They didn't read the article. Just couldn't wait to say their thing. Multiple paragraphs in tfa about bad writing.
3,460 karma · joined July 27, 2011
If you're going to try to argue such a gargantuan point, perhaps don't lead with such a paltry example. Of course an AI video slideshow is going to be fairly indistinguishable from a human. It doesn't exactly take Ken Burns or Errol Morris to put together a decent montage. 'Brad & Kelsey tie the knot!' is going to look fairly identical, whoever cut it, because there are very limited parameters for human expression.
Heck, even my very dated Iphone generates decent sappy video sideshows from the image archive.
If something has compiled some great selects for me, I only have material based on what is said. But I don't know how it is said - which to me is everything. Yes, this goes for podcasts too. What I make just won't be as good as if I'd have taken the time to go through everything.
I even notice this with things like NBA highlights. It's clear the editor (or bot) never watched the game. There were moments in it that are interesting and significant. Even small incidents that are actually clutch to the outcome of the match. But it is clear they've quickly compiled all of the goals and bashed out something mediocre which does not tell the story.
I think your mistake is to assume editing is like painting, where you can just make something brilliant with a few colours and a canvas. But editing is much more analogous to writing a book. If you have read extensively on Ancient Rome and spent time comprehending the subject, you will create something far more interesting than essentially remixing a few primer books and articles that have suggested to you by an LLM.
People have indeed "been creating amazing things with nothing" in the expressive arts, but that approach falls short when the value comes from communicating depth from narrative information.
Editing is a craft. You have to watch everything, otherwise you don't know what you have.
A machine organising stringouts and selects can work for interviews, but not for action. But even then it is only parsing your media for semantic intent. It misses the way things are said, which often imparts a different meaning.
You can use AI features for editing. But it is unlikely you will be making anything very intetesting.
Industry-standard NLE's like Premiere or Avid are probably the closest to Resolve. But even those are legacy programs that rest on their moats, whereas Resolve takes far more chances and does far less dumb shit than Adobe and Avid.
The seamless integration with industry-standard grading software is also... um mindblowing. Premiere has Lumetri and FCP has it'd colour correction tab, both of which are like MS Paint compared to Resolve's colour capabilities.
It's also free. The paid version unlocks mostly things to do with grading.
Talk of the chaos and stupidity of Trump just obfuscates this grim political reality. Ie, focusing the narrative on political and operational incompetency misdirects the citizenry from the fact that money from their labor that could go to healthcare, education, and building community is diverted to an aggressive foreign entity.
The chaos and stupidity narrative only mask and sustain the far grimmer reality of this operation.
There's an enormous thematic subtext of surveillance state and paranoia running in the background of The Conversation that is "informationally dense", but if you've grown up mainlining Coco Melon and Tiktok shorts, that "information" is not available to you because you have poorly developed critical faculties.
Why is this a problem? I don't mean to be confrontational here, but by this I mean: is it about them being "crazy", or us not being able to hold complexity and ambiguity? Politics has to emerge somewhere, and it's not like we have third spaces for these rants in our modern world (save for a few die-hards at your local town-hall meeting).
Also, I think cartoon politics is something that tends to emerge out of somebody's experience. Often it is armor. I think if you learn to not take them at face value, then it can really give you a quick insight (not always accurate) about what makes somebody tick.
For a few reasons I personally find that the best medicine is just to nod along with these people and watch them give away their ideological hand:
a) You know where they stand and who you are dealing with.
b) They can, however rarely, be forced to actually confront the irrational logic when sharing it.
c) I think it is the compassionate thing to do, as people just often want to spout these theories as a much needed release valve. After all, people believe this stuff often because of a confusion or frustration they have with their own lives.
As you say, the medical conspiracies have really evolved since covid. I'm just glad we had covid when we did, because I feel that 5 years later people are so much more ignorant and less willing to all go through something together for the greater good.
With that said, I think the lot of conspiracy that just doesn't really hurt anyone but the believer. Aliens, moon landings, illuminati, etc. Kind of the modern day opiate of the masses.
The literacy crash is alarming, and is no doubt agitating this situation in a major way. However, I think what we are experiencing is something like a kind of siloing of private realities. Not the pearl-clutching 'echo chamber' discourse from 2019. But an increasing lack of social competency amongst younger people that is disallowing them to be present others in the world itself.
This is why I still think it is a power problem. Government, however incompetent, still has the monopoly on control and policy. They have experts yelling at them everyday about these problems. But their answer does seem to be more censorship and surveillance, rather than addressing the causes of these problems. As I mentioned, this only exacerbates the problem and makes it more socially dangerous.
This isn't a justification for irrational conspiracy theory (which are generally harmless, yet occasionally highly catastrophic). It's that the establishment whack-em-all approach is not working, and is probably exacerbating their problem.
A world of 99 percent of jobs being done by AGI (which there remains no convincing grounds for how this tech would ever be achieved) feels ungrounded in the reality of human experience. Dignity, rank, purpose etc are irreducible properties of a functional society, which work currently enables.
It's far more likely that we'll hit some kind of machine intelligence threshold before we see a massive social pushback. This may even be sooner than we think.
Perhaps the parents had clocked-on to this, and were just letting the girl self-soothe so she could learn resillience. Then, on-cue, in steps some member of the public with their own opinion on the child they're trying to raise. This would be kind of tiring for the fatigued parent of a toddler, and the frustration of the parent in the above scenario is justifiable, particularly as encounters like this could happen multiple times daily with a child like that.
Now they could also just be a shitty parent. There's plenty of them. But it's difficult for us to judge and make hard rules in cases like this.