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Comment by scrollop | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

If you've ever tried to get around Gemini or ChatGPT's guardrails, stock footage poisoning, and just general tendency to produce the most frustratingly banal version of your prompt possible, then you would understand that prompting AI images and video absolutely already involves a clash between reality and intent (in the sense that this is Google and OpenAI's world, we're just living in it).

I would love to get around the "individual skill" part, but all of my artist friends would excommunicate me if they knew the AI projects I've been working on, let alone if I asked them to collaborate.

> If you've ever tried to get around Gemini or ChatGPT's guardrails, stock footage poisoning

Art is (often) provocative, uncomfortable, taboo, explicit, subversive, or challenging of norms. You're never going to get that out of increasingly locked-down and Disney-fied BigTech hosted LLMs obsessed with "AI safety."

So, would you agree that working creatively around the Disney-fied locking-down of those tools in order to produce something "provocative, uncomfortable, taboo, explicit, subversive, or challenging of norms" would at least begin to approach being a process that involved at least a semblance of artistic merit?

Because I can assure you that much of what I've gen'd checks those boxes (unless Sorry To Bother You's third-act twist no longer unsettles).

Note that he simply downvoted me. I refuse to believe that it's because equisapiens no longer shock.

FYI it's not possible to downvote replies to your own comment

"He" being "ryandrake".

A notable chunk of criticism GenAI receives has to do with output irreproducibility and semantic instability relative to the input, so this is a bit entertaining to read.

If there's a way to do something better and worse, then one can absolutely talk about added and absent value. I browse AI generated images a ton, and the difference between beginner / low effort submissions and high effort / advanced submissions is very stark.

Yeah one thing people aren’t really grasping with a generative AI is that it fundamentally can’t produce the same thing twice. You can’t really create top notch art with all kinds of inconsistencies

Not fundamentally, no. It is entirely possible to keep putting in the same thing, and then getting out the same thing. To be honest, it's outright frustrating that this feature is so often neglected.

I think you are making the same mistake as everyone else with respect to art.

Art has nothing to do with _mechanical_ difficulty. I see this misconception all the time. Examples

- Kumail Nanjiani roided up for his next movie. This has mechanical difficulty, sure. But what does it add to the artistic element?

- Dream Theatre guitarists play olympics with their guitar and play solo's that are mechanically impossible for normal people. Yet we still find Beatles have more artistic value, why?

I hope this popular misconception will die down. I don't want mechanical difficulty in art being praised. I feel these are things people hold on to because mechanical difficulty has some moat and people don't want to give it up.

I don't think that was fair comparison, earlier comment was that creative person can make million dollar art without having million dollar budget, then again creative person can splash paint on canvas while being dead drunk and make most valuable painting.

Most people find it more impressive if you learn to play Dream theater song on guitar than if you program it in daw.

I partly agree with you - I used to think of mechanical difficulty as a kind of 'proof of work' for art. Nowadays I am less interested in the idea of what counts as art or not.

However, consider works like photorealistic drawings of eyes (usually at a very large scale). A lot of people like these, and consider them to be fine art, while others (art critics?) consider them bland. Contrast that with a Picasso flamingo drawn with a single line.

There is artistic value in high-effort, low concept works as well as low-'effort', high-concept works and other combinations. Perhaps what we are all looking for is effort of some kind (I prefer human effort) whether that is conceptual effort or practice in drawing lines on paper.

I’m curious to understand why you think drawing photorealistic eyes is different from a person beating a Guitar Hero time record.

Both are pushing boundaries in mechanical dexterity. Yet one is considered art and another is not.

If I was feeling unfair I would say there is no difference! However, if a friend drew me an eye on A3 paper would I frame it? Probably yes...

Others have said this better, but art is an qualitative/emotional thing, not a simply measurable quantity of an object. We tend to use the effort put in as a proxy measure for quality, but when photocopiers and 3D printers and - yes - genAI get involved, that becomes harder or impossible.

Beating Guitar Hero is emotional, but not artistic. Photorealistic drawings could be emotional, and may or may not be artistic. Putting a text prompt into a generative model to make a (frankly terrible) music video for $100 is ... something else.

Anything can be artistic, but some things are very hard to make artistic.

Beating Guitar Hero could artistic. I don't even know how, but I'm sure some artist could beat Guitar Hero in a way that was somehow artistic.

This terrible $100 music video which I'm not even going to watch, is surely not art. Also I'm totally sure some person is going to spend $100 with an AI and make art. It's very hard, but they day will come. The slop-to-art ratio will be astronomical.

> 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

That's not art, that's the limitations that everyone working in this industry have been working night and day to overcome for hundreds of years

> Art isn't just the screenplay, or a prompt; it's the clash between reality and the intent

Okay, clanker

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.

Most of the discussions I've read about AI is as a tool. There is a narrative being created that its all about replacing humans. I've not seen that outside of a view influencers.

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.

well said.

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.

When it happens they won’t tell you about it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm9codc_zwk is my pick, but it's not for everybody.

Look at this one: https://x.com/Zahri_10i/status/2078211494349537447?s=20

Look up a Kenneth Anger or Maya Deren film.

You probably won't be impressed and these are legendary figures in experimental film making either.

There is no audience or market for what these tools would be good for.

These videos in the examples are laughable uncreative trash to me but so are big budget super hero human slop.

The main constraint with AI art is that I think the models have been overfit to a very narrow range of visual expression. Midjourney in 2023 could produce the absolute most fucked up images I have ever seen and I have seen a lot of fucked up visual art. That has all been washed out of the model at this point towards a statistical average of what people think is "beautiful".

Also no nudity allowed. What we have is nothing like a model trained to output the sensibility of Hieronymus Bosch or Francis Bacon with nudity. We have literally the opposite of that.

It is the difference between an artist and a "creative". These models are for "creatives", the conformist corporate bullshit version of the artist.

Instead of Hieronymus Bosch we have the statistical average infinite pretty portraits of the virgin mary because we are good people and good corporate citizens.

I don't think you can make the absolute statement that there is no audience or market for these tools. I enjoyed watching all of these videos. They are far from banal crap. They are deranged. They are not intentionally deranged, it is limitation of the tool. If a video artist were to employ these tools not to save effort, but instead to create an aesthetic it would be proper and good use. Just like non-AI video editors or color grading tools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M9r6PZPaIo (slightly NSFW)

I have enjoyed Craft (1979). Artistically might be dubious, it's a sort of genre/style parody but I think writing is better than the actual Minecraft movie.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zX-e9LRR_ko&list=PLF-4qeBB9YHk-P...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PlfOoKTFcAE seems pretty good to me?

I don't agree, but this is exactly why AI is the technology of this century. We will never be able to agree, because we have no common ground.

I think it's pointless dribble. There's no punchline that it's working towards other than "pigeon dumb"

> I would really love to see examples of creatives using modern AI/LLMs to make quality art

Look up "The Chronicles of Bone". It's pretty good.

I've seen a few that have been shared - I'll link them here if I can find them.

I think right now most people here and on twitter have no taste, and post slop that were just sort of one shotted.

But there are people using these tools in a sort of hybrid way, which I think has incredible potential. You can use it to do CGI on existing footage, in a way that's orders of magnitudes faster and cheaper than current CGI methods.

I also think that the most viable models will be video-to-video, and audio-to-audio.

If you've read A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, I think you might get what I'm saying. But essentially, you can capture a lot of emotion, expression, etc, using a cheap camera and a single actor, and then use AI to "stylize" it in a really cheap effective way, while keeping the emotion/expression. Adding lighting for example, upscaling the quality, changing the voice timbre while keeping the pacing, etc.

The suno produced AI world cup country songs were far more exciting and viral than any of the “real” slop produced by the event

https://youtube.com/shorts/xWziEfQxkyo?si=UEzIzVeUUFXEZvCS

They really slap for Social Media, but not real life.

Take a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/@Gossip.Goblin

He (they?) have a vision, and are trying to get it on the screen via AI tools. I don't think the tools are quite there yet, so I wouldn't call it "quality art", but I think it shows the direction of travel, and it shows somebody trying to use those tools to say something (ironically, the message is that the tools are kinda bad news).

I'm reminded of the tipping point when a generation of bedroom producers got tools "good enough" that they didn't need studio time any more. We got some creative music and a lot of slop out of that change. But hey, 80% of everything is crap, so it shouldn't be a surprise.

It just does not feel original, or novel, or actually weird. I dunno it’s impressive but… so empty?

I think its feet stand more in written SF than filmed SF - I haven't seen anything quite like it in film, but I can point to books that seem to have influenced it. In that respect, I think it's novel. I agree with the emptiness comment. Maybe it's empty because it's so relentlessly shiny - there's not much "tonal variation".

But I do think it's a harbinger of things to come: bedroom auteurs with new tools (although they'll be surfing an absolute tidal wave of slop). The tools are going to get better; early synthesizers were pretty primitive.

It won't happen for the intrisc nature of (current-gen, at least) AI of being forced within the limits of their training, which deprives the artist of intent - that is, specifically the ability of questioning in some way what came before him.

The point of art isn't "I made it pretty so it has value now", it's "This is how I see the world, am I the only one who feels this way?".

And yes, this is valid even for absolute jerks who couldn't care less about that the other people were thinking at the time, Like Lou Reed for example. The questions in his music were rhetorical and directed at himself in that case. Unfortunately, as Pablo Picasso said, for this computers (or AIs, in this case) are useless. They can only give you answers.

> AI of being forced within the limits of their training

AI doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's the sum of training, inputs and outputs. If I give it novel inputs, the outputs won't be solely within the limits of their training. If I use it as part of a pipeline, the end result of the pipeline too won't be forced within the limits of AI training.

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.

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