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Comment by solomonb | Hacker News Reader

There are a bunch of these scifi world building short video channels now. IMO they all seem really creative initially but rapidly lose their luster and become repetitive.

Sora makes the hard parts easy and the easy parts hard. I don't think any of these content producers will be remembered in the future. :/

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Years and years ago I became friends with someone who has started a series of companies and created at least one game with each of them (Web, mobile, mobile, crypto, web again). While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution. His ideas are great, in my opinion, though perhaps not unique. However, each success or failure, has come down to the execution. A couple of projects ran out of funding (Didn't execute fast enough). One was a flash game around the same time Apple stuck a knife in Flash, bad timing. Another was backed by a major publisher and was largely a success and the company was sold after 2 proven products shipped.

AI "democratizing" creativity is the biggest crock of lies. Everyone has ideas. Even people who aren't typically thought of as "creative". Ask anyone who watched the last season of Game of Thrones if they thought it could be better and I bet most of them will have "ideas" for how to make it better. Hell, the show runners had IDEAS. But the execution of season 8 was awful, and execution is where an "idea guy" becomes someone who created a product/story worth remembering.

LLMs remove the execution process, which is why they are so attractive to everyone who has ever had an idea and why they are abhorrent to nearly everyone who has ever executed on an idea. Lots of people thin execution is just busy work, but execution is also a major component of being creative.

Creativity is a series of small decisions over the course of the entire execution. To write a poem is not to have it fully-formed in your head. You go down and edit and see what turns up and what new interesting ideas come out of that.

I'm very sympathetic to this view, and it would be a nice counter to claims of AI creativity, but I'm not convinced this is the only way creativity can express itself. There are examples of strokes of genius, hence the term.

I suppose you could say such strokes of genius are the outcomes of a lifetime of creative work but that seems different from your example of editing a poem.

Strokes of genius could be considered the "exception that proves the rule".

We are operating deep in the grey area here so I suppose that case could be made. Personally, I see creativity as more of a life long process which can express itself in a multitude of ways including strokes of genius and the daily iterative grind. I don't think any creative act occurs in a vacuum but I also think that there are moments where big things occur.

AI, as it stands, does not have a lifespan over which for creativity to occur.

Oh, this is an excellent way to phrase it. Thank you!

>While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution.

It's even trickier: execution is irrelevant too (if that means great execution, a polished well executed product). What matters is a works-well-enough for adoption product, plus luck, connections, funding (to continue existing and undercutting), marketing, and things like that.

This is all true. It is amazing to me how many people don't want to acknowledge how much luck or connections play in the success of large brand names.

The problem runs deeper: AI doesn't just remove execution, it replaces it with probabilistic averaging. Mastery of execution in film or code consists of thousands of micro-decisions, like light a bit to the left or pause a bit longer. Current diffusion models make these thousands of decisions for you based on what usually looks good. Democratization won't happen when the Make it Beautiful button works, but when we have tools to control these thousands of micro-decisions without needing to learn to draw pixels by hand. Right now we have randomization, not democratization

More than half of my YouTube subscriptions are channels that once posted neat stuff and stopped - and most of them are from years ago. And before that i was into webcomics back when they were a popular online trend, i was following the updates of several of them and most of them have disappeared these days (and i don't even remember their names).

People stop doing things all the time, i'm not sure that means much.

what does any of that have to do with my comment?

>> they all seem really creative initially but rapidly lose their luster and become repetitive.

Yeah, exactly that :-)

Did you really interpret my statement as "AI content producers are being so creative and then quitting posting"?

I'm not talking about people posting good content and then stopping posting.

I guess its fair to say that "become repetitive" was unclear, what I should have said was "reveals itself to be repetitive."

I'm saying that these AI generated world building channels produce lots of content that looks creative and exciting at first but over time reveals itself to be repetitive and lacking in creativity.

The parent's argument regains relevance if we change "stopped posting" to "stopped posting good stuff and started posting repeatitive shit" though.

Human youtube channels do that all the time.

Both are responses to a miss-interpretation of my original comment (which I will grant is at least in part my fault).

But your argument could be made against anything novel. You love the first 3 seasons of Chopped or Hell’s Kitchen but eventually you figure out the repetitive story arc, you know how each show will unfold halfway through, same kinds on conflict, etc… the show either becomes background while folding clothes or you stop watching entirely. The novelty wears off-for better or worse.

I mean look at house hunters international. Every segment is the sssme. “I need an extra room for overseas family, I want to live by the beach, I need a roof deck but I teach ESL to blind monks and children. My budget is $400”. And then they’ll have some silly hang up about the reliability of elevators in general or maybe they absolutely can’t get over the east facing window. It’s 100% formulatic yet perfect as background.

I dunno where I’m going with this but those AI videos you say you liked… the novelty wore off.

> But your argument could be made against anything novel.

What matters IMO is the lack substance not the quantity of novelty. Your chosen television show examples demonstrate that pretty well IMO.

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