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Comment by MarkusQ | Hacker News Reader

Fresh plums right off the tree taste significantly better than the ones you can get in the produce isle, which are in turn better than canned, which are themselves still better than re-hydrated prunes.

In scaling out computation to the masses, we went from locally grown plums that took a lot of work and were only available to a small number of people that had a plum tree or knew someone that had one, to building near magical prune-cornucopia devices that everyone could carry around in their pockets, giving them an effectively unlimited supply of prunes.

LLMs re-hydrate these for us, making them significantly more palatable; if you're used to gnawing dried fruit, they seem amazing.

But there's still a lot of work to be done.

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Perhaps, but we still failed and not at personal computing, nor just semantic web, but computing and programming in general. The failure is between the original intent (computing was originally more or less AI) along with theory and actual result with every software project turning into unsustainable infinite regress. Things likely broke around ALGOL.

Also LLMs are failing too, for different reasons, but IMO unlikely AI in general will— it will correct a 60 years or so failure in industrial computer science.

> we still failed [at] semantic web

The most reprehensible knowledge-search-and-communication failure of all.

We gave people monetisation of drek instead. Then asked them to use it for education. Then trained bot systems on it. Then said that even those answers must be made to confirm to transient propagandists.

> LLMs re-hydrate these for us, making them significantly more palatable; if you're used to gnawing dried fruit, they seem amazing.

Except sometimes you're expecting a fresh plum, and then you bite into a fig, or an apple, or a banana, or a stick.

But can it beat William Carlos Williams?

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

I really don't like this analogy, and I really don't like the premise of this article.

Writing software is only so scalable. It doesn't matter all of the shortcuts we take, like Electron and JavaScript. There are only so many engineers with so much time, and there are abundantly many problems to solve.

A better analogy would be to look at what's happening to AI images and video. Those have 10,000x'd the fundamental cost savings, time savings, and personnel requirements. It's an industrialization moment. As a filmmaker who has made several photons-on-glass films, this is a game changer and lifts the entire creative industry to a level where individuals can outdo Pixar.

That is the lens with which to look at what AI will do to software. We're going from hand-carving stone wheels to the Model T.

This is all just getting started. We've barely used what the models of today offer us.

Totally agree with the core of your position. But the two perspectives are complementary, and perhaps even more deeply linked.

Initial attempts to alleviate any shortage are likely to result in a decrease in quality; initial attempts to improve quality are likely to reduce variability and thus variety. My point (and my reading of the article) is that we're at the stage where we've figured out how to turn out enough Hostess Twinkies that "let them eat cake!" is a viable option, and starvation is being driven back.

This is definite progress, but also highlights previous failures and future work.

This is a massive cope. AI image/video slop is still slop. Yes it's getting better, but it's still better .. slop. Unless radical new breakthroughs are made, the current LLM paradigm will not outdo Pixar or any other apex of human creativity. It'll always be instantly recognizable, as slop.

And if we allow it to take over society, we'll end up with a society that's also slop. Netflixification/marvelization only much much worse..

He didn't say LLMs can outdo Pixar. That's ridiculous and they are nowhere near that level.

He said that LLMs are at the point "where individuals can outdo Pixar." And that's very possible. The output of a talented individual with the assistance of AI is vastly better than the output of AI alone.

This is a very reductionist take that's to be expected from a software engineer but most definitely something that an artistic person would never utter. The creative process doesn't scale in the way that software engineers imagine. Coming up with genuine new ideas or magical moments of "synthesis" doesn't emerge from throwing lots of commodified tools together and calling it a day.

So far we haven't seen a single iota of creative art coming out of LLMs. Zip. Nada. It's all smoke and mirrors in that we get better and better veneers on top of bad copies of actual art that humans have previously created. The veneers are improving but there is no substance underneath. It's still slop. I don't want to live in a society that doesn't care about substance but instead worships the veneer. Yet this is the place that the current LLMs are taking us.

I'm not talking about LLMs. I'm talking about image and video diffusion models.

Editors, VFX artists, and studios big and small are already using the tools.

I'm in this industry. They're widely deployed as we speak.

Improving every year, it approaches the asymptote of being almost any good.

> This is a massive cope. AI image/video slop is still slop.

Slop content is slop content, AI or not. You don't need an AI to make slop. We've always had films like "The Room", it's just that the financial and time constraints put an upper bound on how much slop was created. AI makes creation more accessible. You've got Reddit for image and video now, essentially.

You are biased by media narratives and slop content you're encountering on social media. I work in the industry and professionals are using AI models in ways you aren't even aware of. I guarantee you can't identify all AI content.

> And if we allow it to take over society, we'll end up with a society that's also slop. Netflixification/marvelization only much much worse..

Auteurs and artists aren't going anywhere. These tools enable the 50,000 annual film students to sustainably find autonomy, where previously there wasn't any.

Scaling the production of almost good things by individuals that used to take just as many people and just as big a budget as a really nice major feature film is certainly full of use cases for education, training, portfolios of work, and pitches of the content.

The analogy doesn't make any sense, computers today are better by any conceivable metric than computers before.

The computers, yes. The experience of using them, no.

There is a joy to having a tool that lets you do what you never could before that has been buried along the way in layers of petty annoyances and digital micro aggressions. As you say, computers today are better by so many metrics—including, unfortunately, their ability to tracks us, sell us things we neither need nor want, outrage and distract us.

Or slop with some plum aroma added. Seems like a good analogy.

Extruded synthetic plum substrate

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