> Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?

The answer seems obvious: because it's better.

Obviously it isn't better now. But it's easy to imagine a day in the not-too-distant future where AI can shit out 1000 hours of content that is better in every way than what humans create. And it will even feel more human than the human made stuff because the AI will have learned that we like that.

What do you do then? Watch the worse stuff? Maybe, and I think a lot still will. But how long does that last?

This is the classic expression of the fallacy that the value of something is based on the cost to create it from the seller, not the benefit it brings to the buyer.

AI tools will continue to get better, and they'll really shine when they can enable increasingly smaller teams of people to execute on their creative vision. Existing non-AI tools have already helped enable tiny teams to create media which is enjoyed by millions of people; the biggest and most recent example is how Source2 is used to animate Skibidi Toilet. But there's still room for increasing accessibility.

The biggest issue I've noticed with most existing AI-gen tools is that they only focus on generating completed output. Ideally you'd have tools that can generate multiple layers or scenes within creative tools to allow for continued iteration.

The future is when one person can do by themselves what previously would've taken hundreds or thousands of people. I'm really looking forward to what sort of creative works we'll get from people that wouldn't normally have access to Hollywood-tier resources.

We already have procedurally generated content in games - and quite a few of those seem to be pretty popular.

Sequelitis and remakes have persuaded me that some people really want intellectual baby food. I'm worried that the majority really just wants content to pass the time. Let's hope creative indie movies will continue to flourish, as we may just end up depending on them.

>My favorite quote on this topic is "Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?"

"If you're like the average consumer, because you have no life, and would doomscroll whatever shit we post for you, and watch whatever slop we produce for you. You did it with the tons of crap remakes, rehashes, franchize, and "multiverse" crap in the 2010-2024 span, you ain't gonna stop just because it's an AI writing it. It's not like the commercial hacks writing the stuff you watched earlier were any more creative than AI".

>Move 37 was so astonishing the world champiion Go player, hardly known for theatrics, got up and left the table.

This is an incredibly minor nitpick, but I recently went down the rabbit hole of move 37[1] after reading Richard Powers' latest novel, Playground, and Sedol didn't get up, he was already away from the table. He did, however, take far longer to make his next move (iirc something like 12-15 minutes instead of 2-4).

1: A good start, maybe is <https://www.wired.com/2016/03/two-moves-alphago-lee-sedol-re...> and ofc wiki <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Lee_Sedol>

Art is not a means of content generation. It is communication between consciousnesses. Why would an AI have anything interesting to tell me?

I feel absolutely insane when I read views like this, like I share the planet with body snatchers.

I like this analogy. If one piece of software can win a game then a completely different piece of software can win at making movies

AlphaGo wasn't an LLM.

On the other hand he was right about music and video on demand back in 2003…

>In every field we don't consider deeply "human," Ai has jumped light years ahead, in astonishing ways

Didn't you answered yourself?

Idk. LLMs may effectively emulate human creativity up to a point, but in the end they are writing literally the most predictable response.

They don’t start with an emotion, a vision, and then devise creative ways to bring the viewer into that world.

They don’t emotion-test hundreds of ideas to find the most effective way to give the viewer/reader a visceral sense of living that moment.

While they can read sentiment, they do not experience an internal emotional response. Fundamentally, they are generating the most probable string of words based on the data in their training set.

There is no way for them to come up with anything that is both improbable and not nonsensical. Their entire range of “understanding” is based on the statistical probability of the next conceptual fragment.

I’m not saying that it might not be possible for LLMs to come up with a story or script… they do that just fine. But it will literally be the most predictable, unremarkable, innovation-less and uninspiring drivel that can be predicted from a statistical walk through vectors starting at a random point.

There is a reason why AI output is abrasive to read. It is literally written with no consideration given to the reader.

No model of mind of the effect that it will have on the receiver, no interesting and unusual prosaic twists to capture your attention or spur your imagination…. Just a soulless, predictable stream of simulated thoughts that remarkably often turns out to be useful, if uninspiring.

LLMs are fantastic tools for navigating the commons of human culture and making a startling breadth of human knowledge easily accessible.

They are truly amazing tools that can release us from many language manipulation burdens in the capture and sorting of data from diverse and unorganized sources.

They will revolutionize many industries that currently are burdened by extensive human labor in the ingestion, manipulation, and interpretation of data. LLMs are like the washing machine to free our minds from the handwashing of information.

But they are not creative agents in the way that we admire creative genius.

fun fact but that is a real stretch to say she was the most famous TV actress in the world when she probably wasn't even the most famous on Family Ties

> I'm not in the industry and I can tell he's failing to conceive many possibilities.

It's also possible that because you're not in the industry, you don't understand the problem domain well enough.

Tech bros love to think they're just so much smarter than everyone in other industries, but it rarely ends up being true. We saw this with Blockchain; this distributed consensus protocol was supposed to solve all the problems with money transfers, settlements, and securities across the world and uh... did none of that. But tech bros sure did love to talk about how the blockchain doubters just didn't understand the technology, without considering that maybe they didn't understand the problem space.

While AI will ( and does) reduce the burden of writers, it’s going to -kill- celebrity acting in most cases.

In doing so, it will turn directing on its ear in a way that many talented directors will not be able to adapt to.

Directors will become proxy actors by having to micromanage AI acting skills. Or Perhaps they will be augmented with a team of “character operators” that do the proxy-acting. Either way, there will be little point in paying celebrity actors and their extravagant salaries for most roles. Instead, it might turn out that skilled and talented generic, no-name actors can play any role, then have the character model deepfaked onto them… which could actually create a large demand in lower paying jobs for character actors, possibly actually being a kind of boom in the acting business.

Lots of possibilities, but the director is going to take center stage in this new reality, while celebrity actors will have to swallow hard as they are priced out of their field.

The point is: art is a means of communicating _between people_. We can appreciate pictures/movies/music generated by machines but at the end of the day we (people) are in a deep need of connection to _other people_.

I don't believe replacing people with machines in this context is possible (one might say: by definition). But if it happens it will be the anti-utopian world of loneliness.

I use AI coding assistants every day and while they're helpful, they're nothing more than a glorified autocomplete.

Rehearsed word soup. He clearly knows zero about the underlying technology. If he did understand it in any depth, he'd show a lot less certainty about the future.

80% as good for 1/10000th the price is quite the offer.

And you'd never get anything close to what Lynch would make, you'd get the equivalent of fan fiction.

Artists are very rarely concerned with their audience. Good Art, capital A, is the unique expression of a singular consciousness - you can't produce that by catering to an audience. That's just a product (see Warhol).

You can't automate art, sorry. Maybe you can crank out a bunch of hollywood dross that undiscerning audiences will slop up, but you're not adding anything of value to our culture.

I don't want to watch a movie cranked out by an AI. I want to see a movie that came from another human's mind because they have an idea they want to communicate with me. LLMs have nothing to "say".

The movie industry is already endlessly pumping out crap with real actors, I suppose it won't get much worse if it removes them entirely.

On the other hand, there's a whole other medium for actors that AI can't replace.

Strong claims.

Have we seen any other form of communication and/or artistic expression become totally automated?

Even 2d art hasn’t been automated by image generation models.

It’s just another tool in the bag.

My prediction. As more and more movies are made with AI, and when they start replacing real actors with AI, people are going to value movies less, and live performances more.

I expect AI will bring a resurgence of live performances like live theater. Why? Because we value what people do more than what machines do.

> He is wrong. Movies will be automated and when they will be, all these actors will be first one to go.

Man, whom should I trust? A guy who's been living and breathing movies since the 1990s, or a 19-minute-old, green-colored account on hackernews? Man, I just don't know.

I feel like many fields are going to basically cut out junior level jobs for AI, then 10 years down the line complain that there are no more people they can hire for mid level/senior jobs.

You're mis-reading what he says. People create new stuff, AI (so far) remixes old stuff. Down the line you will be able to order a remix of succession and AI should be able to do that for you but it won't be able to add any interesting additional spin - it's just gonna make it to order (obviously a big deal! which he says).

>implying the non-AI content we have nowadays is highly creative and unique

You just inserted this, he doesn't say or imply this - he asserted that all of the new ideas (so far) have been generated by humans. Sure lots of it is slop - but all of AI content is slop. That's his point: the new, creative stuff is still coming from humans - even if they are using "AI" tools to do it.

> He even contradicts his whole premise of "actors will always be necessary" with his example of a custom generated series episode.

He said it would be "janky and weird" and likened it to a remix.

How soon though? 2 years? 10? 50? He starts by saying this won't happen soon, _maybe_ ever.