I find the edit video with text the most fascinating aspect. I can see this being used for indie films that doesn’t have a CGI budget. Like the scene with the movie theater, you can film them on lounge chairs first and then edit it to seem like a movie theater.
100% agree, the background replace that puts the guy into a stadium would be fully usable as a cut in a movie/tv show, and the background is believable enough that no one would bat an eye. If you use it properly, I expect a quality uplift on indie films/shorts. Your limit is your creativity
I personally expect a decrease in quality. Without limits people tend to get less creative. Sure, there is some balance here in that tools also enable new things to be done which are not possible without tools but working around limits has often inspired some of the most creative works.
In the professional creative tools business, "Now the only limit is your creativity" has been a popular marketing tagline for decades, especially for products based on new enabling technologies. It's common enough that a wry corollary has developed in response, which goes: "Unfortunately, for a lot of people that's a pretty big limit."
Why bother? Actors cost money and scheduling is difficult. Do the whole thing in AI - the model will be trained on better actors than your indie cast, anyway.
It will be a loong time before AI can produce lead actors that are believable, act exactly the way you as a director want and tell the story you want to tell, so I think at least for now you'll still need the actors for the lead roles. But I can totally this being used for generating people/stuff in the background of certain shots in a low budget movie.
These are not movies, these are clips. The stock photo/clip industry is surely worried about this, and probably will sue because 100% these models were trained on their work. If this technology ever makes movies, it'll be exactly like all the texts, images and music these models create: an average of everything ever created, so incredibly mediocre.
I imagine a movie maker where you say "use model A and put them in scene 32f, add a crowd and zoom in on A. They should look very worried." Then they can just play with it. Then save a scene, onto the next. Since AI can continue an animation, I don't see why it can't faithfully recreate given models with more development
What'll happen in both industries is the same that will happen everywhere else: adopt or die. The huge winners will be those that creatively use this new tool without 100% relying on it to do everything.
There have been several AI short film festivals, as well as several AI music videos that have been produced. The caveats are that quality varies, the best ones simply employ solid production in general (good editing, strong directorial vision, etc), and I don't know that anything feature length is out or even in the works.
the problem is that these stock footage companies are up against the richest corporations to ever exist. Legal recourse will take a monumental amount of money and time.
Hate to say this, but as things stand, tech companies stand to become all pervasive and all powerful if AI keeps growing the way it has
I'm seeing weird bank on a Pixel 6a / chromium browser as well. I'm on mobile so I can't check the source, but this can't just be static HTML.
When I scroll the page, sections of text are missing then pop in, randomly though not as a scroll driven animation. It almost feels like something is blocking the browser's render loop and it can't catch up to actually paint the text. That'd be an insane bug on such a simple page, though I put nothing past react these days if they used it here.
I wish web browsers had a "pause" button for scripts so I can just scroll to the bottom, let everything load and then hit pause and "freeze" the page contents so I can read without distractions.
I also feel like the quality of web UX is in rapid decline, and nobody wants to hire competent web developers who grok the fundamentals anymore.
Over the years, adding many simultaneous videos to websites has become quite common, and I have always marveled at how well many devices can handle this.
Nevertheless, it is pretty demanding for the hardware, and many smartphones are not made for such tasks.
We humans are so excessively dependent on vision input and with entertaining through visuals, too. But more and more all those visuals become meaningless to me and it all just feels like fast-food-junk to me.
As any pre-schooler will be able to produce anything (watch out parents) imaginable in seconds doesn't make it better to me or is of any real value.
Ok, i needed to edit it again to add: maybe this IS the value of it. We can totally forget about phantasizing stories with visuals (movies) because nobody will care anymore.
Yeah I agree, I never understood the appeal of photography, it's so easy, you don't need to paint for hours to produce something original, you just need to buy a camera and click on a button. That's it. And people pay for that, I don't get it.
is it easy? i’m not a photographer but i enjoy taking pictures as a hobby. Your opinion baffles me haha. People always wonder why their iphone can’t shoot photos that look as good as the iphone camera reviews.
Understanding why your camera performs well in certain conditions and how to tweak the camera, is a mini-science all of its own. Also i think the reason photography is appreciated is because of composition.
Knowing where to position yourself, and at what moment, can make photographs turn out magical. Your eyes are processing millions of frames a second, but a photographer often gets just ONE chance to capture some scenes. Some people appreciate the “art” in that. :)
Here’s a thought experiment. Do you consider all wedding photographers to be of equal value? If not, why? Anyone can do it according to you. just click a button. Something to think about…
I honestly thought that, too, until I got my first digital camera and started trying to take photos that I liked as much as other ones I saw. Then I realized how much of a craft it is and I gained a much deeper appreciation.
I've been saying for years that generated content is an impending tsunami that's going to drown out all real human voices online. The internet may become effectively unusable as a result for anything other than entertainment.
This is interesting and i see some of this now. Even here on HN and other forums i thought were mostly "human". Even one of my group chats i can tell one of my friends is using ai responses, but one of the other members cant tell and replies earnestly.
I am grossed out by this. my instinct is to avoid ai slop. The interesting part to me is: What next? Where do we go? Will it be that "human" forums are pushed further into obscurity of the internet? Or will go so far as that we all start preferring meeting in person? Im clueless here
Vetting people into groups will become much more common, I think. Unless you can verify that person, ideally by knowing them irl, don't talk to them online.
Humans will start to notice this shit. I used openai to help me edit my stories originally, but then when I started reading other stories it quickly became evident to me that people just generated them entirely with AI.
ChatGPT is way too happy to overuse the word cacophony.
My hot take is that we will have some small obscure forums with people, some social media flooded with AI content and other social media where you need to register with government ID and facescan.
Maybe that's a good thing. The internet never reached its potential as being the connective fabric of humanity. Mostly it's just marketing and spam. If the internet died and we all went back to smaller communities, that really wouldn't be the worst thing IMO. We're not really evolved for global communications at scale anyway.
The Internet used to be a sort of hideaway for nerdy people to hang out and have fun. Ever since the invention of the smartphone, possibly before (see “Eternal September”) it’s gone to shit. These days I would rather spend time offline.
Are there any other Internet-based hideaways to retreat to? Somewhere where ads, clout chasing, and AI slop doesn’t exist?
All the vids have that instantly recognizable GenAI "sheen", for the lack of a better word. Also, I think the most obvious giveaway are all the micro-variations that happen along the edges, which give a fuzzy artifact.
I assure you that's not enough. These are high quality videos. Once they get uploaded to social media, compression mostly makes imperfections go away. And it's been shown that when people are not expecting AI content, they are much less likely to realize they are looking at AI. I would 100% believe most of these videos were real if caught off guard.
A friend who lives in North Carolina sent me a video of the raging floodwaters in his state- at least that's what the superimposed text claimed it was. When I looked closer, it was clearly an Indian city filled with Indian people and Indian cars. He hadn't noticed anything except the flood water. It reminded me of that famous selective attention test video[1]. I won't ruin it for those who haven't seen it, but it's amazing what details we can miss when we aren't looking for them. I suspect this is made even worse when we're casually viewing videos in a disjointed way as on social media and we're not even giving one part of the video our full attention.
The way I see it, it won’t take long before human eyes won’t be able to distinguish AI generated content from original.
The only regret I have about that is losing video as a form of evidence. CCTV footage and the like are a valuable tool for solving crimes. That’s going to be out the window soon.
That sheen looks (to me) like some of the filters that are used by people who copy videos from TV and movie and post them on (for example) facebook reels.
There's an entire pattern of reels that are basically just ripped-off-content with enough added noise to (I presume) avoid content detection filters. Then the comments have links to scam sites (but are labelled as "the IMDB page for this content").
To me they seem off, but off in the same sense real humans in ads always seem off. E.g. the fake smile of the smiling girl. That's what people look like in ads.
At least all the humans in these videos seem to have the correct number of fingers, so that's progress. And Moo Deng seems to have a natural sheen for some reason so can't hold that against them. But your point about the edges is still a major issue.
I wonder how much RLHF or other human tweaking of the models contributes to this sort of overstauration / excess contrast in the first place. The average consumer seems to prefer such features when comparing images/video, and use it as a heuristic for quality. And there have been some text-to-image comparisons of older gen models to newer gen, purporting that the older, more hands-off models didn't skew towards kitschy and overblown output the way newer ones do.
I think the big blind spot people have with these models is that the release pages only show just the AI output. But anyone competently using these AI tools will be using them in step X of a hundred step creative process. And it's only going to get worse as both the AI tools improve and people find better ways to integrate them into their workflow.
Not even filters; every text2image model ever created thusfar, can be very easily nudged with a few keywords into generating outputs in a specific visual style (e.g. artwork matching the signature style of any artist it has seen the some works from.)
This isn't an intentional "feature" of these models; rather, it's kind of an inherent part of how such models work — they learn associations between tokens and structural details of images. Artists' names are tokens like any other, and artists' styles are structural details like any other.
So, unless the architecture and training of this model are very unusual, it's gonna at least be able to give you something that looks like e.g. a "pencil illustration."
It is maybe recognizable in most cases, but definitely not instantly nor easily. I could definitely see nobody noticing one of those clips used in an otherwise non-AI video production.
The bubble released into the air is also pretty good until at the end where bubbles appear out of thin air.
But overall the physics are surprisingly good. In the videos from text we a person moving covered in a bedsheet, a mirror doing vaguely mirror-like things, a monkey moving in water and creating plausible waves, shadows moving over a 3d object with the sloth in the pool and plausible fire. Those are all classic topics to tackle in computer-generated graphics, all casually handled by a model that isn't explicitly trained on physical simulation.
In a twist of irony it's the simplest of those (the mirror) that's the most obviously wrong.
An important contrast is that early VFX offered strong control with weak fidelity, and these prompt-based AI systems offer high fidelity with weak control. Intent matters if you want to make something more than a tech demo or throwaway B-roll and you can't communicate much intent in a 30 word prompt, assuming the model even follows the prompt accurately.
It's my understanding that the AI sheen is done on purpose to give people a "tell". It is totally possible right now to at least generate images with no discernible tell.
So I’m probably going to be too closed minded about this: but who the f*ck asked for this and did anyone consider consequences of easily accessible AI slop generation?
It’s already nearly impossible to find quality content on the internet if you don’t know where to look at.
I did and I'm quite happy that this is happening :) It's unleashing a new computing era when you just have to lean back, close your eyes and your vision can materialize without a Hollywood production crew.
My kids both have creative hearts, and they are terrified that A.I. will prevent them from earning a living through creativity. Very recently, I've had an alternate thought. We've spent decades improving the technology of entertainment, spending billions (trillions?) of dollars in the process. When A.I. can generate any entertainment you can imagine, we might start finding this kind of entertainment boring. Maybe, at that point, we decide that exploring space, stretching our knowledge of physics and chemistry, and combating disease are far more interesting because they are real. And, through the same lens, maybe human-created art is more interesting because it is real.
> And, through the same lens, maybe human-created art is more interesting because it is real.
Conversations I have with people in real life almost always come back to this point. Most people find AI stuff novel, but few find it particularly interesting on an artistic level. I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.
I always find the breathless joy that some people express at this stuff with confusion. To me, the very instant someone mentions "AI generated" I just instantly find it un-interesting artistically. It's not the same as photoshop or using digital art suites. It's AI generated. Insisting on the bare minimum human involvement as a feature is just a non-starter for me if something is presented as art.
I'll wait to see if the utopian vision people have for this stuff comes to fruition. But I have enough years of seeing breathless positivity for some new tech curdle into resignation that it's ended up as ad focused, bland, MBA driven, slop, that I'm not very optimistic.
> I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.
Yes, I've noticed this. The people who are excited about it usually come off as opportunistic (hence the "breathless joy"), and not really interested in letting whatever art/craft they want to make deeply change them. They just want the recognition of being able to make the thing without the formative work. (I hesitate to point this out, anticipating allegations of elitism.)
Plus, really online people tend to dominate online discussions, giving the impression that the public will be happy to consume only AI generated things. Then again, the public is happy to consume social media engagement crap, so I'm very curious what the revealed preference is here.
The value in learning this stuff is that it changes you. I'll be forever indebted to my guitar teacher partially because he teaches me to do the work, and that evidence of doing the work is manifest readily, and to play the long, long game.
> Insisting on the bare minimum human involvement as a feature is just a non starter for me if something is presented as art
You can make the guidance as superficial or detailed as you like. Input detailed descriptions, use real images as reference, you can spend a minute or a day on it. If you prompt "cute dog" you should expect generic outputs. If you write half a screen with detailed instructions, you can expect it to be mostly your contribution. It's the old "you're holding it wrong" problem.
BTW, try to input an image in chatGPT or Claude and ask for a description, you will be amazed how detailed it can get.
Photography, digital painting, 3D rendering -- these all went through a phase of being panned as "not real art" before they were accepted, but they were all eventually accepted and they all turned out to have their own type of merit. It will be the same for AI tools.
I think the main point is that art is interesting precisely because it can transmit human experience. It's communication from another human being. AI "media" completely lacks that. It's more of an expression of the machine-soul, which is tempting us to continue its development until it takes over.
> I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.
Well put. This is also my experience. And I'm no AI doom-monger or neo-Luddite.
I think a key piece here is that I often consume art from the mindset of, "What was the creator thinking?" What is their worldview? What social situations pushed them to express things in this way?
For video, it's possible AI can feed into the overall creative pipeline, but I don't see it replacing the human touch. If anything, it opens up the industry to less-technical people who can spend more time focusing on the human touch. Even if the next big film has AI generation in it, if it came from someone with a fascinating story and creative insight, I'll still likely appreciate it.
I feel the opposite. I don't care how the sausage was made as long as it's a good sausage. Art was never about the creation process. In fact, before the internet most would never see the process at all. Just go to your local museum and you'll never know how most of pieces were made and that's a good thing. Art is all about the effect on the viewer.
> I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.
I generate a lot of art using Stable Diffusion/Flux of my spouse, kids, friends, etc. I was a professional photographer for nearly 10 years - I quit just last year.
People find even randomly generated stuff artistic. I remember the San Francisco Chronicle review of an art piece, which was random cracks in rock caused by heating.
I sort of wondered how you could claim to be the creator of the art when your kiln did all the work, but I suppose they did the important labor of putting it in there.
I follow a lot of the new AI gen crowd on Twitter. This community is made up of a lot of creative industry people. One guy who worked in commercials shared a recent job he was on for a name brand. They had a soundstage, actors, sound people, makeup, lighting, etc. setup for 3 days for the shoot. Something like 25 people working for 3 days. But behind that was about 3 months of effort if one includes pre-production and post-production. Think about editing, color correction, sound editing, music, etc.
Your creative children may live in a world where they can achieve a similar result themselves. Perhaps as a small team, one person working on characters, one person doing audio, one person writing a script. Instead of needing tens of thousands of dollars of rented equipment and 25 experts, they will be able to take ideas from their own head and realize them with persistence and AI generation.
I honestly believe these new tools will unlock potential beyond what we can currently imagine.
It doesn't really work that way. Over time, it really does just devalue the art form in a sense because now anyone can make a recording.
Electronic music is really the best example. In 1995 it took thousands of dollars to have a fully working studio to even produce any track. By 2005, anyone could do this in their bedroom for basically nothing. In 1995 the cost acted as a filter so only those with talent would bother. Once anyone could do it, all electronic music recordings were devalued by the infinite supply.
I thought there would be 1000 Richard James once this happened. Maybe there even are but I have never heard them because there is so much shit to sift through I really don't even listen to electronic music anymore. I don't think there are though. 900 them probably are doing something else because there is no money left in the art form, 90 are making some other style of music with better financial prospects and the 10 that are, I will never hear of or be able to find.
If the barrier to entry is low for high quality production and anyone is able to make good looking videos, I wonder how audience perception would evolve for judging and valuing what is considered 'good'.
That will be the end of creative work. Marketing and promotion is already the most difficult part of any creative endeavor. With literally unlimited trash being produced, it'll become impossible.
Or maybe, the limiting factor in one's ability to create art will be... creativity rather than the technical skills necessary to make movies, draw, or pluck strings.
Creativity isn’t magic, it’s a skill. There is no creativity without the application of it. By definition creativity produces something. Without skills it’s not possible to produce anything.
The act of creating teaches you to be better at creating, in that way and in that context. This is why people with practice and expertise (e.g., professional artists, like screenwriters and musicians) can reliably create new things.
99% of humanity have very little interest in creating. They're mimics, they're fine with copying, hitting repost, et al. You see this across all social media without exception (TikTok being the most obvious mimic example, but it's the same on Reddit as well). You see it in day to day life. You see it in how people spend their time. You see it in how people spend their money. And none of this is new.
The public can create vast amounts of spectacular original content right now using Dalle, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion - they have very little interest in doing so. Only a tiny fraction of the population has demonstrated that it cares what-so-ever about generative media. It's a passing curiosity for a flicker of an instant for the masses.
The hilariously fantastical premise of: if we just give people massive amounts of time, they'll dedicate their brains to creativity and exploration and live exceptionally fulfilling lives - we already know that's a lie for the masses. That is not what they do at all if you give them enormous amounts of time, they sit around doing nothing much at all (and if you give them enormous amounts of money to go with it, they do really dumb things with it, mostly focused on rampant consumerism). The reason it doesn't work is because all people are not created equal, all people are not the same, all brains are not wired the same, the masses are mimics, they are unable & unwilling to originate as a prime focus (and nothing can change that).
Nah, creativity cannot be separated from the means. "The medium is the message". It is precisely the interaction of technical skill and the mind that creates something truly wonderful.
You don't need any special technical skills to write the next great American novel. Few people actually do it. Talent and dedication are as elusive as ever.
You: escape the oppressive technical limitations of scoring a piece for an orchestra through novel use of technology.
Csound: To make a sine tone, we'll describe the oscillator in a textfile as if it were a musical instrument. You can think of this textfile as a blueprint for a kind of digital orchestra. Later we'll specify how to "play" this orchestra using another text file, called the score.
The issue is that the human performance of those things is precisely how creativity is expressed. You can tell an AI to write a story you envision but if there’s nothing unique in the presentation (or it copies the presentation from existing media to a large extent) you still end up with boring output.
Paint didn't replace charcoal.
Photography didn't replace drawings.
Digital art didn't replace physical media.
Random game level generation didn't replace architecture.
AI generated works will find a place beside human generated works.
It may even improve the market for 'artsy' films and great acting by highlighting the difference a little human talent can make.
It's not the art that's at risk, it's the grunt work. What will shift is the volume of human-created drek that employed millions to AI-created drek that employs tens.
Earning a living through creativity doesn't work for the majority of people anyway even without AI in the picture. Creative expression is a thing that exists for its own sake, the people who make a living out of it are lucky outliers.
I suspect the demand for human creative output will shrink, as AI generated content will be so cheap and prevalent, even as it will only ever be an imitation of human art. The same way that most people eat terrible, flavorless tomatoes from the supermarket, instead of the harder to grow heirloom varieties.
But I don't think human creativity is going anywhere. Unless there is some breakthrough that moves it far beyond anything we've seen so far, AI will always be trailing behind us. Human creativity might become a more boutique product, like heirloom tomatoes, but there will always be people who value it.
I had a similar thought. I knew someone who lived a life of crime, for a long time he was very poor like most criminals, but for a while made it big. He could buy anything he wanted, he always liked suits so bought very nice suits. But they meant nothing to him, he couldn't enjoy them, as he didn't earn then.
I wonder if it will be the same with AI. When you can have anything for nothing, it has no value. So the digital world will have little meaning.
That's my optimistic belief as well but I've also been disappointed at every turn. The future feels like a nihilistic joke constantly competing to plot the most disappointing course forward.
More likely the average person will happily lap up AI generated slop.
If I imagine a random person on the street, they certainly aren’t enjoying fine human arts because it’s made by a real person. They are scrolling TikTok and don’t care if it’s AI generated or not, if they even notice. The people actually caring about art because it is art are maybe 20% of the population.
Creativity is about having original ideas. So far, AI isn’t that good at that, and neither at maintaining a consistent idea throughout a production. Will AI be able to come up with a compelling novel series, music album, video game, movie or TV series in ten years? Possibly, but there’s also a good chance that it won’t.
Cheaper more effective entertainment is likely to only cause more problems: it will be more addictive, better at hijacking our brains and attention, better at pushing the propaganda goals of the author, better at filling traditional "human needs" of relationships that forever separates us from each other into a civilisation of Hikikomori.
I have little faith in an optimistic view of human nature where we voluntarily turn more toward more intellectual or worthy pursuits.
On one hand, entertainment has often been the seed that drives us to make the imagined real, but the adjacent possible of rewarding adventure/discovery/invention only seems to get more unaffordable and out of reach. Intellectual revolutions are like gold rushes. They require discovery, that initial nugget in a stream, the novel idea that opens a door to new opportunities that draws in the prospectors. Without fresh opportunity, there is no enthusiasm and we stew in our juices.
I suspect the only thing that might save us from total solipsistic brain-in-vat immersion in entertainment... is something like glp-1 type antagonists. If they can help us resist a plate of Danish maybe they can protect us from barrages of Infinite Jest brain missiles from Netflix about incestuous cat wizards or whatever. Who knows what alternatives this new permanently medicated society, Pharma-Sapiens, might pursue instead though.
I believe you're right too. The internet and smartphones are great technology in general, and can do pretty great things but what they've ended up doing was screwing with the reward mechanisms in my brain since I was a teenager. Most optimized use case.
Reading these threads sometimes feels like a bad idea, because you just get new sad ideas on how things will almost certainly be used to make it worse than just the ones you can come up on your own.
We'll be able to start fuzz testing the human brain. A horror film that uses bio-feedback to really push the bits that are actually terrifying you, in real-time. Campaign videos that lean in to the bit that your lizard brain is responding to.
We heard this same argument when cameras were invented. Yet some of the most valuable paintings in the world were created in the 20th century.
We heard it again when electronic music started becoming a thing.
Formula 1 wouldn’t exist if the blacksmiths had their way.
The unknown scares people because they are afraid of their known paradigms being shattered. But the new things ahead are often beyond anything of which we could ever dream.
One must not use analogy to analyze individual technologies. People were afraid of the camera, yes, but the camera does not attempt to replace painting. AI attempts to replace photography, painting, and all sorts of art with something that looks like the real thing. Photography never tried to do that, as photographs don't look anything like paintings.
Science is never going to supplant art. They serve two very different functions in society. What I hope is that performance art and experiences that can't be easily replicated by AI become more mainstream. Things like ARGs and multimedia storytelling, where there is a back and forth participatory sort of process between the audience and the creator.
> Maybe, at that point, we decide that exploring space, stretching our knowledge of physics and chemistry, and combating disease are far more interesting because they are real.
It's a compelling thought - we all like hope - and I think it might be realistic if all of humanity were made up of the same kind of people who read hacker news.
But is this not what the early adopters of the internet thought? I wasn't there - this is all second hand - but as far as I know people felt that, once everyone gained the ability to learn anything and talk to anyone, anywhere, humanity would be more knowledgeable, more thoughtful, and more compassionate. Once everyone could effortlessly access information, ignorance would be eliminated.
After all, that's what it was like for the early adopters.
But it wasn't so in practice.
I worry that hopeful visions of the future have an aspect of projecting ourselves onto humanity.
"And, through the same lens, maybe human-created art is more interesting because it is real."
Most human-created art is rather bad. I used to go to a lot of art openings, and we'd look at some works and ask "will this have been tossed in five years?"
Being pleasing to the eye is often not the point. Technical ability is a small part of the art experience. That's one reason a lot of people hate calling image gens "art" - it's so flashy without substance. But it's also a reason I don't think generative AI is much of a threat to the human practice of art-making.
That said, AI is probably a threat to roles in the entertainment industry. But it's also worth noting that much of the creativity was being sucked out of entertainment well before AI arrived.
Im hopeful US will have some subsidy for real creative works like ive seen in europe.
My limited understanding is that AI could generate Netflix top 10 hits that mostly recycle familiar jokes. The creators made a great product, but i expect anyone who attended film school would rather try something new, only issue is Netflix wont foot the bill (i know, they take a few oscar swings a year now).
Recent examples: TV Glow, Challengers, Strange Darling. All movies with specific, unique perspectives, visuals, acting choices, scripts, shots, etc. Think about the perspective in The Wire, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm. There is plenty of great work that obviously is nearly impossible to reproduce by an AI and i hope that AI "art" is taxed in a way that funds human projects.
It is easy to do really creative work now but it is even easier to just browse instagram or tiktok. The real winner in the new world will be people with discipline who can use these tech to create stuff without too much capital or resources.
Why would anybody create stuff that the AI companies are just going to instantly subsume and reproduce far more cheaply? There is not going to be a meaningful economy based on creativity in the next 50 years, any more than there is one now. And then it is going to be far worse. The actual "winners" are just going to be the people who through arbitrary processes like fortunate birth or lucky circumstances are granted admission into elite institutions.
So we’ll automate away entertainment jobs but none of the cool science jobs will be automated? I don’t understand how this proposed world will have an available work for scientists but not entertainers.
Recently I've been cutting back on TV in favor of non fiction reading and I feel you have a point. Entertainment comes in many forms and tbh all of them are interesting and rewarding in their own ways so I'm not worried of AI ruining entertainment for us. That's the least of our actual worries and I'm honestly surprised people find this issue so important.
I guess visualizing AI doing political or social damage or AGI mind control is a bit harder than your favorite show being gone.
Most of my entertainment is watching dudes sitting in their chairs talking into a microphone. I find it more entertaining than the billion dollar entertainment industry.
They will be creating for a very small crowd. It will be nice for me, because I can't stand all the blockbuster movies that prioritize stretching physics with unrealistic special effects over plot and dialog.
I think the musicians that are barely hanging on at this point would prefer to create over having to slog around on tours to pay their health insurance. But nobody is paying for creation.
Unless we have god-like robotics I don't see AI making physical art any time soon. We can print out photos but people still buy paintings. We can 3D print but people still buy sculptures. People are paid to design and build beautiful buildings and interiors.
And of course if you can combine skills with sculpture with graphic design you're getting more specialized and are more likely to make a living - even if the field of graphic design is decimated by AI. That's generally how I feel about my skills as a programmer. I'm not just a programmer. So even if AI does most of the work with coding I can still write code for income as long as it's not the only reason I'm getting paid.
I think there will be a body that certifies artistic content as organic similar to food. This will create a premium offering for organic content and a lower tier AI /uncertified level.
AI content is already very dull, the text is dull the music is dull the images and videos are also dull. No one is interested in AI Seinfeld or this short movie that AI created. Their only audience is just people admiring what the machines come to be able to do.
Any AI content that's good, and there are a few of them, actually has plenty of human creativity in it.
There are some AI artist that begin to emerge or there are some AI generated personas out there who are interesting but they are interesting only because the people behind it made it interesting.
I am not fatalistic at all for the creatives. AI is going to wipe out the producers and integrators(people that specialize in putting things together, like coders who code when tasked, painters who paint when commissioned, musicians that play once provided with the score), not the creatives.
The GOTCHA, IMHO, will be people not developing skills because the machine can do it but I guess maybe they will the skills that make the machine sing.
Readit News
In the professional creative tools business, "Now the only limit is your creativity" has been a popular marketing tagline for decades, especially for products based on new enabling technologies. It's common enough that a wry corollary has developed in response, which goes: "Unfortunately, for a lot of people that's a pretty big limit."
And how many tokens you can afford.
Hate to say this, but as things stand, tech companies stand to become all pervasive and all powerful if AI keeps growing the way it has
The video’s look cool, but I can’t really enjoy reading about them if my phone freezes every 2 seconds.
When I scroll the page, sections of text are missing then pop in, randomly though not as a scroll driven animation. It almost feels like something is blocking the browser's render loop and it can't catch up to actually paint the text. That'd be an insane bug on such a simple page, though I put nothing past react these days if they used it here.
I wish web browsers had a "pause" button for scripts so I can just scroll to the bottom, let everything load and then hit pause and "freeze" the page contents so I can read without distractions.
I also feel like the quality of web UX is in rapid decline, and nobody wants to hire competent web developers who grok the fundamentals anymore.
Over the years, adding many simultaneous videos to websites has become quite common, and I have always marveled at how well many devices can handle this.
Nevertheless, it is pretty demanding for the hardware, and many smartphones are not made for such tasks.
A: because your phone is a potato
The first free tech support from HN is free, subsequent questions will be $29.99 per.
As any pre-schooler will be able to produce anything (watch out parents) imaginable in seconds doesn't make it better to me or is of any real value.
Ok, i needed to edit it again to add: maybe this IS the value of it. We can totally forget about phantasizing stories with visuals (movies) because nobody will care anymore.
https://www.austinmann.com/trek/iphone-16-pro-camera-review-...
Understanding why your camera performs well in certain conditions and how to tweak the camera, is a mini-science all of its own. Also i think the reason photography is appreciated is because of composition.
Knowing where to position yourself, and at what moment, can make photographs turn out magical. Your eyes are processing millions of frames a second, but a photographer often gets just ONE chance to capture some scenes. Some people appreciate the “art” in that. :)
Here’s a thought experiment. Do you consider all wedding photographers to be of equal value? If not, why? Anyone can do it according to you. just click a button. Something to think about…
I am grossed out by this. my instinct is to avoid ai slop. The interesting part to me is: What next? Where do we go? Will it be that "human" forums are pushed further into obscurity of the internet? Or will go so far as that we all start preferring meeting in person? Im clueless here
Too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?
ChatGPT is way too happy to overuse the word cacophony.
Have you seen what most humans say? If an AI says more intelligent things I'm all for it.
And until we get AGI, AI talk will necessarily be some combination of hallucinations, unintelligent, vapid, etc.
And you wouldn’t even know it
https://xkcd.com/810/
Are there any other Internet-based hideaways to retreat to? Somewhere where ads, clout chasing, and AI slop doesn’t exist?
That already happened, even without AI.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
At this point, looking at a big tech SoMe feed I would expect that everything is, or at least could be, gen AI content.
The only regret I have about that is losing video as a form of evidence. CCTV footage and the like are a valuable tool for solving crimes. That’s going to be out the window soon.
The ultimate compression is to reduce the video clip to a latent space vector representation to be rendered on device. :)
Just give us a few more revs of Moore’s law for that to be reasonable.
edit: found a patent… https://patents.google.com/patent/US11388416B2/en
There's an entire pattern of reels that are basically just ripped-off-content with enough added noise to (I presume) avoid content detection filters. Then the comments have links to scam sites (but are labelled as "the IMDB page for this content").
That's something that can be fixed in a future release or you can fix it right now with some filters in post in your pipeline.
This isn't an intentional "feature" of these models; rather, it's kind of an inherent part of how such models work — they learn associations between tokens and structural details of images. Artists' names are tokens like any other, and artists' styles are structural details like any other.
So, unless the architecture and training of this model are very unusual, it's gonna at least be able to give you something that looks like e.g. a "pencil illustration."
This has been the default excuse for the last 5+ years. I won't hold my breath.
But overall the physics are surprisingly good. In the videos from text we a person moving covered in a bedsheet, a mirror doing vaguely mirror-like things, a monkey moving in water and creating plausible waves, shadows moving over a 3d object with the sloth in the pool and plausible fire. Those are all classic topics to tackle in computer-generated graphics, all casually handled by a model that isn't explicitly trained on physical simulation.
In a twist of irony it's the simplest of those (the mirror) that's the most obviously wrong.
There were movies with horrible VFX that still sold perfectly well at the time.
I have yet to find examples of this
It’s already nearly impossible to find quality content on the internet if you don’t know where to look at.
Have you heard of the quip "Because we can"?
We will finally achieve the dream of everything being in public domain!
Conversations I have with people in real life almost always come back to this point. Most people find AI stuff novel, but few find it particularly interesting on an artistic level. I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.
I always find the breathless joy that some people express at this stuff with confusion. To me, the very instant someone mentions "AI generated" I just instantly find it un-interesting artistically. It's not the same as photoshop or using digital art suites. It's AI generated. Insisting on the bare minimum human involvement as a feature is just a non-starter for me if something is presented as art.
I'll wait to see if the utopian vision people have for this stuff comes to fruition. But I have enough years of seeing breathless positivity for some new tech curdle into resignation that it's ended up as ad focused, bland, MBA driven, slop, that I'm not very optimistic.
Yes, I've noticed this. The people who are excited about it usually come off as opportunistic (hence the "breathless joy"), and not really interested in letting whatever art/craft they want to make deeply change them. They just want the recognition of being able to make the thing without the formative work. (I hesitate to point this out, anticipating allegations of elitism.)
Plus, really online people tend to dominate online discussions, giving the impression that the public will be happy to consume only AI generated things. Then again, the public is happy to consume social media engagement crap, so I'm very curious what the revealed preference is here.
The value in learning this stuff is that it changes you. I'll be forever indebted to my guitar teacher partially because he teaches me to do the work, and that evidence of doing the work is manifest readily, and to play the long, long game.
You can make the guidance as superficial or detailed as you like. Input detailed descriptions, use real images as reference, you can spend a minute or a day on it. If you prompt "cute dog" you should expect generic outputs. If you write half a screen with detailed instructions, you can expect it to be mostly your contribution. It's the old "you're holding it wrong" problem.
BTW, try to input an image in chatGPT or Claude and ask for a description, you will be amazed how detailed it can get.
How familiar are you with what is possible and how much human effort goes towards achieving it?
https://civitai.com/images
Photography, digital painting, 3D rendering -- these all went through a phase of being panned as "not real art" before they were accepted, but they were all eventually accepted and they all turned out to have their own type of merit. It will be the same for AI tools.
Well put. This is also my experience. And I'm no AI doom-monger or neo-Luddite.
For video, it's possible AI can feed into the overall creative pipeline, but I don't see it replacing the human touch. If anything, it opens up the industry to less-technical people who can spend more time focusing on the human touch. Even if the next big film has AI generation in it, if it came from someone with a fascinating story and creative insight, I'll still likely appreciate it.
I generate a lot of art using Stable Diffusion/Flux of my spouse, kids, friends, etc. I was a professional photographer for nearly 10 years - I quit just last year.
I sort of wondered how you could claim to be the creator of the art when your kiln did all the work, but I suppose they did the important labor of putting it in there.
I follow a lot of the new AI gen crowd on Twitter. This community is made up of a lot of creative industry people. One guy who worked in commercials shared a recent job he was on for a name brand. They had a soundstage, actors, sound people, makeup, lighting, etc. setup for 3 days for the shoot. Something like 25 people working for 3 days. But behind that was about 3 months of effort if one includes pre-production and post-production. Think about editing, color correction, sound editing, music, etc.
Your creative children may live in a world where they can achieve a similar result themselves. Perhaps as a small team, one person working on characters, one person doing audio, one person writing a script. Instead of needing tens of thousands of dollars of rented equipment and 25 experts, they will be able to take ideas from their own head and realize them with persistence and AI generation.
I honestly believe these new tools will unlock potential beyond what we can currently imagine.
It doesn't really work that way. Over time, it really does just devalue the art form in a sense because now anyone can make a recording.
Electronic music is really the best example. In 1995 it took thousands of dollars to have a fully working studio to even produce any track. By 2005, anyone could do this in their bedroom for basically nothing. In 1995 the cost acted as a filter so only those with talent would bother. Once anyone could do it, all electronic music recordings were devalued by the infinite supply.
I thought there would be 1000 Richard James once this happened. Maybe there even are but I have never heard them because there is so much shit to sift through I really don't even listen to electronic music anymore. I don't think there are though. 900 them probably are doing something else because there is no money left in the art form, 90 are making some other style of music with better financial prospects and the 10 that are, I will never hear of or be able to find.
The act of creating teaches you to be better at creating, in that way and in that context. This is why people with practice and expertise (e.g., professional artists, like screenwriters and musicians) can reliably create new things.
The public can create vast amounts of spectacular original content right now using Dalle, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion - they have very little interest in doing so. Only a tiny fraction of the population has demonstrated that it cares what-so-ever about generative media. It's a passing curiosity for a flicker of an instant for the masses.
The hilariously fantastical premise of: if we just give people massive amounts of time, they'll dedicate their brains to creativity and exploration and live exceptionally fulfilling lives - we already know that's a lie for the masses. That is not what they do at all if you give them enormous amounts of time, they sit around doing nothing much at all (and if you give them enormous amounts of money to go with it, they do really dumb things with it, mostly focused on rampant consumerism). The reason it doesn't work is because all people are not created equal, all people are not the same, all brains are not wired the same, the masses are mimics, they are unable & unwilling to originate as a prime focus (and nothing can change that).
> the technical skills necessary to make movies, draw, or pluck strings
AI will (hopefully) be an accelerator for the people still putting in the hours. At least it is for coding
Csound: To make a sine tone, we'll describe the oscillator in a textfile as if it were a musical instrument. You can think of this textfile as a blueprint for a kind of digital orchestra. Later we'll specify how to "play" this orchestra using another text file, called the score.
AI generated works will find a place beside human generated works.
It may even improve the market for 'artsy' films and great acting by highlighting the difference a little human talent can make.
It's not the art that's at risk, it's the grunt work. What will shift is the volume of human-created drek that employed millions to AI-created drek that employs tens.
But I don't think human creativity is going anywhere. Unless there is some breakthrough that moves it far beyond anything we've seen so far, AI will always be trailing behind us. Human creativity might become a more boutique product, like heirloom tomatoes, but there will always be people who value it.
I wonder if it will be the same with AI. When you can have anything for nothing, it has no value. So the digital world will have little meaning.
More likely the average person will happily lap up AI generated slop.
I have little faith in an optimistic view of human nature where we voluntarily turn more toward more intellectual or worthy pursuits.
On one hand, entertainment has often been the seed that drives us to make the imagined real, but the adjacent possible of rewarding adventure/discovery/invention only seems to get more unaffordable and out of reach. Intellectual revolutions are like gold rushes. They require discovery, that initial nugget in a stream, the novel idea that opens a door to new opportunities that draws in the prospectors. Without fresh opportunity, there is no enthusiasm and we stew in our juices.
I suspect the only thing that might save us from total solipsistic brain-in-vat immersion in entertainment... is something like glp-1 type antagonists. If they can help us resist a plate of Danish maybe they can protect us from barrages of Infinite Jest brain missiles from Netflix about incestuous cat wizards or whatever. Who knows what alternatives this new permanently medicated society, Pharma-Sapiens, might pursue instead though.
Reading these threads sometimes feels like a bad idea, because you just get new sad ideas on how things will almost certainly be used to make it worse than just the ones you can come up on your own.
We heard it again when electronic music started becoming a thing.
Formula 1 wouldn’t exist if the blacksmiths had their way.
The unknown scares people because they are afraid of their known paradigms being shattered. But the new things ahead are often beyond anything of which we could ever dream.
Be optimistic.
It's a compelling thought - we all like hope - and I think it might be realistic if all of humanity were made up of the same kind of people who read hacker news.
But is this not what the early adopters of the internet thought? I wasn't there - this is all second hand - but as far as I know people felt that, once everyone gained the ability to learn anything and talk to anyone, anywhere, humanity would be more knowledgeable, more thoughtful, and more compassionate. Once everyone could effortlessly access information, ignorance would be eliminated.
After all, that's what it was like for the early adopters.
But it wasn't so in practice.
I worry that hopeful visions of the future have an aspect of projecting ourselves onto humanity.
Most human-created art is rather bad. I used to go to a lot of art openings, and we'd look at some works and ask "will this have been tossed in five years?"
That said, AI is probably a threat to roles in the entertainment industry. But it's also worth noting that much of the creativity was being sucked out of entertainment well before AI arrived.
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My limited understanding is that AI could generate Netflix top 10 hits that mostly recycle familiar jokes. The creators made a great product, but i expect anyone who attended film school would rather try something new, only issue is Netflix wont foot the bill (i know, they take a few oscar swings a year now).
Recent examples: TV Glow, Challengers, Strange Darling. All movies with specific, unique perspectives, visuals, acting choices, scripts, shots, etc. Think about the perspective in The Wire, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm. There is plenty of great work that obviously is nearly impossible to reproduce by an AI and i hope that AI "art" is taxed in a way that funds human projects.
I guess visualizing AI doing political or social damage or AGI mind control is a bit harder than your favorite show being gone.
I think the musicians that are barely hanging on at this point would prefer to create over having to slog around on tours to pay their health insurance. But nobody is paying for creation.
As things stand, AI is okay at writing, art/photos, coding, and now, videos.
These are all things people like doing. Even coding is something a lot of people get a ton of pleasure from.
And of course if you can combine skills with sculpture with graphic design you're getting more specialized and are more likely to make a living - even if the field of graphic design is decimated by AI. That's generally how I feel about my skills as a programmer. I'm not just a programmer. So even if AI does most of the work with coding I can still write code for income as long as it's not the only reason I'm getting paid.
So far AI doesn’t seem very good at the creative element.
Seems more likely we'll just plug ourselves into ever more addicting dopamine machines. That's certainly the trend so far anyway.
Are you?
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Any AI content that's good, and there are a few of them, actually has plenty of human creativity in it.
There are some AI artist that begin to emerge or there are some AI generated personas out there who are interesting but they are interesting only because the people behind it made it interesting.
I am not fatalistic at all for the creatives. AI is going to wipe out the producers and integrators(people that specialize in putting things together, like coders who code when tasked, painters who paint when commissioned, musicians that play once provided with the score), not the creatives.
The GOTCHA, IMHO, will be people not developing skills because the machine can do it but I guess maybe they will the skills that make the machine sing.