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Comment by qoez | Hacker News Reader

I know the comments here are gonna be negative but I just find this so sick and awesome. Feels like it's finally close to the potential we knew was possible a few years ago. Feels like a pixar moment when CG tech showed a new realm of what was possible with toy story

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These videos are a very impressive engineering feat. There are a lot of uses for this capability that will be beneficial to society, and in the coming years people will come up with more good uses nobody today has thought of yet.

But clearly we also see some major downsides. We already have an epidemic of social media rotting people's minds, and everything about this capability is set to supercharge these trends. OpenAI addresses some of these concerns, but there's absolutely no reason to think that OpenAI will do anything other than what they perceive as whatever makes them the most money.

An analogy would be a company coming up with a way to synthesize and distribute infinite high-fructose corn syrup. There are positive aspects to cheaply making sweet tasting food, but we can also expect some very adverse effects on nutritional health. Sora looks like the equivalent for the mind.

There's an optimistic take on this fantastic new technology making the world a better place for all of us in the long run, after society and culture have adapted to it. It's going to be a bumpy ride before we get there.

I actually wonder if this will kill off the social apps and the bragging that happens. It will be flooded by people faking themselves doing the unimaginable.

This is also my thesis. The internet is going to be saturated with AI slop indiscernible from real content. Once it reaches a tipping point, there will no longer be much of a reason to consume the content at all. I think social networks that can authenticate video/photo/text content as human-created will be a major trend in a few years.

But then you’re creating an incentive for the AI slop to become so realistic it is indistinguishable from actual video.

Unless there some fundamental, technical way to distinguish the two, I wonder who would win?

there would need to be cameras that can cryptographically sign videos with trusted vendor keys, or perhaps there is some other solution.

This is what https://c2pa.org/ is for. I think some camera vendors already have support.

I regularly get AI movie recaps on my shorts and I just eat it up.

The very fact that I (or billions of others) waste time on shorts is an issue. I don't even play games anymore, it's just shorts. That is a concerning rewiring of the brain :/

Guess what I`m trying to say is that, there is a market out there. It's not pretty, but there certainly is.

Will keep trying to not watch these damn shorts...

there will be billions of people consuming the content

Depending on which internet you do mean, cause meta & insta are NOT THE Internet.

I have no clue if the reactions are real, but there are some videos online of people showing their grandparents gameplay from Grand Theft Auto games trying to convince them that it is real footage. The point of the videos is to laugh at their reactions where they question if it really happened, etc.

Maybe this will result in something similar, but it can affect more people who aren’t as wary.

Heh, fast forward a few years and nobody’s surprised anymore when someone falls for a video which is the result of two sentences long instruction.

Right now with kids, the current trend is to prank their parents using Gemini into thinking they let a homeless guy in their house

https://www.tiktok.com/discover/ai-homeless-people-in-my-hou...

Yes, I wonder if the content distribution networks that call themselves "social networks" can even survive something like this.

Of course, the ones focusing on the content can always editorialize the spam out. And in real social networks you ask your friends to stop making that much slop. But this can be finally the end of Facebook-like stuff.

> There are a lot of uses for this capability that will be beneficial to society

Please enlighten me. What are they? If my elderly grandma is on her deathbed and I have no way to get to see her before she passes, will she get more warmth and fond memories of me with a clip of my figure riding an AI generated dragon saying goodbye, or a handwritten letter?

What about a new electric guitar? Your grandma wouldn't want that on her deathbed so it's useless? Cmon man.

Still zero responses, eh? My example was charged but I clearly had a point: how does AI fill a void where meaning should be, over what has worked for centuries? How is it better than face to face, or a handwritten letter?

I don't think anyone is saying it is.

> There are a lot of uses for this capability that will be beneficial to society

My original question was asking for examples of this. Try to keep up, c'mon man

Suno allows me to rapidly flesh out demos and brainstorm. Played music my whole life manually. Easier for me to find what I'm looking for and while avoiding demo love.

> There are a lot of uses for this capability that will be beneficial to society

Are there? “A lot” of them? Please name a few that will be more beneficial than the very obvious detrimental uses like “making up life-destroying lies about your political opponents or groups of people you want to vilify” or “getting away with wrongdoing by convincing the judge a real video of yourself is a deepfake”.

That last one has already ben tried, by the way.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/apr/27/elon-musk...

It can generate funny videos of bald JD Vance and Harry Potter characters for TikTok. Which makes me wonder, what is the actual plan to make money off these models? Billions have been invested but the only thing they seem to be capable of is shitposting and manipulation. Where is the money going to come from?

I still feel this is limited by what it learned from. It looks cool but it also looks like something I'd dreamt or saw flicking through TV channels. Kind of like spam for the eyes.

It looks like it has been trained exclusively on car advertisement videos playing at airports.

No doubt they can create Hollywood quality clips if the tools are good enough to keep objects consistent, example, coming back to the same scene with same decor and also emotional consistency in actors

> keep objects consistent

I think this is not nearly as important as most people think it is.

In hollywood movies, everyone already knows about "continuity errors" - like when the water level of a glass goes up over time due to shots being spliced together. Sometimes shots with continuity errors are explicitly chosen by the editor because it had the most emotional resonance for the scene.

These types of things rarely affect our human subjective enjoyment of a video.

In terms of physics errors - current human CGI has physics errors. People just accept it and move on.

We know that superman can't lift an airplane because all of that weight on a single point of the fuselage doesn't hold, but like whatever.

It all depends on quantity and "quality" of the continuity errors. There's even a job for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_supervisor

Water level in a glass changing between shots is one thing, the protagonist’s face and clothes changing is another.

Well put. Honestly the actor part is mostly solved by now, the tricky part is depicting any kind of believable, persistent space across different shots. Based off of amateur outputs from places like https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/, at least!

This release is clearly capable of generating mind-blowingly realistic short clips, but I don't see any evidence that longer, multi-shot videos can be automated yet. With a professional's time and existing editing techniques, however...

Location consistency is important. Even something as simple and subtle as breaking the 180-rule [1] feels super uncanny to most audiences. Let alone changing the set the actor occupies, their wardrobe, props, etc.

There are lots of tools being built to address this, but they're still immature.

https://x.com/get_artcraft/status/1972723816087392450 (This is something we built and are open sourcing - still has a ways to go.)

ComfyUI has a lot of tools for this, they're just hard to use for most people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/180-degree_rule

I wonder if this stuff is trained on enough Hallmark movies that even AI actors will buy a hot coffee at a cafe and then proceed to flail the empty cup around like the humans do. Really takes me out of the scene every time - they can't even put water in the cup!?

People got used to James Bond actors changing between movies, but from scene to scene in the same movie would be a bit confusing.

No way man, this is why i loved Mr Robot, they actually payed a real expert and worked story around realism and not just made up gobbleygook that shuts my brain off entirely to its nonsense

Cool demo! But let’s pour one out for all the weird, janky, hand crafted videos that made early internet so fun. Anyone else still crave that kind of content?

I already get enough AI spam and scam videos on social media. I don’t need them to be better quality

Potential for what exactly? More of 30-sec slop?

Pixar moment for me means a novel techonology evoking a profound emotional response for the first time. This was not it.

The ability for the masses to create any video just by typing, among the other features, is not novel technology? Or is it just the lack of emotional response?

Yes, profound emotional response. There were cg animations before Pixar.

> Feels like a pixar moment when CG tech showed a new realm of what was possible with toy story

@qoez

> The first entirely AI generated film (with Sora or other AI video tools) to win an Oscar will be less than 5 years away.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42368951

This prediction of mine was only 10 months ago.

Imagine when we and if we get to 5 years.

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