Veo 3 and Imagen 4, and a new tool for filmmaking called Flow
It makes me sad, though. I wish we were pushing AI more to automate non-creative work and not burying the creatives among us in a pile of AI generated content.
Personally I can't wait to see the new creative doors ai will open for us!
"Creating" with an AI is like an executive "inventing" the work actually done by their team of researchers. A team owner "winning" a game played by the their team.
That being said, AI output is very useful for brainstorming and exploring a creative space. The problem is when the brainstorming material is used for production.
Both things which were dismissed as not art at first but are widely accepted as an art medium nowadays.
There's a line to be drawn somewhere between artist and craftsperson. Creating beautiful things to a brief has always been a teachable skill, and now we're teaching it to machines. And, we've long sought to mass-produce beautiful things anyway. Think textiles, pottery, printmaking, architectural adornments.
Can AI replace an artist? Or is it just a new tool that can be used, as photography was, for either efficiency _or_ novel artistic expression?
The work a camera does is capturing the image in front of the photographer. "Art" in the context of photography is the choice of what in the image should be in focus, the angle of the shot, the lighting. The camera just captures that; it doesn't create anything that isn't already there. So, not even remotely the same thing as AI Gen.
The work of Krita/Inkscape/etc (and technically even Photoshop) is to convert the artistic strokes into a digital version of how those strokes would appear if painted on a real medium using a real tool. It doesn't create anything that the artist isn't deliberately creating. So, not even remotely the same thing as AI Gen.
AI Gen, as demonstrated in the linked page and in the tool comparison, is doing all of the work of generating the image. The only work a human does is to select which of the generated images they like the best, which is not a creative act.
AI cannot “democratize art” any more than the camera did, until the day it starts teaching artistry to its users.
until the day it starts teaching artistry to its users.
It almost definitely can start teaching artistry to its users, and the same people who are mad in this thread will be mad that it's taking away jobs from art instructors.
The central problem is the same and it's what Marshall Brain predicted: If AI ushers in a world without scarcity of labor of all kinds, we're going to have to find a fundamentally new paradigm to allocate resources in a reasonably fair way because otherwise the world will just be like 6 billionaire tech executives, Donald Trump, and 8 billion impoverished unemployed paupers.
And no, "just stop doing AI" isn't an option, any more than "stop having nuclear weapons exist" was. Either we solve the problems, or a less scrupulous actor will be the only ones with the powerful AI, and they'll deploy it against us.
There's nothing creative in having someone or something else doing the work for you.
This would include almost everyone who’s used any editing software more advanced than photoshop CS4.
You could come up with your own story and direct the AI to generate it for you.
A film director is a creative. Ultimately, they are in charge of "visualizing" a screenplay": the setting, the the design of the set or the utilization of real locations, the staging of the actors within a scene, the "direction" of the actors (i.e., how they should act out dialog or a scene, lighting, the cinematography, the use of stunts, staging shots to accommodate the use of VFX, the editing (meaning, the actual footage that comprises the movie).
There's an old show on HBO, Project Greenlight, that demonstrates what a director does. They give 2 directors the same screenplay and budget and they make competing movies. The competing movies are always completely different...even though they scripts are the same. (In the most extreme example from one of the later seasons, one of the movies was a teen grossout comedy, and the competing movie was some sort of adult melodrama.)
But you're not "directing" the AI to generate it for you. You're just giving it a command.
That's what direction is though. Film directors prompt their actors and choose the results they like best (among many other commands to many other groups)
You're selecting from the results it outputs, but you're not controlling the output.
The prompt controls the output (and I bet you'd have more control over the AI than you'd have over a drunk Marlon Brando)
2. Using AI can be can be an iterative process. Generate this scene, make this look like that, make it brighter colors, remove this, add this, etc. That's all carefully crafting the output. Now generate this second scene, make the transition this way, etc. I don't see how that's at all different from a director giving their commands to workers, except now you actually have more creative control (given AI gets good enough)
I've tried AI image generation myself and was not impressed. It doesn't let me create freely, it limits me and constantly gravitates towards typical patterns seen in training data. As it completely takes over the actual creation process there is no direct control over the small decisions, which wastes time.
Edit: another comment about a different meaning of accessibility: the flood of AI content makes real content less accessible.
Other disapproval comes from different emotional places: a retreading of ludditism borne out of job insecurity, criticism of a dystopia where we've automated away the creative experience of being human but kept the grim work, or perceptions of theft or plagiarism.
Whether AI has worked well for you isn't just irrelevant, but contrarian in the face of clear and present value to a lot of people. You can be disgusted with it but you can't claim it isn't there.
I have seen what 99% of people are doing with this "clear and present value". Turns out when you give people a button to print dopamine they probably aren't going to create the next Mona Lisa, they're just going to press the button more. Even with AI, creating compelling art is still a skill that needs to be learned, and it's still hard. And why would they learn a skill when they just decided against learning a skill? Incentives matter, and here the incentives massively favor quantity over quality.
Whether AI has worked well for you isn't just irrelevant
My point was that it's creatively restrictive, and that current models tend to actively steer away from creative outputs. But if you want to limit yourself to what corporations training the models and providing the cloud services deem acceptable, go ahead.
https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralViz
It would have cost millions. Now one person can do it with a laptop and a few hundred dollars of credits a month.
AI is 100% making filmmaking more accessible to creative people who otherwise would never have access to the kind of funding and networks required to realise their visions.
None of the videos I've clicked on required AI for the content to be good, and some of the randomness has no real reason to be there.
Also, they're painfully unoriginal. They're just grabbing bits that The Onion or shows like Rick & Morty have been doing and putting a revolting AI twist to it. It screams to me of 0 effort slop made for the sole purpose of generating money from morons with no creativity clicking on it and being bemused for 10 seconds
How is the requirement to use a computer and maybe pay a cloud subscription in the long term more accessible than other kinds of art?
Because many other kinds of art require thousands of hours to learn before getting to the level of current AI
The real gate keeper to art isn't the cost of a pencil, it's the opportunity cost of learning how to use it
Some people have creative ideas they cannot realise and tools like AI help them do it. The more people that can realise their creative ideas the better it is for everyone.
How is the requirement to use a computer and maybe pay a cloud subscription in the long term more accessible than other kinds of art?
Sometimes I feel like HN comments are working so hard to downplay AI that they’ve lost the plot.
It’s more accessible because you can accomplish amazing storytelling with prompts and a nominal amount of credits instead of spending years learning and honing the art.
Is it at the same level as a professional? No, but it’s more than good enough for someone who wants to tell a story.
Claiming that computer access is too high of a bar is really weird given that computers and phones (which can also operate these sites) are ubiquitous.
Edit: another comment about a different meaning of accessibility: the flood of AI content makes real content less accessible.
No it does not. Not any more than another person signing up for YouTube makes any one channel less “accessible”. Everyone can still access the content the same.
How is the requirement to use a computer and maybe pay a cloud subscription in the long term more accessible than other kinds of art?
Accessibility -- and I don't mean this in the sense particular to disability -- is highly personal; its not so much that it is more accessible, as that it is differentlly-accessible.
I've tried AI image generation myself and was not impressed. It doesn't let me create freely, it limits me and constantly gravitates towards typical patterns seen in training data. As it completely takes over the actual creation process there is no direct control over the small decisions, which wastes time.
No offense, but you've only tried the most basic form of AI image generation -- probably something like pure text-to-image -- if that's what you are finding. Sure, that's definitiely what the median person doing AI image gen does, dumping a prompt in ChatGPT or Midjourney or whatever. But its not all that AI image generation offers. You can have as much or as little control of the small (and large) decisions as you want when using AI image generation.
Why can't people be happy that more individuals would be soon able to create freely in a more accessible way?
The gates are wide open for those that want to put in effort to learn. What AI is doing to creative professionals is putting them out of a job by people who are cheap and lazy.
Art is not inaccessible. It's never been cheaper and easier to make art than today even without AI.
Personally I can't wait to see the new creative doors ai will open for us!
It's opening zero doors but closing many
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What really irks me about this is that I have _seen_ AI used to take away work from people. Last weekend I saw a show where the promotional material was AI generated. It's not like tickets were cheaper or the performers were paid more or anything was improved. The producers pocketed a couple hundred bucks by using AI instead of paying a graphic designer. Extrapolate that across the market for arts and wonder what it's going to do to creativity.
It's honestly disgusting to me that engineers who don't understand art are building tools at the whims of the financiers behind art who just want to make a bit more money. This is not a rising tide that lifts all ships.
The gates are wide open for those that want to put in effort to learn.
Why is effort a requirement?
Why should being an artist be a viable job?
Would you be against technology that makes medical doctors obsolete?
Why is effort a requirement?
That's how human brains work. People have an intrinsic need to sort, build hierarchies and prioritize. Effort spent is one of viable heuristics for these processes.
Why should being an artist be a viable job?
Art itself has great value, if it weren't, museums, theaters and live shows wouldn't exist.
Would you be against technology that makes medical doctors obsolete?
The analogy doesn't work. The results of a medical process is a [more] healthy person. The result doesn't have any links to the one performing it. Result of an artistic creative process is an art piece, and art is tied to its creator by definition.
On jobs: craftsmanship is slightly different than art: industries are built with people who can craft, there is today an artistic part in it but it's not the essence of the job: the ads industry can work with lower quality ads provided they can spam 10x. There is however an overlap between art/craftmanship: a lot of people working in these industries can today be in a balance where they live with a salary and dedicate time to explore their mediums. We know what will happen when the craftmanship part is replaced by AI, being an artist will require to have the balance in the first place.
It feels like a regression: it leads to a reduction of ideas/explorations, a saturation of the affected mediums, a loss of intent. Eager to see what new things come out of it though.
I don't think it's worthwhile to explain the inherent value of human created art or that to learn how to do it one must put some effort into it. All I can say is, if you are one of those people who do not understand art, please don't build things that take away someone else's livelihood without very good reason.
I don't think the majority of AI generation for art is useful for anything but killing artists.
Why should being an artist be a viable job?
Because we as a society have valued it as one for eternity.
Zero-effort output generators like prompting means people are just generating trash that they themselves don't even care about. So why should I take my time to watch/experience that?
The whole "GenAI is accessible" sentiment is ridiculous in my opinion. Absolutely nothing is stopping people from learning various art mediums, and those are skills they'll always have unlike image generators which can change subscription plans or outright the underlying model.
Absolutely no one should be lauding being chained to a big corp's tool/model to produce output.
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Why should being an artist be a viable job? Well, people should get paid for their work. That applies to all domains except technical people love to look down on art while still wanting to watch movies, well produced youtube videos, etc. You can see it in action here on HN frequently: someone will link a blog post they took time to write and edit... and then generate an image instead of paying an artist. They want whatever effect a big header image provides, but are not willing to pay a human to do it or do it themselves. Somehow because it's "just art" it's okay to steal.
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If tech has progressed to the point of true "general artificial intelligence", then likely all jobs will be obsolete and we're going to have to rethink this whole capitalism thing.
I think all industries should be utilizing tech to augment their capabilities, but I don't think actual people should be replaced with our current guesstimator/bullshitter "AI". Especially not critical roles like doctors and nurses.
Rap isn't even music, they aren't even singing!
Rap is really the best example of how stupid these discussions are.
The language models are amazing at rhyming so by the logic then anyone can become a rapper and that is going to put current rappers out of business.
Only someone who has never tried to rap could possibly believe this. Same thing with images, same thing with music, same thing with literally everything involving human creativity.
And who owns the AI?
It’s delusional. Stop falling for the mental jiu Jitsu from the large AI labs. You are not becoming an artist by using a machine to make art for you. The machine is the artist. And you don’t own it.
So the bad news is people are just insecure, jealous, pedantic, easy to offend, highly autistic - and these are the smart ones.
The good news, is with dead internet theory they will all be replaced with bots that will atleast be more compelling make some sort of sense.
burying the creatives among us in a pile of AI generated content.
Isn't the creativity in what you put in the prompt? Isn't spending hundreds of hours manually creating and rigging models based on existing sketch the non-creative work that is being automated here?
Of course that's not what I believe, but let's not limit the definition of what creativity based on historical limitations. Let's see what the new generation of artists and creators will use this new capability to mesmerize us!
Their placement of books. Their aesthetic. The collection of cool things to put into a scene to make it interesting. The lighting. Not yours. Not from you/not from the AI. None of it is yours/you/new/from the AI. It's ALL based underneath on someone else's work, someone else's life, someone else's heart and soul, and you are just taking it and saying 'look what I made'. The equivalent of a 4 year old being potty trained saying 'look I made a poop'. We celebrate it as a first step, not as the friggen end goal. The end goal is you making something uniquely you, based on your life experience, not on Bob the prop guys and Betty the set designer whose work/style you stole and didn't even have the decency to reference/thank.
And your prompt won't ever change dramatically, because there isn't going to be much new truly creative seedcorn for AI to digest. Entertainment will literally go into limbo/Groundhog Day, just the same generative, derivative things/asthetics from the same AI dataset.
personal experience, understanding of the creative process, technique and style development, subtext, hidden ideas and nuances
All of these are just human being exposed more to life and learning new skills, in other words -- having more data. LLM already learns those skills and encounters endless experience of people in its training data.
I hate this argument
That's very subjective. You don't know how the brain works.
That's very subjective
I was expressing my opinion of this argument which absolutely is subjective
You don't know how the brain works.
Neither does grandparent comment's author, didn't stop them from making much bolder claims.
If I see a painting, I see an interpretation that makes me think through someone else's interpretation.
If I see a photograph, I don't analyze as much, but I see a time and place. What is the photographer trying to get me to see?
If I see AI, I see a machine dithered averaging that is/means/represents/construes nothing but a computer predicted average. I might as well generate a UUID, I would get more novelty. No backstory, because items in the scene just happened to be averaged in. No style, just a machine dithered blend. It represents nothing no matter the prompt you use because the majority is still just machine averaged/dithered non-meaning. Not placed with intention, focused with real vision, no obvious exclusions with intention. Just exactly what software thinks is the most average for the scene it had described to it. The better AI gets, the more average it becomes, and the less people will care about 'perfectly average' images.
It won't even work for ads for long. Ads will become wild/novel/distinct/wacky/violations of AI rules/processes/techniques to escape and belittle AI. To mock AI. Technically perfect images will soon be considered worthless AI trash. If for no other reason than artists will only be rewarded for moving in directions AI can't going forward. The second Google/OpenAI reach their goal, the goal posts will move because no one wants procedural/perfectly average slop.
Merely changing a seed number will provide endless different outputs from the same single prompt from the same model; rng.nextInt() deserves as much artist credit as the prompter.
Imagine a world where you have a scene fully sketched out in your head (i.e. creativity), you have the script of what will happen, sketches of what the scene looks light, visual style, etc. You want to make that become reality. You could spend a ton of time and money, or you could describe it and provide sketches to an AI to make it come true.
Yes, the limitations in the former can make you take creative shortcuts that could themselves be interesting, but the latter could be just as true to your original vision.
Just wanted to add representation to that feeling
Creativity is a conversation with yourself and God. Stripping away the struggle that comes with creativity defeats the entire purpose. Making it easier to make content is good for capital, but no one will ever get fulfillment out of prompting an AI and settling with the result.
It'll lower the barrier of entry (and therefore the quality floor before people feel comfortable sharing something "they made" if they can deflect with an easy "the AI made this" versus "I put XY0 hours into this"), but it'll also empower people who wouldn't otherwise even try to create new things and, presumably, follow their passion to learn and do more.
Yes but how many will sign up for that? Im sure few will continue to do so but crea
It’s not important to me that they do.
Im sure few will continue to do so but creativity will certainly take a big hit.
I’ve seen the workflows for AI generated films like https://youtu.be/x6aERZWaarM?si=J2VHYAHLL3og32Ix and I find it to be very creative. Its more interesting to me that this person would never have raised capital and tried to direct this, but this is much closer to what they wanted to create. I’m also entertained by it, whether I was judging it for generative AI issues or not.
its not really anyone's problem, and generally limited to the people that made way too much of their identity to be based on a single field, that they feel they have to gatekeep it
its great that people can express themselves closer to their vision now
Making a movie is not accessible to most people and it's EVERYONES dream. This is not even there yet, but I have a few movies I need to make and I will never get a cast together and go do it before I die. If some creatives need to take a backseat so a million more creatives can get a chance, then so be it.
AI creatives can enjoy the brief blip in time where they might get someone else to watch what they've created before their skills become obsolete in an exponentially faster rate just like everyone else's.
because of the lost experience and joy of learning, connection with the self and others and so many other things.
Nothing prevents human from continue doing just that, precisely because it brings joy and satisfaction. Painting, photography classes are still popular, if not more, in the age of digital photography.
It's just not what gets the exciting headlines and showcases
Similarly with music, prior to recording tech, live performance was where it was at.
You could look at the digital era as a weird blip in art history.
Have a look at the workflow and agent design patterns in this video by youtuber Nate Herk when he talks about planning the architecture:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj9yzBp14EM
There’s less talk about automating non-creative work because it’s not flashy. But I can promise it’s a ton of fun, and you can co-design these automations with an LLM.
We _could_ use this to empower humans, but many of us instinctively know that it will instead be used to crush the human spirit. The end result of this isn’t going to be an expansion of creative ability, it’s going to be the destruction of creative jobs and the capture of these creative mediums by a few large companies.
The end result of this isn’t going to be an expansion of creative ability, it’s going to be the destruction of creative jobs and the capture of these creative mediums by a few large companies.
I agree , but that's the negative. The positive will be that almost any service you can imagine (medical diagnosis, tax preparation, higher education) will come down to zero, and with a lag of perhaps a decade or two it will meet us in the physical world with robo-technicians, surgeons and plumbers. The cost of building a new house or railway will plummet to the cost of the material and the land, and will be finished in 1/10 of the time it takes today. The main problem to me is that there's a lag between the negatives and the positives. We're starting out with the negatives and the benefits may take a decade or two to reach us all equally.
The positive will be that almost any service you can imagine (medical diagnosis, tax preparation, higher education) will come down to zero
Why would you want massive amounts more of those things? In fact I might even argue that medicine, taxation and education are a net negative on society already. And that to the extent that there seems to be scarcity, it's mainly a distribution problem having to do with entrenched interests and bureaucracy.
The cost of building a new house or railway will plummet to the cost of the material and the land
That's is the actual scarcity tho.
Why would you want massive amounts more of those things? In fact I might even argue that medicine, taxation and education are a net negative on society already. And that to the extent that there seems to be scarcity, it's mainly a distribution problem having to do with entrenched interests and bureaucracy.
I'm not sure what you mean. In my country getting a specialist to take a look at you can take weeks, the scarcity is that there's not enough doctors. For sure many people get delayed and suboptimal diagnosis (even if you finally get to see the specialist, he may have 10 mintues for you and 50 other patients to see that day). A.I can simply solve this.
The cost of building a new house or railway will plummet to the cost of the material and the landThat's is the actual scarcity tho
Not necessarily, the labor costs a tremendous amount, and also it might be that we don't need to cram tens of millions of people around cities anymore if most work is automated, we can start spreading out (again, this will take decades and I'm not denying we have pressing problems in the immediate future).
We _could_ use this to empower humans, but many of us instinctively know that it will instead be used to crush the human spirit. The end result of this isn’t going to be an expansion of creative ability, it’s going to be the destruction of creative jobs and the capture of these creative mediums by a few large companies.
The same was said about the camera or photoshop.
There is a more sensical distinction between work that is informational in nature, and work that is physical and requires heavy tools in hard-to-reach places. That's hard to do for big tech, because making tests with heavy machinery is hard and time consuming
models create, empowering artists to bring their creative vision
Interesting logic the new era brings: something else creates, and you only "bring your vision to life", but what it means is left for readers questioning, your "vision" here is your text prompt?
Were at a crossroads where the tools are powerful enough to make the process optional.
That raises uncomfortable questions: if you don’t have to create anymore, will people still value the journey? Will vision alone be enough? What's the creative purpose in life? To create, or to to bring creative vision to life? Isn't the act of creation is being subtly redefined?
Even if they hadn’t , i’d still struggle, i was a horrible guitarist. I could only sing decent, even when i wanted to make music I couldn’t.
Now with suno.com AI , I make songs daily, for myself, for my friends, everyone and it has played a huge impact in my positivity day to day even after gruelling workweeks.
I don’t know about your means of production stuff, but i sure as hell couldn’t afford to spend $10000 a month hiring or bringing singers, musicians to compose songs for me.
Now I can with $10-$15 / month. My mom who can’t code is barely tech literate, uses openai advanced voice mode to create prompts to build software with Replit agent (replit then builds an entire app with one or two prompts and deploys it for her)
Then copy pastes it into replit and gets back financial dashboards to help her analyse the options market, her trading portfolio, building simple calculators etc. She can drill down into math she has no clue of with a teensy bit of my help and a ton of help from gemini, replit assistant and claude.
She makes good money now by herself which is a big deal for her as she was a housewife before and always wanted to build her own thing. These AI tools have given her fulfillment that nothing else before could. She reads and understands complex books now with gemini and openai by clicking photos of pages, and if she’s confused she asks them to translate with examples in her mother tongue (non english speaker). She is far more confident now and positive about her life and looks forward to it everyday.
I don’t know about you’re means of production theory, but with current trends of model distillation making small AI models affordable to train for anyone and constant rapid progress of even unknown startups launching better and better opensource models.
It’s the common plebs like me and my mom who finally have the means of production.
I make songs daily
Sorry for being blunt, but you do not. You receive some music matching your request from a service offered by an entity which aims to control as much of content creation and distribution as possible, up to total monopolization.
I’m not a musician... Now I can with $10-$15 / month.
If you want to create music, do it, it doesn't require much money. If you just want to listen, there's literally thousands of authors creating all kinds of authentic, sincere, daring, skillfully performed, carefully mixed music, giving it away for next to nothing and still striving to find their listeners.
What you pay for is avoiding the effort of finding what suits you.
When he received that song from me, he was super excited for next 3-5 days and still listens to it and flexes them to their friends.
Same thing happened with a lot of my other friends and me too, I have an apple shortcut script that generates songs for me daily based on my routine for that day pulled from todoist.com
I still listen to and pay for others music and songs, but this experience with AI is entirely different.
What I pay for is not avoiding effort of finding what suits me but creating what suits me.
You receive some music matching your request from a service offered by an entity which aims to control as much of content creation and distribution as possible, up to total monopolization.
What I receive is a high fidelity song made from prompts that i’m given full ownership of , when pooled at scale between all users allows people to make their own song generators with GPUs.
Its very nature is the opposite of monopoly. I’d love to hear how you think the big 3 corps (Universal, Sony, etc) who own all the music almost globally are not a monopoly ? Never had an experience where your spotify or apple music streaming albums disappear randomly due to those big 3 corps ?
My friend’s song of himself will never disappear that mp3 file he can store on a pen drive, load ig anywhere, gift to anyone. How is that the “monopoly” ?
when pooled at scale between all users allows people to make their own song generators with GPUs.
I can assure you, local generation is to become a fringe activity, same as self-hosting web services, only worse, because the quality gap (which in case of software is often negligible) will be insurmountable.
I’d love to hear how you think the big 3 corps (Universal, Sony, etc) who own all the music almost globally are not a monopoly?
It's not a monopoly, it's a cartel. Luckily, they don't own everything, though, too much they do.
no artist out there made a japanese song on my anime obsessed schoolteacher friend and his life.
Ok, what you describe is commissioning. Yeah, you can't argue with the fact it now can be done almost free and is becoming good enough for most, but you have to keep in mind, this process had been feeding a considerable amount of artists who do it to keep producing their art. Cutting this source of income is not wrong per se, but the consequences are the opposite of supporting the diversity and abundance in arts.
but the consequences are the opposite of supporting the diversity and abundance in arts.
I made 5 songs about 5 different people in a week, with carefully crafted lyrics and tones described by me in the custom prompt, that led to 10 mp3 files of songs (suno generates 2 songs per prompt) Those songs are out there, it’s different, it’s not sloppy it’s actually quite enjoyable.
Now there is more diversity and abundance those songs wouldn’t have existed without AI and there are millions doing it like me out there, those artists who produce songs also have same tools as me, they can be better than me, faster, better, more albums now made by them, edit stuff to perfection, ideate and iterate faster. Who is stopping them ?
Tell me this song is trash and slop : https://suno.com/song/c36741d6-ec62-4922-86f9-6fd0b6f37497
This is in replacement of me and my friends listening to their same 20-40 artists who would be in billboards list each month.
Tell me it has hurt the abundance and diversity of songs out there, that it stopped someone from making their own thing or others listening to their songs, I listen to that song, it’s made by someone else with AI, I don’t mind, it’s awesome !
Tell me this song is trash and slop
As you wish.
What I argue is not about "diversity of songs", but that's this "AI" revolution strives to further the process of replacing the arts with commodity substitutes. It will be sleek, shiny, comforting, friendly and, possibly, enjoyable, but it's almost worthless in itself.
The song is adequate. The beat, drop, and chords are not that complicated, you could've learned how to do that yourself and not be chained to suno or whatever.
I would be delighted if a friend took the time to personally write and produce a song about me. I would not care at all if I realized it was just auto-generated stuff being pumped out "5x per week". The former I would cherish, the latter would be disposable junk to be listened to once and then forgotten about.
It's slop because it doesn't mean anything or has any value, not because it's literally sloppy.
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listening to their same 20-40 artists who would be in billboards list each month
That's a you problem, quite literally a skill issue. There are so many indie artists making wonderful music that's leagues better than whatever hyper-distilled swill is on the radio at the moment.
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tell me it has hurt the abundance and diversity of songs out there
Actual artists who make music composition and production their career ARE hurt when they can't find jobs/gigs/commissions because of things like suno. These tools are predicated on wholesale theft of music produced by humans.
But you can generate disposable songs at breakneck pace that don't mean anything, so it doesn't matter.
Step two is... sure, every pleb can now create art.
That devalues art. More than that, that makes for a "winner takes all" marketplace. So even fewer people than now benefit from it. More than that, guess who wins out: middlemen, the marketplace owners.
Read the Black Swan by Nassim Taleb, especially the chapters about Extremistan and Mediocristan. Basically every time we invent something that scales and unlocks something for a great amount of people, we commoditize it and the quality of life for the average person in that field goes down while the leeches, pardon me, the middle men, are the only ones that become constantly rich, after the initial struggle to achieve market dominance (so when the market matures).
This allowed people in those crafts to be very rich.
Then came the evil leeches of middle men who brought cheap fine clothes for the masses and music in the hands of every broke college kid in his dorm room. So evil !
Get the sarcasm ? Calling ability for masses to do more things is somehow horrible is elitist, calling the people who make that possible leeches is just elitism in velvet glove.
As long as the majority gets more value in their daily life, world is better.
We maybe needed to go from 1 artist in 1 million people to 1 artist in 10 000 people. We do *not* need to go from 1 artist in 10 people.
And regarding "cheap fine clothes", that was sort of fine.
But what about when cars drive themselves (16.2 million persons - 10.3% of the U.S. labor force works in transportation)?
AND
What about when software mostly writes itself (4,4 million persons)?
AND
What about when stuff mostly manufactures itself (13 million persons)?
AND
... ?
(repeat ad-nauseam for every field upended right now by AI)
If you think MAGA was bad (MAGA being mostly caused by manufacturing jobs being moved away/automated) what do you think will happen when 40% of the population is unemployed and unemployable, forever?
This view also aligns with how generative AI is marketed – it's a way to accelerate realization, not a way to focus on the act of crafting.
That said, outcome-first thinking does run the risk of disconnection, and our current culture is all about disconnection.
Build out your app idea first with replit -> Then export the codebase into your computer -> Run claude code on it and ask it to scan all the files and describe the tech stack to you and how it operates while giving you all the major components you need to learn to understand it with youtube channel and book recommendations for each topic + work exercises -> Use perplexity deep research once a week to further research every topic as you start to learn them
If you’re a busy man/woman make gumloop or lindyai workflow to check your calendar and pack in timeslots to do all of this learning, and then auto send you worksheets via email as homework to test you skills
All of this for a price of 1/15th of a college degree (not even an expensive college)
This is not hypothetical conjecture I do this daily.
So everyone has now 1) Low cost access to build stuff with one prompt to realise the value of tools 2) A personal tutor that can then help you scour the depths of the craft and force you to practice and learn deeply now with your added motivation of knowing what’s possible with building stuff
So it has the potential to connect us more too, it’s upto humans to choose whether they do at the end tho. That is their liberty.
...what do you think a human would choose the most?
That is probably the more likelier possibility. However it just shows the lack of philosophy in our modern times, people don’t do things they are lazy about and a Choice between the easy way and hard way is no longer a choice for majority the easy way’s dangling carrot is the final ultimatum.
I think i’ll leave it at the thought that as time progresses to find value in day to day life, to force ourselves to choose the right thing, philosophy will again have to become a much stronger actor in our lives, or else we’d all drive off a cliff at current rate.
At the end what happens will be decided by choice and liberty of humans as their choices expand.
If you take any high quality AI content and ask their creator what their workflow is, you'll quickly discover that the complexity and nuance required to actually create something high-quality and something that actually "fulfills your vision" is incredibly complex.
Whether you measure quality through social media metrics, reach, or artistic metrics, like novelty or nuance, high quality content and art requires a good amount of skill and effort, regardless of the tool.
Standard reading for context: https://archive.org/details/Bazin_Andre_The_Ontology_of_Phot...
If you take any high quality AI content and ask their creator what their workflow is, you'll quickly discover that the complexity and nuance required to actually create something high-quality and something that actually "fulfills your vision" is incredibly complex
This comes off as so tone deaf seeing your AI artwork is only possible due to the millions of hours spent by real people who created the art used to train these models. Maybe it's easier to understand why people don't respect AI "artists" with this in mind.
Theatre and opera are regarded as high art because they are performed live in front of an audience every time, demanding presence, skill, and immediacy – unlike cinema, which relies on a recorded and edited performance.
Software Engineers bring their vision to life through the source code they input to produce software, systems, video games, ...
b) use that dependency to skim the cream off every economic activity.
Exactly. Probably the most important quote of modern times is, I think it was a CEO of an ISP that said it: "we don't want to be the dumb pipes" (during a comparison with a water utility company).
Everyone wants to seek rents for recurring revenue someone else actually generates.
but what it means is left for readers questioning, your "vision" here is your text prompt?
Right. Imo you have to be imagination handicapped to think that creative vision can be distilled to a prompt, let alone be the medium a creative vision lives in its natural medium. The exact relation between vision, artifact, process and art itself can be philosophically debated endlessly, but, to think artifacts are the only meaningful substrate at which art exists sounds like an dull and hollowed-out existence, like a Plato’s cave level confusion about what is the true meaning vs the representation. Or in a (horrible) analogy for my fellow programmers, confusing pointers to data with the data itself.
These larger companies are clearly going after the agency/hollywood use cases. It'll be fascinating to see when they become the default rather than a niche option - that time seems to be drawing closer faster than anticipated. The results here are great, but they're still one or two generations off.
Plus in local generation you're not limited by the platform moderation that can be too strict and arbitrary and fail with the false positives.
Yes comfy UI can be intimidating at first vs an easy to use chatgpt-like ui, but the lack of control make me feel these tools will still not being used in professional productions in the short term, but more in small YouTube channels and smaller productions.
you're not going to get these results with a 14B video model
Foundation models are starting to outstrip any consumer hardware we have.
If Nvidia wants to stay ahead of Google's data center TPUs for running all of these advanced workloads, they should make edge GPU compute a priority.
There's a future where everything is a thin client to Google's data centers. Nvidia should do everything in its power to prevent that from happening.
Last time I checked, they couldn't produce enough H100s/GB100s to satisfy demand from everyone and their mother running a data center. And their most recent consumer hardware offerings have been repeatedly called a "paper launch" - probably because consumer hardware isn't a priority, given the price (and profit) delta.
There's a future where everything is a thin client to Google's data centers. Nvidia should do everything in its power to prevent that from happening.
there has always been, the mainframe concept is not new. but it goes in and out of fashion.
mainframe
<<<< personalpc
web pages/social media
<<<< personal phones/edge
cloud ai
<<<< ???? personal robotics, chips and ai ???
???? rented swarms ???
Generating a long video one shot at a time kind of makes sense, as long as there's good consistency between shots
While wan and hunyuan are solid free options, the latest from Google and Runway
The Tencent Hunyuan team is cooking.
Hunyuan Image 2.0[1] was announced on Friday and it's pretty amazing. It's extremely high quality text-to-image and image-to-image with millisecond latency[2]. It's so fast that they've built a real time 2D drawing canvas application with it that pretty much duplicates Krea's entire product offering.
Unfortunately it looks like the team is keeping it closed source unlike their previous releases.
Hunyuan 3D 2.0 was good, but they haven't released the stunning and remarkable Hunyuan 3D 2.5[3].
Hunyuan Video hasn't seen any improvements over Wan, but Wan also recently had VACE[4], which is a multimodal control layer and editing layer. The Comfy folks are having a field day with VACE and Wan.
[1] https://wtai.cc/item/hunyuan-image-2-0
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jIfZKMOKME&t=1351s
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1k8kj66/hu...
the agency/hollywood use cases.
It's for advertising.
To clarify this test is purely a PASS/FAIL - unsuccessful means that the model NEVER managed to generate an image adhering to the prompt. So as an example, Midjourney 7 did not manage to generate the correct vertical stack of translucent cubes ordered by color in 64 gen attempts.
It's a little beyond the scope of my site but I do like the idea of maintaining a more granular metric for the models that were successful to see how often they were successful.
Cool site btw! Thanks for sharing.
Actually, search engines do this this too: Google something with many possible meanings -- like "egg" -- on Google, and you'll get a set of intentionally diversified results. I get Wikipedia; then a restaurant; then YouTube cooking videos; Big Green Egg's homepage; news stories about egg shortages. Each individual link is very unlike the others to maximize the chance that one of them's the one you want.
Sorry to dunk so hard, but your example of technology stagnating is actually an example of breakthrough technological innovation deep into a product’s lifecycle: the very thing you were trying to say doesn’t happen.
It's a very interesting resource to map some of the limits of existing models.
I don’t know which is more important, but I would say that people mostly won’t pay for fun but disposable images, and I think people will pay for art but there will be an increased emphasis on the human artist. However users might pay for reliable tools that can generate images for a purpose, things like educational illustrations, and those need to be able to follow the spec very well.
I'd love to see some financials but I'd tend to agree they're probably doing pretty well.
I want to interrupt all of this hype over Imagen 4 to talk about the totally slept on Tencent Hunyuan Image 2.0 that stealthily launched last Friday. It's absolutely remarkable and features:
- millisecond generation times
- real time image-to-image drawing capabilities
- visual instructivity (eg. you can circle regions, draw arrows, and write prompts addressing them.)
- incredible prompt adherence and quality
Nothing else on the market has these properties in quite this combination, so it's rather unique.
Release Tweet: https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/1923263203825549457
Tencent Hunyuan had a bunch of model releases all wrapped up in a product that they call "Hunyuan Game", but the Hunyuan Image 2.0 real time drawing canvas is the real star of it all. It's basically a faster, higher quality Krea: https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/1924713242150273424
More real time canvas samples: https://youtu.be/tVgT42iI31c?si=WEuvie-fIDaGk2J6&t=141 (I haven't found any other videos on the internet apart from these two.)
You can see how this is an incredible illustration tool. If they were to open source this, this would immediately become the top image generation model over Flux, Imagen 4, etc. At this point, really only gpt-image-1 stands apart as having godlike instructivity, but it's on the other end of the [real time <--> instructive] spectrum.
A total creative image tool kit might just be gpt-image-1 and Hunyuan Image 2.0. The other models are degenerate cases.
More image samples: https://x.com/Gdgtify/status/1923374102653317545
If anyone from Tencent or the Hunyuan team is reading this: PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE OPEN SOURCE THIS. (PLEASE!!)
but Imagen 4 doesn't really stand out amongst its image gen peers.
In this AI rat race, whenever one model gets ahead, they all tend to reach parity within 3-6 months. If you can wait 6 months to create your video I'm sure Imagen 5 will be more than good enough.
It's honestly kind of ridiculous the pace things are moving at these days. 10 years ago waiting a year for something was very normal, nowadays people are judging the model-of-the-week against last week's model-of-the-week but last week's org will probably not sleep and they'll release another one next week.
- wine glass that is full to the edge with wine (ie. not half full)
- wrist watch not showing V (hands at 10 and 2 o'clock)
- 9 step IKEA shelf assembly instruction diagram
- any kind of gymnastics / sport acro
I mean, it's a fun edge case, but I'm practice - does it matter?
I mean, it's a fun edge case, but I'm practice - does it matter?
*in practice, not I'm practice. (I swear I have a point, I'm not being needlessly pedantic.) In English, in images, mistakes stick out. Thus negative prompts are used a lot for iterative image generation. Even when you're working with a human graphics designer, you may not know what exactly you want, but you know that you don't want (some aspect of) the image in front of you.
Ie: "Not that", for varying values of "that".
Thus negative prompts are used a lot for iterative image generation.
Are they still? The negative keywords were popular in SD era. The negative prompt was popular with later models in advanced tools. But modern iterations look different - the models capable of editing are perfectly fine with processing the previous image with a prompt "remove the elephant" or "make the clock show a different time". Are the negative parts in the initial prompt still actually used in iteration?
Also "create static + video ads that are 0-99% complete" suggests the performance is hit or miss.
Not sure if this affects your results or not but I resist chiming in!
I wonder how much the commonality or frequency of names for things affects image generation? My hunch is that it it roughly correlates and you'd get better results for terms with more hits in the training data. I'd probably use Google image search as a rough proxy for this.
This is probably one of the better known benchmarks but when I see Midjourney 7 and Imagen3 within spitting distance of each other it makes me question what kind of metrics they are using.
My guess as to determining whether it's 64 attempts to a pass for one and 5 attempts to a fail for another is simply "whether or not the author felt there was a chance random variance would result in a pass with a few more tries based on the initial 5ish". I.e. a bit subjective, as is the overall grading in the end anyways.
If there's only a few attempts and ends in a failure, there's a pretty good chance that I could sort of tell that the model had ZERO chance.
"A dolphin is using its fluke to discipline a mermaid by paddling it across the backside."
Hmm.
Soon, you should be able to put in a screenplay and a cast, and get a movie out. Then, "Google Sequels" - generates a sequel for any movie.
This "fixes" Hollywood's biggest "issues". No more highly paid actors demanding 50 million to appear in your movie, no more pretentious movie stars causing dramas and controversies, no more workers' unions or strikes, but all gains being funneled directly to shareholders. The VFX industry being turned into a gig meatgrinder was already the canary in the coal mine for this shift.
Most of the major Hollywood productions from the last 10 years have been nothing but creatively bankrupt sequels, prequels, spinoffs and remakes, all rehashed from previous IP anyway, so how much worse than this can AI do, since it's clear they're not interested in creativity anyway? Hell, it might even be an improvement than what they're making today, and at much lower cost to boot. So why wouldn't they adopt it? From the bean counter MBA perspective it makes perfect sense.
Then the first fully non-human (but human-like) actors will be created and gain popularity. The IP of those characters will be more valuable than the humans they replaced. They will be derided by old people as "Mickey Mouse" AI actors. The SAG will be beside themselves. Younger people will not care. The characters will never get old (or they will be perfectly rendered when they need to be old).
The off-screen dramas and controversies are part of the entertainment, and these will be manufactured too. (If there will even be an off-screen...)
This is the future, and we've been preparing for it for years by presenting the most fake versions of ourselves on social media. Viewers have zero expectation of authenticity, so biological status is just one more detail.
It will be perfect, and it will be awful. Kids born five years from now will never know anything different.
Very few actors have an appearance or a voice worth a lot in licenses. That's like the top 1% of actors, if that.
I think if done right, humans could also end up getting emotionally attached to 100% AI generated characters, not just famous celebrities.
So the appearance licenses for these 1% are valuable in Stage 1 of the takeover.
The rest are just forgotten collateral damage. Hollywood is full of 'em.
Hollywood's wet dream.
Except it bankrupts Hollywood, they are no longer needed. Of people can generate full movies at home, there is no more Hollywood.
The end game is endless ultra personalized content beamed into people's heads every free waking hour of the day. Hollywood is irrelevant in that future.
Of people can generate full movies at home, there is no more Hollywood.
LLMs have been in the oven for years longer than this, and I'm not seeing any signs of people generating their own novels at home. Well, besides the get-rich-quick grifters spamming the Kindle store with incoherent slop in the hopes they can trick someone into parting with a dollar before they realize they've been had.
Most humans are also not good at writing great scripts/novels either. Just look at the movies that bring in billions of dollars at the box office. Do you think you need a famous novelist to write you a Fast & Furious 11 script?
Sure, there are still great writers that can make scripts that tickle the mind, but that's not what the studios want anymore. They want to push VFX heavy rehashed slop that's cheap to make, easy to digest for the doom-scrolling masses of consumers, and rakes in a lot of money.
You're talking about what makes gourmet Michelin star food but the industry is making money selling McDonals.
The good "creators" are already making bank, helped by app algorithms matching people up to content they'll find addictive to view.
The content doesn't have to be good it just has to be addictive for 80% of the population.
That's why I think Hollywood is rushing to adopt gen-AI, so they can churn out personalized content faster and cheaper straight to streaming, at the same rate as indie producers.
All this is in line with my prediction for the first entirely AI generated film (with Sora or other AI video tools) to win an Oscar being less than 5 years away.
And we're only 5 months in.
We are about six years into transformer models. By now we can get transformers to write coherent short stories, and you can get to novel lengths with very careful iterative prompting (e.g. let the AI generate an outline, then chapter summaries, consistency notes, world building, then generate the chapters). But to get anything approaching a good story you still need a lot of manual intervention at all steps of the process. LLMs go off the rail, get pacing completely wrong and demonstrate gaping holes in their understanding of the real world. Progress on new models is mostly focused in other directions, with better storytelling a byproduct. I doubt we get to "best screenplay" level of writing in five years.
Best Actor/Actress/Director/etc are obviously out for an AI production since those roles simply do not exist.
Similar with Best Visual Effects, I doubt AI generated films qualify.
That leaves us with categories that rate the whole movie (Best Picture, Best International Feature Film etc), sound-related categories (Best Original Score, Original Song, Sound) and maybe Best Cinematography. I doubt the first category is in reach. Video Generation will be good enough in five years. But editing? Screenwriting? Sound Design?
My bet would be on the first AI-related Oscar to be for an AI generated original score or original song, and that no other AI wins Oscars within five years.
Unless we go by a much wider definition of "entirely AI generated" that would allow significant human intervention and supervision. But the more humans are involved the less it has any claim to being "entirely AI". Most AI-generated trailers or the Balenciaga-Potter-style videos still require a lot of human work
I have done quite a bit with AI generated audio/sound/music.
At some point in the process, the end result feels like your own and the models were used to create material for the end work.
At some point, using AI in the creative process will be such a given that it is left unsaid.
I would assume the screen play next year that wins the Oscar will have been helped with the aid of a language model. I can't imagine a writer not using a language model to riff on ideas. The delusional idea here is the prompt "write an Oscar winning screenplay" and that somehow that is all there is going to the creative process.
to win an Oscar being less than 5 years away.
You're assuming Oscar voting is primarily driven by film quality but this hasn't been true for a long time (if it ever was). Many academy voters are biased by whatever cultural and political trends are currently ascendant among the narrow subset of Hollywood creatives who belong to the academy (the vast majority of people listed in movie credits will never be academy voters). Due to the widespread impact of Oscar wins in major categories, voters heavily weight meta-factors like "what should the Hollywood community be seen as endorsing?"
No issue in recent memory has been as overwhelmingly central as AI replacing creatives among the Hollywood community. The entire industry is still recovering from the unprecedented strikes which shut down the industry and one of the main issues was the use of AI. The perception of AI use will remain cultural/political poison among the rarified community of academy voters for at least a decade. Of course, studios are businesses and will hire vendors who use AI to cut costs but those vendors will be smart enough to downplay that fact because it's all about perception - not reality. For the next decade "AI" will be to Academy-centric Hollywood what "child labor" is to shoe manufacturing. The most important thing is not that it doesn't happen, it's ensuring there's no clear proof it's happening - especially on any movie designed to be 'major category Oscar-worthy' (such films are specifically designed to check the requisite boxes for consideration from their inception). predict that in the near-term AI in the Oscars will be limited to, at most, a few categories awarded in the separate Technical Oscars (which aren't broadcast on TV or covered by the mainstream media).
"Lurking, Lifting, Licking"
Ok, I went from being pleasantly surprised to breakout laughter at that point.
But I also think this points out a big problem: high-quality stuff is flying under the radar simply because of how much stuff is out there. I've noticed that when faced with a lot of choice, rather than exploring it, people fall back into popular stuff that they're familiar with in a really sad way. Like a lot of door dash orders will be for McDonalds, or people will go back to watching popular series like Friends, or how Disney keeps remaking movies that people still go to see.
Artists aren't going to be replaced by AI tools being used by me on my iPhone, those artists were already replaced by bulk art from IKEA et al. Artists who reject new tools for being new will be replace by artists who don't. Just like many painters were replaced by photographers.
You're not the monolith of me!
These other universe memes are too good.
Photography increased the abstract and more creative aspects of painting and created a new style because photography removed much of the need to capture realism. Though, I am still entranced by realist painting style myself, it is serving different purpose than capturing a moment.
Ask a person on the street who their favorite painting movements are and likely every name will be more than 100 years old
I think you overestimate the publics art appreciation. The average answer will be a blank stare.
There is an ever growing percentage of new AI-generated videos among every set of daily uploads.
How long until more than half of uploads in a day are AI-generated?
Plus some users might want to legitimately upload things with AI-generated content in it
They're never going to manage to do that, just on a technical level
Why not? Given enough data, it's possible to train models to differentiate - especially since humans can pick up on the difference pretty well.
Plus some users might want to legitimately upload things with AI-generated content in it
Excluding videos from training datasets doesn't mean excluding them from Youtube.
I mean, you could limit yourself to the most popular or most interesting 100 million, but that's still an enormous amount of data to download.
The remaining 10% is the solution to generating good hands, of course. And do you think YouTube has been helping anyone achieve that?
With the media & entertainment hungry world which is about to get worse with the unempoyed/underemployed tiktok generation needing "content", something like this has to have a play.
Nowadays when I randomly open a news website to read some article, at the bottom of the page all the generic "hack to lose your belly" or "doctors recommend weird japanese device" or "how seniors can fly business class", I've been noticing lately 1/3rd of the images seem to be AI generated...
I simply don't think it's fair to cheat service providers when we don't like their service. You have a choice, and that choice is to not use that service at all. They're providing it under the terms that it is ad-supported. If you don't want to support it, but you still want to use it, then you're cheating someone. That is dishonest and unethical.
Advertisement-Permission: [required|requested]
In the meantime, I'm browsing every site with all content blockers set at maximum, because any other choice is incomprehensible on the modern web.
If I consequently visit some sites that want me to consume advertising of which I am unaware, then that is entirely their issue, not mine.
A lot of content is like this - you just need an approximation to sell an idea, not a perfect reproduction. Makes way more sense to have AI generate you a quick image for a sight gag than to have someone spend all day trying to comp it by hand. And as AI imagery gets more exposure in these sort of scenarios, more people will be accustomed to it, and they'll be more forgiving of its faults.
The bar for "good enough" is gonna get a lot lower as the cost of producing it comes way down with AI.
In 2 years we have moved from AI video being mostly a pipe dream to some incredible clips! It’s not what this is like now, but what will it be like in 10 years!
Drive the storytelling, consult with AI on improving things and exploring variations.
Generate visuals, then adjust / edit / postprocess them to your liking. Feed the machine your drawings and specific graphic ideas, not just vague words.
Use generated voices where they work well, record real humans where you need specific performance. Blend these approaches by altering the voice in a recording.
All these tools just allow you to produce things faster, or produce things at all such that would be too costly to shoot in real life.
Now it's "good enough" for a lot of cases (and the pace of improvement is astounding).
AI is still not great at image gen and video gen, but the pace of improvement is impressive.
I'm skeptical image, video, and sound gen are "too difficult" for AI to get "good enough" at for many use cases within the next 5 years.
In reality Luddites did not oppose technology per-se, but the dramatic worsening of the working conditions in the factories, reduced wages and concentration of the income to the capital holders. These are the same problems that should be addressed contemporarily.
They initially tried to address these by political means. But with that failing they moved to sabotage and violence.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/when-robots-take-j...
I mean obviously the answer is "no" and this is going to get a bunch of replies saying that inventors are not to blame but the negative results of a technology like this are fairly obvious.
We had a movie two years ago about a blubbering scientist who blatantly ignored that to the detriment of his own mental health.
https://www.figure.ai/ does not exist yet, at least not for the masses. Why are Meta and Google just building the next coder and not the next robot?
Its because those problem are at the bottom of the economic ladder. But they have the money for it and it would create so much abundance, it would crash the cost of living and free up human labor to imagine and do things more creatively than whatever Veo 4 can ever do.
In the forecast of the AI-2027 guys, robotics come after they've already created superintelligent AI, largely just because it's easier to create the relevant data for thinking than for moving in physical space.
I imagine video is a far tougher thing to model, but it's kind of weird how all these models are incapable of not looking like AI generated content. They all are smooth and shiny and robotic, year after year its the same. If anything, the earlier generators like that horrifying "Will Smith eating spaghetti" generation from back like three years ago looks LESS robotic than any of the recent floaty clips that are generated now.
I'm sure it will get better, whatever, but unlike the goal of LLMs for code/writing where the primary concern is how correct the output is, video won't be accepted as easily without it NOT looking like AI.
I am starting to wonder if thats even possible since these are effectively making composite guesses based on training data and the outputs do ultimately look similar to those "Here is what the average American's face looks like, based on 1000 people's faces super-imposed onto each other" that used to show up on Reddit all the time. Uncanny, soft, and not particularly interesting.
I don't follow the video generation stuff, so the last time I saw AI video it was the initial Sora release, and I just went back to that press release and I still maintain that this does not seem like the type of leap I would have expected.
We see pretty massive upgrades every release between all the major LLM models for code/reasoning, but I was kind of shocked to see that the video output seems stuck in late 2023/early 2024 which was impressive then but a lot less impressive a year out I guess.
Its something that is only obvious when it is obvious. And the more obvious examples you see, the more non-obvious examples slip by.
If you look at the shadows in the background, you can see how they appear and disappear, how things float in the air, and have all the AI artifacts. The video is also slowed down (lower FPS) to overcome the length limit of AI video generator.
But the point is not how we can spot these, because it's going to be impossible, but how the future of news consumption is going to look like.
[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@calm.with.word/video/750583708327412...
I don't believe it's entirely fake, just enhanced.
Imagen 4 is available today in the Gemini app, Whisk, Vertex AI and across Slides, Vids, Docs and more in Workspace.
I'm always hesitant with rollouts like this. If I go to one of these, there's no indication which Imagen version I'm getting results from. If I get an output that's underwhelming, how do I know whether it's the new model or if the rollout hasn't reached me yet?
It is so confusing. Ok, I got gemini pro through workspace or something, but not everything is there? Sure, I can try aistudio, flow, veo, gemini etc to figure out what I can do where, but so bad UX. Just tried using gemini to create an image, definitely not the newest imagegen as the text was just marbled up. But I can't see which version I'm on, genious.
https://aistudio.google.com/generate-image
But this still says it's Imagen 3.0-002, not Imagen 4.
This naming seems very confusing, as I originally thought there must be some connection. But I don't think there is.
But then again, the do no evil motto is long gone, so I guess anything goes now?
Now it just takes giant compute clusters and inference time.
Not in 10 years but now.
People who just see this as terrible are wrong. AI improving curves is exponential.
People adaptability is at best linear.
This makes me really sad. For creativity. For people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPF4MGL7K5I
Obviously we don't know how hand picked that is so it would be interesting to see a comparison from someone with access.
1. People like to be entertained.
2. NeuralViz demonstrates AI videos (with a lot of human massaging) can be entertaining
To me the fundamental question is- "will AI make videos that are entertaining without human massaging?"
This is similar to the idea of "will AI make apps that are useful without human massaging"
Or "will AI create ideas that are influential without human massaging"
By "no human massaging", I mean completely autonomous. The only prompt being "Create".
I am unaware of any idea, app or video to date that has been influential, useful or entertaining without human massaging.
That doesn't mean it can't happen. It's fundamentally a technical question.
Right now AI is trained on human collected data. So, technically, It's hard for me to imagine it can diverge significantly from what's already been done.
I'm willing to be proven wrong.
The Christian in me tells me that Humans are able to diverge significantly from what's already been done because each of us are imbibed with a divine spirit that AI does not have.
But maybe AI could have some other property that allows it to diverge from its training data.
Why is it that all these AI concept videos are completely crazy?
Like if you asked a model to help you create a coffeeshop website for a demo, it started looking more like sex shop, you just vibe with it and say that's what you wanted in the first place. I've noticed that the success rate of using AI is proportional to much you can gaslight yourself.
I like how Veo supports camera moves, though I wonder if it clearly recognizes the difference between 'in-camera motion' and 'camera motion' and also things like 'global motion' (e.g. the motion of rain, snow etc).
Obligatory link to Every Frame a Painting, where he talks about motion in Kurosawa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doaQC-S8de8
The abiding issue is that artists (animators, filmmakers etc) have not done an effective job at formalising these attributes or even naming them consistently. Every Frame a Painting does a good job but even he has a tendency to hand wave these attributes.
The demo videos for Sora look amazing but using it is substantially more frustrating and hit and miss.
The pace is so crazy that was an over estimation! I'll probably get done in 2. Wild times.
0: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7317975...
Since Google seems super cagey about what their exact limits actually are, even for paying customers, it's hard to know if that's an error or not. If it's not an error, if it's intentional, I don't understand how that's at all worth $20 a month. I'm literally trying to use your product Google, why won't you let me?
Ideogram and gpt4o passes only a few, but not all of them.
Created by Ari Kuschnir
On a more societal level, I'm not sure continuously diminishing costs for producing AI slop is a net benefit to humanity.
I think this whole thing parallels some of the social media pros and cons. We gained the chance to reconnect with long lost friends—from whom we probably drifted apart for real reasons, consciously or not—at the cost of letting the general level of discourse to tank to its current state thanks to engagement-maximizing algorithms.
The obvious aim of these foundational image/movie generation AI developments is for these to become the primary source of values at cost and quality unparalleled by preexisting human experts, while allowing but not necessitating further modifications by now heavily commoditized and devalued ex-professional editors at downstream to allow for their slow deprecation.
But the opposite seem to be happening: better data are still human generated, generators are increasingly human curated, and are used increasingly closer to the tail end of the pipeline instead of head. Which isn't so threatening nor interesting to me, but I do wonder if that's a safe, let alone expected, outcome for those pushing these developments.
Aren't you welding a nozzle onto open can of worms?