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by rollinDyno 583 days ago
I'm not in the industry and I can tell he's failing to conceive many possibilities. I don't understand why he's being praised, I guess confidence impresses people.
2 comments

> I'm not in the industry and I can tell he's failing to conceive many possibilities.

It's also possible that because you're not in the industry, you don't understand the problem domain well enough.

Tech bros love to think they're just so much smarter than everyone in other industries, but it rarely ends up being true. We saw this with Blockchain; this distributed consensus protocol was supposed to solve all the problems with money transfers, settlements, and securities across the world and uh... did none of that. But tech bros sure did love to talk about how the blockchain doubters just didn't understand the technology, without considering that maybe they didn't understand the problem space.

I think the other thread did a good job showing you that it's the other way around, people who have been in the industry do not tend to have the imagination people with fresh eyes (and maybe some tech chops) do.

An example I had in mind was when Affleck was speaking of being able to generate the show but with their preferred cast from a different production. He really has no clue that people will be generating themselves and their friends as the main characters of these stories. Like this one, there are many other examples where I thought he was lacking creativity.

Kudos to him for spending time thinking about it but I'm surprised how well received his thoughts have been for just stringing a few ideas together.

That's one example. Here are a few others...

Bezos wasn't in retail. He also wasn't in compute hardware.

Reed Hastings wasn't in entertainment and crushed it. Jeff Katzenberg was, and Quibi was a disaster.

Ken Griffin was a punk kid in harvard, never worked in finance. Jim Simmons was a math professor, didn't work in finance.

AirBnb guys weren't in real estate or tourism or whatever bucket you want that to be.

Larry & Sergey knew zero about advertising. Zuckerberg too.

The incumbents have been destroyed with some frequency by outsiders who take a different approach. It's almost impossible to tell in advance if understanding a domain is an asset or a liability.

Ok but you're listing people/businesses, not technologies, which is what I'm talking about. Or is this nonsensical LLM slop to prove a point?
Nah, you were talking about tech people operating outside of their domain. You just don't like how easy it is to show counter examples so you pretend you had some other point.

But if you don't know the technology involved for each of the above, maybe stay out of a conversation involving technology.

Except every company you listed is a technology company. It's technologists doing technology. Katzenberg proves the point.

Amazon, Netflix, Quibi (a disaster run by a non-technologist), AirBnB, Google, Facebook. These are websites and apps.

I don't think Griffin is particularly illustrative of anything except it's nice to ask your grammy for $100K when you're a teenager.

Feel free to listen to a NotebookLM podcast of a PG post, but if you think any AI is going to create an original thought that catches fire like the MCU, Call Her Daddy, Succession, cumtown, Hamilton, Rogan, Inside Out, Serial, or Wicked, maybe it's you that should stay out of the conversation when it comes to creativity.

Amazon is a retailer. AWS is compute(/etc) for rent. AirBnB is homes for short term rent. Quibi is/was short movies on mobile. Google and facebook are advertising. Netflix is movies/tv shows. There is no such thing as a pure technology company - the technology has to be used to do something people want.

The people closest to the thing which is about to be dominated by machines are often clueless about what is going on.

While AI will ( and does) reduce the burden of writers, it’s going to -kill- celebrity acting in most cases.

In doing so, it will turn directing on its ear in a way that many talented directors will not be able to adapt to.

Directors will become proxy actors by having to micromanage AI acting skills. Or Perhaps they will be augmented with a team of “character operators” that do the proxy-acting. Either way, there will be little point in paying celebrity actors and their extravagant salaries for most roles. Instead, it might turn out that skilled and talented generic, no-name actors can play any role, then have the character model deepfaked onto them… which could actually create a large demand in lower paying jobs for character actors, possibly actually being a kind of boom in the acting business.

Lots of possibilities, but the director is going to take center stage in this new reality, while celebrity actors will have to swallow hard as they are priced out of their field.

Why would it require a director if a generative process can use the information it has on audience (even individual) preferences to produce the story and format that will best hook consumers?
Because it will perform similarly to the way that writing LLMs do…. They obey and produce singularly predictable and droll stories that have trouble keeping the attention of a five year old. It’s the definition of stale tropes and predictable scenes at its worst.

It has no idea of the mind of the viewer or the reader. It’s literally generating the most probable next few words to tack on to the story.

LLMs are great for a lot of stuff, but they are by design not at all creative in any admirable sense of the term. They cannot produce a narrative that is simultaneously unique or genuinely surprising without it also being nonsensical.

Hallucinations are not a bug, they are a result of proper operation , just undesirable. The same thing that makes nonsensical“hallucinations “ if the “temperature” is set too high is what prevents llms from having any unique ideas if the temperature is set low enough to not hallucinate wildly.

LLMs are text prediction engines. Extremely useful and revolutionary in many ways, but not in creative work. Everything they do is by definition derivative and likely.

What graphics models do in images is no different, it’s not all that creative, and works much better when you -tell it- to be derivative. It’s just that the nature of graphic representation is mainly predictable and derivable… so it doesn’t bore us when it produces derivative, predictable work.