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Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

> Nearly all the movies that go to theaters aren't "meaningful art".

No but what they are is expensive, flashy, impressive productions which is the only reason people are comfortable paying upwards of $25 each to see them. And there's no way in the world that an AI movie is going to come anywhere close to the production quality of Godzilla vs Kong.

And like, yeah, their example videos at the posted link are impressive. How many attempts did those take? Are they going to be able to maintain continuity of a character's appearance from one shot to the next to form a coherent visual structure? How long can these shots be before the AI starts tripping over itself and forgetting how arms work?

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My suspicion is that, if AI moviemaking actually becomes common, there will be a younger generation of folks who will grow up on it and become used to its peculiarities.

We will be the old ones going "back in my day, you had to actually shoot movies on a camera! And background objects had perfect continuity!" And they will roll their eyes at us and retort that nobody pays attention to background objects anyway.

Shades of autotune.

But I have faith that people will notice the difference. The current generation may not care about autotune, but that doesn't mean another generation won't. People rediscover differences and decide what matters to them.

When superhero movies were new, almost everyone loved them. I was entranced. After being saturated with them... the audience dropped off. We started being dissatisfied with witty one-liners and meaningless action. Can you still sell a super-hero movie? Sure. Like all action movies, they internationalize well. But the domestic audiences are declining. It makes me think of Westerns. At one time, they were a hollywood staple. Now, not so much. Yes, they still make them, and a good one will do fine, but a mediocre one... maybe not.

> The current generation may not care about autotune

The previous generation's care about autotune was also flatly wrong. Autotune was used by a few prominent artists then and is more widely used now as an aesthetic choice, for the sound it creates which is distinctly not natural singing, as the effect was performed by running the autotune plugin at a much, much higher setting than was expected in regular use.

Tone correction occurs in basically every song production now, and you never hear it. Hell, newer tech can perform tone correction on the fly for live performances, and the actual singing being done on the stage can be swapped out on the fly with pre-recorded singing to let the performer rest, or even just lipsync the entire thing but still allow the performer to jump in when they want to and ad-lib or tweak delivery of certain parts of songs.

The autotune controversey was just wrong from end to end. When audio engineers don't want you to hear them correcting vocals, you don't hear it. I'd be willing to buy another engineer being able to hear tone correction in music, but if a layman says they do, sorry but I assume that person's full of shit.

There are a bunch of videos (e.g., Wings of Pegasus) on youtube that cover pitch-correction, and there are plenty of examples you can hear.

My suspicion (and fear) is that poor members of the younger generation are going to grow up reading AI kids books and watching AI TV shows, and playing AI generated iPad games, and be less literate, less experienced, less rounded and interesting people as a result. This is already kind of a problem where under-served kids access less, experience less, and are able to do less and I see AI doing nothing but absolutely slamming the gas on that process and causing already under-served kids to be even more under-served. That human created art will be yet another luxury only afforded to the children of the advantaged classes.

And maybe they won't have a problem with it, like you say, maybe that'll just be their "normal" but that seems so fucking sad to me.

If poor kids of the future grow up reading AI book-slop instead of classic books that's going to be due to complicated factors of culture and habit rather than economic necessity. Most of the traditional Western canon of "great literature" is already in the public domain, available for free.

https://standardebooks.org/

For newer in-copyright works, public libraries commonly offer Libby:

https://company.overdrive.com/2023/01/25/public-libraries-le...

It gives anyone with a participating-system library card free electronic access to books and magazines. And it's unlikely that librarians themselves will be adding AI book-slop to the title selection.

> If poor kids of the future grow up reading AI book-slop instead of classic books that's going to be due to complicated factors of culture and habit rather than economic necessity.

To be clear, I'm not talking great literature. I'm talking Clifford the Big Red Dog type stuff.

That said I still have a number of problems with this assertion:

It will absolutely be down, in part, to economic necessity. Amazon's platform is already dealing with a glut of shitty AI books and the key way they get ahead in rankings is being cheaper than human-created alternatives, and they can be cheaper because having an AI slop something out is way less expensive and time consuming than someone writing/illustrating a kid's book.

Moreover, our economy runs on the notion that the easier something is to do, the more likely people are to do it at scale, and vetting your kids media is hard and annoying as a parent at the best of times: if you come home from working your second job and are ready to collapse, are you going to prepare a nutritious meal for your child and set them up with insightful, interesting media? No you're going to heat up chicken nuggets and put them in front of the iPad. That's not good, but like, what do you expect poor parents to do here? Invent more time in the day so they can better raise their child while they're in the societal fuckbarrel?

And yes, before it goes into that direction, yes this is all down to the choices of these parents, both to have children they don't really have the resources to raise (though recent changes to US law complicates that choice but that's a whole other can of worms) and them not taking the time to do it and all the rest, yes, all of these parents could and arguably should be making better choices. But ALSO, I do not see how it is a positive for our society to let people be fucked over like this constantly. What do we GAIN from this? As far as I can tell, the only people who gain anything from the exhausted-lower-classes-industrial-complex are the same rich assholes who gain from everything else being terrible, and I dunno, maybe they could just take one for the team? Maybe we build a society focused on helping people instead of giving the rich yet another leg up they don't need?

...if you come home from working your second job and are ready to collapse, are you going to prepare a nutritious meal for your child and set them up with insightful, interesting media? No you're going to heat up chicken nuggets and put them in front of the iPad.

This is what I mean by "complicated factors of culture and habit." An iPad costs more than an assortment of paper books. Frozen chicken nuggets cost more than basic ingredients. But the iPad and nuggets are faster and more convenient. The kids-get-iPad-and-nuggets habit is popular with middle-income American families too, not just poor families where parents work two jobs. The economic explanation is too reductive.

I'm not trying to say that this is the "fault" of parents or of anyone in particular. When the iPad came out I doubt that Apple engineers or executives thought "now parents can spend less time engaging with children" or that parents thought of it as "a way to keep the kids quiet while I browse Pinterest" but here we are.

I mean, that's the thing though. We now have had kids parked in front of iPads for a good amount of time, along with other technical innovations like social media, and we have documented scientific proof of the harms they do to children's self-esteem, focus and mental acuity. I don't think the designers of the iPad or even the engineers at Facebook set out to cause these issues, but. they. did. And now we have a fresh technology in the form of AI that whole swathes of "entrepreneurs" are ready to toss into more children's brains as these previous ones were.

Is it too much to ask for a hint of caution with regard to our most vulnerable populations brains?

As a former iPad (OS) designer, and former Facebook feed engineer, of course we're upset about what happened. Most of us fought valiantly, with awareness, against what became the dark forces and antisocial antipatterns. But the promo-culture performance incentive system instituted by HR being based on growth metrics at all costs made all of us powerless to stop it. Do something good for the world, miss your promo or get fired.

Circa 2020 a huge number of fed-up good-intentioned engineers and designers quit. It had no effect, at all.

I'm genuinely sorry that happened to you. That had to be an absolute nightmare of an experience.

To be clear: I am not saying that engineers need to be better at preventing this stuff. I am saying regulators need to demand that companies be careful, and study how this stuff is going to affect people, not just yeet it into the culture and see what happens.

I was there (Apple) at the time. Absolutely did NOT expect this thing that Steve thought was a neat way to see the whole NYT front page at once, was going to be the defining MacGuffin of an entire generation of children.

There's already conversation in AI art about how "Y'all will miss all these weird AI glitches when they're gone!" It will become the new tape hiss. Something people will nostalgically simulate in later media that doesn't have it naturally.

Looking forward to watching this post age like milk.

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