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Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

99% of everything is bad, so that unsurprisingly includes AI videos.

But i've seen several good videos made using AI, including pretty much everything NeuralViz[0] on YouTube makes, but also some that have been posted in older comments here in HN. Igorrr's ADHD music video[1] was also made using AI and fit the music perfectly.

The common aspect with these "good" uses though is that they do not let the AI do 99% of the job (as mentioned in another comment) but they still involve editing, writing/scripting, acting (NeuralViz for example uses his webcam to act both the motion and voice in his videos and uses AI to change them) and to some extent leaning into the "weirdness" that AI videos have instead of ignoring it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralViz (i high recommend watching them in upload order because they all build into the same "universe" and often make references to older videos)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGIvO4eh190

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I've been a big fan of https://www.youtube.com/@PosyMusic/videos for many years now. The posts there are alawys a little treat - you never quite know when the next one is going to come or what it's going to be... but it'll sure be creative (and fun!) without any of the typical YouTube channel baggage. They do the video, sound, and music creation+editing themselves - being a sound professional by day (among other things).

Anyways, the reason I bring this channel up is they had a video ~2 years back about trying out various AIs to help them in their creative process. Stuff like "using an AI audio generator to quickly make short sounds to sample in their song" for hard to find/make sounds type stuff. Exactly along the lines of "they do not let AI do 99% of the job" you were saying, instead treating it as just another tool in the toolbox. Also, intentionally, the examples like sampling were where the originality comes with what you do with the content you source rather than the content standing on its own. They also spent time creating icon sets to help explicitly label how AI was used in making the material (partly/fully) and encouraged artists that do incorporate AI into part of their workflow to label how so accordingly (2 years ago - so this was still somewhat novel to discuss).

You won't be able to find that video on the channel linked above, though the icons are still on GitHub. Not because the content made with the help of AI was bad, people like the songs the same as his other content (when not explicitly told it was made with the help of AI), but because there was so much hate on the video (and via email etc) for just mentioning that other artists could look at trying to use AI in certain parts of their workflows too that he felt the need to take it down.

That makes me sad. I also love Posy's content, I'm using his cursors right now, and this new knowledge that there is some of it I cannot see gives me real consumerist FOMO anxiety. A little digging and I couldn't find anything. I don't suppose you remember any keywords?

I managed to find an archive: https://archive.org/details/the-ai-icon

I forgot how he introed it with the over the top AI visual and saying "I'll be hated for this" and then ends with a funny continuation of that opening.

There are a bunch of these scifi world building short video channels now. IMO they all seem really creative initially but rapidly lose their luster and become repetitive.

Sora makes the hard parts easy and the easy parts hard. I don't think any of these content producers will be remembered in the future. :/

Years and years ago I became friends with someone who has started a series of companies and created at least one game with each of them (Web, mobile, mobile, crypto, web again). While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution. His ideas are great, in my opinion, though perhaps not unique. However, each success or failure, has come down to the execution. A couple of projects ran out of funding (Didn't execute fast enough). One was a flash game around the same time Apple stuck a knife in Flash, bad timing. Another was backed by a major publisher and was largely a success and the company was sold after 2 proven products shipped.

AI "democratizing" creativity is the biggest crock of lies. Everyone has ideas. Even people who aren't typically thought of as "creative". Ask anyone who watched the last season of Game of Thrones if they thought it could be better and I bet most of them will have "ideas" for how to make it better. Hell, the show runners had IDEAS. But the execution of season 8 was awful, and execution is where an "idea guy" becomes someone who created a product/story worth remembering.

LLMs remove the execution process, which is why they are so attractive to everyone who has ever had an idea and why they are abhorrent to nearly everyone who has ever executed on an idea. Lots of people thin execution is just busy work, but execution is also a major component of being creative.

Creativity is a series of small decisions over the course of the entire execution. To write a poem is not to have it fully-formed in your head. You go down and edit and see what turns up and what new interesting ideas come out of that.

I'm very sympathetic to this view, and it would be a nice counter to claims of AI creativity, but I'm not convinced this is the only way creativity can express itself. There are examples of strokes of genius, hence the term.

I suppose you could say such strokes of genius are the outcomes of a lifetime of creative work but that seems different from your example of editing a poem.

Strokes of genius could be considered the "exception that proves the rule".

We are operating deep in the grey area here so I suppose that case could be made. Personally, I see creativity as more of a life long process which can express itself in a multitude of ways including strokes of genius and the daily iterative grind. I don't think any creative act occurs in a vacuum but I also think that there are moments where big things occur.

AI, as it stands, does not have a lifespan over which for creativity to occur.

Oh, this is an excellent way to phrase it. Thank you!

>While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution.

It's even trickier: execution is irrelevant too (if that means great execution, a polished well executed product). What matters is a works-well-enough for adoption product, plus luck, connections, funding (to continue existing and undercutting), marketing, and things like that.

This is all true. It is amazing to me how many people don't want to acknowledge how much luck or connections play in the success of large brand names.

The problem runs deeper: AI doesn't just remove execution, it replaces it with probabilistic averaging. Mastery of execution in film or code consists of thousands of micro-decisions, like light a bit to the left or pause a bit longer. Current diffusion models make these thousands of decisions for you based on what usually looks good. Democratization won't happen when the Make it Beautiful button works, but when we have tools to control these thousands of micro-decisions without needing to learn to draw pixels by hand. Right now we have randomization, not democratization

More than half of my YouTube subscriptions are channels that once posted neat stuff and stopped - and most of them are from years ago. And before that i was into webcomics back when they were a popular online trend, i was following the updates of several of them and most of them have disappeared these days (and i don't even remember their names).

People stop doing things all the time, i'm not sure that means much.

what does any of that have to do with my comment?

>> they all seem really creative initially but rapidly lose their luster and become repetitive.

Yeah, exactly that :-)

Did you really interpret my statement as "AI content producers are being so creative and then quitting posting"?

I'm not talking about people posting good content and then stopping posting.

I guess its fair to say that "become repetitive" was unclear, what I should have said was "reveals itself to be repetitive."

I'm saying that these AI generated world building channels produce lots of content that looks creative and exciting at first but over time reveals itself to be repetitive and lacking in creativity.

The parent's argument regains relevance if we change "stopped posting" to "stopped posting good stuff and started posting repeatitive shit" though.

Human youtube channels do that all the time.

Both are responses to a miss-interpretation of my original comment (which I will grant is at least in part my fault).

But your argument could be made against anything novel. You love the first 3 seasons of Chopped or Hell’s Kitchen but eventually you figure out the repetitive story arc, you know how each show will unfold halfway through, same kinds on conflict, etc… the show either becomes background while folding clothes or you stop watching entirely. The novelty wears off-for better or worse.

I mean look at house hunters international. Every segment is the sssme. “I need an extra room for overseas family, I want to live by the beach, I need a roof deck but I teach ESL to blind monks and children. My budget is $400”. And then they’ll have some silly hang up about the reliability of elevators in general or maybe they absolutely can’t get over the east facing window. It’s 100% formulatic yet perfect as background.

I dunno where I’m going with this but those AI videos you say you liked… the novelty wore off.

> But your argument could be made against anything novel.

What matters IMO is the lack substance not the quantity of novelty. Your chosen television show examples demonstrate that pretty well IMO.

I would argue that the 1% of AI videos that are "good" are not worth the travesties that it fosters. Deceased celebrities featured in embarrassing / absurd situations and the scourge of fake news are enough for me to realize that this technology is extremely net negative.

I'm ashamed to admit that this made me laugh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJllhkPqixM

I would be alright with making these more expensive to make though, so they don't overrun youtube. Also i'm sure the person that made this had to do a lot of work. It wasn't just a few prompts

The one that's wild is Star Wars OF Zhebrd on YT

I was actually a big fan of this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQfbA2E7z5A

It features a bunch of internationally known figures (mainly world leaders) in drag (or gender-swapped). So obviously something not achievable without AI video generation

I think it's interesting as a gimmick, but generally really don't like AI-generated videos. My main issue with them is more to do with capitalism than AI video generation though.

Yeah I like NeuralViz too. Honestly the writing is what makes it funny in the first place. The AI imagery just adds that extra weirdness on top. Like my faves being the street interviews an the gluron that reviews the Zillow page etc

NeuralViz is one of the best examples of a very creative and skilled person using generative AI to create great content that would not be possible without it. Doopiidoo is another example.

I love Igorrr, but still have mixed feelings about the AI-assisted video. They were capable of making videos weird and unhinged in the past without its use.

> 99% of everything is bad, so that unsurprisingly includes AI videos.

You're probably not wrong, although there's probably also a spread in % between mediums of creation that is worth exploring since a couple % difference could compound.

Even ignoring the above, the issue is WRT rates of creation. I'm no good at drawing. For me to make a bad drawing might take some time. I'll need sleep. And food. I can only make so many bad drawings a day. AI can just work nonstop to make slop. The main strength, if you'd call it that, of automation (AI in this case), is the ability to quickly crank out crap. It is flooding the internet with crap at accelerating rates. The internet/humanity doesn't have enough tools today to deal with the flood of garbage. If AI could make physical crap, we'd quickly end up like that garbage episode of Futurama.

Actually we have a way to filter out that crap, that's what Google, Meta, TikTok, etc... have perfected over decades. The internet is huge and full of crap, and we get to see very little of it. Suggestions from, say, YouTube are generally high quality, few AI slop, vacation videos from random people, or penises. I don't mean good as in moral values, but I mean a production value beyond what you can do by writing a few lines in an AI prompt: decent picture and sound, a well written script, etc...

As more and more AI slop floods the internet, people will start to notice more and more and downvote it down to oblivion and really good content will surface. It may or may not be made with the help of AI, but it won't be sloppy. We are already seeing that, active communities don't have much AI slop, dead communities have plenty, kind if like these abandoned forums that are full of spam no one reads.

People are getting tired of AI slop, it is becoming as recognizable as a photoedit made in 5 minutes in MS-Paint, and it has about the same value. Good for over the top memes where being ugly is part of the charm, but not for anything serious.

I agree that the major platforms have the tools to filter it out. I disagree that those tools are doing that. The primary intent of algos is around engagement, not quality content. We might be able to say the end result is similar (users are engaging on the internet when they wouldn't otherwise if they were getting garbage), but I don't think it's the same. Users aren't being spoon fed high quality content for the brain. They're getting addictive, engagement content to keep them parked on their phones. If content was nutrition for the brain, algos are feeding people candy instead of vegetables. Maybe it's not actual garbage, but most people are not "eating well" with the current approach to content curation by algos.

I saw one recently that was cool. Basically a cinematic for Arthas’ purging of Stratholme from WarCraft. However the entire time I was just thinking “oh that’s cool, looks alright” but none of the “wow the artist that did Uther’s model nailed it” or “Oh great music choice, I wonder who the composer was.”

Uncanny valley aside it felt empty.

For entertainment, I have few concerns. It will compete or fail to compete for attention. For degrading the value of video evidence, accelerating propaganda and fraud, and for making people just feel unsure of what is likely real or fake, that is what I am concerned with.

Praise the monolith

Best recommendation I've been given in years. NeuralViz is amazing, thank you

>But i've seen several good videos made using AI, including pretty much everything NeuralViz[0] on YouTube makes

We can safely dismiss your whole argument then :)

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