$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol
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A talented creative with a vision could make something more interesting and enjoyable in an afternoon with a $0 budget.
Spike Jonze had so many creative ones
Can be art and creative, just like the music.
No, a movie based upon a book is the same art just told in a different way, but I'm not buying that rappers driving luxury cars while rapping and having women in stripper heels tells the same musical artistic story in a different way. Or some random story.
Lol ok that's where you're coming from. Reducing music videos to gangster rap shite is basically the equivalent of "all movies suck because I've ever only seen Hollywood superhero movies".
Yes, they definitely are. I mean not all, but they can be. Just like cover photos on an LP or the music itself.
It might not do anything to you, but it's definitely art that can compliment the video. Might make it worse, might make it better. Might change the feeling.
While "The Blaze - TERRITORY" is already a beautiful song to me, its music video[1] Always brings a tear to my eye.
That said, music Videos, like many songs themselves, are not rarely meaningless and bland. I guess that is just the result of commercial music.
I really wish he hadn't been such a luddite, it would have been great if we had some Smiths music videos that were actually made in the 80s. (OK, we did get one, "Stop Me if You Think That You've Heard This One Before.")
You just described 90% of todays music videos made by humans.
This is actually mostly down to constraints: even if you suck you will suck in some coherent consistent way that will give your music videos more structure than this mess.
Those videos are just nihilistic despair.
Maybe there are some nooks and crannies where this tech can be employed and actually save time/budget. Maybe. But what does not work is to just take the output and use it. There is nowhere near enough precision there.
If you think you can be "specific" enough for AI to match your "creative vision", then maybe you're not really creative.
I have no objection to the potential vision you espouse, I have zero love for the actual ground level reality of the tsunami of AI slop videos being pumped out ATM - many are skewed toward trust building in a probable long con game of deceit or nation swaying, others are just ick.
An app is still useful even when it's cheap for anyone to make it. But art that anyone can make for cheap becomes, by definition, slop.
eg. "scene 32, same 2 characters from the previous scene, now dressed in the garb of Egyption middle kingdom high priests, though with cat faces, dancing on the back of an elephant that is running fast with blurred feet on the surface of a river with licks of water that burst from the water in time with the music that I gave you before, length of song for this clip 2:21 to 2:31"
Your mind is your limit. AI is a tool. If you tell it "create me a music video for this song set in egypt" then it may turn out AI sloppy.
Art has nothing to do with _mechanical_ difficulty. I see this misconception all the time. Examples
- Kumail Nanjiani roided up for his next movie. This has mechanical difficulty, sure. But what does it add to the artistic element?
- Dream Theatre guitarists play olympics with their guitar and play solo's that are mechanically impossible for normal people. Yet we still find Beatles have more artistic value, why?
I hope this popular misconception will die down. I don't want mechanical difficulty in art being praised. I feel these are things people hold on to because mechanical difficulty has some moat and people don't want to give it up.
However, consider works like photorealistic drawings of eyes (usually at a very large scale). A lot of people like these, and consider them to be fine art, while others (art critics?) consider them bland. Contrast that with a Picasso flamingo drawn with a single line.
There is artistic value in high-effort, low concept works as well as low-'effort', high-concept works and other combinations. Perhaps what we are all looking for is effort of some kind (I prefer human effort) whether that is conceptual effort or practice in drawing lines on paper.
Both are pushing boundaries in mechanical dexterity. Yet one is considered art and another is not.
Others have said this better, but art is an qualitative/emotional thing, not a simply measurable quantity of an object. We tend to use the effort put in as a proxy measure for quality, but when photocopiers and 3D printers and - yes - genAI get involved, that becomes harder or impossible.
Beating Guitar Hero is emotional, but not artistic. Photorealistic drawings could be emotional, and may or may not be artistic. Putting a text prompt into a generative model to make a (frankly terrible) music video for $100 is ... something else.
Beating Guitar Hero could artistic. I don't even know how, but I'm sure some artist could beat Guitar Hero in a way that was somehow artistic.
This terrible $100 music video which I'm not even going to watch, is surely not art. Also I'm totally sure some person is going to spend $100 with an AI and make art. It's very hard, but they day will come. The slop-to-art ratio will be astronomical.
Most people find it more impressive if you learn to play Dream theater song on guitar than if you program it in daw.
Okay, clanker
If there's a way to do something better and worse, then one can absolutely talk about added and absent value. I browse AI generated images a ton, and the difference between beginner / low effort submissions and high effort / advanced submissions is very stark.
That's not art, that's the limitations that everyone working in this industry have been working night and day to overcome for hundreds of years
I would love to get around the "individual skill" part, but all of my artist friends would excommunicate me if they knew the AI projects I've been working on, let alone if I asked them to collaborate.
Art is (often) provocative, uncomfortable, taboo, explicit, subversive, or challenging of norms. You're never going to get that out of increasingly locked-down and Disney-fied BigTech hosted LLMs obsessed with "AI safety."
Because I can assure you that much of what I've gen'd checks those boxes (unless Sorry To Bother You's third-act twist no longer unsettles).
I would love to see examples if anyone has any. I saw a few things on r/AIVideos that I sort of liked, but I wouldn't go as far as to call them quality art.
He (they?) have a vision, and are trying to get it on the screen via AI tools. I don't think the tools are quite there yet, so I wouldn't call it "quality art", but I think it shows the direction of travel, and it shows somebody trying to use those tools to say something (ironically, the message is that the tools are kinda bad news).
I'm reminded of the tipping point when a generation of bedroom producers got tools "good enough" that they didn't need studio time any more. We got some creative music and a lot of slop out of that change. But hey, 80% of everything is crap, so it shouldn't be a surprise.
But I do think it's a harbinger of things to come: bedroom auteurs with new tools (although they'll be surfing an absolute tidal wave of slop). The tools are going to get better; early synthesizers were pretty primitive.
You probably won't be impressed and these are legendary figures in experimental film making either.
There is no audience or market for what these tools would be good for.
These videos in the examples are laughable uncreative trash to me but so are big budget super hero human slop.
The main constraint with AI art is that I think the models have been overfit to a very narrow range of visual expression. Midjourney in 2023 could produce the absolute most fucked up images I have ever seen and I have seen a lot of fucked up visual art. That has all been washed out of the model at this point towards a statistical average of what people think is "beautiful".
Also no nudity allowed. What we have is nothing like a model trained to output the sensibility of Hieronymus Bosch or Francis Bacon with nudity. We have literally the opposite of that.
It is the difference between an artist and a "creative". These models are for "creatives", the conformist corporate bullshit version of the artist.
Instead of Hieronymus Bosch we have the statistical average infinite pretty portraits of the virgin mary because we are good people and good corporate citizens.
The point of art isn't "I made it pretty so it has value now", it's "This is how I see the world, am I the only one who feels this way?".
And yes, this is valid even for absolute jerks who couldn't care less about that the other people were thinking at the time, Like Lou Reed for example. The questions in his music were rhetorical and directed at himself in that case. Unfortunately, as Pablo Picasso said, for this computers (or AIs, in this case) are useless. They can only give you answers.
AI doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's the sum of training, inputs and outputs. If I give it novel inputs, the outputs won't be solely within the limits of their training. If I use it as part of a pipeline, the end result of the pipeline too won't be forced within the limits of AI training.
Look up "The Chronicles of Bone". It's pretty good.
I think it's pointless dribble. There's no punchline that it's working towards other than "pigeon dumb"
I think right now most people here and on twitter have no taste, and post slop that were just sort of one shotted.
But there are people using these tools in a sort of hybrid way, which I think has incredible potential. You can use it to do CGI on existing footage, in a way that's orders of magnitudes faster and cheaper than current CGI methods.
I also think that the most viable models will be video-to-video, and audio-to-audio.
If you've read A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, I think you might get what I'm saying. But essentially, you can capture a lot of emotion, expression, etc, using a cheap camera and a single actor, and then use AI to "stylize" it in a really cheap effective way, while keeping the emotion/expression. Adding lighting for example, upscaling the quality, changing the voice timbre while keeping the pacing, etc.
> Your mind is your limit. AI is a tool.
Then the companies should start talking about them the same way as they talk about tools. Because when they are pushing for artists replacement by AI, they are not talking about tools. They are trying to make AI into a person while very intentionally devaluing things people actually like.
> a creative person with a vision that would usually required $1 million budget, could create such a video using AI by being very specific in what they require which would not be a " grey goo of the average of every concept "
How many $1 million budget music videos you look at? The sold vision of AI is to not be the tool you are talking about here. Yes, there is an alternative reality where these companies tried to make tools for artists, but it is not a reality we live in.
If you can't afford a video then don't make one. A slop video for $100 will devalue your entire brand. People will question your music.
There's a lot more value in just cutting some live performance videos together cheaply.
No need to even be so detailed: "Make this an ancient egypt theme" would probably work.
My point being there's a lot more complexity in not producing slop than it seems.
A fake Gauguin painting and a real one can be almost indistinguishable to the human eye. But only one is worth the big bucks. Everyone scoffs at the other (once told which is real and which is fake). Something similar might happen to AI where the requirement to disclose it becomes a signal that the creator has cheapened out
Edit: oh I remembered another, The Blaze said their first music video cost them $100 to make: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UivZrL2znh0 and their follow up didn't cost a whole lot more they've also been on record saying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fea7wuV6s
AI is obviously very useful, but perhaps not in the way people think. Two aspects I would like to see improved are instruction following and providing relevant feedback.
All right, but that's what an average entertainment product looks like. All these new TV shows have exactly the same look and feel about them. The same actors playing the same roles over and over again.
People keep comparing AI to some kind of once in a lifetime genius instead of an average person in the field.
andor is exceptional
Although I guess we should probably update it to "99% of everything is slop.
It works... but once you actually start looking at the details there are so many small cases that need fixing.
Now, if you had someone with experience in editing, and they worked as a team, human + agent, then most of the small issues would be picked up and fixed during development.
I think you are right if the codebase has no tests.
Thats the thing about producing art. Its subjectively consumed. Is it good or bad? You can’t really verify that during generation.
You largely can with code.
It has more artistic value than most modern art.
AI is good at a lot of things, but it genuinely sucks at anything that requires real creativity. The human at the heart of a creative endeavor can't be replaced, and I hope that never changes.
How much would it take for me to create videos like this? I'm guessing 1-4 years calendar time practicing half an hour every day just to break my lack of talent. Immeasurable cost given how there's no way in hell I'm going to invest that kind of time for a skill I don't actually want to acquire.
Somebody who's actually competent and talented is going to make some pretty amazing stuff cheaply with something like this, and the technology is nowhere near its peak yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A_tSyJBsRQ
My point is, anyone can make a music video on any budget or level of talent. And camcorder silliness is more artistic and entertaining than AI generated stuff any day of the week.
https://www.youtube.com/@DementedVinyl
But I have never cared about a video when it comes to music.
'Sabotage' by the Beastie Boys (Spike Jones), 'Hunter' by Bjork (Paul White), 'Praise You' by Fatboy Slim (also Spike Jones), ... er Billie Eilish 'When The Party's Over', Apex Twin's Windowlicker (Chris Cunningam). There are so many great music videos that are more than just the song.
Of course, some are just the artist singing in front of a greenscreen, and that's fine I suppose. Still, they are fundamentally different to an excellent music video.
If you like the music, you probably want to feel some connection to the people making that music.
It doesn't matter what it "can" make when what it does make is 99.999% boomer certified slop
But really, nobody said "only" it's just that the gems are drowning alongside us in a sea of bullshit and the tide is still on the way up I'm afraid.
Why? What's its value? I personally wouldn't watch a video/movie/show that's entirely clanker generated, I see no point in it.
All AI fanatics can talk about is cost, productivity, money, efficiency, ... no wonder they can't understand art or even basic human emotions
That's an incredibly myopic way of thinking about other people. Sort of ironic when you imply that you're better at "basic human emotions".
If the input was a few sentences, an hour of waiting, and $50, why should I value the result any more highly than Excavatorhenge?
Only if you are really sloppy with your book keeping.
Obviously, there will be some who use AI to great artistic effect, but I'm really worried about the discoverability of actually interesting stuff, whether it uses AI or not. Everything will be swamped by the automated goo of mediocrity that will vastly dominate in volume.
My perhaps naive hope is that this pushes people back toward offline and local communities, as well as toward more physical art instead of even more consumerism.
That said, for my taste, his works, while visually beautiful and interesting, feel a bit collage-y and lacking in emotion. The over the top visuals distract from a lack of depth. Sound design is very meh.
As I said, I think there are and will be many artists using AI in great and novel ways. It’s just that so far I have seen many more grifters than artists.
I’m not yet convinced that AI will bring us the next Masamune Shirow, Katsuhiro Otomo, Moebius, H.R. Giger, or Syd Mead in terms of lasting stylistic impact on the genre without them having to learn some actual skills, rather than just being an “idea person"
I wonder what would happen in a study where some art is critiqued by one group that is informed that the art was created by AI and another group that is uninformed.
What do they think of the constant repetition of slow panning shows where barely anything is happening, or a guy spinning on the floor but his head morphs into his feet and his feet morph into his head, or a person kissing a mirror that isn't quite mirroring the person and it slowly becomes a person kissing what appears to be their identical twin standing on the other side a floating empty mirror frame?
I should hope that a "talented" creative "with a vision" could, do better, yes. But now a talentless hack devoid of vision can do something half decent too. And if you don't think this is half decent, just replace "now" with "soon".
How do you define “a better place”?
Seriously, the nudge for artistic value can be made, although I would very much doubt a creative human making a video for an established song with a clear theme would do better in creativity. Perhaps the one advantage a human would have is to reject the expectations for such a tasks, which the AI is trained to fulfil.
The problem isn't that such content lacks artistic value. It is that it is enough for the broadest audience. The average consumer is basically a vacuum cleaner.
Yeah, this has been the hardest pill to swallow, as a creative and person that enjoys art. They know it's all least-common-denominator bullshit and they like it anyway. A lot of people truly just don't care about the meaning or any message in the art, they just like explosions and pretty people.
And that's fine, I guess. There's nothing wrong with it. It just... makes me feel a little empty inside.
I’m really trying not to make a value judgment here—tbh I also care a lot more about artistic integrity (in the arts I’m in a place to understand and judge, anyway) than beef jerky. Just landing on: the mass market is there to satisfy the majority of people that don’t deeply care about the particular slice that the mass market serves, because we’re all mortal and can’t be arsed to refine our tastes and decisions on everything.
see, you keep saying that, but it never comes true. First of all, you suggest that just because progress has been fast up to now, it will continue being fast. I think that's something like Gambler's fallacy. Secondly, the progress we're seeing is not like linear progress to 100%. It continues to get certain things extremely wrong. This might be half decent today for fooling the elderly, but it's not a good look for artistic expression or even marketing for that matter.
And this is the bear case on AI. Sure, if the quality of the output is largely meaningless or binary, e.g. it works or it doesn’t, then AI is useful, but as soon as subjective judgement or taste is involved it is useless.
Even the long video format (I.e movies) are in big trouble due AI because the cheap/junk stuff they produce (I.e Netflix style ) will be easily produced with AI.
Not to mention that people will have the option to no longer subject themselves to the lecturing of various political crap that is being delivered through the big media producers(I.e Netflix)
The media industry is cooked.
Get ready for $100 movie theater tickets, because the cost actual creative work is going to go sky high in the next few years
I suspect movie theaters will just die. Even nowadays, on the occasion I go to see a movie, I damn near gave the entire theater to myself. Given the output from Hollywood is already abysmal, I can’t imagine paying $100 for it even if the alternative is AI slop.
Worth noting that the weird artifacts and morphing transitions that seem to be "free" and perhaps too abundant in AI videos would've probably been impossible or extremely difficult to create otherwise.
"It is pap. It is pabulum." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdEPgB2yizw
Consider Amber Run - Found lyrics versus the video, and the story arc of the video
...
This hit, that ice cold
Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold
This one for them hood girls
...
I just wanna, I just wanna know
If you're gonna, if you're gonna stay
I just gotta, I just gotta know
I can't have it, I can't have it any other way
I swear she's destined for the screen
Closest thing to Michelle Pfeiffer that you've ever seen, oh
...
So "white gold" makes a lot of sense now.
For contrast these have "ice cold" (shot of ice cubes), "got chucks on" (shot of shoes), "livin' it up in the city" (shot of city).
This is what LLM models do.
Once you notice this, it's impossible to not notice it.
If it wasn't a parody of an existing song, and the popular genre, it would be complete garbage. Nothing about the song would work.
> It's funny when the nerd is pointing at the old JS logo and star trek's klingon icon
The lyrics are funny. The video is almost entirely converting each near standalone statement into a very direct scene. "I'm fluent in javascript as well as klingon" is the funny line about his nerdiness, and the video is literally just him pointing to those logos.
Key and Peele locking the car doors is one of the few things that happens that's in the video and not explicitly said in the lyrics.
It's a song about how white people find black culture cool but are themselves stereotypically uncool.
It's a song about nerd culture and celebrating that, wherein a white nerd makes the same kinds of boasts that black rappers do in their music, but about nerd stuff.
It's layered, as any good parody has to be, with cultural references. When Al mows the lawn, he isn't just mowing the lawn because the lyrics say he's mowing the lawn, he's mowing the lawn because that's a sterotype of white people, and the intent is to show how uncool Al is and how unlikely he is to fit into the culture he aspires to. Note that when Key and Peele show up they lock the door on their convertible. This is a joke because their convertible is down and locking it while literally useless is an expression of their frustration with Al's nerdiness, it's also something white people stereotypically do around black people. The candles behind him are arranged like a Pac-Man. Al mentions that his rims don't spin not because the rims of the car in the frame aren't spinning but because he's a nerd and why would a nerd have spinning rims?
In "Amish Paradise" there's a part where Al sweats profusely. This is both a reference to the hard physical labor employed by the Amish and to the original Gangster's Paradise video.
The levels you're missing are irony, cultural awareness and genre awareness. The context is what makes the humor work.
The other things you’re saying are about the song and storytelling there which is not relevant here. We’re talking about the translation from the song and lyrics to a video. The things I’d remembered about the video were very direct translations from the lyrics, because the lyrics are very clear and to the point.
> Al mentions that his rims don't spin not because the rims of the car in the frame aren't spinning but because he's a nerd and why would a nerd have spinning rims?
Right, a thing in the lyrics.
But most people are going to understand the difference between the two and see that argument for the reach that it is.
You don't need to, because I've not done that. This may be why you're reading my comments as obtuse because you think I'm saying something that I am not.
I initially thought you were mixing up a discussion about the lyrics vs creating a music video for a song. However now I'm not sure if you think that Weird Al wrote the lyrics after the video was created?
> If you want to believe that satire and parody only consist of blindly showing things mentioned in the lyrics
The songs are excellent parody, and then things like the music video for white and nerdy is pretty much a series of scenes showing exactly what the lyrics are saying. Almost every shot is explicitly the thing being said.
> Al mentions that his rims don't spin not because the rims of the car in the frame aren't spinning but because he's a nerd and why would a nerd have spinning rims?
The lyrics were written first, explaining that his rims don't spin. This is because he's a nerd. The music video was then created, and at the point this is sung he points to his stationary rims.
If anything, the absurd literalism of the video contrasted so perfectly with the (IMO) brilliant clever originality of the lyrics. E.g. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" is actually a not-so-subtle reference to cocaine. Imagine if the lyrics were as stupidly unoriginal as the video ("Now we're all snorting cocaine!!").
If the music is crazy popular, you can still do it. See Land Down Under
Claude can right great code, but it’ll throw comments into the code about why we chose this approach instead of the random one I discussed with it - when the comment is of no use to a future developer.
It points at some sort of theory of mind problem in LLMs imo.
E.g. this ancient Frank Zappa interview about the decline of the music industry is still as relevant as ever:
They don't have that power yet, but are consistently actively trying to worsen the situation for the last 4 years. They proudly bragged about achieving the bad situation like 2 years ago already.
Until fairly recently "jingles" - ad music - were a huge source of income for many musicians with full time careers. Likewise library music, which was prerecorded with a specific mood so music editors could drop into their projects without having to commission it, and then the composers would be paid for performance royalties/residuals.
Writers - not such a thing now, but in the 60s and 70s a surprising number of "serious" writers in the UK began their careers writing ad copy.
Famous movie directors - many started in the ad slop trenches.
Music videos are literally ads, and it's not a surprise they use many of the same techniques and are directed by ad industry people.
And then in tech there's ad tech...
AI is just the newest arrival to the party.
I was an art major and switched to CompSci purely for the money.
AI "art" is often slop, but the ability to create something in seconds that used to take months shouldn't be taken lightly. There will undoubtedly be truly creative people who will use AI art as a force multiplier instead of a shortcut, and that is when things will get interesting.
We're already seeing this in software; plenty of people can attest to the fact that LLMs give them the opportunity to write software that they couldn't have written without AI, because their ability to write code wasn't up to snuff.
Some use that opportunity to get their existing work done faster.
But some use that opportunity to create things which were beyond their capabilities, just a few years ago. And when that same mindset eventually becomes prevalent among artists, we will undoubtedly see AI "art" that is truly art.
No it won't :-/
What someone carefully prompted and refined over and over over a matter of months can be, the minute it is released, cloned in minutes.
Even being good with AI prompting still results in the product having no value to someone looking for the specific aesthetics.
I worked for 30 years as a pianist. The number of programmers who have told me they too are a musician... No- you aren't. And you never were. That's the thing, if you were a musician, you would be playing music. That would be your job.
I mean as a hobbyist, yes, sure, enjoy splashing paint and calling it art, but spending the tens of thousands of hours to learn what music actually is, no, no, no. You aren't. Would you call yourself an architect if you can draw a picture of a building? No, you aren't.
No artist wants to "create things which were beyond their capabilities" with an AI, they want to develop their capabilities to create things beyond who they are now. Art is about discovering the world, yourself, the strange magic of an ethereal plane, some how reached through vibrations.
I don't know. Reading programmers talk about art, as if they are not dilettantes, is always depressing for me.
Someone who decides, "I'll be a programmer for money," was never an artist. Someone who studies music in college and does admin for some company is not a "musician" and never was. It is the journey in art that makes the artist, not playing a piece.
Unfortunately art is just like that. The amount of time required in devotion to the skill is truly staggering and humbling. And then, it's never enough.
I don't know.
It is possible to make this commitment while working in some unrelated field, but it takes tremendous will-power. Charles Ives is an example I suppose.
You write like the critic from Ratatouille.
Nonsense, frankly. Being an artist is not dependent on monetizing your talent.
There are artists and musicians and photographers, and there are professional musicians and artists and photographers.
What is someone who writes and performs music every day their whole life but bartends to pay their rent, to you? They're not a musician but someone that makes ukulele tracks for corporate training videos is, because the latter does it professionally?
If you are in a band, and you are playing all the time, obviously you are an artist. The job is facilitating you playing. The playing is the focus.
Someone who decides in college, or directly after college, "you know what, I'm just gonna be a programmer." Then touches the piano every once in a while, or plays with his friends every once in a while. I don't call that an artist.
There are so many of these people. They aren't artists. Sorry. Are the smart, probably, are they talented, probably, are they committed, yes to programming.
Well, no, it's very much not obvious, you literally just said "you're not a musician, if you were, it'd be your job" but now it doesn't have to be your job, as long as your job isn't programming?
It's another way of looking at the problem.
Smartphone cameras and easy-to-use professional equipment were thought to destroy the photography profession, yet photographers still exist, although we have to admit not as many as in the past.
If I had a company with a budget, I wouldn't waste my time using Claude to create art, even if it meant I could do all myself.
Certainly people who earned top dollar for doing something that AI can easily do now are going to be displaced, however the world of top dollar business has never been that big for the middle class of artists to begin with.
I guess my point is that there is a decent sized middle class of creative professionals right now, and I expect that the number of them will go down significantly due to AI. Seems like art will become more and more restricted to hobbyists and the lucky few who achieve mainstream success.
This is kind of what happened with photography. But I think the scale is much bigger, affecting all creative industries.
Anyway, I don’t think anything I said was even framed morally (although of course I have my personal opinions). My prediction is just that the amount and average quality of paid creative work is going to massively decline. To me, the scale difference matters a lot (compared to impact of previous tech). I hope I’m wrong.
Maybe the net effect so far has been more extractive and a transfer of wealth to a select few people? Is this how past technological revolutions were, or is this the first so far?
I think the elephant is the room is we hope things will change later - will they really?
Id say it’s definitely possible to get spoiled by high production quality - if I went back to the old Star Trek or even the first seasons of the Doctor Who reboot, I’d mostly have to try to enjoy it for the story (then again, Doctor Who has never been overly concerned with presentation, the most fearsome aliens in the galaxy being metal boxes with plungers sticking out of them is quite silly). Same with most CGI in the older movies or even the style of older anime, it can all be a bit hard to watch.
I guess I also experience the same with video games, though to a lesser degree - some like Hidden & Dangerous 2 can still be enjoyed whereas something like Operation Flashpoint would be quite frustrating, though more often due to controls rather than graphics.
Ehh, they did what they could at the time.
However, you could imagine that maybe with a decade of refinement they'll get better - the existing prompting and composition were okay, it's just that they were plain bad technically. Then again, so was Will Smith eating spaghetti.
Not disagreeing with you that these are unwatchable, but it’s a little rose-tinted to think that (non-AI) slop didn’t exist a long time ago.
All AI-generated content is the result of one or more humans who decided to use AI to create it.
> Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured.
The difference is intent. Watching an old movie, the effects are obviously janky and far from seamless, but the authors had intent and the imperfections are understandable. When an AI jumbles a basic walk animation, it's just weird and soulless. The prompter just didn't want to spend any time doing actual work, so used this slop as a stand-in, when better techniques exists.
The industry haven't matured except until a certain point. Then it declined. Modern visual effects are worse than practical effects in their heyday. They are also worse done than 3D effects in their tasteful early days (like Jurassic Park).
VFX can be more subtle (e.g. how Fincher uses it), but it's rare. The industry (which is separate from the technology) didn't mature, it enabled crappy effects to dominate.
Oh, I hundred percent believe it. But did they spend the money on the vfx?
For example 1917 or Nolan movies I think have great VFX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bRZbsk_wuA (last part)
The music itself is Uptown Funk... which was a very successful song in 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPf0YbXqDm0)
The videos are indeed awful though.
The intent and care is the whole point. It is the difference between slop and art whether generative or not.
This is the current era's version of these hit classics:
- "If you use autotune,you aren't a real singer!"
- "Programming a drum machine isn't really writing percussion!"
- "If you use Photoshop, you can't be a real artist."
- "No real artist would use duct tape as a medium."
- "Video games can't be art."
- "Sampling is just ripping off other people's music."
Art is simply a conversation between the artist and the audience.
The medium, tools, subject, content, or even size of the audience are all just metadata which accompany the art. It will happen with these tools also.
Using AI as part of your workflow? Possibly art. Using it as your entire workflow? Slop, not art.
It really all comes down to the effort and intent of the artist. I use AI tools in the creation of my art, but it would never occur to me to pass off something entirely generated as "my art". The AI tool is just another brush, instrument, or typeface in an assortment of tools I reach for when creating. The AI by itself has no intent. You need a human for that (at least currently). without the human? Yeah, slop like the videos in the OP.
They might do it for free if they enjoy it or for a class, but purely for the money, not even close to being worth their time.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ai-baby-slop-9.7166873
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/us/ai-videos-children-you...
Or for an "Adult" audience, I'm sure you could get an AI to create videos of "OW, My balls!" from Idiocracy.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Dh4l!,f_auto,q_auto:...
https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/D4E22AQEqLntg_DW7vg/fee...
The first two clips are made with Kling (not affiliated, but I use it myself): https://xcancel.com/PJaccetturo/status/2076312902685085815#m
Obviously not one-shot, and finalised in a video editor. It's quite doable to get this kind of fidelity.
Ironically, watching the two shorts had me second-guessing whether what I was watching was actually AI-generated and not created by a professional. It's like peeking at what lies beyond the Overton horizon... only to see it wrap around until we're right back where we started.
Glad they acknowledge this.
Curious how much time in addition to tokens this costs. If you have to spend $25 and wait 45 minutes to get a basically unwatchable video, I'm not worried about indie film makers being replaced just yet...
Then someone comes along and says “I honestly can't really tell how these are worse than the human produced ones. They all sound kinda the same to me” and “I honestly can’t tell a good piece of music from a bad one. I don’t know what makes a piece of music “good”. These AI generated ones seemed pretty good to me, on the same caliber as those Mozart or Beethoven things”.
That’s what you’re doing, and that’s why you’re being downvoted. It’s fine that you can’t tell, but it’s supremely obvious to everyone else.
Like:
> Everyone, including the authors, agrees the result is shit.
> I honestly can't really tell how these are worse than the human produced ones. They all [seem] kinda the same to me
There is not actually a contradiction here.
Acting like some Roman legionary, saying "This slop is good enough for the piggies. not that I, classically trained, could discriminate between the slops either way" is certainly not contradictory, but if it needs to be the kind of discourse defended on here, then please, go right ahead!
I'd assume that it was a bad LLM take, but it looks like the rest of the comments are normal.
You might be able to discuss asthetics from a music theory standpoint because you are "classically trained", again, it is just a weird mismatch that stood out for me recently, but I think everyone is a little more paranoid lately.
This is a fundamental shift in how storytelling is funded and made, not in who does the driving.
Same as is happening with code.
I’m curious (admittedly skeptical) what you mean by this. Are you talking about a world where director’s just like…don’t actually make movies and create AI media?
I don't think you understand my arguments at all.
I don't want people to lose jobs. I don't want the advantages to accrue to a few hyperscalers.
I want there to be more work, more money, more societal progress. For everyone.
AI currently enables experts in their domains (code, film, game design, music) to get the work of small teams done. It is now possible for dedicated, hard-working ICs in several domains to produce extremely good products in a short amount of time without external capital and without studio meddling. This is a good thing.
AI in production has allowed us to salvage bad audio and fix mistakes/not go back for re-shoots or ADR when it’s acceptable. It’s currently a repair/salvage and corner cutting tool. As for video, generative AI is not creating particularly usable stuff and it’s at best useful for short bursts.
If you’re in the commercial game it’s a little more useful - a few seconds of a generic looking kitchen sink and faucet running isn’t a big ask. But also getting quality B-roll isn’t particularly laborious as it is.
It’s great for transcriptions/captioning first passes but we already had great tools for that prior to the ChatGPT era.
It’s not cutting for us, it’s not generating useful shots most of the time and only for a few seconds, it’s not cutting out middlemen. I don’t see what you’re seeing.
Versus:
> It is now possible for dedicated, hard-working ICs in several domains to produce extremely good products in a short amount of time without external capital and without studio meddling
A contradiction exists: lower-capital requirements means less employment all-around and more profit to fewer people.
Just because it’s possible now, doesn’t mean it’s worth doing.
And then the clip was literally just an arm wearing a watch!
That's freaking hilarious!
It's like someone playing charades
OK Go blew up early youtube with Here It Goes again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTAAsCNK7RA .
But these are exceptions to the rule, most people don't have the ability to do much creatively with a shoestring budget.
( Which isn't to say this slop is better. This slop is far worse, it's utterly dreadful. )
I'm sure in a room full of musicians they could come up with more creativity for a video than literally 0, which is what LLMs are currently capable of.
Can AI be used as a tool to help create art? Absolutely. But as a rule, I do not give any shits about AI generated content like this. It’s not art. It’s not human. And the line is really how much meaning and effort _a human_ is putting into it.
If a human spends a minute or two prompting AI and then tweaking The result, and peddling it as their own art… get outta here. You made some content. That’s easy, and no one should cares. Content can already be shoveled out faster than we can watch it with or without AI.
Meaningful art is not mass-produced, generated content.
I realize art is completely subjective, so some person may find meaning in AI generated art. That’s fine, and that’s part of what could make that art. (Like an original way of presenting something that really resonates with someone.)
But this garbage ain’t that.
And I realize this is just a capability test, but plenty of places will see this as cheap and good enough. But it ain’t art, and we should push back against another cost-cutting measure that does nothing to make the world better.
And, yes, most photography ain't art, or at least not meaningful art. Just like most of my attempts at drawing ain't meaningful art either.
Btw, by your high standards most human produced music videos ain't art either. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potboiler
Sounds accurate to me
Andy Warhol might disagree [1] (:
(I realize that's not exactly apples-to-apples, but y'know.)
Or there's "art is anything you can get away with," which I just mention to point out that this kind of issue ("what is art?") is not new. In some ways it seems like a good thing to get people, like you, riled up about these topics, arguing the merits of their point of view. That's how culture happens.
It's an interesting question you tangle with: is it art because of what the artist did, or is it art because of how the viewer/listener/etc receives it? Some of both? How much of each? If you encountered some art but you didn't know its provenance, and it had some emotional impact on you, would it still be art if you found out later it was 100% AI generated?
Like you say, it's all subjective, but it's nice to see random people on the internet talking about the nature of art, since it's something I care about too.
So in other words, thank you for being angry (:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans "... what Time magazine called the 'Slice of Cake School'—artists who treated the banal artifacts of contemporary civilization as legitimate subjects for high art"
At least that's my interpretation of it
Perhaps a more apt example would be Duchamp's "Fountain" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp))
So unless these two concepts are separated, people will endlessly talk past each other assuming both sides hold the same fundamental beliefs.
Claiming you made something by yourself, when in reality someone else made it (AI) is easy to frown upon.
I think if you can have a positive experience from looking at a sunset, hearing birds sing, etc, it should technically be possible to have a positive experience from the outputs of an AI without human input. This assumes art is clearly defined as needing to be made by a human with some effort, which neither a sunset or AI outputs are.
In practice, people who use AI to make content give it some direction. The amount of guidance varies wildly, and in practice the majority of what we see is minimal involvement.
It reminds me also of the eternal "can we separate the art from the artist" debate, too. For instance, some people (myself included) find that their experience of some art that they previously enjoyed is soured when they learn that whoever made it is a Bad Person in some way. Neil Gaiman comes to mind as a recent example.
I think it goes beyond just creative people being more interested in the process behind the art. Even people who are more purely consumers care about where this thing that touches them came from. I think a person's experience of the art makes them feel closer to or entwined with that artist, even if they might be long-deceased. Or non-human?
For example, I had never thought or cared where the trash can in my office came from. I forgot where I bought it from. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm a little curious, but is it worth knowing? If I knew the designer of the trash can was a bad person, should I get get a new one and make sure the designer of that trash can is a good person?
I think logically and ethically yes, but I'm not willing to spend my time on this.
It's an extreme example, but I think the same applies to music, art, movies, etc, just to a lesser degree for people who claim they care more about the outcome than the human author.
It's not really about the artist. It's about the thing that's there. Which you experience, always imperfectly, through your senses. Other people are a wonderful thing that's there, but they aren't the only thing that's enjoyable. Usually the thing that's there which the artist wants you to experience, isn't merely the artist themselves.
Can you wonder at the miracles arising from matrix multiplication? Sure. Especially if it's a good artist trying to show you that miracle. I've enjoyed AI art from the start, but then it's the AI which is the point.
You really can't say, 'art should be this', 'art isn't that'. It's just art, it is what it is, people have a lot of emotions wrapped up in the art they like but it simply is what it is.
Depending on what you mean, this is currently not possible, and probably not ever possible, because as much as people like to call things "autonomous", these AIs are still ultimately being directed by humans to do things. Prompting an AI is on a different level of abstraction, like writing software in a HLL and using a compiler instead of keying in machine instructions on a hexpad, but IMHO it is still the work of a human.
...and then you look at what people who are professional artists do and call art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork)
He might not actually. He could have just printed the cans, yet they’re all hand painted. The fact that he could mass produce them, but didn’t is part of story.
Given that the man made his living doing stunts on top of the corpse of modernity, I'm not surprised he would love anti-human stuff like AI music. He famously said he wished he could be a machine. I don't think appealing to his nihilistic embrace of the spectacle is persuasive.
I fall on the other side of that coin: I care about the final output way more than the story & struggle of the artist.
Also: Nature is probably the most epic artist in my book - a sunset, leaf, coral or rock can outshine virtually any human creation.
However people will claim that the artist had an intention, it was just not obvious to the artist at the time. The art was also shaped by their experiences, etc. So in contrast, AI does not have this intention.
maybe masters of art will train their own tortured models in digital dungeons and a rich man’s home won’t be complete without a cyber collective of pathological artist models actively that you guests CAN interrogate about why they chose what on the basement homelab.
I'm not too familiar with visual arts, but I know most jazz musicians make a living off of teaching music and doing concerts where the attendees are just other musicians. It's very much centered around technique and human performance. (the term musician's musician is also used here)
Meanwhile, the average person think jazz is noise.
So my point is, saying "What makes music meaningful..." sounds more like an elitist jazz musician take. (I'd say jazz musicians tend to be more self deprecating than elitist, and often make light of the genre and how people perceive it!)
AI art shows the philistines for who they are. It's a giant decoy to lure them away from spaces where people are making art of more substance.
I feel the same way about things like the absolutely miserable quality of Marvel, Star Wars, etc. stuff leading to films being increasingly polarized between 60 IQ blockbusters and more interesting small projects. It's what kicked off the 70s arthouse cinema in the US, and I'm hoping we get a similar renaissance soon with the success of all of the small and difference projects lately.
>doing concerts where the attendees are just other musicians
If this is how jazz musicians actually made money, they'd have all died of starvation at this point. Every jazz musician that's not a top 20 or so act makes most of their money playing whatever kind of music people pay them to make, whether it's church music, session musician gigs, etc. The entire reason they started doing (and still do!) straightahead jams is that they were tired of playing schlock all day and wanted to spice it up with and for other people tired of playing schlock.
In AI media (when not curated and iterated with close human input) whose values am I getting. Who is communicating their values to me? Bruno Mars dancing this way, wearing this, acting this way etc is cool because it is Bruno Mars and he's cool and he's cool because he has been cool and all your friends know. So by watching him you get enculturated into this culture. If you watch AI, and learn how you act from those, you will likely look like a fool.
Similarly with stories. The morale may be entirely opposite to what a human would say. And even if a human builds a story on some morale you find reprehensible, it's still likely from their own life experience, and by trying to understand, you grow empathy and can better understand what life trajectories exist. Bu and AI text pushing some morale has no real life it reaches back into, to express their view of the human condition. There is no gain from reading it.
I beg to disagree: meaningful art is where something speaks of its own. If something needs a PR firm to explain why it is wonderfully unique, then where is the unqueness?
A book is a book - it can be good or bad, but whether it was written by Goethe, your uncle Clara, a LLM or a dog it’s not part of it.
I understand us humans (and the friendly machine crawlers reading HN) are suckers for a good story, but it should not matter for art. Of course, YMMV.
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/5817/tereska-a-child-in-a-res...
When I was younger, still trying to figure out who I was and what I'd be doing for a career, I was very interested in science. Sadly, my home life as it was prevented me from pursuing it as a student and survival as an adult meant catching up was an uphill battle. I just didn't have the discipline. So instead I just read books, mostly cosmology related, but also computer science. That was my way of making up for lost time to become the software developer and eventually engineer that I am today. But something was sorely missing.
I believed science would solve everything, that we could use technology to lift humans out of regressive traditionalism, force out ignorant politicians, but more obviously, build things that would solve climate change, hunger, disease, whatever. Growing up and realizing this was not the case has left me cynical. Social media is a blight that poisons everything and truly has not been studied enough on how it has raped society from increased vanity, parasocial relationships, addiction, the ability to be targeted by bad actors, I could go on. This technology in particular is probably at fault for the rise of fascism and far right politics. American tax payer funded and researched space innovation has been plundered and now controlled by a fucking weirdo psychopath trillionaire with a taste for culture wars. It is just absurd. Now, AI, and that is a whole topic of its own.
Good science still happens, of course, but now it's being buried by noise from the newest tech hype, AI. What chaps my ass about AI is that it has amazing uses but because of capital at all costs, we advance it in the most blind and irresponsible ways possible at the expense of our humanity and planet. So much so, now it is blasting out "art" for the cost of fucking up people's lives wherever there is a datacenter.
My main point is, that with all these topics, I've found that people are generally "philosophically empty". It is easy to say people are dumb, but I don't think that is the case (or, well, it is but that is too simple). That younger self scoffed at philosophy, seeing it as a fun thought experiment and little more, science was king. Now? Oh man. I feel so foolish. I think we all should have been challenged to think more philosophically at a much younger age. We have a generation of young people who dream of being influencers. Have you ever seen a more talentless, uninspired, cynical group of people worse than influencers? I sure haven't. But it is my more philosophical side that sees so clearly how vapid it is, and how it cheapens what we are as human in the name of attention seeking capitalism, to sell yourself at all costs and one more medium to be a walking advertisment. It feels like we're at the end game. I'm sure most generations have felt this way, and some had good reason (looking at you generation of the atomic bomb). But somehow, this feels less tangible, more philosophically bad, and already endemic. We're all so ill equipped to address it or even acknowledge it societally.
Sorry for the rant, thanks for reading if you got this far.
The other side of it is that most humans can't produce art. I can't draw, rhyme, dance, act, etc.
> I realize art is completely subjective, so some person may find meaning in AI generated art. > But this garbage ain’t that.
These two statements are very conflicting. I'm sure you can find someone who thinks that The Centre Pompidou is full of genius pieces. I didn't enjoy it that much. So, it's exactly the same with AI.
Genuinely curious, because I have friends without any sense of rhythm and it’s interesting how it manifests
I'd say less than 20? Maybe even less than that. Even counting short bursts, to especially compelling music, that did't last more than few seconds.
The closest I ever felt, to what I imagine people might feel while dancing, was playing Beat Saber in VR. You could have your friends try, they might enjoy it. I did. I spent way more hours on Beat Saber than I ever spent dancing. But I don't see any improvement from that.
> Have you ever trained at a sport beyond the recreational level, especially highly rhythmic ones like basketball or soccer?
I don't think I ever did anything in my life beyond recreational level. Even coding feels recreational level regardless of how much I get paid.
Basketball is completely incomprehensible for me. The rule that you can't do more than one step while holding the ball is impossible and unreadable when somebody else does it. Dribbling is pretty hard too.
I played some soccer as a kid and at school but I wasn't good at this because of multiple factors. I mostly played defense when sometimes I could interrupt the attacking player mostly with a single action, not a sequence. I wouldn't even think about soccer as rhythmic sport, but I imagine it can be, if you are leading the ball which I pretty much never did successfully.
I hate repeatable movements done during exercises. Never participated in any exercise groups (beyond what was enforced at school). I like biking but I vary my pedaling style a lot while riding and I don't ride for too long, few hours at most. I like walking but I zone out completely during walks. I can't run due to rapidly diminishing lung capacity when I try but I imagine if I could it would resemble walking.
I don't play instruments and never had any success in that area. I can't do and don't enjoy trying souls like games. I'm not a fan of platformers with all the repeated jumping and timing their repeats to what happens in the level. From games that require skill I prefer (quake-like) FPPs.
On the plus side, I have decent full body reflexes and rarely ever fall. In falls reliably instincitvely shield myself with arms to prevent damage to the head and mostly body. I can't imagine getting hurt by stepping on lego brick because my feet react to what I'm stepping on quickly shifting the load around any sharp or uneven objects. The brain itself is decent as well. I'm in top <1% according to Mensa iq test results.
It feels like cyclical engine of my brain is very weak while the reactive one is fairly good.
Lean into the not-quite-but-almost uncanny-valley-ness. Make it a feature, not a bug.
Behind the scenes here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UhOc0VXo7II
I agree though, you can combine art with AI and make something really unique but the majority of art people are pushing with AI is in my opinion being rightfully branded as AI slop.
AI as artists tool, not AI as artist.
The clip incorporates images of the band and, as @DoktorDelta pointed out (which I didn't know before), it was trained on art created by some of the band members. It also totally fits the psychedelic rock vibe, not just for this song, but also into the canon of psychedelic rock film clips and general psychedelia media.
Now rewind, uninvent AI and then would you consider that same ad art?
Tilt-shift photography for those wondering.
Three and a half years at the rate of AI progress has gotten to the point of reality-level picture quality, but there's a lot AI gets wrong without nudges here and there. That may be slightly unfair, however, given that this film clip took a couple of months and the ones in TFA cost $100 max and took less than an hour.
Now it feels obvious that I'm comparing apples and oranges. I mean, nice to know that we all seem to like 'proper art' better than an hour worth of an AI generated version of 'one art please'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZIU8sF3YlY
(the song is AI too)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rseqmSGH7xk&t=59s
> From the start, the production team knew they didn’t want a music video that relied solely on any single technique. With this goal in mind, they worked to blend live action, AI, and a wide range of handcrafted animation styles – 2D, 3D, collage and motion design.
https://lbbonline.com/news/psyop-and-temple-cache-get-surrea...
Filmmaking is inherently an iterative process. You don’t normally one shot music videos in the real world. Agents should review and iterate at every step of the process. Lots of room for improvement here.
Also for comparison, budget of the original Uptown Funk music video was probably around $100,000. Even “indie” is pretty expensive in traditional filmmaking due to high cost of equipment, people and places. 100x cost reduction is huge for any industry.
While checking out the gallery, came across this image:
https://www.tryai.dev/gallery/d3725e9b-1df9-4c10-8a23-2fc705...
There’s something wrong with it, but I just can’t put my paw on the problem.
Grok fast came up with a lot of minor quibbles and missed the issue.
Grok expert touched on it with a "Limbs/anatomy ambiguity / This creates a slight "how many legs does this cat actually have?" moment." but then moved on to complain about texturing . Later it summarized the issue as "classic "animal + held object" anatomy problem".
Chatgpt 5.6 instant didn't notice it
Chatgpt 5.6 medium didn't notice it and mainly complained about the background being blurry
Chatgpt 5.6 high (46s) "The biggest error is the cat appears to have six paws"
Google AI mode complained about whiskers and feet placement
Only chatgpt high and marginally grok expert had acceptable answers.
This specific type of garbage is exactly what arms the anti-AI critics with valid arguments. We should really wait a few years for the technology to mature before releasing these kinds of projects into the cultural sphere.
Feel free to not make your own music videos, but I am not sure why you would be so upset about other people having fun.
As a person who makes a lot of music, I don't care if folks have fun. In fact I am having such a hard time caring hat folks do or how they do it I can't get motivated to book any shows this season.
But the part you're missing is when folks make these things and then say "yeah, you see this thing we're doing? That's what we think -you- are doing." LIke when someone sets up an LLM to shit out some song lyrics, I don't care if they are having fun doing it, but I think it displays a lot of contempt for [insert an songwriting artist youlike here] to claim that the LLM is doing the same thing.
Which is fine and all- I've got plenty of unmitigated contempt for my fellow humans.
And you don't even need a computer to do that- I've released a certain amount of music that is facile and boring and in retrospect understand why folks were dismissive.
But if you want to understand why folks who consider themselves invested in their craft (or even invested in other artists' craft) are dismissive of these things, then you might consider how radically dismissive of craft these kinds of cultural products might seem to artists.
a) You are allowed to dislike cheap stuff, in fact it is common in western culture to dislike art where it is obvious that the artist cheaped out.
b) Never in the history of western art critique has there been a requirement that the critic is able to do better then the artist (let alone for cheaper). As the saying goes, “I may not be able to pilot a 100000 ton cargo ship, but I can tell when one is stuck in a canal.”
If you are not expecting them to be as good as people then their failures seem wholly unremarkable. The specific nature of tbe failures can be quite interesting in fact. They can expose deficiencies in the architecrure, training data, or presumptiona of those controlling the models.
In my experience very few people are claiming the capabulities that would be required for me to expect them to produce better than they currenrly are.
I'm not bothered by a fish's inability to quote Shakespeare.
But I am bothered when they put a pencil in the mouth of a fish and tell us that this is the future of literature, that this qualifies as playwright, and that theaters will soon begin putting on plays written by a fish with a pencil in its mouth.
Do you think that a descendant of a fish could be a playwright or put on a play?
However there is a major flaw in your logic. Fishes (or their descendants) reciting Shakespeare is part of natural history. AI making quality music videos is just a prediction (or maybe even just wishful thinking). The former has occurred and has been observed, the later has not. So you are comparing nature with science fiction.
I believe that was the point.
Every talk show then has to have me on. It would be one thing if I was boasting about the fish, but scared of it? Well then surely there must be something important going on there. I begin:
"Don't worry. Be happy"
A music video is not (necessarily) a depiction of what the lyrics say at any moment. Soulless for sure.
If nothing else, it serves as a great reminder that you can't offload taste and creative decisions to AI. AI is also not a mind reader. It _may_ do a useful thing sometimes - but it's much better to codify that thing in your requirements if it's something you want to occur consistently.
Uptown Funk is a very enjoyable track -- but if you're familiar with his influences, it can make his music generally stale and unenjoyable. Like Silk Sonic has the technical sound of that era, but it feels like they're treating it like a joke.
People constantly think the music video I created for Zingara's Unlock Your Keys [1] is AI, but it really is just real footage all around, except for a handful of lines / pulse textures that were created in TouchDesigner.
I am really excited for the possibilities that AI can give us in the future but often I find trying to use it generatively I run into the paradox of choice and end up paralyzed!
1: https://xfeeefeee.net/unlock-your-keys/ tribal dance fusion music video, sfw but does show some skin. Uses lots of slow motion ink in water footage for texture as well.
It would be very hard for anyone to make a good music video with the tools Fable and Sol had available to them. They don't have precise control over the clips that get generated, and they can't see or hear the result, other than screenshots. So I'm not sure what the experimenters expected.
The LLMs mostly used older video models from a year ago that are capped at 10 second single shot clips. Newer video models like Seedance 2 go up to 15 seconds (Seedance 2.5 even up to 30 seconds) and they support multimodal references.
As a tool, I think those video models can be pretty amazing for artists as you can create things not possible before. Here is a music video made by an artist using Seedance 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYfDJQxyHFg
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E6XofKqFYeQ
I like the scene with the hands.
I'm scared because that's the most labor intensive area. Top talents will survive but all the volume industry will collapse.
https://www.minimax.io/news/minimax-hailuo-23
(No affiliation, I just want to see how well they work).
The videos convey this in a more vivid and direct way than any text answer could. I often have the thought that if Claude were a human colleague, I'd avoid having to work with them.
Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lWArXcsxYo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn-4lIFhybA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kjUEan_fgM
Most of their videos have a similar retro-futurism look
Start from an entirely AI generated song, and have an AI generated video. We apparently already have an example of such:
Trent Reznor would make a decent Snape...
It's interesting how the Harry Potter fanbase was one of the first to get on the AI video trend, but not too surprising as there was already plenty of HP fanfiction, and no doubt many who wanted to have them visualised.
Here's another channel with a ton of AI parody videos: https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralDerpMusic
https://youtu.be/uDAeAuYyl0E (parody of Claude announcements) https://youtu.be/cSsVNtGPOIg (recreating a fireship video)
Did you use a skill library to make this?
The Claude one was a 3-prompt to get it to recreate the original “Agent view” announcement video. But wanted to challenge it, hence the bankruptcy mode. But it’s really bad at coming up with jokes and a coherent narrative so had to guide it wit prompts like 5 times or so
Fireship video that was just a single prompt, with allowing it to use my basement gpu which has Higgs installed for the voice clone
The jevons paradox is you need auteurs to curate vignettes or effects and cut or mask them in etc. That's not really different philosophically when software entered art in other ways. I could see errors/glitches lowering in time but I doubt there will be much acceleration.
The problem is that reliable, repeatable professional-grade commercial art and design sensibilities happen in full-time careers. It’s entirely different than fine art, where intense self-exploration and experimentation are a very viable option.
These tools are exacerbating an already difficult creative job market so there’s no reasonable path to get those skills. Our creative professional pipeline is fundamentally broken.
The last of the core industrial skilled trade workforce that came up in the 70s and 80s, before offshoring, is retiring. Offshoring left the industry with all the skilled workers they needed for decades, so a vanishingly small number of apprentices were trained. Since the seniors transferred very little knowledge, very few people still have that knowledge, and they’re scrambling to transfer all of that knowledge into a new batch of apprentices.
I think the software business is closer to a trade than an engineering profession than people care to admit, and is looking at something like that down the road a few years. In the interim, we can look to the rust belt to see how the America industry treats workers that are no longer needed. I don’t even think we need autonomous, agentic virtual developers to make that happen — a double-digit productivity boost will likely result in a double-digit job market contraction.
You did back when MTV made songs big.
No one actually pays attention to the details of music videos any more. It’s visual chewing gum at best. The reality is that now, if you have something half decent, nice colours, nice lighting and a wee bit of a story, no one is going to care.
The only other route is a huge budget spectacular - but you only get the huge budgets if you label lends you the money to make a huge budget video because they think it will increase the amount of money they make - while extending the amount of time it takes you to recoup.
Ultimately, now, it is just another social media asset, so promo videos are built with that in mind.
None of these would cut it.
Hilarious to hear someone in industry blame their audience for the commodification of the medium. Is every industry like this? Surely nobody goes into creative fields thinking “I can’t wait to feed the masses slop!” Who’s killing our spirit?
Although arguably music videos have always been a sort of short-form-video - takes strung together enough to keep you engaged through the song.
Though we're finding the studios contracted to do this can bill $50k. I know several studios that previously billed clients six figures for ad campaigns (P&G, HBO, pharma, etc.) are now charging five figures and winning a lion share of the bids now.
Not sure why Wan is the focus of this article and Seedance is a footnote. Wan/LTX/open models are significantly behind Chinese closed source models. (And the Chinese have left the Western models in the dust.)
I wouldn't do anything production grade in Wan.
My guess is that an AI music video would have to be a lot cheaper for artists to consider it outside of making one just because you want to make an AI music video.
The idea is to reduce production cost and therefore more plentiful/accessible.
I was ROFL over some of the mistakes the AI made. Parts of it was amazing, other parts were amazingly off.
Stuff like veo 3 can't always hold a coherent storyline for 8s. It's asking too much to expect a whole, coherent music video.
GPT? Sure, you can write a book with it, but in writing its use as a tool by a real human is perhaps best when it is providing a jumpstart to creativity. If I'm writing a script I might have a chatbot give me a rough outline which will usually be complete garbage that I throw away 90% of but it got me over the decision paralysis of getting started.
Image generation? Sure, you can create varying degrees of body horror wrong-hand imagery and ugly-as-sin event flyers. But it's also indispensable for, as an example, object deletion and cleanup workflows within Photoshop. Or intelligently letting me change the paint color of a car while preserving the reflection's tones and realistic shadows.
Video generation? Sure, you can make ugly nonsensical slop but I imagine it will be hugely useful for AI driven rotoscoping, quickly creating placeholder or background resources.
Of course, the ethics of how this training data was all gained creates an entirely different aspect of discussion. Supposedly Adobe's image generation, by far some of the worst on the market, is so bad because it is ONLY trained on imagery that they already have reproduction and usage rights to. Which tracks, because it does an admirable job of erasing an ugly building and revealing trees and a field behind it, but anything that results in it having to generate stuff more complex than the landscape photography that makes up the glut of its training data has... hilarious results.
Aesthetically, where can you place these? I feel like the late David Lynch could have used some tropes in his unnerving, unsettling dream sequences (a la the intro dream in "Mulholland Drive" where people are so cheery and upbeat that it feels viscerally disturbing).
That's the consistent feeling that I'm left with watching each one, is just a deep, deep unsettled and uneasy feeling. A scowl on my face the whole time trying to make through each one.
I did crack up seeing a martini glass presented to the camera, then float in place on it's own and the presenter resumes holding it with his other hand.
Everything else made me nauseous.
It's just a cheap video-generation model doing its thing. I wonder if the orchestrator model noticed this and tried "Create a scene with a martini glass. Make no mistakes".
As soon as you want something very specific, or something novel, or anything with a lot of moving objects/people, it falls apart.
You can still delete this, there is time.
The OP would exclusively be using Seedance 4k if they were serious about this.
for the $25 video it was $4.27 (Sol) vs $16.99 (Fable)
this seems like an interesting benchmark of a complex task, even if the output has little artistic merit. the efficiency of Sol is impressive
Where I began to feel delightfully uncomfortable was when it asked me if it should build a Go board and start a game. Surely you jest, Mr Claude... I thought.
No. The crazy bastard built a beautiful HTML/SVG board, and before I knew what was going on, there it was. I thought for a moment that fraud rhymes with something. Then before I knew it, I was black (that's courtesy!) and I made my first move expecting nothing, kind of astonished by what was happening. Mind you, I was on a phone. Then it made a move in response, and lo and bloody behold, I was playing a game of Go with Claude, on a 19x19 board made in a few seconds, with formidable aesthetics.
I was enamored enough to overlook that Claude does need some practice. But wow. I guess everyone is impressed by something, but that got me.
I used Claude the other day to drive my codex and agy (anti-gravity) clis iterate on a XKCD like film strip. I needed to teach people how my product worked.
It did surprisingly well!
My fav AI video is still Post-Scarcity Blues from a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_t3h2AZ0KY There have been others I've enjoyed since then. But, that one stands out in memory. Work warning: it is occasionally just a bit spicy.
AI has plenty of utility, but this isn't one of them. If anything, I want to see AI automate all of the tedious stuff so that human beings can focus more deeply on art and culture. Automating art and culture is anti-human.
Despite how awful the end result may be, the models did successfully plan and execute a moderately complicated generation and editing process.
There is no going back from this, only forwards, for better or worse.
This is technology that was unthinkable before just a couple of years ago. Photorealistic video generated by typing out a description of what you want to see is something from a sci-fi movie. I must be dreaming, this can't be real.
I took a screenshot in the middle of a video, and it's indistinguishable from a photograph: https://imgur.com/a/TyNbd7E
I don't know, maybe I'm just old. I remember hacking the hidden iframe trick to make ajax-style file uploads work in IE7. The advancements I've watched unfold in the past couple of years are still hard to wrap my head around.
At some point you have to move past your astonishment at the technical achievement alone and judge the result for what it is, on its own merits, as if a human had made it. Especially when the goal of using generative AI is to remove as many human creators and as much human effort from the creative process as possible, and to have as much "art" be as fully AI generated as possible.
People are criticizing these videos because they aren't good. As "art." Which is a problem if this is what all art is supposed to be become.
I don't think anyone was proposing this as an actual professional music video, right? It's a tech demo that used all of $25 of budget. So why are you judging it "on its own merits, as if a human had made it"?
Besides, several people in this thread have already decided that these tech demos are better than human created music videos. In fact, many AI "artists" already claim generative AI has surpassed humans in every relevant metric and they judge it on the same merits as I do just coming to the opposite conclusion. They certainly aren't waiting until it's "good" to call it art.
So it's entirely valid to point out that this technology is actually bad at doing the thing it's supposed to do.
>I was on an airplane and there was high speed internet on the airplane… it’s fast, I’m watching YouTube clips, I’m on an airplane. It breaks down, they apologize, and the guy next to me is like “This is bullshit..."
>Like how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago?
>Flying is the worst one, people come back from flights, they tell you their story and it’s a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany.
>"It was the worst day of my life! First of all we didn’t board for 20 minutes. And then we got on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there."
>Oh really, what happened next, did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero?
>You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should be constantly going ‘oh my God, wow!’
>You’re sitting in a chair in the sky
>….Here’s the thing, people say there are delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in 5 hours. That used to take 30 years. And a bunch of you would die on the way there. And have a baby. You’d be a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and you take a shit and you’re home.
https://youtu.be/nUBtKNzoKZ4?si=yaCJhTLiXkPyksbg - his delivery starts at around 2:00 but he starts with additional jokes.