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by xena 562 days ago
My hope was that AI would make it easier for people to create new things that haven't been done before, but my fear was that it would just be an endless slop machine. We're living in the endless slop machine timeline and even genuine attempts to make something artistic end up just coming off as more slop.

I love this timeline.

3 comments

It might be true for "Creators" etc. but there were things that I always wanted paintings of but I have no talent, time, tools or anything really.

When I first got access to dalle (in '22) the first thing I tried was to get an impressionist style painting of the way I always imagined Bob Dylan's 'Mr. Tambourine Man' I regenerated it multiple times and I got something I was very happy with! I didn't put it on social media, didn't try to make money off it, it's for me .

If you enjoy "art" (nice pictures, paintings, videos now I guess) You can create it yourself! I think people are missing that aspect of it, use it to make yourself happy, make pictures you want to look at!

Even if it's made with AI, it is slop only if you don't add anything original in your prompt, and don't spend much time selecting.

The real competition of any new work is the backlog of decades of content that is instantly accessible. Of course it makes all content less valuable, you can always find something else. Hence the race for attention and the slop machine. It was actually invented by the ad driven revenue model.

We should not project on AI something invented elsewhere. Even if gen AI could make original interesting works, the social network feeds would prioritize slop back again. So the problem is the way we let them control our feeds.

> if you don't add anything original in your prompt

Define "original". You could generate a pregnant Spongebob Squarepants and that would be original, but it would still be noise that doesn't inherently expand the creative space.

> don't spend much time selecting

That's the unexpected issue with the proliferation of generative AI now being accessible to nontechnical people. Most are lazy and go with the first generation that matches the vibe, which is the main reason why we have slop.

Imagine a movie like Napoleon, but instead of needing 100 million and thousands of extras, you just need 5 actors and maybe a budget of 50k.

You could get something much more creative or historically accurate than whatever Hollywood deems marketable.

I think about AI like any other tool. For example I make music using various software.

Are drum machines cheating? Is electronic music computer sloop compared to playing each instrument.

Is using a Mac and a 1k mic over a 30k studio cheating ?

The main comparator is Kasane Teto and Suno. Kasane Teto is functionally a piano that uses generative AI for vocal synthesis: https://youtu.be/s3VPKCC9LSs. This is an aid to the creative process. Suno lets you put in a description and completely bypass the creative process by instantly getting to the end: https://youtu.be/UpBVDSJorlU

Kokoro is art. Driveway is content. Art uses the medium and implementation to say something and convey messages. Content is what goes between the ads so the shareholders see a number increase.

I wish there were more things like Kokoro and less things like Driveway.

What if your making a short movie and driveway is playing in the background during a scene.

It's like everything else. It's just a tool.

You can create an entire movie using a high end phone with quality that would have cost millions 40 years ago. Do real movies need film?