Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

I'm an AI optimist. But AI video is probably the one thing that does depress me. Seeing that we can make anything visually, there's nothing that impresses me visually. I watch a video that two years ago I would've thought was really cool, and now my first thought is, "Yawn, is this AI?".

Video, more than anything else, is the place where I really care if something is AI or not. If I could get a TikTok that had no AI usage -- I'd be in. Which is weird for me, because I'm typically the guy who is all-in on AI.

View on HN

It ruined the whole category of "cute animals acting goofy" content for sure.

Yeah, I'm kinda sad about that one. Most of my friends and family are aware many of these are fake now, but argue that it still invokes the same response in us so it's okay. For me, though, however intangible or irrational it may be, I do feel a sense of loss.

Funny enough, this is actually one of the few things which has bothered me with the AI boom, and I'm mostly pro-acceleration. A lot of what's happening seems inevitable. But surprisingly, knowing that cat or dog or bird or lizard or butterfly or whatever has a strong chance of being generated really does take something out of it to my mind. And I say that also knowing the extreme amount of staging which has long gone on with traditional nature videography. Somehow, knowing the animal is real means something... I'm still trying to figure out how to better understand and express this.

In addition, even knowing it's not real, I feel like I can't appreciate it as much as I did (or would've) a well-made clip that I knew was CGI.

I think the opposite. It allows more people to be creative. Similar to how the DAW allowed more people to become musicians. You can produce a hit song with just a laptop now.

Now you can have people producing videos without needing a crew of people.

You never needed a crew of people to make videos. This is just outsourcing people's creativity.

The potential for harm is so much greater with video than creating an mp3. You can stoke hate and fear so easily.

The method in the madness is to generate so much on demand slop no one will accidentally find your hate and FUD content anyway.

It will be found because our politicians will share it.

Or the opposite? all tools are dangerous…

>I think the opposite. It allows more people to be creative.

Why are you assuming that a majority of people don't already have the means to make videos? Many people have access to a phone, laptop, and stable internet connection. What else do they really need? What's stopping them from using their phones to shoot home movies, making animations with MS Paint, recording themselves talking about a subject they're genuinely interested in, etc.?

>Now you can have people producing videos without needing a crew of people.

This is conflating production values with creativity. Mr. Beast's videos cost millions of dollars to film and produce, yet they're creatively bankrupt.

I think it is like around 2010 or so I use to upload just this god awful music to early Sound Cloud because it was easy to make music with a DAW.

I even remember being on a psytrance production music mailing list 25 years ago and 95% of the tracks people posted were absolutely terrible, including myself.

I have seen a few incredible pieces from AI video but most has just not been that interesting. Then even the incredible pieces are 5 second one offs. No narrative, no continuity. I think of a random, real 5 second clip from Clockwork Orange with no backstory or context in the movie, who cares? Even the most visually interesting scenes wouldn't make sense and would be boring.

Right now it seems like we are at the stage of sampling random 5 second clips from early sound cloud and concluding this is the artistic utility of an entire new technology like DAW software and VST synths. That is obviously absurd.

For a few weeks, YouTube thought I wanted to see videos of package thieves being surprised by a booby-trapped box that was actually a glitter bomb. Video after video were these AI created shorts of supposed doorbell camera footage showing a thief running away with a box that explodes into a giant pink cloud.

I eventually picked one and opened the comments and the top comment was something like "This is obviously an AI video. Who watches this?" and the reply was along the lines of "me because I like seeing thieves get what's coming to them".

So you, like me, aren't interested in AI videos but I think there's a lot of people who don't care if it's real or not.

Thankfully, YouTube eventually stopped showing those to me. Now it thinks I'm interested in road rage videos. My YouTube feed outside of the three of four channels I've subscribed to is terrible.

> and the reply was along the lines of "me because I like seeing thieves get what's coming to them".

I really wish a subject matter expert would pitch in to tell us what this is about?

like a totally made up thing that is fake, somehow gives a sense of justice and satisfaction?

is it something about imagining it happening in reality, or what?

for me, if I see that something is AI, it's like I just feel nothing. because there's nothing in it, it has nothing of real value? like it doesn't evoke anything in me, it doesn't make me think "this was a great find!" or make me want to send a link over to my friends, etc.

Do you ever feel a sense of satisfaction watching a movie? I'm thinking of scenarios like when the bad guy is finally defeated or the hero achieves their goal.

I think with a book or movie, a lot of the emotional reaction actually comes from the work of the human that created it. You can feel the emotion of the creator and the story they set out to tell and have some connection with them. You make a good point about how we've always been able to emotionally connect with fiction, but low effort AI does feel different.

What causes the emotional reaction in a film is moving images in front of you in sync with sound. Further, even the simplest of movies is the product of more than one person with more than one emotional state. What causes the emotional reaction in a book is you reading and understanding what text is in front of you. The emotional reaction can happen in the radical absence of the author and in total contravention of their alleged will!

We'll have to disagree here. My feelings are more in line with Nick Cave's recent essay on AI generated music: https://www.theredhandfiles.com/considering-human-imaginatio...

This is the whole Dhar Mann genre, which is so cringe, but it definitely tickles something in us.

As in any form of fiction?

It's not all bad: https://www.tiktok.com/@openchub/video/7641631412407274782

I tried to watch it, but TikTok kept throwing up a dialog over top asking me to slide a puzzle piece into place. I did three or four before just closing it.

You get back as much as you put in. Just like with all generative tools the quality of the output depends on the quality of input. Slapping a prompt together will only get you so far, if you want the models to generate something really striking and unique you need to get your hands dirty. Gotta break out ComfyUI and build yourself a specific workflow, once you dig deep and understand how things are put together, why and so on, you can make really amazing stuff with any generative models. But you have to pay for that experience in patience and knowledge.

>Gotta break out ComfyUI and build yourself a specific workflow, once you dig deep and understand how things are put together, why and so on, you can make really amazing stuff with any generative models.

Where is this amazing stuff? Social media is a marketplace of ideas supposedly, so why haven't we seen a new wave of creators rise up in popularity?

Because there is a stigma about use of AI in creative spaces, the people that do use it to creative very impressive pieces don't disclose that information on their profiles. People tend to see AI anywhere mentioned in the profile and automatically shit on the work regardless of its beauty or creativity. They don't consider the staggering amount of work that goes in to the pics with all the control nets, custom hyper parameter tuning, custom finetuned lora's, and many other technical like workflow chaining and such. They automatically assume someone only spent 5 seconds on some slop prompt and that's it. But I can assure you if no mention of AI is anywhere everyone who looks at the work is always impressed. So you have an observation bias situation going on. You see only AI slop because a. most of its is low effort slop and b. the good stuff you assume had no AI in it because it wasn't disclosed by the artist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com