Comment by notfed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notfed | Hacker News Reader

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You seem convinced this is "fake". It's unclear what you think is fake about this.

Fruits are wet, salty, acidic objects. As such, they can be used in an electronic circuit. They have an impedance, and, if you do it right, a voltage. [1] There's nothing fake or surprising about this.

He's just placing the fruit in series with the power source of some effect pedal. Unsurprisingly, this slightly alters the power source for the pedal, creating an audible difference in effect.

It's probably not something someone would do in practice, but notably, when it comes to electric guitars, experimenting with different types of distortion is pretty common, and it's common for guitar players to get creative.

Even if this "fruit effect" is not practical (I mean, you'd get inconsistent results), it's definitely a silly and interesting enough idea to justify a YouTube video. I could even see someone using it as a gimmick for playing live.

> I think anyone with a basic understanding of electronics would see the absurdity of these circuits and wouldn’t buy the schematics

Which schematics are you referring to? I think you might be assuming he's selling the "fruit" circuit. I think he's selling circuits for effect pedals, completely independently of this "fruit" video.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_battery

He’s not selling the schematics for the “Produce Preamp”, that’s a freebie on his website.

I downloaded it. It’s a PDF of a circuit where instead of a 9v battery, there’s 2 nails and a banana.

Then he demos the sound in the video. A sound that could not possibly be produced by the circuit in the PDF or any reasonable variation of the circuit.

This is all presented without any tongue in cheek. It’s presented in the video, the website and PDF as being 100% real.

Yet, it’s objectively and indisputably fiction.

To go through all the trouble of setting this channel up and fabricating all the devices and the website with schematics and recording and editing the videos at a very high level seems extremely unlikely.

That’s a lot of work for very, very little or no gain. Unless I’m missing the big scam and there is a bunch of money to be made, but I don’t see it.

However, if this was AI slop. That’s 100% reasonable. Who cares, just write a prompt and out comes the video.

“Create a video of a new pedal that uses a banana for electricity.”

The whole thing has the feel of long AI hallucination for a vague prompt. It fits really well.

Except, I haven’t heard of any service that could generate a video with that level of quality and duration.

I totally expect that to be available sometime in the relatively near future. But from my understanding, currently available AI models can’t possibly be responsible for high quality videos of that length.

And given these videos have been showing up for many months makes the whole thing that much more strange.

It seems incredibly improbable that a person would put so much energy into creating high quality videos of nonsense for no purpose. Not impossible, but it just doesn’t add up.

It seems completely possible that, in 3 or 4 years time, publicly available AI services will be able to produce videos of this quality and duration.

I can’t think of any reasonable explanation for why these videos exist or for how they were made.

> A sound that could not possibly be produced by the circuit in the PDF or any reasonable variation of the circuit.

Why not? What's wrong with the circuit?

Here's my rebuttal to your claim: I literally show a circuit of a single wire and say I'm using it on my guitar, and I could get that sound. Why? Because I didn't say I'm _only_ using the wire. I have other equipment.

> The whole thing has the feel of long AI hallucination for a vague prompt.

I really doubt the video itself is AI. Only because it doesn't need to be. It's literally just a dude sitting and talking to a camera. It would be easier to make this video than to generate it with AI.

> I can’t think of any reasonable explanation for why these videos exist or for how they were made.

Respectfully , that's a bit of a ridiculous thing to say. I'm not sure where you're going with it. Even if this was 100% AI, there would _still_ be a reason someone took the time to generate it and post it. Why does any YouTuber post a video?

> It seems completely possible that, in 3 or 4 years time, publicly available AI services will be able to produce videos of this quality and duration.

I think you're completely correct, and I think many of us share your paranoia here. But honestly, there are _plenty_ of better examples of AI slop out there, and it's sort of ironic that you've chosen to focus on one that very much doesn't appear to have any signs of AI.

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