Judging by how they've been trying to ram AI into YouTube creators workflows I suppose it's only a matter of time before they try to automate the entire pipeline from idea, to execution, to "engaging" with viewers. It won't be good at doing any of that but when did that ever stop them.
Last week I started seeing a banner in Google Docs along the lines of "Create a video based on the content of this doc!" with a call to action that brought me to Google Vids.
And then suddenly this is not something that fascinates people anymore… in 10 years as non-synthetic becomes the new bio or artisan or whatever you like.
Humanity has its ways of objecting accelerationism.
Put another way, over time people devalue things which can be produced with minimal human effort. I suspect it's less about humanity's values, and more about the way money closely tracks "time" (specifically the duration of human effort).
I strongly disagree. How many clothes do you buy that have 100 thread count, and are machine-made, vs hand-knit sweaters or something?
When did you ask people for directions, or other major questions, instead of Google?
You can wax poetic about wanting "the human touch", but at the end of the day, the market speaks -- people will just prefer everything automated. Including their partners, after your boyfriend can remember every little detail about you, notice everything including your pupils dilating, know exactly how you like it, when you like it, never get angry unless it's to spice things up, and has been trained on 1000 other partners, how could you go back? When robots can raise children better than parents, with patience and discipline and teaching them with individual attention, know 1000 ways to mold their behavior and achieve healthier outcomes. Everything people do is being commodified as we speak. Soon it will be humor, entertainment, nursing, etc. Then personal relations.
Just extrapolate a decade or three into the future. Best case scenario: if we nail alignment, we build a zoo for ourselves where we have zero power and are treated like animals who have sex and eat and fart all day long. No one will care about whatever you have to offer, because everyone will be surrounded by layers of bots from the time they are born.
PS: anything you write on HN can already have been written by AI, pretty soon you may as well quit producing any content at all. No one will care whether you wrote it.
> PS: anything you write on HN can already have been written by AI, pretty soon you may as well quit producing any content at all. No one will care whether you wrote it.
People theoretically would care, but the internet has already set up producing things to be pseudo-anonymous, so we have forgotten the value of actually having a human being behind content. That's why AI is so successful, and it's a damn shame.
What exactly is the value of having a human behind content if it gets to the point that content generated by AI is indistinguishable from content generated by humans?
The fact that anyone would ask this question is incredible!
It's so we can in a fraction of those cases, develop real relationships to others behind the content! The whole point of sharing is to develop connections with real people. If all you want to do is consume independently of that, you are effectively a soulless machine.
A few may be interested in developing a relationship. The vast majority though is only interested in consuming content and moving on. I fail to see how that preference makes one a "soulless machine". But maybe I'm already a lost cause shrugs.
I think "indistinguishable" is a receding horizon. People are already good at picking out AI text, and AI video is even easier. Even if it looks 100% realistic on the surface, the content itself (writing, concept, etc) will have a kind of indescribable "sameness" that will give it away.
If there's one thing that connects all media made in human history, it's that humans find humans interesting. No technology (like literally no technology ever) will change that.
You'll be surprised by how many already mistake AI generated content for human creation[0], when the tech is still so young. And it cuts both ways since people also mistake human creations for AI content [1]. I see no reason why it won't eventually get to the point where they're fully indistinguishable, given AI is continually being trained to be better. Bits are bits, whether arranged by man or AI.
> People are already good at picking out AI text, and AI video is even easier.
Source? My experience has been that people at most might be “ok” at picking up completely generic output, and outright terrible at identifying anything with a modicum of effort or chance placed into it.
> My experience has been that people at most might be “ok” at picking up completely generic output, and outright terrible at identifying anything with a modicum of effort or chance placed into it.
Bold of you to assume any effort is placed into content when the entire point of using AI in the first place is to avoid this.
> Bold of you to assume any effort is placed into content when the entire point of using AI in the first place is to avoid this.
I mean, i've seen people using it in that way yes. These are normally the same people I saw copying and pasting the first google result they found for any search as an answer to their customers/co-workers etc. qOr to whom you would say "Do not send this to the customer, this is my explanation to you, use your own words, this is just a high level blah blah" and then five minutes later you see your response word for word having gone out to a customer with zero modification or review for appropriateness.
I equally see a very different kind of usage, where its just another tool used for speeding up portions of work, but not being produced to complete a work in totality.
Like sadly yes, i've now see sales members with rando chrome extensions that just attach AI to everything and they just let it do whatever the fuck it wants, which makes me want to cry...but again, these people were already effectively doing that, they are just doing it faster than ever.
If a fish could write a novel, would you find what it wrote interesting, or would it seem like a fish wrote it? Humans absorb information relative to the human experience, and without living a human existence the information will feel fuzzy or uncanny. AI can approximate that but can't live it for real. Since it is a derivative of an information set, it can never truly express the full resolution of it's primary source.
All that may or may not be the case, but whether or not it is, given that AI is trained on the works of humanity, it only stands that it'll inevitably get to the point where the content it creates will evoke the same response as if created by a human. "Roses are red" is composed of the same bit sequence, regardless of creator.
> What exactly is the value of having a human behind content if it gets to the point that content generated by AI is indistinguishable from content generated by humans?
What would be the point of paying for AI content if nobody did anything to produce it? Just take that shit!
There won't even be any "paying" or "taking" per se. What is generated by one can be generated by another, making those concepts generally moot in that regard.
>PS: anything you write on HN can already have been written by AI
Yeah in some broad sense, the same as we've always had: back in the 2010s it could have been generated by a Markov chain, after all. The only difference now is that the average quality of these LLMs is much, much higher. But the distribution of their responses is still not on par with what I'd consider a good response, and so I hunt out real people to listen to. This is especially important because LLMs are still not capable of doing what I care most about: giving me novel data and insights about the real world, coming from the day to day lived experience of people like me.
HN might die but real people will still write blogs, and real people will seek them out for so long as humans are still economically relevant.
I have both machine-made and hand-knit sweaters. In general, I expect handmade clothes to be more expensive than machine-made, which kinda proves my point. I never said machine-made things had zero value. I said we will tend to devalue them relative to more human-intensive things.
Asking for directions is a bad example, because it takes very little time for both humans and machines to give you directions. Therefore it would be highly unusual for anyone to pay for this service (LOL)
> Humanity has its ways of objecting accelerationism.
Actually, typically human objection only slows it down and often it becomes a fringe movement, while the masses continue to consume the lowest common denominator. Take the revival of the flip phone, typewriter, etc. Sadly, technology marches on and life gets worse.
Does life get worse for the majority of people or do the fruits of new technology rarely address any individual person’s progress toward senescence? (The latter feels like tech moves forward but life gets worse.)
Of course, it depends on how you define "worse". If you use life expectancy, infant mortality, and disease, then life has in the past gotten better (although the technology of the past 20 years has RARELY contributed to any of that).
If you use 'proximity to wild nature', 'clean air', 'more space', then life has gotten worse.
But people don't choose between these two. They choose between alternatives that give them analgesics in an already corrupt society creating a series of descending local maximae.
TikTok’s main attraction are the people, not just the videos. Trends, drama and etc. all involve real humans doing real human stuff, so it’s relatable.
I might be wrong, but AI videos are on the same path as AI generated images. Cool for the first year, then “ah ok, zero effort content”.
Sure, humanity has its ways of objecting Accelerationism, but the process fundamentally challenges human identity:
"The Human Security System is structured by delusion. What's being protected there is not some real thing that is mankind, it's the structure of illusory identity. Just as at the more micro level it's not that humans as an organism are being threatened by robots, it's rather that your self-comprehension as an organism becomes something that can't be maintained beyond a certain threshold of ambient networked intelligence." [0]
See also my research project on the core thesis of Accelerationism that capitalism is AI. [1]
> Judging by how they've been trying to ram AI into YouTube creators workflows […]
Thanks for sharing that video and post!
One way to think about this stuff is to imagine that you are 14 and starting to create videos, art, music, etc in order to build a platform online. Maybe you dream of having 7 channels at the same time for your sundry hobbies and building audiences.
For that 14 year old, these tools are available everywhere by default and are a step function above what the prior generation had. If you imagine these tools improving even faster in usability and capability than prior generations' tools did …
If you are of a certain age you'll remember how we were harangued endlessly about "remix culture" and how mp3s were enabling us to steal creativity without making an effort at being creative ourselves, about how photobashing in Photoshop (pirated cracked version anyway) was not real art, etc.
And yet, halfway through the linked video, the speaker, who has misgivings, was laughing out loud at the inventiveness of the generated replies and I was reminded that someone once said that one true IQ test is the ability to make other humans laugh.
> laughing out loud at the inventiveness of the generated replies
Inventive is one way of putting it, but I think he was laughing at how bizarre or out-of-character the responses would be if he used them. Like the AI suggesting that he post "it is indeed a beverage that would make you have a hard time finding a toilet bowl that can hold all of that liquid" as if those were his own words.
"remix culture" required skill and talent. Not everyone could be Girl Talk or make The Grey Album or Wugazi. The artists creating those projects clearly have hundreds if not thousands of hours of practice differentiating them from someone who just started pasting MP3s together in a DAW yesterday.
If this is "just another tool" then my question is: does the output of someone who has used this tool for one thousand hours display a meaningful difference in quality to someone who just picked it up?
I have not seen any evidence that it does.
Another idea: What the pro generative AI crowd doesn't seem to understand is that good art is not about _execution_ it's about _making deliberate choices_. While a master painter or guitarist may indeed pull off incredible technical feats, their execution is not the art in and of itself, it is widening the amount of choices they can make. The more and more generative AI steps into the role of making these choices ironically the more useless it becomes.
And lastly: I've never met anyone who has spent significant time creating art react to generative AI as anything more than a toy.
> does the output of someone who has used this tool for one thousand hours display a meaningful difference in quality to someone who just picked it up?
Yes. A thousand hours confers you with a much greater understanding of what it's capable of, its constraints, and how to best take advantage of these.
By comparison, consider photography: it is ostensibly only a few controls and a button, but getting quality results requires the user to understand the language of the medium.
> What the pro generative AI crowd doesn't seem to understand is that good art is not about _execution_ it's about _making deliberate choices_. While a master painter or guitarist may indeed pull off incredible technical feats, their execution is not the art in and of itself, it is widening the amount of choices they can make.
This is often not true, as evidenced by the pre-existing fields of generative art and evolutionary art. It's also a pretty reductive definition of art: viewers can often find art in something with no intentional artistry behind it.
> I've never met anyone who has spent significant time creating art react to generative AI as anything more than a toy.
It's a big world out there, and you haven't met everyone ;) Just this last week, I went to two art exhibitions in Paris that involved generative AI as part of the artwork; here's one of the pieces: https://www.muhka.be/en/exhibitions/agnieszka-polska-flowers...
We were told that what we were doing didn't require as much skill as whatever the previous generation were doing to sample music and make new tracks. In hindsight, of course you find it easy to cite the prominent successes that you know from the generation. That's arguing from survivorship bias and availability bias.
But those successes were never the point: the publishers and artists were pissed off at the tens of thousands of teenagers remixing stuff for their own enjoyment and forming small yet numerous communities and subcultures globally over the net. Many of us never became famous so you can cite our fame as proof of skill but we made money hosting parties at the local raves with beats we remixed together ad hoc and that others enjoyed.
> The artists creating those projects clearly have hundreds if not thousands of hours of practice differentiating them from someone who just started pasting MP3s together in a DAW yesterday.
But they all began as I did, by being someone who "just started pasting MP3s together" in my bedroom. Darude, Skrillex, Burial, and all the others simply kept doing it longer than those who decided they had to get an office job instead.
The teenagers today are in exactly the same position, except with vastly more powerful tools and the entire corpus of human creativity free to download, whether in the public domain or not.
I guess in response to your "required skill and talent", I'm saying that skill is something that's developed within the context of the technology a generation has available. But it is always developed, then viewed as such in hindsight.
> If this is "just another tool" then my question is: does the output of someone who has used this tool for one thousand hours display a meaningful difference in quality to someone who just picked it up?
Yes, absolutely. Not necessarily in apparent execution without knowledge of intent (though, often, there, too), but in the scope of meaningful choices that fhey can make and reflect with the tools, yes.
This is probably even more pronounced with use of open models than the exclusively hosted ones, because more choices and controls are exposed to the user (with the right toolchain) than with most exclusively-hosted models.
They already do that. 90% of cheerful top comments on some channels are clearly generated. They never mention content (yet) and are abstract as hell. “Very useful video, thanks”, “I’m watching this every day, love the content” and so on. It’s unclear if they have a real view count either, at least in promotion phase.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26QHXElgrl8
https://x.com/surri01/status/1867433782992879617