Hacker News Reader

Comment by globular-toast | Hacker News Reader

What are the positive applications? This all seems to be generating fake images/videos just because we can, not because it solves any real problems. It makes me wonder where the money is coming from to fund this stuff. Why would a regular person want to generate fake videos except for purposes of deception or debauchery?

View on HN

The lack of creative understanding is astounding: all these generative media AI are fantastic for education applications. Sure, the vast majority want to use them to jerk off, but that's what humanity does anyway. Education is where these are extremely useful, and that is for the aid in conveying understanding to those that need the Jazz Hands of an image or audio or a video presentation to grasp the concept they are not.

It's been here for a while, where are the numbers?

Youtube is also great for education, yet 99% of the watch time is pure brainrot entertainment

The numbers reflect the vast majority jerking off, self entertaining. To find the 1% of the 1% that use anything for self improvement, one needs to look at the statistical tails. Because that market is so small, and their skills so advanced, you will not hear about them because they represent too small a market for our pop culture to try to leverage them for profits, other low hanging fruit is far too sweet, such as all the idiots that want to jerk off and will pay.

I was a content moderator for Midjourney for many years. I’ve seen more AI-generated debauchery than I could ever hope to convey. I also saw 100,000x more joy, creativity, beauty and expression in that same community.

Unfortunately, millions of people playing around having low-key fun making low-effort art is a boring headline. One person getting caught trying to be gross with AI drives a million times more media engagement than a million people trying to be creative for once. So, guess which one the media focuses on.

> What are the positive applications?

Generating large training video datasets for robotics is going to be huge. Google used generative AI to make training data for self-driving cars (Waymo). This is by far the most promising facet of this tech, IMHO, and hugely underestimated in potential future impact.

Benefit: entertainment

Downsides: *

(Well <all> minus entertainment)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com