99% of everything is bad, so that unsurprisingly includes AI videos.
But i've seen several good videos made using AI, including pretty much everything NeuralViz[0] on YouTube makes, but also some that have been posted in older comments here in HN. Igorrr's ADHD music video[1] was also made using AI and fit the music perfectly.
The common aspect with these "good" uses though is that they do not let the AI do 99% of the job (as mentioned in another comment) but they still involve editing, writing/scripting, acting (NeuralViz for example uses his webcam to act both the motion and voice in his videos and uses AI to change them) and to some extent leaning into the "weirdness" that AI videos have instead of ignoring it.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralViz (i high recommend watching them in upload order because they all build into the same "universe" and often make references to older videos)
I've been a big fan of https://www.youtube.com/@PosyMusic/videos for many years now. The posts there are alawys a little treat - you never quite know when the next one is going to come or what it's going to be... but it'll sure be creative (and fun!) without any of the typical YouTube channel baggage. They do the video, sound, and music creation+editing themselves - being a sound professional by day (among other things).
Anyways, the reason I bring this channel up is they had a video ~2 years back about trying out various AIs to help them in their creative process. Stuff like "using an AI audio generator to quickly make short sounds to sample in their song" for hard to find/make sounds type stuff. Exactly along the lines of "they do not let AI do 99% of the job" you were saying, instead treating it as just another tool in the toolbox. Also, intentionally, the examples like sampling were where the originality comes with what you do with the content you source rather than the content standing on its own. They also spent time creating icon sets to help explicitly label how AI was used in making the material (partly/fully) and encouraged artists that do incorporate AI into part of their workflow to label how so accordingly (2 years ago - so this was still somewhat novel to discuss).
You won't be able to find that video on the channel linked above, though the icons are still on GitHub. Not because the content made with the help of AI was bad, people like the songs the same as his other content (when not explicitly told it was made with the help of AI), but because there was so much hate on the video (and via email etc) for just mentioning that other artists could look at trying to use AI in certain parts of their workflows too that he felt the need to take it down.
That makes me sad. I also love Posy's content, I'm using his cursors right now, and this new knowledge that there is some of it I cannot see gives me real consumerist FOMO anxiety. A little digging and I couldn't find anything. I don't suppose you remember any keywords?
I forgot how he introed it with the over the top AI visual and saying "I'll be hated for this" and then ends with a funny continuation of that opening.
There are a bunch of these scifi world building short video channels now. IMO they all seem really creative initially but rapidly lose their luster and become repetitive.
Sora makes the hard parts easy and the easy parts hard. I don't think any of these content producers will be remembered in the future. :/
Years and years ago I became friends with someone who has started a series of companies and created at least one game with each of them (Web, mobile, mobile, crypto, web again). While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution. His ideas are great, in my opinion, though perhaps not unique. However, each success or failure, has come down to the execution. A couple of projects ran out of funding (Didn't execute fast enough). One was a flash game around the same time Apple stuck a knife in Flash, bad timing. Another was backed by a major publisher and was largely a success and the company was sold after 2 proven products shipped.
AI "democratizing" creativity is the biggest crock of lies. Everyone has ideas. Even people who aren't typically thought of as "creative". Ask anyone who watched the last season of Game of Thrones if they thought it could be better and I bet most of them will have "ideas" for how to make it better. Hell, the show runners had IDEAS. But the execution of season 8 was awful, and execution is where an "idea guy" becomes someone who created a product/story worth remembering.
LLMs remove the execution process, which is why they are so attractive to everyone who has ever had an idea and why they are abhorrent to nearly everyone who has ever executed on an idea. Lots of people thin execution is just busy work, but execution is also a major component of being creative.
Creativity is a series of small decisions over the course of the entire execution. To write a poem is not to have it fully-formed in your head. You go down and edit and see what turns up and what new interesting ideas come out of that.
I'm very sympathetic to this view, and it would be a nice counter to claims of AI creativity, but I'm not convinced this is the only way creativity can express itself. There are examples of strokes of genius, hence the term.
I suppose you could say such strokes of genius are the outcomes of a lifetime of creative work but that seems different from your example of editing a poem.
We are operating deep in the grey area here so I suppose that case could be made. Personally, I see creativity as more of a life long process which can express itself in a multitude of ways including strokes of genius and the daily iterative grind. I don't think any creative act occurs in a vacuum but I also think that there are moments where big things occur.
AI, as it stands, does not have a lifespan over which for creativity to occur.
The problem runs deeper: AI doesn't just remove execution, it replaces it with probabilistic averaging. Mastery of execution in film or code consists of thousands of micro-decisions, like light a bit to the left or pause a bit longer. Current diffusion models make these thousands of decisions for you based on what usually looks good. Democratization won't happen when the Make it Beautiful button works, but when we have tools to control these thousands of micro-decisions without needing to learn to draw pixels by hand. Right now we have randomization, not democratization
>While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution.
It's even trickier: execution is irrelevant too (if that means great execution, a polished well executed product). What matters is a works-well-enough for adoption product, plus luck, connections, funding (to continue existing and undercutting), marketing, and things like that.
More than half of my YouTube subscriptions are channels that once posted neat stuff and stopped - and most of them are from years ago. And before that i was into webcomics back when they were a popular online trend, i was following the updates of several of them and most of them have disappeared these days (and i don't even remember their names).
People stop doing things all the time, i'm not sure that means much.
Did you really interpret my statement as "AI content producers are being so creative and then quitting posting"?
I'm not talking about people posting good content and then stopping posting.
I guess its fair to say that "become repetitive" was unclear, what I should have said was "reveals itself to be repetitive."
I'm saying that these AI generated world building channels produce lots of content that looks creative and exciting at first but over time reveals itself to be repetitive and lacking in creativity.
But your argument could be made against anything novel. You love the first 3 seasons of Chopped or Hell’s Kitchen but eventually you figure out the repetitive story arc, you know how each show will unfold halfway through, same kinds on conflict, etc… the show either becomes background while folding clothes or you stop watching entirely. The novelty wears off-for better or worse.
I mean look at house hunters international. Every segment is the sssme. “I need an extra room for overseas family, I want to live by the beach, I need a roof deck but I teach ESL to blind monks and children. My budget is $400”. And then they’ll have some silly hang up about the reliability of elevators in general or maybe they absolutely can’t get over the east facing window. It’s 100% formulatic yet perfect as background.
I dunno where I’m going with this but those AI videos you say you liked… the novelty wore off.
I would argue that the 1% of AI videos that are "good" are not worth the travesties that it fosters. Deceased celebrities featured in embarrassing / absurd situations and the scourge of fake news are enough for me to realize that this technology is extremely net negative.
I would be alright with making these more expensive to make though, so they don't overrun youtube. Also i'm sure the person that made this had to do a lot of work. It wasn't just a few prompts
It features a bunch of internationally known figures (mainly world leaders) in drag (or gender-swapped). So obviously something not achievable without AI video generation
I think it's interesting as a gimmick, but generally really don't like AI-generated videos. My main issue with them is more to do with capitalism than AI video generation though.
Yeah I like NeuralViz too. Honestly the writing is what makes it funny in the first place. The AI imagery just adds that extra weirdness on top. Like my faves being the street interviews an the gluron that reviews the Zillow page etc
NeuralViz is one of the best examples of a very creative and skilled person using generative AI to create great content that would not be possible without it. Doopiidoo is another example.
I love Igorrr, but still have mixed feelings about the AI-assisted video. They were capable of making videos weird and unhinged in the past without its use.
> 99% of everything is bad, so that unsurprisingly includes AI videos.
You're probably not wrong, although there's probably also a spread in % between mediums of creation that is worth exploring since a couple % difference could compound.
Even ignoring the above, the issue is WRT rates of creation. I'm no good at drawing. For me to make a bad drawing might take some time. I'll need sleep. And food. I can only make so many bad drawings a day. AI can just work nonstop to make slop. The main strength, if you'd call it that, of automation (AI in this case), is the ability to quickly crank out crap. It is flooding the internet with crap at accelerating rates. The internet/humanity doesn't have enough tools today to deal with the flood of garbage. If AI could make physical crap, we'd quickly end up like that garbage episode of Futurama.
Actually we have a way to filter out that crap, that's what Google, Meta, TikTok, etc... have perfected over decades. The internet is huge and full of crap, and we get to see very little of it. Suggestions from, say, YouTube are generally high quality, few AI slop, vacation videos from random people, or penises. I don't mean good as in moral values, but I mean a production value beyond what you can do by writing a few lines in an AI prompt: decent picture and sound, a well written script, etc...
As more and more AI slop floods the internet, people will start to notice more and more and downvote it down to oblivion and really good content will surface. It may or may not be made with the help of AI, but it won't be sloppy. We are already seeing that, active communities don't have much AI slop, dead communities have plenty, kind if like these abandoned forums that are full of spam no one reads.
People are getting tired of AI slop, it is becoming as recognizable as a photoedit made in 5 minutes in MS-Paint, and it has about the same value. Good for over the top memes where being ugly is part of the charm, but not for anything serious.
I agree that the major platforms have the tools to filter it out. I disagree that those tools are doing that. The primary intent of algos is around engagement, not quality content. We might be able to say the end result is similar (users are engaging on the internet when they wouldn't otherwise if they were getting garbage), but I don't think it's the same. Users aren't being spoon fed high quality content for the brain. They're getting addictive, engagement content to keep them parked on their phones. If content was nutrition for the brain, algos are feeding people candy instead of vegetables. Maybe it's not actual garbage, but most people are not "eating well" with the current approach to content curation by algos.
I saw one recently that was cool. Basically a cinematic for Arthas’ purging of Stratholme from WarCraft. However the entire time I was just thinking “oh that’s cool, looks alright” but none of the “wow the artist that did Uther’s model nailed it” or “Oh great music choice, I wonder who the composer was.”
For entertainment, I have few concerns. It will compete or fail to compete for attention. For degrading the value of video evidence, accelerating propaganda and fraud, and for making people just feel unsure of what is likely real or fake, that is what I am concerned with.
AI generated videos are being used in more and more ads. To cut costs I’m sure. The result is that ads that were just annoying are now terrible and jarring.
When I hear talk about AI risks I mostly hear things like runaway super intelligence doing whatever it wants and leaving humanity in the lurch. But what about more realistic concerns, like accelerating the race to the bottom by cheaply and poorly ripping off other people’s work and forcing everyone else to do the same just to keep up?
A local window blinds company ran an ad before a movie. Clearly AI. Besides the obvious fake humans, how can I trust that the AI blinds in your ad match your real product?
Yeah I am not an absolute GenAI hater. I’ve used it quite a bit myself, and I think there are ways to be creative about it. However 95% of what we see online, especially in the Ads space, is bottom of the barrel quality. It is obvious basic AI generated images/video most of the time and for me is an instant “I’m not going to bother with that product” marker.
One of the worst one was an allegedly “illustrated history” book. All Ads were of AI generated history book pages with tons of historical inconsistencies. Looked up the real book and it actually looked decent: hand drawn, well formatted etc. Why not use pictures of the actual book instead of whatever mess I was seeing.
I might be wrong but to me most of the art is looks AI generated, and the few pages they show just don’t make any historical sense. Yet they sell it as “hand drawn”. From the animations seems like some stuff was AI generated and then redrawn by hand? But the drawing themselves are plain weird: the nonsensical castle. The archers and scoped crossbow in a page about medieval crossbows, the silly submarine
Last night, I deliberately paid attention to an ad because it had the disclaimer "images generated with AI". I was curious to see what the advertisers did with the technology. The ad featured a bunch of animals of different species driving cars around a city. It clearly had that AI uncanny valley that high budget 3D modeled CGI animals doesn't have. I thought about what it would have cost for a effects team to 3D model and render all those animals, and also wondered how many rendering attempts with the AI did it take to get good footage for the ad.
The ad felt sickening to look at, like a TV with smooth motion turned on. It's like my brain is rejecting the pictures that it sees because it doesn't match the patterns of motion that it has been trained to recognize. Or was it just regular motion sickness.
I don't know if we're in the minority or not, insofar as we are able to look at these things and discern that they are fake. One problem going forward is that the proportion of us who are able to do so will grow smaller as individuals become habituated to the AI output, especially children.
This is a weird complaint because ads have always been a curse on the world; they've always been "slop". The worst part about AI ads is that they're ads.
i don't get this "race to the bottom", "to cut costs".. like isn't that a good thing? your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces.
I don't think AI reduces cost of marketing in any significant way. Everybody has access to these tools so at best it just allows marketing companies to employ fewer ad-creation teams to pump out the same amount of advertisements.
Pushed to the extreme, where a single person could create an oscar-worthy advertisement in seconds, it doesn't suddenly mean that the superbowl will charge pennies for an ad slot.
I suspect the end state will be just-in-time rich ad creation (not bidding) tailored specifically to you.
> Pushed to the extreme, where a single person could create an oscar-worthy advertisement in seconds, it doesn't suddenly mean that the superbowl will charge pennies for an ad slot.
For a superbowl ad, there's the high cost to air the spot, but most of them also have a high cost to produce the spot (maybe not for the the one from last year that was just a dvd logo esque bouncing qr code for a crypto scam); if your marketing budget was ~ $5M, maybe you spent $1M on production and $4M on airtime. If AI gives you a good enough result for approximately no money, maybe you spend all that budget on airtime, maybe you cut the budget and still spend $4.5M on airtime. Of course, if everybody is spending more on airtime, you might not get more airtime, but you could still reduce/eliminate the production part of the budget.
>your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces.
One could imagine that once every company in a market uses AI videos to reduce said costs they will then have to spend even more to stand out from the other marketers, leaving us all back where we started, but with a lot of crappy AI videos to wade through.
They also get crappier though. I am generally okay with a lot of the tradeoffs to reduce the cost of construction and mass production. We definitely have more crappy stuff than we need—I'd prefer if we had a little less, higher quality stuff, but the balance is not too far out of whack.
With media though, I feel it's a lot worse. It's already been trending that way for text with blogspam already diluting the value of the web even before AI. But with AI this is accelerating to video and audio as well. Not only does the AI slop drown out the best of human creativity, it also raises the floor on superficial production value so that if you don't use AI you fall behind on the initial attention-grabbing first impression. I acknowledge a big part of this is due to where we are in the hype cycle, and once we absorb the capabilities of the tools, we'll figure out how to use them more tastefully, and human creativity will shine through again. But no I don't think always making everything easier and more efficient is necessarily always a good thing a priori. Friction and effort sometimes leads to positive outcomes.
We once built pyramids, massive castles, temples and churches which took hundreds of years to build. We don't build those things any more. Same happened to music and art. There's this eternal sloppification of everything, although at the same time things get on average better and cheaper for more people to enjoy. Quantity beats quality, i.e. capitalism optimizes for scalability.
The end game is quite sad, which will be some kind of neural device which just directly manipulates brain signals for happiness, and everything physical will be just gray goo. It's more scalable to make you think the world is beautiful, than to actually make it beautiful. We are almost there already, because we experience the world through a screen, which shows us happy things, while we care less and less about the real world around us.
One of the arguments I keep seeing from people churning out AI video is that the tech is enabling people "creative freedom" that's been made possible now even without the technical know how.
However, 99% of the the "creativity" from what I've seen is done by the AI (how it should look, where the cuts need to happen, the tone, color grading, etc). Which is to say, it's taken from other people's (creative) work.
While a big part of being able to create a good video has much to do with storytelling, the craft of shooting and editing a video is a big part of the creative process as well.
AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together.
I was involved in a conversation about cheating in video games the other day, and the topic shifted to AI use in music. Someone said, "using AI is like using an aimbot for music." I absolutely love that comparison since it highlights the shortcut past creativity/skill to get a computerized best result while also associating it with blatant cheating.
The "enables creativity" argument is ironic since the root of the word is "create" and AI users are literally removing the "create" step from their production process.
I made my wife a song about how we met using Suno. It took me about 4 hours to get the lyrics just right, rewriting them (without AI help, it’s terrible with lyrics), plugging them in, seeing how they sounded, fixing them some more to get the verse so it sounded right.
She thought it was really special and she cried as we listened to it while holding hands in the car. I can’t play guitar, and I can’t hit some notes with my low singing voice, but I wrote every word and it felt like something really special to the both of us. I don’t really care if people think I “cheated”. To torture the analogy, it’s like cheating in a two player game since I’m not publishing this song to anyone else.
That made me imagine -- in the future when AI is much more advanced, maybe I could just prompt it with say "something sentimental to make my wife cry." I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here? Is this some sort of human emotion exploit, or a legitimate bonding experience?
It’s rarely the thought that counts. It’s the committed effort. Presents aren’t just nice because they needed those socks. More importantly, they’re a signifier that you consider the person to be worth thinking about. You value them enough to spend time and effort thinking about them. Then you followed through. This is why we don’t just give people money as a present.
The effort that you put in is often what people like most about a gift. Don’t try too hard to hack around that.
I'm going to draw this example out to make it more realistic.
"Say something sentimental to make my wife cry" you prompt. The computer comes back:
Ok, tell me a few things about your wife. How did you meet? What are her favorite things? Tell me about some great moments in your relationship. Tell me about some difficult moments in your relationship.
Ok, tell me a few things about you. What do you love about your wife? What have you struggled with?
Ten minutes of this kind of conversation and I'll bet the LLM can generate a pretty good hallmark card. It might not make your wife cry but she'll recognize it as something personal and special.
Four hours of this kind of conversation and you might very well get some output that would make your wife cry. It might even make you cry.
The work is adding context. And getting people to add meaningful, soul-touching context is not easy - just ask any therapist.
1. Wives aren't a monolith. The prompt is underspecified, or else individual taste and preciousness is dead.
2. No matter how good the tech today is (or isn't) getting, the responses are very low temperature. The reason it takes a human 4 hours to write the poem is because that is time spent exploring profoundly new structures and effects. Compare this to AI which is purpose-built to hone in on local optima of medians and clichés wherever possible.
> I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here?
Sociologically, devoid of AI discussion, I imagine the limit is the extent to which the ideas expressed in the poem aren't outright fabrications (e.g. complimenting their eyes when really you couldn't care less). As well, it does not sit right with humans if you attempt to induce profound feelings in them by your own less-than-profound feelings; it's not "just the thought," it's also the effort that socially signals the profundity of the thought.
Usually they are. Most people are surprisingly similar and predictable, which is why basic manipulation tactics are so successful. Sure, you have 10% of people who truly are special, but the other 90% has a collective orgasm while listening to whatever is the hottest pop star.
> The reason it takes a human 4 hours to write the poem is because that is time spent exploring profoundly new structures and effects.
Most likely dude spent 4 hours doing exactly the same things that everyone else does when making their first song. It's not like within these 4 hours he discovered a truly new technique of writing lyrics. Each instance of human life that wants to write songs needs to go through exactly the same learning steps, while AI does it just once and then can endlessly apply the results.
> it's not "just the thought," it's also the effort that socially signals the profundity of the thought.
In close relationships yes. When dealing with those you less care about, it's the result that matters.
I think expended effort is what counts here for these types of interactions, and how much of that effort is tailored to the specific person.
I mean, we're almost always standing on the shoulders of other people, and we're almost always using tools. But if the output is fully mechanical and automatic without being tailored for the specific person, it's hard to see it as personal in any way.
It's more like going into a video game and tuning the difficulty all the way down so you are virtually invincible. It's taking the fun out of the game for some, but for others that's the only way to play it.
And you know what? I’ve got a medically complicated kid with a million doctor’s appointments and a full time job. I often switch the games down to the easiest mode. Then sometimes a new Dark Souls comes out and I relish every moment, if I’ve got the time.
I’ve been having Suno make random instrumental chiptunes, too, and it’s got me interested in buying a MIDI keyboard to play around with. Which 40 years ago people were saying that wasn’t real music, either.
It was special and you didn't cheat: you wrote the lyrics and they meant something to you and your wife, which is what matters. If you asked someone else to set the music for you, it would still be music about something meaningful to you both. The AI part of this is pretty meaningless, but you made it meaningful by putting something real into it and sharing that with another person.
I do like the idea that another person commented of exporting the stems and actually singing the vocal portion of the song. It’d be fun to sing again (I sang some in high school), but I feel I never would have been able to come up with the tune in the first place if I’d started from zero.
Maybe we can distinguish craftmanship from creativity. This case can then be cast as one of deploying creativity without embodying the traditional craftmanship (ability to play guitar, sing low notes). I don't see that as illegitimate, so long as no false credit is taken about the said guitar playing, low note singing.
Can an artist be good if they can't draw a good circle by hand? Yes. Except they can't take credit for the goodness of circles that appear in their work, if not drawn by them.
I think it’s also potentially a sense of taste, like being a music producer vs a music creator.
When AI art was nascent and stable diffusion came out, I put probably 1000 hours into really getting good at using it. I like to compare it to picking up pretty seashells on the sand. When working with those old models where many results were terrible, the prompt was akin to driving to a beach you know has seashells, then generating 100-200 pictures on an A100 was like combing through the beach to see if you find any good ones. Finally you could clean up the couple few that were real gems and get something that looked nice. It may not be artistry, but that doesn’t mean it has zero value at all.
Although let’s be real, most people aren’t going to make a living being a beach comber looking for pretty things that washed up on the shore, when even a kid can do it.
I've been doing this. I've been a poet/songwriter for a while, but I'm no musician. This lowers the bar and provides a great deal of relief from the "creative boilerplate" necessary when booting up a song from zero using a DAW, especially for me, a non-musician.
So, I get a good song by throwing spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. Then I can export the stems to the DAW and replace the AI vocals with my own. A little audio processing and mixing later and the whole song is mine.
That’s a good idea actually! The AI did a fantastic job of making a tune that sounded good and matched the style I was going for, then a lot of the iteration was changing the verses because I discovered there’s a lot of lyrics that sound extremely “cringe” when you listen back. Like nails on a chalkboard, a “you know it when you hear it” situation.
My wife wrote a song for a story she’s been working on, and honestly her sense of verse and timing gave an output with me writing a simple style prompt that sounded absolutely fantastic. But she’d spent hours writing and refining that song as it’s important to the story.
Replacing the AI vocals with my own would likely work, although there’s a certain note in the chorus that’s beyond my vocal range. I bet if I practiced it and recorded myself singing the chorus 50 times I could get one result that sounded right, though. Thanks for sharing.
As a semi-professional musician, sounds fair to me.
You wrote the lyrics. There are professional songwriters with many hit songs who only write lyrics. Some can't even play an instrument, much less compose music. So what do they do? They work with a music composer. They hire a music arranger. They hire a band.
So in this case, you still did the foundational songwriting part yourself, but instead of hiring humans to help you finish it, you hired AI.
Grand Theft Auto V launched with auto-aim ('aimbot') as default in 2013. It is one of the most successful games in history, bringing joy to many people.
Are you arguing that's not a real game because of this?
I disagree. The point of playing a shooter game is to have fun and be competitive while abiding by the rules of the game. Using aimbot is circumventing the whole purpose.
The purpose of making music is to make music. So why does it matter what tool you use to do it? Because tools like Logic or Garageband can create lots of sounds for you is that removing creativity? Really shouldn’t music be recorded with a live band every time? Those music production tools are destroying creativity… No. Obviously not.
AI does enable creativity. Turns out it also requires a lot of skill to use it to get something good.
People just enjoy and value the process of making music.
Just like you could enjoy the process of drawing, or doing sports.
Given the amount of talented musicians that do not live off their art, most of the time they value the process and the result and if other people like it too and pay for it it’s even better. Most music is not produced to give emotions to other but to the musician. It happens we share the same emotions that the musician sometimes.
So if you remove the process or devalue it, it’s touching the artist in its heart and values because most of them worked on their craft for years.
One person using more software to "make" music does not remove the process or devalue music for another person who wants to use less software to make music. Replace music with anything in this reasoning.
Actually with AI the music is made for you. I don’t have to learn how to play the piano the guitar or anything. I just prompt what kind of instrument I want to. Is that still « making music » ? Idk, for me it’s not the same. In the end I’m not a musician. I just enjoy music. But I can understand that the reality of some people is different from mine as regards to what is « making music ». My view or use of AI does not invalidates theirs.
Absolutely and I hope you understand my point as well. Actually I’ve never been able to learn an instrument and I always wanted to make music. I’m all in to make music without having to learn anything complicated. Other people might not have the same definition of mine or like what I could produce without their craft.
Exactly right. It's like arguing there is only one way to make food for enjoyment. It's pure snobbery to proclaim there's only one proper way to do X thing along these lines. Making art is just the same, there is no right way to do it.
The HN crowd wants everybody sitting at home on UBI suffering trying to be creative. It's like arguing for hand washing clothes to get that full, proper, drawn-out, brain smashing experience.
Now sit at home and be a good boy, take that UBI, create and be productive - but don't make it too easy, don't you dare use AI, bleed for that UBI.
>Now sit at home and be a good boy, take that UBI, create and be productive
Honestly i prefer that listening marketing bro's on linkedin posting about how AI means X is finished and everyone who learned X needs to pay for their webinar on writing prompts.
> Turns out it also requires a lot of skill to use it to get something good.
I agree. I don't like blaming/crediting a tool, for how it is used.
Some tools may be too dangerous for "just anyone" to use, and there may be justification in restricting access, but I'm not sure the tools should always be banned.
I was just talking about this, with a friend who leans conservative (but not nuttily so). He was telling me about watching all these shows about folks living north of the Arctic Circle, and how everyone walks around with guns, because polar bears look at us as walking snacks. In those cases, the gun is an absolutely necessary tool, and no one even thinks twice about it.
Not so, New York City.
But it would be a life-endangering mistake for someone in NYC to dictate to an Alaskan Inuit, that they can't carry a gun, and it might be a life-endangering mistake for an Alaskan to insist that everyone in NYC walk around with a gun (I won't get into the political arguments, there, be draggones).
I agree. My problem with AI produced media is that a lot of the things I've seen are really bad. If someone uses AI, but has taste and takes the time to curate and fix the output, then the output can be fine.
Just like with digital effects in movies, plastic surgery, and makeup - if it's done well, there's a good chance I didn't even notice it. If it's clearly noticeable, it's often because it's not done well.
I think you can compare to another "uncreative" way of making music: sampling. The way the Timelords do it in "Doctorin' the Tardis" is pretty terrible (in their case on purpose, I believe). There are plenty of hip hop examples where I think musically not much is added to the music, but the lyrics and maybe the act do add a lot. And then there are bands like Daft Punk that will chop up and recontextualize the samples to the point that it's clearly a completely new thing.
There were plenty of hiphop examples where the samples are recontextualized as well, then Puff Daddy came along and attempted to rap over virtually unchanged Led Zeppelin songs and everyone ate it up. AI Is doing the same thing to music that he did decades ago. ruin it.
I didn't mean to say all hiphop is like what I mention. I'm 100% sure that hiphop also does sampling in really interesting ways, I'm just not as familiar with the examples. This was not not meant as a diss, and I wasn't saying all hiphop does things the same way. I was just mentioning examples that I'm personally familiar with of "Sampling Slop", "Different kind of creativity", and "Using Sampling as a completely new instrument".
For the middle category, I meant things like Gangsta's Paradise. I really like the song, I think Coolio really adds something. But you can hear much more of "Pasttime Paradise" in there than you can hear "More Spell On You" in Daft Punk's "One More time"
I mention Daft Punk because it's really accessible: there are videos on youtube that can show a layperson like me exactly how they chopped up the samples.
During Christmas shopping, I saw several books and board games with illustrations in the signature ChatGPT cartoon style [1, 2] as cover art. (As well as a coloring book that was literally only ChatGPT images) They were sold both in comic shops and large book stores.
I found it just sad, honestly. Nothing against using some AI help to create good cover art, but not even bothering to change the default style screams "low effort".
That's the effect I'm fearing. Sure, AI could probably be used to create new high-quality content by people who really put in the effort, but in reality, it just seems to define a new level of "good enough" that lowers the overall level of quality.
AI isn't being used the same way as a drum loop or an electronic instrument, It's being used to vertically integrate services like Spotify so that they don't have to pay as much for content. Maybe you have found a place for generative AI in your workflow that fosters creativity, but this is not how it's being used the vast majority of the time.
The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made. There is no cheating when there is feeling.
Generic AI music so far does not touch me. I might tolerate it in the background, but I know there is great music being made with the help of AI. (Which is different from letting the AI do it all)
An aimbot in competive playing is indeed cheating and sucks the fun out for others. But if you have fun with single player aimbots, why not. (I know some games integrated autoaim and they can still be fun)
It feels insincere and manipulative, especially when I don't know upfront if the content (music, video, text) is from another human being or from AI.
AI will become good enough to write songs better than humans; it's a matter of time. But it feels like someone tries to hack my mind, exploit my human instincts, it doesn't feel like genuine art the way it was for the whole human history - people expressing themselves, creating and sharing something beautiful with each other.
The end result is an automated personalized "enjoy" button, and this is sad.
> AI will become good enough to write songs better than humans; it's a matter of time.
I'm unconvinced. The process of songwriting is so dependent on being able to listen to what you've made and decide whether you enjoy it or not. We can train a model to imitate popular music, but we can't train a model to enjoy music, because we can't quantify enjoyment and turn it into a data set. You can train an LLM on soup recipes, but you can't train one to taste the soup and tell you whether it's good or not.
That's part of what offends me so much about the notion of AI-assisted "creativity." Creating music should be a way of engaging more deeply with music, but you've discovered a way to pay even less attention to music than before. None of the details in an AI-generated song really matter; they were chosen arbitrarily, because they seemed normal. Indeed, they are so normal that your ear will slide right off of them.
You can't fix a soup that someone else prepared—not as an amateur. You don't know what went into it, so you can't pick out the individual flavours and decide whether they're right or not. They were never "right" for you, because you didn't pick them. It's like ordering a Big Mac, taking it apart, and trying to workshop it into Duck à l'Orange. All you get is a Big Mac with some orange slices on it. Maybe you like Big Macs; maybe you're happy. It's a pretty poor substitute for creativity, though.
> But it feels like someone tries to hack my mind, exploit my human instincts, it doesn't feel like genuine art the way it was for the whole human history - people expressing themselves, creating and sharing something beautiful with each other.
There's a thin line between art and business - quite often the goal isn't to have you feel something, it's to sell you product that you pay for, and if by the way you feel something, that's cool.
People care about authenticity, though. There are people who get bothered by things like fake DJs, ghostwritten songs, lip synced live performances, and manufactured artists (such as many kpop groups).
And as for single-player aimbots, I agree that it doesn't do anyone any harm, but what's the point? It's like running the course of a marathon on a segway. If you're just doing it by yourself, then I suppose it doesn't hurt anyone, but you can't really say that you ran a marathon, can you?
Having fun. You don't achieve anything for real anyway, unless you are playing professional e-sports. And some games can still be fun, with aimbot. There is more to games than precision mouse work. I remember a arcade space shooter, where flying the aircraft was speedy action with dogfights, and you had only to do rough aiming, the rest did the "targeting computer". But I also have seen FPS shooters with that option and people enjoying the action and boom boom boom feeling powerful.
"There are people who get bothered by things like .. lip synced live performances, and manufactured artists"
And that would actually be me as well. But I try to keep an open mind even with the shallowest mainstream popsongs. Not liking it because of the source, but to see if I feel the music. Usually I turn it off a very quickly though, but I still don't talk down to my niece for example who likes it.
> The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made.
The touching you emotionally part is due to the quality of the underlying creative work. I'm sure the GP's wife was touched- they put in the work to make something- but the fact is that work they did was enabled by the theft-at-scale of work others have done.
You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale. These models did not come from the ether- they are weighted mathematical averages based on ingesting shit tons of existing creative work, made by people, the vast majority of which was ingested against those creatives' explicit wishes.
Unfortunately most people don't give a shit where things come from as long as they get whatever they want in the end, which is why our economy is almost exclusively run by sociopaths.
"You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale"
I know enough of music creation to know, all music we enjoy is created by "theft". Meaning taking a riff from here, a melody from there. And tweaking it. AI just automated it. Not sure, it sucks with the whole buisness modell around it. That only some profit and not the truly creative composers. But that .. is hardly a new thing. There are many, many awesome musicians out there. Always have been. But only some become "superstars". Where a whole industry pushes them so they stay on top no matter what. That's not fair, but AI did not change this.
This argument always hinges on pretending that "humans being influenced by other humans" is the same thing as "a model ingesting millions of works without permission," and it just isn’t. Not even remotely.
Human influence is selective. It’s contextual, filtered through taste, memory, culture, and intent. A metal songwriter doesn't subconsciously absorb the entire global corpus of music; they draw from the artists who shaped them, or deliberately subvert something specific. That’s literally the creative process: choosing what to reference, twist, or subvert, reject, counter.
A model doesn't do that. It doesn't choose influences, it doesn’t have tastes, and it doesn't have intent. It just digests everything it's fed into a massive statistical set of averaged patterns that it has found, and then regurgitates them on command so as to "minimize error." Calling that the same thing as human inspiration is like saying a wood chipper is just an automated sculptor because both involve wood going in and differently shaped wood coming out.
The music industry fucks musicians raw, to be sure, but this is not guaranteeing anything for musicians in the slightest, quite the opposite: it just makes it so users of the models can also fuck musicians. How is that good at all? The exploitation of artists at scale being the status quo is not a reason to excuse even more exploitation, that's certifiably insane.
"A metal songwriter doesn't subconsciously absorb the entire global corpus of music; they draw from the artists who shaped them"
They also draw from the people around them. The music they hear when they are in public spaces. Etc.
Out of curiosity, have you ever done composing?
Anyway, one can create very shallow songs by hand. One can also give empty vague prompts.
Or one can make a complex music arrangement, manual editing of tracks, have some AI generated mixed in, very detailed prompts etc. If that ain't creative to you, that is your opinion. I think different.
If it were just an average, we'd only get gray sludge. Models learn the manifold distribution - they don't just mix existing works; they discover the hidden rules by which those works were created. This is reverse-engineering of human culture, and that's exactly why control over the latent space is so critical - otherwise, we surrender culture to an algorithm that has "learned the rules" but has no concept of meaning
AI music models are a tool. They're only as good as the person doing the steering and curation.
I am a filmmaker. I have made photons-on-glass films for decades.
I have always wanted to make big-budget sci-fi and fantasy films, as have my friends and colleges who went to film school. The barrier to entry is almost impossible to climb. Most of my friends wound up in IATSE or doing commercial work, but never had the chance to follow through on their passion projects.
Ten thousand kids go to film school every year. Very few of them will wind up being able to make what they dream to create. It's a fucking tragedy that all of this ambition withers on the vine.
Getting a large film budget requires connections. You see a lot of nepotism. Sometimes a director who was in the right place at the right time with the right ideas will make it, but that's such a survivor's bias problem. There are orders of magnitude more people that didn't make it. Talented people full of dreams. And that's a tragedy - imagine how many Martin Scorseses, Hayao Miyazakis, Yorgos Lanthimoses, Denis Villeneuves, and Chloe Zhaos we're losing.
AI is the first tool that will level the playing field for truly driven individuals. I mean this with my full heart - this is a great tool for creative and driven people. It's the arrival of the printing press for us.
But the news of this gift has been twisted and soured by the media and by popular influencers who push only a fear agenda.
By trying to make AI films, I have been doxed, sent death threats, insulted, called thousands of names. Every day! People pour out hatred, racist comments, sexist comments - they literally want me (all of us) to DIE because they've been taught to hate this.
I can't even begin to tell you how exhausting this is. Instead, let me focus on the good.
Here's a list of (what I think) are really good AI films. Each of them takes 10+ hours of work:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQWRBCt_5E - Created by a Hollywood TV writer for an FX show you've probably seen. Not the best animation or voicing, but you can see how it gives a writer more than just a blank page to convey their thoughts.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U - Made by a film school grad as a Robot Chicken homage. If you're going to tell them "don't use AI", then are you going to get them a job at Disney? Also, all the pieces are hand-rotoscoped, the mouth animations are hand-animated, and every voice is from a hired (and paid) voice actor.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKYeDIiqiHs - Totally 100% cursed. Made by a teenager following the comic book's plot. Instead of this teenager spending 100 hours on Fortnite, they made this.
These tools do not remove the need for editing, compositing, rotoscoping. You still have to understand film language, character arcs, story, pacing. The human ingredients still have to be there.
By using these models and tools, directors and editors can finally pursue projects that would require many people and potentially very large budgets. Like the Red vs. Blue creators sitting down and making machinima, they can create vivid sci-fi worlds or whatever genre or mood they want to evoke.
AI is a tool. In the hands of an artist, you can make art with AI.
Yes, people are using AI to make slop. Cameras also make slop - selfies, food pics. Your own camera roll is full of garbage.
People are posting slop AI because it's novel. If we'd gone from "no cameras at all" to "smartphones" overnight, you would see so much smartphone camera slop it would be unbearable. We, as a society, had time to develop filters and curation around cameras. That'll eventually happen for AI too.
Cameras can make incredible art in the hands of an artist. They can also make a lot of shit. But we don't demonize the cameras. Soon, our feelings towards AI will become equivalent.
But right now, it's extremely painful to be a creative person using AI.
I -
ABSOLUTELY HATE
ABSOLUTELY DETEST
THE "ALL AI IS BAD" MEME
IT IS MIMETIC VITRIOL
People have let this stupid meme boil over to the point of sending death threats and doxxing creators. And that is beyond unacceptable.
We need to stop adopting angry slogans of hate and start thinking on a case by case basis with nuance.
This entire conversation needs way more humanity and humility.
And we need to accept that there are good things being created with AI too.
I agree with you on pretty much all that you’ve said here. Thank you especially for the recommended viewing!
I wonder what happens, though, as the economics shift? It’ll be great, creatively speaking, for people who have a project inside them itching to get out into the world. Those were always the people who made the most interesting art anyway.
But viewership economics aren’t expanding in the same way. Same number of viewers, less patience for feature-length work, less willingness to pay.
If the status quo only generated enough money for an already-small universe of Hollywood professionals to feed their families through their creative work, what happens when even that withers?
Film school, it seems to me, is partly about the access to equipment and talent, but mostly about the time and community expectation to dedicate every waking hour to your creative project.
Art and commerce have always been awkward bedmates, but it makes me a little sad that the price for anyone being able to create is that ~none of them will be able to make money from their creative labor.
Hollywood budgets aren't growing, but they're not shrinking either.
Most recent cost cutting has been Hollywood offshoring IATSE jobs to Europe and Asia. 80% of Atlanta's once burgeoning film production has moved away. We have tremendous, multi-billion dollar studio facilities here too.
I do expect AI to eventually be used for saving on VFX costs, pre-production, and even B roll, but I don't think it'll replace principal photography right away. It might be used in more animation projects.
I don't think those budgets will disappear. Rather, I think they will be spent on other projects to increase the slate of offerings.
Meanwhile, completely orthogonal to all of this, the creator economy has been growing tremendously year over year. We have lots of independent creators that are now household names and brands.
I suspect we'll see a rise of indie filmmakers and that the field will begin to look more like writing, indie music, or indie games. Anyone can bring their talent and not much capital and make interesting and compelling work.
The problem, as always, will be discovery. A lot of good work will still go unseen. But this is better than the work not being practical or possible.
As long as people capture minds and attention, there will be incredible value in creating and captivating. Artists will get paid. It's just a matter of artists breaking through and finding an audience.
As a longtime musician, I fervently believe in doing the best you can with the tools you have.
As a programmer with a philosophical bent, I have thought a lot about the implications and ethics of toolmaking.
I concluded long before genAI was available that it is absolutely possible to build tools that dehumanize the users and damage the world around them.
It seems to me that LLMs do that to an unprecedented degree.
Is it possible to use them to help you make worthwhile, human-focused output?
Sure, I'd accept that's possible.
Are the tools inherently inclined in the opposite direction?
It sure looks that way to me.
Should every tool be embraced and accepted?
I don't think so. In the limit, I'm relieved governments keep a monopoly on nuclear weapons.
The people saying "All AI is bad" may not be nuanced or careful in what they say, but in my experience, they've understood rightly that you can't get any of genAI's upsides without the overwhelming flood of horrific downsides, and they think that's a very bad tradeoff.
I created a jazz fusion supergroup in Suno capable of impossibly tight jamming. I believe the synth player has 8 arms. I'm not even selling it as an output of my own creativity - even though I partially feel like it was - but rather, it was just fun to make! I had a ton of fun with it, even downloaded stems and mixed a lot in a DAW. I still LOL at how fresh some of it is. Suno rocks. Top 40 is garbage anyways, and the best music out right now are live bands, imo, so I don't feel that I'm encroaching on anyone else's artistic opportunity (hopefully) by doing these Suno projects.
That said, I haven't shown it to anyone... I'm not trying to make anyone mad. But what's the point of working on any music, AI or not, if nobody wants to hear it? This was a bit of a depressing realization for someone who was always fearful of letting anyone listen to my own actual music. It doesn't matter how much I piloted the prompt, or mixed down the stems, and how good the final result is, because at the end of the day, its just AI... I really don't know how to feel about the whole thing - there are legitimate arguments against AI for creative use, it's hard to not feel like a hypocrite or something for even using it..
> Someone said, "using AI is like using an aimbot for music."
Ok. Lets go with that analogy. Whats the problem with someone playing a single player game with an aimbot on? Sure they wont get good at the aiming part. But it feels kinda up to them on if that matters or not.
Additionally, I wouldn't see anything morally wrong with that. Now, if someone entered into a music competition, where only human made music was allow then I agree that this would be "cheating". But what if its not that and the listeners simply are OK with the "aimbotted" music?
> where all the musicians live, and they have no other place to go, only disconnect.
No actually. Those musicians are free to continue making whatever music that they want and can refuse to listen to the AI music if they dont want to.
The fact that 2 other, unrelated 3rd parties both like to make AI music and listen to AI music is not the musicians area of control here. They do not get to decide what other people like to listen to or make.
> free to continue making whatever music that they want
Never said they weren't.
> can refuse to listen to the AI music if they don't want to
A musician can be a listener, indeed. If you believe a listener has this freedom and will keep it, you're most probably mistaken. No one besides musicians and discerning, ideologically relentless listeners is interested in making NN-generated music distinguishable and supporting the right of filtering it. The goal is to supplant one with the other.
> The fact that 2 other, unrelated 3rd parties both like to make AI music and listen to AI music…
Listeners is not an unrelated party to a musician. They form a vital symbiosis. And it's a zero-sum game, as listener's attention is a limited resource.
> They do not get to decide what other people like to listen to or make.
This is an unrelated point. Who decides what is a separate topic.
The crux of the issue is that we have two types of superficially similar product which are in fact substantially different (hope this does not require clarification) and incomparable in terms of resources necessary for their creation. This begets unprecedented power imbalance and incentives for deceit, biased legislation and other moves to solidify this situation.
To use the video game analogy, I think it's more about PVP vs "bots" as opposed to PVP vs "humans". A lot of PVP games (especially battle royale style) struggle with the question of whether to include dumb AI characters as "fodder" for people to play against. The PVP purists, pro players, and streamers tend to be against bots because they think the game should be a pure test of human skill. Normie players, less skilled players, and players who just don't have the time to master the game tend to like to play against a mix of bots and humans. Some people just don't like PVP and would prefer to just play against bots only.
I'm not going to weigh in on which side I'm on, but I notice the discussion around AI "making creativity too easy" and "devaluing practiced skills" to be similar to the discussion around bots in PVP games.
The long history of art shows a story of technology developments and how artists have creatively applied them as new techniques and mediums.
Is AI music today able to emulate what a brilliant human artist does? Not really. But is it something that artists can leverage creatively? Absolutely.
AI can do the most basic first pass of creation. For a senior engineer writing code is a relatively small part of the job. There is a paradox where complete novices can churn out content / code that looks decent, but is superficially empty or a maintenance nightmare waiting to happen if the complexity increases even a little. On the other hand, for senior engineers, it is truly useful. If you treat the AI like a modestly skilled junior developer and actually still design your software it just does a lot of the boring boiler plate for you. You are still doing almost everything important. When you understand the code and could write it yourself you can almost always keep the LLM on track towards your objective, achieve appropriate code quality, and finish the task quicker. They are also really decent at refactoring and doing boilerplate. Especially in languages like C++ with a lot of boilerplate.
I imagine the same idea above holds for media (music, film) as well. When you understand how to prompt and can get the right scene with all the right constraints you are saving time. The human is still composing, editing, and storytelling. The LLM again becomes a relatively interesting but boring tool in your workflow to speed up some aspects.
Right now the power of LLMs is that you can funnel parts of your workflow that they can handle well and you save a lot of time for minimal design cost in terms of how to use them.
The analogy is great, but it breaks down when we talk about professional use. An aimbot in multiplayer is evil because it ruins the game for others. But an aimbot in game development (e.g., procedural aiming animation) is just a tool. The problem with current AI video is that the model often shoots not where the director wants, but where it's easiest to hit (the template)
There's literally no problem at all with using aimbots, the problem is when you're playing with other people and lie about it. In fact, many games have built in aimbots simply because it's a fun mechanic (Ion Fury and Borderlands: Pre-Sequel are two that come to mind.)
Using AI to create music is like having your mom buy you a surfer wardrobe in the 80s/90s even though you lived in landlocked midwest or a skater wardrobe even though you didn't skate.
No, comparing to an aimbot is too charitable. Using AI for music is at best like watching a gaming stream and you barely choosing the game, though not the streamer.
Sorry that isn't true. Lots of smaller communities online, especially around small streamers make small meme style videos. Usually these are mocking someone doing something dumb online, or jokes/memes about the show etc. These are similar to parody videos online that were hugely popular on YouTube back in the early 2010s.
People did do this before AI. Usually cutting people faces out and sticking them on actors faces in existing movies, or subtly doing parody cover, doing clever edits (Cassette Boy is a notable example) or people were performing and recording it like the "Epic Rap Battles of History".
All it done is allow people to create these sort of to a higher creative standard, in other cases it allowed people to create jokey stuff that they wouldn't otherwise be able to create.
People using this technology in this manner is clearly creative. They are using the tech to make something new and unique for a particular audience.
In the 80s/90s you would be complaining about people using tracker software and samples to create music instead of learning to play an instrument. Under your logic someone like FatboySlim isn't a musician.
I have another example. Web development. Dealing with css and designing exact objects or elements in websites was a pain meaning needs technical expertise, time and good idea to be expressed. LLMs made it easier. Still the website created by a dilettante can never compete with one from a creative mind.
If I have $500,000 I can buy a car that’s meticulously hand-crafted with hand-stitched leathers and fine woods in the interior with an engine built by hand by a single person.
But I just need to get from point A to point B so I have a $10,000 used car.
Or you could get one with a better service history, the paint job and interior is in better condition, and it has the optional extras and a recent cam belt change for $12,000.
It depends whether you think the extra cost is worth it.
Under your logic someone playing a CD is a musician.
I'm exaggerating a bit to make the point that the amount of human creativity put into a work of art is not binary. Just pasting a rehashed joke as a genAI video prompt is not much of a creative process.
I think a lot of people mean "Wedding DJ" or "Radio DJ".
However there is a whole small subculture around this. A friend would go hunting for records to sample in Charity shops for old vinyls (this was pre-ebay). This apparently is known a "Digging" and lot of Music Producers, DJs etc would do this to find samples for their sets/albums.
Discussions about "DJs" are difficult because there's a WIDE range of skills behind what we call a DJ.
Yes, some have zero skill and will basically just show up with a pre-determined Spotify playlist. They won't even have mixing/transitions between songs.
Some are in the middle and will be able to do basic transitions between songs (ie, just simple beat matching) and know how to carry a vibe.
At the far end of the spectrum are actual composers that are effectively making new mixes of songs on the fly.
And so you have the problem where someone says "Being a DJ takes a lot of skill" because they're thinking of the last category, while the person hearing that message replies with "How does it take skill to just press Play?" because they're thinking of the first.
> Under your logic someone playing a CD is a musician.
No. That isn't my logic at all.
> Just pasting a rehashed joke as a genAI video prompt is not much of a creative process.
That isn't what is happening. What people are doing is taking people from different online streaming shows, making new content based on jokes made on those show and turning them into music videos, which are usually a cover of a well known song.
People have been doing this online without AI for quite a while. Usually this was with various music software. All AI does, it make this process easier.
Any time something is made easier and you get more of it, it becomes worth less.
There might be a claim that there is still some human creativity involved, maybe. But it's sort of like amateurs at an open mic night telling memorized jokes that they didn't write compared to a comedian who has spent thousands of hours perfecting stories, jokes, punch lines, timing, and phrasing.
> Any time something is made easier and you get more of it, it becomes worth less.
That is only the case with commodities. Not creative works and/or entertainment.
> But it's sort of like amateurs at an open mic night telling memorized jokes that they didn't write compared to a comedian who has spent thousands of hours perfecting stories, jokes, punch lines, timing, and phrasing.
Often these amateurs are often funnier than the professionals. However that of course is subjective.
Using samples is not the same as AI or creating AI videos. Nor is using photoshop or an editing suite.
"Creating" AI art is analogous to commissioning a work of art from someone else.
Person A put in a request to person B, pers. A receives a mockup or a draft from pers. B, pers. A and B might engage in convos to refine the work, pers. B delivers the final product to pers. A. AI "artists" are person A in that scenario.
Sampling, like FatboySlim, or many other producers, is clearly not person A in that scenario. They're exerting intentional, direct, creative control. Creating AI art is mediated in a way that is far more indirect and stochastic. The creative inputs in AI art is more directly the text in the prompt rather than the output. Editing the output afterwards is creative input afterwards, though. However, sign a work you commissioned from someone else as your own and people will probably roll their eyes, which I think describes most reactions to AI videos.
> Using samples is not the same as AI or creating AI videos. Nor is using photoshop or an editing suite.
It is very similar. You are using a piece of software to aid in the creative process.
In these cases, you are remixing previous artistic works to create a new one.
> "Creating" AI art is analogous to commissioning a work of art from someone else.
Depends what you are doing and how you are using the AI. So this isn't always the case.
If all they did was "Take Thriller but make it look like an anime". I would agree. But there is obviously more happening than that.
> Sampling, like FatboySlim, or many other producers, is clearly not person A in that scenario. They're exerting intentional, direct, creative control. Creating AI art is mediated in a way that is far more indirect and stochastic.
No often I've created some basic stuff and you really have to tell it exactly what you want, often make sure it has the right images, fonts etc.
I could do the exactly the same in GIMP. It would just take me longer as I will have to watch a YouTube tutorial for the 5th time on how to add a text shadow to some text as I use GIMP about like twice a week and forget how to do stuff.
So what is the difference between me providing commands via a prompt to make an image, as opposed to using a mouse and keyboard in GIMP? How I am inputting the instructions? There is a bit more abstraction.
However one is considered creative by you and another isn't, because there is a slight loss of direct control.
Similar with these AI parodies there is obviously a lot of work done in getting the AI to produce the output they want. Especially considering some of the characters are obscure individuals.
There is a creative process taking place. Just because you've used AI (which at the end of the day is a piece of software) doesn't invalidate that process taking place. It doesn't mean the creative process is done by the AI either.
It's both... I think it can cut both ways... I was largely on your side, as most of the AI stuff I've seen is just annoying more than anything. Then the "Star Wars: Beggar's Canyon" video completely changed my mind. The voice generation is clear and inflection appropriate... the cuts, sequence, and overall effects are clearly put together in a consistent way.
I can only imagine how much work that video was, but is really the first thing I've seen as AI video that gives me hope... and obviously a work of passion and a lot of effort to get such a great final result.
Thanks for name dropping this video, I hadn't heard of it. Maybe I'm just getting old but this felt as empty to me as most other GenAI stuff does. The tech is getting better but I'd still prefer a no-budget fan film that looks worse but has heart (and visual consistency) to something like this. I can meet halfway and say that perhaps this is a modern version of someone being able to play with their action figures and micromachines and show others what they were imagining and that lowering barriers to sharing such things should be celebrated. To mirror my youtube comment though, I'm worried that this sort of thing will stop being a tool to storyboard and play around and will just become the final product for studios who could do so much more.
This was already the direction for studios though... Improvements to CGI and vault filming have cut costs dramatically relying on tech.
The clip mentioned likely took a few green screen segments, a lot of training data and many tries to get the clips needed for that sohrt story. B it's a lot more work at current state of the tech than just entering a single prompt.
It’s almost like people that use the tools to the best of their ability will produce higher quality outputs. This is a new tool like we’ve never seen before with a low skill floor to use it. We don’t know what the skill ceiling is yet.
If you're correct, creative people have nothing to worry about then. Creative people will still stand out and have a role. But the world already has an oversupply of creativity, and a need for a lot more of boring, uncreative things. A plumber, mechanic, or programmer, all need minimal creativity -- 99% perspiration, and 1% inspiration, as they say.
Yes, that's exactly right. It's why I, and many other creatives I know, are not worried about AI. Our annoyance comes more from it dominating the conversation rather than actual perceived risk.
I'm sure there's a creative way to respond to the annoyance. One slightly worrying factoid is that chess players said the same thing about early chess engines, and them being no match for human creativity. Time will tell.
With chess, there is a known, specific end goal, and the "creativity" comes with how you arrive there. With an artwork, the end goal is entirely decided by the artist, there is no "win state" to reward.
That's not what people who play chess thought. The creativity wasn't in the goal, but how you arrived there. The "beauty" of the steps that you took on the way to the goal. They believed that it was human creativity and sense of beauty that would never be encapsulated in a computer program. They turned out to be incorrect, but maybe you're right and things are different in a wider domain, we'll see.
Not sure exactly you mean, or who you are referring to as being correct. Not sure the relevance of anything being a game, the question is the intersection of computation and interacting with humans. Having been there at the time, I saw the snide dismissals of computers playing chess, they were "simply playing by rote", they were just glorified calculators who could never understand the beautiful moves played by human grandmasters. And this was actually true at the time... it just didn't stay true.
Today, very many humans enjoy spectating computer played chess games, and often comment on the "beauty" of the moves played. Take that for what you will.
Do you have any source for your claim that there is an oversupply of creativity? My gut feeling is that not all creativity is created equal, and there is a small amount of truly impressive creative works that are not simply retreads of existing ideas.
I mean, a lot of "creatives" fund their art by doing work like making icons, thumbnails, jingles, website designs, corporate logos, etc. Things that can, and are being done by AI. This will have downstream effect on creativity since we aren't using the efficiency that AI provides for the greater good of society. Koenigsegg might sell one or two more cars though, so there's that.
> AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together.
This is very much not the case with the Stable Diffusion/Wan/general open diffusion models space.
The amount of effort and creativity that goes on in creating complex workflows, custom LoRAs, fine-tunes etc is genuinely a new area of art imho. Sure a lot of it is going to produce things that most people might not consider "art", but it's unfair to lump the work happening in this space with people randomly prompting Sora and dumping it on TikTok.
Those aspects aren’t the only “creative” aspects of filmmaking.
What if someone used AI to say something important or get across a different perspective?
99% of people in the world do not have the time/money/connections to achieve a film vision. They were locked out of the ability to create their vision - creating an high concept or production-heavy film has been the most privileged position in the world - until now.
Agree entirely - creativity emerges through the process of work, or is "discovered" through work. If AI does the work, it fundamentally can not be a creative process.
There is a lot of content whose final value ultimately doesn’t justify the time that would be spent on creating it. Worse, there is sometimes only a specific window of time where a content has entertainment value and it quickly drops off after you leave that window.
For example, someone recently created an entire anime style video of the United States invading Venezuela and capturing Maduro. It came out awesome! But… to make a similar quality video by hand would have easily taken a team of humans several months at best. By then, the news cycle would have moved on, and the delivered video would have even less value being watched so distant from the event that inspired it. People wouldn’t care anymore, and it wouldn’t have as much impact.
AI is the perfect solution for delivering such a video exactly when you need it. To me, this is one of the more acceptable uses of AI, to make fun throwaway content that you just laugh about for a few moments and then move on with your life. Having a human dedicate a large amount of their time to make such videos would be sad, and it’s better if they preserve their effort for more serious artistic works that are timeless in their value.
I think there is some tenuous analog between today's AI, and yesteryear's music synthesizers and "modern art". Regarding music, I understand synthesizers were created to mimic real instruments, whereas artists used its capabilities not to mimic, but to create entirely new sounds. My limited understanding of modern art (and without a search I don't distinguish between expressionism, impressionism or any other isms because of my ignorance of the differences) is that it was a reaction to the modern world, and an expression of something that could not be anything other than a creation of the human mind. AI may be helping people to copy existing aesthetics, but I'm hoping/waiting for it to enable people to take it in a completely novel direction that can only be augmented human expression.
I don’t agree with your music synthesizer analogy. I own a synthesizer, however I don’t possess any musical talent whatsoever. I cannot for the life of me produce anything remotely listenable from the thing. I know how to use it, but cannot make good music. You just need to look at some street performer banging on a plastic bucket and entertaining a circle of people to realise that the ability to make music is orthogonal to having the right tools.
AI art is more like me pressing the demo button on the synth, looking you in the eye as it plays the preset tune and saying “I made this”
Would you scream at a child that shows you a beautiful shell they found on the beach -- "you didn't make that!" -- why assume that everyone's ego is entwined with sharing?
No, because the child is behaving as a curator which is a valuable act. I never hear ai “artists” claim to be curators, they always claim to be creatives.
Photographers were not initially respected as artists -- they are now. The history of this cultural evolution is well documented. It is easier than typing a prompt to take a picture with a smartphone, yet the respect for photography somehow remains. It is definitely a cultural problem.
We need to disambiguate what you mean by "AI" here. If you're referring to people typing prompts in a frontier web UI, maybe. But if you're using local models, you can do quite a bit more, ComfyUI workflows can get crazy. Multi-region controlnet guided generations with IP adapters and loras, etc.
The art gatekeepers want to try and paint everyone using AI creatively as monkeys mashing ignorantly on keyboards, taking the unmodified output and parading it around like Picasso. The reality is that is to AI art as bathroom dick graffiti is to manual art.
A lot of technological advancements (or use scare quotes here) that claimed to let “regular people” be creative just end up passifying us and relinquishing our creativity. Why play the guitar, the record player already does it better. Why learn to juggle, some kid in <supposedly whiz-genius country> already does that.
Of course of course of course, people have been inspired by play in bands and to learn to juggle. But the trajectory seems to be to move away from small intimiate creative offerings, like playing music in your living room, to passively recieving Taylor Swift into your earbuds.
Not only are they removing creativity but they're eroding the medium with a flood of high quanity/low quality of misinformation or fakes. My youtube feed is innundated in AI generated talks, audiobooks, history etc. The audiobooks may be okay but I can't trust any AI generated content. At this point I wish I could just fiter it out. Just yesterday I saw a video by Yuval Noah Harari and almost towards the end I realize it's AI slop. It has nothing to do with the author except for his syntehtized voice. The content is not even vetted by a human, it's being created faster than users can consume it. For now I can spot these AI channels and attempt to avoid them but am not sure how long this is going to last.
A lot of digital tech produces more waste than actual value. Just look at your email inbox: odds are, the overwhelming majority of emails you get aren't useful correspondence from real people.
>However, 99% of the the "creativity" from what I've seen is done by the AI (how it should look, where the cuts need to happen, the tone, color grading, etc). Which is to say, it's taken from other people's (creative) work.
I don't get why this is a big deal? Like 99% of the creativity of taking a video of an ocean is also just taken from the nature. Your creativity was actually a small portion of "information" out of all the bits required to make that video.
A video of an ocean (or anything) is not, inherently, art, or creative. But also...if you're taking a video of the ocean, it's probably because you want to capture/share a video of the ocean, which an AI generated video is not.
Unless you're making a very particular type of video, you likely want to capture aspects of the water's movement, color, sound, or interactions without much care about faithfully capturing a video of the literal ocean. The former part is a big portion of what turns a video of the ocean from not inherently being art to being as much of art as you make it so. Saying the only reason would be to share the literal ocean forces the art out, not in.
"99% of the creativity of baking is done by the wheat growing in nature. Your creativity of "baking" was a small portion of what was required to make that pastry."
I find the mental gymnastics like this around AI discourse really confusing. Taking a still video of the ocean isn't "creativity". And if a video of an ocean is truly creative it's likely not attributed to "nature".
Taking still photos of anything is widely considered a creative activity. There's usually only a small amount of creativity involved. Sometimes more. Same goes for AI generated anything. You can have low effort photos and high effort photos, low effort AI generated pictures and high-effort AI generated pictures.
AI just lets you get a better result for less effort (for some definitions of "better"), just as a camera lets you get a better result for less effort than a paintbrush and canvas does.
It produces an image, just like painting does. It does so quicker and "better" than humans. But it also requires less creative input and allows less creative freedom.
Yes, 99% of people are uncreative and use the creative freedom this way. Besides, many truly creative people won't even touch it, some because of the ethics and others because it's not up to their standard yet. Does it really look surprising to you?
>AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together.
That's quite a leap of thought and doesn't follow from the first part at all.
Put a different way, would you say Fiverr enables people to be more creative?
Using AI to create an artistic work has more in common with commissioning art than creating it. Just instead of a person, you're paying the owners of a machine built on theft because it's cheaper and more compliant. It isn't really your creativity on display, and it certainly isn't that of the model or the hosting company.
The smallest part of any creative work is the prompt. The blood and the soul of it live in overcoming the constraints and imperfections. Needing to learn how to sing or play an instrument isn't an impediment to making music, it's a fundamental aspect of the entire exercise.
>would you say Fiverr enables people to be more creative?
That's not what GP said. They said that using a model removes creativity. That's a ridiculous leap from their premise, especially considering that it's misleading at best.
>The smallest part of any creative work is the prompt.
Like most people who never actually played with it, you seem to assume that prompting is all you can do, and repeat the tiresome and formulaic opinions. That's not worth discussing in the 1000th time honestly. Instead, I encourage you to actually study it in depth.
I agree. This is not about creativity, but about producing something that kinda looks like professional art. People assume that creative output has to pass some bar, so that other people can appreciate it. But you can also produce interesting art with very simple techniques. XKCD is an example that comes to mind.
I've been making music videos with a very satisfying creative process: Use AI to make a ton of images, pick the very best ones, and carefully arrange them in the right order. Example: https://youtu.be/r-_dJNgt3SM
I think most people have the ability to express themselves through art, but if their first experience of trying to make something is using AI tools, they will never discover that they can make something genuine that reflects their experience.
Or you could argue that it’s simply lifting from other people’s creativity. Like making a song entirely of sampled sounds from other songs with a key change.
Having watched both. Yes the Incredibles are much much worse. Especially if we focus on the color palette. You could have not picked a worse example.
But for example Moana is not worse than Cinderella. Arguably it's better. But the algorithmic choices around perspectives, reflections, etc. Were not really automated. In both cases a lot of people where involved in each scene, and I am confident, they went over every frame, checking the result was what they wanted.
Additionally, hand-coloring wasn't necessarily a more pure creative choice anyway. It was dictated by material conditions such as the availability of pigments, studio constraints, time pressures, etc.
This feels like an incredibly disingenuous comparison and I suspect you know that. But just to play along, real artists had to design the character models, real filmmakers had to decide which shots to capture, real editors had to put that together to make a cohesive story. Also they almost certainly went through color grading after having completed the rendering, so the colors are certainly selected by humans to produce a nice looking composition.
If you think this for one ai you must think it for all.
I can now instantly visualize anything I think of. That is creative power. The same for code - I can instantly scaffold a frontend I think of in google ai studio. Its not all great and I have to keep the slot machine spinning. But it's empowering.
These "ai kills creativity" arguments are all rather uncreative.
No, you are given someone else vision of anything you want. If you are being 100 % honest with yourself, the output of a prompt would never be exactly what you imagined. This is where YOUR creativity dies. Yes, you create, but you create through the filter of someone else. If this ceiling of creativity is enough for you, good. You will never break through it anyway, by design.
idk we are sure getting close and this stuff isnt even good yet. 1 example - I nearly one-shotted all the images for my blog https://backnotprop.com/blog and i felt creatively empowered as they came out better than I imagined (but aligned in general design)
My writing is not good at all. Much like your bland resume experience. But I never really needed that - I was Accenture's youngest senior manager while you were a consultant there.
> the output of a prompt would never be exactly what you imagined
There is way more than just a prompt to make something interesting with AI though. For example this test[0] i saw some time ago, includes several different AI systems (Z-Image Turbo with a custom lora for the specific style, Wan 2.2 Time-To-Move for the animation output, After Effects for the control animations and some sort of upscaler.
This involves way more than just a prompt and the video still has a few issues, like the right hand remaining "stuck" on the head, but the way to fix it would most likely be the same as making the motion with perhaps some additional editing work.
IMO AI can make some things easier and/or faster, even allow people to do things that'd be impossible for them before (e.g. i doubt the person who posted the video could make a real live video with actors, etc like the AI video shown) but to do anything beyond simple slop you still need to put in effort and that includes making things close to your vision.
(not getting the 100% exact results is fine because that was always the case with any tech - it isn't like most, if not all, PS1 devs wanted to low res graphics with wobbly polygons and lack of texture filtering, but the better games leaned in what the tech could do)
Do an experiment. Take any single photograph and try to recreate any aspect of it with the AI. For example, try to match overall vibe of the color palette _exactly_ as it is on your photo. Or try to match the exact camera angle. Or exact composition. How many slot spins did it take? How many would it take to match multiple aspects of a single image?
Creativity involves an extra step, imagining something in your mind eye and then bringing it to life. Not settling for whatever comes out, but demanding more. As you learn any craft your ability to articulate increases beyond happy little accidents into intentional mastery. Not so much with AI.
The argument about killing creativity makes a lot of sense to me. Our brains are inherently lazy and always they seek paths of least resistance. That's the intelligence, basically, strategizing for best outcome with least effort. AI models require ~zero effort to map your prompt to a mere sliver of the entire possibility space. How can we then convince ourselves to spend weeks or years to try to reach some novel art styles, when they require so much manual labor and the attention muscle that we allowed to deteriorate away?
Painters don't imagine something and through shear technical skills translate what is in their head to a canvas. Their style emerges through constant, repetitive work and iteration. The work itself creates the art, not an idea. An idea is just fuel.
Except you’re not the one doing the creating. It would be like me hiring an artist to execute my vision and then calling myself artistic. Empowering, maybe, but it’s closer to the illusion of power. You control a genie, but you don’t have the power yourself. And it’s worse than that, because in reality the genie is controlled by some mega corp, and not by you at all, and suddenly you need this genie to do all your thinking for you because you’ve forgotten how.
I don't care to call myself an artist. Nor is it about "being an artist" - subjective anyways and _could_ be defined as the ability to bring to life the things you think; of which AI is a tool.
At least those people are aware of where they sit and who they depend on, and they're not hiding it. A movie producer doesn't pretend to have created the movie by himself, someone who uses AI to write their blog posts on the other hand...
It's too tempting for people to have AI do all the creative work and then take credit for it, and it gives these people the delusion of thinking they're literally artists, authors, bloggers, etc.
Disagree. I'm someone who thinks in pictures, which might sound like a great skill for a visual artist to have, but I can't draw for crap. I'm not even very proficient with digital art tools. Through some trial and error, I found that music was a much better creative output for me. If generative AI was around during my formative years, I might have just been satisfied creating slop art and stopped there.
AI (as it currently exists) will never be "creative" in the sense that it can only imitate or interpolate between past works. At some point we'll recognize that AI generated works are boring and predictable. AI will probably never invent a new musical genre or artform since it can only reproduce or recombine works from the past. I wonder what happens when the internet is so full of AI generated slop that that the only things worth "training" on were made in the time before AI generation became a thing. Will AI generations be full of dated references to a time gone by?
People may say it increases creativity but I see it more as lowering the bar to produce things. The same could be said for a lot of inventions like photography made producing images easier and I'm sure a lot of portrait painters lost their jobs to photographers. I think the danger is that we may see a very rapid erosion of jobs in the creative space that won't be easy to transition into new fields which I feel will have a detrimental effect on our society.
I am currently working on a script with my uncle who is a professional playwright, my grandfather wrote for Benny Hill. So it runs in my family.
Biting the bullet, I have accurately had it generate the scene of the cafe. Generating visual imagery of how I imagine it; a cyber dystopian gothic cafe with wandering goths.
It's capped to ten seconds and that alone would've costed me a fair sum to even get a small render without revisions.
I could now technically pitch this with the AI works and get the funding required to hire actual animators/actors or spend my savings myself giving it to an artist depicting the theme and style; not that I could afford it.
How is creativity lost in that scenario? AI is a tool, it shouldn't be a do-everything, I created the script and it's generated the visual mock.
Personally I wouldn't want it to create the whole show and would personally prefer real folk to do the magic but for my own personal consumption it's given me the excitement and further drive to continue.
I don't think using GenAI to storyboard and pitch is inherently bad. There's long historical precedent for folks using existing film and music in demo reels to explain the feeling and tone they're going for (e.g. WW2 footage for Star Wars storyboarding reels IIRC). In isolation what you explained sounds fine, there may even be some argument that parts of this fall under fair use which may diffuse certain training attribution copyright challenges. Where things start to fall apart for me would be if your story/script and resulting prompts start to rely on GenAI upstream. And as you say, when the end product itself starts to lean on this tech as a shortcut.
> how it should look, where the cuts need to happen, the tone, color grading, etc
That's not creativity. That's skill. A person can think of something (creativity) and not know how to bring it to life without the skills to do so. The creator still needs to have a creative vision, and communicate that vision effectively at the very least.
Of course, there's also people that are just cranking out slop, but I'd argue there's no creativity there, other than finding creative ways to copy others. But that's been a problem since forever.
It's not like these discussions haven't have quite a lot of precedence. I bought a 4-track tape "portastudio" back in the 90s, but it didn't make me a good producer- years of playing music with dozens of groups did that. And I bought a canon xl1, but that didn't make the movies I was making more compelling than if I'd had budget to shoot on 16mm.
Creativity and good craft come from struggling to communicate an idea; anything that short circuits that will make you a worse artists.
AI is, to me, like claming that because you have access to a forklift going to the gym is no longer useful- you're missing both the aesthetic and material reasons why folks have been doing things.
What's worse- people claim a forklift is better than, say, working out and then say to the folks who were working out "this is what you're doing and it is dumb to spend all that effort doing it". That's nothing new either- I get why folks look at a lot of my early, cracked FruityLoop-based work from 2002 with some disdain-- it misses all of the nuances and trade-craft knowledge that I gained playing in bands over the following 20 years.
And I know how it sounds because I can hear it in the products of other young musicians: I play a lot of jazz with kids in their 20s who have way better chops than I ever will and who have a lot of the real book memorized. That real book allows them to pick up the tunes super fast, but they don't have a lot of the nuance that the 70 year olds I sometimes get to play with have in their playing.
I use AI for the dumbest stuff, like writing contracts for mechanical licensing. It's shit, because I'm just looking to copy some already-written document without paying a lawyer. I can't see see why folks would -want- to use it to make documents that no one else had previously thought would be worth writing and to me it very much seems like it can only produce, by definition, derivative works.
Musicians are terrible about that. I love being in a cover band, because I usually like the people and playing. But absent that, simply being able to "poof here's 'your' cover of Stariway" seems super boring, almost soul crushing.
And paying AI do the creative parts- that's like paying someone to have sex with my partner because I wanted to spend my nights playing video games instead of woodshedding on pedal steel guitar :D
Just think of what photography did to portrait painting. The camera and film did all of the color work, the person hitting the button had no need to mix their own pigments anymore. All the creativity was removed.
> 99% of the “creativity” is done by the AI…it's taken from other people's (creative) work.
Yes, and prior to AI, 99% of creativity was also taken from other peoples work. This is how creativity works. Man has no ideas in a vacuum.
As humans we take influences in from what we’ve seen and when we “create” things we’re simply combining things together, resulting in output falling somewhere on the spectrum from a 1:1 copy to somewhat novel.
If you can’t spot the influences in a painting or song or piece of graphic design, it’s simply because you aren’t deeply familiar with prior works in the field at the time.
Oh boy, it’s this again. You’re essentially admitting to having had no meaningful experiences in your entire life, as you’re incapable of imagining doing anything other than consuming content. Good art says something about the world, not other art.
How ironic that your response, "Good art says something about the world" is also just repeating a meme you've heard, a no-true-scotsman fallacy wrapped in an old cliche.
It's a meaningless, religious statement. Good art is impossible to define, and everything says something about the world.
I too can repeat tired memes to support my position, ie. Good artists copy, great artists steal.
The truth is, the process of creation starts with something called inspiration. Inspiration is theft. Again, man has no ideas in a vacuum.
As you believe you've led a far more interesting life than me (!), please cite some examples of what you believe to be "good" art. Then let's investigate how devoid of any influences it actually is.
Well, your claim was 99%, and you’re making the claim so the burden of proof is on you, so you first: Give me ninety-nine examples that support your position and explain why for each of them, and then I’ll give my one and do the same and we can see who has the stronger body of evidence.
I have an idea for a movie. Its kind of an epic idea - more about the characters, story and the feeling. I want to get the idea across as close as possible to what is in my head.
AI has given me the opportunity to do it. I just have to keep prompting to get the exact feeling and I can share my idea.
I don't like these curmudgeonly takes.. I'm sure this "All AI Videos Are Harmful" take will age just like how "All videos are harmful" and "All cartoons are harmful" have aged.
While I appreciate your positive experience, if you were unable to write, storyboard, and communicate your idea before AI--than AI is not going to be "the thing" that suddenly turns you into a filmmaker.
You're writing anyway, you just call it prompting. If you feel that the AI is giving you back more than what you're putting in with that writing, you have to ask yourself who's vision the result really is.
>if you were unable to write, storyboard, and communicate your idea before AI--than AI is not going to be "the thing" that suddenly turns you into a filmmaker.
The person you are replying to doesn’t say that they couldn’t do these aspects before. In fact they mention that they are able to communicate EXACTLY what they want to AI. The only problem was that their idea is high concept.
Getting a high concept film made is one of the most privileged positions in the world. Practically no one can actually just do this. Even people in the film industry with family connections to producers struggle to get their films made.
You have no idea what you’re asking from people when you tell them they should have just made it.
> You're writing anyway, you just call it prompting. If you feel that the AI is giving you back more than what you're putting in with that writing, you have to ask yourself who's vision the result really is.
They didn’t say that, they said they were getting exactly what they were seeing in their head.
Animating is a ton of work. Animation decisions can give a great deal of "feel" to a cartoon. Studio Ghibli works are distinct from Disney's old animation and each conveys a distinct feeling. Those decisions are often made by the production team. Its why One Punch Man season 3 is so derided this year after Season 1 was heralded as the greatest season of Anime in a very long time. You'd think following the literal story boards provided by the already published Manga would be simple! but somehow it lost all of its charm.
Animation, or shooting video is the result of many, many pieces. If you're not putting a ton of work into the decisions that result in the final "shot" the video camera makes then the video that is shot isn't magically going to show an enormous amount of care in its construction.
me neither. I think there's a real sense of concern, but that people are also just being contrarian or are maybe acting out of a concern for their job or something. Seems like a lot of people have had the opposite experience, that a lot of AI vids are not harmful but have in a lot of cases been funny or helpful. People need time to experiment with the tech and see what impact it has on society before they adjust their expectations to its real impact.
Imho this is as if you were a music producer and instead of synthesizing the sound you want you were exploring random presets till you found one that matched.
I think the concern of the author, that AI video ultimately "enable(s) those who want to manipulate, deceive, and exploit people for engagement, profit, or ideology", cannot be understated. However, the binary claim that the author doubles down on throughout, "All AI Videos Are Harmful", dilutes this messaging.
All? Yes, there's a lot of garbage and outright dangerous, malicious stuff out there, but there's also moving art. It may take a while to drown out the stupid and evil stuff, but there are examples that amaze me:
There’s no “justifying” anything - the tech is here. Even if you ban it globally, it would actually stop be here and would still be able to cause harm - it would just not be able to be used for good either.
The technology is currently being heavily subsidized and made widely available. If we decided to ban it globally things would look very different. Would it be worthwhile for scammers to run a massive server farm and spend thousands on training and generation? Maybe? It would certainly reduce the quantity.
The mirror climbing tech chaps are doing to justify the technology per se is the most baffling I’ve seen years of following in tech.
It exists therefore it has to be out there. Imagine if we applied that to industrial chemicals, pharmaceutical products, or literally any other industrial endeavor.
It’s particularly pathetic to watch the absolutely non-existent level of self reflection.
If you couldn't have made the story into a short film before AI video then AI video isn't going to suddenly make you a talented film maker. Eventually one day you'll be able to put your vague story idea in and get a fully finished coherent well made movie out but currently if you lacked the talent before you're still lacking the talent today.
We know this because actually existing talented film makers have done entertaining work with AI video. But it's silly to use it as justification to write it off just because you're not talented in the field.
It’s ridiculous to say everyone who has an idea for a film could have gotten it made already if they had the skill.
There are endless amounts of people with real skill in the film industry that cannot get their movie made even though they have the connections and the experience. Famous filmmakers even experience this.
Imagine the number of people who couldn’t break into the industry or simply don’t trust it? There are countless people around the world who have fully fleshed out ideas for films that producers won’t finance because literally billions of dollars are going to create ever more Marvel slop.
You’re focusing on one type of person that may or may not have the skills. That’s just one specific scenario, there are many others to weight just as much.
What about all those that do but can’t make it happen because of all the realities of life?
> cannot get their movie made even though they have the connections
I'm talking about film makers, as in directors who can either hold the camera themselves or instruct someone else where to point it from a budget they provide or source. You seem to be conflating having the talent to actually make a short film yourself with script writers getting a production green lit on someone elses dime.
Almost all successful directors have done the former at the start of their career.
> Or it's indirectly harmful by training us to accept a synthetic reality where nothing can be trusted and everything must be questioned.
I do find myself questioning the premise that accepting a 'synthetic reality where nothing can be trusted' is automatically bad. I've long felt that everyone took what they saw on the internet at face value when they should not. I do hope that injecting enough chaos into the system can force people to question their intake more consistently.
I'm not trying to detract from the OP's point but if the author turned the lens they are using to evaluate whether AI videos are harmful or not onto the videos one usually encountered on the internet pre-AI videos, I think they would find most internet videos are harmful by those same metrics. It's propaganda, rage-baiting, trying to manipulate you into buying something, etc. It's no wonder that's the sort of content we see being generated.
- find a random topic tied to their channel, e.g. some battle in Napoleonic wars
- have Perplexity do as much research on the topic
- have AI write a script for 20 minutes of it based on research
- genAI images and video content
- genAI the voiceover
- profit
I hate it.
It's not even terrible content, nor it's not informative, but it's soulless and not very entertaining.
Worst thing is that you're not told it's AI generated so you looking at pictures of the battle thinking they come from real paintings or something, so you maybe want to research more about that painting and it's all fake and not ai labeled.
TikTok has it even worse. I think I've seen the "mother protects child from avalanche on a porch" variation in any goddamn way, with wolves, bears, people, deer, snow tigers..nothing is ai labeled and it all pretends to be genuine.
Most videos about funny pets, which I loved, are also super fake. Labrador saves small child from falling tv, British shorthair chasing mastiff...all of this fake..
AI content should be required by law to be flagged and described how the AI was used. It's bullshit when a channel pops up with a known person sitting facing the camera speaking for 20 minutes and it turns out to be entirely AI generated. The person in question not involved, the textual/spoken content is not their work, etc.
I have been blocking and reporting 90% of the "new" youtube channels that get recommended to me by the algorithm. Kids youtube is also an absolute wasteland of garbage AI generated crap now.
Weirdly, I actually enjoy flipping through Sora every once in a while. Where it is upfront about being AI and a lot of it is quite entertaining.
I would not mind if youtube added an "AI" section where you can generate your own videos or watch AI generated videos, but they need to start banning people that post AI generated videos in normal youtube channels.
The author nailed the problem but missed the technical root cause: lack of controllability. Current models (Sora, Veo, Runway) are probabilistic generators. They are optimized to output a plausible image, not the specific image a director needs. Spammers and scammers don't care about specifics, they just need a "talking head" or a "burning city." An artist however needs a specific angle, specific lighting, and character consistency. Until we solve the problem of reliable latent space control (something like ControlNet, but for video and on steroids), AI video will remain a tool for generating digital noise, not cinema
> Or it's indirectly harmful by training us to accept a synthetic reality where nothing can be trusted and everything must be questioned.
Good. Its beneficial, I'd think. Lies are not new, the amount of lies, probably not new either.
I don't think we have (yet) reached a level of badness compared to the prior point of tobacco companies telling people around the world that cigarettes have medical benefits.
This headline does not match the article at all. It claims all AI videos are harmful then immeidately goes on to throw this claim out and say old confused people might be fooled by the videos. This is a very narrow subset of AI videos.
It's not just a pedantic issue. Making these kinds of extremely bold and all covering claims is par for the course for those who want to find and exploit attention from others for profit. If that's not what the author is doing I think the most charitable interpretation I can come up with is that they just have no experience with AI videos and are going off sensational press stories.
They should buy an nvidia 3060 12GB ($200~ second hand) and try out wan2.2 on their home computer. It's really fun to be able to make these kind of videos on a whim. And they'll get some real lived experience with the subject.
I will grant that most AI-generated videos I've experienced seem like novelties... although they've generated plenty of "valuable" humor. Certainly not universal harm!
Give it time for the tool to be improved and for people to make better use of it?
Reading your messages, I've come to the personal conclusion that we live in an age of misunderstanding. We're incapable of reaching any useful, consensual agreements.
This holds us back, halting progress that could be truly positive for humanity, because having a society that's moving in opposite directions keeps us stagnant.
This has been going on for far too many years.
Let AI users use it. And let's train those who are defenseless against this advancement so they can decide for themselves.
I can’t seem to figure out a good prompt for these yet. But there are people doing clever things (short clips with first frame previous last frame, instructions on the image of first frame, etc.) and I hope that over time these get to become as good as image models have.
> AI-generated videos have developed their own unique look. There's a visual quality that marks them, a subtle wrongness that your brain picks up on even when you can't articulate exactly what's off. It's the new uncanny valley, and I feel an intense revulsion whenever I encounter it.
Yesterday on the comment thread for the "Attention is Bayesian Inference" blog post (which definitely seems to have been written by AI), a couple people were asking "who cares who/what wrote it, if it has good information", and others were struggling to articulate a response. Well, for me this is the response: it has a specific tone, and every time I see it it activates my gag reflex and I back-button straight out of the page. I'm not interested in examining or deconstructing this response either, as far as I'm concerned it's evolutionarily adaptive and I intend to keep it.
That's only relevant until the AI output no longer has a tone that triggers your gag reflex. Then you'll be in the same boat as everyone else, and the "who cares who/what wrote it, if it has good information" question will apply to you as well.
What will actually happen if and when AI output is indistinguishable from human writing is that I will curate a whitelist of people I know personally whom I trust don't use it, only read from them, and everyone else can piss off. I've already stopped using several websites where the SNR has dropped too low because AI usage is rampant, I'd have no problem extending that to the entire internet.
The author is right that AI video is being used to propagandize and rot minds at scale in a way sort of unthinkable a couple years ago. Short-form video content wasn't good for us beforehand, but any balance has been fully upturned.
(I think that's all intrinsic to genAI in a way the author doesn't want to confront, but there is a crisis)
The author has a myopic view on Gen AI videos. They only focus on the most extreme examples and then hand wave cat videos as some crisis about reality. We had these exact same alarmists with previous technologies. Human's have an uncanny ability to adapt as their environment changes. Photoshop and 3D didn't destroy our brains and neither will this. Misinformation and the such have never needed AI to be effective. Those prey upon people's already existing biases and thoughts.
The time where this becomes normal and these alarmists become the fringe crazies ranting about the end of civilization cannot come fast enough.
I think long term the primary use case for AI generated video is people creating AI generated video for themselves to watch as consumers, rather than passing off AI generated work as their own.
I would not mind if I could go to ChatGPT and say: "Make me a 15 minute video about the history of gold mining in the Byzantine Empire", and it makes a mediocre soulless video I can half pay attention to while working.
If I see a 15 minute video on youtube about it and I find out after starting to watch it that it was AI generated, it sends me into a blind rage that makes me want to delete the internet, though.
Don't give me AI content unless I explicitly ask for it!
I agree that it feels like a bait and switch on YouTube. I expect to see user made videos there. Regardless of how much effort was put into it. I think a policy where these AI videos could be flagged as such would help a ton. Would not be an easy task though for sure.
Put down the phone, close that youtube, tik tok or whatever tab.
Don't try to explain to your relatives which video is AI and which is not, explain to them that everything on the internet is bullshit and trolling, AI or not it does not matter it's all bullshit to sell ads.
Tell them they are better off watching TV, even Fox news.
My main point is that trying to educate people to spot AI videos is pointless, in a matter of months, years the output will be impossible to discern from real videos.
The central problem is the platforms and the wild west around disinformation campaigns. The AI is just an accelerant and we were on fire already.
I didn't have time to read all the comments but here is Claude's summary for those interested:
```
1. "Good AI work exists when humans stay involved"
Quality AI videos exist but require human editing, scripting, acting - not letting AI do 99% of the work. Examples: NeuralViz, Igorrr's music videos.
2. "AI removes creativity, doesn't enable it"
AI handles creative decisions (color grading, cuts, tone) that were previously human craft. This strips creativity from the process rather than democratizing it.
3. "Execution is the creativity"
Ideas are worthless - execution is what matters. AI removes the execution process, which is where real creative work happens. "Using AI is like using an aimbot for music."
4. "AI enables creative expression for those locked out"
Counter-position: High-concept filmmaking was previously only for the privileged. AI lets people with vision but without technical skills/money/connections realize their ideas.
5. "Race to the bottom / slop flood"
AI's main "strength" is cranking out content at scale, flooding platforms with low-quality material faster than humans can filter. The internet is being overrun with unlabeled AI garbage.
6. "Trust erosion is the real harm"
Even "harmless" AI videos contribute to a world where nothing visual can be trusted. This affects everyone regardless of whether they consume AI content directly.
7. "Theft at scale"
Models exist only because of mass ingestion of creative work without consent. Using AI tools participates in this regardless of output quality.
8. "Platforms will adapt / people will learn"
Optimistic view: Recommendation algorithms will filter slop, people will recognize AI aesthetic as they did MS Paint edits, and good content will surface.
```
Personal take: all these points are true/valid/correct/accurate.
Controversial take: regardless, cat's outta the bag now and there's little we can do to stop it.
Some AI videos are harder and harder to distinguish from real ones. This terrifies me, since it's not that obvious AI fake that some average grandmother would fall for. In short videos, it is more difficult to distinguish AI fakes from real ones, because there is less time for some error or inconsistency to appear.
tilt at this windmill all you like, but the genie is out of the bottle and there's nothing you can do about it but kvetch. you can't ban it, you can't regulate it, no more than the US government could rein in cryptography.
None of these companies are making money, so all we need to do is wait until the VC money runs out and it turns out there’s no market for any of this slop if the people creating it have to actually pay for it.
Did cryptography or Toy story 3D animation make every human need to question the reality of any electronic audio or video they encounter, no matter how realistic?
Did cryptography make me have to train my parents not to trust my own voice if I make strange asks like money?
There is a lot more to do for each other as a society to adjust to the new normal of AI, than just complain. Awareness and realignment are critical.
cryptography enables spies, terrorists, criminals, and dissidents to communicate over any network with absolute impunity. if it was feasible, every government in the world would have banned or "regulated" it, as some had attempted to. but in the end, they had conceded defeat, and the world had not ended.
>make every human need to question the reality of any electronic audio or video they encounter, no matter how realistic?
you left out "images", which we learned to question decades ago. likewise, audio and video could also be manipulated with readily available, completely unregulated tools, to produce quite believable results.
I disagree with your final assertion. Completely or nearly-completely undetectable reproductions of reality, and specific human voices with intonation and generative vocabulary, have not been widely available before now to anyone with the will.
Not sure how much of this is AI vs other techniques, though it's definitely AI as part of the toolset. But I think the result speaks for itself, it's absolutely impressive the work that has come out. I can only say, that the work that went into this video is definitely real, and I'm happy to see more of this, as opposed to "AI Slop" that we're mostly seeing so far.
I wonder how Mark Hammill likes that they reused his likeness without permission. Seems emblematic of the larger problems with AI stealing whatever. Very ghoulish..
No idea... since Disney/Lucas already did this in Mandalorean, I'm sure he's open to the idea of it. In the specific instance, a non-commercial fan film, who knows.
The fact that Disney/Lucas and others have already done so with dead actors, I'm not sure that fan films are any worse.
it always rubs me the wrong way when people infantilize the masses. The "vulnerable" masses already already partake in lots of harmful substances and practices (tobacco, alcohol, drugs, gambling/lotto), AI videos are just another potential pitfall people will need to learn to be wary of.
I think "learning that absolutely nothing you see with your own eyes can be trusted as reality despite looking completely real" is a valid problem and that we are all somewhat vulnerable there.
His rationale ignores all the legitimate and harmless use cases for AI. I've seen people make with the help of AI comedy/meme/comedy music videos and put them up on YouTube.
Making a hyperbolic statements stating that it is all harmful, because there are deceptive usages of AI is just asinine.
(Please forgive the typos - I'm on my phone and didn't want to put this comment through AI...)
This feels like a very strongly opinionated anti-AI echo chamber; while I absolutely recognize the destructive potential of AI video, I think the author is far off to the extreme end of completely ignoring every useful use case, and also, being somewhat naive.
For example, trying to explain to people in your group chat why an AI video is fake, when they are not attentive to this message or never showed any sign they might care, and then being disappointed when nobody listens. Imagine crashing into a party and explaining to everybody why the music sucks and the food is bad; you might be right, but did you consider they just want to have a good time, and they just don't care?
Since I've been to this rabbit hole myself, as I assume have many other readers with elderly parents, let me share my own experience. I've taken the time to show the older people in my family how AI works and how easy it is to create anything fake - including using their own appearance and voice! - and in the end of the day, they don't care. When forwarding a fake video, they say they know it's fake, but they still agree with the message, or liked the cute animals, so they forwarded it.
This is old people for you.
Now, I feel that during the post, the author has progressed from stating their own opinion on AI videos, to subtly claiming everybody hates AI videos and feel a physical sickness when seeing one, to the point that YouTube is scaring off viewers. This - while at the same time detailing how some people forward these videos like crazy. So which one is it?
Well, I for one don't hate AI video as much as I hate bad, sloppy videos, but to be honest these have been around for a long time, there's a massive surge of misinformation and just aweful - and completely organic - videos out there. AI videos do open the door for very creative and awesome creations, and I've seen plenty of those, and enjoyed them quite a bit.
This is just another tool. It's all up to you how you use it and what you create. Blaming the tool is just not going to work, just like blaming an instrument for the music being bad. The blame is with the composition, not the instrument.
There will be a time, very soon, where you will not be able to tell it's AI. In fact, this time is now, and I assure you that some AI content in the right hands is just not distinguishable from the real thing anymore. You may have even seen, or - God help us - even enjoyed an AI generated video, without realizing it, and this will happen more often as these tools mature.
This is just my 2 cents. I hope you will be able to finish you AI movie one day.
I completely disagree. Meme's are a basic form of psyop, and are being using by intelligence agencies, the military, old media and new media, to warp our brains, and make us biological robots. Comedy is used much the same.
It's the other way around. Psyops are just memes. You should view everything communicated to you as a meme - a complex, semantically rich packet of information that implies the content and the intent arising from the agenda and context of the communicator.
Everything from a simple wave hello by random passersby to pseudonymous manipulative poasting by nation state actors in service to secret purpose is a meme. Understand the actors or you will never be able understand the memes.
AI is, for now, a tool. It's a powerful tool, a potent force multiplier, but there is no agency there. AI labs and governments and big tech companies have agendas and the ways in which they manipulate the output of AI tools is a meme modifier, so you should understand the ways in which different entities want to change the output of the tools you use, in order to correct for anything that deviates from your own intent and understanding.
Psyops are just a particular configuration of meme scale within a culture; if your model of the world is correct and has reliable predictive power, you can correct for things that attempt to warp reality. Understanding how and why different entities warp their communications, whether it's intentional or endemic, is crucial to a reliable model.
It wasn't always this way. Comedy has deep, deep roots as a channel for speaking truth to power. Only in recent decades does it seem we've discovered that you can flip the parity on both aspects and run it in reverse.
99% of everything is bad, so that unsurprisingly includes AI videos.
But i've seen several good videos made using AI, including pretty much everything NeuralViz[0] on YouTube makes, but also some that have been posted in older comments here in HN. Igorrr's ADHD music video[1] was also made using AI and fit the music perfectly.
The common aspect with these "good" uses though is that they do not let the AI do 99% of the job (as mentioned in another comment) but they still involve editing, writing/scripting, acting (NeuralViz for example uses his webcam to act both the motion and voice in his videos and uses AI to change them) and to some extent leaning into the "weirdness" that AI videos have instead of ignoring it.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralViz (i high recommend watching them in upload order because they all build into the same "universe" and often make references to older videos)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGIvO4eh190
I've been a big fan of https://www.youtube.com/@PosyMusic/videos for many years now. The posts there are alawys a little treat - you never quite know when the next one is going to come or what it's going to be... but it'll sure be creative (and fun!) without any of the typical YouTube channel baggage. They do the video, sound, and music creation+editing themselves - being a sound professional by day (among other things).
Anyways, the reason I bring this channel up is they had a video ~2 years back about trying out various AIs to help them in their creative process. Stuff like "using an AI audio generator to quickly make short sounds to sample in their song" for hard to find/make sounds type stuff. Exactly along the lines of "they do not let AI do 99% of the job" you were saying, instead treating it as just another tool in the toolbox. Also, intentionally, the examples like sampling were where the originality comes with what you do with the content you source rather than the content standing on its own. They also spent time creating icon sets to help explicitly label how AI was used in making the material (partly/fully) and encouraged artists that do incorporate AI into part of their workflow to label how so accordingly (2 years ago - so this was still somewhat novel to discuss).
You won't be able to find that video on the channel linked above, though the icons are still on GitHub. Not because the content made with the help of AI was bad, people like the songs the same as his other content (when not explicitly told it was made with the help of AI), but because there was so much hate on the video (and via email etc) for just mentioning that other artists could look at trying to use AI in certain parts of their workflows too that he felt the need to take it down.
That makes me sad. I also love Posy's content, I'm using his cursors right now, and this new knowledge that there is some of it I cannot see gives me real consumerist FOMO anxiety. A little digging and I couldn't find anything. I don't suppose you remember any keywords?
I managed to find an archive: https://archive.org/details/the-ai-icon
I forgot how he introed it with the over the top AI visual and saying "I'll be hated for this" and then ends with a funny continuation of that opening.
There are a bunch of these scifi world building short video channels now. IMO they all seem really creative initially but rapidly lose their luster and become repetitive.
Sora makes the hard parts easy and the easy parts hard. I don't think any of these content producers will be remembered in the future. :/
Years and years ago I became friends with someone who has started a series of companies and created at least one game with each of them (Web, mobile, mobile, crypto, web again). While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution. His ideas are great, in my opinion, though perhaps not unique. However, each success or failure, has come down to the execution. A couple of projects ran out of funding (Didn't execute fast enough). One was a flash game around the same time Apple stuck a knife in Flash, bad timing. Another was backed by a major publisher and was largely a success and the company was sold after 2 proven products shipped.
AI "democratizing" creativity is the biggest crock of lies. Everyone has ideas. Even people who aren't typically thought of as "creative". Ask anyone who watched the last season of Game of Thrones if they thought it could be better and I bet most of them will have "ideas" for how to make it better. Hell, the show runners had IDEAS. But the execution of season 8 was awful, and execution is where an "idea guy" becomes someone who created a product/story worth remembering.
LLMs remove the execution process, which is why they are so attractive to everyone who has ever had an idea and why they are abhorrent to nearly everyone who has ever executed on an idea. Lots of people thin execution is just busy work, but execution is also a major component of being creative.
Creativity is a series of small decisions over the course of the entire execution. To write a poem is not to have it fully-formed in your head. You go down and edit and see what turns up and what new interesting ideas come out of that.
I'm very sympathetic to this view, and it would be a nice counter to claims of AI creativity, but I'm not convinced this is the only way creativity can express itself. There are examples of strokes of genius, hence the term.
I suppose you could say such strokes of genius are the outcomes of a lifetime of creative work but that seems different from your example of editing a poem.
Strokes of genius could be considered the "exception that proves the rule".
We are operating deep in the grey area here so I suppose that case could be made. Personally, I see creativity as more of a life long process which can express itself in a multitude of ways including strokes of genius and the daily iterative grind. I don't think any creative act occurs in a vacuum but I also think that there are moments where big things occur.
AI, as it stands, does not have a lifespan over which for creativity to occur.
Oh, this is an excellent way to phrase it. Thank you!
The problem runs deeper: AI doesn't just remove execution, it replaces it with probabilistic averaging. Mastery of execution in film or code consists of thousands of micro-decisions, like light a bit to the left or pause a bit longer. Current diffusion models make these thousands of decisions for you based on what usually looks good. Democratization won't happen when the Make it Beautiful button works, but when we have tools to control these thousands of micro-decisions without needing to learn to draw pixels by hand. Right now we have randomization, not democratization
>While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution.
It's even trickier: execution is irrelevant too (if that means great execution, a polished well executed product). What matters is a works-well-enough for adoption product, plus luck, connections, funding (to continue existing and undercutting), marketing, and things like that.
This is all true. It is amazing to me how many people don't want to acknowledge how much luck or connections play in the success of large brand names.
More than half of my YouTube subscriptions are channels that once posted neat stuff and stopped - and most of them are from years ago. And before that i was into webcomics back when they were a popular online trend, i was following the updates of several of them and most of them have disappeared these days (and i don't even remember their names).
People stop doing things all the time, i'm not sure that means much.
what does any of that have to do with my comment?
>> they all seem really creative initially but rapidly lose their luster and become repetitive.
Did you really interpret my statement as "AI content producers are being so creative and then quitting posting"?
I'm not talking about people posting good content and then stopping posting.
I guess its fair to say that "become repetitive" was unclear, what I should have said was "reveals itself to be repetitive."
I'm saying that these AI generated world building channels produce lots of content that looks creative and exciting at first but over time reveals itself to be repetitive and lacking in creativity.
The parent's argument regains relevance if we change "stopped posting" to "stopped posting good stuff and started posting repeatitive shit" though.
Human youtube channels do that all the time.
Both are responses to a miss-interpretation of my original comment (which I will grant is at least in part my fault).
But your argument could be made against anything novel. You love the first 3 seasons of Chopped or Hell’s Kitchen but eventually you figure out the repetitive story arc, you know how each show will unfold halfway through, same kinds on conflict, etc… the show either becomes background while folding clothes or you stop watching entirely. The novelty wears off-for better or worse.
I mean look at house hunters international. Every segment is the sssme. “I need an extra room for overseas family, I want to live by the beach, I need a roof deck but I teach ESL to blind monks and children. My budget is $400”. And then they’ll have some silly hang up about the reliability of elevators in general or maybe they absolutely can’t get over the east facing window. It’s 100% formulatic yet perfect as background.
I dunno where I’m going with this but those AI videos you say you liked… the novelty wore off.
> But your argument could be made against anything novel.
What matters IMO is the lack substance not the quantity of novelty. Your chosen television show examples demonstrate that pretty well IMO.
Yeah, exactly that :-)
I would argue that the 1% of AI videos that are "good" are not worth the travesties that it fosters. Deceased celebrities featured in embarrassing / absurd situations and the scourge of fake news are enough for me to realize that this technology is extremely net negative.
I'm ashamed to admit that this made me laugh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJllhkPqixM
I would be alright with making these more expensive to make though, so they don't overrun youtube. Also i'm sure the person that made this had to do a lot of work. It wasn't just a few prompts
The one that's wild is Star Wars OF Zhebrd on YT
I was actually a big fan of this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQfbA2E7z5A
It features a bunch of internationally known figures (mainly world leaders) in drag (or gender-swapped). So obviously something not achievable without AI video generation
I think it's interesting as a gimmick, but generally really don't like AI-generated videos. My main issue with them is more to do with capitalism than AI video generation though.
Yeah I like NeuralViz too. Honestly the writing is what makes it funny in the first place. The AI imagery just adds that extra weirdness on top. Like my faves being the street interviews an the gluron that reviews the Zillow page etc
NeuralViz is one of the best examples of a very creative and skilled person using generative AI to create great content that would not be possible without it. Doopiidoo is another example.
I love Igorrr, but still have mixed feelings about the AI-assisted video. They were capable of making videos weird and unhinged in the past without its use.
> 99% of everything is bad, so that unsurprisingly includes AI videos.
You're probably not wrong, although there's probably also a spread in % between mediums of creation that is worth exploring since a couple % difference could compound.
Even ignoring the above, the issue is WRT rates of creation. I'm no good at drawing. For me to make a bad drawing might take some time. I'll need sleep. And food. I can only make so many bad drawings a day. AI can just work nonstop to make slop. The main strength, if you'd call it that, of automation (AI in this case), is the ability to quickly crank out crap. It is flooding the internet with crap at accelerating rates. The internet/humanity doesn't have enough tools today to deal with the flood of garbage. If AI could make physical crap, we'd quickly end up like that garbage episode of Futurama.
Actually we have a way to filter out that crap, that's what Google, Meta, TikTok, etc... have perfected over decades. The internet is huge and full of crap, and we get to see very little of it. Suggestions from, say, YouTube are generally high quality, few AI slop, vacation videos from random people, or penises. I don't mean good as in moral values, but I mean a production value beyond what you can do by writing a few lines in an AI prompt: decent picture and sound, a well written script, etc...
As more and more AI slop floods the internet, people will start to notice more and more and downvote it down to oblivion and really good content will surface. It may or may not be made with the help of AI, but it won't be sloppy. We are already seeing that, active communities don't have much AI slop, dead communities have plenty, kind if like these abandoned forums that are full of spam no one reads.
People are getting tired of AI slop, it is becoming as recognizable as a photoedit made in 5 minutes in MS-Paint, and it has about the same value. Good for over the top memes where being ugly is part of the charm, but not for anything serious.
I agree that the major platforms have the tools to filter it out. I disagree that those tools are doing that. The primary intent of algos is around engagement, not quality content. We might be able to say the end result is similar (users are engaging on the internet when they wouldn't otherwise if they were getting garbage), but I don't think it's the same. Users aren't being spoon fed high quality content for the brain. They're getting addictive, engagement content to keep them parked on their phones. If content was nutrition for the brain, algos are feeding people candy instead of vegetables. Maybe it's not actual garbage, but most people are not "eating well" with the current approach to content curation by algos.
I saw one recently that was cool. Basically a cinematic for Arthas’ purging of Stratholme from WarCraft. However the entire time I was just thinking “oh that’s cool, looks alright” but none of the “wow the artist that did Uther’s model nailed it” or “Oh great music choice, I wonder who the composer was.”
Uncanny valley aside it felt empty.
For entertainment, I have few concerns. It will compete or fail to compete for attention. For degrading the value of video evidence, accelerating propaganda and fraud, and for making people just feel unsure of what is likely real or fake, that is what I am concerned with.
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Best recommendation I've been given in years. NeuralViz is amazing, thank you
Praise the monolith
>But i've seen several good videos made using AI, including pretty much everything NeuralViz[0] on YouTube makes
We can safely dismiss your whole argument then :)
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AI generated videos are being used in more and more ads. To cut costs I’m sure. The result is that ads that were just annoying are now terrible and jarring.
When I hear talk about AI risks I mostly hear things like runaway super intelligence doing whatever it wants and leaving humanity in the lurch. But what about more realistic concerns, like accelerating the race to the bottom by cheaply and poorly ripping off other people’s work and forcing everyone else to do the same just to keep up?
A local window blinds company ran an ad before a movie. Clearly AI. Besides the obvious fake humans, how can I trust that the AI blinds in your ad match your real product?
It's convenient! I know that they are cutting corners on the product, because they are cutting corners with their ads.
Yeah I am not an absolute GenAI hater. I’ve used it quite a bit myself, and I think there are ways to be creative about it. However 95% of what we see online, especially in the Ads space, is bottom of the barrel quality. It is obvious basic AI generated images/video most of the time and for me is an instant “I’m not going to bother with that product” marker.
One of the worst one was an allegedly “illustrated history” book. All Ads were of AI generated history book pages with tons of historical inconsistencies. Looked up the real book and it actually looked decent: hand drawn, well formatted etc. Why not use pictures of the actual book instead of whatever mess I was seeing.
However I also keep getting Ads for this other historical book that drives me nuts: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vilno/the-codex-book
I might be wrong but to me most of the art is looks AI generated, and the few pages they show just don’t make any historical sense. Yet they sell it as “hand drawn”. From the animations seems like some stuff was AI generated and then redrawn by hand? But the drawing themselves are plain weird: the nonsensical castle. The archers and scoped crossbow in a page about medieval crossbows, the silly submarine
Last night, I deliberately paid attention to an ad because it had the disclaimer "images generated with AI". I was curious to see what the advertisers did with the technology. The ad featured a bunch of animals of different species driving cars around a city. It clearly had that AI uncanny valley that high budget 3D modeled CGI animals doesn't have. I thought about what it would have cost for a effects team to 3D model and render all those animals, and also wondered how many rendering attempts with the AI did it take to get good footage for the ad.
The ad felt sickening to look at, like a TV with smooth motion turned on. It's like my brain is rejecting the pictures that it sees because it doesn't match the patterns of motion that it has been trained to recognize. Or was it just regular motion sickness.
I don't know if we're in the minority or not, insofar as we are able to look at these things and discern that they are fake. One problem going forward is that the proportion of us who are able to do so will grow smaller as individuals become habituated to the AI output, especially children.
Right there, it's a distraction from the actual problem. They promote safety research as if they are fighting Skynet and it works.
This is a weird complaint because ads have always been a curse on the world; they've always been "slop". The worst part about AI ads is that they're ads.
War predates human history, and the worst thing about chemical warfare is that it’s warfare; therefore there is no need to ban chemical weapons.
i don't get this "race to the bottom", "to cut costs".. like isn't that a good thing? your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces.
I don't think AI reduces cost of marketing in any significant way. Everybody has access to these tools so at best it just allows marketing companies to employ fewer ad-creation teams to pump out the same amount of advertisements.
Pushed to the extreme, where a single person could create an oscar-worthy advertisement in seconds, it doesn't suddenly mean that the superbowl will charge pennies for an ad slot.
I suspect the end state will be just-in-time rich ad creation (not bidding) tailored specifically to you.
> Pushed to the extreme, where a single person could create an oscar-worthy advertisement in seconds, it doesn't suddenly mean that the superbowl will charge pennies for an ad slot.
For a superbowl ad, there's the high cost to air the spot, but most of them also have a high cost to produce the spot (maybe not for the the one from last year that was just a dvd logo esque bouncing qr code for a crypto scam); if your marketing budget was ~ $5M, maybe you spent $1M on production and $4M on airtime. If AI gives you a good enough result for approximately no money, maybe you spend all that budget on airtime, maybe you cut the budget and still spend $4.5M on airtime. Of course, if everybody is spending more on airtime, you might not get more airtime, but you could still reduce/eliminate the production part of the budget.
>your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces.
One could imagine that once every company in a market uses AI videos to reduce said costs they will then have to spend even more to stand out from the other marketers, leaving us all back where we started, but with a lot of crappy AI videos to wade through.
They also get crappier though. I am generally okay with a lot of the tradeoffs to reduce the cost of construction and mass production. We definitely have more crappy stuff than we need—I'd prefer if we had a little less, higher quality stuff, but the balance is not too far out of whack.
With media though, I feel it's a lot worse. It's already been trending that way for text with blogspam already diluting the value of the web even before AI. But with AI this is accelerating to video and audio as well. Not only does the AI slop drown out the best of human creativity, it also raises the floor on superficial production value so that if you don't use AI you fall behind on the initial attention-grabbing first impression. I acknowledge a big part of this is due to where we are in the hype cycle, and once we absorb the capabilities of the tools, we'll figure out how to use them more tastefully, and human creativity will shine through again. But no I don't think always making everything easier and more efficient is necessarily always a good thing a priori. Friction and effort sometimes leads to positive outcomes.
Yeah I don't care how cheap/expensive Coca-Cola is.
I care how expensive ram and gpus are though and this ain't helping.
because the race to the bottom does not and will not benefit us, they will cut costs but whatever it is will still cost you the same or more.
Wake me up when my things get cheaper from cutting costs in the process.
We once built pyramids, massive castles, temples and churches which took hundreds of years to build. We don't build those things any more. Same happened to music and art. There's this eternal sloppification of everything, although at the same time things get on average better and cheaper for more people to enjoy. Quantity beats quality, i.e. capitalism optimizes for scalability.
The end game is quite sad, which will be some kind of neural device which just directly manipulates brain signals for happiness, and everything physical will be just gray goo. It's more scalable to make you think the world is beautiful, than to actually make it beautiful. We are almost there already, because we experience the world through a screen, which shows us happy things, while we care less and less about the real world around us.
Maybe in the past. In todays world, when something becomes cheaper, the extra revenue goes straight to the executives. The consumer doesn't see it
> your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces.
Prices won't go down. Profits go up. The winners are the shareholders.
One of the arguments I keep seeing from people churning out AI video is that the tech is enabling people "creative freedom" that's been made possible now even without the technical know how.
However, 99% of the the "creativity" from what I've seen is done by the AI (how it should look, where the cuts need to happen, the tone, color grading, etc). Which is to say, it's taken from other people's (creative) work.
While a big part of being able to create a good video has much to do with storytelling, the craft of shooting and editing a video is a big part of the creative process as well.
AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together.
I was involved in a conversation about cheating in video games the other day, and the topic shifted to AI use in music. Someone said, "using AI is like using an aimbot for music." I absolutely love that comparison since it highlights the shortcut past creativity/skill to get a computerized best result while also associating it with blatant cheating.
The "enables creativity" argument is ironic since the root of the word is "create" and AI users are literally removing the "create" step from their production process.
I made my wife a song about how we met using Suno. It took me about 4 hours to get the lyrics just right, rewriting them (without AI help, it’s terrible with lyrics), plugging them in, seeing how they sounded, fixing them some more to get the verse so it sounded right.
She thought it was really special and she cried as we listened to it while holding hands in the car. I can’t play guitar, and I can’t hit some notes with my low singing voice, but I wrote every word and it felt like something really special to the both of us. I don’t really care if people think I “cheated”. To torture the analogy, it’s like cheating in a two player game since I’m not publishing this song to anyone else.
> 4 hours
That made me imagine -- in the future when AI is much more advanced, maybe I could just prompt it with say "something sentimental to make my wife cry." I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here? Is this some sort of human emotion exploit, or a legitimate bonding experience?
It’s rarely the thought that counts. It’s the committed effort. Presents aren’t just nice because they needed those socks. More importantly, they’re a signifier that you consider the person to be worth thinking about. You value them enough to spend time and effort thinking about them. Then you followed through. This is why we don’t just give people money as a present.
The effort that you put in is often what people like most about a gift. Don’t try too hard to hack around that.
I'm going to draw this example out to make it more realistic.
"Say something sentimental to make my wife cry" you prompt. The computer comes back:
Ok, tell me a few things about your wife. How did you meet? What are her favorite things? Tell me about some great moments in your relationship. Tell me about some difficult moments in your relationship.
Ok, tell me a few things about you. What do you love about your wife? What have you struggled with?
Ten minutes of this kind of conversation and I'll bet the LLM can generate a pretty good hallmark card. It might not make your wife cry but she'll recognize it as something personal and special.
Four hours of this kind of conversation and you might very well get some output that would make your wife cry. It might even make you cry.
The work is adding context. And getting people to add meaningful, soul-touching context is not easy - just ask any therapist.
Biggest blockers:
1. Wives aren't a monolith. The prompt is underspecified, or else individual taste and preciousness is dead.
2. No matter how good the tech today is (or isn't) getting, the responses are very low temperature. The reason it takes a human 4 hours to write the poem is because that is time spent exploring profoundly new structures and effects. Compare this to AI which is purpose-built to hone in on local optima of medians and clichés wherever possible.
> I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here?
Sociologically, devoid of AI discussion, I imagine the limit is the extent to which the ideas expressed in the poem aren't outright fabrications (e.g. complimenting their eyes when really you couldn't care less). As well, it does not sit right with humans if you attempt to induce profound feelings in them by your own less-than-profound feelings; it's not "just the thought," it's also the effort that socially signals the profundity of the thought.
> Wives aren't a monolith
Usually they are. Most people are surprisingly similar and predictable, which is why basic manipulation tactics are so successful. Sure, you have 10% of people who truly are special, but the other 90% has a collective orgasm while listening to whatever is the hottest pop star.
> The reason it takes a human 4 hours to write the poem is because that is time spent exploring profoundly new structures and effects.
Most likely dude spent 4 hours doing exactly the same things that everyone else does when making their first song. It's not like within these 4 hours he discovered a truly new technique of writing lyrics. Each instance of human life that wants to write songs needs to go through exactly the same learning steps, while AI does it just once and then can endlessly apply the results.
> it's not "just the thought," it's also the effort that socially signals the profundity of the thought.
In close relationships yes. When dealing with those you less care about, it's the result that matters.
That would indeed make it meaningless.
I think expended effort is what counts here for these types of interactions, and how much of that effort is tailored to the specific person.
I mean, we're almost always standing on the shoulders of other people, and we're almost always using tools. But if the output is fully mechanical and automatic without being tailored for the specific person, it's hard to see it as personal in any way.
It's more like going into a video game and tuning the difficulty all the way down so you are virtually invincible. It's taking the fun out of the game for some, but for others that's the only way to play it.
And you know what? I’ve got a medically complicated kid with a million doctor’s appointments and a full time job. I often switch the games down to the easiest mode. Then sometimes a new Dark Souls comes out and I relish every moment, if I’ve got the time.
I’ve been having Suno make random instrumental chiptunes, too, and it’s got me interested in buying a MIDI keyboard to play around with. Which 40 years ago people were saying that wasn’t real music, either.
>a MIDI keyboard to play around with. Which 40 years ago people were saying that wasn’t real music, either.
Citation needed
Cozy games where you basically can't lose are a booming industry in the last decade, so that outlook is certainly bullish for AI creative tools!
It was special and you didn't cheat: you wrote the lyrics and they meant something to you and your wife, which is what matters. If you asked someone else to set the music for you, it would still be music about something meaningful to you both. The AI part of this is pretty meaningless, but you made it meaningful by putting something real into it and sharing that with another person.
I do like the idea that another person commented of exporting the stems and actually singing the vocal portion of the song. It’d be fun to sing again (I sang some in high school), but I feel I never would have been able to come up with the tune in the first place if I’d started from zero.
Maybe we can distinguish craftmanship from creativity. This case can then be cast as one of deploying creativity without embodying the traditional craftmanship (ability to play guitar, sing low notes). I don't see that as illegitimate, so long as no false credit is taken about the said guitar playing, low note singing.
Can an artist be good if they can't draw a good circle by hand? Yes. Except they can't take credit for the goodness of circles that appear in their work, if not drawn by them.
[Edit: "responsibility" -> "credit"]
I think it’s also potentially a sense of taste, like being a music producer vs a music creator.
When AI art was nascent and stable diffusion came out, I put probably 1000 hours into really getting good at using it. I like to compare it to picking up pretty seashells on the sand. When working with those old models where many results were terrible, the prompt was akin to driving to a beach you know has seashells, then generating 100-200 pictures on an A100 was like combing through the beach to see if you find any good ones. Finally you could clean up the couple few that were real gems and get something that looked nice. It may not be artistry, but that doesn’t mean it has zero value at all.
Although let’s be real, most people aren’t going to make a living being a beach comber looking for pretty things that washed up on the shore, when even a kid can do it.
I've been doing this. I've been a poet/songwriter for a while, but I'm no musician. This lowers the bar and provides a great deal of relief from the "creative boilerplate" necessary when booting up a song from zero using a DAW, especially for me, a non-musician.
So, I get a good song by throwing spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. Then I can export the stems to the DAW and replace the AI vocals with my own. A little audio processing and mixing later and the whole song is mine.
That’s a good idea actually! The AI did a fantastic job of making a tune that sounded good and matched the style I was going for, then a lot of the iteration was changing the verses because I discovered there’s a lot of lyrics that sound extremely “cringe” when you listen back. Like nails on a chalkboard, a “you know it when you hear it” situation.
My wife wrote a song for a story she’s been working on, and honestly her sense of verse and timing gave an output with me writing a simple style prompt that sounded absolutely fantastic. But she’d spent hours writing and refining that song as it’s important to the story.
Replacing the AI vocals with my own would likely work, although there’s a certain note in the chorus that’s beyond my vocal range. I bet if I practiced it and recorded myself singing the chorus 50 times I could get one result that sounded right, though. Thanks for sharing.
As a semi-professional musician, sounds fair to me.
You wrote the lyrics. There are professional songwriters with many hit songs who only write lyrics. Some can't even play an instrument, much less compose music. So what do they do? They work with a music composer. They hire a music arranger. They hire a band.
So in this case, you still did the foundational songwriting part yourself, but instead of hiring humans to help you finish it, you hired AI.
Grand Theft Auto V launched with auto-aim ('aimbot') as default in 2013. It is one of the most successful games in history, bringing joy to many people.
Are you arguing that's not a real game because of this?
Yours is a bad faith argument based on an overly narrow pedantic acontextual definitional gripe. Not worth engaging.
You say this, and yet you did. Not by actually explaining why you think my argument is bad mind you, but instead by just throwing big words around.
Bravo.
[dead]
I disagree. The point of playing a shooter game is to have fun and be competitive while abiding by the rules of the game. Using aimbot is circumventing the whole purpose.
The purpose of making music is to make music. So why does it matter what tool you use to do it? Because tools like Logic or Garageband can create lots of sounds for you is that removing creativity? Really shouldn’t music be recorded with a live band every time? Those music production tools are destroying creativity… No. Obviously not. AI does enable creativity. Turns out it also requires a lot of skill to use it to get something good.
People just enjoy and value the process of making music. Just like you could enjoy the process of drawing, or doing sports. Given the amount of talented musicians that do not live off their art, most of the time they value the process and the result and if other people like it too and pay for it it’s even better. Most music is not produced to give emotions to other but to the musician. It happens we share the same emotions that the musician sometimes. So if you remove the process or devalue it, it’s touching the artist in its heart and values because most of them worked on their craft for years.
One person using more software to "make" music does not remove the process or devalue music for another person who wants to use less software to make music. Replace music with anything in this reasoning.
Actually with AI the music is made for you. I don’t have to learn how to play the piano the guitar or anything. I just prompt what kind of instrument I want to. Is that still « making music » ? Idk, for me it’s not the same. In the end I’m not a musician. I just enjoy music. But I can understand that the reality of some people is different from mine as regards to what is « making music ». My view or use of AI does not invalidates theirs.
> My view or use of AI does not invalidates theirs.
This reads like you agree with my sentiment.
Absolutely and I hope you understand my point as well. Actually I’ve never been able to learn an instrument and I always wanted to make music. I’m all in to make music without having to learn anything complicated. Other people might not have the same definition of mine or like what I could produce without their craft.
Exactly right. It's like arguing there is only one way to make food for enjoyment. It's pure snobbery to proclaim there's only one proper way to do X thing along these lines. Making art is just the same, there is no right way to do it.
The HN crowd wants everybody sitting at home on UBI suffering trying to be creative. It's like arguing for hand washing clothes to get that full, proper, drawn-out, brain smashing experience.
Now sit at home and be a good boy, take that UBI, create and be productive - but don't make it too easy, don't you dare use AI, bleed for that UBI.
>Now sit at home and be a good boy, take that UBI, create and be productive
Honestly i prefer that listening marketing bro's on linkedin posting about how AI means X is finished and everyone who learned X needs to pay for their webinar on writing prompts.
> Turns out it also requires a lot of skill to use it to get something good.
I agree. I don't like blaming/crediting a tool, for how it is used.
Some tools may be too dangerous for "just anyone" to use, and there may be justification in restricting access, but I'm not sure the tools should always be banned.
I was just talking about this, with a friend who leans conservative (but not nuttily so). He was telling me about watching all these shows about folks living north of the Arctic Circle, and how everyone walks around with guns, because polar bears look at us as walking snacks. In those cases, the gun is an absolutely necessary tool, and no one even thinks twice about it.
Not so, New York City.
But it would be a life-endangering mistake for someone in NYC to dictate to an Alaskan Inuit, that they can't carry a gun, and it might be a life-endangering mistake for an Alaskan to insist that everyone in NYC walk around with a gun (I won't get into the political arguments, there, be draggones).
I agree. My problem with AI produced media is that a lot of the things I've seen are really bad. If someone uses AI, but has taste and takes the time to curate and fix the output, then the output can be fine.
Just like with digital effects in movies, plastic surgery, and makeup - if it's done well, there's a good chance I didn't even notice it. If it's clearly noticeable, it's often because it's not done well.
I think you can compare to another "uncreative" way of making music: sampling. The way the Timelords do it in "Doctorin' the Tardis" is pretty terrible (in their case on purpose, I believe). There are plenty of hip hop examples where I think musically not much is added to the music, but the lyrics and maybe the act do add a lot. And then there are bands like Daft Punk that will chop up and recontextualize the samples to the point that it's clearly a completely new thing.
There were plenty of hiphop examples where the samples are recontextualized as well, then Puff Daddy came along and attempted to rap over virtually unchanged Led Zeppelin songs and everyone ate it up. AI Is doing the same thing to music that he did decades ago. ruin it.
I didn't mean to say all hiphop is like what I mention. I'm 100% sure that hiphop also does sampling in really interesting ways, I'm just not as familiar with the examples. This was not not meant as a diss, and I wasn't saying all hiphop does things the same way. I was just mentioning examples that I'm personally familiar with of "Sampling Slop", "Different kind of creativity", and "Using Sampling as a completely new instrument".
For the middle category, I meant things like Gangsta's Paradise. I really like the song, I think Coolio really adds something. But you can hear much more of "Pasttime Paradise" in there than you can hear "More Spell On You" in Daft Punk's "One More time"
I mention Daft Punk because it's really accessible: there are videos on youtube that can show a layperson like me exactly how they chopped up the samples.
The purpose of eating is to ingest nutrients, but that's not why most chefs enjoy cooking, or why people pay more for nicer meals.
Come to think of it, AI Stans do remind me of people bending over backwards to justify how their Soylent farts made them more skilled at living life.
During Christmas shopping, I saw several books and board games with illustrations in the signature ChatGPT cartoon style [1, 2] as cover art. (As well as a coloring book that was literally only ChatGPT images) They were sold both in comic shops and large book stores.
I found it just sad, honestly. Nothing against using some AI help to create good cover art, but not even bothering to change the default style screams "low effort".
That's the effect I'm fearing. Sure, AI could probably be used to create new high-quality content by people who really put in the effort, but in reality, it just seems to define a new level of "good enough" that lowers the overall level of quality.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1o0sfzz/chatgpt...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kmao1t/i_asked_ch...
AI isn't being used the same way as a drum loop or an electronic instrument, It's being used to vertically integrate services like Spotify so that they don't have to pay as much for content. Maybe you have found a place for generative AI in your workflow that fosters creativity, but this is not how it's being used the vast majority of the time.
It's not real music if you aren't hand crafting the atoms that make up the molecules of the medium you are vibrating to create sound waves.
I feel like there should be an XKCD for this
The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made. There is no cheating when there is feeling.
Generic AI music so far does not touch me. I might tolerate it in the background, but I know there is great music being made with the help of AI. (Which is different from letting the AI do it all)
An aimbot in competive playing is indeed cheating and sucks the fun out for others. But if you have fun with single player aimbots, why not. (I know some games integrated autoaim and they can still be fun)
I'm not sure I want AI to touch me emotionally.
It feels insincere and manipulative, especially when I don't know upfront if the content (music, video, text) is from another human being or from AI.
AI will become good enough to write songs better than humans; it's a matter of time. But it feels like someone tries to hack my mind, exploit my human instincts, it doesn't feel like genuine art the way it was for the whole human history - people expressing themselves, creating and sharing something beautiful with each other.
The end result is an automated personalized "enjoy" button, and this is sad.
> AI will become good enough to write songs better than humans; it's a matter of time.
I'm unconvinced. The process of songwriting is so dependent on being able to listen to what you've made and decide whether you enjoy it or not. We can train a model to imitate popular music, but we can't train a model to enjoy music, because we can't quantify enjoyment and turn it into a data set. You can train an LLM on soup recipes, but you can't train one to taste the soup and tell you whether it's good or not.
That's part of what offends me so much about the notion of AI-assisted "creativity." Creating music should be a way of engaging more deeply with music, but you've discovered a way to pay even less attention to music than before. None of the details in an AI-generated song really matter; they were chosen arbitrarily, because they seemed normal. Indeed, they are so normal that your ear will slide right off of them.
You can't fix a soup that someone else prepared—not as an amateur. You don't know what went into it, so you can't pick out the individual flavours and decide whether they're right or not. They were never "right" for you, because you didn't pick them. It's like ordering a Big Mac, taking it apart, and trying to workshop it into Duck à l'Orange. All you get is a Big Mac with some orange slices on it. Maybe you like Big Macs; maybe you're happy. It's a pretty poor substitute for creativity, though.
> But it feels like someone tries to hack my mind, exploit my human instincts, it doesn't feel like genuine art the way it was for the whole human history - people expressing themselves, creating and sharing something beautiful with each other.
There's a thin line between art and business - quite often the goal isn't to have you feel something, it's to sell you product that you pay for, and if by the way you feel something, that's cool.
People care about authenticity, though. There are people who get bothered by things like fake DJs, ghostwritten songs, lip synced live performances, and manufactured artists (such as many kpop groups).
And as for single-player aimbots, I agree that it doesn't do anyone any harm, but what's the point? It's like running the course of a marathon on a segway. If you're just doing it by yourself, then I suppose it doesn't hurt anyone, but you can't really say that you ran a marathon, can you?
"but what's the point? "
The point of playing video games?
Having fun. You don't achieve anything for real anyway, unless you are playing professional e-sports. And some games can still be fun, with aimbot. There is more to games than precision mouse work. I remember a arcade space shooter, where flying the aircraft was speedy action with dogfights, and you had only to do rough aiming, the rest did the "targeting computer". But I also have seen FPS shooters with that option and people enjoying the action and boom boom boom feeling powerful.
"There are people who get bothered by things like .. lip synced live performances, and manufactured artists"
And that would actually be me as well. But I try to keep an open mind even with the shallowest mainstream popsongs. Not liking it because of the source, but to see if I feel the music. Usually I turn it off a very quickly though, but I still don't talk down to my niece for example who likes it.
"The purpose of games is (usually) to win. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how you won. There is no cheating when there is winning."
> The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made.
The touching you emotionally part is due to the quality of the underlying creative work. I'm sure the GP's wife was touched- they put in the work to make something- but the fact is that work they did was enabled by the theft-at-scale of work others have done.
You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale. These models did not come from the ether- they are weighted mathematical averages based on ingesting shit tons of existing creative work, made by people, the vast majority of which was ingested against those creatives' explicit wishes.
Unfortunately most people don't give a shit where things come from as long as they get whatever they want in the end, which is why our economy is almost exclusively run by sociopaths.
"You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale"
I know enough of music creation to know, all music we enjoy is created by "theft". Meaning taking a riff from here, a melody from there. And tweaking it. AI just automated it. Not sure, it sucks with the whole buisness modell around it. That only some profit and not the truly creative composers. But that .. is hardly a new thing. There are many, many awesome musicians out there. Always have been. But only some become "superstars". Where a whole industry pushes them so they stay on top no matter what. That's not fair, but AI did not change this.
This argument always hinges on pretending that "humans being influenced by other humans" is the same thing as "a model ingesting millions of works without permission," and it just isn’t. Not even remotely.
Human influence is selective. It’s contextual, filtered through taste, memory, culture, and intent. A metal songwriter doesn't subconsciously absorb the entire global corpus of music; they draw from the artists who shaped them, or deliberately subvert something specific. That’s literally the creative process: choosing what to reference, twist, or subvert, reject, counter.
A model doesn't do that. It doesn't choose influences, it doesn’t have tastes, and it doesn't have intent. It just digests everything it's fed into a massive statistical set of averaged patterns that it has found, and then regurgitates them on command so as to "minimize error." Calling that the same thing as human inspiration is like saying a wood chipper is just an automated sculptor because both involve wood going in and differently shaped wood coming out.
The music industry fucks musicians raw, to be sure, but this is not guaranteeing anything for musicians in the slightest, quite the opposite: it just makes it so users of the models can also fuck musicians. How is that good at all? The exploitation of artists at scale being the status quo is not a reason to excuse even more exploitation, that's certifiably insane.
"A metal songwriter doesn't subconsciously absorb the entire global corpus of music; they draw from the artists who shaped them"
They also draw from the people around them. The music they hear when they are in public spaces. Etc.
Out of curiosity, have you ever done composing?
Anyway, one can create very shallow songs by hand. One can also give empty vague prompts.
Or one can make a complex music arrangement, manual editing of tracks, have some AI generated mixed in, very detailed prompts etc. If that ain't creative to you, that is your opinion. I think different.
If it were just an average, we'd only get gray sludge. Models learn the manifold distribution - they don't just mix existing works; they discover the hidden rules by which those works were created. This is reverse-engineering of human culture, and that's exactly why control over the latent space is so critical - otherwise, we surrender culture to an algorithm that has "learned the rules" but has no concept of meaning
AI music models are a tool. They're only as good as the person doing the steering and curation.
I am a filmmaker. I have made photons-on-glass films for decades.
I have always wanted to make big-budget sci-fi and fantasy films, as have my friends and colleges who went to film school. The barrier to entry is almost impossible to climb. Most of my friends wound up in IATSE or doing commercial work, but never had the chance to follow through on their passion projects.
Ten thousand kids go to film school every year. Very few of them will wind up being able to make what they dream to create. It's a fucking tragedy that all of this ambition withers on the vine.
Getting a large film budget requires connections. You see a lot of nepotism. Sometimes a director who was in the right place at the right time with the right ideas will make it, but that's such a survivor's bias problem. There are orders of magnitude more people that didn't make it. Talented people full of dreams. And that's a tragedy - imagine how many Martin Scorseses, Hayao Miyazakis, Yorgos Lanthimoses, Denis Villeneuves, and Chloe Zhaos we're losing.
AI is the first tool that will level the playing field for truly driven individuals. I mean this with my full heart - this is a great tool for creative and driven people. It's the arrival of the printing press for us.
But the news of this gift has been twisted and soured by the media and by popular influencers who push only a fear agenda.
By trying to make AI films, I have been doxed, sent death threats, insulted, called thousands of names. Every day! People pour out hatred, racist comments, sexist comments - they literally want me (all of us) to DIE because they've been taught to hate this.
I can't even begin to tell you how exhausting this is. Instead, let me focus on the good.
Here's a list of (what I think) are really good AI films. Each of them takes 10+ hours of work:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4 - Made by a film school grad as a demo of real filmmaking combined with AI VFX.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQWRBCt_5E - Created by a Hollywood TV writer for an FX show you've probably seen. Not the best animation or voicing, but you can see how it gives a writer more than just a blank page to convey their thoughts.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZYP5jn5w4 - Music video. Slightly MAGA-coded, but made by a Hollywood VFX person.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U - Made by a film school grad as a Robot Chicken homage. If you're going to tell them "don't use AI", then are you going to get them a job at Disney? Also, all the pieces are hand-rotoscoped, the mouth animations are hand-animated, and every voice is from a hired (and paid) voice actor.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY - Made by a film school grad as a Robot Chicken homage. See previous comment.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_KXYpaTe_8 - Another slightly MAGA-coded music video. Made by the same Hollywood VFX person.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hlx5Rslrzk - Amazing Spider-Man vs. Carnage anime created with ComfyUI and other models.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U - Christmas Grinch anime. It's really funny if you like Jojo and get the references.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKYeDIiqiHs - Totally 100% cursed. Made by a teenager following the comic book's plot. Instead of this teenager spending 100 hours on Fortnite, they made this.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps5Dhc3Lh8U - A Pixar-like short film
These tools do not remove the need for editing, compositing, rotoscoping. You still have to understand film language, character arcs, story, pacing. The human ingredients still have to be there.
By using these models and tools, directors and editors can finally pursue projects that would require many people and potentially very large budgets. Like the Red vs. Blue creators sitting down and making machinima, they can create vivid sci-fi worlds or whatever genre or mood they want to evoke.
AI is a tool. In the hands of an artist, you can make art with AI.
Yes, people are using AI to make slop. Cameras also make slop - selfies, food pics. Your own camera roll is full of garbage.
People are posting slop AI because it's novel. If we'd gone from "no cameras at all" to "smartphones" overnight, you would see so much smartphone camera slop it would be unbearable. We, as a society, had time to develop filters and curation around cameras. That'll eventually happen for AI too.
Cameras can make incredible art in the hands of an artist. They can also make a lot of shit. But we don't demonize the cameras. Soon, our feelings towards AI will become equivalent.
But right now, it's extremely painful to be a creative person using AI.
I -
ABSOLUTELY HATE
ABSOLUTELY DETEST
IT IS MIMETIC VITRIOLPeople have let this stupid meme boil over to the point of sending death threats and doxxing creators. And that is beyond unacceptable.
We need to stop adopting angry slogans of hate and start thinking on a case by case basis with nuance.
This entire conversation needs way more humanity and humility.
And we need to accept that there are good things being created with AI too.
I agree with you on pretty much all that you’ve said here. Thank you especially for the recommended viewing!
I wonder what happens, though, as the economics shift? It’ll be great, creatively speaking, for people who have a project inside them itching to get out into the world. Those were always the people who made the most interesting art anyway.
But viewership economics aren’t expanding in the same way. Same number of viewers, less patience for feature-length work, less willingness to pay.
If the status quo only generated enough money for an already-small universe of Hollywood professionals to feed their families through their creative work, what happens when even that withers?
Film school, it seems to me, is partly about the access to equipment and talent, but mostly about the time and community expectation to dedicate every waking hour to your creative project.
Art and commerce have always been awkward bedmates, but it makes me a little sad that the price for anyone being able to create is that ~none of them will be able to make money from their creative labor.
Hollywood budgets aren't growing, but they're not shrinking either.
Most recent cost cutting has been Hollywood offshoring IATSE jobs to Europe and Asia. 80% of Atlanta's once burgeoning film production has moved away. We have tremendous, multi-billion dollar studio facilities here too.
I do expect AI to eventually be used for saving on VFX costs, pre-production, and even B roll, but I don't think it'll replace principal photography right away. It might be used in more animation projects.
I don't think those budgets will disappear. Rather, I think they will be spent on other projects to increase the slate of offerings.
Meanwhile, completely orthogonal to all of this, the creator economy has been growing tremendously year over year. We have lots of independent creators that are now household names and brands.
Some indie YouTubers that have grown big include:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zach_Hadel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivienne_Medrano
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Haver
All of them were offered network deals.
I suspect we'll see a rise of indie filmmakers and that the field will begin to look more like writing, indie music, or indie games. Anyone can bring their talent and not much capital and make interesting and compelling work.
The problem, as always, will be discovery. A lot of good work will still go unseen. But this is better than the work not being practical or possible.
As long as people capture minds and attention, there will be incredible value in creating and captivating. Artists will get paid. It's just a matter of artists breaking through and finding an audience.
As a longtime musician, I fervently believe in doing the best you can with the tools you have.
As a programmer with a philosophical bent, I have thought a lot about the implications and ethics of toolmaking.
I concluded long before genAI was available that it is absolutely possible to build tools that dehumanize the users and damage the world around them.
It seems to me that LLMs do that to an unprecedented degree.
Is it possible to use them to help you make worthwhile, human-focused output?
Sure, I'd accept that's possible.
Are the tools inherently inclined in the opposite direction?
It sure looks that way to me.
Should every tool be embraced and accepted?
I don't think so. In the limit, I'm relieved governments keep a monopoly on nuclear weapons.
The people saying "All AI is bad" may not be nuanced or careful in what they say, but in my experience, they've understood rightly that you can't get any of genAI's upsides without the overwhelming flood of horrific downsides, and they think that's a very bad tradeoff.
I agree with them.
The Corridor Crew [1] are luminaries in our field, and they are incredibly bullish on this tech.
They've made dozens of essays and done tons of experiments showing that they think AI is going to be great for our field:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSRrSO7QhXY (scrub through the timelines to the end of these videos to see)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq5JaG53dho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUFlOynaUyk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT3WUa-48Y
Listen to them.
Our entire industry pays attention to them, and they're right!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corridor_Digital
The Corridor Crew [1] are luminaries in our field, and they are incredibly bullish on this tech.
They are literally "react" youtubers who have never worked a single day as professional vfx artists.
This is like saying Jake Paul is the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.
I created a jazz fusion supergroup in Suno capable of impossibly tight jamming. I believe the synth player has 8 arms. I'm not even selling it as an output of my own creativity - even though I partially feel like it was - but rather, it was just fun to make! I had a ton of fun with it, even downloaded stems and mixed a lot in a DAW. I still LOL at how fresh some of it is. Suno rocks. Top 40 is garbage anyways, and the best music out right now are live bands, imo, so I don't feel that I'm encroaching on anyone else's artistic opportunity (hopefully) by doing these Suno projects.
That said, I haven't shown it to anyone... I'm not trying to make anyone mad. But what's the point of working on any music, AI or not, if nobody wants to hear it? This was a bit of a depressing realization for someone who was always fearful of letting anyone listen to my own actual music. It doesn't matter how much I piloted the prompt, or mixed down the stems, and how good the final result is, because at the end of the day, its just AI... I really don't know how to feel about the whole thing - there are legitimate arguments against AI for creative use, it's hard to not feel like a hypocrite or something for even using it..
> Someone said, "using AI is like using an aimbot for music."
Ok. Lets go with that analogy. Whats the problem with someone playing a single player game with an aimbot on? Sure they wont get good at the aiming part. But it feels kinda up to them on if that matters or not.
Additionally, I wouldn't see anything morally wrong with that. Now, if someone entered into a music competition, where only human made music was allow then I agree that this would be "cheating". But what if its not that and the listeners simply are OK with the "aimbotted" music?
> Whats the problem with someone playing a single player game with an aimbot on?
People are doing it on the server where all the musicians live, and they have no other place to go, only disconnect.
> where all the musicians live, and they have no other place to go, only disconnect.
No actually. Those musicians are free to continue making whatever music that they want and can refuse to listen to the AI music if they dont want to.
The fact that 2 other, unrelated 3rd parties both like to make AI music and listen to AI music is not the musicians area of control here. They do not get to decide what other people like to listen to or make.
You're confused at multiple levels.
> free to continue making whatever music that they want
Never said they weren't.
> can refuse to listen to the AI music if they don't want to
A musician can be a listener, indeed. If you believe a listener has this freedom and will keep it, you're most probably mistaken. No one besides musicians and discerning, ideologically relentless listeners is interested in making NN-generated music distinguishable and supporting the right of filtering it. The goal is to supplant one with the other.
> The fact that 2 other, unrelated 3rd parties both like to make AI music and listen to AI music…
Listeners is not an unrelated party to a musician. They form a vital symbiosis. And it's a zero-sum game, as listener's attention is a limited resource.
> They do not get to decide what other people like to listen to or make.
This is an unrelated point. Who decides what is a separate topic.
The crux of the issue is that we have two types of superficially similar product which are in fact substantially different (hope this does not require clarification) and incomparable in terms of resources necessary for their creation. This begets unprecedented power imbalance and incentives for deceit, biased legislation and other moves to solidify this situation.
To use the video game analogy, I think it's more about PVP vs "bots" as opposed to PVP vs "humans". A lot of PVP games (especially battle royale style) struggle with the question of whether to include dumb AI characters as "fodder" for people to play against. The PVP purists, pro players, and streamers tend to be against bots because they think the game should be a pure test of human skill. Normie players, less skilled players, and players who just don't have the time to master the game tend to like to play against a mix of bots and humans. Some people just don't like PVP and would prefer to just play against bots only.
I'm not going to weigh in on which side I'm on, but I notice the discussion around AI "making creativity too easy" and "devaluing practiced skills" to be similar to the discussion around bots in PVP games.
The long history of art shows a story of technology developments and how artists have creatively applied them as new techniques and mediums.
Is AI music today able to emulate what a brilliant human artist does? Not really. But is it something that artists can leverage creatively? Absolutely.
AI can do the most basic first pass of creation. For a senior engineer writing code is a relatively small part of the job. There is a paradox where complete novices can churn out content / code that looks decent, but is superficially empty or a maintenance nightmare waiting to happen if the complexity increases even a little. On the other hand, for senior engineers, it is truly useful. If you treat the AI like a modestly skilled junior developer and actually still design your software it just does a lot of the boring boiler plate for you. You are still doing almost everything important. When you understand the code and could write it yourself you can almost always keep the LLM on track towards your objective, achieve appropriate code quality, and finish the task quicker. They are also really decent at refactoring and doing boilerplate. Especially in languages like C++ with a lot of boilerplate.
I imagine the same idea above holds for media (music, film) as well. When you understand how to prompt and can get the right scene with all the right constraints you are saving time. The human is still composing, editing, and storytelling. The LLM again becomes a relatively interesting but boring tool in your workflow to speed up some aspects.
Right now the power of LLMs is that you can funnel parts of your workflow that they can handle well and you save a lot of time for minimal design cost in terms of how to use them.
The analogy is great, but it breaks down when we talk about professional use. An aimbot in multiplayer is evil because it ruins the game for others. But an aimbot in game development (e.g., procedural aiming animation) is just a tool. The problem with current AI video is that the model often shoots not where the director wants, but where it's easiest to hit (the template)
I find many of the top videos on civitai.com to be amazing
https://civitai.com/videos
There's literally no problem at all with using aimbots, the problem is when you're playing with other people and lie about it. In fact, many games have built in aimbots simply because it's a fun mechanic (Ion Fury and Borderlands: Pre-Sequel are two that come to mind.)
Using AI to create music is like having your mom buy you a surfer wardrobe in the 80s/90s even though you lived in landlocked midwest or a skater wardrobe even though you didn't skate.
[dead]
No, comparing to an aimbot is too charitable. Using AI for music is at best like watching a gaming stream and you barely choosing the game, though not the streamer.
That is an excellent way to put it. Thank you for relaying this.
Agree... AI enables output, not creativity. The mediocre confuse one for the other.
Sorry that isn't true. Lots of smaller communities online, especially around small streamers make small meme style videos. Usually these are mocking someone doing something dumb online, or jokes/memes about the show etc. These are similar to parody videos online that were hugely popular on YouTube back in the early 2010s.
People did do this before AI. Usually cutting people faces out and sticking them on actors faces in existing movies, or subtly doing parody cover, doing clever edits (Cassette Boy is a notable example) or people were performing and recording it like the "Epic Rap Battles of History".
All it done is allow people to create these sort of to a higher creative standard, in other cases it allowed people to create jokey stuff that they wouldn't otherwise be able to create.
People using this technology in this manner is clearly creative. They are using the tech to make something new and unique for a particular audience.
In the 80s/90s you would be complaining about people using tracker software and samples to create music instead of learning to play an instrument. Under your logic someone like FatboySlim isn't a musician.
I have another example. Web development. Dealing with css and designing exact objects or elements in websites was a pain meaning needs technical expertise, time and good idea to be expressed. LLMs made it easier. Still the website created by a dilettante can never compete with one from a creative mind.
Can’t compete in what way? Popularity? Views? Revenue? Profitability? Reader satisfaction?
Sometimes a website that looks like shit does its job better than one that is finely crafted.
Berkshire Hathaway has a text only website with no CSS at all.
I am talking about differences like these :)
https://ciechanow.ski/ vs https://debugarguments.app/
> Sometimes a website that looks like shit does its job better than one that is finely crafted.
It even better if it looks good and works well. You can make sites that do both.
If I have $500,000 I can buy a car that’s meticulously hand-crafted with hand-stitched leathers and fine woods in the interior with an engine built by hand by a single person.
But I just need to get from point A to point B so I have a $10,000 used car.
Or you could get one with a better service history, the paint job and interior is in better condition, and it has the optional extras and a recent cam belt change for $12,000.
It depends whether you think the extra cost is worth it.
Under your logic someone playing a CD is a musician.
I'm exaggerating a bit to make the point that the amount of human creativity put into a work of art is not binary. Just pasting a rehashed joke as a genAI video prompt is not much of a creative process.
We call them DJ's and many are quite famous.
DJs are rated on their ability to read the dancefloor and get people to dance.
Yes, well, that sounds exactly like the skillset of a meme creator in a slightly different form factor.
Most arguments against gen-AI are bad arguments - you can (and should) admit this even if you (like me) don't respect gen-AI.
I haven't stated anything about meme creators using AI, I just pointed out a DJ's skill isn't based on randomly playing songs.
I think a lot of people mean "Wedding DJ" or "Radio DJ".
However there is a whole small subculture around this. A friend would go hunting for records to sample in Charity shops for old vinyls (this was pre-ebay). This apparently is known a "Digging" and lot of Music Producers, DJs etc would do this to find samples for their sets/albums.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6aQgZFrVKE
Similar you have people using tracker software on old Amigas / Ataris to play sets.
e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkTQ-15jGD0&list=RDCkTQ-15jG...
Oh. Why? I didn't see anybody arguing that DJing was random or unskilled.
Do you honestly believe that DJs, particularly the very famous ones, just play CDs?
Discussions about "DJs" are difficult because there's a WIDE range of skills behind what we call a DJ.
Yes, some have zero skill and will basically just show up with a pre-determined Spotify playlist. They won't even have mixing/transitions between songs.
Some are in the middle and will be able to do basic transitions between songs (ie, just simple beat matching) and know how to carry a vibe.
At the far end of the spectrum are actual composers that are effectively making new mixes of songs on the fly.
And so you have the problem where someone says "Being a DJ takes a lot of skill" because they're thinking of the last category, while the person hearing that message replies with "How does it take skill to just press Play?" because they're thinking of the first.
"What do DJs actually do?" https://youtube.com/shorts/9WqICdFQqkE
I think many of them don't even do that live anymore, as the entire set has been mixed upfront in order to preprogram visual/light/pyro effects. :-)
> Under your logic someone playing a CD is a musician.
No. That isn't my logic at all.
> Just pasting a rehashed joke as a genAI video prompt is not much of a creative process.
That isn't what is happening. What people are doing is taking people from different online streaming shows, making new content based on jokes made on those show and turning them into music videos, which are usually a cover of a well known song.
People have been doing this online without AI for quite a while. Usually this was with various music software. All AI does, it make this process easier.
Any time something is made easier and you get more of it, it becomes worth less.
There might be a claim that there is still some human creativity involved, maybe. But it's sort of like amateurs at an open mic night telling memorized jokes that they didn't write compared to a comedian who has spent thousands of hours perfecting stories, jokes, punch lines, timing, and phrasing.
> Any time something is made easier and you get more of it, it becomes worth less.
That is only the case with commodities. Not creative works and/or entertainment.
> But it's sort of like amateurs at an open mic night telling memorized jokes that they didn't write compared to a comedian who has spent thousands of hours perfecting stories, jokes, punch lines, timing, and phrasing.
Often these amateurs are often funnier than the professionals. However that of course is subjective.
Using samples is not the same as AI or creating AI videos. Nor is using photoshop or an editing suite.
"Creating" AI art is analogous to commissioning a work of art from someone else.
Person A put in a request to person B, pers. A receives a mockup or a draft from pers. B, pers. A and B might engage in convos to refine the work, pers. B delivers the final product to pers. A. AI "artists" are person A in that scenario.
Sampling, like FatboySlim, or many other producers, is clearly not person A in that scenario. They're exerting intentional, direct, creative control. Creating AI art is mediated in a way that is far more indirect and stochastic. The creative inputs in AI art is more directly the text in the prompt rather than the output. Editing the output afterwards is creative input afterwards, though. However, sign a work you commissioned from someone else as your own and people will probably roll their eyes, which I think describes most reactions to AI videos.
> Using samples is not the same as AI or creating AI videos. Nor is using photoshop or an editing suite.
It is very similar. You are using a piece of software to aid in the creative process.
In these cases, you are remixing previous artistic works to create a new one.
> "Creating" AI art is analogous to commissioning a work of art from someone else.
Depends what you are doing and how you are using the AI. So this isn't always the case.
If all they did was "Take Thriller but make it look like an anime". I would agree. But there is obviously more happening than that.
> Sampling, like FatboySlim, or many other producers, is clearly not person A in that scenario. They're exerting intentional, direct, creative control. Creating AI art is mediated in a way that is far more indirect and stochastic.
No often I've created some basic stuff and you really have to tell it exactly what you want, often make sure it has the right images, fonts etc.
I could do the exactly the same in GIMP. It would just take me longer as I will have to watch a YouTube tutorial for the 5th time on how to add a text shadow to some text as I use GIMP about like twice a week and forget how to do stuff.
So what is the difference between me providing commands via a prompt to make an image, as opposed to using a mouse and keyboard in GIMP? How I am inputting the instructions? There is a bit more abstraction.
However one is considered creative by you and another isn't, because there is a slight loss of direct control.
Similar with these AI parodies there is obviously a lot of work done in getting the AI to produce the output they want. Especially considering some of the characters are obscure individuals.
There is a creative process taking place. Just because you've used AI (which at the end of the day is a piece of software) doesn't invalidate that process taking place. It doesn't mean the creative process is done by the AI either.
It's both... I think it can cut both ways... I was largely on your side, as most of the AI stuff I've seen is just annoying more than anything. Then the "Star Wars: Beggar's Canyon" video completely changed my mind. The voice generation is clear and inflection appropriate... the cuts, sequence, and overall effects are clearly put together in a consistent way.
I can only imagine how much work that video was, but is really the first thing I've seen as AI video that gives me hope... and obviously a work of passion and a lot of effort to get such a great final result.
Thanks for name dropping this video, I hadn't heard of it. Maybe I'm just getting old but this felt as empty to me as most other GenAI stuff does. The tech is getting better but I'd still prefer a no-budget fan film that looks worse but has heart (and visual consistency) to something like this. I can meet halfway and say that perhaps this is a modern version of someone being able to play with their action figures and micromachines and show others what they were imagining and that lowering barriers to sharing such things should be celebrated. To mirror my youtube comment though, I'm worried that this sort of thing will stop being a tool to storyboard and play around and will just become the final product for studios who could do so much more.
This was already the direction for studios though... Improvements to CGI and vault filming have cut costs dramatically relying on tech.
The clip mentioned likely took a few green screen segments, a lot of training data and many tries to get the clips needed for that sohrt story. B it's a lot more work at current state of the tech than just entering a single prompt.
It’s almost like people that use the tools to the best of their ability will produce higher quality outputs. This is a new tool like we’ve never seen before with a low skill floor to use it. We don’t know what the skill ceiling is yet.
If you're correct, creative people have nothing to worry about then. Creative people will still stand out and have a role. But the world already has an oversupply of creativity, and a need for a lot more of boring, uncreative things. A plumber, mechanic, or programmer, all need minimal creativity -- 99% perspiration, and 1% inspiration, as they say.
Yes, that's exactly right. It's why I, and many other creatives I know, are not worried about AI. Our annoyance comes more from it dominating the conversation rather than actual perceived risk.
I'm sure there's a creative way to respond to the annoyance. One slightly worrying factoid is that chess players said the same thing about early chess engines, and them being no match for human creativity. Time will tell.
With chess, there is a known, specific end goal, and the "creativity" comes with how you arrive there. With an artwork, the end goal is entirely decided by the artist, there is no "win state" to reward.
That's not what people who play chess thought. The creativity wasn't in the goal, but how you arrived there. The "beauty" of the steps that you took on the way to the goal. They believed that it was human creativity and sense of beauty that would never be encapsulated in a computer program. They turned out to be incorrect, but maybe you're right and things are different in a wider domain, we'll see.
To be clear, Chess is a game, so yes they are still correct.
Not sure exactly you mean, or who you are referring to as being correct. Not sure the relevance of anything being a game, the question is the intersection of computation and interacting with humans. Having been there at the time, I saw the snide dismissals of computers playing chess, they were "simply playing by rote", they were just glorified calculators who could never understand the beautiful moves played by human grandmasters. And this was actually true at the time... it just didn't stay true.
Today, very many humans enjoy spectating computer played chess games, and often comment on the "beauty" of the moves played. Take that for what you will.
> A plumber, mechanic, or programmer, all need minimal creativity
I really have to take issue with this statement.
Well you probably don’t want an overly creative plumber at least.
Do you have any source for your claim that there is an oversupply of creativity? My gut feeling is that not all creativity is created equal, and there is a small amount of truly impressive creative works that are not simply retreads of existing ideas.
Are you actually asking someone for a source for their opinion?
I mean, a lot of "creatives" fund their art by doing work like making icons, thumbnails, jingles, website designs, corporate logos, etc. Things that can, and are being done by AI. This will have downstream effect on creativity since we aren't using the efficiency that AI provides for the greater good of society. Koenigsegg might sell one or two more cars though, so there's that.
> AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together.
This is very much not the case with the Stable Diffusion/Wan/general open diffusion models space.
The amount of effort and creativity that goes on in creating complex workflows, custom LoRAs, fine-tunes etc is genuinely a new area of art imho. Sure a lot of it is going to produce things that most people might not consider "art", but it's unfair to lump the work happening in this space with people randomly prompting Sora and dumping it on TikTok.
Those aspects aren’t the only “creative” aspects of filmmaking.
What if someone used AI to say something important or get across a different perspective?
99% of people in the world do not have the time/money/connections to achieve a film vision. They were locked out of the ability to create their vision - creating an high concept or production-heavy film has been the most privileged position in the world - until now.
That’s because they don’t know what creativity is.
They believe the idea itself is the creative bit: that thinking of the idea of a dog riding a skateboard is in and of itself a creative act.
Agree entirely - creativity emerges through the process of work, or is "discovered" through work. If AI does the work, it fundamentally can not be a creative process.
No it isn’t.
There is a lot of content whose final value ultimately doesn’t justify the time that would be spent on creating it. Worse, there is sometimes only a specific window of time where a content has entertainment value and it quickly drops off after you leave that window.
For example, someone recently created an entire anime style video of the United States invading Venezuela and capturing Maduro. It came out awesome! But… to make a similar quality video by hand would have easily taken a team of humans several months at best. By then, the news cycle would have moved on, and the delivered video would have even less value being watched so distant from the event that inspired it. People wouldn’t care anymore, and it wouldn’t have as much impact.
AI is the perfect solution for delivering such a video exactly when you need it. To me, this is one of the more acceptable uses of AI, to make fun throwaway content that you just laugh about for a few moments and then move on with your life. Having a human dedicate a large amount of their time to make such videos would be sad, and it’s better if they preserve their effort for more serious artistic works that are timeless in their value.
I think there is some tenuous analog between today's AI, and yesteryear's music synthesizers and "modern art". Regarding music, I understand synthesizers were created to mimic real instruments, whereas artists used its capabilities not to mimic, but to create entirely new sounds. My limited understanding of modern art (and without a search I don't distinguish between expressionism, impressionism or any other isms because of my ignorance of the differences) is that it was a reaction to the modern world, and an expression of something that could not be anything other than a creation of the human mind. AI may be helping people to copy existing aesthetics, but I'm hoping/waiting for it to enable people to take it in a completely novel direction that can only be augmented human expression.
I don’t agree with your music synthesizer analogy. I own a synthesizer, however I don’t possess any musical talent whatsoever. I cannot for the life of me produce anything remotely listenable from the thing. I know how to use it, but cannot make good music. You just need to look at some street performer banging on a plastic bucket and entertaining a circle of people to realise that the ability to make music is orthogonal to having the right tools.
AI art is more like me pressing the demo button on the synth, looking you in the eye as it plays the preset tune and saying “I made this”
Would you scream at a child that shows you a beautiful shell they found on the beach -- "you didn't make that!" -- why assume that everyone's ego is entwined with sharing?
No, because the child is behaving as a curator which is a valuable act. I never hear ai “artists” claim to be curators, they always claim to be creatives.
Photographers were not initially respected as artists -- they are now. The history of this cultural evolution is well documented. It is easier than typing a prompt to take a picture with a smartphone, yet the respect for photography somehow remains. It is definitely a cultural problem.
This is problematic. It is so common to attach and assume pride to musical discovery. Why can't it be "I discovered this"?
We need to disambiguate what you mean by "AI" here. If you're referring to people typing prompts in a frontier web UI, maybe. But if you're using local models, you can do quite a bit more, ComfyUI workflows can get crazy. Multi-region controlnet guided generations with IP adapters and loras, etc.
The art gatekeepers want to try and paint everyone using AI creatively as monkeys mashing ignorantly on keyboards, taking the unmodified output and parading it around like Picasso. The reality is that is to AI art as bathroom dick graffiti is to manual art.
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A lot of technological advancements (or use scare quotes here) that claimed to let “regular people” be creative just end up passifying us and relinquishing our creativity. Why play the guitar, the record player already does it better. Why learn to juggle, some kid in <supposedly whiz-genius country> already does that.
Of course of course of course, people have been inspired by play in bands and to learn to juggle. But the trajectory seems to be to move away from small intimiate creative offerings, like playing music in your living room, to passively recieving Taylor Swift into your earbuds.
Not only are they removing creativity but they're eroding the medium with a flood of high quanity/low quality of misinformation or fakes. My youtube feed is innundated in AI generated talks, audiobooks, history etc. The audiobooks may be okay but I can't trust any AI generated content. At this point I wish I could just fiter it out. Just yesterday I saw a video by Yuval Noah Harari and almost towards the end I realize it's AI slop. It has nothing to do with the author except for his syntehtized voice. The content is not even vetted by a human, it's being created faster than users can consume it. For now I can spot these AI channels and attempt to avoid them but am not sure how long this is going to last.
A lot of digital tech produces more waste than actual value. Just look at your email inbox: odds are, the overwhelming majority of emails you get aren't useful correspondence from real people.
And computers allowed that slop to come into the real world. Now 95% of my physical mail is automated mailer junk asking me to sell my home/car
Yeah. You know most people consider that bad, right?
>However, 99% of the the "creativity" from what I've seen is done by the AI (how it should look, where the cuts need to happen, the tone, color grading, etc). Which is to say, it's taken from other people's (creative) work.
I don't get why this is a big deal? Like 99% of the creativity of taking a video of an ocean is also just taken from the nature. Your creativity was actually a small portion of "information" out of all the bits required to make that video.
A video of an ocean (or anything) is not, inherently, art, or creative. But also...if you're taking a video of the ocean, it's probably because you want to capture/share a video of the ocean, which an AI generated video is not.
Unless you're making a very particular type of video, you likely want to capture aspects of the water's movement, color, sound, or interactions without much care about faithfully capturing a video of the literal ocean. The former part is a big portion of what turns a video of the ocean from not inherently being art to being as much of art as you make it so. Saying the only reason would be to share the literal ocean forces the art out, not in.
This is like saying:
"99% of the creativity of baking is done by the wheat growing in nature. Your creativity of "baking" was a small portion of what was required to make that pastry."
Your video of the ocean and Roger Deakins video of the ocean are going to be very, very different.
I find the mental gymnastics like this around AI discourse really confusing. Taking a still video of the ocean isn't "creativity". And if a video of an ocean is truly creative it's likely not attributed to "nature".
Taking still photos of anything is widely considered a creative activity. There's usually only a small amount of creativity involved. Sometimes more. Same goes for AI generated anything. You can have low effort photos and high effort photos, low effort AI generated pictures and high-effort AI generated pictures.
AI just lets you get a better result for less effort (for some definitions of "better"), just as a camera lets you get a better result for less effort than a paintbrush and canvas does.
A camera doesn't produce a painting though. Your comment doesn't make any sense.
It produces an image, just like painting does. It does so quicker and "better" than humans. But it also requires less creative input and allows less creative freedom.
> a camera lets you get a better result for less effort than a paintbrush and canvas does
Only if your goal is photorealism, which is one of the least interesting forms of art.
Yes, 99% of people are uncreative and use the creative freedom this way. Besides, many truly creative people won't even touch it, some because of the ethics and others because it's not up to their standard yet. Does it really look surprising to you?
>AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together.
That's quite a leap of thought and doesn't follow from the first part at all.
Put a different way, would you say Fiverr enables people to be more creative?
Using AI to create an artistic work has more in common with commissioning art than creating it. Just instead of a person, you're paying the owners of a machine built on theft because it's cheaper and more compliant. It isn't really your creativity on display, and it certainly isn't that of the model or the hosting company.
The smallest part of any creative work is the prompt. The blood and the soul of it live in overcoming the constraints and imperfections. Needing to learn how to sing or play an instrument isn't an impediment to making music, it's a fundamental aspect of the entire exercise.
>would you say Fiverr enables people to be more creative?
That's not what GP said. They said that using a model removes creativity. That's a ridiculous leap from their premise, especially considering that it's misleading at best.
>The smallest part of any creative work is the prompt.
Like most people who never actually played with it, you seem to assume that prompting is all you can do, and repeat the tiresome and formulaic opinions. That's not worth discussing in the 1000th time honestly. Instead, I encourage you to actually study it in depth.
I agree. This is not about creativity, but about producing something that kinda looks like professional art. People assume that creative output has to pass some bar, so that other people can appreciate it. But you can also produce interesting art with very simple techniques. XKCD is an example that comes to mind.
When faced with the choice of making genmedia more expressive vs looking higher production-value, big labs always choose the latter.
Expressivity requires intent, which turns out to be rarer and therefore less apt to show up in a benchmark or crowdsourced head-to-head comparison.
I've been making music videos with a very satisfying creative process: Use AI to make a ton of images, pick the very best ones, and carefully arrange them in the right order. Example: https://youtu.be/r-_dJNgt3SM
I think most people have the ability to express themselves through art, but if their first experience of trying to make something is using AI tools, they will never discover that they can make something genuine that reflects their experience.
Or you could argue that it’s simply lifting from other people’s creativity. Like making a song entirely of sampled sounds from other songs with a key change.
Now do hand drawn cartoons vs 3d rendered cartoons.
Is Pixar Incredibles where a computer algorithm made decisions about exact colors worse than Disney Cinderella where it was hand-drawn animation?
Having watched both. Yes the Incredibles are much much worse. Especially if we focus on the color palette. You could have not picked a worse example.
But for example Moana is not worse than Cinderella. Arguably it's better. But the algorithmic choices around perspectives, reflections, etc. Were not really automated. In both cases a lot of people where involved in each scene, and I am confident, they went over every frame, checking the result was what they wanted.
Additionally, hand-coloring wasn't necessarily a more pure creative choice anyway. It was dictated by material conditions such as the availability of pigments, studio constraints, time pressures, etc.
This feels like an incredibly disingenuous comparison and I suspect you know that. But just to play along, real artists had to design the character models, real filmmakers had to decide which shots to capture, real editors had to put that together to make a cohesive story. Also they almost certainly went through color grading after having completed the rendering, so the colors are certainly selected by humans to produce a nice looking composition.
This isn't even remotely comparable.
How does someone learn the colour grading, the editing, the scripting etc?
Almost entirely by studying other peoples works, the rest by doing something and getting feedback on it.
I wonder if people also are like "CHatgpt, write me a poem about love" and then think "hey, i wrote this poem!! I'm a poet!!!"
If you think this for one ai you must think it for all.
I can now instantly visualize anything I think of. That is creative power. The same for code - I can instantly scaffold a frontend I think of in google ai studio. Its not all great and I have to keep the slot machine spinning. But it's empowering.
These "ai kills creativity" arguments are all rather uncreative.
No, you are given someone else vision of anything you want. If you are being 100 % honest with yourself, the output of a prompt would never be exactly what you imagined. This is where YOUR creativity dies. Yes, you create, but you create through the filter of someone else. If this ceiling of creativity is enough for you, good. You will never break through it anyway, by design.
idk we are sure getting close and this stuff isnt even good yet. 1 example - I nearly one-shotted all the images for my blog https://backnotprop.com/blog and i felt creatively empowered as they came out better than I imagined (but aligned in general design)
They are disconnected, bland, and made me feel that if you rely that heavily on generic AI images, your writing can't be much better.
My writing is not good at all. Much like your bland resume experience. But I never really needed that - I was Accenture's youngest senior manager while you were a consultant there.
> the output of a prompt would never be exactly what you imagined
There is way more than just a prompt to make something interesting with AI though. For example this test[0] i saw some time ago, includes several different AI systems (Z-Image Turbo with a custom lora for the specific style, Wan 2.2 Time-To-Move for the animation output, After Effects for the control animations and some sort of upscaler.
This involves way more than just a prompt and the video still has a few issues, like the right hand remaining "stuck" on the head, but the way to fix it would most likely be the same as making the motion with perhaps some additional editing work.
IMO AI can make some things easier and/or faster, even allow people to do things that'd be impossible for them before (e.g. i doubt the person who posted the video could make a real live video with actors, etc like the AI video shown) but to do anything beyond simple slop you still need to put in effort and that includes making things close to your vision.
(not getting the 100% exact results is fine because that was always the case with any tech - it isn't like most, if not all, PS1 devs wanted to low res graphics with wobbly polygons and lack of texture filtering, but the better games leaned in what the tech could do)
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1pfl6os/zi...
Do an experiment. Take any single photograph and try to recreate any aspect of it with the AI. For example, try to match overall vibe of the color palette _exactly_ as it is on your photo. Or try to match the exact camera angle. Or exact composition. How many slot spins did it take? How many would it take to match multiple aspects of a single image?
Creativity involves an extra step, imagining something in your mind eye and then bringing it to life. Not settling for whatever comes out, but demanding more. As you learn any craft your ability to articulate increases beyond happy little accidents into intentional mastery. Not so much with AI.
The argument about killing creativity makes a lot of sense to me. Our brains are inherently lazy and always they seek paths of least resistance. That's the intelligence, basically, strategizing for best outcome with least effort. AI models require ~zero effort to map your prompt to a mere sliver of the entire possibility space. How can we then convince ourselves to spend weeks or years to try to reach some novel art styles, when they require so much manual labor and the attention muscle that we allowed to deteriorate away?
Painters don't imagine something and through shear technical skills translate what is in their head to a canvas. Their style emerges through constant, repetitive work and iteration. The work itself creates the art, not an idea. An idea is just fuel.
Except you’re not the one doing the creating. It would be like me hiring an artist to execute my vision and then calling myself artistic. Empowering, maybe, but it’s closer to the illusion of power. You control a genie, but you don’t have the power yourself. And it’s worse than that, because in reality the genie is controlled by some mega corp, and not by you at all, and suddenly you need this genie to do all your thinking for you because you’ve forgotten how.
I don't care to call myself an artist. Nor is it about "being an artist" - subjective anyways and _could_ be defined as the ability to bring to life the things you think; of which AI is a tool.
> It would be like me hiring an artist to execute my vision and then calling myself artistic.
Not disagreeing with you, but you might want to sit down for this...
https://www.ft.com/content/d84c8502-d413-4a26-a59c-494af1197...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45416670
Frauds have existed before AI, sure. There are people who get others to write their books for them too.
You mean like a movie/tv/music Producer?
At least those people are aware of where they sit and who they depend on, and they're not hiding it. A movie producer doesn't pretend to have created the movie by himself, someone who uses AI to write their blog posts on the other hand...
It's too tempting for people to have AI do all the creative work and then take credit for it, and it gives these people the delusion of thinking they're literally artists, authors, bloggers, etc.
Disagree. I'm someone who thinks in pictures, which might sound like a great skill for a visual artist to have, but I can't draw for crap. I'm not even very proficient with digital art tools. Through some trial and error, I found that music was a much better creative output for me. If generative AI was around during my formative years, I might have just been satisfied creating slop art and stopped there.
AI (as it currently exists) will never be "creative" in the sense that it can only imitate or interpolate between past works. At some point we'll recognize that AI generated works are boring and predictable. AI will probably never invent a new musical genre or artform since it can only reproduce or recombine works from the past. I wonder what happens when the internet is so full of AI generated slop that that the only things worth "training" on were made in the time before AI generation became a thing. Will AI generations be full of dated references to a time gone by?
People may say it increases creativity but I see it more as lowering the bar to produce things. The same could be said for a lot of inventions like photography made producing images easier and I'm sure a lot of portrait painters lost their jobs to photographers. I think the danger is that we may see a very rapid erosion of jobs in the creative space that won't be easy to transition into new fields which I feel will have a detrimental effect on our society.
I am currently working on a script with my uncle who is a professional playwright, my grandfather wrote for Benny Hill. So it runs in my family.
Biting the bullet, I have accurately had it generate the scene of the cafe. Generating visual imagery of how I imagine it; a cyber dystopian gothic cafe with wandering goths.
It's capped to ten seconds and that alone would've costed me a fair sum to even get a small render without revisions.
I could now technically pitch this with the AI works and get the funding required to hire actual animators/actors or spend my savings myself giving it to an artist depicting the theme and style; not that I could afford it.
How is creativity lost in that scenario? AI is a tool, it shouldn't be a do-everything, I created the script and it's generated the visual mock.
Personally I wouldn't want it to create the whole show and would personally prefer real folk to do the magic but for my own personal consumption it's given me the excitement and further drive to continue.
I don't think using GenAI to storyboard and pitch is inherently bad. There's long historical precedent for folks using existing film and music in demo reels to explain the feeling and tone they're going for (e.g. WW2 footage for Star Wars storyboarding reels IIRC). In isolation what you explained sounds fine, there may even be some argument that parts of this fall under fair use which may diffuse certain training attribution copyright challenges. Where things start to fall apart for me would be if your story/script and resulting prompts start to rely on GenAI upstream. And as you say, when the end product itself starts to lean on this tech as a shortcut.
> how it should look, where the cuts need to happen, the tone, color grading, etc
That's not creativity. That's skill. A person can think of something (creativity) and not know how to bring it to life without the skills to do so. The creator still needs to have a creative vision, and communicate that vision effectively at the very least.
Of course, there's also people that are just cranking out slop, but I'd argue there's no creativity there, other than finding creative ways to copy others. But that's been a problem since forever.
It's not like these discussions haven't have quite a lot of precedence. I bought a 4-track tape "portastudio" back in the 90s, but it didn't make me a good producer- years of playing music with dozens of groups did that. And I bought a canon xl1, but that didn't make the movies I was making more compelling than if I'd had budget to shoot on 16mm.
Creativity and good craft come from struggling to communicate an idea; anything that short circuits that will make you a worse artists.
AI is, to me, like claming that because you have access to a forklift going to the gym is no longer useful- you're missing both the aesthetic and material reasons why folks have been doing things.
What's worse- people claim a forklift is better than, say, working out and then say to the folks who were working out "this is what you're doing and it is dumb to spend all that effort doing it". That's nothing new either- I get why folks look at a lot of my early, cracked FruityLoop-based work from 2002 with some disdain-- it misses all of the nuances and trade-craft knowledge that I gained playing in bands over the following 20 years.
And I know how it sounds because I can hear it in the products of other young musicians: I play a lot of jazz with kids in their 20s who have way better chops than I ever will and who have a lot of the real book memorized. That real book allows them to pick up the tunes super fast, but they don't have a lot of the nuance that the 70 year olds I sometimes get to play with have in their playing.
I use AI for the dumbest stuff, like writing contracts for mechanical licensing. It's shit, because I'm just looking to copy some already-written document without paying a lawyer. I can't see see why folks would -want- to use it to make documents that no one else had previously thought would be worth writing and to me it very much seems like it can only produce, by definition, derivative works.
Musicians are terrible about that. I love being in a cover band, because I usually like the people and playing. But absent that, simply being able to "poof here's 'your' cover of Stariway" seems super boring, almost soul crushing.
And paying AI do the creative parts- that's like paying someone to have sex with my partner because I wanted to spend my nights playing video games instead of woodshedding on pedal steel guitar :D
All that is to say- I agree.
There's historical precedent for this too!
Just think of what photography did to portrait painting. The camera and film did all of the color work, the person hitting the button had no need to mix their own pigments anymore. All the creativity was removed.
/s
> 99% of the “creativity” is done by the AI…it's taken from other people's (creative) work.
Yes, and prior to AI, 99% of creativity was also taken from other peoples work. This is how creativity works. Man has no ideas in a vacuum.
As humans we take influences in from what we’ve seen and when we “create” things we’re simply combining things together, resulting in output falling somewhere on the spectrum from a 1:1 copy to somewhat novel.
If you can’t spot the influences in a painting or song or piece of graphic design, it’s simply because you aren’t deeply familiar with prior works in the field at the time.
Oh boy, it’s this again. You’re essentially admitting to having had no meaningful experiences in your entire life, as you’re incapable of imagining doing anything other than consuming content. Good art says something about the world, not other art.
How ironic that your response, "Good art says something about the world" is also just repeating a meme you've heard, a no-true-scotsman fallacy wrapped in an old cliche.
It's a meaningless, religious statement. Good art is impossible to define, and everything says something about the world.
I too can repeat tired memes to support my position, ie. Good artists copy, great artists steal.
The truth is, the process of creation starts with something called inspiration. Inspiration is theft. Again, man has no ideas in a vacuum.
As you believe you've led a far more interesting life than me (!), please cite some examples of what you believe to be "good" art. Then let's investigate how devoid of any influences it actually is.
Well, your claim was 99%, and you’re making the claim so the burden of proof is on you, so you first: Give me ninety-nine examples that support your position and explain why for each of them, and then I’ll give my one and do the same and we can see who has the stronger body of evidence.
I have an idea for a movie. Its kind of an epic idea - more about the characters, story and the feeling. I want to get the idea across as close as possible to what is in my head.
AI has given me the opportunity to do it. I just have to keep prompting to get the exact feeling and I can share my idea.
I don't like these curmudgeonly takes.. I'm sure this "All AI Videos Are Harmful" take will age just like how "All videos are harmful" and "All cartoons are harmful" have aged.
While I appreciate your positive experience, if you were unable to write, storyboard, and communicate your idea before AI--than AI is not going to be "the thing" that suddenly turns you into a filmmaker.
You're writing anyway, you just call it prompting. If you feel that the AI is giving you back more than what you're putting in with that writing, you have to ask yourself who's vision the result really is.
>if you were unable to write, storyboard, and communicate your idea before AI--than AI is not going to be "the thing" that suddenly turns you into a filmmaker.
The person you are replying to doesn’t say that they couldn’t do these aspects before. In fact they mention that they are able to communicate EXACTLY what they want to AI. The only problem was that their idea is high concept.
Getting a high concept film made is one of the most privileged positions in the world. Practically no one can actually just do this. Even people in the film industry with family connections to producers struggle to get their films made.
You have no idea what you’re asking from people when you tell them they should have just made it.
> You're writing anyway, you just call it prompting. If you feel that the AI is giving you back more than what you're putting in with that writing, you have to ask yourself who's vision the result really is.
They didn’t say that, they said they were getting exactly what they were seeing in their head.
Would you say the same thing for cartoonists? Don’t call it film making, call it something else. You are just drawing.
Your video camera is also giving you more than what you put in it.
Animating is a ton of work. Animation decisions can give a great deal of "feel" to a cartoon. Studio Ghibli works are distinct from Disney's old animation and each conveys a distinct feeling. Those decisions are often made by the production team. Its why One Punch Man season 3 is so derided this year after Season 1 was heralded as the greatest season of Anime in a very long time. You'd think following the literal story boards provided by the already published Manga would be simple! but somehow it lost all of its charm.
Animation, or shooting video is the result of many, many pieces. If you're not putting a ton of work into the decisions that result in the final "shot" the video camera makes then the video that is shot isn't magically going to show an enormous amount of care in its construction.
> I don't like these curmudgeonly takes
me neither. I think there's a real sense of concern, but that people are also just being contrarian or are maybe acting out of a concern for their job or something. Seems like a lot of people have had the opposite experience, that a lot of AI vids are not harmful but have in a lot of cases been funny or helpful. People need time to experiment with the tech and see what impact it has on society before they adjust their expectations to its real impact.
> I want to get the idea across as close as possible to what is in my head.
In my experience, AI is poorly suited for that, unless what you have in mind is just some remix of what already exists.
Imho this is as if you were a music producer and instead of synthesizing the sound you want you were exploring random presets till you found one that matched.
You say that as if that's not something creatives genuinely spend a lot of time on.
Just look at piano vsts, everyone keeps trying things until they find something they particularly like. There's no difference here.
Cool, but what about the rampant fraud portion of the article?
that's cool. every new technology can be used in both ways
I think the concern of the author, that AI video ultimately "enable(s) those who want to manipulate, deceive, and exploit people for engagement, profit, or ideology", cannot be understated. However, the binary claim that the author doubles down on throughout, "All AI Videos Are Harmful", dilutes this messaging.
All? Yes, there's a lot of garbage and outright dangerous, malicious stuff out there, but there's also moving art. It may take a while to drown out the stupid and evil stuff, but there are examples that amaze me:
https://www.youtube.com/@kellyeld2323/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@alffx123/videos
Artistically not relevant enough to justify the downsides
There’s no “justifying” anything - the tech is here. Even if you ban it globally, it would actually stop be here and would still be able to cause harm - it would just not be able to be used for good either.
The technology is currently being heavily subsidized and made widely available. If we decided to ban it globally things would look very different. Would it be worthwhile for scammers to run a massive server farm and spend thousands on training and generation? Maybe? It would certainly reduce the quantity.
If you think the tech only exists via mega corporations apps, then you’re very misinformed.
You can generate videos locally. The models anlready exist.
The mirror climbing tech chaps are doing to justify the technology per se is the most baffling I’ve seen years of following in tech. It exists therefore it has to be out there. Imagine if we applied that to industrial chemicals, pharmaceutical products, or literally any other industrial endeavor. It’s particularly pathetic to watch the absolutely non-existent level of self reflection.
If you couldn't have made the story into a short film before AI video then AI video isn't going to suddenly make you a talented film maker. Eventually one day you'll be able to put your vague story idea in and get a fully finished coherent well made movie out but currently if you lacked the talent before you're still lacking the talent today.
We know this because actually existing talented film makers have done entertaining work with AI video. But it's silly to use it as justification to write it off just because you're not talented in the field.
It’s ridiculous to say everyone who has an idea for a film could have gotten it made already if they had the skill.
There are endless amounts of people with real skill in the film industry that cannot get their movie made even though they have the connections and the experience. Famous filmmakers even experience this.
Imagine the number of people who couldn’t break into the industry or simply don’t trust it? There are countless people around the world who have fully fleshed out ideas for films that producers won’t finance because literally billions of dollars are going to create ever more Marvel slop.
You’re focusing on one type of person that may or may not have the skills. That’s just one specific scenario, there are many others to weight just as much.
What about all those that do but can’t make it happen because of all the realities of life?
> could have gotten it made already
> cannot get their movie made even though they have the connections
I'm talking about film makers, as in directors who can either hold the camera themselves or instruct someone else where to point it from a budget they provide or source. You seem to be conflating having the talent to actually make a short film yourself with script writers getting a production green lit on someone elses dime.
Almost all successful directors have done the former at the start of their career.
> Or it's indirectly harmful by training us to accept a synthetic reality where nothing can be trusted and everything must be questioned.
I do find myself questioning the premise that accepting a 'synthetic reality where nothing can be trusted' is automatically bad. I've long felt that everyone took what they saw on the internet at face value when they should not. I do hope that injecting enough chaos into the system can force people to question their intake more consistently.
I'm not trying to detract from the OP's point but if the author turned the lens they are using to evaluate whether AI videos are harmful or not onto the videos one usually encountered on the internet pre-AI videos, I think they would find most internet videos are harmful by those same metrics. It's propaganda, rage-baiting, trying to manipulate you into buying something, etc. It's no wonder that's the sort of content we see being generated.
I have a huge beef with AI on YouTube.
It's clear that plenty are doing the following:
- find a random topic tied to their channel, e.g. some battle in Napoleonic wars
- have Perplexity do as much research on the topic
- have AI write a script for 20 minutes of it based on research
- genAI images and video content
- genAI the voiceover
- profit
I hate it.
It's not even terrible content, nor it's not informative, but it's soulless and not very entertaining.
Worst thing is that you're not told it's AI generated so you looking at pictures of the battle thinking they come from real paintings or something, so you maybe want to research more about that painting and it's all fake and not ai labeled.
TikTok has it even worse. I think I've seen the "mother protects child from avalanche on a porch" variation in any goddamn way, with wolves, bears, people, deer, snow tigers..nothing is ai labeled and it all pretends to be genuine.
Most videos about funny pets, which I loved, are also super fake. Labrador saves small child from falling tv, British shorthair chasing mastiff...all of this fake..
None of it labeled. It's slop after slop.
AI content should be required by law to be flagged and described how the AI was used. It's bullshit when a channel pops up with a known person sitting facing the camera speaking for 20 minutes and it turns out to be entirely AI generated. The person in question not involved, the textual/spoken content is not their work, etc.
I have been blocking and reporting 90% of the "new" youtube channels that get recommended to me by the algorithm. Kids youtube is also an absolute wasteland of garbage AI generated crap now.
Weirdly, I actually enjoy flipping through Sora every once in a while. Where it is upfront about being AI and a lot of it is quite entertaining.
I would not mind if youtube added an "AI" section where you can generate your own videos or watch AI generated videos, but they need to start banning people that post AI generated videos in normal youtube channels.
The author nailed the problem but missed the technical root cause: lack of controllability. Current models (Sora, Veo, Runway) are probabilistic generators. They are optimized to output a plausible image, not the specific image a director needs. Spammers and scammers don't care about specifics, they just need a "talking head" or a "burning city." An artist however needs a specific angle, specific lighting, and character consistency. Until we solve the problem of reliable latent space control (something like ControlNet, but for video and on steroids), AI video will remain a tool for generating digital noise, not cinema
> Or it's indirectly harmful by training us to accept a synthetic reality where nothing can be trusted and everything must be questioned.
Good. Its beneficial, I'd think. Lies are not new, the amount of lies, probably not new either.
I don't think we have (yet) reached a level of badness compared to the prior point of tobacco companies telling people around the world that cigarettes have medical benefits.
This headline does not match the article at all. It claims all AI videos are harmful then immeidately goes on to throw this claim out and say old confused people might be fooled by the videos. This is a very narrow subset of AI videos.
It's not just a pedantic issue. Making these kinds of extremely bold and all covering claims is par for the course for those who want to find and exploit attention from others for profit. If that's not what the author is doing I think the most charitable interpretation I can come up with is that they just have no experience with AI videos and are going off sensational press stories.
They should buy an nvidia 3060 12GB ($200~ second hand) and try out wan2.2 on their home computer. It's really fun to be able to make these kind of videos on a whim. And they'll get some real lived experience with the subject.
"All AI Videos are Harmful"
Obviously an incorrect statement?
I will grant that most AI-generated videos I've experienced seem like novelties... although they've generated plenty of "valuable" humor. Certainly not universal harm!
Give it time for the tool to be improved and for people to make better use of it?
Reading your messages, I've come to the personal conclusion that we live in an age of misunderstanding. We're incapable of reaching any useful, consensual agreements.
This holds us back, halting progress that could be truly positive for humanity, because having a society that's moving in opposite directions keeps us stagnant.
This has been going on for far too many years.
Let AI users use it. And let's train those who are defenseless against this advancement so they can decide for themselves.
> indirectly harmful by training us to accept a synthetic reality where nothing can be trusted and everything must be questioned.
that's quite the definition of 'harmful'
"synthetic reality" is my new favorite term.
I can’t seem to figure out a good prompt for these yet. But there are people doing clever things (short clips with first frame previous last frame, instructions on the image of first frame, etc.) and I hope that over time these get to become as good as image models have.
> AI-generated videos have developed their own unique look. There's a visual quality that marks them, a subtle wrongness that your brain picks up on even when you can't articulate exactly what's off. It's the new uncanny valley, and I feel an intense revulsion whenever I encounter it.
Yesterday on the comment thread for the "Attention is Bayesian Inference" blog post (which definitely seems to have been written by AI), a couple people were asking "who cares who/what wrote it, if it has good information", and others were struggling to articulate a response. Well, for me this is the response: it has a specific tone, and every time I see it it activates my gag reflex and I back-button straight out of the page. I'm not interested in examining or deconstructing this response either, as far as I'm concerned it's evolutionarily adaptive and I intend to keep it.
That's only relevant until the AI output no longer has a tone that triggers your gag reflex. Then you'll be in the same boat as everyone else, and the "who cares who/what wrote it, if it has good information" question will apply to you as well.
What will actually happen if and when AI output is indistinguishable from human writing is that I will curate a whitelist of people I know personally whom I trust don't use it, only read from them, and everyone else can piss off. I've already stopped using several websites where the SNR has dropped too low because AI usage is rampant, I'd have no problem extending that to the entire internet.
Sure you will.
Nearly everyone on this website can quote "MongoDB is web scale" from memory.
That was an AI-generated video (for a very primitive definition of AI). I think we're all pretty ok with the concept.
This isn’t a crisis. The author is describing a good thing.
When the day comes that the author can fulfill his dream that will not be a good day. And AI videos will be even more dangerous then.
The author is right that AI video is being used to propagandize and rot minds at scale in a way sort of unthinkable a couple years ago. Short-form video content wasn't good for us beforehand, but any balance has been fully upturned.
(I think that's all intrinsic to genAI in a way the author doesn't want to confront, but there is a crisis)
Yeah but at least they are still (barely) discernible. Most young minds can still see the difference.
Wait a year and this may change.
Does this really need a (2025) clarification? That was 6 days ago
The author has a myopic view on Gen AI videos. They only focus on the most extreme examples and then hand wave cat videos as some crisis about reality. We had these exact same alarmists with previous technologies. Human's have an uncanny ability to adapt as their environment changes. Photoshop and 3D didn't destroy our brains and neither will this. Misinformation and the such have never needed AI to be effective. Those prey upon people's already existing biases and thoughts.
The time where this becomes normal and these alarmists become the fringe crazies ranting about the end of civilization cannot come fast enough.
I think long term the primary use case for AI generated video is people creating AI generated video for themselves to watch as consumers, rather than passing off AI generated work as their own.
I would not mind if I could go to ChatGPT and say: "Make me a 15 minute video about the history of gold mining in the Byzantine Empire", and it makes a mediocre soulless video I can half pay attention to while working.
If I see a 15 minute video on youtube about it and I find out after starting to watch it that it was AI generated, it sends me into a blind rage that makes me want to delete the internet, though.
Don't give me AI content unless I explicitly ask for it!
I agree that it feels like a bait and switch on YouTube. I expect to see user made videos there. Regardless of how much effort was put into it. I think a policy where these AI videos could be flagged as such would help a ton. Would not be an easy task though for sure.
Erase the barrier of entry for the unwashed masses, pardon my snob, and it will inevitably turn to shit.
There has to be a middle ground between insurmountable obstacles and "whip your phone out, push button to generate, and send".
> There's no easy solution to this crisis.
Put down the phone, close that youtube, tik tok or whatever tab.
Don't try to explain to your relatives which video is AI and which is not, explain to them that everything on the internet is bullshit and trolling, AI or not it does not matter it's all bullshit to sell ads.
Tell them they are better off watching TV, even Fox news.
When mass voting patterns change because they’re being influenced by AI it will affect you
Because these platforms did not massively affect voting patterns before AI generated videos were a thing?
Of course social media affected voting patterns
AI is going to turbo charge that and allow fewer people (those with the wealth to buy the compute) to sway more opinions
While I don't disagree with your point.
My main point is that trying to educate people to spot AI videos is pointless, in a matter of months, years the output will be impossible to discern from real videos.
The central problem is the platforms and the wild west around disinformation campaigns. The AI is just an accelerant and we were on fire already.
Thats really why governments are "racing" and backstopping the AI effort, its the most powerful propaganda tool ever invented.
You’re right, it is the most powerful propaganda tool.
However, most western governments have checks and balances to stop the abuse
Its billionaires and adversary states using the tools to subvert the west
> Tell them they are better off watching TV, even Fox news.
The good old original brain rot
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I always take January off from a variety of things...
This year I added in my phone which I keep across the room all day and haven't been taking when I leave the house.
I'd already gotten rid of social media, and blocked most news on my phone, and youtube... and have almost all notifications silent
And yet it's still amazing at just how much calmer the world feels with out the phone anywhere near me lol.
my favourite AI videos are the obviously fake ones like cats working menial jobs. everything else can go.
I didn't have time to read all the comments but here is Claude's summary for those interested:
```
1. "Good AI work exists when humans stay involved"
Quality AI videos exist but require human editing, scripting, acting - not letting AI do 99% of the work. Examples: NeuralViz, Igorrr's music videos.
2. "AI removes creativity, doesn't enable it"
AI handles creative decisions (color grading, cuts, tone) that were previously human craft. This strips creativity from the process rather than democratizing it.
3. "Execution is the creativity"
Ideas are worthless - execution is what matters. AI removes the execution process, which is where real creative work happens. "Using AI is like using an aimbot for music."
4. "AI enables creative expression for those locked out"
Counter-position: High-concept filmmaking was previously only for the privileged. AI lets people with vision but without technical skills/money/connections realize their ideas.
5. "Race to the bottom / slop flood"
AI's main "strength" is cranking out content at scale, flooding platforms with low-quality material faster than humans can filter. The internet is being overrun with unlabeled AI garbage.
6. "Trust erosion is the real harm"
Even "harmless" AI videos contribute to a world where nothing visual can be trusted. This affects everyone regardless of whether they consume AI content directly.
7. "Theft at scale"
Models exist only because of mass ingestion of creative work without consent. Using AI tools participates in this regardless of output quality.
8. "Platforms will adapt / people will learn"
Optimistic view: Recommendation algorithms will filter slop, people will recognize AI aesthetic as they did MS Paint edits, and good content will surface.
```
Personal take: all these points are true/valid/correct/accurate.
Controversial take: regardless, cat's outta the bag now and there's little we can do to stop it.
My personal take: All AI comments are harmful, including summaries. Now I have to update my hn comment summarizer prompt to ignore comments like this.
> Even the "harmless" AI videos contribute to a broader erosion of trust in visual media.
Frankly, the sooner we lose this trust the better. It's better to adjust our expectations than to stay vulnerable to manipulations
Some AI videos are harder and harder to distinguish from real ones. This terrifies me, since it's not that obvious AI fake that some average grandmother would fall for. In short videos, it is more difficult to distinguish AI fakes from real ones, because there is less time for some error or inconsistency to appear.
That Trump "Made in America" AI video making rounds last night was hilarious though.
okay. and?
tilt at this windmill all you like, but the genie is out of the bottle and there's nothing you can do about it but kvetch. you can't ban it, you can't regulate it, no more than the US government could rein in cryptography.
None of these companies are making money, so all we need to do is wait until the VC money runs out and it turns out there’s no market for any of this slop if the people creating it have to actually pay for it.
Did cryptography or Toy story 3D animation make every human need to question the reality of any electronic audio or video they encounter, no matter how realistic?
Did cryptography make me have to train my parents not to trust my own voice if I make strange asks like money?
There is a lot more to do for each other as a society to adjust to the new normal of AI, than just complain. Awareness and realignment are critical.
>cryptography
cryptography enables spies, terrorists, criminals, and dissidents to communicate over any network with absolute impunity. if it was feasible, every government in the world would have banned or "regulated" it, as some had attempted to. but in the end, they had conceded defeat, and the world had not ended.
>make every human need to question the reality of any electronic audio or video they encounter, no matter how realistic?
you left out "images", which we learned to question decades ago. likewise, audio and video could also be manipulated with readily available, completely unregulated tools, to produce quite believable results.
I disagree with your final assertion. Completely or nearly-completely undetectable reproductions of reality, and specific human voices with intonation and generative vocabulary, have not been widely available before now to anyone with the will.
Not sure how much of this is AI vs other techniques, though it's definitely AI as part of the toolset. But I think the result speaks for itself, it's absolutely impressive the work that has come out. I can only say, that the work that went into this video is definitely real, and I'm happy to see more of this, as opposed to "AI Slop" that we're mostly seeing so far.
https://youtu.be/SGJC4Hnz3m0?si=J_8gsXEx4-cL3Mc9
I wonder how Mark Hammill likes that they reused his likeness without permission. Seems emblematic of the larger problems with AI stealing whatever. Very ghoulish..
No idea... since Disney/Lucas already did this in Mandalorean, I'm sure he's open to the idea of it. In the specific instance, a non-commercial fan film, who knows.
The fact that Disney/Lucas and others have already done so with dead actors, I'm not sure that fan films are any worse.
And to make these harmful videos, they have ingested terabytes of uncredited video content and are causing a RAM shortage. What's the point?
> What's the point?
If AGI is achieved, some of the "they" at the cutting edge get to become feudal lords over massive AI empires that don't need you in them.
I'm not sure why this is downvoted because this is very literally the motivating reasoning, see: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoreactionary_movement
> manipulating vulnerable viewers
it always rubs me the wrong way when people infantilize the masses. The "vulnerable" masses already already partake in lots of harmful substances and practices (tobacco, alcohol, drugs, gambling/lotto), AI videos are just another potential pitfall people will need to learn to be wary of.
I think "learning that absolutely nothing you see with your own eyes can be trusted as reality despite looking completely real" is a valid problem and that we are all somewhat vulnerable there.
His rationale ignores all the legitimate and harmless use cases for AI. I've seen people make with the help of AI comedy/meme/comedy music videos and put them up on YouTube.
Making a hyperbolic statements stating that it is all harmful, because there are deceptive usages of AI is just asinine.
(Please forgive the typos - I'm on my phone and didn't want to put this comment through AI...)
This feels like a very strongly opinionated anti-AI echo chamber; while I absolutely recognize the destructive potential of AI video, I think the author is far off to the extreme end of completely ignoring every useful use case, and also, being somewhat naive.
For example, trying to explain to people in your group chat why an AI video is fake, when they are not attentive to this message or never showed any sign they might care, and then being disappointed when nobody listens. Imagine crashing into a party and explaining to everybody why the music sucks and the food is bad; you might be right, but did you consider they just want to have a good time, and they just don't care?
Since I've been to this rabbit hole myself, as I assume have many other readers with elderly parents, let me share my own experience. I've taken the time to show the older people in my family how AI works and how easy it is to create anything fake - including using their own appearance and voice! - and in the end of the day, they don't care. When forwarding a fake video, they say they know it's fake, but they still agree with the message, or liked the cute animals, so they forwarded it.
This is old people for you.
Now, I feel that during the post, the author has progressed from stating their own opinion on AI videos, to subtly claiming everybody hates AI videos and feel a physical sickness when seeing one, to the point that YouTube is scaring off viewers. This - while at the same time detailing how some people forward these videos like crazy. So which one is it?
Well, I for one don't hate AI video as much as I hate bad, sloppy videos, but to be honest these have been around for a long time, there's a massive surge of misinformation and just aweful - and completely organic - videos out there. AI videos do open the door for very creative and awesome creations, and I've seen plenty of those, and enjoyed them quite a bit.
This is just another tool. It's all up to you how you use it and what you create. Blaming the tool is just not going to work, just like blaming an instrument for the music being bad. The blame is with the composition, not the instrument.
There will be a time, very soon, where you will not be able to tell it's AI. In fact, this time is now, and I assure you that some AI content in the right hands is just not distinguishable from the real thing anymore. You may have even seen, or - God help us - even enjoyed an AI generated video, without realizing it, and this will happen more often as these tools mature.
This is just my 2 cents. I hope you will be able to finish you AI movie one day.
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There is one use case that is brilliant: comedy and meme videos.
Bigfoot comes to mind.
I completely disagree. Meme's are a basic form of psyop, and are being using by intelligence agencies, the military, old media and new media, to warp our brains, and make us biological robots. Comedy is used much the same.
It's the other way around. Psyops are just memes. You should view everything communicated to you as a meme - a complex, semantically rich packet of information that implies the content and the intent arising from the agenda and context of the communicator.
Everything from a simple wave hello by random passersby to pseudonymous manipulative poasting by nation state actors in service to secret purpose is a meme. Understand the actors or you will never be able understand the memes.
AI is, for now, a tool. It's a powerful tool, a potent force multiplier, but there is no agency there. AI labs and governments and big tech companies have agendas and the ways in which they manipulate the output of AI tools is a meme modifier, so you should understand the ways in which different entities want to change the output of the tools you use, in order to correct for anything that deviates from your own intent and understanding.
Psyops are just a particular configuration of meme scale within a culture; if your model of the world is correct and has reliable predictive power, you can correct for things that attempt to warp reality. Understanding how and why different entities warp their communications, whether it's intentional or endemic, is crucial to a reliable model.
It wasn't always this way. Comedy has deep, deep roots as a channel for speaking truth to power. Only in recent decades does it seem we've discovered that you can flip the parity on both aspects and run it in reverse.
Totally agree with your larger point, btw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)