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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

Generative AI is replacing writers, designers, actors, ... it is nothing like just a spell checker or Phtoshop.

Everyday, I see ads on YouTube with smooth-talking, real-looking AI-generated actors. Each one represents one less person that would have been paid.

There is no exact measure of correctness in design; one bad bit does not stop the show. The clients don't even want real art. Artists sometimes refer to commercial work as "selling out", referring to hanging their artistic integrity on the hook to make a living. Now "selling out" competes with AI which has no artistic integrity to hang on the hook, works 24 hours a day for peanuts and is astonishingly prolific.

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> Everyday, I see ads on YouTube with smooth-talking, real-looking AI-generated actors. Each one represents one less person that would have been paid.

Were AI-generated actors chosen over real actors, or was the alternative using some other low-cost method for an advertisement like just colorful words moving around on a screen? Or the ad not being made at all?

The existence of ads using generative AI "actors" doesn't prove that an actor wasn't paid. This is the same logical fallacy as claiming that one pirated copy of software represents a lost sale.

A) J. Crew and others are using AI models instead of real models. Retail modeling was steady pay-the-bills work for models and actors and is actively being replaced by AI image generators— sometimes trained on images of a particular model they’re no longer paying. Writers and stock photographers are in much worse shape.

B) Even in cases where AI actors are used where there wouldn’t have been actors before, the skillset is still devalued, and even that modest insulation for higher-end work is almost certainly temporary. Someone doing a worse version of what you do for 1% of your pay affects the market, and saving 99% is great incentive for companies to change their strategy until the worse version is good enough.

Yes, this. I recently used Midjourney to generate a super-convincing drone shot video for a presentation. The alternative would have been a stock photo.

Probably took me the same amount of time to generate a pleasing video as I would have spent browsing Shutterstock. Only difference is my money goes to one corporation instead of the other.

As far as the video is concerned, it adds a bit of a wow factor to get people interested, but ultimately it's the same old graphs and bullet points with words and numbers that matter. And those could just as well have been done on an overhead transparency in 1987.

It means that being a live actor is less of a differentiator. Of course great movie stars will remain, playing live, or animating computer characters, no matter. But simpler works like ads featuring a human now become more accessible.

Among other things, this will remove most entry-level jobs, making senior-level actors more rare and expensive.

I think this means that personal branding is going to get even more important than it already is (for example, people watching movies specifically because of Ryan Reynolds, or avoiding them because of Jared Leto)

It's really both effects happening at once. AI is just like the invention of the assembly line, or the explosion of mass produced consumer packaged goods starting from the first cotton gin. Automation allows a massive increase in quantity of goods, and even when quantity comes with tradeoffs to quality vs artisanally produced goods, they still come to dominate. Processed cheese or instant coffee is pretty objectively worse that the 'real' thing, but that didn't stop cheap mass production still made those products compelling for many million/billion of consumers.

You can still find a tailor who will hand make you a bespoke clothing or sew your own clothes yourself (as even the boomer generation often did growing up), but tailored clothing is a tiny fraction of the amount of clothing in circulation. Do tailors and artisanal cheese makers still exist? Yep, they are not extinct. But they are hugely marginalized compared to machine-made alternatives.

the crazy thing is, I can get locally-roasted beans that are single-origin microlots from all over the world, in part because of the coffee boom that was a result of instant coffee and the desire for better.

I’m not sure if your statements are actually correct. What you are implying is that there are fewer tailors today than in the past. And I’m not sure if that holds. I’m not even sure that their relative position on the income ladder has deteriorated.

In the time before automated T-shirt production, almost nobody bought clothes. They were just far too expensive. There were of course people that did. And those paid extremely well. But those kinds of tailors still exist!

At the same time, I do think that the comparison is less than apt. And a better one would be comparing it to the fate of lectors and copywriters. A significant amount of those have been superseded by spellchecking tools or will be by AI “reformulations”.

Yet even here I’m not sure if those jobs have seen a significant decline in absolute numbers. Even while their relative frequency kind if obviously tends to 0

It is likewise a fallacy that no pirated copy of software represents a lost sale.

Use of AI is exerting a downward pressure on artists and designers to get paid.

It's not true that AI is only servicing the pent-up demand for that kind of work from clients who would never have paid people to do it.

I agree with your sentiment. But where I struggle is: to what degree do each of those ads “represent one less person who would have been paid” versus those that represent one additional person who would not be able to afford to advertise in that medium.

Of course that line of reasoning reduces similar to other automation / minimum wage / etc discussions

It reminds me of the piracy lawsuits that claimed damages as if every download would have been a sale

The extreme opposite idea that no unlicensed use of software is a lost sale is likewise a fantasy.

Obviously there's some mix of the two, but given then I've seen AI used (poorly) for both TV commercials (in expensive time slots) and billboards (I think expensive as well, but I don't really know) where you know they can afford to pay "real people" to do it, there's definitely a noticeable amount of real replacement.

YouTube has the lowest quality ads of any online platform I use by several orders of magnitude. AI being used for belly fat and erectile dysfunction ads is not exactly good for its creative reputation

Local governments in BR have already made ads using generative AI that were shown during prime time TV hours[1].

You can argue that is a bad thing (local designers/content producers/actors/etc lost revenue, while the money was sent to $BigTech) or that this was a good thing (lower cost to make ad means taxpayer money saved, paying $BigTech has lower chance of corruption vs hiring local marketing firm - which is very common here).

[1]https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/tecnologia/video-feito-com-inte...

I have no doubt there will be AI advertising. I bet it’s the primary untapped revenue stream. My argument is that it will be associated with cheap, untrustworthy products over time, even if it’s possible to spend more money and get better AI ads. Same thing as social/search ads.

There's a difference between taking one thing and putting something else in it's spot, and truly REPLACING something. Yes, some ads have AI generated actors. You know because you can tell because they're "not quite right", rather than focusing on the message of the ad. Noticing AI in ads turns more people off than on, so AI ads are treated by a lot of people as an easy "avoid this company" signal. So those AI ads are in lieu of real actors, but not actually replacing them because people don't want to watch AI actors in an ad. The ad ceases to be effective. The "replacement" failed.

Realistic video generation only became a thing in the last year or so.

How long do you suppose it will be before we can't tell the difference between it and reality anymore? A few years at the most. Then what?

I don't think AI will ever be able to compete with real actors, not in a meaningful way.

Animated films have competed for box office dollars since basically the dawn of cinema. Animated characters have fan followings.

Just wait; the stuff is coming. Ultra-realistic full-length feature films with compelling AI characters that are not consistent from beginning to end, but appear in multiple features.

The public will swallow it up.

Animation is drawn by humans, not AI. That's why it sells, it still has heart and emotion in it.

“ Everyday, I see ads on YouTube with smooth-talking, real-looking AI-generated actors. Each one represents one less person that would have been paid.”

The thing is that they would not have paid for the actor anyway. It’s that having an “actor” and special effects for your ads cost nothing, so why not?

The quality of their ads went up, the money changing hands did not change.

> Generative AI is replacing writers, designers, actors, ... it is nothing like just a spell checker or Phtoshop.

For cheap stuff it’s true. However, nobody wants to watch or listen generated content and this will wear thin aside from the niche it’ll take hold of and permanently replace humans.

> Each one represents one less person that would have been paid

or equally, one more advert which (let's say rightly) wouldn't have been made.

seriously though, automation allows us to do things that would not have been possible or affordable before. some of these are good things.

Anecdata: I know writers, editors, and white collar non-tech workers of all kinds who use AI daily and like it.

When GPT3.5 first landed a lifelong writer/editor saw a steep decrease in jobs. A year later the jobs changed to "can you edit this AI generated text to sound human", and now they continue to work doing normal editing for human or human-ish writing while declining the slop-correction deluge because it is terrible work.

I can't help but see the software analogy for this.

And as people get more used to the patterns of AI it’s getting called out more and more.

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