$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol | Hacker News Reader

$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol

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396 pointshershyb_542 comments

Like most of this stuff, it's obviously impressive technology compared to what existed a few years ago. But the end product has zero artistic value. It's a grey goo of the average of every concept picked up from the concept of the song.

A talented creative with a vision could make something more interesting and enjoyable in an afternoon with a $0 budget.

As much as I don't want jobs taken away by AI, a creative person with a vision that would usually required $1 million budget, could create such a video using AI by being very specific in what they require which would not be a " grey goo of the average of every concept "

eg. "scene 32, same 2 characters from the previous scene, now dressed in the garb of Egyption middle kingdom high priests, though with cat faces, dancing on the back of an elephant that is running fast with blurred feet on the surface of a river with licks of water that burst from the water in time with the music that I gave you before, length of song for this clip 2:21 to 2:31"

Your mind is your limit. AI is a tool. If you tell it "create me a music video for this song set in egypt" then it may turn out AI sloppy.

Art isn't just the screenplay, or a prompt; it's the clash between reality and the intent (whether a location or practical set constraints), the individual skill of everyone involved, costume and prop department. And it may change during production. And effort. If it's easy, it's easily reproducible and not worth that much. And novelty, that's something current models aren't capable of. That's why Jarimoquai's Virtual Insanity video became popular. That's why practical effects are more impressive than CGI, even if they're jankier and hide behind clever camerawork.

I find video models very hard to steer. They can output amazing "shiny" things quickly, but if you want something very specific, you may need to spend days on it. It is not like sitting down with an artist and seeing how they make the exact changes you need in real time while also ensuring artistic cohesion.

AI is obviously very useful, but perhaps not in the way people think. Two aspects I would like to see improved are instruction following and providing relevant feedback.

This is not about jobs taken away by AI. There are not that many jobs for artists to begin with. And OP was not talking about a job.

> Your mind is your limit. AI is a tool.

Then the companies should start talking about them the same way as they talk about tools. Because when they are pushing for artists replacement by AI, they are not talking about tools. They are trying to make AI into a person while very intentionally devaluing things people actually like.

> a creative person with a vision that would usually required $1 million budget, could create such a video using AI by being very specific in what they require which would not be a " grey goo of the average of every concept "

How many $1 million budget music videos you look at? The sold vision of AI is to not be the tool you are talking about here. Yes, there is an alternative reality where these companies tried to make tools for artists, but it is not a reality we live in.

The prompts would more be like: "The dancing and lip movement is still wildly out of time with the music"... "Ok now the dancing is even more out of sync with the beat"

Sure, but it appears as if the LLM just doesn't understand dancing and rhythm. I don't know why, but an old music video by the band Jungle came to mind -- just a kid dancing, and while it definitely cost more than $100 I'm sure, it couldn't have been all that expensive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JkDzNOgO3U

Edit: oh I remembered another, The Blaze said their first music video cost them $100 to make: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UivZrL2znh0 and their follow up didn't cost a whole lot more they've also been on record saying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fea7wuV6s

Have you ever experienced real artistic process? Because each and every comment from -presumedly- tech people that follow along these lines above is inevitably proof that the author does not grok creative processes at all, and they assume it’s just another algorithmic endeavor, or a collation of serial inputs. This mentality is awful.

I would really love to see examples of creatives using modern AI/LLMs to make quality art, and it feels like this should be happening, but I can't think of any examples yet. Maybe there's so much low-effort slop that the good works are lost in the noise. Or maybe most artists don't use AI on principle.

I would love to see examples if anyone has any. I saw a few things on r/AIVideos that I sort of liked, but I wouldn't go as far as to call them quality art.

You're kinda right but it's exactly the ease of generation and the lack of time and money spent which makes people value AI output less.

A fake Gauguin painting and a real one can be almost indistinguishable to the human eye. But only one is worth the big bucks. Everyone scoffs at the other (once told which is real and which is fake). Something similar might happen to AI where the requirement to disclose it becomes a signal that the creator has cheapened out

There was an interesting recent 99% invisible episode about the creation of videos for Karaoke in the 90s, which talked about videos created on very low budgets for songs with tight constraints. Even adjusting for inflation, their budgets would be well below a million dollars by today’s standards (and some costs would likely be lower thanks to digital video removing the cost of purchasing and processing film stock and making editing cheaper).

A lot of iconic scenes were at the discretion of the actors in those scenes. One wonders how much personality and complexity you can really get without the skills and idiosyncrasies of everybody in front of and behind the cameras on a real movie set.

My point being there's a lot more complexity in not producing slop than it seems.

It's much simpler than that.

If you can't afford a video then don't make one. A slop video for $100 will devalue your entire brand. People will question your music.

There's a lot more value in just cutting some live performance videos together cheaply.

> eg. "scene 32, same 2 characters from the previous scene, now dressed in the garb of Egyption middle kingdom high priests, though with cat faces, dancing on the back of an elephant that is running fast with blurred feet on the surface of a river with licks of water that burst from the water in time with the music that I gave you before, length of song for this clip 2:21 to 2:31"

No need to even be so detailed: "Make this an ancient egypt theme" would probably work.

Interestingly, I enjoyed early GenAI videos much more. All those bizarre, fever dream like experiences from the lack of consistency between frames, where things would morph or pop in and out of existence. They had a certain flair and something truly distinct to the medium. Now it is mostly just this uncanny valley of bringing stock photography to life.

Obviously, there will be some who use AI to great artistic effect, but I'm really worried about the discoverability of actually interesting stuff, whether it uses AI or not. Everything will be swamped by the automated goo of mediocrity that will vastly dominate in volume.

My perhaps naive hope is that this pushes people back toward offline and local communities, as well as toward more physical art instead of even more consumerism.

Have you been following Gossip Goblin?

I'm amazed how easily people dismiss this. They used less that an hour of wall clock time and max $50 to do this.

How much would it take for me to create videos like this? I'm guessing 1-4 years calendar time practicing half an hour every day just to break my lack of talent. Immeasurable cost given how there's no way in hell I'm going to invest that kind of time for a skill I don't actually want to acquire.

Somebody who's actually competent and talented is going to make some pretty amazing stuff cheaply with something like this, and the technology is nowhere near its peak yet.

That depends on your own standards to be honest. Here's a video from Meshuggah which is a camcorder recording of them emoting in a camper van - that's half an hour of work, a few hours of editing tops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A_tSyJBsRQ

My point is, anyone can make a music video on any budget or level of talent. And camcorder silliness is more artistic and entertaining than AI generated stuff any day of the week.

It's like using an excavator to arrange a bunch of big stones in a circle and saying it's a new Stonehenge. The excavator is obviously a powerful tool, it took you an hour to do what took the ancients a huge amount of time and effort. But why should anybody care? The stones aren't the actual point of Stonehenge, despite the name. It's the history and meaning.

If the input was a few sentences, an hour of waiting, and $50, why should I value the result any more highly than Excavatorhenge?

> I'm amazed how easily people dismiss this.

Why? What's its value? I personally wouldn't watch a video/movie/show that's entirely clanker generated, I see no point in it.

All AI fanatics can talk about is cost, productivity, money, efficiency, ... no wonder they can't understand art or even basic human emotions

Why would you want to make a video like that though, it’s soulless slop

I've seen similaer videos in the pre AI time where someone stiches stock fotos together that fit to the lyrics. Absolute shit, and this is the advanced way to do that. It's a costly gimmic for illegal youtube uploads. The videos have no more value than that. So yes, you could do that in half an hour with your current knowledge and 0$, but it would be meaningless still images instead of meaningless video snippets. I see not much difference.

A talented creative with a vision can now direct AI to build things that would have otherwise cost millions or been entirely impossible. I don’t understand the myopic view people have when it comes to this technology. Just three or four years ago, we saw the exact same skepticism with programming. People insisted it can't do this and it can't do that, but many of those things are possible today.

This tech isn’t steerable enough when it comes to creative output.

Maybe there are some nooks and crannies where this tech can be employed and actually save time/budget. Maybe. But what does not work is to just take the output and use it. There is nowhere near enough precision there.

But there is no evidence of this - its is your hypothetical reckons. If a "talented creative" wanted realism, they can already access it and in a reliable, repeatable, direct-able way using all of their lived experience. Your idea of 'directing AI' just shows you haver never directed a human actor, or collaborated with a talented DOP etc. All you describe is an unreliable shortcut to shiny blandness and call anyone who points out your massive blindspot 'myopic'. It would appear it is you who is profoundly myopic about the reality of producing creative work of worth.

"can" but generally doesn't .. and the rare gold is buried in a mountain of bland crap and outright propaganda, state level and crank level.

I have no objection to the potential vision you espouse, I have zero love for the actual ground level reality of the tsunami of AI slop videos being pumped out ATM - many are skewed toward trust building in a probable long con game of deceit or nation swaying, others are just ick.

It remains godawful slop in every instance I've seen, no matter how expensive it would be to produce without AI.

Art is kind of unique though, because it inherits a lot of it's value from scarcity, both of the art itself and of the rare talent that can make quality art. If an artistic style or product becomes too common, it tends to lose its luster.

An app is still useful even when it's cheap for anyone to make it. But art that anyone can make for cheap becomes, by definition, slop.

> A talented creative with a vision could make something more interesting and enjoyable in an afternoon

I should hope that a "talented" creative "with a vision" could, do better, yes. But now a talentless hack devoid of vision can do something half decent too. And if you don't think this is half decent, just replace "now" with "soon".

We all know that tasteless junk media would never be successful, this is why you only find high quality media on the internet and only high quality media gets popular in the mainstream. That sounds right, right?

Seriously, the nudge for artistic value can be made, although I would very much doubt a creative human making a video for an established song with a clear theme would do better in creativity. Perhaps the one advantage a human would have is to reject the expectations for such a tasks, which the AI is trained to fulfil.

The problem isn't that such content lacks artistic value. It is that it is enough for the broadest audience. The average consumer is basically a vacuum cleaner.

And do you think that makes the world a better place?

> And if you don't think this is half decent, just replace "now" with "soon".

see, you keep saying that, but it never comes true. First of all, you suggest that just because progress has been fast up to now, it will continue being fast. I think that's something like Gambler's fallacy. Secondly, the progress we're seeing is not like linear progress to 100%. It continues to get certain things extremely wrong. This might be half decent today for fooling the elderly, but it's not a good look for artistic expression or even marketing for that matter.

Yes, and it has me genuinely concerned.

> It's a grey goo of the average of every concept picked up from the concept of the song.

All right, but that's what an average entertainment product looks like. All these new TV shows have exactly the same look and feel about them. The same actors playing the same roles over and over again.

People keep comparing AI to some kind of once in a lifetime genius instead of an average person in the field.

This seems overly pessimistic to me. Of the recent shows I have watched, Andor contradicts it in my opinion. Might even be one of the best shows I have watched. Granted I rarely watch movies/TV shows these days so my random sample might just be lucky.

Guess what, I don't like or watch those either.

No one is denying that AI can generate worthless slop, just how most of what humans generate is worthless slop.

We don't yet know the "load bearing" or "delve" or "not X. Not Y. Just..." Clichés of video AI - at least I don't know. But given it's instruction tuned, we can be confident they will be there, and that the breadth of what it can generate for a given prompt will have extremely low diversity compared to its training data.

One of the big dead giveaways for AI videos is the sequence of slow pan shots without any sort of real action or focus. Once you start seeing it in a few of them, you'll start seeing it in _all_ of them. Just shot after shot of a slow pan of a scene with minimal action happening in only a few areas.

People keep referring to the output of neural nets as the "average of the training data" but imho the deep value in neural nets and the interesting philosophical part is they are massive conditional probability engines whose results can change based on the variables you feed in.

> A talented creative with a vision could make something more interesting and enjoyable in an afternoon with a $0 budget.

Only if you are really sloppy with your book keeping.

I think these videos are a great visual representation of what happens to your codebase of you let the agent vibe code the entire thing by itself without review and guidance!

It works... but once you actually start looking at the details there are so many small cases that need fixing.

Now, if you had someone with experience in editing, and they worked as a team, human + agent, then most of the small issues would be picked up and fixed during development.

>I think these videos are a great visual representation of what happens to your codebase of you let the agent vibe code the entire thing by itself without review and guidance!

I think you are right if the codebase has no tests.

Thats the thing about producing art. Its subjectively consumed. Is it good or bad? You can’t really verify that during generation.

You largely can with code.

Completely agree. Impressive as a tech demo, but that is pretty much where it ends. Give a talented kid an iPhone and they could create something significantly better and more interesting.

And this is the bear case on AI. Sure, if the quality of the output is largely meaningless or binary, e.g. it works or it doesn’t, then AI is useful, but as soon as subjective judgement or taste is involved it is useless.

"It's a grey goo of the average of every concept picked up from the concept of the song."

You just described 90% of todays music videos made by humans.

Even the worst music videos I have seen aren’t as incoherent as this mess.

This is actually mostly down to constraints: even if you suck you will suck in some coherent consistent way that will give your music videos more structure than this mess.

Those videos are just nihilistic despair.

I remember an Apple ad from a while back where a hydraulic press crushes a bunch of musical instruments. Your "grey goo of the average" analogy resonates for me because these videos feel like what would ooze out if we take all relevant videos that were produced by humans and then crush them under a generative press.

It was made with zero artistic intent, so it has zero value. If you sat down a talented art student that cared, they could prompt AI to make something artistically interesting to watch.

You can find someone on Fiverr that’ll do a better job than this for $100. The concept will be completely different but it’ll be much better.

$100 for a video on Fiverr?

remembering that line from the Portlandia sketch where the PTA is discussing the music their kids are listening to with the subtext that it's not indie enough :

"It is pap. It is pabulum." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdEPgB2yizw

Yes but they would have had to spend years training/practicing which apparently is not a thing we value anymore.

I wonder how much of the sloppy feeling is created by the knowledge that its AI generated.

I wish I could see it with fresh eyes without the accumulated knowledge I have of how AI looks. What does this video look like to a person clueless about AI?

What do they think of the constant repetition of slow panning shows where barely anything is happening, or a guy spinning on the floor but his head morphs into his feet and his feet morph into his head, or a person kissing a mirror that isn't quite mirroring the person and it slowly becomes a person kissing what appears to be their identical twin standing on the other side a floating empty mirror frame?

Same. I think there's a lot of AI prejudice influencing people's opinions on AI output.

I wonder what would happen in a study where some art is critiqued by one group that is informed that the art was created by AI and another group that is uninformed.

Yeah, a $100 AI music video is materially worse than not having a music video.

The scary thing is that this is the worst this technology will ever be.

The media industry is cooked.

Get ready for $100 movie theater tickets, because the cost actual creative work is going to go sky high in the next few years

Movie tickets won't skyrocket. The price to make content will only go down. Best case, creators will be able to make better movies w/ a fraction of the $$ (faster iteration on concepts, cheaper CGI, no need to hire extras, etc). Worst case, movie makers don't find AI useful and ticket prices stay the same.

Wouldn't it track that AI creative work would plummet ticket costs rather than increase them?

The industry may be cooked, but the economic effect you predict is entirely illogical. Things don't get more expensive simply because other things get cheaper.

> Get ready for $100 movie theater tickets, because the cost actual creative work is going to go sky high in the next few years

I suspect movie theaters will just die. Even nowadays, on the occasion I go to see a movie, I damn near gave the entire theater to myself. Given the output from Hollywood is already abysmal, I can’t imagine paying $100 for it even if the alternative is AI slop.

The hooks are more important than the quality. The whole short video stuff is designed to be filled by AI slop.

Even the long video format (I.e movies) are in big trouble due AI because the cheap/junk stuff they produce (I.e Netflix style ) will be easily produced with AI.

Not to mention that people will have the option to no longer subject themselves to the lecturing of various political crap that is being delivered through the big media producers(I.e Netflix)

A lot of the replies to this are, predicably, disappointing. For what its worth, I entirely agree.

AI is good at a lot of things, but it genuinely sucks at anything that requires real creativity. The human at the heart of a creative endeavor can't be replaced, and I hope that never changes.

"90% of everything is crap".

Although I guess we should probably update it to "99% of everything is slop.

>But the end product has zero artistic value

It has more artistic value than most modern art.

We dont need music videos though. Music videos are absurd and meaningless.

I don't know if there is a hidden /s but I disagree with your general statement. Music Videos often enough expand the story the song tells.

While "The Blaze - TERRITORY" is already a beautiful song to me, its music video[1] Always brings a tear to my eye.

That said, music Videos, like many songs themselves, are not rarely meaningless and bland. I guess that is just the result of commercial music.

[1] https://youtu.be/54fea7wuV6s

Ah man I love the music videos of the 90s

Spike Jonze had so many creative ones

That was Morrissey's stance when he was in the Smiths.

I really wish he hadn't been such a luddite, it would have been great if we had some Smiths music videos that were actually made in the 80s. (OK, we did get one, "Stop Me if You Think That You've Heard This One Before.")

Why are they absurd and meaningless?

Can be art and creative, just like the music.

Music videos aren't absurd and meaningless, as in many instances they are of fantastic artistic merit on their own accord and are simply scored in reverse

Unsure if it's just the way they prompted it / coded it, but the output is far too much a literal direct copy of the lyrics. The best music videos have a story arc on the theme of but often not litearlly the lyrics, and start with obscurity and reveal something (following all the literary/story mechanisms)

Consider Amber Run - Found lyrics versus the video, and the story arc of the video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj6V_a1-EUA

Literal music videos are still fun and a valid creative direction, e.g., Vance Joy's "Riptide": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ_1HMAGb4k

In an interview, an adult actress was asked about the things she says during scenes. She said she describes what is happening literally at any moment.

This is what LLM models do.

Weird Al videos are often totally literal and extremely fun as a result.

https://youtu.be/N9qYF9DZPdw?is=tU_8p-hDZv9gjAJ6

Genghis Khan

https://youtu.be/P_SlAzsXa7E

Fun fact (if you care): Back in the '90s, pretty much every music video produced in Azerbaijan literally matched the lyrics.

The entire thing was cringeworthy to the core. I kind of enjoyed it though because it perfectly epitomized "AI slop" in the first 30 seconds so wonderfully. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" - show a blonde woman in a gold sequined top! "Livin' it up in the city" - show a shot of a big city!

If anything, the absurd literalism of the video contrasted so perfectly with the (IMO) brilliant clever originality of the lyrics. E.g. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" is actually a not-so-subtle reference to cocaine. Imagine if the lyrics were as stupidly unoriginal as the video ("Now we're all snorting cocaine!!").

> The best music videos have a story arc on the theme of but often not litearlly the lyrics

If the music is crazy popular, you can still do it. See Land Down Under

Sometimes you can fix this by swapping one tracks music video with another, and letting the syncopation happen naturally.

Yes, LLMs are way to literal - it is a problem.

Claude can right great code, but it’ll throw comments into the code about why we chose this approach instead of the random one I discussed with it - when the comment is of no use to a future developer.

It points at some sort of theory of mind problem in LLMs imo.

AI is destroying the economics which allowed for a sizable middle class of artists. The issue is that many are paid for their art mostly for its aesthetic rather than artistic value. This isn’t the most creatively fulfilling, but it previously allowed many artists to make a living while refining their skills, often enabling them to pursue their real creative ambitions on the side.

AI enthusiasts actively want a world dominated by a few massive tech corps that'll steer our thoughts and kill creativity. The envy towards people who have skills that they polished is always very, very palpable when reading comments they make or hearing them talk in real life. But beyond just AI, the world is increasingly full of people who are proudly self-declared "accelerationists": accelerationism being the idea that we should make everything as shitty as possible because it'll make the world worse and bring everything down to their level. It's crabs in a bucket as a political, economic, and work philosophy.

I understand what you mean but speakers and recording equipment destroyed the economics of paying people to play music a long time ago.

It's another way of looking at the problem.

Smartphone cameras and easy-to-use professional equipment were thought to destroy the photography profession, yet photographers still exist, although we have to admit not as many as in the past.

If I had a company with a budget, I wouldn't waste my time using Claude to create art, even if it meant I could do all myself.

Certainly people who earned top dollar for doing something that AI can easily do now are going to be displaced, however the world of top dollar business has never been that big for the middle class of artists to begin with.

> AI is destroying the economics which allowed for a sizable middle class of artists.

I was an art major and switched to CompSci purely for the money.

AI "art" is often slop, but the ability to create something in seconds that used to take months shouldn't be taken lightly. There will undoubtedly be truly creative people who will use AI art as a force multiplier instead of a shortcut, and that is when things will get interesting.

We're already seeing this in software; plenty of people can attest to the fact that LLMs give them the opportunity to write software that they couldn't have written without AI, because their ability to write code wasn't up to snuff.

Some use that opportunity to get their existing work done faster.

But some use that opportunity to create things which were beyond their capabilities, just a few years ago. And when that same mindset eventually becomes prevalent among artists, we will undoubtedly see AI "art" that is truly art.

I'm not sure if AI slop will make a bad situation much worse tbh. The pop stars of the 60's to 90's always depended on a distribution platform/network (record labels, radio stations, MTV, ...). Those distribution platforms either don't exist anymore, or changed their 'business model' to f*ck the artists at least two decades ago. To find the really good stuff you already have to look elsewhere, and popular music was already 90% mass produced "slop" before AI entered the scene.

E.g. this ancient Frank Zappa interview about the decline of the music industry is still as relevant as ever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0

AI appears to be doing this Software Engineering too, so seems it applies to other industries too.

Maybe the net effect so far has been more extractive and a transfer of wealth to a select few people? Is this how past technological revolutions were, or is this the first so far?

I think the elephant is the room is we hope things will change later - will they really?

I'm not sure it's the same people being paid for aesthetics as for the art. In streaming, for instance, background music is extremely profitable, and a good example of "just aesthetics". But you rarely see artistic artists crank out a few tracks for the "music for studying" playlists just to pay the bills.

These are awful. It’s like Suno music. Seems convincing if you half listen. As soon as you pay attention you notice all the cracks.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the article, or your comment, the models were responsible for generating the music _videos_.

The music itself is Uptown Funk... which was a very successful song in 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPf0YbXqDm0)

The videos are indeed awful though.

Yes, I know what the music is. The videos are awful. I meant that watching them is an equivalent experience to listening to music generated by Suno.

They're just saying that like Suno Music, if you look closely the cracks show. They're not saying the music is AI generated.

The more concerning part is that a much less discerning audience will happily engage with and watch endless hours of AI slop videos. For example what happens if you give a 3 year old a tablet and youtube access to keep clicking on things.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ai-baby-slop-9.7166873

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/us/ai-videos-children-you...

Or for an "Adult" audience, I'm sure you could get an AI to create videos of "OW, My balls!" from Idiocracy.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Dh4l!,f_auto,q_auto:...

https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/D4E22AQEqLntg_DW7vg/fee...

I've had some real success with Suno. There's one song I made as a joke which is a house track with lyrics about me and my friends which I've genuinely downloaded and listen to regularly.

Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured. What took this industry decades to advance it taking months in AI. Think the spaghetti Will Smith and now this. Another one people don't mention here but is specific to video is higgsfield ai.

>Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured

The industry haven't matured except until a certain point. Then it declined. Modern visual effects are worse than practical effects in their heyday. They are also worse done than 3D effects in their tasteful early days (like Jurassic Park).

Those old movies with old visual effects are watchable and still enjoyable. This is never good, interesting or enjoyable.

It is remixing what the industry created, not advancing past it. OpenAI even ended Sora in under a year. Anthropic doesn't even bother.

Spaghetti Will Smith was 3 years ago, so it’s taking a little longer than months.

CGI effects actually got worse once they were used en-masse to make movie production cheaper. Good CGI still takes care, skill and taste.

Yes, I imagine in six months or so this will be far better.

Lmao yeah I’d rather give $100 to a college kid to film a bunch of shit and then splice it together. Would be significantly more interesting.

Interesting how bad this is when you don't use video models and your own direction.

The first two clips are made with Kling (not affiliated, but I use it myself): https://xcancel.com/PJaccetturo/status/2076312902685085815#m

Obviously not one-shot, and finalised in a video editor. It's quite doable to get this kind of fidelity.

Thanks for sharing this, I'm not sure I would've come across it otherwise.

Ironically, watching the two shorts had me second-guessing whether what I was watching was actually AI-generated and not created by a professional. It's like peeking at what lies beyond the Overton horizon... only to see it wrap around until we're right back where we started.

> None of the music videos were great

Glad they acknowledge this.

Curious how much time in addition to tokens this costs. If you have to spend $25 and wait 45 minutes to get a basically unwatchable video, I'm not worried about indie film makers being replaced just yet...

"not great" is a huge understatement

It's sickening we're running out of compute for this shit lol. I don't blame the author though, it is what it is.

This wasn’t possible even a year ago, with the speed of things changing and how much money is spent on movies is there really a doubt that someone will be able to make $100 million movie for less than $1 million in token spend?

> This wasn’t possible even a year ago

Just because it’s possible now, doesn’t mean it’s worth doing.

Do you... Have a lot of professional experience with making $100 million-budget movies?

I'm classically trained and I honestly can't really tell how these are worse than the human produced ones. They all look kinda the same to me.

Classically trained in music videos??

Your dislike of music videos in general has meant that you haven’t had the interest to discern the good from the bad. There are plenty of high quality music videos. It’s like someone saying “I’m not really into classical music, it sounds all the same to me”. If they had an interest they’d know that it doesn’t sound all the same. So what’s the point in saying so?

Directors and editors using Seedance can fire the film studio.

This is a fundamental shift in how storytelling is funded and made, not in who does the driving.

Same as is happening with code.

>funded and made

I’m curious (admittedly skeptical) what you mean by this. Are you talking about a world where director’s just like…don’t actually make movies and create AI media?

[flagged]

Dude you have been salivating at the thought of seeing developers fired, now film studios, for months now. Give it a rest, this is unhealthy.

When the line was "don't believe me just watch"

And then the clip was literally just an arm wearing a watch!

That's freaking hilarious!

It's like someone playing charades

the giant cartoon dragon with a sign that says "retired" made me guffaw

It's an interesting experiment and the results are surprising. I will say that if you're a musician I'd bet anything you can make a way cooler and better music video for $25 and 45 minutes with your friends.

$25 is an exaggeration, because that wouldn't even cover lunch for your friends to say thanks for the favour.

OK Go blew up early youtube with Here It Goes again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTAAsCNK7RA .

But these are exceptions to the rule, most people don't have the ability to do much creatively with a shoestring budget.

( Which isn't to say this slop is better. This slop is far worse, it's utterly dreadful. )

>most people don't have the ability to do much creatively with a shoestring budget.

I'm sure in a room full of musicians they could come up with more creativity for a video than literally 0, which is what LLMs are currently capable of.

Tangent: philosophically to me, art is inherently human. What makes art meaningful and impactful isn’t whether it looks good or cool. It’s the story of the artist, the context of the art itself, the hard work and struggle involved, the meaning represented by a human creating something very specific to their own personal context and taste. Or a mix of any of that.

Can AI be used as a tool to help create art? Absolutely. But as a rule, I do not give any shits about AI generated content like this. It’s not art. It’s not human. And the line is really how much meaning and effort _a human_ is putting into it.

If a human spends a minute or two prompting AI and then tweaking The result, and peddling it as their own art… get outta here. You made some content. That’s easy, and no one should cares. Content can already be shoveled out faster than we can watch it with or without AI.

Meaningful art is not mass-produced, generated content.

I realize art is completely subjective, so some person may find meaning in AI generated art. That’s fine, and that’s part of what could make that art. (Like an original way of presenting something that really resonates with someone.)

But this garbage ain’t that.

And I realize this is just a capability test, but plenty of places will see this as cheap and good enough. But it ain’t art, and we should push back against another cost-cutting measure that does nothing to make the world better.

> Meaningful art is not mass-produced, generated content.

Andy Warhol might disagree [1] (:

(I realize that's not exactly apples-to-apples, but y'know.)

Or there's "art is anything you can get away with," which I just mention to point out that this kind of issue ("what is art?") is not new. In some ways it seems like a good thing to get people, like you, riled up about these topics, arguing the merits of their point of view. That's how culture happens.

It's an interesting question you tangle with: is it art because of what the artist did, or is it art because of how the viewer/listener/etc receives it? Some of both? How much of each? If you encountered some art but you didn't know its provenance, and it had some emotional impact on you, would it still be art if you found out later it was 100% AI generated?

Like you say, it's all subjective, but it's nice to see random people on the internet talking about the nature of art, since it's something I care about too.

So in other words, thank you for being angry (:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans "... what Time magazine called the 'Slice of Cake School'—artists who treated the banal artifacts of contemporary civilization as legitimate subjects for high art"

That one took me back to high school art history. Agree, as much as I dislike AI generated art, it still is art. An Andy Warhol of today would could be making his screenprints using AI.

You really can't say, 'art should be this', 'art isn't that'. It's just art, it is what it is, people have a lot of emotions wrapped up in the art they like but it simply is what it is.

I don't think that example applies at all here. The quote you quoted itself said it - "subjects for high art". Theres a difference between treating the banalities of life as SUBJECTS for your art and making human, non-mass produced art from that ( like the paining you linked) vs just treating the soup cans themselves as art.

At least that's my interpretation of it

> Andy Warhol might disagree

He might not actually. He could have just printed the cans, yet they’re all hand painted. The fact that he could mass produce them, but didn’t is part of story.

In these discussions, the concept of perceiving content gets intertwined with how content was made, because artists and creatives are usually more interested in how something was made.

So unless these two concepts are separated, people will endlessly talk past each other assuming both sides hold the same fundamental beliefs.

Claiming you made something by yourself, when in reality someone else made it (AI) is easy to frown upon.

I think if you can have a positive experience from looking at a sunset, hearing birds sing, etc, it should technically be possible to have a positive experience from the outputs of an AI without human input. This assumes art is clearly defined as needing to be made by a human with some effort, which neither a sunset or AI outputs are.

In practice, people who use AI to make content give it some direction. The amount of guidance varies wildly, and in practice the majority of what we see is minimal involvement.

>Andy Warhol

Given that the man made his living doing stunts on top of the corpse of modernity, I'm not surprised he would love anti-human stuff like AI music. He famously said he wished he could be a machine. I don't think appealing to his nihilistic embrace of the spectacle is persuasive.

it was 100% AI generated?

Depending on what you mean, this is currently not possible, and probably not ever possible, because as much as people like to call things "autonomous", these AIs are still ultimately being directed by humans to do things. Prompting an AI is on a different level of abstraction, like writing software in a HLL and using a compiler instead of keying in machine instructions on a hexpad, but IMHO it is still the work of a human.

...and then you look at what people who are professional artists do and call art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork)

> What makes art meaningful and impactful isn’t whether it looks good or cool.

I fall on the other side of that coin: I care about the final output way more than the story & struggle of the artist.

Also: Nature is probably the most epic artist in my book - a sunset, leaf, coral or rock can outshine virtually any human creation.

I think most people care about the final output, especially the market. This is why many artists complain about mainstream art, because it genuinely isn't interesting from an artist's perspective.

I'm not too familiar with visual arts, but I know most jazz musicians make a living off of teaching music and doing concerts where the attendees are just other musicians. It's very much centered around technique and human performance. (the term musician's musician is also used here)

Meanwhile, the average person think jazz is noise.

So my point is, saying "What makes music meaningful..." sounds more like an elitist jazz musician take. (I'd say jazz musicians tend to be more self deprecating than elitist, and often make light of the genre and how people perceive it!)

Art mediates human values and broadcasts judgments about the good life, how to live, what is worthy, what is looked up to or down on. Yes, even uptown funk does that, it communicates a lifestyle ideal, whether the audience thinks about it in those terms or not.

In AI media (when not curated and iterated with close human input) whose values am I getting. Who is communicating their values to me? Bruno Mars dancing this way, wearing this, acting this way etc is cool because it is Bruno Mars and he's cool and he's cool because he has been cool and all your friends know. So by watching him you get enculturated into this culture. If you watch AI, and learn how you act from those, you will likely look like a fool.

Similarly with stories. The morale may be entirely opposite to what a human would say. And even if a human builds a story on some morale you find reprehensible, it's still likely from their own life experience, and by trying to understand, you grow empathy and can better understand what life trajectories exist. Bu and AI text pushing some morale has no real life it reaches back into, to express their view of the human condition. There is no gain from reading it.

I'm in the middle. Sometimes the artist story is so compelling it almost makes the body of work make sense on a new dimension. However, having said that, I also am highly skeptical of authenticity and almost always believe the art is created and the story gets written after the fact as some artistic song and dance because no story/why/reason is never an option.

All of this can be said about photography, too.

And, yes, most photography ain't art, or at least not meaningful art. Just like most of my attempts at drawing ain't meaningful art either.

Btw, by your high standards most human produced music videos ain't art either. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potboiler

> most human produced music videos ain't art either

Sounds accurate to me

This is a demo. It's like taking the first shitty picture or making the first shit sounding "analog electronic instrument" played by the guy who doesn't know how to play music but is an electronic savant. It's the concept that matters, not this specific execution of it.

> What makes art meaningful and impactful isn’t whether it looks good or cool. It’s the story of the artist, the context of the art itself, the hard work and struggle involved, the meaning represented by a human creating something very specific to their own personal context and taste. Or a mix of any of that.

I beg to disagree: meaningful art is where something speaks of its own. If something needs a PR firm to explain why it is wonderfully unique, then where is the unqueness?

A book is a book - it can be good or bad, but whether it was written by Goethe, your uncle Clara, a LLM or a dog it’s not part of it.

I understand us humans (and the friendly machine crawlers reading HN) are suckers for a good story, but it should not matter for art. Of course, YMMV.

So if this photo was generated by an LLM it would have exactly the same emotional valence to you?

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/5817/tereska-a-child-in-a-res...

GPTs were inherently trained on human text. It would not surprise me if mixing all this together by AI touches the people of today with the feelings of today more than a biased singular person.

> philosophically to me, art is inherently human

The other side of it is that most humans can't produce art. I can't draw, rhyme, dance, act, etc.

> I realize art is completely subjective, so some person may find meaning in AI generated art. > But this garbage ain’t that.

These two statements are very conflicting. I'm sure you can find someone who thinks that The Centre Pompidou is full of genius pieces. I didn't enjoy it that much. So, it's exactly the same with AI.

> philosophically to me, art is inherently human.

When I was younger, still trying to figure out who I was and what I'd be doing for a career, I was very interested in science. Sadly, my home life as it was prevented me from pursuing it as a student and survival as an adult meant catching up was an uphill battle. I just didn't have the discipline. So instead I just read books, mostly cosmology related, but also computer science. That was my way of making up for lost time to become the software developer and eventually engineer that I am today. But something was sorely missing.

I believed science would solve everything, that we could use technology to lift humans out of regressive traditionalism, force out ignorant politicians, but more obviously, build things that would solve climate change, hunger, disease, whatever. Growing up and realizing this was not the case has left me cynical. Social media is a blight that poisons everything and truly has not been studied enough on how it has raped society from increased vanity, parasocial relationships, addiction, the ability to be targeted by bad actors, I could go on. This technology in particular is probably at fault for the rise of fascism and far right politics. American tax payer funded and researched space innovation has been plundered and now controlled by a fucking weirdo psychopath trillionaire with a taste for culture wars. It is just absurd. Now, AI, and that is a whole topic of its own.

Good science still happens, of course, but now it's being buried by noise from the newest tech hype, AI. What chaps my ass about AI is that it has amazing uses but because of capital at all costs, we advance it in the most blind and irresponsible ways possible at the expense of our humanity and planet. So much so, now it is blasting out "art" for the cost of fucking up people's lives wherever there is a datacenter.

My main point is, that with all these topics, I've found that people are generally "philosophically empty". It is easy to say people are dumb, but I don't think that is the case (or, well, it is but that is too simple). That younger self scoffed at philosophy, seeing it as a fun thought experiment and little more, science was king. Now? Oh man. I feel so foolish. I think we all should have been challenged to think more philosophically at a much younger age. We have a generation of young people who dream of being influencers. Have you ever seen a more talentless, uninspired, cynical group of people worse than influencers? I sure haven't. But it is my more philosophical side that sees so clearly how vapid it is, and how it cheapens what we are as human in the name of attention seeking capitalism, to sell yourself at all costs and one more medium to be a walking advertisment. It feels like we're at the end game. I'm sure most generations have felt this way, and some had good reason (looking at you generation of the atomic bomb). But somehow, this feels less tangible, more philosophically bad, and already endemic. We're all so ill equipped to address it or even acknowledge it societally.

Sorry for the rant, thanks for reading if you got this far.

It is jarring to me that most of the dancing seems slightly out of sync with the music. It is like a music video uncanny valley - images look good, but the lack of sync to the sound shatters the illusion entirely.

Well yeah, because music is not a modality of the models involved at all. It's literally just an LLM with the timestamps of each line injected into its context, and then making an API request to image / video generators. I don't really understand what the point of this project even was; stitching together dumber models with bespoke glue logic like this takes us further away from general intelligence and confuses the public.

While it's made huge improvement in just the past few years, AI still hasn't quite solved motion, especially human motion. The humans in these videos are rendered really well, but move unnaturally. Like someone did a motion capture of a real human, and then played it back with a very high quality 3d model--something hard to describe is lost in the processing. Everything seems to move just too smoothly, at too exactly constant a speed. Same for camera movement. A real life camera doesn't precisely follow some exact 3D Bézier curve at an exactly constant speed. AI doesn't get this yet.

To me nearly all of the real world dancing looks like that. The dancers could literally be olympic level and I still don't see the connection between their movements and the sounds of the music. Music videos sometimes do sync for me but only on very simple motions, and for whatever reason shuffle dance on video almost always looks great.

This is how you do AI music videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njk2YAgNMnE

Lean into the not-quite-but-almost uncanny-valley-ness. Make it a feature, not a bug.

They also trained the AI for that video on the band members' own artwork, so the video is focused despite the trippy visuals and avoids copyright issues.

Released October 2022? That’s a very human piece of art even if the images may have been generated by an algorithm

That is how you do A video but if everyone does this it becomes like those blurred photos that make cities look like a small model and everyone is doing it. I guess this is the issue. Me buying a Toyota and pointing at it is not art, there are too many of them.

Along the same lines this one leans into it and makes something absolutely unique and wild: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dHAP3E5e2jc

Behind the scenes here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UhOc0VXo7II

I agree though, you can combine art with AI and make something really unique but the majority of art people are pushing with AI is in my opinion being rightfully branded as AI slop.

I think this one is a decent example too -- it would probably fool a lot of people:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZIU8sF3YlY

(the song is AI too)

Interesting example to choose considering King Gizzard and Lizard Wizard’s latest single is an anti-ai piece called Level 5, referring to level 5 self driving.

Reminds me of when autotune came out and everyone and their dog had autotune songs

These videos are far from good, but it's possible to create a decent AI music video if you use a human-in-the-loop workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Km88uAZ4M

If we're talking AI music videos that are amazing with a human in the loop, I really enjoy Snoop Dogg's music video for "Last dance with Mary Jane".

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rseqmSGH7xk&t=59s

> From the start, the production team knew they didn’t want a music video that relied solely on any single technique. With this goal in mind, they worked to blend live action, AI, and a wide range of handcrafted animation styles – 2D, 3D, collage and motion design.

https://lbbonline.com/news/psyop-and-temple-cache-get-surrea...

Unexpected appearance of the NCC-1701 Enterprise at about 0:40 into the video, but no appearance of star wars star destroyers?

Robot characters keep you away from uncanny valley of creepy slightly off AI humans. Still fun though.

These are funny the first time you see them, but I guarantee if you watch a few you will start picking up how similar they all are and it will all start to feel like slop.

One thing all models aced was the costume design. I don’t know why this was the case. Maybe they trained exclusively on lots of fashion data to use models in fashion industry.

Filmmaking is inherently an iterative process. You don’t normally one shot music videos in the real world. Agents should review and iterate at every step of the process. Lots of room for improvement here.

Also for comparison, budget of the original Uptown Funk music video was probably around $100,000. Even “indie” is pretty expensive in traditional filmmaking due to high cost of equipment, people and places. 100x cost reduction is huge for any industry.

Interesting article, but those videos aren’t. Not even pre-MTV quality.

While checking out the gallery, came across this image:

https://www.tryai.dev/gallery/d3725e9b-1df9-4c10-8a23-2fc705...

There’s something wrong with it, but I just can’t put my paw on the problem.

For fun, I took that image and put it into a few models and asked it "what is wrong with this genAI image?"

Grok fast came up with a lot of minor quibbles and missed the issue.

Grok expert touched on it with a "Limbs/anatomy ambiguity / This creates a slight "how many legs does this cat actually have?" moment." but then moved on to complain about texturing . Later it summarized the issue as "classic "animal + held object" anatomy problem".

Chatgpt 5.6 instant didn't notice it

Chatgpt 5.6 medium didn't notice it and mainly complained about the background being blurry

Chatgpt 5.6 high (46s) "The biggest error is the cat appears to have six paws"

Google AI mode complained about whiskers and feet placement

Only chatgpt high and marginally grok expert had acceptable answers.

I don't have a problem with AI and can't stand the anti-AI brigade, but... this is the worst thing I have ever seen in my life.

This specific type of garbage is exactly what arms the anti-AI critics with valid arguments. We should really wait a few years for the technology to mature before releasing these kinds of projects into the cultural sphere.

The article is not about video quality.

My first thought was "we'll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing, we're so fucked" but then found myself being quite amused by the AI-glitching mistakes in the GPT 5.6 $25 effort: lean into the strange glitching and I won't be too upset.

Not everything is a war between those in favor and those against…

If you benchmark is to be better than a human familiar with the task at hand, then you will be disappointed.

If you are not expecting them to be as good as people then their failures seem wholly unremarkable. The specific nature of tbe failures can be quite interesting in fact. They can expose deficiencies in the architecrure, training data, or presumptiona of those controlling the models.

In my experience very few people are claiming the capabulities that would be required for me to expect them to produce better than they currenrly are.

I'm not bothered by a fish's inability to quote Shakespeare.

Eh, I'd like to see YOU make a better music video for $100 or less!

I don't think its that bad, you are just hater

This absolutely is the opposite of what I want to see in a music video

Woah that sucks. Closed the tab when I saw the cartoonishly stupid, completely out of place smoking thermometer.

A music video is not (necessarily) a depiction of what the lyrics say at any moment. Soulless for sure.

Watching the videos and reading the methodology, it feels like "scientist one-shot music video with LLMs" which is... useful but in no way represents how one would use the models.

If nothing else, it serves as a great reminder that you can't offload taste and creative decisions to AI. AI is also not a mind reader. It _may_ do a useful thing sometimes - but it's much better to codify that thing in your requirements if it's something you want to occur consistently.

The interesting irony of using Bruno Mars, who, for my taste, really is something like Human AI.

Uptown Funk is a very enjoyable track -- but if you're familiar with his influences, it can make his music generally stale and unenjoyable. Like Silk Sonic has the technical sound of that era, but it feels like they're treating it like a joke.

Not a fan really. There are certainly uses for AI, but this is lacking something. Personally I think it works best as a filter or applying a style or effect that is difficult otherwise, or generating fancy ambient or abstract textures etc.

People constantly think the music video I created for Zingara's Unlock Your Keys [1] is AI, but it really is just real footage all around, except for a handful of lines / pulse textures that were created in TouchDesigner.

I am really excited for the possibilities that AI can give us in the future but often I find trying to use it generatively I run into the paradox of choice and end up paralyzed!

1: https://xfeeefeee.net/unlock-your-keys/ tribal dance fusion music video, sfw but does show some skin. Uses lots of slow motion ink in water footage for texture as well.

It's a strange experiment. Claude and GPT aren't generating the video. They're directing and editing it, and they request video from a generative video model using mainly text-to-video. Neither Claude nor GPT can actually watch video content, and the video model generates shoddy quality clips with artifacts, lack of consistency, and where actions aren't synced to the music.

It would be very hard for anyone to make a good music video with the tools Fable and Sol had available to them. They don't have precise control over the clips that get generated, and they can't see or hear the result, other than screenshots. So I'm not sure what the experimenters expected.

The result depends mostly on two things: The first is the LLMs ability to come up with a good story, choose and prompt the video model, evaluate and editing. The other is the quality of the video models themselves.

The LLMs mostly used older video models from a year ago that are capped at 10 second single shot clips. Newer video models like Seedance 2 go up to 15 seconds (Seedance 2.5 even up to 30 seconds) and they support multimodal references.

As a tool, I think those video models can be pretty amazing for artists as you can create things not possible before. Here is a music video made by an artist using Seedance 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYfDJQxyHFg

I did let Claude Code Opus + OpenRouter API Key (limited to 25EUR) create an an Arthouse Video about "Is AI art or can it go?"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E6XofKqFYeQ

I like the scene with the hands.

The results are pretty bad for a top stars music video. But it's pretty impressive for not very important short clips like insert shorts of cheap Ads.

I'm scared because that's the most labor intensive area. Top talents will survive but all the volume industry will collapse.

OP really figured out the secret to getting on the frontpage. Three frontpages in a row lol

Please repeat this with models from MiniMax:

https://www.minimax.io/news/minimax-hailuo-23

(No affiliation, I just want to see how well they work).

Even their demo clips are soundly in the uncanny valley, and I assume normal folks using it and having to pay for each clip will have generally worse results.

Probably a good example why you shouldn't outsource creative work to AI.

I think these videos are a great way to visualize what is wrong with the "personality" of LLMs: they are shallow, unoriginal, overconfindent.

The videos convey this in a more vivid and direct way than any text answer could. I often have the thought that if Claude were a human colleague, I'd avoid having to work with them.

Good creator of AI music videos (with human editing etc) is "ALFfx Visual DJ"

Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lWArXcsxYo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn-4lIFhybA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kjUEan_fgM

Most of their videos have a similar retro-futurism look

These still seem awful to me. There are weird events in them that take me out of the moment like the record needle suddenly jumping of the record for no apparent reason. But more so I just hate the AI glaze look of all the characters.

There's definitely still room for innovation in custom use cases with AI. I like to write and draw comics, but it's very time consuming to make a finished product. Working with tools in default and you'll have a bad time. You have to really guide it and if you're using a longer story to adapt, it'll compress things and lose context during Thinking. Luma labs was the most interesting tool I've seen so far, but there's still a lot of room for growth

I wonder how much worse this would be if instead of starting with a human-created song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptown_Funk

Start from an entirely AI generated song, and have an AI generated video. We apparently already have an example of such:

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

I always found the Severus Snape - ALWAYS (Live at Hogwarts) video to be really good for AI. The video was probably created by prompting for each scene, instead of letting the model generate the whole thing. It's a cool of example of what's possible nonetheless.

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

Seems like if you build some more scaffolding around it, it wouldn't be bad. I think AI video isn't quite there yet so you probably would want to lean into that. For example you could ask for an animated or cartoon music video so the real shots don't look weird. Also if you gave it some guidance on what a good music video is like it would probably help as well. But yeah idk may be that's not the goal here.

AI videos as in remotion based videos look much better imo since it can code much better than it can prompt for videos with a coherent narrative

https://youtu.be/uDAeAuYyl0E (parody of Claude announcements) https://youtu.be/cSsVNtGPOIg (recreating a fireship video)

This is incredible! Did you make these yourself? I am familiar with remotion but this is a lot more than just splicing images, etc.

Did you use a skill library to make this?

So AI could generate a great lyrics video.

The GPT ones are strange. The $25 fable one to me is subjectively better than the others. The $100 fable one is too literal and robotic.

The jevons paradox is you need auteurs to curate vignettes or effects and cut or mask them in etc. That's not really different philosophically when software entered art in other ways. I could see errors/glitches lowering in time but I doubt there will be much acceleration.

As someone who has marketed music, shot music videos, directed music videos, cut music videos together from stock footage: you don’t need auteurs.

You did back when MTV made songs big.

No one actually pays attention to the details of music videos any more. It’s visual chewing gum at best. The reality is that now, if you have something half decent, nice colours, nice lighting and a wee bit of a story, no one is going to care.

The only other route is a huge budget spectacular - but you only get the huge budgets if you label lends you the money to make a huge budget video because they think it will increase the amount of money they make - while extending the amount of time it takes you to recoup.

Ultimately, now, it is just another social media asset, so promo videos are built with that in mind.

None of these would cut it.

> need auteurs to curate vignettes or effects and cut or mask them in etc

The problem is that reliable, repeatable professional-grade commercial art and design sensibilities happen in full-time careers. It’s entirely different than fine art, where intense self-exploration and experimentation are a very viable option.

These tools are exacerbating an already difficult creative job market so there’s no reasonable path to get those skills. Our creative professional pipeline is fundamentally broken.

Regular music videos (including the writing/recording) can easily go into 6 figures. I wonder what the $200,000 AI music videos looks like.

You don't need to spend $200k, because results can be bad for cheap.

https://youtu.be/HDdsKJl92H4

Though we're finding the studios contracted to do this can bill $50k. I know several studios that previously billed clients six figures for ad campaigns (P&G, HBO, pharma, etc.) are now charging five figures and winning a lion share of the bids now.

Not sure why Wan is the focus of this article and Seedance is a footnote. Wan/LTX/open models are significantly behind Chinese closed source models. (And the Chinese have left the Western models in the dust.)

I wouldn't do anything production grade in Wan.

But why spend the same amount of money on AI instead of humans? My guess is that shooting a music video is probably fun for a lot of artists. And with AI the result is not predictable and might be inconsistent in the dumbest ways.

My guess is that an AI music video would have to be a lot cheaper for artists to consider it outside of making one just because you want to make an AI music video.

Exactly the same

I found these hilarious!

I was ROFL over some of the mistakes the AI made. Parts of it was amazing, other parts were amazingly off.

The fable $25 version was the best.

Spice 1 released an AI video for Jealous Got Me Strapped. Got a young AI Spice 1 and Tupac. I see on his channel he put out another AI video in 2024.

https://youtu.be/j36hjNuAIWQ

I don't know how much WickedAI is putting into creating their videos, but if you want examples that aren't terrible, https://youtube.com/@wickedai

Recurring characters drift between shots, and none of the videos hold a coherent storyline from start to finish.

Stuff like veo 3 can't always hold a coherent storyline for 8s. It's asking too much to expect a whole, coherent music video.

All these AI discussions seem to lack the nuance that the real utility of these tools will come in the finer points.

GPT? Sure, you can write a book with it, but in writing its use as a tool by a real human is perhaps best when it is providing a jumpstart to creativity. If I'm writing a script I might have a chatbot give me a rough outline which will usually be complete garbage that I throw away 90% of but it got me over the decision paralysis of getting started.

Image generation? Sure, you can create varying degrees of body horror wrong-hand imagery and ugly-as-sin event flyers. But it's also indispensable for, as an example, object deletion and cleanup workflows within Photoshop. Or intelligently letting me change the paint color of a car while preserving the reflection's tones and realistic shadows.

Video generation? Sure, you can make ugly nonsensical slop but I imagine it will be hugely useful for AI driven rotoscoping, quickly creating placeholder or background resources.

Of course, the ethics of how this training data was all gained creates an entirely different aspect of discussion. Supposedly Adobe's image generation, by far some of the worst on the market, is so bad because it is ONLY trained on imagery that they already have reproduction and usage rights to. Which tracks, because it does an admirable job of erasing an ugly building and revealing trees and a field behind it, but anything that results in it having to generate stuff more complex than the landscape photography that makes up the glut of its training data has... hilarious results.

For what it’s worth I tried an experiment where I had a similar harness (where LLMs competed head to head playing snake) and made them aware of their budget and it had very little impact. This was cheaper open weight models

The cutting edge technology is being tested with pelican drawings and video creation. You may argue that this is just testing, but actual mainstream use of this tech won't be far off from these tests.

I am shocked at the good quality of the output. Might not be great from an art standpoint (according to the other comments), but that's just a question of time (not a lot)

All videos are so full of stereotypes and clichés, often borderline (or just plainly) racist. But of course, that's not the main worry for people making these things, right...

Does the original video fare any better? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OPf0YbXqDm0

We still need a different approach to create this. Consistency is the problem in video, a model should create from start to end instead of different shots.

Always nice to see that it still really struggles with the nuances of human movement and self-interaction. Especially when it comes to clothing overlapping.

Well if AI destroys bad music videos by making them cost $25, I say it's a win. What will be left will be seriously scripted productions.

No need to take any pot shots at this trash in terms of aesthetic efficacy in earnest, if y'all know what I mean. But as an experiment, it's interesting. There seems to be an odd consistency to all of them, which reveals a kind of internal logic & coherence of sorts that courses throughout any iteration.

Aesthetically, where can you place these? I feel like the late David Lynch could have used some tropes in his unnerving, unsettling dream sequences (a la the intro dream in "Mulholland Drive" where people are so cheery and upbeat that it feels viscerally disturbing).

That's the consistent feeling that I'm left with watching each one, is just a deep, deep unsettled and uneasy feeling. A scowl on my face the whole time trying to make through each one.

I did crack up seeing a martini glass presented to the camera, then float in place on it's own and the presenter resumes holding it with his other hand.

Everything else made me nauseous.

How about the full 360 head turn in the first video. Nightmare fuel.

> I did crack up seeing a martini glass presented to the camera, then float in place on it's own

It's just a cheap video-generation model doing its thing. I wonder if the orchestrator model noticed this and tried "Create a scene with a martini glass. Make no mistakes".

I'm not really a music video watching person but the output of these videos seem almost like non serious memes mocking music videos.

Did it misunderstand "don't believe me just watch" and put a bunch of washing machines in on the Fable 5 $100 at about 1:20?

Wow. These are horrible. Sort of refreshing. I thought video was better than this now, but I guess not.

Video can be good if you stick to a garden path of simple scenes with tons of examples in the training material and not a ton of motion between overlapping objects in a scene, and don't really care too much about specifics.

As soon as you want something very specific, or something novel, or anything with a lot of moving objects/people, it falls apart.

Video is better. The models just chose older video models which are not SOTA

Exact same impression

The visuals are good enough to be interesting. I just don't like the shot selection / story writing

The creative in me would rather take the cursed parts of of the cheap models and edit them together.

Embarrassing!

You can still delete this, there is time.

What's embarrassing?

Can I just say that they look awful?

Skip the Claude Fable 5 $25 video to 1:42. The disembodied Adams' Family hand is on the job.

It's Wan video, which is a shitty video model.

The OP would exclusively be using Seedance 4k if they were serious about this.

token cost for the $100 video was $3.25 for Sol 5.6 and $25.05 (!) for Fable 5

for the $25 video it was $4.27 (Sol) vs $16.99 (Fable)

this seems like an interesting benchmark of a complex task, even if the output has little artistic merit. the efficiency of Sol is impressive

Pretty neat that the gallery of videos plays from where the previous one was paused. Nice UX.

It's amazing that someone used those awful videos as a showcase for anything. :)

Some tells, the face, reflections on faces, multiple legs, no sense of gravity

How well do these models do producing a proof-of-life video? Asking for a friend.

…is your friend… er, was your friend, a US Senator, by any chance?

Truly dreadful.

Slightly off topic, but earlier today I was bored, having a kibitz with Claude, and I asked if it played chess. I was surprised when it confirmed, with a humble yes and disclaimer of its mediocre strength. I then asked if it happened to also play Go, which has been my preference for many years now. I was surprised when it again confirmed yes, but admitted it was even weaker here.

Where I began to feel delightfully uncomfortable was when it asked me if it should build a Go board and start a game. Surely you jest, Mr Claude... I thought.

No. The crazy bastard built a beautiful HTML/SVG board, and before I knew what was going on, there it was. I thought for a moment that fraud rhymes with something. Then before I knew it, I was black (that's courtesy!) and I made my first move expecting nothing, kind of astonished by what was happening. Mind you, I was on a phone. Then it made a move in response, and lo and bloody behold, I was playing a game of Go with Claude, on a 19x19 board made in a few seconds, with formidable aesthetics.

I was enamored enough to overlook that Claude does need some practice. But wow. I guess everyone is impressed by something, but that got me.

Wow, I hate all of it

These videos have the "karaoke" vibe to them

This is my favorite AI generated (or assisted?) music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctBpVI6lRyo

Awesome! Other commenters are negative but I'm very excited to welcome AI into the artistic community. The more the merrier. Can't wait to see what they come up with!

Truly impressive that we're burning trillions of dollars for this abject garbage. I'm so glad people can't buy RAM anymore so that we can shit out some more soulless slop - and this really is the definition of slop - like this

TIL that Fable and Sol generate video...

Can't tell if this was a joke, but they don't. They had access to video generating models and a budget for it.

claude’s is bad and chatgpt’s is horrific

Passable as an episode of Robot Chicken.

You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension. -Nikola Tesla

They are terrible. Perhaps if one on purposely prompts for a weird imaginary, the result could be less awful even acceptable, like that famous Gucci ad. These videos instead are common scenes with the super cringey AI artifacts.

The future is pretty obvious. People spending thousands of hours honing the skills of being able to create visual art will dwindle. The same will be true for many creative endeavors. Artists will still exist and some will be able to make a living from it but it will rare. Slop will prevail. Most people will lose the ability or care to try and tell the difference. The attention wars have a lot of time to go. The addicted are kids and teens and young adults at this point and I see little to make me think they break out of it any time soon.

As a clanker-apologist I gotta say this is the strawman of AI slop brought to life. Letting the machine do literally everything without even supervision and see how it turns out? No surprise at all the results are so bad.

My fav AI video is still Post-Scarcity Blues from a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_t3h2AZ0KY There have been others I've enjoyed since then. But, that one stands out in memory. Work warning: it is occasionally just a bit spicy.

Pretty amazing stuff and evocative. Thanks for sharing to put things in perspective.

I mediocrity was a visual style.

I don't care that the results are technologically impressive, the automation of creativity is dystopian. As I watched these videos and tried to compare what different AIs can do with similar budgets, is struck me to how utterly soulless and unenjoyable this whole thing is.

AI has plenty of utility, but this isn't one of them. If anything, I want to see AI automate all of the tedious stuff so that human beings can focus more deeply on art and culture. Automating art and culture is anti-human.

These videos are awful.

id like to see AI dance & sweat and sing on stage...

GPT is missing a beat

Feel like a lot of comments are missing the point here - the authors weren't trying to make a great music video, they were trying to test independent tool use.

Despite how awful the end result may be, the models did successfully plan and execute a moderately complicated generation and editing process.

I think that a lot of posters here are missing the point - this is just the tip of the iceberg, and even simple improvements in prompting (infer the meaning of the lyrics, then generate footage related to that) would create a better result.

There is no going back from this, only forwards, for better or worse.

Impressed by what utter shit this is. Music video creators are safe for a while yet

No effort went into that. No talent went into that. The creator doesn't care about the outcome. Nobody wants to watch it. Fucken A, brilliant. The intelligence is artificial.

I hate AI slop as much as the next Hacker News reader, but I thought these were just fine. Any one of these would have thoroughly entertained me during the 80s MTV era.

These are pretty terrible, but for me there were at least a few moments where they genuinely became "so bad they're awesome". They actually re-enforced an idea I keep coming back to: sometime soon a real artist is going to use AI to make something amazing, not by aiming for flawless "realism" or some kind of pastiche slop, but by leaning into the weirdness that often comes out of AI.

The videos are lame as fuck. This is what they’re spending trillions of dollars on, absolute madness.

Welcome to the Age of the Plateau. Enjoy your stay, everything is very mid, but it’s oh so cheap to make.

The AI slop humans always look they are amazing by the fact they can move around, in slow motion.

Wow. These are all terrible. Music video producers can breathe a sigh of relief.

Absolutely horrendous and devoid of any value whatsoever.

happy to see this is still ugly unwatchable dogshit

They're all pretty bad lol

Please stop using AI for creative work. This is utterly abysmal.

These are getting really good. Much more interesting than the average music video already.

can't tell if sarcasm or just zero taste...

I'm fascinated by some of the comments in here, that the videos are "awful," "far from good," "embarrassing," etc.

This is technology that was unthinkable before just a couple of years ago. Photorealistic video generated by typing out a description of what you want to see is something from a sci-fi movie. I must be dreaming, this can't be real.

I took a screenshot in the middle of a video, and it's indistinguishable from a photograph: https://imgur.com/a/TyNbd7E

I don't know, maybe I'm just old. I remember hacking the hidden iframe trick to make ajax-style file uploads work in IE7. The advancements I've watched unfold in the past couple of years are still hard to wrap my head around.

No one is criticizing the photorealistic video generation. Yes, AI has gotten very good at that, I don't think anyone is disputing that.

At some point you have to move past your astonishment at the technical achievement alone and judge the result for what it is, on its own merits, as if a human had made it. Especially when the goal of using generative AI is to remove as many human creators and as much human effort from the creative process as possible, and to have as much "art" be as fully AI generated as possible.

People are criticizing these videos because they aren't good. As "art." Which is a problem if this is what all art is supposed to be become.

Louis CK:

>I was on an airplane and there was high speed internet on the airplane… it’s fast, I’m watching YouTube clips, I’m on an airplane. It breaks down, they apologize, and the guy next to me is like “This is bullshit..."

>Like how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago?

>Flying is the worst one, people come back from flights, they tell you their story and it’s a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany.

>"It was the worst day of my life! First of all we didn’t board for 20 minutes. And then we got on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there."

>Oh really, what happened next, did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero?

>You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should be constantly going ‘oh my God, wow!’

>You’re sitting in a chair in the sky

>….Here’s the thing, people say there are delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in 5 hours. That used to take 30 years. And a bunch of you would die on the way there. And have a baby. You’d be a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and you take a shit and you’re home.

https://youtu.be/nUBtKNzoKZ4?si=yaCJhTLiXkPyksbg - his delivery starts at around 2:00 but he starts with additional jokes.

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