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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I'm comparing HN attitudes. People dismiss AI as if it were crypto.

> that led to absolutely nothing.

This is the part most of you are completely blind to. It's astonishing to me that you don't see the step function changes happening. I guess that means less competition, though.

By the end of the year, anyone will be able to make brand new Taylor Swift music that sounds good. The average child will be able to animate short films.

This is insane. Both the fact that sci-fi possibilities are tangibly right ahead of us, and the fact that so many people are dismissing it outright.

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You know you can make Taylor Swift music you know? Youtube has plenty of tutorials and the web has plenty of DAWs you can use that require no training that you cannot get on the internet. The sounds "good" bit has nothing to do with technology imo. If you have no skill, you won't be able to make good sounding Taylor Swift music but you will be able to make another entity make it for you. You don't need AI for this. You could contract the services of someone to do it, you could ask the Switfies communities to do it. You don't need AI for this.

The only difference is that you will now be able to press a button and have something that resembles Swift music but I highly doubt you will be able to steer the output through the multidimensional output space towards something that falls within "good sounding Swift music* if you yourself have zero musical knowledge. You could still end up there randomly though. But what are the chances? Fairly low, I would say.

Short films is the same.

You are looking at music and films the same way a random biz manager looks at programmers when he says "I will give you a magical glove that enables you to type faster so you can complete your work much faster".

What I think this tech will be good at is prototyping for people that already have the skills or knowledge of what the final product should look like

The problem is that while those things might be true, their impact might be quite limited. Will all the kids do their own short films? Will people stop listening to Taylor Swift?

More "trinkets and gadgets" is a continuation of the last decade, the real question is if things remain incremental (maybe up to a percent more GDP growth) or become truly transformational. Claims to the later do invite scrutiny.

> By the end of the year, anyone will be able to make brand new Taylor Swift music that sounds good. The average child will be able to animate short films.

But will I be able to listen to that music and watch those films in my fully autonomous vehicle which will be available in 2016... I mean 2020... I mean 2025... I mean 2040?

> But will I be able to listen to that music and watch those films in my fully autonomous vehicle which will be available in 2016... I mean 2020... I mean 2025... I mean 2040?

Despite Waymo's current state, I don't think autonomous cars will be solved or deployed widely anytime soon.

I do think Hollywood is about to be toast. Movies, music, games (non-engine, non-gameplay aspects), narrative fiction, etc.

These techniques will impact different fields in different ways. Some will be outright washed over and remade entirely.

You're missing the point of comparison -- fully autonomous vehicles have been a year away for 15 years now. Much like generative AI will be a year away from making artists obsolete for the next 15 years.

Forget replacing Hollywood and the game industry. Show me one hit movie or game that was generated by AI. Show me a hit song that was generated by AI. Show me a widely beloved novel, or even a short story, that was written by an LLM. A single one! Don't tell me the entire industry is going to die off at some indeterminate point in the future if you can't show a single example!

> Show me a hit song that was generated by AI.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/arts/music/ai-drake-the-w...

AI Hub had half a million people in it creating music before the RIAA got it taken down.

https://torrentfreak.com/popular-ai-hub-discord-taken-down-f...

> Show me one hit movie or game that was generated by AI.

This is just getting started. The early results are getting serious attention.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-8DT5Q8kzI

https://twitter.com/pika_labs/status/1729510078959497562

Camera and scene controllability is almost here. Temporal stability and the uncanniness are being solved.

Indie game developers have been incorporating AI assets (art, vocals, textures, sprites) in their games for over a year already:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/wtpgqo/anyone_usin...

The "AI" Drake/The Weeknd song was not created by AI -- it used AI voice synthesis to recreate Drake/The Weeknd's vocals on top of a human-created song. If you're considering that to be AI-generated, I would point you to the many songs using vocals by Hatsune Miku which have been made for the past 15+ years to say that this is nothing new.

The rest of the stuff you've created is meme content, which while funny, is not a serious threat to Hollywood.

Think about what you're asking for.

Until GenAI is good enough, there will be zero examples.

But the moment it becomes good enough, it's game over for everyone in that field of work — at current gpt-4-1106-preview prices, it's cheaper to generate a complete new novel from scratch than to buy a single copy of a paperback in a closing-down sale.

There's no intermediate state where the AI and the humans are both competitive on the marketplace, just an adjustment period where businesses and employees don't yet realise they're redundant. And an endless tide of mediocrity overwhelming the publishers until then because the cost of creation is so low.

And that transition… is kinda already happening with image generation, where the AI temporarily wins awards until the awarding body decides AI aren't allowed to.

The impression I have is that artists who like their role turning into "editor" seem to be fine with this, the ones who actually enjoyed coming up with novel art from scratch seem to resent it.

(It's entirely possible it will take ages to get good enough in other domains, but the evidence you're asking for will only come when it's too late to matter).

> But the moment it becomes good enough, it's game over for everyone in that field of work

HN really fails to see this. The writing is on the wall. But HN keeps writing about their techno utopia fantasies very reminiscent of the comic strip about the nerd who thought that having a super strong encryption would somehow keep his data totally safe (hint: it didn't). The reality is likely to be that most people will be unemployed and then re-employed into low-value min-wage soul-destroying dead-end jobs while all the profits from AI will go towards the people who financed the very development of AI and then used dirty tactics to destroy small companies from the market (see AI 1%rs).

What you fear is certainly a possibility.

There was a story a while back about a society where ever more jobs are done by AI, eventually including the police. In such a situation (and in the story) it would be cheap enough to keep all the unemployed people housed and fed with all that automation; in the story the people have no freedom, the robots keep them from going too far from their free apartment. That could totally happen, even in our various current governments in the real world, leaders can be very divorced from the lives of those at the bottom — "let them eat cake" may not have really come from Marie Antoinette, but the cliché exists for a reason.

I didn't like the twist for the final chapter where the lead character was rescued by a Deus Ex Machina in the form of winning a surprise two-person ticket to a fully automated UBI trust fund based in Australia, but my problem was with the tonal shift of the story rather than plausibility given the prior world building. Likewise in reality, while the cliché "a rising tide lifts all boats" is often wrong because of the metaphorical equivalent of many not being maintained in a seaworthy state, technological advances do change the lives of even the poorest. My 18 month old iPhone SE can run some Stable Diffusion models locally, in addition to being a near-real-time audio and visual translator, a route finder, and having some limited healthcare functions. The wealth will concentrate unless governments take special care to prevent that, but it takes active malice (which can and does happen) to prevent many of the benefits from reaching even the worst-off.

The twist was there to show an alternative future to the techno-dystopia. I think the author now believes that we’re merely waiting for the latent effects of climate change to destroy civilization, so I doubt he’s worried about an AI takeover these days.

> anyone will be able to make a brand new Taylor Swift

I was with you until this. I think music is actually informative for what we can expect in visual arts and generative models generally; synths, drum machines, and music production equipment and software share very similar qualities with this new stuff, yet we still have rockstars like Swift.

Vocals are solved [1] and the workflows are getting better and better [2].

AI influencers and celebs are getting big [3], not to mention VTubers such as CodeMiko [4] and Hololive [5] are huge and increasingly AI-powered.

People are absolutely willing to be addicted to following virtual personalities and artists. Gorillaz predate all of this AI stuff and they're pretty big.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K__IR3J58zU&list=PLRQ_sm_IcX...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc3h9iKYKDs (dated by now, but shows the direction)

[3] https://www.thestar.com/business/technology/these-people-do-...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IV7TBFTNl4

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hololive_Production

I know of all that, hell I was listening to Plastic Beach when it came out. My point is that EDM and modern Pop coexist with older forms of music. I don't think new ways of creating art are zero-sum, they create new demand.

Taylor Swift is a personality, not a musical genius.

But we don't need more Taylor Swift music. We especially don't need more "I can't believe it's not Taylor Swift" music which is more realistically what the AIs will get you.

If you could make (metaphorically) more Taylor Swifts that might be interesting. But it doesn't do that.

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