I've been a big fan of https://www.youtube.com/@PosyMusic/videos for many years now. The posts there are alawys a little treat - you never quite know when the next one is going to come or what it's going to be... but it'll sure be creative (and fun!) without any of the typical YouTube channel baggage. They do the video, sound, and music creation+editing themselves - being a sound professional by day (among other things).

Anyways, the reason I bring this channel up is they had a video ~2 years back about trying out various AIs to help them in their creative process. Stuff like "using an AI audio generator to quickly make short sounds to sample in their song" for hard to find/make sounds type stuff. Exactly along the lines of "they do not let AI do 99% of the job" you were saying, instead treating it as just another tool in the toolbox. Also, intentionally, the examples like sampling were where the originality comes with what you do with the content you source rather than the content standing on its own. They also spent time creating icon sets to help explicitly label how AI was used in making the material (partly/fully) and encouraged artists that do incorporate AI into part of their workflow to label how so accordingly (2 years ago - so this was still somewhat novel to discuss).

You won't be able to find that video on the channel linked above, though the icons are still on GitHub. Not because the content made with the help of AI was bad, people like the songs the same as his other content (when not explicitly told it was made with the help of AI), but because there was so much hate on the video (and via email etc) for just mentioning that other artists could look at trying to use AI in certain parts of their workflows too that he felt the need to take it down.

There are a bunch of these scifi world building short video channels now. IMO they all seem really creative initially but rapidly lose their luster and become repetitive.

Sora makes the hard parts easy and the easy parts hard. I don't think any of these content producers will be remembered in the future. :/

I would argue that the 1% of AI videos that are "good" are not worth the travesties that it fosters. Deceased celebrities featured in embarrassing / absurd situations and the scourge of fake news are enough for me to realize that this technology is extremely net negative.

I'm ashamed to admit that this made me laugh.

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

I would be alright with making these more expensive to make though, so they don't overrun youtube. Also i'm sure the person that made this had to do a lot of work. It wasn't just a few prompts

Yeah I like NeuralViz too. Honestly the writing is what makes it funny in the first place. The AI imagery just adds that extra weirdness on top. Like my faves being the street interviews an the gluron that reviews the Zillow page etc

NeuralViz is one of the best examples of a very creative and skilled person using generative AI to create great content that would not be possible without it. Doopiidoo is another example.

I love Igorrr, but still have mixed feelings about the AI-assisted video. They were capable of making videos weird and unhinged in the past without its use.

> 99% of everything is bad, so that unsurprisingly includes AI videos.

You're probably not wrong, although there's probably also a spread in % between mediums of creation that is worth exploring since a couple % difference could compound.

Even ignoring the above, the issue is WRT rates of creation. I'm no good at drawing. For me to make a bad drawing might take some time. I'll need sleep. And food. I can only make so many bad drawings a day. AI can just work nonstop to make slop. The main strength, if you'd call it that, of automation (AI in this case), is the ability to quickly crank out crap. It is flooding the internet with crap at accelerating rates. The internet/humanity doesn't have enough tools today to deal with the flood of garbage. If AI could make physical crap, we'd quickly end up like that garbage episode of Futurama.

I saw one recently that was cool. Basically a cinematic for Arthas’ purging of Stratholme from WarCraft. However the entire time I was just thinking “oh that’s cool, looks alright” but none of the “wow the artist that did Uther’s model nailed it” or “Oh great music choice, I wonder who the composer was.”

Uncanny valley aside it felt empty.

For entertainment, I have few concerns. It will compete or fail to compete for attention. For degrading the value of video evidence, accelerating propaganda and fraud, and for making people just feel unsure of what is likely real or fake, that is what I am concerned with.

Best recommendation I've been given in years. NeuralViz is amazing, thank you

Praise the monolith

>But i've seen several good videos made using AI, including pretty much everything NeuralViz[0] on YouTube makes

We can safely dismiss your whole argument then :)

[dead]

A local window blinds company ran an ad before a movie. Clearly AI. Besides the obvious fake humans, how can I trust that the AI blinds in your ad match your real product?

Yeah I am not an absolute GenAI hater. I’ve used it quite a bit myself, and I think there are ways to be creative about it. However 95% of what we see online, especially in the Ads space, is bottom of the barrel quality. It is obvious basic AI generated images/video most of the time and for me is an instant “I’m not going to bother with that product” marker.

One of the worst one was an allegedly “illustrated history” book. All Ads were of AI generated history book pages with tons of historical inconsistencies. Looked up the real book and it actually looked decent: hand drawn, well formatted etc. Why not use pictures of the actual book instead of whatever mess I was seeing.

However I also keep getting Ads for this other historical book that drives me nuts: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vilno/the-codex-book

I might be wrong but to me most of the art is looks AI generated, and the few pages they show just don’t make any historical sense. Yet they sell it as “hand drawn”. From the animations seems like some stuff was AI generated and then redrawn by hand? But the drawing themselves are plain weird: the nonsensical castle. The archers and scoped crossbow in a page about medieval crossbows, the silly submarine

Last night, I deliberately paid attention to an ad because it had the disclaimer "images generated with AI". I was curious to see what the advertisers did with the technology. The ad featured a bunch of animals of different species driving cars around a city. It clearly had that AI uncanny valley that high budget 3D modeled CGI animals doesn't have. I thought about what it would have cost for a effects team to 3D model and render all those animals, and also wondered how many rendering attempts with the AI did it take to get good footage for the ad.

The ad felt sickening to look at, like a TV with smooth motion turned on. It's like my brain is rejecting the pictures that it sees because it doesn't match the patterns of motion that it has been trained to recognize. Or was it just regular motion sickness.

I don't know if we're in the minority or not, insofar as we are able to look at these things and discern that they are fake. One problem going forward is that the proportion of us who are able to do so will grow smaller as individuals become habituated to the AI output, especially children.

Right there, it's a distraction from the actual problem. They promote safety research as if they are fighting Skynet and it works.

This is a weird complaint because ads have always been a curse on the world; they've always been "slop". The worst part about AI ads is that they're ads.

i don't get this "race to the bottom", "to cut costs".. like isn't that a good thing? your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces.

I was involved in a conversation about cheating in video games the other day, and the topic shifted to AI use in music. Someone said, "using AI is like using an aimbot for music." I absolutely love that comparison since it highlights the shortcut past creativity/skill to get a computerized best result while also associating it with blatant cheating.

The "enables creativity" argument is ironic since the root of the word is "create" and AI users are literally removing the "create" step from their production process.

Sorry that isn't true. Lots of smaller communities online, especially around small streamers make small meme style videos. Usually these are mocking someone doing something dumb online, or jokes/memes about the show etc. These are similar to parody videos online that were hugely popular on YouTube back in the early 2010s.

People did do this before AI. Usually cutting people faces out and sticking them on actors faces in existing movies, or subtly doing parody cover, doing clever edits (Cassette Boy is a notable example) or people were performing and recording it like the "Epic Rap Battles of History".

All it done is allow people to create these sort of to a higher creative standard, in other cases it allowed people to create jokey stuff that they wouldn't otherwise be able to create.

People using this technology in this manner is clearly creative. They are using the tech to make something new and unique for a particular audience.

In the 80s/90s you would be complaining about people using tracker software and samples to create music instead of learning to play an instrument. Under your logic someone like FatboySlim isn't a musician.

It's both... I think it can cut both ways... I was largely on your side, as most of the AI stuff I've seen is just annoying more than anything. Then the "Star Wars: Beggar's Canyon" video completely changed my mind. The voice generation is clear and inflection appropriate... the cuts, sequence, and overall effects are clearly put together in a consistent way.

I can only imagine how much work that video was, but is really the first thing I've seen as AI video that gives me hope... and obviously a work of passion and a lot of effort to get such a great final result.

If you're correct, creative people have nothing to worry about then. Creative people will still stand out and have a role. But the world already has an oversupply of creativity, and a need for a lot more of boring, uncreative things. A plumber, mechanic, or programmer, all need minimal creativity -- 99% perspiration, and 1% inspiration, as they say.

> AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together.

This is very much not the case with the Stable Diffusion/Wan/general open diffusion models space.

The amount of effort and creativity that goes on in creating complex workflows, custom LoRAs, fine-tunes etc is genuinely a new area of art imho. Sure a lot of it is going to produce things that most people might not consider "art", but it's unfair to lump the work happening in this space with people randomly prompting Sora and dumping it on TikTok.

Those aspects aren’t the only “creative” aspects of filmmaking.

What if someone used AI to say something important or get across a different perspective?

99% of people in the world do not have the time/money/connections to achieve a film vision. They were locked out of the ability to create their vision - creating an high concept or production-heavy film has been the most privileged position in the world - until now.

That’s because they don’t know what creativity is.

They believe the idea itself is the creative bit: that thinking of the idea of a dog riding a skateboard is in and of itself a creative act.

No it isn’t.

There is a lot of content whose final value ultimately doesn’t justify the time that would be spent on creating it. Worse, there is sometimes only a specific window of time where a content has entertainment value and it quickly drops off after you leave that window.

For example, someone recently created an entire anime style video of the United States invading Venezuela and capturing Maduro. It came out awesome! But… to make a similar quality video by hand would have easily taken a team of humans several months at best. By then, the news cycle would have moved on, and the delivered video would have even less value being watched so distant from the event that inspired it. People wouldn’t care anymore, and it wouldn’t have as much impact.

AI is the perfect solution for delivering such a video exactly when you need it. To me, this is one of the more acceptable uses of AI, to make fun throwaway content that you just laugh about for a few moments and then move on with your life. Having a human dedicate a large amount of their time to make such videos would be sad, and it’s better if they preserve their effort for more serious artistic works that are timeless in their value.

I think there is some tenuous analog between today's AI, and yesteryear's music synthesizers and "modern art". Regarding music, I understand synthesizers were created to mimic real instruments, whereas artists used its capabilities not to mimic, but to create entirely new sounds. My limited understanding of modern art (and without a search I don't distinguish between expressionism, impressionism or any other isms because of my ignorance of the differences) is that it was a reaction to the modern world, and an expression of something that could not be anything other than a creation of the human mind. AI may be helping people to copy existing aesthetics, but I'm hoping/waiting for it to enable people to take it in a completely novel direction that can only be augmented human expression.

We need to disambiguate what you mean by "AI" here. If you're referring to people typing prompts in a frontier web UI, maybe. But if you're using local models, you can do quite a bit more, ComfyUI workflows can get crazy. Multi-region controlnet guided generations with IP adapters and loras, etc.

The art gatekeepers want to try and paint everyone using AI creatively as monkeys mashing ignorantly on keyboards, taking the unmodified output and parading it around like Picasso. The reality is that is to AI art as bathroom dick graffiti is to manual art.

A lot of technological advancements (or use scare quotes here) that claimed to let “regular people” be creative just end up passifying us and relinquishing our creativity. Why play the guitar, the record player already does it better. Why learn to juggle, some kid in <supposedly whiz-genius country> already does that.

Of course of course of course, people have been inspired by play in bands and to learn to juggle. But the trajectory seems to be to move away from small intimiate creative offerings, like playing music in your living room, to passively recieving Taylor Swift into your earbuds.

Not only are they removing creativity but they're eroding the medium with a flood of high quanity/low quality of misinformation or fakes. My youtube feed is innundated in AI generated talks, audiobooks, history etc. The audiobooks may be okay but I can't trust any AI generated content. At this point I wish I could just fiter it out. Just yesterday I saw a video by Yuval Noah Harari and almost towards the end I realize it's AI slop. It has nothing to do with the author except for his syntehtized voice. The content is not even vetted by a human, it's being created faster than users can consume it. For now I can spot these AI channels and attempt to avoid them but am not sure how long this is going to last.

>However, 99% of the the "creativity" from what I've seen is done by the AI (how it should look, where the cuts need to happen, the tone, color grading, etc). Which is to say, it's taken from other people's (creative) work.

I don't get why this is a big deal? Like 99% of the creativity of taking a video of an ocean is also just taken from the nature. Your creativity was actually a small portion of "information" out of all the bits required to make that video.

Yes, 99% of people are uncreative and use the creative freedom this way. Besides, many truly creative people won't even touch it, some because of the ethics and others because it's not up to their standard yet. Does it really look surprising to you?

>AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together.

That's quite a leap of thought and doesn't follow from the first part at all.

I agree. This is not about creativity, but about producing something that kinda looks like professional art. People assume that creative output has to pass some bar, so that other people can appreciate it. But you can also produce interesting art with very simple techniques. XKCD is an example that comes to mind.

I've been making music videos with a very satisfying creative process: Use AI to make a ton of images, pick the very best ones, and carefully arrange them in the right order. Example: https://youtu.be/r-_dJNgt3SM

I think most people have the ability to express themselves through art, but if their first experience of trying to make something is using AI tools, they will never discover that they can make something genuine that reflects their experience.

Now do hand drawn cartoons vs 3d rendered cartoons.

Is Pixar Incredibles where a computer algorithm made decisions about exact colors worse than Disney Cinderella where it was hand-drawn animation?

How does someone learn the colour grading, the editing, the scripting etc?

Almost entirely by studying other peoples works, the rest by doing something and getting feedback on it.

I wonder if people also are like "CHatgpt, write me a poem about love" and then think "hey, i wrote this poem!! I'm a poet!!!"

If you think this for one ai you must think it for all.

I can now instantly visualize anything I think of. That is creative power. The same for code - I can instantly scaffold a frontend I think of in google ai studio. Its not all great and I have to keep the slot machine spinning. But it's empowering.

These "ai kills creativity" arguments are all rather uncreative.

AI (as it currently exists) will never be "creative" in the sense that it can only imitate or interpolate between past works. At some point we'll recognize that AI generated works are boring and predictable. AI will probably never invent a new musical genre or artform since it can only reproduce or recombine works from the past. I wonder what happens when the internet is so full of AI generated slop that that the only things worth "training" on were made in the time before AI generation became a thing. Will AI generations be full of dated references to a time gone by?

People may say it increases creativity but I see it more as lowering the bar to produce things. The same could be said for a lot of inventions like photography made producing images easier and I'm sure a lot of portrait painters lost their jobs to photographers. I think the danger is that we may see a very rapid erosion of jobs in the creative space that won't be easy to transition into new fields which I feel will have a detrimental effect on our society.

I am currently working on a script with my uncle who is a professional playwright, my grandfather wrote for Benny Hill. So it runs in my family.

Biting the bullet, I have accurately had it generate the scene of the cafe. Generating visual imagery of how I imagine it; a cyber dystopian gothic cafe with wandering goths.

It's capped to ten seconds and that alone would've costed me a fair sum to even get a small render without revisions.

I could now technically pitch this with the AI works and get the funding required to hire actual animators/actors or spend my savings myself giving it to an artist depicting the theme and style; not that I could afford it.

How is creativity lost in that scenario? AI is a tool, it shouldn't be a do-everything, I created the script and it's generated the visual mock.

Personally I wouldn't want it to create the whole show and would personally prefer real folk to do the magic but for my own personal consumption it's given me the excitement and further drive to continue.

> how it should look, where the cuts need to happen, the tone, color grading, etc

That's not creativity. That's skill. A person can think of something (creativity) and not know how to bring it to life without the skills to do so. The creator still needs to have a creative vision, and communicate that vision effectively at the very least.

Of course, there's also people that are just cranking out slop, but I'd argue there's no creativity there, other than finding creative ways to copy others. But that's been a problem since forever.

Or you could argue that it’s simply lifting from other people’s creativity. Like making a song entirely of sampled sounds from other songs with a key change.

It's not like these discussions haven't have quite a lot of precedence. I bought a 4-track tape "portastudio" back in the 90s, but it didn't make me a good producer- years of playing music with dozens of groups did that. And I bought a canon xl1, but that didn't make the movies I was making more compelling than if I'd had budget to shoot on 16mm.

Creativity and good craft come from struggling to communicate an idea; anything that short circuits that will make you a worse artists.

AI is, to me, like claming that because you have access to a forklift going to the gym is no longer useful- you're missing both the aesthetic and material reasons why folks have been doing things.

What's worse- people claim a forklift is better than, say, working out and then say to the folks who were working out "this is what you're doing and it is dumb to spend all that effort doing it". That's nothing new either- I get why folks look at a lot of my early, cracked FruityLoop-based work from 2002 with some disdain-- it misses all of the nuances and trade-craft knowledge that I gained playing in bands over the following 20 years.

And I know how it sounds because I can hear it in the products of other young musicians: I play a lot of jazz with kids in their 20s who have way better chops than I ever will and who have a lot of the real book memorized. That real book allows them to pick up the tunes super fast, but they don't have a lot of the nuance that the 70 year olds I sometimes get to play with have in their playing.

I use AI for the dumbest stuff, like writing contracts for mechanical licensing. It's shit, because I'm just looking to copy some already-written document without paying a lawyer. I can't see see why folks would -want- to use it to make documents that no one else had previously thought would be worth writing and to me it very much seems like it can only produce, by definition, derivative works.

Musicians are terrible about that. I love being in a cover band, because I usually like the people and playing. But absent that, simply being able to "poof here's 'your' cover of Stariway" seems super boring, almost soul crushing.

And paying AI do the creative parts- that's like paying someone to have sex with my partner because I wanted to spend my nights playing video games instead of woodshedding on pedal steel guitar :D

All that is to say- I agree.

There's historical precedent for this too!

Just think of what photography did to portrait painting. The camera and film did all of the color work, the person hitting the button had no need to mix their own pigments anymore. All the creativity was removed.

/s

> 99% of the “creativity” is done by the AI…it's taken from other people's (creative) work.

Yes, and prior to AI, 99% of creativity was also taken from other peoples work. This is how creativity works. Man has no ideas in a vacuum.

As humans we take influences in from what we’ve seen and when we “create” things we’re simply combining things together, resulting in output falling somewhere on the spectrum from a 1:1 copy to somewhat novel.

If you can’t spot the influences in a painting or song or piece of graphic design, it’s simply because you aren’t deeply familiar with prior works in the field at the time.

While I appreciate your positive experience, if you were unable to write, storyboard, and communicate your idea before AI--than AI is not going to be "the thing" that suddenly turns you into a filmmaker.

You're writing anyway, you just call it prompting. If you feel that the AI is giving you back more than what you're putting in with that writing, you have to ask yourself who's vision the result really is.

> I don't like these curmudgeonly takes

me neither. I think there's a real sense of concern, but that people are also just being contrarian or are maybe acting out of a concern for their job or something. Seems like a lot of people have had the opposite experience, that a lot of AI vids are not harmful but have in a lot of cases been funny or helpful. People need time to experiment with the tech and see what impact it has on society before they adjust their expectations to its real impact.

> I want to get the idea across as close as possible to what is in my head.

In my experience, AI is poorly suited for that, unless what you have in mind is just some remix of what already exists.

Imho this is as if you were a music producer and instead of synthesizing the sound you want you were exploring random presets till you found one that matched.

Cool, but what about the rampant fraud portion of the article?

Artistically not relevant enough to justify the downsides

It’s ridiculous to say everyone who has an idea for a film could have gotten it made already if they had the skill.

There are endless amounts of people with real skill in the film industry that cannot get their movie made even though they have the connections and the experience. Famous filmmakers even experience this.

Imagine the number of people who couldn’t break into the industry or simply don’t trust it? There are countless people around the world who have fully fleshed out ideas for films that producers won’t finance because literally billions of dollars are going to create ever more Marvel slop.

You’re focusing on one type of person that may or may not have the skills. That’s just one specific scenario, there are many others to weight just as much.

What about all those that do but can’t make it happen because of all the realities of life?

AI content should be required by law to be flagged and described how the AI was used. It's bullshit when a channel pops up with a known person sitting facing the camera speaking for 20 minutes and it turns out to be entirely AI generated. The person in question not involved, the textual/spoken content is not their work, etc.

I have been blocking and reporting 90% of the "new" youtube channels that get recommended to me by the algorithm. Kids youtube is also an absolute wasteland of garbage AI generated crap now.

Weirdly, I actually enjoy flipping through Sora every once in a while. Where it is upfront about being AI and a lot of it is quite entertaining.

I would not mind if youtube added an "AI" section where you can generate your own videos or watch AI generated videos, but they need to start banning people that post AI generated videos in normal youtube channels.

That's only relevant until the AI output no longer has a tone that triggers your gag reflex. Then you'll be in the same boat as everyone else, and the "who cares who/what wrote it, if it has good information" question will apply to you as well.

The author is right that AI video is being used to propagandize and rot minds at scale in a way sort of unthinkable a couple years ago. Short-form video content wasn't good for us beforehand, but any balance has been fully upturned.

(I think that's all intrinsic to genAI in a way the author doesn't want to confront, but there is a crisis)

I think long term the primary use case for AI generated video is people creating AI generated video for themselves to watch as consumers, rather than passing off AI generated work as their own.

I would not mind if I could go to ChatGPT and say: "Make me a 15 minute video about the history of gold mining in the Byzantine Empire", and it makes a mediocre soulless video I can half pay attention to while working.

If I see a 15 minute video on youtube about it and I find out after starting to watch it that it was AI generated, it sends me into a blind rage that makes me want to delete the internet, though.

Don't give me AI content unless I explicitly ask for it!

When mass voting patterns change because they’re being influenced by AI it will affect you

> Tell them they are better off watching TV, even Fox news.

The good old original brain rot

I always take January off from a variety of things...

This year I added in my phone which I keep across the room all day and haven't been taking when I leave the house.

I'd already gotten rid of social media, and blocked most news on my phone, and youtube... and have almost all notifications silent

And yet it's still amazing at just how much calmer the world feels with out the phone anywhere near me lol.

My personal take: All AI comments are harmful, including summaries. Now I have to update my hn comment summarizer prompt to ignore comments like this.

None of these companies are making money, so all we need to do is wait until the VC money runs out and it turns out there’s no market for any of this slop if the people creating it have to actually pay for it.

Did cryptography or Toy story 3D animation make every human need to question the reality of any electronic audio or video they encounter, no matter how realistic?

Did cryptography make me have to train my parents not to trust my own voice if I make strange asks like money?

There is a lot more to do for each other as a society to adjust to the new normal of AI, than just complain. Awareness and realignment are critical.

I wonder how Mark Hammill likes that they reused his likeness without permission. Seems emblematic of the larger problems with AI stealing whatever. Very ghoulish..

> What's the point?

If AGI is achieved, some of the "they" at the cutting edge get to become feudal lords over massive AI empires that don't need you in them.

I think "learning that absolutely nothing you see with your own eyes can be trusted as reality despite looking completely real" is a valid problem and that we are all somewhat vulnerable there.

I completely disagree. Meme's are a basic form of psyop, and are being using by intelligence agencies, the military, old media and new media, to warp our brains, and make us biological robots. Comedy is used much the same.