What's the benefit of this? Curious if anyone has a solid viewpoint steelmanning any positives they can think of.
(personal rant) I've been in a mild existential crisis since I read Amusing Ourselves to Death. Can one form of entertainment really be more well-regarded than another? Is fine art fundamentally different from pop art? Are there 'finer' pop cultures amongst all pop cultures? I do still think reading The Song of Ice and Fire is more meaningful than scrolling TikTok. The crisis part is that I can't justify this belief with words.
1: Reading a long book demands focus on a longer timespan than scrolling TikTok, and with focusing on a single thing for a long time, we get a sense of accomplishment. I don’t know how to justify this as valuable, but for some reason I feel that it is.
2: The Song of Ice and Fire (and GoT) were consumed by a huge proportion of people, and you now have this in common with them. This act of consuming entertainment also grants you a way to connect with other humans - you have so much to talk about. Contrast that with an algorithmic feed, which is unique just for you - no one else sees your exact feed. Of course, there are tons of people that see some of the same snippets of content, if their interests overlap with yours, but it’s not nearly as universal as having read the same series of books (and there’s much less to talk about when you’ve seen the same 17-second short form video than when you’ve both invested dozens of hours in reading the same series of books).
I don’t think these thoughts fully justify your belief, but hopefully they provide some support to it.
Remember when you were taught to extract the "moral of the story" in school? That was the whole point. That form of communication is what makes art valuable and it definitely is what makes some art more valuable than others.
https://x.com/theo/status/1973167911419412985 (Music video with Sam Altman as Skibidi Toilet)
This is pretty fun.
These keep getting wilder and wilder:
https://x.com/MatthewBerman/status/1973115097339011225 (Kinda gross)
https://x.com/cloud11665/status/1973115723309515092 (Japanese)
It can do cartoons:
https://x.com/venturetwins/status/1973158674899280077 (Rick and Morty)
https://x.com/TheJasonRink/status/1973163915476611314 (Family Guy)
https://x.com/cfryant/status/1973162037305024650 (Family Guy Horror)
Incredibly convincing anime:
https://x.com/fofrAI/status/1973164820863262748
Minecraft meets GTA:
https://x.com/Angaisb_/status/1973160337752121435
Super Mario in the real world:
https://x.com/skirano/status/1973184329619743217
Super solid looking movie trailer:
https://x.com/jasonjoyride/status/1973142061114335447
Damn:
I really want to call this the "Suno moment" for AI video.
Prior to Sora 2, you had to prompt a lot of clips which you then edited together. You had to create a starting frame, maybe do some editing. Roll the dice a lot.
Veo 3 gave us the first glimpse of a complex ensemble clip with multiple actors talking in a typically social media or standup comedy fashion. But it was still just an ingredient for some larger composition, and it was missing a lot of the soul that a story with a beginning-middle-end structure has.
Sora 2 has some internal storytelling mechanic. I'm not sure what they did, but it understands narrative structure and puts videos into an arc. You see the characters change over the course of the video. They're not just animated Harry Potter portraits. They're alive. And they do things that change the world they're in.
Furthermore, Sora 2 has really good "taste" and "aesthetic", if that makes sense. It has good understanding of shot types, good compositions, good editing, good audio. It does music. It brings together so much complexity in choice and arranges them into a very good final output.
I'm actually quite blown away by this.
Just like Suno made AI music simple and easy - it handled lyrics, chorus, beat, medley, etc. - this model handles all of the ingredients of a 10 second video. It's stunning.
Sora 2 isn't the highest quality video model. It doesn't have the best animation. But it's the best content machine I've ever seen.
Now these things aren't new, fake videos / images go back decades if not a century. But they took some effort to make, whereas this technology makes it possible for it to take less effort than it took for me to write this comment.
Of course, it's always my choice; if I stop visiting Reddit and touch grass instead it really won't affect me directly.
Everything has a relevancy and penetration decay curve.
The funny thing is, I think this law applied in the classical era (1950's, 1990's, etc.), we just weren't creating at scale to realize it.
Maybe it's just one dominant variable: novelty. I'd be curious to see how we might model this.
> https://x.com/jasonjoyride/status/1973142061114335447
This isn't AI generated. They're a production company and they made a short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGLoTjxd-Ss
>> How do you get HD renders? im getting like super low res shit
>It's because this isn't AI
I haven't watched the film, but the premise is something about an orbiting space station. I could easily imagine scenes featuring rapid day/night cycles like astronauts experience on the ISS.
I prefer classics myself, but this is exactly why booktok works (and why Fourth Wing blew up the way it did).
It depends on what you want to get out of art.
Do you want human connection and shared cultural context so you can talk to real friends about things? Do you want virtual friends and connections? Do you want ideas to inspire you to create your own things, or change how you think?
Do you just want to distract yourself from how hungry you are, how much inequality is in the world, and how depressed you are, letting death draw closer?
All of those are valid things, and different art is more meaningful for different goals.
Scrolling tiktok fits into the last one, it's burning time to avoid thinking about things, moving you closer to death. Song of Ice and Fire builds a large coherent world, has bits of morality and human relation, and all of those can spark ideas and be related to your own human suffering, so it indeed feels more valid to me as a way to reflect and change how you think.
My personal process of grappling with this led to a focus on agency and intentionality when defining the difference.
Scrolling TikTok, much as scrolling Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or YouTube's recommendations would be, is an entirely passive activity. You sit back and you allow the Content to be fed to you.
Reading a book requires at least a bare minimum of selecting a book to read, choosing to finish that book, and intentionally choosing at any given time to spend your time reading that particular book. Similar things can be said for selecting movies. The important part in my mind is that you chose it, rather than letting someone or something else pick what they think you'll like.
The process of picking things yourself allows you to develop taste and understand what you like and dislike, mentally offloading that to someone or something else removes the opportunity to develop that capability.
I think there's arguments to be made against this view: how can you decide what to read or watch without getting recommendations or opinions? If you only engage with popular media isn't it just a slower process of the same issue?
But I do believe there is a fundamental difference between passivity and active evaluation of engagement as mental processes, and it's the exact reason why it is harder to do than scrolling is.
Compare https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesesucht (use Google Translate).
The gist of your linked article is that they were opposed to reading because they believed that reading distracted people from labor, which they considered undisciplined and immoral. Of course there also seems to be a healthy dose of misogyny associated with it:
> Poeckel's statement that women should acquire a certain amount of knowledge, but not too much, because then they could become a "burden on human society," is representative of many other texts in which reading regulations played a central role.
Then once you get to the progression of books > comics > movies > Youtube > TikTok (did I miss any?), you can observe a steady decrease in the amount of cognitive effort required to engage with the medium and a reduction in attention spans. Reduced attention span is a legitimate concern and it's only getting worse as time goes on (ask teachers).
I actually enjoy TikTok in moderation these days but I worry about people who struggle to engage with anything but TikTok, it's like a generational ratchet that only seems to go one way, towards shorter and shorter attention spans.
Maybe someone can make the argument that this won't actually matter, but it's incorrect to say that things haven't changed in observable and measurable ways, and that people are just complaining about nothing.
My S.O. probably spends 3 hours a day on TikTok/Reels and I seriously doubt they could remember even 10% of what they saw in that time. It's like a part of their brain turns off while scrolling.
What is wrong is instead the routine consumption of art created by others in a stupor to rest from the drudgery of daily work.
Create art, don’t waste your life consuming.
But TV and Social Media have their incentives twisted. It's just about ads. They don't really care what you are seeing as long as you are seeing as many ads as possible. The joke about TV was that a valid description of it was advertisements with a little bit of entertainment sprinkled in throughout.
I'm not saying that people haven't been able to use these platforms to build anything meaningful, but that the incentives and the purpose of these platforms are not to entertain, but to keep you glued to the feed for as long as possible to see as many ads as possible (which is why I think "rage bait" is so common).
On the other hand, reading a book is like getting on a boat. You've made certain preparations for acquiring the vessel and set course through unknown territory. A journey away from the shore and away from what's immediately at hand, which can also turn out to be a journey towards self-discovery.
Here's one attempt; it's art versus content. Tiktok is content; it's people recording a video, sometimes in one take and publishing, sometimes in multiple takes with some editing etc, sometimes fully professional ones. But overall, it's cheap, rapidly produced content for cheap, rapid consumption. ASoIaF was a labor of years to produce not just a series of books, but a world, a rich history, and later on a multi-media enterprise that involved and employed millions of people, then entertained and excited hundreds of millions of people over the years.
AI is lowering the barrier to entry even more, with anyone able to just punch in some words - less even than this comment - and produce something. For someone to consume. Maybe one in a billion will be remembered or still popular in a decade (like how some of these cheap videos are still popular / remembered / quoted, think vines / memes). But the ratio just keeps getting worse.
ASoIaF to a TikTok video is like... ASoIaF to a tweet.
I am not sure how important fiction novels are (compared to reading non-fiction books or biographies who tell true facts about the real world), but I would say they broaden the horizon of the reader? And there is a selection effect in that “literature” was done by pretty smart people.
Scrolling TikTok is often described as mindless and with people not describing later what videos they watched. In general short form content (TikTok, Instagram, X/Tweets) seem to be much more superficial than long form content (eg this hn discussion board).
> "[...] in its place, he identifies a different kind of crisis. Not the crisis of attention, but the crisis of interest."
Our attention in fact, has never been as fully absorbed as is today's. In place of books and architecture (as in the film), our attention has shifted towards more rapid forms. Yet in terms of hours spent, our 'attention' towards them has massively increased.
Is the crisis we're feeling then one of purported inattention, or a general loss of interest and satisfaction from our surrounds? What has spurred this crisis? Gabriel and Casey's conversation ends:
> "What about everyday life? Are we losing interest in everyday life?"
The film offers an hopeful answer.
Or perhaps Aristotle’s Poetics - pop culture has value because it is mimetic, and AI generated pop culture is no less a mirror, just one which produces reflections of every moment, all the time - but rather than the grand catharsis we might experience in a work of literature with well wrought characters with whom we empathise, we find the void staring into us as we do into it. Hollow art for hollow men.
Like it or not, the void is culture, and has value because it reflects us, albeit through a glass, darkly.
I did this, found two things I did for fun, both consuming significant blocks of time. The one that felt useless left not real impact. I want to do more of it, but after spending hours on it, I'm no different than I was before (other than perhaps a bit more skilled at the form of entertainment).
The other form, which was the same thing from an outside perspective (for example, my parents would see them as the same) left me different. It led to me building new goals, reevaluating things happening around me, spend more time thinking about where I'll be in 10/20 years. It led to me walking an hour a day and to start jogging some to build my endurance, despite the form of entertainment being unrelated to physical activity. I don't think this is innately a property of one entertainment form over another, but more about my personal relationship to entertainment.
Using this, how do 'poorly regarded' entertainment impact those engaging in it, compared to 'well regarded' entertainment? Are their lives better for it?
Say that somebody writes to make certain ideas more visible. For example, somebody wants people to buy the idea that amusing oneself to death is what we do (the book you mentioned). Somebody else perhaps has found that we are chronically depressed and cynic, when instead we should be thinking that a dead death itself is a fine trophy to hang on the wall during the march of progress[^1].
You can a) decide that you are set on your ways, thus entertainment should be pure and removed enough from reality so it doesn't mess with your deeply held beliefs and not read any of those books. or b) run the risk and read the thing with an open mind.
A lot of people are in the a) camp. Those who are in the b) camp would still like to be entertained a little.
[^1] Yours truly. I do that in fiction. https://www.ouzu.im/
Most short form content would probably score low. It’s short, for one, and it tends to be repetitive and lack anything like plot complexity or nuance.
Of course it’s not like trite pop is new. Way back in the dime store novel days it was called pulp. TikTok is just one of the latest iterations. People have always consumed dumb filler.
Reading thousand page novels requires actively engaging with the material as you grow your vocabulary, and explore new ideas.
Scrolling TikTok on the other hand is a passive process. Could you recall even a quarter of all the videos you see on your TikTok feed in a single day? I would doubt it.
is a trash derivative "we have Lords of the Rings at home" wannabe, completely void of joy and feels like it's written by an angsty edgy teenager who hates the world and has learned about medieval history for the first time and wanted to add zombies and dragons, the most original fantasy tropes.
I would honestly and unsarcastically take a day of scrolling through TikTok over sitting through 1 chapter of ASoIaF.
And apparently lately the author feels so too.
I think that it reduces down to "reward without effort is bad for you" - in so many different contexts in life, especially entertainment.
This is a no-brainer question. For an extreme example: CSAM is a form of entertainment for some people.
So there isn't necessarily some huge crisis that you need to justify: in some ways reality just is (and this includes subjective reality;).
Say if you ask why do the laws of physics conserve energy locally, you can actually argue that if it were otherwise actually life would be extremely more unlikely, as that tends to increase instability in various systems (both energy divergence and going to 0 makes life unlikely); but still I'm almost certain you could conceive of forms of life in non-energy-conservative systems (something like Conway's Game of Life, but maybe with more advance rules if you prefer). So while it makes sense that the physics in our universe is approximately locally conservative (maybe not exactly in GR?), in totality it's just kind of a brute fact, an experimental observation. Our theories help us devise say better experiments to test e. conservation, and in a way map out the landscape of consistent physical laws. But they don't tell you which realization of consistent or admissible laws you'll find yourself in.
Other way to phrase it, what you feel is in a way real. So if you feel in some fundamental way better reading A than B, then that simply reflects a property of reality and needs no further explanation. The only problem is that in some cases our judgement can be distorted, like by substances or maybe overwhelming blinding desires (that fail to reflect fundamental experiences) or by limitations of our memory, etc.. But if we assume this isn't the case (i.e. some pathological reason for your preference), then your feeling is valid irrespective of a wordy justification. I think some things really are subjective, but also believe in a fundamental and very complex way subjectivity is actually as objective as anything else. I think the fact that one experience is actually (with some important caveats and necessary context) better than another in what might be called essentially an objective sense, is one of the most counterintuitive things we will come to accept about the human mind. We tend to mistaken complexity (it's very complex to compare experiences) to impossibility (it's impossible to judge experiences objectively).
I believe in principle there might be the equivalent Laws of Physics (say Newtonian mechanics) for the human mind, but I suspect we're still very far from it, because it might require analyzing the network of n=100 trillion synapses in our brain. I think one day we might get there, but that would probably require something like a computational effort maybe at least several times n, or even on the order of n², or some other poly(n), and also poly(n) memory. If we think of one of the major objectives of physical law is to make predictions, and explain behavior, and say to aid in engineering and designing structures, I think one of the main objective of the laws of the mind would be say to predict whether say an experience or mental state is good or not, and explain why it is so; and then perhaps allow improving a little the design of things so that we have better experiences, that is, a better life. I guess this is already what say psychology, various spiritual traditions, philosophy and arts try to achieve (and I think gets already in many cases pretty close, maybe increasingly closer, to the still inaccessible extremely complicated reality of the human mind and brain).
Regardless, we often have to do our best with what we have today, which is our best-effort subjective judgement, aided by language various human disciplines :)
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1n6j1jg/pur...
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?"
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
Why should a commercial enterprise that has had billions of investments have benefits outside of earning money? Besides the entertainment value that the masses get from making and viewing these, of course.
Is there? Creating AGI sounds like a great way to utterly upend every assumption that our economy and governments are built on. It would be incredibly destabilizing. That's not typically good for business. There's no telling who will profit once that genie is out of the bottle, or if profit will even continue to be a meaningful concept.
> By "defeat," I don't mean "subtly manipulate us" or "make us less informed" or something like that - I mean a literal "defeat" in the sense that we could all be killed, enslaved or forcibly contained.
Linked from https://openai.com/index/planning-for-agi-and-beyond/
Just reminds me of this: <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...>
>If you genuinely believed you were 2-4 years away from AGI, is Sora slop really the thing you'd release?
User engagement. That translates into money.
Now I can see it can make for a fun party game, but that they seriously go after it, when their game should be leading models to do serious work ... is not a great sign to me.
Not only it has the slot-machine like addiction factor, it's going to make lots of money and it will take off very quickly.
All OpenAI has to do is to make the video generation much much faster.
Also, remember that it’s not about benefitting society as a whole, it’s about benefitting the investors. If the investors get rich at the cost of society, it’s a win for OpenAI.
I mainly am curious if anyone has the view that there is broader benefit to the development of this, after all, wasn't that the entire mission statement of OpenAI?
Quoting from their announcement on their site:
> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.
This feels like something constrained by the need to generate a financial return, and not something primarily focused on understanding physics and world models, to be blunt.
Or 'everything has to fit into 120 characters' (= Twitter). Or 'replies are designed to be maximally rage bait-y' (= Tumblr).
People always like telling stories. Books, comic strips, movies, they're all just telling a story with a different amount of it left up to the viewer's imagination. Lowering the barrier to entry for this type of stuff is so cool.
I think you have to be pretty pessimistic to not just think it's really cool. You can find issues with it for sure, and maybe argue that those issues outweigh the benefit, but hard to say it's not going to be fun for some people.
This response just never feels true to me. Many of the most successful web comics are crude drawings of just stick figures and text[1] with potentially a little color thrown in[2] and like half of the videos I see on TikTok are just a person talking into the forward facing camera of their phone. The barrier to entry in the pre-AI world isn't actually that high if you have something interesting to say. So when I see this argument about lowering the barrier to entry, I can't stop myself from thinking that maybe the problem is that these people have nothing interesting to say, but no one can admit that to themselves so they must blame it on the production values of their content which surely will be improved by AI.
[1] - https://xkcd.com/
[2] - https://explosm.net/
I think people have a mistaken view of what makes some form of storytelling interesting. Perhaps this is my own bias, but something could be incredibly technically proficient or realistic and I could find it utterly uninteresting. This is because the interesting part is in what is unique about the perspective of the people creating it and ideas they want to express, in relation to their own viewpoint and background.
Like you pointed out, many famous and widely enjoyed pieces of media are extremely simple in their portrayal.
I completely agree. And now that you mention this, I realize I didn't even point to the most obvious and famous examples of this sort of thing with artists like Picasso and Van Gogh.
If someone criticizes Picasso's or Van Gogh's lack of realism, they are completely missing the point of their work. They easily could have and occasional did go for a more photorealistic look, but that isn't what made them important artists. What set them apart was the ways they eschewed photorealism in order to communicate something deeper.
Similarly, creating art in their individual styles isn't interesting because it shifts the primary goal from communication to emulation. That is all AI art really is, attempts at imitation, and imitation without iteration just isn't interesting from an artistic or storytelling perspective.
Social media is the new CB radio.
But now with an AI-powered addiction factor so you can never put it down, no matter how bad it is.
Blipverts are next.
What exactly is this enabling, other than the mass generation of low quality, throwaway crap that exists solely to fatten up Altman's wallet some more?
One that comes to mind is a sort of podcast-style of two cats having a conversation, and in each "episode" there's some punchline where they end up laughing about some cat stereotype. Definitely low quality garbage, but I guess what I mean by "barrier of entry" (sorry for the buzzword), is just that this is going to enable a new generation of content, memes, whatever you want to call it.
It's not just different amounts, but different kinds. A (good) comic strip isn't just the full text of a book plus some pictures..
I do find the actual generation of video very cool as a technical process. I would also say that I can find a lot of things cool or interesting that I think are also probably deleterious to society on the whole, and I worry about the possibility of slop feeds that are optimized to be as addictive as possible, and this seems like another step in that direction. Hopefully it won't be, but definitely something that worries me.
Tiktok makes a lot of money, doesn't it? It definitely draws a lot of eyeballs.
Seems pretty clear what the benefit (to the company) is?
Please note that I’m not necessarily commenting on whether the existence of AI generated video is good or bad for our society, because I think it’s pretty moot what we think about it. It’s not going to just go away even if the majority of people here at HN or in general feel that it’s problematic.
I'm just curious if such thing is possible.
Do they care at all how societally terrible thing it is? They found an addictive way of retaining traffic, and they will be holding to it.
Revealed preferences. Keep giving the people exactly what they want (not what they claim to want), in unlimited quantities, until the message is received or we're all dead.
If this works it is a more powerful algorithm shaping mechanism than TikTok’s revealed preference feed. Even if Sora doesn’t take off, it could force TikTok to integrate something similar.
The question is whether people will eventually get bored with this stuff or if it actually will mesmerize people for huge fractions of their waking lives.
If the latter, I suspect we will outlaw it eventually. It’d be like legalizing hard opiates, literally, but minus the ODs and health damage.
Nonetheless, a platform for AI videos with an audience looking for them, rather than the horrible "boomer-slop" that is prevalent on other social media, is welcome in my eyes.
They'll just cross-post. That's been going on since back when Facebook was The Face Book.
Instagram does not welcome this and I don't think they should. It is its own lane. And if it's just a place to sweep AI slop into, that's a good thing.
The thread replies show what deadbeats Hacker News users are.
The worlds knowledge base could be turned to video.
Like Khan academy but rather than old out of date videos instant upgrades from rerunning / correcting a prompt.
In practice it's not good enough to do this but no more so than other applications. It could be an interesting first iteration. /end steelmaned.
Personally I think the problem with TikTok is largely based in hyperoptimized content specialized to your interest shaping your worldview and isolating your perspective of the world from others, as well as probably being pretty bad for the ability to maintain attention and engage with long form narratives and ideas. I don't really think TikTok is unique here, other than that it's the best in the game at doing it and keeping people's attention.
But overall I suppose I just see something like this as potentially worse in those regards, but maybe I'm overly pessimistic.