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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

I found the one about the people in Lagos pretty funny. The camera does about a 360deg spin in total, in the beginning there are markets, then suddenly there are skyscrapers in the background. So there's only very limited object permanence.

> A beautiful homemade video showing the people of Lagos, Nigeria in the year 2056. Shot with a mobile phone camera.

> https://cdn.openai.com/sora/videos/lagos.mp4

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Also the women in red next to the people is very tiny and the market stall is also a mini market stall, and the table is made out of a bike.

For everyone that's carrying on about this thing understanding physics and has a model of the world...it's an odd world.

The thing is -- over time I'm not sure people will care. People will adapt to these kinds of strange things and normalize them -- as long as they are compelling visually. The thing about that scene is it looks weird only if you think about it. Otherwise it seems like the sort of pan you would see in some 30 second commercial for coffee or something.

If anything it tells a story: going from market, to people talking as friends, to the giant world (of Lagos).

I'm not so sure.

My instagram feed is full of AI people, I can tell with pretty good accuracy when the image is "AI" or real, the lighting and just the framing and the scene itself, just something is off.

I think a similar thing will happen here, over the next few months we'll adapt to these videos and the problems will become very obvious.

When I first looked at the videos I was quite impressed, but I looked again and I saw a bunch of werid stuff going on. I think our brains are just wired to save energy, and accepting whatever we see on a video or an image as being good enough is pretty efficient / low risk thing.

Agreed, at first glance of the woman walking I was so focused on how well they were animating that the surreal scene went unnoticed. Once I'd stopped noticing the surreal scene, I started picking up on weird motion in the walk too.

Where I think this will get used a lot is in advertising. Short videos, lots going on, see it once and it's gone, no time to inspect. Lady laughing with salad pans to a beach scene, here's a product, buy and be as happy as salad lady.

This will be classified unconsciously as cheap and uninteresting by the brain real quick. It'll have its place in the tides of cheap content, but if overall quality was to be overlooked that easily, producers would never have increased production budget that much, ever, just for the sake of it.

In the video of the girl walking down the Tokyo city street, she's wearing a leather jacket. After the closeup on her face they pull back and the leather jacket has hilariously large lapels that weren't there before.

Object permanence (just from images/video) seems like a particularly hard problem for a super-smart prediction engine. Is it the old thing, or a new thing?

There are also perspective issues: the relative sizes of the foreground (the people sitting at the café) and the background (the market) are incoherent. Same with the "snowy Tokyo with cherry blossoms" video.

Though I'm not sure your point here -- outside of America -- in Asia and Africa -- these sorts of markets mixed in with skyscrapers are perfectly normal. There is nothing unusual about it.

Yeah, some of the continuity errors in that one feel horrifying.

> then suddenly there are skyscrapers in the background. So there's only very limited object permanence.

Ah but you see that is artistic liberty. The director wanted it shot that way.

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