I'm curious why you decide to declare victory after one successful attempt, but try many times for unsuccessful models. Are you trying to measure whether a model _can_ get it right, or whether it frequently _does_ get it right? I feel like success rate is a better metric here, or at least a fixed number of trials with some success rate threshold to determine model success.
vunderba · 37d ago
It's hard to nail down a good objective metric on something that is always going to be marginally qualitative in nature but it's a good call out - I should probably add a FAQ to the site.
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.
bigmadshoe · 37d ago
Makes sense. It just set off some statistical alarm bells in my head to see a model marked as passing with 1 trial, and some models marked as failing with 5. What if the probability of success is 5% for both models? How confident are we that our grading of the models is correct? It's an interesting problem.
Cool site btw! Thanks for sharing.
npinsker · 37d ago
The current metric is actually quite strong -- it mirrors the real-world use case of people trying a few times and being satisfied if any of them's what they're looking for. It rewards diversity of responses.
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.
Taek · 37d ago
Its made a little bit better by the fact that there's something like a dozen different prompts. Across all of the prompts each model had a fair number of opportunities to show off.
ipnon · 37d ago
It is indicative of marginal improvements instead of new breakthroughs. iPhone 1 was a paradigm shift. iPhone 10 was essentially iPhone 9 with tweaks. As an AI optimist I would be disappointed to find we are already seeing diminishing returns on R&D.
TeMPOraL · 36d ago
Just moments ago, I managed to turn a photo of a person into a short clip of them dancing, in half-decent quality, fully locally, on a mid-range gaming GPU (RTX 4070 Ti, 12GB VRAM). I almost run out of RAM (32GB), but it worked, worked well, and took only couple of minutes.
Half a year ago, that was sort of possible for some genius really bent on making it happen. A year ago, that was unthinkable. Today, it's a matter of drag&dropping a workflow to a fresh ComfyUI install and downloading a couple dozen GB of img2vid models.
The returns on R&D are not diminishing, the progress is just not happening everywhere evenly and at the same time.
Uehreka · 37d ago
Not only did the iPhone 9 never exist, the iPhone X was a huge paradigm shift in design and capabilities. That was the phone that introduced edge-to-edge OLED screens to the iPhone line, as well as the IR camera that enabled FaceID and the first generation of Portrait mode. I know it well since it also introduced the ability for developers to build facial motion capture apps that would’ve previously required expensive pro hardware and allowed people like me to build live facial motion capture effects for theatre.
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.
ofrzeta · 36d ago
Arguably OLED screens and IR cameras are no paradigm shift. At least nothing comparable to "no smartphone" to iPhone 1.
jere · 36d ago
There were smartphones before the iPhone. One could also describe the difference as "just a touchscreen".
ofrzeta · 36d ago
The iPhone 1 featured "touch screen, GPS, camera, iPod, and internet access. Its software capabilities were a turning point for the smartphone industry" (random source: https://www.textline.com/blog/smartphone-history).
If you want to doubt that it was in fact a not a turning point you'd need to provide very strong arguments.
kybernetikos · 36d ago
All of the things you mentioned were available in phones before the first iPhone (assuming by ipod you mean mp3 player). In fact from a software point of view it was lacking a bunch of functionality and software ecosystem some competitors had.
In my view the reason the iPhone felt so new was almost entirely the incredibly responsive capacitive touch screen with a finger ui, everything I'd used before it did resistive and preferred pen for detail. Pen actually is better for detail so in some ways it was that more than anything else that turned the device from a creation device to a consumption device which was whole new way of thinking about smart personal devices.
Of course it was also sold in a decent package too where Apple did deals that ensured it was available with good mobile internet plans which were also unusual at the time.
hollerith · 36d ago
Also, the touchscreen was the type that unlike all previous touchscreens (except the ones made by a startup that Apple had bought)
could detect touches at more than one screen location simultaneously.
spogbiper · 36d ago
as someone who owned a number of smartphones and PDAs prior to the first iPhone coming out, the real advance was a usable mobile browser. i'd had all the same capabilities with devices for quite some time before the iphone came out, but their browsers were painful to use. the touch interface was also a big advance over previous touch interfaces. in other areas the first iphone was lacking compared to other smartphones.. copy and paste and 3rd party apps were missing for example.
vincnetas · 37d ago
technological advancements yes, but did it drastically changed how users (majority) use the iphone. I'd say marginally. Fancy selfie filters, ok i'll give it that. But edge to edge screens, meh, give me back my home button :D
sethaurus · 37d ago
At the risk of unbearable pedantry, there's never been an iPhone 9. (There was never a 2 either; there was kind of a 3, although it was really called the 3G.)
No comments yet
woolion · 37d ago
The winning image entry for "The Yarrctic Circle" by OpenAI 4o doesn't actually wields a cutlass. It's very aesthetically pleasing, even though it's so wrong in all fundamental aspects (perspective is nonsensical and anatomy is messed up, with one leg 150% longer than the other, ...).
It's a very interesting resource to map some of the limits of existing models.
danpalmer · 37d ago
In my own testing between the two this is what I’ve noticed. Imagen will follow the instructions, and 4o will often not, but produces aesthetically more pleasing images.
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.
fragmede · 37d ago
People pay for digital sticker packs so their memoji in iMessage are customized. How much money they make on sticker packs is unknown to me, but image generation platform Midjourney seems to be doing alright.
vunderba · 37d ago
Midjourney got in REALLY early in the GenAI game despite only allowing image generation through Discord for at least a year. I heard that it was one of the largest Discord channels ever having something absurd like 20+ million members.
I'd love to see some financials but I'd tend to agree they're probably doing pretty well.
ilikehurdles · 36d ago
o4-mini-high I’ve noticed is far better the 4o on prompt adherence in image generation in personal use.
echelon · 37d ago
Google Flow is remarkable as video editing UX, but Imagen 4 doesn't really stand out amongst its image gen peers.
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.
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
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.
If anyone from Tencent or the Hunyuan team is reading this: PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE OPEN SOURCE THIS. (PLEASE!!)
dheera · 37d ago
> 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.
Narciss · 37d ago
This is amazing, can’t see how I’ve missed it. Thank you!
echelon · 36d ago
I've given this some more thought. Even if Imagen 4 isn't that great on its own, all of Google's models and UX products in conjunction (Veo 3, Flow, etc.) are orders of magnitude above the rest of the playing field.
If Tencent wants to keep Google from winning the game, they should open source their models. From my perspective right now, it looks like Google is going to win this entire game, and open source AI might be the only way to stop that from being a runaway victory.
vunderba · 37d ago
Good catch - that's on me I accidentally uploaded the wrong image for gpt-image-1. Fixed!
NoahZuniga · 37d ago
I can't find the image you're talking about. Link pls?
tintor · 37d ago
Hands in Winning entry in "Not the Bees" are very unlike any driver. I wouldn't count it as a pass.
vunderba · 37d ago
I hate to say it but I feel like as a result of staring at so many equivalents of Tyrone Rugen since the dark ages of Stable Diffusion 1.5 - I literally DID NOT EVEN notice that until you called it out. The training data in my wetware has been corrupted.
tintor · 37d ago
More difficult examples:
- 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
viraptor · 37d ago
What's the reason to test the "not showing ..."? I've never seen anyone make that kind of request in real life. They ask for what they actually want instead. You'd ask for a clock showing 3:25 rather than "not 10:10".
I mean, it's a fun edge case, but I'm practice - does it matter?
tintor · 30d ago
Problem is that watchmakers always set the watches to show V with clock hands when they market their watches. This causes a very strong bias in image generation models, making it very difficult for them to generate watch that shows any other time, even if user requests it.
fragmede · 37d ago
> 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".
viraptor · 37d ago
> 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?
strongpigeon · 37d ago
How can you tell you're using Imagen 4 and not Imagen 3? Gemini seems unable to tell me which model it's using. Are you using Vertex AI?
vunderba · 37d ago
I used Whisk. The model listing shows 3/4 because testing against Imagen 4 did not result in a measurable increase in accuracy from Imagen 3.
Well they've labelled it 3/4 so I'm guessing they can't but you can use 4 it in whisk
EGreg · 37d ago
Tell me you’re using Imagen 3 without telling me you’re using Imagen 4… or something
andybak · 36d ago
Side note. It's my understanding that being a pith helmet is pretty orthogonal to having a spike. Plenty of helmets with spikes aren't pith helmets and plenty of pith helmets don't have spikes.
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.
vunderba · 31d ago
well I'm about a billion years late to this but going to reply anyway. It's not mentioned but internally I give each model several "iterations" of the prompts themselves. This included using hippity hop, space hopper, and even a physical description of the toy itself. But it's a good call out!
Onavo · 37d ago
How do companies like https://icon.com do their image Gen if the existing SOTA for prompt adherence is so poor?
yorwba · 37d ago
People who generate images for ads probably don't often need strict prompt adherence, just a random backdrop to slap a picture of their product on top of. The kind of thing they'd have used a stock image library for before.
Also "create static + video ads that are 0-99% complete" suggests the performance is hit or miss.
AsmodiusVI · 37d ago
Exactly this. It just helps the foundation which doesn’t need specific details in most cases.
peab · 37d ago
fine tuning and prompt techniques can go a long way. That + cherrypicking results
htrp · 37d ago
multishot generation with discriminators
mcphage · 37d ago
> "A dolphin is using its fluke to discipline a mermaid by paddling it across the backside."
Hmm.
snug · 37d ago
How do you determine how many attempts are made before the results are failing?
mcphage · 37d ago
It's listed in Purple to the right of the model name.
zamadatix · 37d ago
I think they're asking how the number to stop at was determined, not what the number stopped at was.
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.
vunderba · 37d ago
That's exactly what it was. It's hard to define a discrete rubric for grading at an inherently qualitative level. Usually more attempts means that it seemed like the model had the "potential" to get across the finish line so I gave it more opportunities.
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.
anton-c · 36d ago
They failed but man those snakes are cool. Awesome website!
xixixao · 37d ago
Awesome showcase! Fun descriptions. Are there similar sites?
vunderba · 37d ago
Thanks! There are definitely other GenAI image comparison sites out there - but I found that the majority of them were more concerned with visual fidelity which IMHO is a less challenging problem than prompt adherence.
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.
I think the change here will be something we've seen with the other modalities. Text was interestingly syntactically correct but nonsense sentences. Then paragraphs but the end of the article would go off the rails. Then the article. Now it's that the creativity of the children's story in question.
Pictures were awful fever dreams filled with eyes but you could kind of see a dog. Then you could see what it was, then decent
Videos were fun that they kind of worked, then surprising it took a few seconds for the panda to turn into spaghetti, then it kept the general style for a decent time.
I see this moving towards the creativity being the major thing, or it having a few general styles (softly lit background for example).
This has mostly all shifted in a very short space of time and as someone who put RBMs on GPUs possibly for the first time (I'm gonna claim it) this is absolutely wild.
Had I seen some of this, say, 6 months ago I'd not have guessed at all bits weren't real.
Workaccount2 · 36d ago
Last night my girlfriend asked me why I kept watching the same bland sounding videos again and again. She came over and watched for a bit, gave a sort of confused laugh of solidarity to something, like "Uhh, why is he so into this? But, ok, I guess..." and then walked away.
It wasn't until I was able to get my jaw off the ground that I told her it was AI. No, not AI like special effects, completely AI.
rtkwe · 35d ago
A very important demo video I also found on reddit is this one [0] that's a fairly generic series of action scenes of a raid leading to a gun fight. The individual scenes are look mostly fine, notable exceptions being the muzzle flashes and nonsense guns in a few shots, but the connecting flow is nonsense if you look at it even a little. It has some of the consistency issues that are a bit of a halmark of AI videos, the interior size and layout of rooms and vehicles morphs and shifts from 'shot' to 'shot', they get out of the vehicle twice, etc. The wheels really come off in the more actiony scene though with the pace feeling very plodding for what would be an intense scene in even a moderately competitent human editor. Also some of the 'cops' wind up shooting each other in one scene which was a funny mistake.
If you have ever tried to use VEO in Google's AI studio, it lets you upload a starting frame image and ending frame image which is cool.
But they do not allow any people in the image even cartoon depictions of humans. This knee caps a lot of potential usage.
WheelsAtLarge · 36d ago
Looks like AI crossed a line. At the very least, one person can do long form documentaries from their basement using VEO 3. There is no need for camera shoots. Yikes.
This reminds me of Pixar's video of an animated lamp 40 years ago. I remember that within 5 years Toy Story came out and changed everything on how animated films were made. Looks to me like we are on our way to doing the same thing with realistic movies.
bathtub365 · 35d ago
What are they documenting if it’s entirely AI generated images?
WheelsAtLarge · 35d ago
Good point, how about something history related? Ken burns does something similar with photos. I've also seen animation used in documentaries. So use AI instead. How about a mock documentary? Spinal Tap comes to mind.
marcyb5st · 36d ago
Calling it now.
Someone will use AI to make the "AI Killed the Video Star" video. Probably the same guy that made this[1] and other masterpieces.
It’s true. YTMND nailed the TikTok / Vine format like 12 years ahead of its time. If only they’d “pivoted to mobile” and added more ease of use creation tools they may have stayed relevant.
jjcm · 37d ago
It finally feels like the professional tools have greatly outpaced the open source versions. While wan and hunyuan are solid free options, the latest from Google and Runway have started to feel like a league above. Interestingly it feels like the biggest differentiator is editing tools - ability to prompt motion, direction, cuts, or weaving in audio, rather than just pure ability to one shot.
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.
echelon · 37d ago
> 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.
I think open source still has an important advantage in the pro environment despite being less convenient, and it's the possibility of adding things in between the generation process like control net, and custom loras with new concepts or characters.
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.
MrScruff · 37d ago
I don't think this is just about convenience - you're not going to get these results with a 14B video model. I'd much prefer to have something I could hack on in ComfyUI but the open weights models don't compete with this anymore than a 32B LLM competes with Gemini 2.5 Pro for coding. And at least in coding you can easily edit the output from the LLM regardless...
echelon · 37d ago
> 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.
sigmaisaletter · 37d ago
Your post strangely sounds like Nvidia primarily makes graphic cards for consumers.
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.
sofixa · 36d ago
I read their comment as meaning that Nvidia should prioritise a specific kind of consumer/prosumer hardware.
Nobody is running H100s at home, nor are most video companies running ones. So the choice for them is to "rent" them from Google, or... invest a lot in almost impossible to obtain Nvidia hardware? One has lower initial cost, and is available now.
sigmaisaletter · 36d ago
Thanks for the (possible) clarification.
But as long as Google isn't their _only_ customer, why would Nvidia care?
larodi · 36d ago
>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 ???
popalchemist · 37d ago
Control net etc can be served via API; the intrinsic advantage of open-source is the ability to train and run inference privately.
doctorpangloss · 37d ago
Someone out there might care about nudity, but unfortunately, nobody that matters.
irq-1 · 37d ago
> the agency/hollywood use cases.
It's for advertising.
doctorpangloss · 37d ago
IMO, this is a misconception. For example, in the case of social media display ads (i.e., not the typical Google text ad), most campaigns are "saturation," they only work if the creatives are seen 100+ times by the intended audience and look more or less exactly the same, which is kind of the exact opposite theory that benefits from being able to create unlimited personalized creatives.
Flamentono2 · 36d ago
We already have seen that Opensource can compete which is a lot more than people expected. After all opensource and running huge models?
But what it means, that with time, Opensource will be as good as what commercial offerings now have. Hardware will get cheaper, research is open or delayed open.
colordrops · 37d ago
Has anyone cracked the nut of making videos longer than a few seconds though? No one seems to have made any progress on this. This is all nearly worthless until that is addressed.
plokiju · 37d ago
I thought that for a while. Until it was pointed out to me that most long videos are made of 6 second shots.
Generating a long video one shot at a time kind of makes sense, as long as there's good consistency between shots
colordrops · 37d ago
It would narrow down what you could do by quite a bit if you are limited to 6 seconds per shot. While that is average, there are many shots that are longer. Also, you bring up a good point about consistency between shots. That doesn't seem like as hard of a problem, but it's still a big one.
Der_Einzige · 36d ago
I don’t care if the normies dont do long shots. The best movies have very long shots. Children of men or 1917. Until AI video gen can get past 5-10 second shots of slop, we won’t see any major critically acclaimed AI movies or related.
lancekey · 35d ago
I would think there’s a major difference in the inference time commute for tools like this. And major providers can spend a lot more (at a loss) on the runtime compute. That’s just a guess though.
mensetmanusman · 37d ago
We will know GAI exists when there is no difference, because anything can be coded at any level of quality :)
fooker · 37d ago
Well no, humans have 'natural' general intelligence and there's an obvious gap between an expert and a novice at any task.
julianpye · 37d ago
An indie film with poor production values, even bad acting can grip you, make you laugh and make you cry. The consistency of quality is key - even if it is poor. The directing is the red thread throughout the scenes. Anything with different quality levels interrupts your flow and breaks your experience.
The problem with AI video content at this stage is that the clips are very good 'in themselves', just as LLM results are, but putting them together to let you engage beyond an individual clip will not be possible for a long time.
It will work where the red thread is in the audio (e.g. a title sequence) and you put some clips together to support the thread. But Hollywood has nothing to fear at this stage. In addition, remember that visual artists are control freaks of the purest kind. Film is still used because of the grain, not despite it. 24p prevails.
rcarr · 37d ago
You might want to look up NeuralViz on YouTube. 180k subscribers. They've been building out an entire cinematic universe using AI video tools. And it's by far the funniest show I've watched in years. So the claim that "let you engage beyond an individual clip will not be possible for a long time" isn't true. People are already doing it.
I hadn't seen these before, but they're working because of the limitations of the technology.
The format of the shows are mostly clip-based - man on the street, news hour, etc - and obviously the jokes are all written by someone with a good sense of humour.
Not to discount that this is, as you say, an example of someone using AI to successfully create characters and stories that resonate with people. it's just still very much because of a creative human's talent and good taste that it's working.
preommr · 37d ago
> "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.
wickedsight · 37d ago
Since the first GenAI started popping up, many people have glossed over the fact that they are just tools. All the anger from artists and keyboard warriors completely ignored the fact that you still need skill and time to make something good with these tools.
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.
jplusequalt · 36d ago
>Artists aren't going to be replaced by AI tools being used by me on my iPhone
This is the first time I've wanted more AI video content. Thanks for sharing.
spaceman_2020 · 36d ago
The Dor Brothers on YouTube have also been making some very funny, stylized music videos with AI. They've managed to use the limitations to their advantage
goosejuice · 37d ago
This is news is hilarious.
dlisboa · 36d ago
You don't need to make an entire movie out of this. One or two scenes that are difficult or impossible to film on a certain budget is enough to lift the production value of a movie. One can use this as CGI replacement, for example to produce a couple seconds scene of an ancient city and stretch that out with fake panning.
You can also use it as a communication tool such as making a "live" storyboard to prep location, blocking, maybe even as notes for actors.
anton-c · 36d ago
That storyboard idea is pretty huge. Imagine dailies go in the other direction - "here's how I want it to look"
dlisboa · 36d ago
Yeah, I did an amateur short once as part of a college assignment and doing the storyboard was the most difficult part for me as I'm not a good drawer at all. Getting the idea for a certain shot from my head to the paper was a struggle.
Being able to express visual ideas with words is one of the most powerful things of this AI craze. Text/code is whatever.
doctorpangloss · 37d ago
There’s already more good content than anyone can watch. It’s impossible to disentangle strength of the art from strength of distribution. Google, the world’s biggest distributor of culture, is focusing on this problem they do not need to solve, instead of the one everyone in art actually suffers from, because: they’re bad at this. It’s that simple.
sandspar · 37d ago
AI video may be to Hollywood as photography was to painting. Photography wasn't "painting, but better" - it was a different thing. AI-native video may not resemble typical Hollywood 3-act structure. But if it takes enough eyeballs away from Hollywood then Hollywood will die all the same.
pedalpete · 37d ago
I think you're contradicting your own argument. Painting didn't die from photography.
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.
sandspar · 37d ago
I'm not an expert so I may be wrong about all this. But my impression is that Pictorialist photography aped painting for 50 years. Photography only came into its own as a "photography native" art form with Stieglitz and people like that around ~1905. By that time, non-representational painting styles like Cubism had already sucked the remaining juice out of painting, with Duchamp's 1917 urinal perhaps deserving credit for the coup de grace. Today painting is a shadow of what it once was - and public interest and auction prices reflect that. Museums occasionally have abstract painting exhibits but they're poorly attended because the public dislikes them. Ask a person on the street what their favorite painting movements are and likely every name will be more than 100 years old, possibly hundreds of years old. Compare auction prices between pre-1917 paintings and post-1917 paintings. Besides a few middlebrow pop artists like Dali or Warhol, meme painters like Pollock, or trendy political painters like Basquiat or Johns, the older paintings will be orders of magnitude more in demand. Painting used to move the conversation forward, now nobody cares.
sigmaisaletter · 37d ago
> 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.
satvikpendem · 37d ago
Well if you want to really be pedantic, they said every name, not average answer, so if most people reply with a blank state, that is still not in the set of every name, because they're not names. So the ones who actually do reply with a name are, as I agree with them, likely to be older than 100 years.
sigmaisaletter · 36d ago
Have my upvote for pedantic overkill.
autobodie · 37d ago
Sounds right, except calling Dali or Warhol "middlebrow." That's just weird.
djeastm · 36d ago
>Painting didn't die from photography.
Commercial portrait painters died out pretty fast.
Cthulhu_ · 36d ago
Hollywood and other "real" films is like the 1% of video content though, as is youtube which has a top 1% of good content and a lot of shit.
AI tools used for any content will / are being used to add to the pile of shit.
DoesntMatter22 · 36d ago
Most Hollywood and indie films aren't that good. I feel the complete opposite of this comment.
Id much rather start seeing individuals creating AI movies where you aren't bogged down by the need to hire actors and what bot
precompute · 35d ago
Sorry, but AI generated video is unwatchable. Even now, when it's really great. It just doesn't seem authentic.
Daub · 37d ago
As an artist and designer (with admittedly limited AI experience), where I feel AI to be lacking is in its poverty of support for formal descriptors. Content descriptors such as 'dog wearing a hat' are a mostly solved problem. Support for simple formal descriptors such as basic color terms and background/foreground are ok, but things like 'global contrast' (as opposed to foreground background contrast), 'negative shape', 'overlap', 'saturation contrast' etc etc... all these leave the AI models I have played with scratching their heads.
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).
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.
No comments yet
Workaccount2 · 37d ago
I'm sure by this point, and if not, pretty soon, everyone will have seen a clip of AI generated video and not thought twice about it.
Its something that is only obvious when it is obvious. And the more obvious examples you see, the more non-obvious examples slip by.
gpt5 · 37d ago
I saw a video today [1]. Millions of views, ten thousand comments, not a single commenter mentioned that it's AI generated.
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.
Well, what does news (or any media) consumption look like now? It's been trending towards pure noise for a good while, and this is a way to further automate the generation of yet more noise.
xarope · 37d ago
the detail around the eyes is a dead-giveaway for AI generated video
alkonaut · 36d ago
The inverse follows from this and is even more scary. Soon there will be videos of something terrible happening, reported in the news, which is widely rejected as fake despite being real.
carlosdp · 37d ago
Wow, this is incredible work! Blown away at how well the audio/video matches up, and the dialogue is better sounding / on-par with dedicated voice models.
aaroninsf · 36d ago
Funny but also illustrative issue:
in the owl/badger video, the owl should fly silently.
This is an interesting non-trivial problem of generalization and world-knowledge etc., but also?
There's something somewhat sad about that slipping through; it makes me think, *no one involve in the production of this video, its selection, it passing review... etc., seemed to realize that it is one of the characteristic things about owls that you don't hear their wings.
We have owls on our hill right now and see them almost every day and regularly seem them fly. It's magic, especially in an urban environment.
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.
nrjames · 37d ago
This is technically impressive and I commend the team that brought it to life.
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.
swalsh · 37d ago
I think the non-creative work is coming... but it's harder, needs more accuracy, and just generally takes more effort. But it's 100% coming. AI today can one shot with about 80% perfection. But for use cases that need to be higher than that, that last 20% is grueling to gain. It's like taking a jet across the country, and then getting jammed in traffic while you're taking a taxi to your hotel.
TechDebtDevin · 37d ago
80% on todo apps
dyauspitr · 37d ago
There’s limited training data for physical movements. Once there is enough of that the non creative space will start getting their own LLMs.
ahmedfromtunis · 37d ago
The amount of gatekeeping I see when this topic is brought is outstanding! Why can't people be happy that more individuals would be soon able to create freely in a more accessible way?
Personally I can't wait to see the new creative doors ai will open for us!
alpaca128 · 37d ago
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? Which individuals are gatekept exactly? Before you bring up disabled people (as often happens when the term accessibility is used), know that many of them are not happy to be used as a shield for this without ever being asked and would rather speak for themselves.
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.
alickz · 37d ago
>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.
emkoemko · 37d ago
so its for lazy people? who don't want to learn a skill? there are many ways to realize your creativity, and now you have to write your "prompt" for your creative result? then why not just write a story? like authors have been doing for ever ?
jplusequalt · 36d ago
>The more people that can realise their creative ideas the better it is for everyone
There is a fundamental misunderstanding of creating going on here. There's a reason why people always talk about the work/journey/process rather than the end goal. That's what makes someone an artist--not the end result.
dsadfjasdf · 36d ago
do you think taking a photo of something is skipping to the end goal of painting? no. it will just be used as a tool for more creativity for the people who will do the work.
jplusequalt · 36d ago
>do you think taking a photo of something is skipping to the end goal of painting
Going outside and taking a photo requires you to be engaging with the scene around you. You are the actor doing the thing. When you prompt an AI, the AI is the actor doing the thing.
alickz · 36d ago
Would you consider film directors to be artists?
jplusequalt · 35d ago
Yes! Directors orchestrate hundreds of people and other creatives, have a say in how scenes are shot, how actors perform their lines, which music gets used, which lines need to be changed or added, etc.
Not to mention that many directors also write the script for the film.
I-M-S · 35d ago
Wouldn't all this hold true for AI videos as well, it's just that you'll be going through hundreds of prompts and bad generations before you get to something approaching your vision?
N.B. If directing people is the distinguishing factor, then animation directors are robbed of their claim to artistry as well, as is basically any solo artist in history
jplusequalt · 35d ago
I never said directing people is the distinguishing factor. I only said a director is an artist as they are deeply involved in the creation of the art in question. There is no hidden layer of linear algebra that obfuscates the creative process and that does the majority of the work.
dsadfjasdf · 34d ago
this view is really limited. like I said, people who will do the work... will. You are thinking of the majority of lazy people who aren't producing anything of real value in the design/art world already.
BeFlatXIII · 36d ago
I don't care at all about the philosophy of art. I have creative goals in mind and not enough time to become competent at all the prerequisite skills to master them.
jplusequalt · 36d ago
>I have creative goals in mind and not enough time to become competent at all the prerequisite skills to master them
You are consuming, not creating.
BeFlatXIII · 35d ago
Cool story; don't care.
Aurornis · 37d ago
> 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.
rcarr · 37d ago
Try and tell me that a single individual would have been able to create this 10 years ago on a normal salary:
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.
alpaca128 · 37d ago
Since 10+ years ago various YT channels have been creating interesting content, sometimes on less than a normal salary, filmed with a phone and with one person acting for three characters at once. And imho they (fortunately) won't disappear if what you linked is representative for what AI enables.
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.
sensanaty · 37d ago
Most of those "skits" can be done on a cheap camera with a single person being the actor. In fact, many such videos existed already in the past.
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
dragonwriter · 37d ago
> 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.
Clamchop · 37d ago
There's a pretty standard argument that creating artworks should or must require the hardship of developing the skill to bring vision into reality, or paying someone who can. That can be debated, but the position is textbook gatekeeping.
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.
alpaca128 · 37d ago
Gatekeeping means restricting power or opportunities.
Is it gatekeeping when a skill can be learned for free, and on top is also optional?
Is it also gatekeeping to forbid students from using ChatGPT for homework because it would force them to go through the hardship of earning an education?
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.
Clamchop · 37d ago
I stated exactly what the enumeration of arguments that I know of are and which one is gatekeeping. (It's still the first one, devaluing or dismissing work out of hand if AI was involved, regardless of other merit.)
hooverd · 36d ago
Good, it's a socially corrosive technology. Much like you might dismiss a quality product made with child labor.
Clamchop · 36d ago
Terrible analogy that trivializes child abuse.
Aurornis · 37d ago
> Gatekeeping means restricting power or opportunities.
Gatekeeping commonly means excluding others from a group, a label, or an identity. That’s what they’re referring to.
_DeadFred_ · 37d ago
Remember how there were all those cake shows all of a sudden, and they were making cakes that looked super pretty, but they were just fondant and sheet cakes? We're not thrilled having to wade through the AI equivalent.
duped · 37d ago
> 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
---
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.
ahtihn · 37d ago
> 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?
ZoomZoomZoom · 37d ago
> 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.
jackphilson · 37d ago
I think the result of an art piece is "wow that looks pretty cool / makes me feel this certain way". Human properties aren't required there. Sure, some art rests on there being human properties, but then AI wouldn't be able to replace it by definition. You can argue that AI lowers the discoverability of art that falls in the latter category, but I'd say that it's a solvable problem that can be fixed with better recommendation algorithms.
ZoomZoomZoom · 36d ago
> I think the result of an art piece is "wow that looks pretty cool / makes me feel this certain way".
This is an expansive definition and thus not useful, because it would include:
1. Natural phenomena (sand on a vibrating plate is pretty cool).
2. Folk crafts (this hand-woven rug sure ties the room together!).
3. Advertisement.
4. Industrial design (this soap dispenser looks like a droid head, awesome!).
5. Drug induced experiences.
6. Art forgery and plagiarism.
Nothing in the list is really art. Rough definition of art is an intentional process (or the results thereof) of self-expression, and/or interpretation/modeling of reality performed with symbolic means. This implies intentionality and a conscience, which current "AI" doesn't have.
> AI lowers the discoverability of art that falls in the latter category, but I'd say that it's a solvable problem that can be fixed with better recommendation algorithms.
Theoretically it is. However, it won't be ever solved and implemented widely due to the lack of incentives and the fact that just replacing it all with "AI" is much more profitable and exploitable.
duped · 37d ago
I would be against technology that freezes medicine at our current understanding and makes it economically unviable to develop new medicine.
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.
aimxhaisse · 37d ago
On effort being a requirement: part of art is around playing with limits of a medium and finding a way in it, it takes a lot of trials, attempts, and errors for an artist to make their way. It's not a requirement per se, but something needed for someone to intent something different. Not worried about creative ways where artists explore AI, new things will come out of it and it's going to be interesting. Not worried either about post-modernists who already dropped requirements long time ago and tape bananas to walls, they'll find their way. But the category artists who make their way through the effort put in a medium, not only the narrative around the medium will be affected.
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.
huimang · 37d ago
I think effort is a signal that whatever the thing is, the artist/team -really- wanted to put it out there and have people view it. They had -something- that drove them to take the time and effort to make the thing.
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.
---
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.
---
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.
Klonoar · 37d ago
> Why should being an artist be a viable job?
Because we as a society have valued it as one for eternity.
hooverd · 36d ago
Why do you want to destroy social mobility? Do you think you'll be on the safe side of the line?
emkoemko · 37d ago
i think real art will just go underground kind of like how it was pre internet, and the internet will be filled with AI slop
gamblor956 · 37d ago
There's nothing creative in having someone or something else doing the work for you.
"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.
jampa · 37d ago
The first two paragraphs of your argument could be used to discuss whether Photography (Camera is doing most of the work) or Digital Drawing (Photoshop is doing most of the work) are art.
Both things which were dismissed as not art at first but are widely accepted as an art medium nowadays.
MattGrommes · 37d ago
I see this comparison to a camera a lot but I don't think it works (not that you're saying this, I'm just contributing). I'm not an expert but to me the camera is doing very little of the work involved in taking an artistic picture. The photographer chooses which camera to use to get a certain effect, which lenses, the framing, etc. All the camera is doing recording the output of what the person is specifying.
Jordan-117 · 37d ago
I think there's a sliding scale in both cases. Vanilla prompting something like DALL-E 3 and uncritically accepting what it spits out is the AI equivalent of dime-a-dozen smartphone snapshots of the Eiffel Tower or an ocean sunset. But like your description of professional photography, there are more intricate AI approaches where an expert user can carefully select a model, a fine-tune/LORA, adjust the temperature or seed, inpaint or layer different elements, and of course have the artistic vision to describe something interesting in the first place.
Clamchop · 37d ago
Photography mostly eliminated the once-indispensable portrait artist, among other formerly-dependable lines of work.
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?
mensetmanusman · 37d ago
Billions of R&D and millions of man hours made the camera exist. It’s doing most of the embodied work.
blargey · 37d ago
Everyone has a phone camera, and takes photos, but not everyone is a photographer, and even photographers wouldn’t proclaim all their photos “art”.
AI cannot “democratize art” any more than the camera did, until the day it starts teaching artistry to its users.
xp84 · 37d ago
> 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.
gamblor956 · 37d ago
The first two paragraphs of your argument could be used to discuss whether Photography (Camera is doing most of the work) or Digital Drawing (Photoshop is doing most of the work) are art.
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.
andoando · 37d ago
I don't think that's true. Is a film director not a creative?
You could come up with your own story and direct the AI to generate it for you.
gamblor956 · 37d ago
In your example, the "come up with your own story" part is the creative part. But you're not "directing" the AI to generate it for you. You're just giving it a command. You're selecting from the results it outputs, but you're not controlling the output.
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.)
andoando · 37d ago
So 1. being able to bring your own story come to life automatically is cool in itself, and would result in a lot of creative media that is not possible now. Do you know how many people have their own stories, plays, etc that are dying to find someone rich enough to get them published?
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)
gamblor956 · 36d ago
1. We already have that now, it's called Word. Most people are just too lazy to write out their story. AI doesn't improve the situation, it makes it worse. It will become vastly harder to find the good stuff in the avalanche of crap.
2. Current AI can't do what you're describing, so the biggest difference is that you're posing a hypothetical against the real world. But more specifically: the director already has a specific vision in their hand; the purpose of the "direction" is to bring this vision into reality within the scope of their budget and resources. With AI, you have a general idea and the AI creates its own vision and you pick what you like the best, until you ultimately realize the AI isn't going to get what you actually want and you settle for the best the AI can do for you. So, completely different.
alickz · 37d ago
>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)
cloverich · 37d ago
Not even if you are directing and refining it? What if i smudge out sections repeatedly and over the course of say 20 iterations produce a unique image that matches closely what i am imagining, and that has not be seem before?
MichaelZuo · 37d ago
> 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.
kmijyiyxfbklao · 37d ago
Buñuel would disagree with you: "The peak of film-making will be reached when you are able to take a pill, switch off the lights, sit facing a blank wall and project on it, directly from your eyes, the film that passes through your head."
GenshoTikamura · 36d ago
No need for any pills. Such tech exists for centuries and is colloquially known as "reading books". It requires some lighting though
ionwake · 36d ago
if I wasnt around to witness it over the last 10 years I would have thought most commenters on HN were bots pretending to be offended and gatekeeping for obscure profit motives.
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.
lm28469 · 36d ago
God forbid people have an opinion
"Oh you're posting on hackernews, if you don't suck google's dick and every single gadgets megacorps shit out you must be highly autistic".... interesting take
Der_Einzige · 36d ago
This is objectively one of the most autistic websites on the internet. Likely worse than 4chan /g/. Just as dang and PG like it though!
ionwake · 35d ago
Sure is! And it’s great.
Sorry I being autistic didn’t even phrase it well I think people got too offended I was just saying the bad side to it, HN is great.
Couple of people were so upset at the suggestion they replied in a defensive manner I should have been more careful with my rant
GenshoTikamura · 36d ago
If you call motives of designers, painters, musicians, filmmakers and other c-word professionals obscure, then I have bad news for whatever occupation you have for a living. Maybe it's just because it depends on how well AI sells, or because there's suddenly a perceived window of opportunity wide open at some fee for everyone unable to c-word anything on their own to finally become able, even if by relying on corporate crutches, the window you deem endangered by said gatekeepers?
lm28469 · 36d ago
"happy", "free", "creative", "accessible"
What a weird way to spell "give $200 a month to google"
kranke155 · 37d ago
Individuals won’t be able to do anything. The artist here is the LLM. There is no AI art where the human in the loop carries any significance. Proof of that is you can’t replicate their work using tbt same LLM. In AI art, the AI is the artist. The human is just a client making a request.
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.
StefanBatory · 37d ago
Creative? There's nothing creative in it.
ahmedfromtunis · 37d ago
It's funny that you're defending creativity by being close-minded about a creative new way to explore it. You're being your judgment of an entire new medium based on a few early examples. It's as if you're downplaying photography just based on the few first blurry, dark clichés produced. Let's keep our minds open to new forms of creativity if we really care about it so much.
kleiba · 37d ago
What grandparent means is that the AI enables human creativity in a new way.
rxtexit · 37d ago
"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.
onemoresoop · 37d ago
It does but so does it encourage efortlessness and haste. It definitely is something new, it remains to be see whether creatives bring it to new heigts as with other mediums. I remain a bit skeptical but am open to it. One thing is certain, a tsunami of content is upon us.
anton-c · 36d ago
Finally figured out what gp stands for. Ty.
ehsankia · 37d ago
> 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?
mirkodrummer · 37d ago
How does a prompt describe creativity? It's a vision so far off that it's so frustrating because greater creativity came from limited tools, greater creativity came from imperfections, a different point of view, love, a slightly off touch of a painter or a guitar player, the wood of the instrument and the humidity affecting. I can go on and on, prompts are a reduction to the minimum term of everything you'd want to describe, no matter how much you can express via a prompt
ehsankia · 37d ago
I agree that limitation does lead to some creativity, but I wouldn't say lack of limitation means no creativity. Saying prompts have no creativity is like saying books or scripts have no creativity compared to a movie. Not only that, these tools can actually take images and sketches.
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.
mirkodrummer · 37d ago
Imagine a world where(spoiler alert you shouldn't it's already there) your vision is limited by yourself and a light technician gives a different point of view that you like, a punk pioneer in your team that is the computer graphics chief animator that gives life to your animatronics(jurassic park, and still unmatched today, cgi looks so fake and cheap). And yes you should spend a lot of time, not necessarily money, because art is time and something you have spent zero time in it its valued zero money
jryle70 · 37d ago
Huh? is poem not creative? If I write a poem and tell AI to create a painting that expresses that poem visually, is that not creative?
mirkodrummer · 37d ago
Your hand that moves the brush on the painting will express more than thousand words, it's your hand, your movement, your actual emotions, your tools
jplusequalt · 36d ago
No it's not because you aren't creating the painting, the AI is. Having an idea is not sufficient to create art, you have to sit down and actually create it. If you hired a painter to create the work based off your poem, I'm not going to attribute that painters creation to you.
ahmedfromtunis · 37d ago
So deliberately writing a prompt that meticulously describes how a generated photo would look like isn't creative, but pushing a button for a machine to take the photo for you is??!! If anything, it's the way around!
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!
blargey · 37d ago
No, it isn’t, because the prompt doesn’t have a millionth of the information density of the output.
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.
_DeadFred_ · 37d ago
Your meticulous prompt is using the work of thousands of experts, and generating a mashup of what they did/their work/their commitment/their livelihood.
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.
ahmedfromtunis · 37d ago
And that's exactly how your brain work. What you call "creativity" is nothing more than exactly that: mixing ideas and thoughts you were exposed to. We're all building on others' work. The only difference is that computers do it on a much larger scale. But it's the very same process.
renerick · 37d ago
This is completely absurd and reductive point of view, which I always assume is a cop out. Just because it's called "machine learning" doesn't mean it actually has anything to do with how human learning or human brain works, and it's certainly not "exactly how" or "very same". There's much more going on on in human creative process, aside from mere "mixing": personal experience, understanding of the creative process, technique and style development, subtext, hidden ideas and nuances, etc. Computers are very good at mixing and combining, but this is not even close to what goes into actual creative process. I hate this argument
jryle70 · 37d ago
> 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.
mirkodrummer · 37d ago
You seem to not fully understand the quote. LLMs learn patterns/noises from an existing output, these are not skills nor endless experience learned. It's like saying you learn how to make a cake by learning how it should look like not how it's composed. LLMs mock the studio ghibli style images, didn't invent the style or learned the endless experience the studio accumulated over the years. In fact it's a mocking of the images and it just looks horrible
renerick · 37d ago
It's not just more data, it's deeper understanding of the fundamentals, of the idea and of the tools used, as well as the process of creation itself. It's what makes studying art interesting: why did author chose to do this and that, what's their style, what was the process, etc. For LLM the answers will universally be "because it was in the prompt and there was appropriate training data" and "the author prompted the model until the model returned something tolerable". You may argue that not all art has or needs depth, or that not all people are interested in it, but that doesn't mean that we should fill our cultures with empty boring slop.
> 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.
_DeadFred_ · 37d ago
But you aren't being creative here. Just using the 'average' of tons of actually creative peoples work to create an 'average' computer predicted scene. The opposite of art. Warhol already did it and did it better.
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.
emkoemko · 37d ago
artist have a style,you can see a work of art and know who made it, with these AI images its all random all over the place no direction, they can call them self's artists but i will never see them as that
mirkodrummer · 37d ago
To answer your first question: carpe diem! And historical limitations? Go visit the Sistine Chapel, unmatched still today
hooverd · 37d ago
Eh, every AI "artist" want the cachet of being an artist without any of the effort, but they're competing with other AI "artists" so they have no choice but to unleash a firehose of content sludge onto the commons in a race to the bottom.
dktp · 37d ago
For better or worse, a big chunk (if not most) of the AI development probably does go into non-creative work like matching ads against users and ranking search results
It's just not what gets the exciting headlines and showcases
sarks_nz · 37d ago
Distribution of art (particularly digital) is a recent phenomenon. Prior to that, art in human history was one-off. Are we just going back to that time?
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.
mindwok · 37d ago
It's definitely coming. Creative work is first because there's zero constraints on it. Doing non-creative work, you're bound to hit a constraint - real world or otherwise - immediately, and AI is only just starting to navigate that.
owlboy · 37d ago
Data for the non creative work isn’t as easy to, uh, “obtain” from others without their consent.
skepticATX · 37d ago
The fact that so many feel the same way about this technology (I do too!) is an indictment of humanity, not the technology itself.
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.
weatherlite · 37d ago
> 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.
kilpikaarna · 37d ago
> 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.
weatherlite · 37d ago
> 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 land
>> That'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).
GenshoTikamura · 36d ago
So the humankind was waiting for AI to bring down all costs to zero, good lord! I thought it was waiting for steam engine, penicillin, railroads, aviation, robotics, computers, nuclear energy, space flight to bring that forth!
sekai · 37d ago
> 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.
GenshoTikamura · 36d ago
The kind of argument which boils down to "the death of the human spirit is imminent, because it is never OK to stop where we are, and only a step forward is possible, because there are plenty steps already taken behind"
dsadfjasdf · 36d ago
you act as if the human population has no agency to choose what they want? This will be another tool for good and bad. People will make beautiful things the world hasn't seen before, and others will use it for propaganda. just like all things we touch
yieldcrv · 37d ago
I’m a creative and I’m really glad that more people can express themselves
Just wanted to add representation to that feeling
lilwobbles · 37d ago
Expressing themselves by generating boilerplate content?
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.
ivape · 37d ago
Check out all the creatives on /r/screenwriting, half the time they are trying to figure out how to "make connections" just to get a story considered. It's a fucking nightmare out there. Whatever god is providing us with AI is the greatest gift I could imagine to a creative.
onemoresoop · 37d ago
AI could be useful if used like any other tool, but not as an all in box where everything is done for you minus the prompt. Im actually worried people will become lazy
drusepth · 36d ago
People will always become lazy with new tools. But not all people.
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.
onemoresoop · 36d ago
Im sure not all people will become lazy but im worried about the trend in general.
ivape · 36d ago
Creativity is an expression. It comes from the heart. Hard work isn't always the greatest vehicle for creativity. We just think it is. I've seen plenty of things that clearly took a lot of execution but fundamentally lack creativity, often becoming an exhibition in technical virtuosity.
Here's something you can try to prove it to yourself. Sit down and write a novel. It'll be like squeezing blood out of a rock unless your heart is ready to do it freely. You'll see that if you force yourself through hard work to do it, you'll just end up with something that people will laud as creative due to the execution but it'll lack everything about free-flowing creativity. Good programmers are lazy, so are good creatives, but now I'm just repeating myself.
It's a lot easier squeezing blood out of a heart, especially for the lazy.
yieldcrv · 37d ago
exactly, creatives and everyone else can always do something fulfilling for themselves just like before AI. They can struggle all they want and continue doing it for no capital. because that process is fulfilling to them.
onemoresoop · 37d ago
Yes but how many will sign up for that? Im sure few will continue to do so but creativity will certainly take a big hit.
yieldcrv · 37d ago
> 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.
StefanBatory · 37d ago
They always could express themselves.
yieldcrv · 37d ago
Not close to the way they wanted, and at too much sacrifice to the other things they were interested in or supported their family with
emkoemko · 37d ago
so they where never interested in the first place... but now they can call them self's artists after prompting a AI to make a image....
yieldcrv · 37d ago
the level of discipline needed in a trade has gone down in almost every trade, including all mediums of art, for centuries
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
toenail · 37d ago
Do you find it sad that people can use recordings, and don't have to hire musicians any more?
lm28469 · 36d ago
That's step 1, we're at step 100, it looks like that now:
Recordings of who? Not only sad but a disaster, I'm sorry but anyone that ever tried to play an instrument seriously knows how much human touch/imperfections come into play, otherwise you're just an anonymous guy playing in a cover band(like the ai will do)
onemoresoop · 37d ago
A tsunami of effortless content is upon us and that will change many things including tastes, probably for the worse. People not having to learn instruments because same can be done with a prompt is a tragic loss for humanity, not because human work is better but because of the lost experience and joy of learning, connection with the self and others and so many other things.
jryle70 · 37d ago
> 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.
BosunoB · 37d ago
Robotics will come in the next few years. If you believe the AI2027 guys, though, the majority of work will be automated in the next 10 years, which seems more and more plausible to me every day.
hooverd · 37d ago
Are you independently wealthy enough to benefit from that or someone who should invest in suicide pills for themselves and their family if that day comes?
BeFlatXIII · 35d ago
Why invest in weaksauce suicide pills when you could instead invest in nitrogen compounds and suicide bomb the tallest nearby building? Just because you've already lost doesn't mean they get to win, let alone survive.
hooverd · 35d ago
Maybe we'll get the Iain Banks Culture future!
GenshoTikamura · 36d ago
Some people haven't overcome their childhood desire to die or suffer so as to make the parents regret their decision not to buy that candy or take the puppy home. They imagine dismal future as a glorified way to suffer. Talk about cyberpunk - there's that sweet alluring promise to spend a whole life eating instant ramen sitting next to a window with a blinking neon sign and endless rain behind it, coding routinely to a lofi soundtrack, or lurking lonesomely about the techno-slum neighbourhood hiding their faces from CCTV behind masks
hooverd · 36d ago
You know, I'd really prefer not to, but I have eyes and object permanence. Maybe we'll get the Iain Banks Culture future!
cadamsdotcom · 37d ago
Plenty of non-creative work can be automated.
Have a look at the workflow and agent design patterns in this video by youtuber Nate Herk when he talks about planning the architecture:
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.
golol · 36d ago
Multimodal LLMs are currently the natural research step towards AGI robots that can do mundane non-creative work. I believe this is just the reality of the situation. If you can generate a video of a robot doing the dishes then your model understands the physical world quite well. That should be useful for robot control.
ugh123 · 37d ago
This kind of tech will open up filmmaking to a much wider base of creative talent.
ivape · 37d ago
Dude.
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.
onemoresoop · 37d ago
Yeah, there will be so many AI generated videos that many will go unwatched. Not sure where this is heading but it's certainly an interesting future.
briankelly · 37d ago
Nobody will watch anyone's "creations". The TV or whatever device watch on will observe what you and everyone else engage with and how you interact with it and create content for you on the fly, just like Instagram and TikTok's feeds do now.
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.
jackphilson · 37d ago
Then everyone can just get their own personal movies and infinite content stream. Honestly people would probably like that given how atomized society has become.
grugagag · 37d ago
Sounds terrifying to me.
seydor · 36d ago
What is non-creative work? I think the term reeks of elitism. Every job is creative, even picking up garbage can become an art when one puts effort in it.
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
jb1991 · 36d ago
> even picking up garbage can become an art when one puts effort in it.
good lord. talk about pedantic.
woah · 37d ago
It makes me sad that the US and western Europe which have been the most flexible and forward-thinking societies in the world for generations have now memed themselves into fretting and hand-wringing about technical advances that are really awesome. And for what? The belief that illustration and filmmaking which have always been hobbies for the vast majority of participants should be some kind of jobs program?
dmonitor · 37d ago
People aren't looking forward to companies playing the "how much sawdust can you put in a rice crispy before people notice the difference" experiment on the entertainment industry. The quality of acting, scripting, lighting, and animation in the film/television industry already feels second rate to stuff being made before 2020. The cost cutting and gutting of cultural products is becoming ridiculous, and this technology will only be an accelerant.
woah · 37d ago
If you don't like a movie, then don't watch it.
kapildev · 37d ago
Google has partnered with Darren Aronofsky’s AI-Driven Studio Primordial Soup. I still don't understand why SAG-AFTRA's strike to ban AI from Hollywood studios didn't affect this new studio. Does anyone know?
cjkaminski · 37d ago
Primordial Soup isn't a guild signatory, which means they aren't bound by the agreement negotiated during the strike. It also means they cannot hire guild actors for their projects, but that isn't a likely concern given the nature of the company.
anilgulecha · 37d ago
I'd made a prediction/bet a month ago, predicting 6 months to a full 90 minute movie by someone sitting on their computer. [0]
The pace is so crazy that was an over estimation! I'll probably get done in 2. Wild times.
It's doable now. Someone just needs to do it. With voice now it's completely doable. Just throw it all together add some effects and you've got a great movie... In theory
jb1991 · 36d ago
It's not a theory, at Cannes a feature movie has premiered that is generated entirely by AI. Made in Spain.
DoesntMatter22 · 36d ago
It's a great movie in theory. Idk how good the movie you mentioned is
There's still a lot of work to be done. It's good at making short individual scenes but when you start trying to string them together the wheels start to come off a lot. This [0] pretty basic police raid leads to shootout video for example turns to mush pretty quick because even in the initial car ride the interior of the car's size and shape warps pretty drastically.
Feels like there's going to be a dichotomy where the individual visuals look pretty good taken by themselves but the story told by those shots will still be mushy AI slop for a while. I've seen this kind of mushy consistency hold up over the generations so far, it seems very difficult to remove becasue it relies on more context than just previous images and text descriptions to manage.
So what the copyright situation going to be in an ai generated movie?
My last recollection is recent case said AI generated didn’t have copyright?
BeFlatXIII · 36d ago
I hope no copyright. Ideas are meant to be freely copied.
ssijak · 37d ago
Older people on social networks are cooked. I mean in general, we are entering an age where making scams and spreading false news will be easily done with 10$ of credits.
asl2D · 36d ago
Yeah i fear that too, my grandma is already sending me links of AI animals that she thinks is real, and the horrible/beautiful art of facebook memes/holiday cards, seems to be completely overtaken by AI. We know that full fake video of you with your own voice asking for something or even interacting on a video call is basically solved problem.
Prime time to reestablish and confirm trusted channels with the people you care about.
Workaccount2 · 36d ago
Recently at a family dinner we established that any kind of unsolicited contact that falls outside typical conversation - Asking for money, sending money, pretty much anything with money - you must say the word that only people in our family would know.
Ironically, this would be a good application of AI, where the AI listens in on their calls, and will flag conversation that warrants the keyword being said.
elzbardico · 37d ago
Got a bit of an uncanny valley feeling with the owl and the old man videos. And the origami video give me a sort of sinister feeling, seemed vaguely threatening, agressive.
benlivengood · 37d ago
We've made so much progress in the last 20 years; it used to take huge teams of developers and artists and giant compute clusters and rendering time to generate uncanny valley!
Now it just takes giant compute clusters and inference time.
thinkingtoilet · 37d ago
The owl one had that glow that so many AI images have for some reason. The man was very impressive to me.
jjcm · 37d ago
Lower on the page there's a knitted characters version that feels much better. It seems like for some of these, divorcing yourself from reality a little bit helps avoid the uncanny valley.
vjerancrnjak · 37d ago
It's a reflection of yourself.
Origami for me was more audio than video. Felt like it's exactly how it would sound.
TheAceOfHearts · 36d ago
I tried Whisk to generate images which I then animated, thinking it would be using the newest model. But then I noticed that Veo 3 and Imagegen 4 are only usable through Flow, and only if you're on the most expensive plan. AI Studio also only shows Imagegen3 and Veo2 as media generating options.
My main issue when trying out Veo 2 was that it felt very static. A couple elements or details were animated, but it felt unnatural that most elements remained static. The Veo 3 demos lack any examples where various elements are animated into doing different things in the same shot, which suggests that it's not possible. Some of the example videos that I've seen are neat, but a tech demo isn't a product.
It would be really cool if Google contracted a bunch of artists / directors to spend like a week trying to make a couple videos or short movies to really showcase the product's functionality. I imagine that they don't do that because it would make the seams and limitations of their models a bit too apparent.
Finally, I have to complaint that Flow claims to not be available in Puerto Rico: "Flow is not available in your country yet." Despite being a US territory and being US citizens.
Workaccount2 · 36d ago
You can use imagen 4 in vertex ai. But no Veo 3.
Also Google is going to have to tread carefully, people in the entertainment industry are already AI hostile, and they dictate a surprising amount of public opinion.
dsadfjasdf · 36d ago
You can use veo 2 for free in the google ai dashboard. like 5 a day
arduinomancer · 37d ago
I can definitely see this being used for lower end advertising
I’ve noticed ads with AI voices already, but having it lip synced with someone talking in a video really sells it more
gloosx · 37d ago
>>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?
dmonitor · 37d ago
It's being redefined in such a way that 2-3 very large entities get to hold the means of production. It's a very convenient redefinition for them.
No comments yet
klabb3 · 37d ago
> 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.
hooverd · 37d ago
LLM providers want to a) make you dependent on their services as you outsource your skills and cognition and b) use that dependency to skim the cream off every economic activity.
oblio · 36d ago
> 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.
kkarakk · 37d ago
we can see what happened to opera/theater/hand drawn art as conclusive answer. humans move on to the newer more easier to create/consume thing in general (digital music/tv/digital art) and a small percentage of people treat the older mode of creation as high art coz it's more difficult and expensive to learn / implement.
gloosx · 37d ago
Calling cinema a "new form" of theatre is quite a simplification. It was certainly inspired by theatre, but the two differ in almost every aspect: medium, communication language, cultural role, and audience dynamics. Most people throughout history probably never experienced theatre or opera – so they didn’t move from them to cinema; rather, cinema emerged as a more accessible and reproducible medium for those.
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.
vessenes · 36d ago
Umm no. GTA 6 will cost on the order of 2bn to make, more than some wars. You will likely play it. Your kids definitely will.
What is true is that cheapening the cost of creative production will yield a wider variety of expression: we will see what people prefer to consume.
lxe · 37d ago
I've been doing AI art since 2022 and I'm still both disappointed and not quite surprised that this still is a pervasive view of what it takes to create anything high quality using AI.
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.
>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.
vessenes · 36d ago
I also feel unhappy when painters get formal art training which summarizes millions of human hours of work. Even worse they then go to Florence and waste their time stealing art by painting..exact copies of other people’s paintings!
I feel a real artist would make their own tools: brushes, paint, canvas, and above all be truly creative by not unfairly using anything that’s gone before. If they did they aren’t creative; they’re a thief.
hooverd · 36d ago
Ok, there is fundamentally a difference in creation versus consumption here though.
jplusequalt · 36d ago
Spending thousands of hours honing a craft and along the way learning from those who came before you, is not the same as using these models. You're being overly reductive to try and force a similarity, but in the process you just come off as disingenuous.
vessenes · 36d ago
No. You're gatekeeping what "craft" is.
Is craft making your own chisels for woodworking?
Perhaps there are craftsman who buy chisels made by others.
Okay. Then is craft only making furniture with dovetail joints by hand?
Well, I guess people use planers.
So, no it's not just hand made wood working that's craft.
Someone uses a CnC machine with a design they made to cut wood, then hand sands and polishes. Is that craft?
What if you learned it took them three or four times as many hours to learn the CnC machine and design as it did to hand plane a cedar log?
To be clear, I don't identify as an artist at all, but I do have a stake in this conversation -- which is that I'd like more young folks to be positive, pick up tools at their disposal and build good things with them. The future's coming, and it's going to be built out by people with open minds who are soaking up everything they can about whatever tools are available. It's a sort of brain rot to gatekeep technology advances out of creativity.
jplusequalt · 36d ago
>which is that I'd like more young folks to be positive, pick up tools at their disposal and build good things with them
People have had access to tools for creating for generations. In the modern era you can buy a pencil and a sketch pad for dollars. You can buy an instrument used for as little as a hundred dollars. Hell, schools teach art and music for free.
>The future's coming, and it's going to be built out by people with open minds who are soaking up everything they can about whatever tools are available.
Not all technology presents a net good for society. These technologies only exist on top the mountain of stolen artwork created by millions of artists, and this tech will continue to hamper the livelihoods of artists as long these companies are pushing them.
>It's a sort of brain rot to gatekeep technology advances out of creativity.
JFC. Don't talk to me about brain rot. The "art" and "creativity" you speak about here is just more finely grained consumption. Now instead of scrolling through a feed, you can ask Google to present your dopamine addicted brain exactly what you want to see in that moment.
In contrast, focusing on improving a craft acts as a sort of antidote to "brain rot" because you're engaging in multiple important things at once:
- critical thinking
- delayed gratification
- habit formation
- emotional exploration
- and more
vessenes · 36d ago
I agree on the benefits of a hand-type craft, and that it’s an antidote to brain rot. Totally with you.
I agree with the idea of “Amistics” (thanks Neal) - a sort of societal and moral lens to view technologies through and evaluate them. Totally with you there too.
I agree that doomscrolling and social media are cancer-y in the extreme, to the extent that for a number of years I printed a daily personal newspaper. Srsly.
> this tech will continue to hamper the livelihoods of artists …
Nope. We’ll just redefine what an artist is. Pop quiz: did Disney employ more “artists” when each cel of a film was hand drawn and colored, or now when these modern “faux-artists, not like the real ones” have access to rendering clusters?
Or a second pop quiz, when da Vinci or Rubens ran workshops where apprentices painted “da Vincis” or “Rubens(s?)” who was the artist?
By the way, it’s right to redefine what an artist is. I’m going to get super controversial, ca 1900 and say that photographers can be artists. Now I’m going to get super controversial ca 1910 and say that someone mounting a bicycle wheel as a ‘readymade’ and displaying it can be an artist. Wait, now I’m going to move ahead the 1980s and say a cow cut in half and suspended in some sort of formaldehyde can be art. Hang on. A poem on a disk that deletes itself as its read is art.
The art is the creative endeavor itself. It’s the outcome of a creative person engaging with whatever tools they want to create some output. If someone wants to engage with an LLM or diffusion model or whatever and have it make something to those standards, it’s art. Calling them ‘not an artist’ based on their choice of tools is just totally incorrect.
I’m not saying all uses of diffusion models or any other AI assisted imagery is art. But I am saying that ingesting and summarizing publicized images is not theft, and people choosing to use those tools to instantiate a creative vision can absolutely be art, and further that generally the cheaper a form of creative expression becomes the better on balance for the world.
jplusequalt · 36d ago
>Calling them ‘not an artist’ based on their choice of tools is just totally incorrect
Here's the crux of the issue I have with this entire conversation--because you now are able to generate "artwork," you expect the artistic community to respect you as an artist. You're waltzing into the room with none of the same battle scars, experiences, or morals and demanding that they bestow upon you the title of "creator".
>By the way, it’s right to redefine what an artist is
Sure, but let artists be the ones who take charge in redefining what art is. How is it right to redefine what "art" and "creating" is without the goodwill or consent of the artistic community at large? You are effectively trying to force a hostile takeover of the space, to demand everyone consider your generated image/song/video be treated with the same amount of respect as actual art.
If you can't even be bothered to respect the artistic community enough to understand why they feel slighted over the creation of these tools, or to empathize with them over their impact in livelihood due to the proliferation of AI slop, why the hell do you expect them to consider you an artist?
vessenes · 36d ago
Some ad hominem here; and a bunch of goalpost shifting. I’m not claiming to be an artist. Are you, by the way?
If you look through civitai and the stable diffusion subreddit you’ll find people who’ve spent thousands of hours tuning these AI tools to produce something that they imagined. In my mind, they’re artists. It might be bad art, some of it is, some of it is arguably not, but they fit the description to me. They certainly think of themselves as struggling to create things they envisioned, and sometimes achieving it.
As to who gets to define art and what art is: please understand that I’m saying —>> you are gatekeeping <<— by calling people who spend thousands of hours creating imagery they want to create “not part of the artistic community”.
So, I have a broader view of the artistic community than you, full stop. It includes people whose livelihood is going to be disrupted by this technology. It includes a bunch of people who couldn’t create imagery they imagined before but can now.
Just as I can understand why Luddites burned shit in Northern England, I can understand and even respect a fight from interest groups to turn back the clock on new technology. And I am interested to see how strong guilds like SAG navigate and negotiate new economies around creating.
End of the day - I think moralizing in order to limit human creativity with bullshit made up rules about what an artist “is” or should be is foolish, wrong-headed, and ultimately doomed as an endeavor, plus it runs the risk of convincing new creatives not to engage. It’s a net loss for human creative output, while advocates get to pearl-clutch about the evils of tech. It’s just the wrong, wrong, wrong attitude to have about it; probably a waste of time trying to convince one well-spoken person on HN to change their views. But, hopefully you will. You could still rail against the tech by the way, or advocate for protectionism or a bunch of stuff, even if you decided to accept a person could use a diffusion model to make something creative.
GenshoTikamura · 36d ago
You said you're an AI artist, but you've just dismissed all artists upon whose work you build your own art as thieves, so either you've admitted yourself a thief as well or you got some serious trouble with logic
vessenes · 36d ago
Sorry, I think you missed the sarcasm in my original post. I am saying that gatekeeping what art is, and what theft is, typically ignores exactly how art is made, how artists are trained, and the history of tools impacting creative endeavors -- basically close to what you say here: there are logical and historical errors that invalidate these complaints in my mind.
p.s. def not an artist.
kevinventullo · 37d ago
Given the pervasiveness of AI slop with hundreds of thousands of likes on Facebook, I wouldn’t be so sure about using social media metrics as proof of high skill and effort.
tintor · 37d ago
Text prompts are very short now, but that can quickly change if prompt following improves.
Software Engineers bring their vision to life through the source code they input to produce software, systems, video games, ...
Imnimo · 37d ago
>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?
cubefox · 37d ago
Indeed. At the bottom of their Imagen page, they link to Google AI Studio:
But this still says it's Imagen 3.0-002, not Imagen 4.
matsemann · 36d ago
Yes, Google is so, so, so bad at this. I even struggle with gemini often telling me it can't make images, until I tell it that it can, and then it does. I have no idea what's really supposed to be supported or not in gemini.
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.
Edit: After clicking through lots of google products I'm still not able to find a single place I can actually try the new imagegen, despite the article claiming it's available today in X,Y,Z
minimaxir · 37d ago
Google is typically upfront about which model versions you're using in those tools. Not as behind-the-scenes as ChatGPT.
However, looking at the UI/UX in Google Docs, it's less transparent.
Can we talk about the elephant in the room, porn and i mean the weird and dangerous one? that moment in history of AI is going to happen and when it did shit will hit the fan.
Flamentono2 · 36d ago
AI porn already exist.
Im pretty sure kid/child ai porn already exist somewhere. But i'm quite lucky despite knowing rotten.com and plenty of other sides, never having seen real so i doubt i will see fake child porn.
Whats the elephant in the room now? Nothing changed. Whoever consumes real will consume fake too. FBI/CIA will still try to destroy cp rings.
We could even think it might make this situation somehow better because they might consume purely virtual cp?
Your family will be target for example, just imagine your daughter in high-school getting bullied by these type of generated AI videos. it's easy to say nothing happen, but when it happen to you you will be aware how fucked is these AI videos.
Flamentono2 · 35d ago
If someone bullies someone else, they will do it with anything they have.
At least with AI Video you can now always say its AI video.
Is it shitty that this is possible? yes of course. But hidding knowledge never works.
We have to deal with it as adults. We need to educate about it and we need to talk about it.
stavros · 36d ago
Finally, the single most powerful force on earth comes for child sexual abuse: It'll be much cheaper to use AI than to abuse actual children.
We should all be hoping AI-generated CSAM floods the CSAM market, instead of trying to restrict AI so that we artificially prop the market up and cause harm to many more humans.
nomdep · 36d ago
AI-generated porn cannot be “dangerous” for the same reason a dream cannot be dangerous: they are not real, no matter how weird it is
asl2D · 36d ago
Do you think anybody will really care? People were generating CSAM basically as soon as image generation become accessible. And for the less dangerous stuff situation is way more rampant already, both in free and commercial way.
UncleMeat · 36d ago
Yes. Deepfaked porn is already a widespread mechanism for harassment, both among children and adults. As it gets even easier to create and more and more convincing it will just get worse.
HamsterDan · 36d ago
You should have AI start writing your comments for you so at least then they'll make sense.
baxtr · 37d ago
A whale coming out of the street in Manhattan, a women with a Jellyfish belly walking in the woods.
Why is it that all these AI concept videos are completely crazy?
matsemann · 36d ago
There is a point in that since you don't know how these really should look you can't really judge them on small idiosyncrasies, and hence you get a better impression compared to uncanny valley if it's something common.
However, I also think this is to show that it can create anything, not just copies of stuff it has seen. If you ask for a painting of a woman and it shows you mona lisa, that's not very impressive.
kypro · 36d ago
If the concept is unrealistic your mind will be more forgiving to unrealisms. But if it's suppose to be photo-realistic, you'll be hyper-critical.
rafaelmn · 37d ago
I'm going to go out on a limb and say because it's easiest to take whatever comes out looking interesting and sell it as a vibe ?
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.
jader201 · 37d ago
I'm surprised no one has yet to mention the use of the name "Flow", which is also the title of the 2025 Oscar winning animated movie, built using Blender. [1]
This naming seems very confusing, as I originally thought there must be some connection. But I don't think there is.
For sure seems they are likely deliberately riding on the fame of the movie. I too instantly thought it is some kind of Flow movie animation collaboration similarily like Flow is represented in Blender 4.4 splash screen or is even their mascot.
imp0cat · 37d ago
Would Google really stoop so low and try to use the success of the movie to prop their AI video generator tool?
But then again, the do no evil motto is long gone, so I guess anything goes now?
lnyan · 37d ago
Note that it's very likely that Veo models are based on "Flow Matching" [1]
It's a common word. There are like 50 things named Flow. It's unrelated.
a2128 · 37d ago
Before picking a name it's necessary to Google it and make sure you're not squatting on anything important. It's hard to believe that they didn't find they're about to squat on an Oscar winning animated film less than a year after its release. They decided to roll with it anyway, for a tool that basically aims to eliminate animators and filmmakers
numpad0 · 37d ago
I came across some online threads sharing LoRA models the other day - and it seemed that a lot of generative AI users seem to share models that are effectively just highly specialized fixed function filters for existing (generated)images?
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?
cryptoegorophy · 37d ago
For anyone with an access, can you ask it to make a pickup truck drive through mud? I’ve tested various different AIs and they all suck with physics and tires spinning wrong way, it is just embarrassing. Demos look amazing, but when it comes to actual use - there is none that worked for me. I guess it is all to increase “investor value”
roskelld · 37d ago
Google posted a video of their own of an off-roader going through mud.
Obviously we don't know how hand picked that is so it would be interesting to see a comparison from someone with access.
lelandbatey · 37d ago
I think Google's got something going wrong with their usage limits, they're warning I'm about to hit my video limit after I gave two prompts. I have a Google AI Pro subscription (came free for 1 year with a phone) and I logged into Flow and provided exactly 2 prompts. Flow generated 2 videos per prompt, for a total of 4 videos, each ~8 seconds long. I then went to the gemini.google.com interface, selected the "Veo 2" model, and am now being told "You can generate 2 more videos today".
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?
itissid · 37d ago
Who is doing all the work of making physical agents that can behave as good as a UBI generator? Something that can not just create videos, but go get groceries(hell grow my food), help a construction worker lay down tiling, help a nurse fetch supplies.
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.
BosunoB · 37d ago
There are companies working on this, but my understanding is that the training data is more challenging to get because it involves reinforcement learning in physical space.
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.
pj_mukh · 37d ago
Welcome to the defining paradox of the 21st century:
I think I have a similar distaste for Google as you, but it's just due to limitations in the (bleeding edge...) technology. There's not like a conspiracy to _not_ make a "UBI generator" - which is surely not possible with current technology and won't be for awhile however hard Google might try.
Ideogram and gpt4o passes only a few, but not all of them.
Animats · 37d ago
The ad for Flow would be much better if they laid off the swirly and wavy effects, and focused on realism.
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.
dimal · 37d ago
The swirly effects are probably used to distract from the problems of getting realism right.
FirmwareBurner · 37d ago
>Soon, you should be able to put in a screenplay and a cast, and get a movie out.
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.
quesera · 37d ago
Actors will license their appearance, voice, and mannerisms to these new media projects. (Maybe by established Hollywood studios, maybe not).
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.
FirmwareBurner · 37d ago
>Actors will license their appearance, voice, and mannerisms to these new media projects
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.
quesera · 37d ago
Sure, but I'd bet that 1% of actors (of the total pool of SAG on-screen talent membership?) comprise 75%+ of branding/name recognition for consumers.
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.
com2kid · 37d ago
> 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.
FirmwareBurner · 37d ago
Good point, this is indeed a threat to them. Like how many young people are watching streamers now instead of worshiping present day's music, TV or movie star like in the 90's. The likes of Youtube and Twitch could be more valuable than Hollywood.
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.
pelagicAustral · 37d ago
I wish I could feed Dan Simmons' books to an AI and watch at my leisure
myth_drannon · 37d ago
That's potentially not far in the future. If you can drop a couple of research pdfs and generate a podcast discussion on it, it is even more straightforward to generate a video based on a text. The limit is mostly hardware.
gh0stcat · 37d ago
Infinite Jest?
jsheard · 37d ago
> 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.
com2kid · 37d ago
Look at view counts for short form videos that are 100% AI generated.
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.
echelon · 37d ago
You're describing the difference between The Godfather and Skibidi Toilet.
com2kid · 37d ago
Do you think platforms like YouTube and tiktok care?
Whatever gets the views.
FirmwareBurner · 37d ago
> I'm not seeing any signs of people generating their own novels at home
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.
suddenlybananas · 37d ago
Generating banal stock footage is wildly different than generating a film.
bilbo0s · 37d ago
This doesn't necessarily preclude the possibility of making a model that can generate a film. It's still something they can work out. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if models we're seeing these days are not a necessary first step in that process.
suddenlybananas · 37d ago
I'm not saying it's in principle impossible, but rather I'm saying this doesn't show that it will happen soon.
colesantiago · 37d ago
Definately plausible.
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.
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).
wongarsu · 37d ago
Oscar in what category?
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
rxtexit · 37d ago
I just think the entire framing is wrong.
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.
zanellato19 · 37d ago
I would believe that an AI generated film will never win an Oscar.
I bet they will soon add rules that AI movies can't even compete on it.
I feel like we should probably draw a distinction between "AI trailers exist as a replacement for traditional trailers" and "AI trailers exist because they're the clickbait du-jour for cynical social media engagement farmers". For now they're 100% the latter.
ericskiff · 37d ago
Has anyone gotten access to Imagen 4 for image editing, inpaint/outpaint or using reference images yet? That's core to my workflow and their docs just lead to a google form. I've submitted but it feels like it's a bit of a black hole.
curvaturearth · 37d ago
The first video is problematic? the owl faces forwards then seamlessly turns around - something is very off there.
The guy in the third video looks like a dressed up Ewan McGregor, anyone else see that?
I guess we can welcome even more quality 5 second clips for Shorts and Instagram
ravenical · 36d ago
Why do people making AI image tools keep showing "pixel art" made with it when the tools are so obviously bad at making it? it's such a basic unforced error
brm · 37d ago
I think it's a good thing to have more people creating things. I also think it's a good thing to have to do some work and some thinking and planning to produce a work.
IncreasePosts · 37d ago
I don't care about AI animals but the old salt offended me.
skc · 36d ago
I'm excited about this.
Think of all of your favorite novels that are deemed "impossible" to adapt to the screen.
Or think of all the brilliant ideas for films that are destined to die in the minds of people who will never, ever have the luck or connections required to make it to Hollywood.
When this stuff truly matures and gets commoditized I think we are going to see an explosion of some of the most mind blowing art.
flmontpetit · 36d ago
It's already difficult enough to make a successful book adaptation, even WITH authorial intent. Can't imagine that hours of patchwork AI-generated video, with all its artifacting and consistency errors, will fare any better than "The Rings of Power".
marcyb5st · 36d ago
I think not yet, but it is coming.
I can see it using some form of PEFT so that the output becomes consistent with both the setting and the characters and then it is about generating over and over each short segment until you are happy with the outcome. Then you stitch them together and if you don't like some part you can always try to re-generate them, change the prompt, ...
flmontpetit · 35d ago
I don't believe we will live to see the day where these models can replace a competent production team. At best they'll be what LLMs are to creative writing, which has so far only conclusively replaced low effort blogspam and fraud/plagiarism.
sergiotapia · 37d ago
How do you use Imagen 4 in Gemini? I don't see it in the model picker, I just 2.5 Flash and 2.5 Pro (Upgrade).
vunderba · 37d ago
It's not at all obvious from Gemini - probably the easiest way is through Whisk.
Whisk is only available in certain countries though, unlike Gemini.
pelagicAustral · 37d ago
Have they reveled anything similar to Claude Code yet? I sure hope they are saving that for I/O next month... this video/photo reveals are too gimmicky for my liking, alas I'm probably biased because I don't really have a use for them.
Yeah, I saw that... not quite the same... I used it for a bit but it's more like an agent that clings to a Github repo and deals with tickets up there, can't really test live on local, it just serves a different purpose.
lxgr · 37d ago
Google I/O is happening right now. This is one of the announcements, I believe.
onlyreal_1 · 36d ago
tbh, wasnt that impressed
maybe its cause social media has been heavily marketing out all these things in bulkkk
and moreover, at this point, it just feels one company copying what the other released, even the names feel not original?
horhay · 36d ago
I generally think that Kling or even Runway has achieved the visual fidelity of Veo (flaws and all, physics problems and direction of action and such), but now people are basically experiencing sensory bias where they think that some things about the visuals make better sense because nw it has sound as an added context. Visually, yeah. Probably on par with Kling, possibly worse on the depction of dynamic action
airstrike · 37d ago
On a technical level, this is a great achievement.
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.
sebau · 37d ago
Future is not bright. While we are endlessly talking about details reality is that AI is taken over so many jobs.
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.
mindvirus · 37d ago
Maybe. The internet was also exponential, and while it has its drawbacks, I think it's resulted in a huge increase in creativity. The world looks very different than it did 30 years ago, and I think mostly for the better.
jampekka · 37d ago
> Future is not bright. While we are endlessly talking about details reality is that AI is taken over so many jobs.
Of course this is not because of AI. It's because of the ridiculous system of social organization where increased automation and efficiency makes people worse off.
I have some base knowledge about diffusion/dit, I am so curious about how this can be done. Do you know some resources in this field? THANKS!
pier25 · 37d ago
what do they use to train these models? youtube videos?
nico · 37d ago
Wow, the audio integrations really makes a huge difference, especially given it does both sounds and voices
Can’t wait to see what people start making with these
nprateem · 36d ago
Stability is conspicuously absent from the imagen benchmarks. I assume that means it's significantly better
flakiness · 37d ago
How does this compare with sora (pro)?
echelon · 37d ago
Sora, the video model, is shit. Kling, Runway, and a whole host of other models are better. You don't have to do much to be better than Sora.
Sora, the image model (gpt-image-1), is phenomenal and is the best-in-class.
I can't wait to see where the new Imagen and Veo stack up.
ugh123 · 37d ago
When can I change the camera view and have everything stay consistent?
methuselah_in · 37d ago
Well all this is great from a technology point of view. But what about millions of jobs in the film industry in animation, motion artists etc? Why is it feeling like few humans are making sure others stop eating and living a good life?
IncreasePosts · 37d ago
Do you feel the same way about all the human computers that computers put out of work?
emkoemko · 37d ago
what exactly do you do that AI won't take it over? or are you one of those "AI artists"? you do know their end goal would be to replace you as the "prompter" with AI and have auto generated content for everyone?
IncreasePosts · 36d ago
I'm a computer programmer and I'm not really worried about it. If it can take my job, then it can take a while slew of other jobs too, and society is in for a big upheaval.
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.
This is coming for everyone's jobs. It'd be possibly an OK or good thing after some adaptation if I didn't suspect that the people with power during this transition were nihilists or people who's mission in life is to be relatively rather than absolutely well off. If everyone can have what they need they will not feel important enough
StefanBatory · 37d ago
Thanks to them, we will be able to enter new era of politics. Where nothing is true, and everything is vibe based.
Thank you, researchers, for making our world worse. Thank you for helping to kill democracy.
bowsamic · 37d ago
I'm surprised at how bad these are
clarkcharlie03 · 36d ago
Google's been coooooking
kumarm · 37d ago
All my Veo 3 videos has sound missing. No idea why. Seems like a common problem.
rvz · 37d ago
Well, all the AI labs wanted to "Feel the AGI" and the smoke from Google...
They all got smoked by Google with what they just announced.
htrp · 37d ago
is it still a waitlist?
999900000999 · 37d ago
Ehh, really for 20$. Break dancers with no music, people just pop in and out ?
Google what is this?
How would anyone use this for a commercial application.
impalallama · 36d ago
Well this is terrifying
matthewaveryusa · 37d ago
"The Bloomberg terminal for creatives"
_ncuy · 37d ago
Google hit the jackpot with their acquisition of YouTube and it's now paying dividend. YouTube is the largest single source of data and traffic on the Internet, and it's still growing fast. I think this data will prove incredibly important to robotics as well. It's a shame they sold Boston Dynamics in one of their dumbest ever moves because of bad PR.
brunoborges · 37d ago
"Growing fast" is questionable these days.
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?
codelord · 37d ago
Even if the content was 100% AI generated (which is the furthest thing from reality today) human engagement with the content is a powerful signal that can be used by AI to learn. It would be like RLHF with free human annotation at scale.
dom96 · 36d ago
Won't the human engagement be replaced by AI engagement too? if it isn't already being replaced?
thomashop · 36d ago
The AI is not paying for watching videos yet
DrScientist · 36d ago
Indeed, it's the advertisers who are paying for AI to watch videos....
ben_w · 36d ago
And paying for my sofa to watch a unskippable 50s ad while I make a coffee.
mr_toad · 36d ago
Back in the day when everyone used to watch broadcast TV, and stations synchronised their add breaks, water consumption would spike with every add break.
jdietrich · 36d ago
The UK has a unique problem with demand spikes for electricity during commercial breaks, due to the British penchant for using high-power electric kettles to make tea. In the worst case, demand could rise and fall by gigawatts within a matter of minutes.
Google already invests a tremendous amount of resources into identifying and preventing fraudulent ad impressions -- I don't see that changing much until AI is so cheap that it makes sense to run a full agent for pennies per hour. Sadly.
DrScientist · 35d ago
Not talking about fraud per se - in the sense of trying to drive revenue for a particular video channel - just that if you wanted to train AI on youtube videos you are in effect getting the advertisers to pay for the serving of them.
Perhaps the difference here is the behaviour would be much more human and thus harder to detect using current fraud detection?
And google is in the best possible position to detect it if they want to exclude it from their datasets.
sebstefan · 37d ago
They're never going to manage to do that, just on a technical level
Plus some users might want to legitimately upload things with AI-generated content in it
derektank · 36d ago
I'm pretty sure YouTube saves the metadata from all the video files uploaded to it. It seems pretty trivial to exclude videos uploaded without camera model or device setting information. I seriously doubt even a tiny fraction of people uploading AI content to YouTube are taking the time to futz about with the XMP data before they upload it. Sure, they'll miss out on a lot of edited videos doing that, but that's probably for the best if you're trying to create a data set that's maintaining fidelity to the real world. Lots of ways to create false images without AI
sim7c00 · 36d ago
"Since launching in 2023, SynthID has watermarked over 10 billion images, videos, audio files and texts, helping identify them as AI-generated and reduce the chances of misinformation and misattribution. Outputs generated by Veo 3, Imagen 4 and Lyria 2 will continue to have SynthID watermarks.
Today, we’re launching SynthID Detector, a verification portal to help people identify AI-generated content. Upload a piece of content and the SynthID Detector will identify if either the entire file or just a part of it has SynthID in it.
With all our generative AI models, we aim to unleash human creativity and enable artists and creators to bring their ideas to life faster and more easily than ever before."
I somewhat doubt that YT cares much about AI content being uploaded, as long as it’s clearly marked as such.
What they do care about is their training set getting tainted, so I imagine they will push quite hard to have some mechanism to detect AI; it’s useful to them even if users don’t act on it.
Timon3 · 37d ago
> 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.
_delirium · 37d ago
I agree, especially because in practice the vast majority of AI-generated videos uploaded to YouTube are going to be from one of about 3 or 4 generators (Sora, Veo, etc.). May change in the future, but at the moment the detection problem is pretty well constrained.
sebstefan · 35d ago
> Excluding videos from training datasets doesn't mean excluding them from Youtube.
Ah then sure. It was this part that was problematic.
If users are still allowed to upload flagged content, then false positives almost don't matter, so Youtube could just roll out some imperfect solution and it would be fine
bamboozled · 37d ago
In the future, a new intelligent species will roam the earth, they will ask, "why did their civilization fall?" The answer? These homo-sapiens strip mined the Earth and exacerbated climate change to generate enough power to make amusing cat videos...
jonplackett · 37d ago
It’s the much-feared the paper clip apocalypse, but we did it to ourselves with cat clips.
Duralias · 37d ago
And those videos were either not watched by anyone human or not truly watched by being part of an endless feed of similar slop.
akho · 36d ago
how do you truly watch an ai-generated cat video
sim7c00 · 36d ago
use your eyes. write a detailed and elaborate review on your blog of the cat and his antics. seems easy enough?
Cthulhu_ · 36d ago
At this point heat death through cat videos sound more appealing than nuclear apocalypse, lol
Flamentono2 · 36d ago
We don't have an energy problem on earth. We have a capitalism problem.
Renewable energy is easily able to provide enough energy sustainable. Batteries can be recycled. Solar panels are glas/plastic and silicium.
Nuclear is feasable, fusion will happen in 50 years one way or the other.
Existens is what it is. If it means being able to watch cat videos, so be it. We are not watching them for nothing, we watch them for happiness.
bamboozled · 36d ago
Existens is what it is. If it means being able to watch cat videos, so be it. We are not watching them for nothing, we watch them for happiness.
Well that's just your opinion.
Yes we can generate electricity, but it would be nice if used it wisely.
Flamentono2 · 34d ago
Of course its my opinion, its my comment after all.
Nonetheless, survival can't be the life goal after all the moon will drift away from earth in the future, the sun will explode and if we survive that as a species, all bonds between elements will disolve.
It also can't be about giving your dna away because your dna has very little to no impact over just a handful of generations.
And no the goal of our society has to be to have as much energy available as possible to us. So much energy, that energy doesn't matter. There is enough ways of generating energy without a real issue at all. Fusion, renewable energy directly from the sun.
There is also no inherant issue right now preventing us all having clean stable energy besides capitalsm. We have the technology, we have the resources, we have the manufacturing capacity.
To finish my comment: Its not about energy, its about entropy. You need energy to create entropy. We don't even consume the energy of the sun, we use it for entropy and dissipate it back to space after.
doctorpangloss · 37d ago
On the other hand, take one look at the way they caption a video in their dataset, and you have seen like 90% of the "secret sauce" of generative art. All this supposed data and knowledge, and anyone who has worked 1 day on Imagen or Veo could become a serious competitor.
The remaining 10% is the solution to generating good hands, of course. And do you think YouTube has been helping anyone achieve that?
qoez · 36d ago
I hear BD aren't making much money anyway so I wonder if they couldn't just buy them back for not much loss overall.
informal007 · 36d ago
Why videos are important for robotics?
vbezhenar · 36d ago
If you can generate realistic video stream, responding to player movements and interactions, you can train your robot using that video stream. It's much more scalable, compared to building physical environments and performing real-world training.
Of course the alternative is to use game engines, but it's possible that AI would generate more realistic video stream for the same money spent. Those recent AI-generated videos certainly look much more realistic than any game footage I ever saw.
mikepurvis · 36d ago
Game engines require a lot of additional work to make them suitable for that task, too— deep integration for sensor data, inputting maps and assets, plus the basic mismatch that these workflows are centered around Windows gui tools whereas robotics is happening on the Linux command line.
sim7c00 · 36d ago
object detection i'd guess.
mrklol · 37d ago
Why should YouTube be here at the advantage? Every competitor also has access to these videos(?)
aloha2436 · 37d ago
Easy access to the videos without having to download them from Google (and without Google trying to stop you from scraping them, which they will) is an enormous advantage. There's way, way too much on Youtube for to index and use over the internet, and especially not at full resolution.
Workaccount2 · 36d ago
That is the other perk, Google has all those videos stored in original quality locally.
It wouldn't be hard for google to poison competitor training just by throttling bandwidth.
jclardy · 36d ago
Google is making money hosting these videos, and users are freely uploading them. A competitor would have to scrape/download them, store them, process them all at their own cost, along with having much less metadata available (Which videos are most viewed, which segments, what do people repeat, what do people skip, what do people watch after this video, which video generates the most ad revenue, etc.)
sofixa · 36d ago
> Google is making money hosting these videos
This isn't certain. Google do not break out Youtube revenues nor costs. Hosting this amount of videos, globally, redundantly, the vast majority of which are basically never watched, cannot be cheap.
It's entirely plausible that Google's wider benefit from Youtube (such as training video generation algorithms and better behaviour tracking for better targeted ads across the internet) are enough to compensate for Youtube in particular losing money.
1024core · 36d ago
> Google do not break out Youtube revenues nor costs.
My bad, I thought it's the two. But they don't break out costs, so in reality we don't know if YouTube is profitable or not.
bongoman42 · 36d ago
Videos without metadata is not as useful. Google also has details on which videos are watched where. Which parts do people skip. All the videos that are blocked for various reasons. The performance of videos with humans over time and so on. They can focus on videos with signals that indicate that humans prefer those videos or clips.
akie · 37d ago
Do they, though? Are competitors actually downloading all these videos? Supposedly there are 5 billion videos on YouTube (https://seo.ai/blog/how-many-videos-are-on-youtube), downloading all of that is a LOOOOT of data and time.
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.
mrklol · 37d ago
Just wanted to mention the latter, you don’t need all videos. It’s indeed a lot of data but doable so I am not sure if I would count this as big advantage.
qudat · 36d ago
You are incredibly naive if you don’t see full, unrestricted access to YT as an advantage.
sim7c00 · 36d ago
presumed datasets:
1. its petabytes of data in the public/listed/free tier videos.
2. there's paywalled videos.
3. there's private/unlisted videos.
google will have access to all of these. competitors will have to do tons of network interactions with google to pull in only the first set. (which google could detect and block depending on how these competitors go about it)
seydor · 36d ago
Most youtube videos use stock video photography. Or the face of some youtuber.
If we look at the Veo 3 examples, this is not the typical youtube video, but instead they seem to recreate cgi movies, or actual movies.
phh · 37d ago
Of course they had to name a film making proprietary tool with the name of an award winning film made using open-source tools released less than a year ago...
paxys · 37d ago
"Flow" is one of the most generic names in tech. I can think of 10+ products called that off the top of my head.
debugnik · 37d ago
There's no way they named their AI filmmaking tool after the last winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature by accident.
debugnik · 37d ago
I still remember a style transfer paper which proudly mimicked a popular artist who had passed away barely a few years before (Qinni). Many AI researchers seemingly want to wear the skins of the people they rip off.
woah · 37d ago
Seems pretty obvious that they named it after Facebook's JS type checker from 2015
quantumHazer · 37d ago
Like most AI image or video generation tools, they produce results that look good at first glance, but the more you watch, the more flaws and sloppiness you notice, and they really lack storytelling
harikb · 37d ago
They don't have to be as good as the best film production team - they just need to be better than the average/B-grade ones to gain adoption.
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.
inerte · 37d ago
Or replace cutscenes in video games, or short videos on ads on mobile (already small and people are barely paying attention)
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...
nathan_compton · 37d ago
God, what a dismal future we're building.
nine_k · 37d ago
Warning: browsing the Web without an ad blocker is hazardous to your mental health. If you regularly see ads permeating most web pages, and don't know how to avoid that, you may need to see a specialist.
AStonesThrow · 37d ago
Perhaps some of us choose not to rip off payments that are due to the people who provide a service that we're using. If I visit a website that's so infested with ads that I don't like being there, it's on me to stop visiting that website.
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.
quesera · 37d ago
If ad-supported sites would return an optional response header indicating such, and their opinion on adblocking visitors. E.g.:
Advertisement-Permission: [required|requested]
And my adblockers had a config option to abort pageloads with an appropriate error message, if `required` or `requested`, then I would use it happily.
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.
bsimpson · 37d ago
Jon Stewart did a gag in this week's episode where there were happy meal toy versions of a bunch of congressmen on screen for a few seconds.
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.
nine_k · 37d ago
But you don't have to outsource 100% of your creative work to your tools. This is a toolbox, not a complete automatic masterpiece generator. If you want serious production, don't remove yourself from the loop.
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.
onlyrealcuzzo · 37d ago
AI used to be quite bad at coding just - what - 2 years ago?
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.
quantumHazer · 34d ago
it's still quite bad though
Closi · 37d ago
I don’t get how someone can look at these videos and think “wow there’s lots of flaws and it’s sloppy and no storytelling” rather than “holy smokes this stuff is improving fast!”
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!
horhay · 36d ago
In the era of more software advancements, people have perceived the progress of tech to be incremental more than the opposite. I think even tech bigwigs of the past have said extrapolation is a futile endeavor because technology is unpredictable.
Closi · 36d ago
Bill Gates saw computers and extrapolated that there would be one in every home, Gordon Moore produced Moores Law which literally extrapolated compute in the 60s and almost still holding, and you can extrapolate that GPT-5 will perform better than GPT-4, and that there will probably be a GPT-6 that will be even better than that.
Extrapolating that technology will get better in the future when it has got better in the past isn’t a sure bet, but it’s a reasonably reliable one.
quantumHazer · 34d ago
No, past performances are not an indicator of future performance. Sometimes it happens to be, but many other times it does not.
Closi · 34d ago
I think this is a strange take - Technological advancements aren't mutual funds.
Of course it's an indicator of future performance - Not a guarantee, but certainly a indictator.
horhay · 33d ago
I think what I genuinely have an issue with is that extrapolation ignores the finer details of research work being taken to understand the current issues that may affect the future goals of a technology. It basically just ignores the science of it in favor of "well we've seen this level work before". The thing is, sometimes the more these experts learn about the current goal to beat in their product, the more things previously unknown and unplanned for present themselves as new issues. Extrapolating is a bit past-facing when you see it this way, because those new problems are entirely new challenges that haven't been considered in the equation and may require an entirely new approach. Every success is different, every failure, and every challenge is different. So extrapolating seems pointless.
horhay · 33d ago
Yeah, no. That's not my point. Saying something will get better in /any/ amount isn't unreasonable. That's being positive towards innovation and it's harmless. That's not exactly what the modern tech consumer is being made to expect nowadays. It's always the next iPhone moment. The next GPT. Always a huge leap. Like if we landed on the moon and we've been promised we'll have colonies outside the solar system by 2040
superb_dev · 37d ago
You don’t even have to look close for some of these. The owl suddenly flipping direction in the first video was jarring
billyp-rva · 37d ago
When it's in silhouette you don't know what direction it is facing, technically. I think what's happening is when you see a shot of something flying in front of something prominent (in this case, the moon), your brain naturally perceives it is going away from the camera and toward the object.
llm_nerd · 37d ago
I think that's just the silhouette illusion[1]. In this case likely abetted by the framing elements moving near the edges.
It doesn't flip, it's an illusion. The owl is always facing the camera.
quantumHazer · 37d ago
Yeah the owl ""animation"" is terrible, I bet they could have found better examples? If it wasn't the case I don't know what to think
JamesBarney · 37d ago
It looked to me like the owl was turning around to land.
jhaile · 37d ago
Yea, but we're early days and I think that will go away as the tools get better. Also - did you watch the sample short films they have?
spiderice · 37d ago
You should see the terrible results it's possible to generate with AfterEffects, Blender, Houdini, etc..
Lucasoato · 37d ago
> Flow is not available in your country yet.
A bit depressing.
lenerdenator · 37d ago
I do find myself wondering if the people working on this stuff ever give any real thought to the impact on society that this is going to have.
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.
bowsamic · 37d ago
It's really being forced on us too. Jira, Confluence, and Notion are three products I've used where they've purposefully ignored requests to allow us to disable or hide the bundled generative AI. It's really intrusive. I also switched to Duck Duck Go because of the new AI on Google
tmpz22 · 37d ago
How could you possibly push back on the societal benefit of a director being able buy a vacation home in Lake Tahoe?
briankelly · 37d ago
And what about the rest of human pyramid working under the director employed in these productions?
tootie · 37d ago
Remember when they fired Timnit Gebru for publishing on AI safety?
themacguffinman · 37d ago
Quite a narrow view to interpret what happened there as firing Gebru for publishing on AI safety. Google still conducts and publishes research on AI safety, just without Gebru who helpfully offered to resign if Google didn't name her critics.
dragonwriter · 37d ago
Ethics, not safety. AI safety as a term became a big focus after that, largely pushed by big AI vendors, and largely as a way of refocusing attention away from the issues being raised by people working in AI ethics.
ionwake · 37d ago
Love flow tv ! Absolutely blown away by the improvements on these models, and also the channel interface was not bad and quite smooth.
I cant be the only one wondering where the swedish beach volleyball channel is though.
crat3r · 37d ago
This doesn't look (any?) better than what was shown a year or two ago for the initial Sora release.
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.
ahmedfromtunis · 37d ago
It has long been established that Veo has a waaay better understanding of physics, and consistency over multiple frames, than Sora. Not even close.
crat3r · 37d ago
I want to be clear, I don't think Sora looks better. What I am saying is they both look AI generated to a fault, something I would have thought would be not as prominent at this point.
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.
https://genai-showdown.specr.net
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.
Half a year ago, that was sort of possible for some genius really bent on making it happen. A year ago, that was unthinkable. Today, it's a matter of drag&dropping a workflow to a fresh ComfyUI install and downloading a couple dozen GB of img2vid models.
The returns on R&D are not diminishing, the progress is just not happening everywhere evenly and at the same time.
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.
If you want to doubt that it was in fact a not a turning point you'd need to provide very strong arguments.
In my view the reason the iPhone felt so new was almost entirely the incredibly responsive capacitive touch screen with a finger ui, everything I'd used before it did resistive and preferred pen for detail. Pen actually is better for detail so in some ways it was that more than anything else that turned the device from a creation device to a consumption device which was whole new way of thinking about smart personal devices.
Of course it was also sold in a decent package too where Apple did deals that ensured it was available with good mobile internet plans which were also unusual at the time.
No comments yet
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!!)
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.
If Tencent wants to keep Google from winning the game, they should open source their models. From my perspective right now, it looks like Google is going to win this entire game, and open source AI might be the only way to stop that from being a runaway victory.
- 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?
*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".
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?
https://labs.google/fx/tools/whisk
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.
Also "create static + video ads that are 0-99% complete" suggests the performance is hit or miss.
Hmm.
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.
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.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-image
Created by Ari Kuschnir
I think the change here will be something we've seen with the other modalities. Text was interestingly syntactically correct but nonsense sentences. Then paragraphs but the end of the article would go off the rails. Then the article. Now it's that the creativity of the children's story in question.
Pictures were awful fever dreams filled with eyes but you could kind of see a dog. Then you could see what it was, then decent
Videos were fun that they kind of worked, then surprising it took a few seconds for the panda to turn into spaghetti, then it kept the general style for a decent time.
I see this moving towards the creativity being the major thing, or it having a few general styles (softly lit background for example).
This has mostly all shifted in a very short space of time and as someone who put RBMs on GPUs possibly for the first time (I'm gonna claim it) this is absolutely wild.
Had I seen some of this, say, 6 months ago I'd not have guessed at all bits weren't real.
It wasn't until I was able to get my jaw off the ground that I told her it was AI. No, not AI like special effects, completely AI.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kru6jb/this_video...
But they do not allow any people in the image even cartoon depictions of humans. This knee caps a lot of potential usage.
This reminds me of Pixar's video of an animated lamp 40 years ago. I remember that within 5 years Toy Story came out and changed everything on how animated films were made. Looks to me like we are on our way to doing the same thing with realistic movies.
Someone will use AI to make the "AI Killed the Video Star" video. Probably the same guy that made this[1] and other masterpieces.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EICWYazyqu4
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.
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...
[4] https://github.com/ali-vilab/VACE
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.
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.
Nobody is running H100s at home, nor are most video companies running ones. So the choice for them is to "rent" them from Google, or... invest a lot in almost impossible to obtain Nvidia hardware? One has lower initial cost, and is available now.
But as long as Google isn't their _only_ customer, why would Nvidia care?
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 ???
It's for advertising.
But what it means, that with time, Opensource will be as good as what commercial offerings now have. Hardware will get cheaper, research is open or delayed open.
Generating a long video one shot at a time kind of makes sense, as long as there's good consistency between shots
https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralViz
The format of the shows are mostly clip-based - man on the street, news hour, etc - and obviously the jokes are all written by someone with a good sense of humour.
Not to discount that this is, as you say, an example of someone using AI to successfully create characters and stories that resonate with people. it's just still very much because of a creative human's talent and good taste that it's working.
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.
Except they already are.
https://societyofauthors.org/2024/04/11/soa-survey-reveals-a...
> You're not the monolith of me!
These other universe memes are too good.
You can also use it as a communication tool such as making a "live" storyboard to prep location, blocking, maybe even as notes for actors.
Being able to express visual ideas with words is one of the most powerful things of this AI craze. Text/code is whatever.
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.
I think you overestimate the publics art appreciation. The average answer will be a blank stare.
Commercial portrait painters died out pretty fast.
AI tools used for any content will / are being used to add to the pile of shit.
Id much rather start seeing individuals creating AI movies where you aren't bogged down by the need to hire actors and what bot
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.
No comments yet
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.
https://www.youtube.com/@jrcollection5246/shorts
in the owl/badger video, the owl should fly silently.
This is an interesting non-trivial problem of generalization and world-knowledge etc., but also?
There's something somewhat sad about that slipping through; it makes me think, *no one involve in the production of this video, its selection, it passing review... etc., seemed to realize that it is one of the characteristic things about owls that you don't hear their wings.
We have owls on our hill right now and see them almost every day and regularly seem them fly. It's magic, especially in an urban environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WigEGNnuTE
Longer version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3ZnrhPtER8
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.
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!
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.
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.
There is a fundamental misunderstanding of creating going on here. There's a reason why people always talk about the work/journey/process rather than the end goal. That's what makes someone an artist--not the end result.
Going outside and taking a photo requires you to be engaging with the scene around you. You are the actor doing the thing. When you prompt an AI, the AI is the actor doing the thing.
Not to mention that many directors also write the script for the film.
N.B. If directing people is the distinguishing factor, then animation directors are robbed of their claim to artistry as well, as is basically any solo artist in history
You are consuming, not creating.
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.
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
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.
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.
Gatekeeping commonly means excluding others from a group, a label, or an identity. That’s what they’re referring to.
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
---
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.
Why is effort a requirement?
Why should being an artist be a viable job?
Would you be against technology that makes medical doctors obsolete?
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.
This is an expansive definition and thus not useful, because it would include:
1. Natural phenomena (sand on a vibrating plate is pretty cool).
2. Folk crafts (this hand-woven rug sure ties the room together!).
3. Advertisement.
4. Industrial design (this soap dispenser looks like a droid head, awesome!).
5. Drug induced experiences.
6. Art forgery and plagiarism.
Nothing in the list is really art. Rough definition of art is an intentional process (or the results thereof) of self-expression, and/or interpretation/modeling of reality performed with symbolic means. This implies intentionality and a conscience, which current "AI" doesn't have.
> AI lowers the discoverability of art that falls in the latter category, but I'd say that it's a solvable problem that can be fixed with better recommendation algorithms.
Theoretically it is. However, it won't be ever solved and implemented widely due to the lack of incentives and the fact that just replacing it all with "AI" is much more profitable and exploitable.
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.
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.
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.
---
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.
---
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.
Because we as a society have valued it as one for eternity.
"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?
AI cannot “democratize art” any more than the camera did, 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.
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.
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.)
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)
2. Current AI can't do what you're describing, so the biggest difference is that you're posing a hypothetical against the real world. But more specifically: the director already has a specific vision in their hand; the purpose of the "direction" is to bring this vision into reality within the scope of their budget and resources. With AI, you have a general idea and the AI creates its own vision and you pick what you like the best, until you ultimately realize the AI isn't going to get what you actually want and you settle for the best the AI can do for you. So, completely different.
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)
This would include almost everyone who’s used any editing software more advanced than photoshop CS4.
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.
"Oh you're posting on hackernews, if you don't suck google's dick and every single gadgets megacorps shit out you must be highly autistic".... interesting take
Sorry I being autistic didn’t even phrase it well I think people got too offended I was just saying the bad side to it, HN is great.
Couple of people were so upset at the suggestion they replied in a defensive manner I should have been more careful with my rant
What a weird way to spell "give $200 a month to google"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 land
>> That'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).
The same was said about the camera or photoshop.
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.
Here's something you can try to prove it to yourself. Sit down and write a novel. It'll be like squeezing blood out of a rock unless your heart is ready to do it freely. You'll see that if you force yourself through hard work to do it, you'll just end up with something that people will laud as creative due to the execution but it'll lack everything about free-flowing creativity. Good programmers are lazy, so are good creatives, but now I'm just repeating myself.
It's a lot easier squeezing blood out of a heart, especially for the lazy.
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
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rtxJ0t8Cf6g
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wjaSPHRNfjQ
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.
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.
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.
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
good lord. talk about pedantic.
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...
Feels like there's going to be a dichotomy where the individual visuals look pretty good taken by themselves but the story told by those shots will still be mushy AI slop for a while. I've seen this kind of mushy consistency hold up over the generations so far, it seems very difficult to remove becasue it relies on more context than just previous images and text descriptions to manage.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kru6jb/this_video...
The demo videos for Sora look amazing but using it is substantially more frustrating and hit and miss.
https://x.com/fofrAI
My last recollection is recent case said AI generated didn’t have copyright?
Ironically, this would be a good application of AI, where the AI listens in on their calls, and will flag conversation that warrants the keyword being said.
Now it just takes giant compute clusters and inference time.
Origami for me was more audio than video. Felt like it's exactly how it would sound.
My main issue when trying out Veo 2 was that it felt very static. A couple elements or details were animated, but it felt unnatural that most elements remained static. The Veo 3 demos lack any examples where various elements are animated into doing different things in the same shot, which suggests that it's not possible. Some of the example videos that I've seen are neat, but a tech demo isn't a product.
It would be really cool if Google contracted a bunch of artists / directors to spend like a week trying to make a couple videos or short movies to really showcase the product's functionality. I imagine that they don't do that because it would make the seams and limitations of their models a bit too apparent.
Finally, I have to complaint that Flow claims to not be available in Puerto Rico: "Flow is not available in your country yet." Despite being a US territory and being US citizens.
Also Google is going to have to tread carefully, people in the entertainment industry are already AI hostile, and they dictate a surprising amount of public opinion.
I’ve noticed ads with AI voices already, but having it lip synced with someone talking in a video really sells it more
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?
No comments yet
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.
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.
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.
What is true is that cheapening the cost of creative production will yield a wider variety of expression: we will see what people prefer to consume.
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...
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.
I feel a real artist would make their own tools: brushes, paint, canvas, and above all be truly creative by not unfairly using anything that’s gone before. If they did they aren’t creative; they’re a thief.
Is craft making your own chisels for woodworking?
Perhaps there are craftsman who buy chisels made by others.
Okay. Then is craft only making furniture with dovetail joints by hand?
Well, I guess people use planers.
So, no it's not just hand made wood working that's craft.
Someone uses a CnC machine with a design they made to cut wood, then hand sands and polishes. Is that craft?
What if you learned it took them three or four times as many hours to learn the CnC machine and design as it did to hand plane a cedar log?
To be clear, I don't identify as an artist at all, but I do have a stake in this conversation -- which is that I'd like more young folks to be positive, pick up tools at their disposal and build good things with them. The future's coming, and it's going to be built out by people with open minds who are soaking up everything they can about whatever tools are available. It's a sort of brain rot to gatekeep technology advances out of creativity.
People have had access to tools for creating for generations. In the modern era you can buy a pencil and a sketch pad for dollars. You can buy an instrument used for as little as a hundred dollars. Hell, schools teach art and music for free.
>The future's coming, and it's going to be built out by people with open minds who are soaking up everything they can about whatever tools are available.
Not all technology presents a net good for society. These technologies only exist on top the mountain of stolen artwork created by millions of artists, and this tech will continue to hamper the livelihoods of artists as long these companies are pushing them.
>It's a sort of brain rot to gatekeep technology advances out of creativity.
JFC. Don't talk to me about brain rot. The "art" and "creativity" you speak about here is just more finely grained consumption. Now instead of scrolling through a feed, you can ask Google to present your dopamine addicted brain exactly what you want to see in that moment.
In contrast, focusing on improving a craft acts as a sort of antidote to "brain rot" because you're engaging in multiple important things at once:
- critical thinking
- delayed gratification
- habit formation
- emotional exploration
- and more
I agree with the idea of “Amistics” (thanks Neal) - a sort of societal and moral lens to view technologies through and evaluate them. Totally with you there too.
I agree that doomscrolling and social media are cancer-y in the extreme, to the extent that for a number of years I printed a daily personal newspaper. Srsly.
> this tech will continue to hamper the livelihoods of artists …
Nope. We’ll just redefine what an artist is. Pop quiz: did Disney employ more “artists” when each cel of a film was hand drawn and colored, or now when these modern “faux-artists, not like the real ones” have access to rendering clusters?
Or a second pop quiz, when da Vinci or Rubens ran workshops where apprentices painted “da Vincis” or “Rubens(s?)” who was the artist?
By the way, it’s right to redefine what an artist is. I’m going to get super controversial, ca 1900 and say that photographers can be artists. Now I’m going to get super controversial ca 1910 and say that someone mounting a bicycle wheel as a ‘readymade’ and displaying it can be an artist. Wait, now I’m going to move ahead the 1980s and say a cow cut in half and suspended in some sort of formaldehyde can be art. Hang on. A poem on a disk that deletes itself as its read is art.
The art is the creative endeavor itself. It’s the outcome of a creative person engaging with whatever tools they want to create some output. If someone wants to engage with an LLM or diffusion model or whatever and have it make something to those standards, it’s art. Calling them ‘not an artist’ based on their choice of tools is just totally incorrect.
I’m not saying all uses of diffusion models or any other AI assisted imagery is art. But I am saying that ingesting and summarizing publicized images is not theft, and people choosing to use those tools to instantiate a creative vision can absolutely be art, and further that generally the cheaper a form of creative expression becomes the better on balance for the world.
Here's the crux of the issue I have with this entire conversation--because you now are able to generate "artwork," you expect the artistic community to respect you as an artist. You're waltzing into the room with none of the same battle scars, experiences, or morals and demanding that they bestow upon you the title of "creator".
>By the way, it’s right to redefine what an artist is
Sure, but let artists be the ones who take charge in redefining what art is. How is it right to redefine what "art" and "creating" is without the goodwill or consent of the artistic community at large? You are effectively trying to force a hostile takeover of the space, to demand everyone consider your generated image/song/video be treated with the same amount of respect as actual art.
If you can't even be bothered to respect the artistic community enough to understand why they feel slighted over the creation of these tools, or to empathize with them over their impact in livelihood due to the proliferation of AI slop, why the hell do you expect them to consider you an artist?
If you look through civitai and the stable diffusion subreddit you’ll find people who’ve spent thousands of hours tuning these AI tools to produce something that they imagined. In my mind, they’re artists. It might be bad art, some of it is, some of it is arguably not, but they fit the description to me. They certainly think of themselves as struggling to create things they envisioned, and sometimes achieving it.
As to who gets to define art and what art is: please understand that I’m saying —>> you are gatekeeping <<— by calling people who spend thousands of hours creating imagery they want to create “not part of the artistic community”.
So, I have a broader view of the artistic community than you, full stop. It includes people whose livelihood is going to be disrupted by this technology. It includes a bunch of people who couldn’t create imagery they imagined before but can now.
Just as I can understand why Luddites burned shit in Northern England, I can understand and even respect a fight from interest groups to turn back the clock on new technology. And I am interested to see how strong guilds like SAG navigate and negotiate new economies around creating.
End of the day - I think moralizing in order to limit human creativity with bullshit made up rules about what an artist “is” or should be is foolish, wrong-headed, and ultimately doomed as an endeavor, plus it runs the risk of convincing new creatives not to engage. It’s a net loss for human creative output, while advocates get to pearl-clutch about the evils of tech. It’s just the wrong, wrong, wrong attitude to have about it; probably a waste of time trying to convince one well-spoken person on HN to change their views. But, hopefully you will. You could still rail against the tech by the way, or advocate for protectionism or a bunch of stuff, even if you decided to accept a person could use a diffusion model to make something creative.
p.s. def not an artist.
Software Engineers bring their vision to life through the source code they input to produce software, systems, video games, ...
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?
https://aistudio.google.com/generate-image
But this still says it's Imagen 3.0-002, not Imagen 4.
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.
Edit: After clicking through lots of google products I'm still not able to find a single place I can actually try the new imagegen, despite the article claiming it's available today in X,Y,Z
However, looking at the UI/UX in Google Docs, it's less transparent.
Im pretty sure kid/child ai porn already exist somewhere. But i'm quite lucky despite knowing rotten.com and plenty of other sides, never having seen real so i doubt i will see fake child porn.
Whats the elephant in the room now? Nothing changed. Whoever consumes real will consume fake too. FBI/CIA will still try to destroy cp rings.
We could even think it might make this situation somehow better because they might consume purely virtual cp?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/25-arrested-so-f...
Your family will be target for example, just imagine your daughter in high-school getting bullied by these type of generated AI videos. it's easy to say nothing happen, but when it happen to you you will be aware how fucked is these AI videos.
At least with AI Video you can now always say its AI video.
Is it shitty that this is possible? yes of course. But hidding knowledge never works.
We have to deal with it as adults. We need to educate about it and we need to talk about it.
We should all be hoping AI-generated CSAM floods the CSAM market, instead of trying to restrict AI so that we artificially prop the market up and cause harm to many more humans.
Why is it that all these AI concept videos are completely crazy?
However, I also think this is to show that it can create anything, not just copies of stuff it has seen. If you ask for a painting of a woman and it shows you mona lisa, that's not very impressive.
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.
This naming seems very confusing, as I originally thought there must be some connection. But I don't think there is.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43237273
But then again, the do no evil motto is long gone, so I guess anything goes now?
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.02747
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?
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.
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?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
Ideogram and gpt4o passes only a few, but not all of them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whatever gets the views.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42368951
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).
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.
I bet they will soon add rules that AI movies can't even compete on it.
The guy in the third video looks like a dressed up Ewan McGregor, anyone else see that?
I guess we can welcome even more quality 5 second clips for Shorts and Instagram
Think of all of your favorite novels that are deemed "impossible" to adapt to the screen.
Or think of all the brilliant ideas for films that are destined to die in the minds of people who will never, ever have the luck or connections required to make it to Hollywood.
When this stuff truly matures and gets commoditized I think we are going to see an explosion of some of the most mind blowing art.
I can see it using some form of PEFT so that the output becomes consistent with both the setting and the characters and then it is about generating over and over each short segment until you are happy with the outcome. Then you stitch them together and if you don't like some part you can always try to re-generate them, change the prompt, ...
https://labs.google/fx/tools/whisk
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.
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.
Of course this is not because of AI. It's because of the ridiculous system of social organization where increased automation and efficiency makes people worse off.
Edit: https://labs.google/fx/tools/whisk
Can’t wait to see what people start making with these
Sora, the image model (gpt-image-1), is phenomenal and is the best-in-class.
I can't wait to see where the new Imagen and Veo stack up.
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...
Thank you, researchers, for making our world worse. Thank you for helping to kill democracy.
They all got smoked by Google with what they just announced.
Google what is this?
How would anyone use this for a commercial application.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slDAvewWfrA
Perhaps the difference here is the behaviour would be much more human and thus harder to detect using current fraud detection?
Plus some users might want to legitimately upload things with AI-generated content in it
Today, we’re launching SynthID Detector, a verification portal to help people identify AI-generated content. Upload a piece of content and the SynthID Detector will identify if either the entire file or just a part of it has SynthID in it.
With all our generative AI models, we aim to unleash human creativity and enable artists and creators to bring their ideas to life faster and more easily than ever before."
From the page linked in the post....
So there's different ways to detect AI generated content (videos/images atleast). (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4 <-- paper on synthID / watermarking and detecting it with LLMs)
What they do care about is their training set getting tainted, so I imagine they will push quite hard to have some mechanism to detect AI; it’s useful to them even if users don’t act on it.
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.
Ah then sure. It was this part that was problematic.
If users are still allowed to upload flagged content, then false positives almost don't matter, so Youtube could just roll out some imperfect solution and it would be fine
Renewable energy is easily able to provide enough energy sustainable. Batteries can be recycled. Solar panels are glas/plastic and silicium.
Nuclear is feasable, fusion will happen in 50 years one way or the other.
Existens is what it is. If it means being able to watch cat videos, so be it. We are not watching them for nothing, we watch them for happiness.
Well that's just your opinion.
Yes we can generate electricity, but it would be nice if used it wisely.
Nonetheless, survival can't be the life goal after all the moon will drift away from earth in the future, the sun will explode and if we survive that as a species, all bonds between elements will disolve.
It also can't be about giving your dna away because your dna has very little to no impact over just a handful of generations.
And no the goal of our society has to be to have as much energy available as possible to us. So much energy, that energy doesn't matter. There is enough ways of generating energy without a real issue at all. Fusion, renewable energy directly from the sun.
There is also no inherant issue right now preventing us all having clean stable energy besides capitalsm. We have the technology, we have the resources, we have the manufacturing capacity.
To finish my comment: Its not about energy, its about entropy. You need energy to create entropy. We don't even consume the energy of the sun, we use it for entropy and dissipate it back to space after.
The remaining 10% is the solution to generating good hands, of course. And do you think YouTube has been helping anyone achieve that?
Of course the alternative is to use game engines, but it's possible that AI would generate more realistic video stream for the same money spent. Those recent AI-generated videos certainly look much more realistic than any game footage I ever saw.
It wouldn't be hard for google to poison competitor training just by throttling bandwidth.
This isn't certain. Google do not break out Youtube revenues nor costs. Hosting this amount of videos, globally, redundantly, the vast majority of which are basically never watched, cannot be cheap.
It's entirely plausible that Google's wider benefit from Youtube (such as training video generation algorithms and better behaviour tracking for better targeted ads across the internet) are enough to compensate for Youtube in particular losing money.
Google does break out Youtube revenue.
Latest 10-K: https://abc.xyz/assets/77/51/9841ad5c4fbe85b4440c47a4df8d/go...
See page 10, for youtube Ads revenue.
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.
google will have access to all of these. competitors will have to do tons of network interactions with google to pull in only the first set. (which google could detect and block depending on how these competitors go about it)
If we look at the Veo 3 examples, this is not the typical youtube video, but instead they seem to recreate cgi movies, or actual movies.
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.
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.
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 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!
Extrapolating that technology will get better in the future when it has got better in the past isn’t a sure bet, but it’s a reasonably reliable one.
Of course it's an indicator of future performance - Not a guarantee, but certainly a indictator.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_dancer
A bit depressing.
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.
I cant be the only one wondering where the swedish beach volleyball channel is though.
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.