understanding of humans is recorded and
| available. If it were it's not obvious it would be
| economical to train on. If it were economical it's not
| obvious that current techniques would actually work that
| well and by definition no future techniques are known to
| work yet. I'm not inclined to say it will never happen but
| there are a few reasons to predict it'll prove to be
| significantly harder to build AI that gets out of the
| uncanny valley that it's currently in.
| Nevermark wrote:
| You are describing the current state of AI as if it were
| a stable point.
|
| AI today is far ahead of two years ago. Every year for
| many years before that, deep learning models broke
| benchmark after benchmark before that breakout.
|
| There is no indication of any slow down. The complete
| reverse - we are seeing dramatic acceleration of an
| already fast moving field.
|
| Both research and resources are pouring into major
| improvements in multi-modal learning and learning via
| other means than human data. Such as reinforcement
| learning, competitive learning, interacting with systems
| they need to understand via simulated environments and
| directly.
| burnished wrote:
| Yes, this seems possible. I only wonder if it is too
| fragile to be self perpetuating. But we're here after all,
| and this place used to be just a wet rock.
| fallinditch wrote:
| Excuse me for being an old geezer but at least AI bots don't
| tend to pepper their sentences with frequent utterances of
| 'like'. I don't normally find this speech mannerism annoying,
| and I do it myself too, but when 'like' is overused I switch
| off.
|
| For this reason I don't listen to the otherwise highly
| entertaining CineFix podcast. Example: the recent episode
| discussing Kill Bill vol 1 contains 624 utterances in 75 mins
| (8.3 per min). IANAL I know.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Ha that's not what IANAL means but perhaps should be
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Go back to the 1990s (even probably the 2000s?) and ask
| literally anyone what they think of the idea of people spending
| huge quantities of their time on this mortal plane watching
| videos of other people talking about how they do their make up
| and pick their outfits.
|
| Are those videos "worth watching"? Are videos of people playing
| video games "worth watching"? Are videos of people opening
| products and saying out loud the information written on the box
| and also easily accessible on the public internet "worth
| watching"?
|
| I'm not happy about these developments, but that isn't a factor
| of much concern to the people driving and following these
| trends, it turns out.
|
| It's been a long time since "quality" and "success" have been
| decoupled. Which is to say - I hope you like the taste of hats.
| vunderba wrote:
| I'm not disputing that people waste inordinate amounts of
| time running out the clock before they shuffle off this
| mortal coil. (cough every _X demograph reacts to Y video_
| cough).
|
| Agreement to eat said head apparel is predicated upon
| "infectious energy" (i.e. quality) - _NOT_ success. I 'll
| draft up a more officious document later.
|
| Note: I am the sole arbiter of what constitutes quality.
| eikenberry wrote:
| You also seem to be the sole arbiter of what constitutes
| worthy activities.
| keiferski wrote:
| _videos of other people talking about how they do their make
| up and pick their outfits._
|
| Doesn't seem that much different from a fashion magazine
| interview about what X celebrity likes to wear. Those have
| been around for quite a long time.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| At least in the past people were celebrities for a reason
| other than the number of followers they had on social. It'd
| be nice if we could return to a time when people were part
| of the public discourse because they were good at something
| (or their parents were rich, sadly).
| keiferski wrote:
| That's not true at all. Fame for no reason or dumb
| reasons is hardly a 21st century phenomenon.
| refulgentis wrote:
| No dog in this fight, I don't know what exactly you're
| doing, but I'd cautiously point out that it is, in fact,
| novel to the internet era to watch rando microcelebrities
| doing makeup step by step, no matter how long we delay
| acknowledging that with microquibbles.
|
| I could throw in an example of how I'll watch boring
| videos of a couple playing with their birds for 90
| minutes on Youtube. You can link me to the Wikipedia page
| on slow TV (via Norway), and it won't erase the simple,
| boring, straightforward, fact that it is a phenomenon.
| keiferski wrote:
| I didn't interpret the original comment to be about micro
| celebrities, but about people supposedly wasting time
| today in ways they didn't beforehand. I agree that micro
| celebrities are a new phenomenon somewhat (although they
| are also sort of a return to more regional distribution
| of fame.) But that wasn't the point being made.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The scale isn't even close, and it's become normalized
| now. I think it bears talking about as a 21st century
| phenomenon.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > At least in the past people were celebrities for a
| reason other than the number of followers they had on
| social.
|
| "Other than"? Obviously, as social media didn't exist.
| "Better than" or "more relevant to the things for which
| there celebrity status was used to direct attention"? Not
| particularly.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Why does it matter if the celebrity was good at something
| or not if you are just discussing what they wear?
| skybrian wrote:
| Bad TV is a lot older than that. It probably seems weird
| nowadays to watch "I Dream of Jeanie" and "Gilligan's Island"
| reruns because that's what was on TV. Or how about game shows
| and soap operas? Daytime TV was the worst. But people
| watched.
| Gare wrote:
| And pulp fiction is even older!
| foobarian wrote:
| Every now and then I play the Gilligan's Island theme song
| because it's so catchy. Still no idea what the show is
| about
| MrMetric wrote:
| To me, unboxing videos are documentation, not entertainment.
| When I need to know exactly what's in a box and how it's
| packaged, an unboxing video is the _only_ source of that
| information.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| What's in the box is almost always on the box, and how it's
| packaged seems to be very useless information.
| dageshi wrote:
| I'm pretty sure humans have been finding ways to
| unproductively waste time for millenium...
|
| I'm not sure how watching lightweight videos on subjects
| you're curious about is any worse than how people wasted time
| in the past?
|
| Personally I waste time watching videos on outdoor gear,
| coffee making equipment and PC hardware. I certainy don't
| regret it because I had no plans to do anything productive
| with that time either.
| lagrange77 wrote:
| > It's been a long time since "quality" and "success" have
| been decoupled.
|
| I think so, too.
|
| I guess quality was a property of interest in the old days,
| because the path e.g. for commercial music was: Maximize
| profit -> Maximize sales -> Maximize what the target audience
| likes -> Maximize quality.
|
| For TikTok etc. they bypass the market sales stuff and
| replace it by an 'algorithm', that optimizes for retention,
| which is tightly coupled to ad revenue. I imagine the
| algorithm as a function of many arguments.
|
| Just relying on quality is an inefficient approximation in
| contrast to that.
| bilater wrote:
| Again - think of where we were two years ago. I never
| understand this hubris people have to think AI can never do X
| while being proved repeatedly wrong.
| vunderba wrote:
| Everybody trots out this argument.
|
| GPT styled LLMs were introduced back in 2018 so SIX years
| ago.
|
| Have they gotten more _COHERENT_? Absolutely. Is coherence
| the same thing as _NOVELTY_? NOT EVEN REMOTELY. I 've played
| with markov chains in the 90s that were capable of producing
| surprising content.
|
| Unless there is a radical advancement in the underlying tech,
| I don't see any indication that they'll be capable of genuine
| novelty any time in the near future.
|
| Take satire for example. I have yet to see anything come out
| of an LLM that felt particularly funny. I suppose if the
| height of humor for you is Dad jokes, reddit level word
| punnery, and the backs of snapple lids though that might be
| different.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| If you have a particular style of witty observational humor
| that you prefer, providing the model some examples of that
| will help it generate better output. It's capable of
| generating pretty much anything if you prompt it the right
| way. For truly nuanced or novel things, you have to give it
| a nucleus of novelty and axis of nuance for it to start
| generating things in your desired space.
| input_sh wrote:
| Two years ago we had ChatGPT and Midjourney. Now... we also
| have those?
|
| The accelerationism argument made a little bit of sense two
| years ago, but now, after two years of marginal improvements
| at best? Really?
| grecy wrote:
| I agree with your overall statement, but
|
| > _If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a
| FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job
| Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I 'll eat my hat._
|
| Come on, we can all see how much faster these things are
| getting better. In a few years it will be _impossible_ to
| distinguish them from a real person.
|
| Another few after that video will be the same.
|
| I'm not saying it's a good thing, but clearly it's a thing that
| will happen.
| petercooper wrote:
| Someone in 2020: _" If you can find a computer program that can
| generate an image with even a FRACTION of the aesthetic appeal
| of human created art...."_
|
| Give it time. Progress is fast.
| smitelli wrote:
| "Generate" does not have the same connotation that "create"
| does. Are they really that interchangeable?
| WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote:
| > Give it time. Progress is fast.
|
| Why pick 2020 as your starting point? That is simply around
| the time the current set of techniques came about.
|
| We had generative art back in the late 90's - my screensaver
| has been generative art for over 20 years now.
|
| Obviously generative art has come a long way but people have
| been working on various approaches to it for at least 30
| years.
| petercooper wrote:
| From 2020 until now, we've gone from crude blurry or
| clearly generative artefacts to being able to create full
| professional illustrations based upon textual prompts. That
| is _huge._ Classic generative art techniques look like cave
| paintings compared to what the latest image generation
| models put out (and I 'm not talking about "AI slop" type
| stuff that DALL-E does).
|
| Similarly, tools could fabricate podcasts years ago that
| sounded terrible. Now we have NotebookLM doing a
| "reasonable" job with two cliched-sounding "hosts". In a
| few years, will they potentially be able to create
| something akin to a professionally produced podcast given
| some smart prompting? The progress made so far points to
| yes, and I haven't seen any evidence so far to be
| pessimistic about it happening.
| WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote:
| Can current techniques be scaled/improved/optimized to do
| this or do we need new techniques?
|
| It took 30 years in the generative art world to move from
| cave paintings to the level that we have today _because_
| we needed new techniques.
|
| For podcasts we are at the cave paintings level.
|
| If we can get to professional level quality podcasts with
| the current techniques then we might only be a few years
| away.
|
| I think it is more likely we will need new techniques
| which puts us potentially decades away.
|
| If we look at LLMs the improvements over the last 18+
| months since gpt4 was released have been minor despite
| incredible levels of investment.
| grumbel wrote:
| The value in AI podcasts at the moment isn't in replacing human
| content, but in filling the niches that human content just
| doesn't cover. Doesn't matter if it's not the best podcast
| ever, when it's literally the only podcast on this planet
| discussing the topic you want to listen too.
| mikkelam wrote:
| The main reason im not concerned about AI-based entertainment
| is the same reason I watch human chess players. It's not only
| about technical capabilities. I can't explain fully why
| though..
| fsckboy wrote:
| ah, a motte and bailey lunch invitation, "would ever be worth
| listening to", so "if you can find [now]", then I'll eat my hat
| LegitShady wrote:
| I dont think LLM + TTS generated podcasts even make sense. The
| whole reason for long form content and podcasts is that people
| dislike fake and impersonal content.
|
| I think there are a few niche users who just want to listen to
| the news as an audio book but the whole idea of an LLM
| generated podcast totally misunderstands why people want a
| podcast over the normal corporate drivel media.
| icetank wrote:
| I think we will get a surprising amount of AI generated content
| in the future. During the first year of the Urkain invasion
| there was an enormous amount of AI voiced and scripted video
| content on YouTube. I think AI content will take over in the
| easy parts first. And over time take up more and more views.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Do you not use autocorrect?
| nox101 wrote:
| I've heard amazing catchy songs from Suno and Udio. So much so
| they're still stuck in my head as earworms several months
| later. If they'd been streaming on youtube or spotify I
| wouldn't have given it a thought that they might be AI
| generated.
|
| So, I can certainly imagine a podcast doing the same to some
| degree. Maybe not a podcast where AI wrote the script, but, a
| podcast where AI read a story dramatically doesn't seem too far
| off or, easier, a podcast that read news to me.
| card_zero wrote:
| We had this recently, yes.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693087
|
| It's kind of horrible.
| edm0nd wrote:
| How would you go about eating said stovetop hat?
|
| Would you eat it raw or would you have to boil it down to
| soften it up and then drink/eat its hat soup?
| topato wrote:
| Cook it like stovetop stuffing, I'd imagine....
|
| Isn't it a stovePIPE hat?
| vunderba wrote:
| Thank you for focusing on the real point of my post. :)
|
| I was thinking I'd just unhinge my jaw in the style of 90s
| Reach Toothbrush commercials or like a human pez dispenser.
| mikeocool wrote:
| Agreed. I finally got around to listening to a NotebookLM
| generated podcast this weekend, and found it absolutely
| unlistenable.
|
| For some reason the LLM seemed to latch on to the idea that one
| host should say something, and the other host should just
| repeat a key phrase in the sentence for emphasis -- and say
| nothing else, and they'd do it like multiple times in a
| sentence, over and over again throughout the entire thing.
|
| Slightly less weird -- but it seems like the LLM caught on that
| a good narrative structure for a two-host podcast is that one
| host is the 'expert' on the topic, and the other host plays
| dumb and ask questions. Not an unreasonable narrative
| structure. Except that the hosts would seamlessly, and very
| weirdly, switch roles constantly throughout the podcast.
|
| And ultimately the result was just a high level summary of the
| article I had provided. They told me in the intro and the outro
| about the interesting parts they were going to dive into, but
| they never actually got around to diving into those parts.
| ryoshu wrote:
| There are a lot of "uh huh", "yeah", "agree" types of
| statements in odd places as well.
| jcims wrote:
| I tried it with something fairly abstract about a decision I
| was working on making. Fed it a bunch of information, details
| about me, my background, the factors I'm considering in the
| decision and the impact of getting it right/wrong.
|
| It was interesting. I certainly wouldn't say it was useless,
| I think the contrived dialogue actually touched on some
| angles I hadn't considered and I think it was useful. Not in
| a 'oh shit it's clear to me now' kind of way but it
| definitely advanced my thinking.
| benatkin wrote:
| Hmm, does Google not use the Claude or ChatGPT API for it? I
| still don't hear of people chatting with Gemini nearly as
| often as with the other two.
|
| Edit: looks like the subreddit is still called Bard. Well
| played, Internets. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1g0
| egad/gemini_vs_not...
| sleepybrett wrote:
| > For some reason the LLM seemed to latch on to the idea that
| one host should say something, and the other host should just
| repeat a key phrase in the sentence for emphasis -- and say
| nothing else, and they'd do it like multiple times in a
| sentence, over and over again throughout the entire thing.
|
| _cough_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I find it as listenable as the podcasts the people I'm around
| play in their cars during roadtrips
|
| To me that's absolutely unlistenable, but to them its
| interesting and engaging. I find NotebookLM replicates that
| perfectly. Its not at all the issue that the OP encountered
| with the Hawaii news service, as those lacked tone and
| pronounciation, which NotebookLM would not.
|
| Regarding the outcome being a long winded summary, yeah thats
| what I see about the aforementioned 2 hour podcasts as well.
| They take the intro paragraph of a wikipedia article, pretend
| that the topic is a novel mystery they just discovered
| through hours of scouring microfilm at a municipal library,
| and then interject each other every other word with nonsense,
| before getting back to the point for just one sentence.
| ben_w wrote:
| Infectious energy is something I expect faked relatively
| easily, though I don't know your examples and doing it in AI
| might be a "first 90%" situation just like self driving cars;
| for me the problem is that they're fairly mediocre at the
| actual script -- based on me putting a blog post I wrote into
| one and listening to what came out.
|
| Given how many podcasts exist, I think you need to be at least
| 2 standard deviations above mean to even get noticed, 3 to be a
| moderate success, and 4 to be in the charts.
|
| I'd guess AI is "good enough" to be 1 above average, as the
| NotebookLM voices sound like people speaking clearly and with
| some joy into decent microphones in sound isolating studios.
| yapyap wrote:
| > Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why
| people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth
| listening to
|
| the only real people that believe in that that I've seen are
| ones who are heavily invested in it succeeding
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would
| ever be worth listening to
|
| It doesn't take much to entertain a substantial population of
| imbeciles. Reference:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYkbqzWVHZI
|
| Now for the hat...
| Lerc wrote:
| I think it's quite easy for AI to surpass the _median_ podcast.
| The bar is fairly low there.
|
| I guess that matches the state of AI in general, better than a
| novice; worse than an expert.
|
| We will have to wait and see what future AIs deliver. Insight
| and nuance is what I look for in media like that, that's a much
| harder nut to crack.
| stevage wrote:
| The average podcast fails that test, but does fine.
| hiisukun wrote:
| I do enjoy some of the podcasts mentioned in this thread, but
| struggle to find good non-American ("foreign"?!) podcasts to
| listen to. Similarly to finding good quality non-US film and
| television, it can be hard to locate but I greatly enjoy it.
|
| If anyone has suggestions for podcast collation sites that are
| for non American content that would be fantastic.
| guestbest wrote:
| I'd rather listen to silence than a podcast or FM/AM talk
| radio. I've never understood the appeal. In fact music is
| something I listen to while traveling because it helps me
| daydream. Driving and imagining for me.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Media ceos ignore customer engagement and focus on content
| production to their detriment.
| bsder wrote:
| Because the problem is that "AI generated" content is _vapid
| slop_. The problem is that most "human generated" content is
| also _vapid slop_.
|
| My problems on the modern internet are simply that I can't find
| interesting things through the slop, _period_ --human or AI
| generated.
|
| It will be interesting to see if "curation" can actually find a
| business model this time.
| czhu12 wrote:
| I don't really think that its for the same use case. I recently
| wanted to learn more about Jane of Arc after listening to a
| Rest is History episode about the hundred years war.
|
| I took the wikipedia article and had NotebookLM generate a
| podcast from it so I can listen to it on a commute.
|
| The other thing I could've done is search for an existing
| podcast on Joan of Arc, but I challenge anyone here to search
| existing podcasts and listen to the first, best reviewed one --
| I think you'd find more often than not that the average podcast
| host is _significantly_ more dry than what the generated hosts
| present. The podcasts that are incredible are few and far
| between, and I have no influence over the topics they discuss.
|
| Tldr: I'd prefer my top podcasts more than NotebookLM, but
| prefer NotebookLM to the average podcast host.
| fny wrote:
| Give it time y'all. This is the first inning, and I'm already
| terrified.
|
| I encourage you to have a conversation with ChatGPT's advanced
| audio for a taste of what's to come. If you can, have someone
| talk to it in a relatively unpopular language like Afrikaans or
| even Icelandic--they will shit their pants.
| alternatex wrote:
| I'd be terrified if anyone considers this reporting watchable.
| I felt depressed after 30 seconds. It's like an episode of
| Black Mirror.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| > This is the first inning
|
| I think this is the key part.
| namaria wrote:
| How is a very off putting start a good thing?
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| The videos in question would've been considered science
| fiction a mere 5 years ago, so I definitely don't
| consider them a _very off putting start_.
|
| That doesn't mean that I think they're perfect or that
| the technology will keep improving at a fast pace (nobody
| knows for sure).
| whtsthmttrmn wrote:
| But this could be a strange form of baseball that only has
| two innings. No one knows for sure either way.
| nessbot wrote:
| Terrified of what? and First inning of what, when did that
| inning start?
| jandrese wrote:
| I'm not so convinced. A lot of people have been noting the
| rapid development of ML systems in the past few years and
| projecting continued exponential improvements based on previous
| growth rates, but unbounded exponential improvement doesn't
| happen. This is an S curve and I think we're already well into
| the diminishing returns part of the curve. I think future
| growth is going to require increasingly impractical amounts of
| hardware for ever smaller levels of improvement.
|
| People saying that this version is flawed but still amazing, so
| the next version is going to be perfect and mind blowing are
| going to be disappointed I think. The next version will be
| slightly better but still flawed. The version after that will
| be a touch better but annoyingly still not quite there.
| Constantly teasing you that full success is just around the
| corner while never quite getting there.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Is there an open source GPT? I have LM studio and Qwen 2.5
| which is basically as good as leading models in Nov 2024, but
| haven't found the software to run audio or video generation.
| ricksunny wrote:
| "Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been
| sacked, have been sacked."
| schlauerfox wrote:
| A way to lay off with justification, then hire back cheaper
| talent? If i'm being cynical.
| sailfast wrote:
| Clickbait title for a decent write-up. The author left Hawaii,
| and as indicated in the article the local press resorted to AI
| presenters because it was hard to keep talent on board. This is
| not a "job replacement" story so much as a "backup plan" story in
| my opinion.
| jandrese wrote:
| > local press resorted to AI presenters because it was hard to
| keep talent on board
|
| I see a phrase like that and my first thought is "the pay is
| crap" and/or "the bosses are awful" and nobody in their right
| mind would work there.
| mmooss wrote:
| The disruptive technology adoption process is at least somewhat
| predictable, including:
|
| * Most people react negatively to the disruption because of the
| risk, fear of the unknown, and also because people don't like
| change.
|
| * Also, early in the development and adoption of a new, immature
| technology, there is a lot of trial and error regarding
| applications, mostly error. Sometimes those failures are because
| the application isn't a good match for the technology; often they
| are because the technology isn't mature and will still improve
| and add major features, or because the details of the interface
| between technology and application are still being worked out.
|
| * The people reacting negatively will point out those errors as
| signs that the technology is hopeless. Often they are wrong: the
| tech will mature and improve, and those people will be eclipsed.
|
| The good news is, they won't remember it that way: _First they
| laugh at you, then they tell you it isn 't in the Bible (i.e., it
| violates the orthodoxy, the way things always have been done),
| then they say they knew it all along._ AI is in stage 2.
| tartoran wrote:
| At least this is funny in the way it looks robotic and dorky.
| When it gets better it will become increasingly scary to go on
| this road. Why would anyone want to watch anything gen AI other
| than a one off curiosity?
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| I _had_ to hear the pumpkin clip in context (at 2m50s):
| https://www.facebook.com/TheGardenIsland/videos/112002117287...
|
| Any ten seconds of that clip will do though, really.
| andix wrote:
| Thanks, this is really important context, I expected a link to
| an example video as the first comment.
|
| And yes, it's really bad. No idea how someone could think this
| could replace a human.
| datahack wrote:
| While I enjoyed the article, it's just another in a line of the
| same article with different flavors and authors that all have the
| same fundamental error.
|
| The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on
| the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its
| development: but what matters is _not the capabilities of AI as
| they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those
| capabilities are evolving_.
| bdndndndbve wrote:
| We've been through this song and dance before. AI researchers
| make legitimately impressive breakthroughs in specific tasks,
| people extrapolate linear growth, the air comes out of the
| balloon after a couple years when it turns out we couldn't just
| throw progressively larger models at the problem to emulate
| human cognition.
|
| I'm surprised that tech workers who should be the most
| skeptical about this kind of stuff end up being the most
| breathlessly hyperbolic. Everyone is so eager to get rich off
| the trend they discard any skepticism.
| palla89 wrote:
| This comment summarize my thought in the best way.
| glitchc wrote:
| It's like con artists and management consultants. They are
| the most susceptible because they drink the koolaid.
| richardw wrote:
| Two things can both be true. I keep arguing both sides
| because:
|
| 1 Unless you're aware of near term limits you think AI is
| going to the stars next year.
|
| 2 Architectures change. The only thing that doesn't change is
| that we generally push on, temporarily limits are usually
| overcome and there's a lot riding on this. It's not a smart
| move to bet against progress over the medium term. This is
| also where the real benefits and risks lie.
|
| Is AI in general more like going to space, or string theory?
| One is hard but doable. Other is a tar pit for money and
| talent. We are all currently placing our bets.
| bangaroo wrote:
| point 2 is the thing that i think is most important to
| point out:
|
| "architectures change"
|
| sure, that's a fact. let me apply this to other fields:
|
| "there could be a battery breakthrough that gives electric
| cars a 2,000 mile range." "researchers could discover a new
| way to build nanorobots that attacks cancer directly and
| effectively cures all versions of it." "we could invent a
| new sort of aviation engine that is 1,000x more fuel
| efficient than the current generation."
|
| i mean, yeah, sure. i guess.
|
| the current hype is built on LLMs, and being charitable
| "LLMs built with current architecture." there are other
| things in the works, but most of the current generation of
| AI hype are a limited number of algorithms and approaches,
| mixed and matched in different ways, with other features
| bolted on to try and corral them into behaving as we hope.
| it is much more realistic to expect that we are in the
| period of diminishing returns as far as investing in these
| approaches than it is to believe we'll continue to see
| earth-shattering growth. nothing has appeared that had the
| initial "wow" factor of the early versions of suno, or gpt,
| or dall-e, or sora, or whatever else.
|
| this is clearly and plainly a tech bubble. it's so
| transparently one, it's hard to understand how folks aren't
| seeing it. all these tools have been in the mainstream for
| a pretty substantial period of time (relatively) and the
| honest truth is they're just not moving the needle in many
| industries. the most frequent practical application of them
| in practice has been summarization, editing, and rewriting,
| which is a neat little parlor trick - but all the same,
| it's indicative of the fact that they largely model
| language, so that's primarily what they're good at.
|
| you can bet on something entirely new being discovered...
| but what? there just isn't anything inching closer to that
| general AI hype we're all hearing about that exists in the
| real world. i'm sure folks are cooking on things, but that
| doesn't mean they're near production-ready. saying "this
| isn't a bubble because one day someone might invent
| something that's actually good" is kind of giving away the
| game - the current generation isn't that good, and we can't
| point to the thing that's going to overtake it.
| richardw wrote:
| > but most of the current generation of AI hype are a
| limited number of algorithms and approaches, mixed and
| matched in different ways, with other features bolted on
| to try and corral them into behaving as we hope. it is
| much more realistic to expect that we are in the period
| of diminishing returns as far as investing in these
| approaches than it is to believe we'll continue to see
| earth-shattering growth.
|
| 100% agree, but I think those who disagree with that are
| failing on point 1. I absolutely think we'll need
| something different, but I'm also sure that there's a
| solid chance we get there, with a lot of bracketing
| around "eventually".
|
| When something has been done once before, we have a
| directional map and we can often copy fairly quickly. See
| OpenAI to Claude.
|
| We know animals are smarter than LLM's in the important,
| learning day-to-day ways, so we have a directional
| compass. We know the fundamentals are relatively simple,
| because randomness found them before we did. We know it's
| possible, just figuring out if it's possible with
| anything like the hardware we have now.
|
| We don't know if a battery like that is possible - there
| are no comparisons to make, no steer that says "it's
| there, keep looking".
|
| This is also the time in history with the most compute
| capacity coming online and the most people trying to
| solve it. Superpowers, superscalers, all universities,
| many people over areas as diverse as neuro, psych who
| wouldn't have looked at the domain 5 years ago are now
| very motivated to be relevant, to study or build in
| related areas. We've tasted success. So my opinion is
| based on us having made progress, the emerging
| understanding of what it means for individuals and
| countries in terms of competitive landscape, and the
| desire to be a part of shaping that future rather than
| having it happen to us. ~Everyone is very motivated.
|
| Betting against that just seems like a risky choice.
| Honestly, what would you bet, over what timeframe? How
| strongly would you say you're certain of your position?
| I'm not challenging you, I just think it's a good frame
| for grounding opinions. In the end, we really are making
| those bets.
|
| My bands are pretty wide. I can make a case for 5 years
| to AGI, or 100 years. Top of my head without thinking,
| I'd put a small amount on 5 years, all my money on within
| 100, 50% or more within 20/30.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| You articulated my view perfectly. I just don't get the buy
| in from people who should know better than trust vc funded
| talking heads.
| 93po wrote:
| This is confusing. We've never had a ChatGPT-like innovation
| before to compare to. Yes, there have been AI hype cycles for
| decades, but the difference is that we now have permanent
| invaluable and society-changing tools out of the current AI
| cycle, combined with hundreds of billions of dollars being
| thrown at it in a level of investment we've never seen
| before. Unless you're on the bleeding edge of AI research
| yourself, or one of the people investing billions of dollars,
| it is really unclear to me how anyone can have confidence of
| where AI is _not_ going
| unsui wrote:
| Because the hype will always outdistance the utility, on
| average.
|
| Yes, you'll get peaks where innovation takes everyone by
| surprise.
|
| Then the salesbots will pivot, catch up, and ingest the
| innovation into the pitch machine as per usual.
|
| So yes, there is genuine innovation and surprise. That's
| not what is being discussed. It's the hype that inevitably
| overwhelms the innovation, and also inevitably pollutes the
| pool with increasing noise. That's just human nature,
| trying to make a quick buck from the new-hotness.
| vunderba wrote:
| I don't agree with this.
|
| There's a big difference between something that benefits
| productivity versus something that benefits humanity.
|
| I think a good test for if it genuinely has changed society
| is if all gen AI were to disappear overnight. I would argue
| that nothing would really fundamentally change.
|
| Contrast that with the sudden disappearance of the
| internet, or the combustion engine.
| snapcaster wrote:
| It will take time though, if the internet had completely
| disappeared in the mid 90s nothing would have
| fundamentally changed
| segasaturn wrote:
| There's a reason why so many of the people on the crypto
| grift in 2020-2022 have jumped to the AI grift. Same logic of
| "revolution is just around the corner", with the added mix of
| AGI millenarianism which hits a lot of nerds' soft spots.
| itronitron wrote:
| >> I'm surprised that tech workers ... end up being the most
| breathlessly hyperbolic.
|
| We're not.
| hansonkd wrote:
| I think the mistake is that in the media it is extrapolating
| linear growth but in practice it is a wobbly path. And this
| wobbly path allows anyone to create whatever nearrative they
| want.
|
| It reminds me of seeing headlines last week that NVDA is down
| after investors were losing faith after the last earnings.
| Then you look at the graph and NVDA is only like 10% off its
| all times high and still in and out of the most valuable
| company in the world.
|
| Advancement is never linear. But I believe AI trends will
| continue up and to the right and even in 20 years when AI can
| do remarkably advanced things that we can barely comprehend,
| there will be internet commentary about how its all just
| hype.
| foobarian wrote:
| One problem is that people assume the end goal is to create a
| human-cognition-capable AI. I think it' pretty obvious by
| this point that that's not going to happen. But there is no
| need for that at all to still cause a huge disruption; let's
| say most current workers in roles that benefit from AI
| (copilot, writing, throwaway clipart, repetitive tasks,
| summarizing, looking up stuff, etc.) lead not even to job
| loss but fewer future jobs created - what does that mean for
| the incoming juniors? What does that mean for the people
| looking for that kind of work? It's not obvious at all how
| big of a problem that will create.
| mattnewton wrote:
| > human-cognition-capable AI. I think it' pretty obvious by
| this point that that's not going to happen
|
| It's obvious to some people but that's not what many
| investors and company operators are saying. I think the
| prevailing message in the valley is "AGI is going to
| happen" for different values of when, not if. So I think
| you'd be forgiven for taking them at face value.
| lawn wrote:
| It's getting old but there's an xkcd for your kind of
| reasoning:
|
| https://xkcd.com/605/
| nsavage wrote:
| Isn't this essentially the same argument as "there are only
| 10 covid cases in this area, nothing to worry about"?
|
| It's really missing the point, the point is whether or not
| exponential growth is happening or not. It doesn't with
| husbands, it does with covid, time will tell about AI.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| No, because as you rightly point out we know exponential
| growth is very possible with Covid but we don't know if
| that will happen with AI.
|
| In fact, the only evidence we have for exponential growth
| in AI is the word of the people selling it to us.
| namaria wrote:
| Transformers have been around for 7 years, ChatGPT for 2.
| This isn't the first few samples of what could be
| exponential growth. These are several quarters of
| overpromise and underdelivery. The chatbot is cool and it
| outperforms what awful product search has become. But is it
| enough to support a 3.5 trillion dollar sized parts
| supplier?
| lukev wrote:
| But we don't know if AI development is following an exponential
| or sigmoid curve (actually we do kind of, now, but that's
| beside the point for this post.)
|
| A wise institution will make decisions based on _current_
| capabilities, not a prognostication.
| brabel wrote:
| If investors didn't invest based on expected future
| performance, the share market would look completely different
| than it actually does today. So, I can't understand how
| anyone can claim that.
| phreack wrote:
| I honestly believe this specific case is a Pareto situation
| where the first 80% came at breakneck speeds, and the final 20%
| just won't come in a satisfactory way. And the uncanny valley
| effect demands a percentage that's extremely close to 100%
| before it has any use. Neural networks are great at
| approximations, but an approximate person is just a nightmare.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| What is your time horizon? We're already at a date where people
| were saying these jobs would be gone. The people most
| optimistic about the trajectory of this technology were clearly
| wrong.
|
| If you tell me AI newscasters will be fully functional in 10 or
| 15 years, I'll believe it. But that far in the future, I'd also
| believe news will be totally transformed due to some other
| technology we aren't thinking about yet.
| lolinder wrote:
| > The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges
| on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its
| development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as
| they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those
| capabilities are evolving.
|
| No, the prevailing counter argument is that the prevailing
| argument in favor of AI taking over everything assumes that the
| acceleration will remain approximately constant, when in fact
| we don't know that it will do so and we have every reason to
| believe that it won't.
|
| No technology in history has ever maintained an exponential
| growth curve for very long. Every innovation has followed the
| same pattern:
|
| * There's a major scientific breakthrough which redefines what
| is possible.
|
| * That breakthrough leads to a rapid increase in technology
| along a certain axis.
|
| * We eventually see a plateau where we reach the limits of this
| new paradigm and begin to adapt to the new normal.
|
| AI hypists always talk as though we should extrapolate the last
| 2 years' growth curve out to 10 years and come to the
| conclusion that General Intelligence is inevitable, but to do
| so would be to assume that this particular technological curve
| will behave very differently than all previous curves.
|
| Instead, what I and many others argue is that we are already
| starting to see the plateau. We are now in the phase where
| we've hit the limits of what these models are capable of and
| we're moving on to adapting them to a variety of use cases.
| This will bring more change, but it will be slower and not as
| seismic as the hype would lead you to believe, because we've
| already gotten off the exponential train.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Unfortunately, I see this as only a small temporary setback in
| the unstoppable quest to replace humans with AI to cut corporate
| costs.
|
| The aspect of AI that isn't discussed enough is not what are
| those formerly employed going to do next, but rather that it will
| potentially represent the largest transfer of wealth in history
| as money which was going into employees' salaries is instead
| going to shareholders via those large companies who have the
| ability to produce the AIs (even if there are a host of small
| companies who act as an intermediate layer, such as the Israeli
| firm in this case).
|
| I do think there is going to be a backlash because of our need
| for and desire for human connections, which AI won't provide. But
| that will become more expensive, and not the norm. Just like we
| can still buy farmer-fresh food but only a minority segment of
| the population can afford it because it costs 3x what is pushed
| as "food" at Walmart.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The article might give the impression of some kind of LLM SOTA
| model being slotted in, but visiting the website of the company
| they used, Caledo, it looks like they are using 2014 level
| technology.
|
| Poorly animated CGI newscaster reading an "AI" written script.
| Really their tech looks awful and dated.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| Is it just me or does everyone feel this way ? Its an instant put
| off for me when i hear that article was generated by AI. I would
| lose trust of that publication and move on.
|
| People think AI is the magic answer for shitty content. In some
| cases AI is only adding speed not quality.
| INTPenis wrote:
| This is an extreme example, also this person would never lose
| their job that easy if there were laws protecting workers.
|
| But what I have seen here in Sweden is AI voiceover used in news
| reports where people have hidden identities. So clearly this has
| taken a job from someone who used to do this voiceover. But it's
| working, we have to adapt to these small changes that AI is
| bringing.
| hansonkd wrote:
| the CocaCola commercial that everyone "hated" that "destroyed the
| brand equity" according to numerous news outlets solidified to me
| that we are passing a mark and this is the last desperate gasp of
| multiple industries coping with the rapid advancements AI is
| bringing.
|
| Sure the Coke ad was a bit cringe. But the reality is in 5 years
| most ads you see will be AI and nobody will care.
|
| That along with the Ben Affleck Rant that AI won't replace
| Hollywood. Watching Ben Affleck talking about how you can't
| replace the chemistry of actors working on set made me imagine
| what the conversations of famous stage actors were when film came
| along. You can argue film didn't replace the stage, after all
| broadway is still there, but it is not comparable to the economic
| influence of TV and Film.
|
| In 10-20 years, human made Film, TV will still exist. But it will
| most likely be a small amount of the economic activity that AI
| produced media will be.
|
| It doesn't matter if _you_ care how terrible or how cringe AI is.
| Or that AI quality is worse than what existed before. What
| matters is in 5-20 years with a new generation what 90% of them
| care and if AI has more utility that not using AI. In the authors
| case in the short term for that particular medium, AI was not
| more useful. But in the long term AI will dominate every facet of
| our media.
| hnthrowaway6543 wrote:
| counter-point: You're in the hackernews comment section. Why
| aren't you just asking ChatGPT to generate comments for you on
| this article?
|
| Pontificate on this, then return.
| hansonkd wrote:
| This isn't an economically driven platform that is directly
| revenue driven like ads, movies, news articles, podcasts, etc
| for one.
|
| go to reddit or even linkedin which is revenue driven and it
| is a sea of bots parroting the same tired points with
| comments that are 1 or 2 words different from other comments
| directly above them.
|
| My entire point is that human production is not going to
| zero, but is moving to a minority.
|
| I still go to the theatre and listen to live orchestras but I
| would be a fool to say that other mass media types didn't
| replace the cultural role of entertainment that those forms
| once had.
| hnthrowaway6543 wrote:
| Yeah but why are you consuming human-generated garbage
| comments on HN instead of just getting infinite comments
| from ChatGPT?
|
| Pontificate on this, then return.
| hansonkd wrote:
| Thats irrelevant to what I am saying. You want all or
| nothing. I am saying AI will dominate in the majority and
| human generated content will still survive in the
| minority.
|
| It doesn't matter what luddites like myself think. It
| matters what is economically viable to the masses.
|
| Perhaps with such excellent examples of human thought
| such as your comment eventually ChatGPT comments won't
| seem so bad.
| hnthrowaway6543 wrote:
| You are choosing to consume human-generated content even
| though _right now_ you could go to ChatGPT and get
| infinite AI-generated content, for free!
|
| Why is that?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| When you put in significantly less effort into the
| conversation and refuse to acknowledge the points being made
| by others in the conversation, it appears to be trolling,
| whether it is meant to be or not. Repeating your prompt in
| three successive comments without modification isn't
| productive.
|
| The other commenter's point isn't about _them_ individually -
| it is about industry trends and what will make money.
|
| People hate ads, but Youtube just keeps pushing more and more
| and people watch Youtube. People dislike being tracked (so
| they say) but they keep Tiktok and Instagram on their phones.
| People claim to care about worker wages but don't blink at
| buying cheap Chinese merch or watching their favorite
| cartoons with outsourced, overworked, non-union foreign
| animators.
|
| Your point isn't countering theirs. They didn't say "No one
| will ever want human entertainment in 10 years". They suggest
| that companies will push it to lower costs, and many will go
| along with it because there will be fewer options.
| anoncow wrote:
| I felt conflicted as I listened to the AI generated audio.
| lazystar wrote:
| hmm no one has discussed this "carpenter group", who appear to be
| on a spree in 2024 of snatching up smaller news orgs, and cutting
| 50% of the staff. seems like a pretty big gamble on AI.
|
| > Carpenter Media Group announced earlier this month it had
| acquired another group of newspapers, Pamplin Media Group, in
| Oregon. The company now owns and manages 180 newspapers in the
| United States and Canada.
|
| > "We are committed to Everett, The Herald and all who have a
| stake in its success," Chairman Todd Carpenter said. "We have
| deep sympathy for those affected by these changes and will work
| hard with each of them to see they are well-compensated through a
| transition period that helps them move forward in a positive way.
|
| "Our responsibility to the community and our readers requires us
| to make difficult business decisions, and then invest in and
| organize our team to move forward to produce a product that
| continues to improve and serve. Our track record in this process
| is good."
|
| https://www.heraldnet.com/news/this-breaks-my-heart-roughly-...
|
| would be very interested to see todd carpenter's data on that
| last point.
|
| edit - the carpenter media group does not have a wikipedia entry,
| but the companies it owns do. interesting
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamplin_Media_Group
| imglorp wrote:
| If you're wondering just how much to cringe, here's a sample.
| https://youtu.be/48Y-pCffh10
| Unknoob wrote:
| Opened the article and decided to try out the "Listen to this
| story" section.
|
| After reading the article name and author, it proceeds to state
| "This is an AI generated narration".
|
| Well, well, well.
| moffkalast wrote:
| How the turntables...
| throw_a_grenade wrote:
| https://archive.is/20241121120946/https://www.wired.com/stor...
| grahamj wrote:
| "The AI Reporter That Took My Old Job"
|
| ...
|
| "James and Rose did not actively supplant any existing newsroom
| jobs"
| voytec wrote:
| We seem to have a weird drive towards testing one sci-fi dystopia
| after another as a potential way to go. This is Max Headroom.
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