AI doesn’t increase the value of content, it makes it meaningless by destroying scarcity.
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
Most art is in some way or form derivative of another work or a combination of somesorts. I enjoy derivative works. To me, AI already has value. I don't seek endless gratification through originality.
You could make the same argument about musical instruments, or being able to record and playback music, dj tools, etc.
I think what you get is the power law distribution for tons of content. Some of the stuff is still mega valuable, but distribution just gets more and more important and it’s harder and harder to break through. This is what the “democratization” of any previously difficulty-gated endeavor does.
More niches will be created, more fragmentation in tastes, stuff like that. Not just completely valueless content.
Incumbents and platform providers get to win through it all though, because humans still want to fill their time.
A lot of people right now claim that they cannot tell apart AI output from human art, while many of them seem to grow rather agitated and stressed after repeated exposure. I bet they're going to be forced into exclusively making art manually, or viewing exclusively human art at some point, and through that ways, AIs could increase value of human made data.
I find it funny that wishes for AI arts always seem to be more anime and end to Marvel slop. They want human slop go away thanks to AI slop? I'm not meaning to call out someone for contradiction or inconsistency - as I do understand the sentiment. But it gives me chuckles.
Even TikTok's main fuel are likes and shares. Isolated material will just cease to be interesting, because it's from your own imagination.
No more Disney-fication, no more Marvel / Star Wars "mass media slop". We'll have media that caters to people's long-tail interests. If you have a passion for Egyptology and Atlantis, you'll be able to watch a steampunk adventure about the Egyptians waging war with the Atlanteans. But perhaps with the serious tone of "The Wire". That would never have been greenlit before, but it'll soon be possible.
Good creators will arise just like good indie music, indie manga/comic, and indie game creators. Discovery will be the problem to solve for creators. There will be an abundance of talent that is finally able to create their vision rather than nepotism their way into one of 500 limited annual roles of autonomy.
Small creators who grow large like VivziePop [1] and PsychicPebbles [2] will be the model for the future of content. They start small on YouTube, grow large, and eventually have their own large-scale distribution and franchises.
The creative world is about to get orders of magnitude better. Not 2x, not 10x, but easily 1,000x.
I hate most movies and tv shows, but love the medium. The problem is most content produced just isn't my vibe. I like super artsy stuff, but also have particular tastes. That's going to change dramatically. Stuff will start fitting the shape of my interest graph.
I'm so excited.
This isn't inherently a bad thing but I don't believe it's without its costs, one of which being that with everyone watching (potentially) completely unique media there'll be no shared cultural artifacts to communicate with others about.
VivziePop may have started as a small creator but the recent creations such as Hazbin Hotel have now become things where the enjoyment can be shared with other fans, which in some ways is the secondary purpose of all media. Media enjoyed alone can still be rewarding, media enjoyed with others can be much more than that (except for going to the cinema with strangers, that can disappear immediately).
It seems like a common idea that if we can just generate a practically-infinite stream of media then we've solved some kind of problem with there just not being enough "content" (I hate using the term in this way but it's concise), and while I do sympathise with the points of view from people that can't find things they like, I also don't really believe that "Content is a problem".
More variety itself isn't a problem, but I'm not convinced that in general there's a _lack_ of content. Humans have already reached peak saturation in terms of the sheer amount of text, audio and video that's created every day. No single item of media is itself a problem, but perhaps the total aggregate of everything isn't helpful.
This is quite literally what the Marvel / Star wars mass media slop is, a sort of syncretistic version of every pop culture phenomenon scientifically engineered down to A/B tested audience taste. It's excatly what you're complaining about, never-ending banal stuff. It'll be Disneyfication on steroids.
It's a sort of media masturbation, hooking your brain up to itself and feeding it its own output, what the large studios are already doing with their franchises, just on an individual level. You'll basically sit in your own never-ending Marvel hell, basically D.F Wallace's Infinite Jest.
Art is obviously the opposite, something external and disruptive, a creative act from someone who isn't you.
Is it possible that part of what creates quality is having to collaborate with others? Would Star Wars have been as good as it was without Marcia Lucas?
Lol. Where do you think these models will get the source data for these amazing generations?
Also, an average person's "long tail" is incredibly boring (I know mine is). You will need someone to create a next Breaking Bad, or a next Discworld, or... Your slop-generating machine will not be able to generate it from a "long tail"
Can't wait to create shadowrun movies for example :)
As you scroll, it learns what you like and generates more videos.
This is chilling and also seems inevitable long term
ChatGPT can already generate endless "comments". And yet you're here.
If there was an HN clone generated on the fly for you or the guy you replied to then what's the difference? Especially if you imagine you didn't know it was generated. That's the problem with this tech, for you there's no difference. But probably a difference for society.
Some people are talking to ChatGPT though. We are here, for now.
Probably before that though we'll see AI movies pre-generated before we see them generated on the fly during scrolling.
It will happen for different people at different times, but at some point the realization that you are looking at people who don't exist living lives that aren't possible to sell you products that won't help you will click for you, and when it does it will cut you off from society in a way we don't currently have words for.
Brands pay for ads because it generate sales. If people become vegetables that doomscroll all day, barely pausing to eat and have a dump, they will also stop purchasing stuff.
Or maybe people will be so addicted that social medias as a drug becomes a commercial product in its own riggt and tiktok can paywall it.
The TikTok algorithm is good at figuring out what you do. Not what you say. So the content will be a lot more engaging.
The piano in the beginning or the photo camera used by the photographer has "AI text" written on it. The old man with the beret in the cafe goes through his beret with his hand. The girl on the seaside looking back turns her head too much almost like an owl. The boy-in-a-bike-through-an-ewuropean-city scene ends on a square with an amorphous being in a unicycle under the tree...
It's already ranking better than Google Veo 3:
https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-video/arena?tab=leader...
Veo3 does support image to video, so what you can do is create an image that is the start of a scene, and then use that to generate the actual scene. Unfortunately, Veo3 is really bad at this. I expect this will improve over time.
Although I'm not super excited about this Seedance model personally, I do really like that it focuses on consistency between shots. I hope this puts pressure on increased performance from Veo3 in that regard.
I’m starting to wonder if it will. There seems to be this pattern that an awesome T2V model will come out and everyone starts clamoring for an I2V model and then when the I2V version drops a couple months later it’s not as good. I’m starting to get the feeling that I2V is just intrinsically challenging in a way that makes it hard to do well at all.
> https://www.doubao.com/chat/create-video
Anyway, if everyone wants to be a content creator, why not charge them for the privilege of that desire? A content creator will forever need AI-generated something. So now we move from "you get to post your content for free" over to "you get to now pay us through this AI-gateway to post your content".
I assume that an expert in CGI can point out obvious flaws in these outputs. But I wonder if it is possible to fix those details by prompting it to change only specific segments.
There is also the question of how much compute/money they are spending per second of output, compared to a high-budget Hollywood CGI.
Change management will indeed be interesting.
Does anyone else feels same looking at motion heavy samples of Seedance?
It seems to me they all have subtle "badness" that makes them essentially useless. Quick example on this is the video of "guy sitting on the subway chair" has people passing in front of him even as the camera is about an inch from his face. Unless you are half asleep it is disconnecting in a way that my brain background processing says this is nonsense and I cannot care about it. It seems all AI video has this issue at this time in essentially infinite ways. Meaning I don't think there is any near term solution that will make them viable for production use.
Maybe I'm just old and not suited to this new hyper ADHD style media world.
People are already way too easy to get to believe conspiracy theories. Shit like Pizzagate or whatever is only going to get more common when bad people start making, "and look, here's the video proof!"
And we've already got Tiktok and Youtube Shorts just pumping the dopamine centers in the brain for short form content. Generating shit you like dynamically is going to be an addictive nightmare. The moment it gets monetized we're going to see the equivalent of slot machines pumped at us from every channel -- flashing lights and emotional tugs to get us to part with our valuable money or attention.
And that's to say nothing of the impact these tools have on artists and creative people or the costs to train and deploy these tools.
We're already seeing it today. The amount of 'footage' about LA right now that's showing some sort of war zone that is clearly AI generated, but being consumed as if it was real is staggering.
- treating certain content in the same way that drugs are treated. Lots of countries are already moving towards age restrictions for social media.
- some kind of hardware-provided signatures for images and video, anything else must be assumed to be generated
Will be interesting for kids growing up - the peer pressure is now already very high to have smartphones, to be on Whatsapp, Instagram, TikTok, this will only get worse.
Maybe if I have kids I will found some Amish-like community with only 90's tech (only half joking).
In evolution, rapid reproduction gives an advantage to spamming low-quality offspring [1], and rapid selection without agglomeration [2,3] incentivizes antisocial behavior.
Ideas spread, mutate, and evolve just like animals [4]. So when the Internet made it free for anyone to transmit information to millions of people instantly, trustworthy information sources [5] and prosocial cultural values started dying [6], as literally the worst and craziest people become dominant [7,8,9,10,11].
...Presumably "AI" is going to make this even worse, and immeasurably so.
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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
2. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers
6. https://theweek.com/culture-life/third-places-disappearing
7. https://globalnews.ca/news/1157137/internet-trolls-are-sadis...
8. https://www.engadget.com/2018-03-19-study-shows-distribution...
9. https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
10. https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/news/2023/why-are-online-po...
Video production just got a lot cheaper and requires very few skills. This is basically destroying the creative video production industry (ads, product videography, youtube content of all kinds) and probably VFX industry as well.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-video/arena?tab=leader...
They've been running tests for weeks under the covert name "Unicorn" and just renamed the model to Seedance a few days ago.
edit: I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted for this, except perhaps not liking the ByteDance angle.
China produces incredibly good video models and have been in the market lead for at least a year now. All of the top video models, save for Veo 3, are from China.
In fact, the only open source video models of note are all non-American (mostly Chinese, and one Israeli model).