Hacker News Reader

Comment by clvx | Hacker News Reader

Off topic but some day you could live off grid with your own solar fusion mini reactor powering your own hardware that enables creating your own stories, movies and tales. No more need of streaming services. Internet would be to obtain news, goods and buy greatest and latest (or not) data to update your models. Decentralization could be for once not as painful as it is now; however, I still believe every single hardware vendor would try to hook to the internet and make you install an app. Looking forward to this AI revolution for sure.

View on HN

To me, this feels like a very dystopian take. I watch movies, read books, and listen to music because they are a way to connect with fellow human beings. Taking the human out of the equation also removes any meaning for me.

I get that this is kind of a fundamental line in the sand for most of the "AI art" going around, and it seems like most people fall on one side or the other. "I consume art for entertainment" vs "I interact with art to experience the human condition".

I also don't want to say that AI Art has no value, because I think as a tool to help artists realize their vision it can be very useful! I just don't think that art entirely made by AI is interesting.

Surely if you’ve watched an amazing show you’re likely to share it with a friend, no? I see this bringing likeminded people together in tight, niche communities.

I'm not. The likelihood that such movies (for example) would have anything significant to say about being human seems very low.

If one watches movies, reads books, etc. just to pass the time, maybe this would be some kind of boon. But for those of us looking for meaningful commentary on life, looking to connect with other human beings, this would be some circle of hell. It's some kind of solipsism.

95% of television and movies, to me, are completely uninteresting and not worth watching. the property of being human-made has a pretty low success rate for basically anyone

I wouldn't be so sure. AI can ingest far more information about humans than a human ever could. It has read our stories and understands our languages. AI might have more to say about humans than we do ourselves.

Of course AI can never truly experience being human, it has no emotions, but it is excellent at mimicry and it can certainly provide a meaningful outside perspective.

Is there anything to say about humanity that is not in the training corpus already?

Every new novel of any merit shows that there is. And the world keeps changing. The experience of being human keeps changing.

Nothing AI has yet done has demonstrated anything at the level of art or mastery. I guess I'm unconvinced that throwing a million stories into the blender and synthesizing is going to produce a compelling one.

Maybe people with good story literacy and cultural comprehension will be able to tell the difference for much longer, maybe even indefinitely. But the majority of people, and I dread that includes me, won't, at some point. I've already fallen for some AI generated music and thought "hey, that sounds pretty good, I'll bookmark it". It's genuinely scary.

That doesn't follow at all. If I come up with a meaningful story and use AI to generate clips and stich them together to tell it, that's real art.

If you disagree with that, you're basically saying La Jetee isn't art, which would be a hard sell.

I don't have anything against stitching together clips to tell your story, but I'm unconvinced that these demonstrate anything like that. As I said in another comment, it seems like you'd need to write a screenplay PLUS all the information the director, cinematographer, etc. use to create an actual movie -- everything from direction for how actors portray scenes to decisions on exactly how shots are constructed, to blocking for multiple actors in a scene, to color schemes...

There are a LOT of choices in making a movie, and if you just let the AI make them, you are getting "random" (uncontrolled) choices. I don't think that is going to compare favorably to the real thing.

If you can specify all that, then it's just a tool. Cool. But it's still going to take pro-level skills to use it.

If La Jetee was just some photos stitched together plus meaningful narration, then of course, you could use AI-generated photos.

But would AI be able to quote Vertigo, like La Jetee does? Doesn't art, at least to some degree, require intent (including all intentional subversions of that intent dogma, of course)?

They used to say that the Internet would make people smarter and more knowledgeable.

That prediction became true for like 5% of the population, everyone else is probably stupider than they were before, thanks to social media.

Similarly, I think your prediction will apply to a small subset of humanity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com