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Comment by jesucresta | Hacker News Reader

This is 100% AI slop, cool story and all but I'd 100 times rather see a very poorly drawn 2007 animation than any of this.

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Tbf, the original is also slop (albeit of the pre-AI variety)

no is not, the original is full of personality and ideas even if its poorly drawn and kitsch.

Yes, but also literally AI slop. Stock characters auto-puppeted to a text script with text-to-voice run across it. The artist's input was writing the text and signing off on the final auto-generated product. The reason the two characters in the video are weird superheroes is those were the available stock characters in the XtraNormal.com service he used.

After all, the creator didn't want to be an professinal full-time animator, he just wanted to animate three minutes.

It is only "literally AI slop" if you widen the definition to include anything made using computers. That is not an honest take on what content made with AI is.

The original author chose those assets and that background, other people made those assets on the first place and had to take a ton of tiny creative choices that changed the final thing and help transmit ideas and feelings (of uncanniness, vulgarity, surrealism, whatever).

Anyone can tell the difference between one and the other.

Text to speech in the 2000s would be considered AI

The things we called AI back then weren't AI. The things we call AI now aren't AI either. The definition remains wide.

Sounds like Humpty-Dumpty.

> Yes, but also literally AI slop. Stock characters auto-puppeted to a text script with text-to-voice run across it.

Maybe I'm wrong but I would say that the slop feeling of the original version was a deliberate decision and part of its charm. That kind of video and voices were a meme back then, IIRC.

As is the slop feeling of the current, no doubt. I don't think that changes it being "slop" in the sense of low-effort and mostly generated by machine learning (rather than hand-edited like a machinima)

If the tech stack used to make that video makes it "AI slop" then every video game cutscene is AI slop.

Most videogame cutscenes (well, for AAA games; I'm going to ignore the wide, worthy, and growing ecosystem of "I had an idea and made it in Unity with purchased assets") use bespoke model and texture assets, motion-capture human animation, and voice acting.

None of that is what an Xtranormal auto-puppet show is about.

Motion capture in bigger budget games only started to become common around the Xbox 360/PS3 generation. Go back to prior generations and it was a lot of "2 models facing each other and their mouths wiggle up and down while audio files play"

Pretty much exactly what you see in that video.

The difference being that someone actually had to record said audiofiles, and animate the mouths wiggling. The "slop"-ness is defined by the inputs, not the outputs.

video game cutscenes usually involve real artists designing and animating the characters, not just using preset stock characters

Xtranormal was slop, you just plugged in a script and chose premade character models

Oh we’re at this stage of AI huh :)

“No it was always slop!!!! Nyeh!”

Feeding text into a machine-learning based app that creates low-effort audio and visuals? Yeah, that's always been slop. I don't use "slop" in a particularly negative sense here, it is what it is

It’s an intriguing use of the word I’ll admit — I think it’s a bit of a loaded term atm though. Overwhelmingly negative, anecdotally.

> Overwhelmingly negative, anecdotally

I don't think it is, actually? "Friend-slop" is a super-popular genre of video game right now (for example, indie smash-hit PEAK), typically characterised by low-friction co-op experiences with a low-fi and/or kit-bashed aesthetic

The games are the popular, but I do not think that term to describe them is that well-used nor used with that much affection :)

It’s requires a good base group of friends that you will have fun with already, and the design for the game is “slop” / cheap / lazy in that regard. But not necessarily bad.

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