Looking better than other things that are also bad is sort interesting in that it represents progress in some direction, but it isn't very interesting to people outside of the topic.
Yes, people learned not to generate other people eating. Current SOTA models still have no concept of walking (left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg; it's so complicated?), there is no reason to believe that they have learned the peculiarities of food consumption.
We seem to be in an exponential uptick phase of tech driven by hardware improvements; a few years ago this was impossible on consumer grade GPU. So in some sense there isn't a useful frame of reference, state of the art should improve out-of-sight about every 2 years and eventually I'd expect iPhones to be outgenerating Disney at movies.
Not GP, but when I looked at the examples, I thought that those already look pretty useable in comic book-like storytelling to set the mood. I.e. in settings where smaller details of the scene are not relevant and are not taking away from the "larger product".
I don't think there's such a thing as key frames here, just frames. And if you run SD through every frame, the output will be janky because SD doesn't know about temporal coherence.
As soon as it's an MP4 it will have key frames all right. You could add AI upscaling to your encoder. People are making fun of "Just", but I believe I could take apart ffmpeg to add this feature (PoC) in two weeks or less. Provide somebody pays for my labor and for the HW.
Adding the word 'just' doesnt make it any easier. Something I've noticed is that people who have never done something themselves and are telling someone to do an difficult task, will use:
Yeah I'd imagine that GH has a way to report trademark abuse, or yes of course you can get lawyers involved. Since it's international that might get annoying unless you're fine just getting it off of GitHub and other hosts you can easily reach.
It's a one-way street with AI companies though, they are against IP protection for training data but support IP protection for the product of that training. Read the TOS/license of nearly any big model and it's clear the creator considers it and its output to be their IP and they will fight to restrict how you can use it for commercial purposes or training competing models, because those being a free-for-all would get in the way of their business model.
In practice it's less "abolishing intellectual property" and more "transmuting everyone else's IP into their own IP so they can be the ultimate IP landlords".
Sure. And I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. Micr.. OpenAI can manage to brib.. convince a judge to make government to enforce this by force.
But how ML is at least currently developing, other megacorporations and universities are only a year or so behind OpenAI etc, and publishing their weights and models. Of course disregarding training set IP because otherwise keeping up would be impossible.
If the media and advertising megacorporations manage to get a ban on training on IP material, Micr.. OpenAI would be a huge benefactor, as they could afford some weird licensing deal on everybody's data and the actual open efforts would be extinguished.
Luckily US hegemony is fading and many other powers DGAF anymore what a US judge says. Or a WTO judge, because USA kind of destroyed WTO themselves already.
Unless the entity they're taking from can defend themselves in court. Just ask Copilot to generate an image in the style of AI hater Tim Burton and you'll get a ToS wrong-think violation. So really it is just for taking from small fries.
Intellectual property in the form of trademarks is generally good for consumers, you don't want a new database product to be called Postgres despite no association with the developers of PostgreSQL.
Intellectual property in the form of patents and copyrights is often harmful for consumers. In music, academia and mechanical engineering it's clearly been harmful in slowing the spread of innovation. It sucks to wait 20 years for a new excellent new dishwasher tray shape.
If you think for more than a few seconds on the matter, you quickly realise that intellectual property is a moral necessity, because intellectual expropriation (which is what you are really talking about) would destroy a major incentive for positive contributions to society.
Everything political is rooted in morality, and while it is easy to point out political challenges on the topic, intellectual property is ethically an unambiguously good concept.
Most of the great art was created in a world without intellectual property, or with no effective IP enforcement on that art.
While I don’t think all IP should be abolished, I think in general there is too much of it, protected for too long, and society would be better off getting rid of patents and dramatically downsizing copyright to at most a few decades of protection.
(And yes I have thought a lot on this matter. The evidence behind patents being overall beneficial is weak, and there is no effective societal argument for the current copyright terms.)
I tend to agree with your takeaway, but I want to pick a nit on your point about great art being made without copyright.
"The Most Powerful Idea in the World" basically makes the case that intellectual property is what enabled the Industrial Revolution. I won't try to summarize or defend the entire thing here, but I think it makes a very compelling case that the notion of "owning ideas as property" was the thing that made Britain unique (among other factors of course) and led to runaway technological explosion. It points out how in earlier times, inventors were literally killed for coming up with better methods that threatened some established system. So there is a big difference between art and technology there, and while I think debating the merits of copyright as it pertains to art is valid (and 100% agree it's overdone in our current system), I'm not convinced the current issues are serious enough to undermine the entire concept of intellectual property.
Most creators work for hire and the company owns the IP. Anecdote: I can't remember the song written on a bus and sold to the record company for $250 to keep food on the table that has earnt billions for Warner, Sony, or Universal Music. Nothing more for the creator.
Big company stealing from another big company to benefit the rest of us? Seems like fair use. Nothing to do with creators.
That incentive was meant to be something like 20 years (same as patents) not almost "forever" like the Mouse wants who expropriated from all of those European folktales and sanitised them.
No incentive if you live off the earnings of a "one-hit wonder".
And without any form of copyright it would have gone "hey $RECORD_COMPANY here's this cool jingle I made" and they'd say "yeah we think so too, we'll use that and compensate you $0."
I have thought on the matter for millions of seconds.
Politics and economics don't have anything to do with morality. It's about power. The moral fairytailes are there to justify whatever the state of affairs are. When these change, new fairytales justifying them will be adopted.
If right to property is a God given right, why the hell I as a atheist should give a damn?
And if your argument ("... god given ... atheist ... etc.) can be copy-pasted into a valid defence of arbitrary evil (I like to use Hitler for a concrete example, but avoid it in public because some subset of people erroneously thinks that is an automatic fallacy), then it is trivial in the sense that it doesn't add anything to the discussion, regardless of your opinion or pov.
> If right to property is a God given right, why the hell I as a atheist should give a damn?
You can argue it from political necessity.
Some kind of property rights are necessary for the operation of any social group. Even in a communist society you can't have the air force stealing land from the navy, or the transport department taking electricity from hospitals, or neighbours taking each others food allocations.
There needs to be some kind of organised transfer of property or you get chaos.
Ideally there would other ways than economical to facilitate production of intellectual goods. Ownership economies are exceptionally bad in non-scarce resources.
There are some alternative and less destructive ways to handle the economy already in place. Academic institutions generally don't claim or enforce IP (paywalls are more a corporate than academic thing). Many library systems pay authors (notably not the publishers) for each loan from public funds. Open source software is funded via services (and increasingly with ads, which is not necessarily great).
State enforced monopoly on ideas or lumps of matter isn't the only way of structuring the economy. Alternatives haven't been discussed in 30 or so years, so it's understandable that many have hard time even conceptualizing such.
Is IP on names also a huge drag? Would it be beneficial to the mankind if I—or anyone—were able to just make their own Linux or Nginx, with no relation to the group that originally made it?
Arguably "first come, first serve" policy on names per domain is a good one and serves to reduce confusion.
I agree but in the mean time, stealing from millions of artists and writers to build systems with the goal of replacing them is incredibly shitty.
If we lived in an economic system where people don't starve or lose their house when they don't have a job then I wouldn't care. Until then, OpenAI and its ilk are looters.
No. AI firms are a good example of precisely why copyright was put in place.
Right now, AI is taking people's original works and rehashing them in a way that directly competes with the original work. Some AI firms (e.g. perplexity) just have their LLMs paraphrase the work lightly.
This is a problem because it drives original work out of business. Even setting aside matters of originality, artistic value, and AI being vapid slop:
Gen-AI is and will remain a derivative work that is reliant on original human-made work
ChatGPT is not going to do investigative journalism. If we let AI push all journalists into bankruptcy, the news just becomes an endless sewer of PR statements recycled into AI slop.
If you don't want Google's woke "diverse nazis" to push real news into bankruptcy, copyright is needed to stop them.
We should find new ways to fund essential services like journalism and the arts, rather than artificially crimping the possibilities of new technology in order to get a half-assed solution under the current paradigm.
If you want to make an adjective out of an English noun, just add a 'y' directly to the end of it, e.g. 'morphy'.
The hyphen is erroneous here: 'morph-y' would be pronounced like 'morph why', and has the structure of a compound modifier without making any sense as one.
I'm a native English (Canadian) speaker and, given this context, would never pronounce "morph-y" as "morph why" (if that pronunciation was intended I'd capitalize the Y and probably not hyphenate it, "Morph Y").
Indeed, sometimes I'll use the -y construction when I'm inventing an adjective from a noun like this, especially if omitting it looks "wrong" to me because it's an invented word (not sure if I would've for "morphy" but whatever).
I don't know if you're a native speaker and there's some kind of cultural or generational gap here where some of us are more/less particular about this than others or if you're a non-native speaker trying to be helpful but underestimating the flexibility of casual written English.
> I'm a native English (Canadian) speaker and, given this context, would never pronounce "morph-y" as "morph why" (if that pronunciation was intended I'd capitalize the Y and probably not hyphenate it, "Morph Y").
Words conjoined with hyphens are always pronounced separately in normal usage -- the only exception I can think of is the special use case of hyphens representing continuations of a single word across a line break.
> Indeed, sometimes I'll use the -y construction when I'm inventing an adjective from a noun like this, especially if omitting it looks "wrong" to me because it's an invented word (not sure if I would've for "morphy" but whatever).
It's an "invented word" with or without the hyphen. But the standard way of "inventing" word forms in English is to apply suffixes directly to the root word without hyphens.
Using an interstitial hyphen as metadata to indicate one's own squeamishness about using a novel word form seems very strange to me. (The typical convention for this is to enclose the novel word in quotation marks, calling attention to the word itself in addition to invoking its meaning.)
> I don't know if you're a native speaker and there's some kind of cultural or generational gap here where some of us are more/less particular about this than others or if you're a non-native speaker trying to be helpful but underestimating the flexibility of casual written English.
I am very much a native speaker, and it's precisely for that reason that I find this nonstandard use of hyphenation jarring and disruptive of reading comprehension.
So, this morning I happened to be reading a crossword blog - written by an English professor - and, reflecting on this conversation, thought, "Jeez, I'll bet Rex Parker uses the -y construct." So I scrolled back a few pages in his archives, and sure enough, earlier this month he described something as "bro-y" [0].
In case you still feel like you're more of an authority on whether this is acceptable in colloquial English than me (a Canadian native Engish speaker), OP (who - I peeked at their profile - appears to be a British native English speaker), or an American professor of English:
I also noticed, while scrolling through Rex's archives, that the Times itself had used the "-y" in the crossword. See the cited clue on 36A on June 18 [1], which describes something as "sting-y" - not to be confused with "stingy". Good enough for The Gray Lady, good enough for me.
At this point, I think - if it's still causing you to struggle with reading comprehension - you need to accept that it's a construct in common usage and spend some time practicing until you start to feel comfortable with it. Sorry, I know it's inconsistent; English is known for having quite a few quirks that you just need to get used to.
As I mentioned in another comment, I think using the hyphen to eliminate ambiguity where it would otherwise create a word form that's easily confused with, or sounds like, another word entirely is perfectly reasonable. The "sting-y" and "bro-y" examples seem consistent with this, but "morph-y" doesn't quite.
That doesn't always work in a way that's clear, though. If I said a microcontroller felt pretty army, that's different to saying it feels arm-y, since army is already a word. I wasn't trying to say that it was like chess player Paul Morphy, I was trying to indicate it was an adjective derived from "morph". Language is meant to convey meaning, and you understood the meaning I was trying to convey, so what's the issue?
> If I said a microcontroller felt pretty army, that's different to saying it feels arm-y, since army is already a word.
I'm assuming that you don't mean that the microcontroller reminds you of an upper body appendage, and are instead referring to a well-known instruction set architecture. If that's the case, I'd recommend 'ARMy'. But you're correct about the ambiguity where the word form you want to use collides with another pre-existing word. In that situation, you'll naturally need a different solution.
> Language is meant to convey meaning, and you understood the meaning I was trying to convey, so what's the issue?
That's precisely it. Language is meant to convey meaning: and the more complex and abstract the meaning we mean to convey, the more precise we need to be in our use of language. Deviating too much from well-established conventions makes ambiguity or miscommunication more likely. Conversely, to your point, blindly adhering to conventions where that would increase ambiguity also impedes communication.
In this case, the erroneous hyphen didn't completely erase your intended meeting, but it did make the sentence slower to parse.
At some point we should stop treating our mothers as infants. It doesnt matter that they didn't grow up with the internet, they should adapt , despite their age. It has happened before and will happen again.
(it makes me mad that similar arguments are often brought when discussing mobile phones' walled garden policies)
Sure, but if it s dangerous to you, then maybe you shouldn't be using it - at all. We trust older people to vote, they should do it in good judgement and this includes consideration of where they get their information
I know AI will be used to spam, but to not see or acknowledge the positive capabilities of this technology is absolutely flabbergasting to me.
This is going to make filmmaking cheap and accessible to a broad audience, and that's nothing short of a miracle.
I typically do each year's 48 hour film project with a team of 8 or more people. This year I did it with myself and an editor, and it was amazing - no 6 AM trip to the prop house, no lifting heavy props from the top shelf, no signing location release forms, no sweltering lights. I didn't have to put on makeup or do blocking for hours. (I used mocap, rotoscoping, and compositing.)
I've been using AI diffusion canvases to design - something I'd previously found entirely intimidating and unapproachable. I'm having so much fun and enjoyment with this.
I don't see the world the same way, and I don't get this negativity.
I get it. I play with image generation myself, with the odd bit of training and fine-tuning. But you have to recognize that the low marginal cost of this kind of generation is self-cheapening, and a world filled with gaudy saccharine content (the kind of stuff that wins RLHF head to head comparisons) upvoted and shared by people who don't recognize it for what it is, is a little bit dispiriting.
You've hit the nail on the head. Its good at designing. But you can see from the visual quality of the examples that its not ready to be used as final content. No AI content I've seen is really ready to be used as a final piece, It shouldn't only ever really be the basis for something. I have no issues with an AI generated piece being used as a "sketch" or a "storyboard" but using it for a final product is just... lazy and looks crap?
IMO it's "pretty good" from a technical and power efficiency perspective, but to someone who doesn't know/understand/care or has to deliver a "product" this is far from good or acceptable.
Ironically, I think having a Twitter clone be called Open-X might fly legally, since that's generic enough, but pretty much any other instance where the trademarked name is very specific, like Open-Google or Open-Facebook would be surely easy to be removed by a judge. It's just that it takes a while for this process to happen, and until there's a legal injunction you can still use the name.
You could say that actually being available to the public makes it pretty good relative to a product that's still vaporware 5 months after being announced. There's no timeline for Sora availability, or any indication of its compute demands, and by extension its cost per generation.
I don't think vaporware as a term really applies here. Sora is real and I've seen it used live - it actually works and it is pretty astounding. I don't know how well scaling it for the public will go but they definitely built the thing.
Anybody else completely apathetic towards all of this? I'm so fed up with the morally-bankrupt Sam Altman and Open AI as a whole that by the time another one of these "Hey, check out the latest blah blah AI blah!!" gets posted, my first (and often lasting) impression "meh".
For me it's more than apathetic - for example when I'm encountering content which is illustrated with AI-generated images I noticed that I'm subconsciously downgrading it's quality right away - for sure it's wrong because that's classic example of judging book by the cover and even some good quality OS software on GH and/or good tech blogs with proven record use AI-generated content for illustrative purposes - however it's kind of automatic reaction for me and I need to use conscious effort to combat it.
The dramatic predictions that tend to occur between the model updates are what annoy me. AGI is coming! It’ll be smarter than PhDs! We will need technocommunism!! Cold War 2!
These look like shit. Yeah I guess it's kinda cool you can make them with nothing but text but I dunno man, I could think of a dozen ways to make all of these shots that wouldn't have the sides of every object threatening to melt in the next frame. More difficult and cost more, I mean yeah, but again, then it won't look like a computer is hallucinating your scenes while also tripping on mushrooms.
If this is indeed the "future of making movies," I dunno, I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I have no interest in watching anything made this way. Sorry. If you don't care enough about your project to do something besides AI prompts, I don't think you have anything to say that I need to hear.
> If this is indeed the "future of making movies," I dunno, I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I have no interest in watching anything made this way.
I'm still burned out on "regular" CG in movies. I'd be much more excited about a (hypothetical) return to practical effects than a push even further into computer imagery.
I recently watched John Wick 1 and I was mostly stricken by how little CGI was used in the movie.
I kept watching, noticing small bits here and there, subtle things, but there was not much CGI compared to almost any other action movie I've seen in the last several years, especially not much of any obvious full green screen sets and fly-by-wire wuxia heroism BS.
Anybody else a bit scared for how this tech will impact people? It seems quite far reaching. Job loss from video production and film. Ease of spreading misinformation, lies and propaganda. I could even see less investment in physical infrastructure as real world experiences get replaced by generated video. Scary stuff.
Since we were talking about hammers, a more apt comparison might be a nail gun. Vastly more efficient than hammering nails by hand when constructing e.g. a roof truss, but you still need carpenters.
If you want to look at it from a brighter side, I think it's great that this tech exists and people know about it in large and how easy it is to fabricate false information with this.
If I was very optimistic, I'd hope that people would question more what they see and hear and read to due to widespread of "Gen AI tools".
In reality that will most likely not happen, but yeah, one can hope.
And on job loss: Jobs come and go, nobody cared much about carriage drivers when cars took off...
Exactly this. What if we can now produce 100x video content and anyone can do it? YouTube didn’t kill TV shows just because anyone could make a video or stream live.
Yeah but the people reskilled into other demanding jobs that still needed people.
With AI, the demand for that skillset is diminishing as is the need for people at all.
We're heading towards a Solaria situation, where the rich genuinely might no longer need to employ the masses, or sell them products. What would you do if you had a magic box that met all your needs? Pay a consultant? Hire a gardener? Call a maid? Request an escort? Why.
AI is not and most likely will not be a "magic box that meets all your needs" in at least 1000 years unless something insane happens, AI does function approximation, when you scale it up it can do amazing things but you still need human creativity, you still need engineers because it can only output data not act on real-world stuff, you still need data that is generated by humans, you still need to train every model for your specific task, and tasks are infinite.
If we wanted to replace humans we'd have to fully figure out how the human brain works first, for now no one knows how the human brain truly works so how can we claim AI will replace all humans?
In my opinion, AGI is just an acronym pushed by people who have something to gain from mass hysteria, FOMO, and making people feel like "the end is near", AKA, AI influencers and founders who want investors to give them money.
Of course, this doesn't mean everyone who believes in AGI is one of the two, most were probably just fed this narrative and it sounded believable so they just went with it.
These are my two cents, sorry for the wall of text :P, but I just had to say something about what I perceive as an "AI bubble" that generates mass panic for most in order to benefit a few
Sure, repetitive tasks may get replaced in the short time depending on the complexity, but, the way I see it, there will always be a human need, new jobs of higher complexity and creativity will be created, and maybe there will be less jobs overall, but predictable jobs being replaced always happen with new advances in technology, whether that's a good thing or not :)