[jazzyjackson]

I see the demand for being able to produce content with 0 effort, but where is the demand to consume it coming from? I thought people watch tiktoks to interact with people, the desire to engage with nonhuman personalities must be extremely niche, but could be I’m in a millennial/luddite bubble.

[ilaksh]

That's a good point but there is also a lot more passive consumption than actual interaction.

Also, AI video's IQ is generally pretty low now, but it still has the capacity to create very tailored experiences, such as with AI influencers automatically responding to every single comment from any viewer that donates X dollars. The are limitations to the digital avatars and video generation etc., but they are already very engaging. And in the next 1-3 years they will get much better.

Where we are headed in possibly 2-5 years is the expectation for many people that the personalities, activities, videos in general are completely customized for them or for the communities they are in. And change immediately based on their whims (or constrained by more realistic humanlike reactions if desired).

LTX video can be fine-tuned to produce a consistent character and runs at realtime frame rates. It is a tiny 2b model and it's understanding of prompts and the world is garbage because of that, but hardware and models keep getting much much better.

[emseetech]

Before investing billions in individually curated, generated influencers and content creators, maybe we should market test it first and see if it's what anybody actually wants, let alone whether it's even achievable in any meaningful way.

A lot of AI people make strong assumptions about what the consumer market demand is for explicitly (as in, not "tricking" the user) AI generated art, music and content.

[ToucanLoucan]

The fundamental issue is extremely pro-AI people do not respect any creative endeavor at all, and therefore all of this is unknowable to them. They don't know why people are interested in art or why people want to make art; movies, images, music, any form of creative expression; they simply know that people are interested in those things, and that various AI models will let them make those things without investing into the skills to execute, or indeed, even the vision to know what they might want to make. To them, a movie is not a thing you make because you want to express something: a movie is a product, brought to market, and people then pay tickets to see, and they see things like Sora as a way to make movies that people will want to see. This is the only way that the way they talk makes any sense: because they don't know why people want to see movies, them wanting to see it is treated as a given. Of course they'll want to see it, it's a movie.

And like, this isn't that weird. This is the mindset of every money-minded media executive that exists, and is why studio meddling in projects is almost universally bad, and the more meddling there is, the more frantic focus-group testing that's done, the more diluted and bad the art comes out in the end. Classic example is the original theatrical release of Blade Runner which was subject to tons of studio interference before it's release, and the studio's version is so legendarily bad that the studio itself, decades later, has all but fucking buried it at sea.

It's this particular kind of brain worms that infests people who want to get into that space, but have no desire to cultivate skill. They want to make things people love and/or get the money for doing so, but they have no idea why people make things, or why people want the things people make. Hence why all of them are tripping over themselves for their imagined AI future.

And if you think I’m being elitist or whatever, I’m just reading the marketing here. All of this stuff is sold with the primary selling point being you can make stuff without learning the skills required to make stuff so it’s naturally going to be most appealing to people who lack skills and see the acquisition of them, or more likely the difficulty involved in that, as something they don’t want to deal with.

[ToucanLoucan]

> I see the demand for being able to produce content with 0 effort, but where is the demand to consume it coming from?

There isn't one. The only type of people excited about AI content are people who are into AI, and see it as the aforementioned way to produce potentially algorithmically driven viral content with no skills or effort. And, with anything as unpredictable as various content platform's algorithms, and especially when it's initially starting out, there will be successes, simply by the law of averages. However, no one, and I do mean absolutely no one, is seeking out AI content beyond for the notion of maybe seeing what it's like for it's own sake. People comment regularly on TikTok and elsewhere about how they find the AI voices grating, they dislike the AI captions that don't match what's actually said, and we have ample history of content farms turning out repetitive, odd nonsense that people have already become incredibly sick of... which is basically what you're guaranteed to get when you have an AI generate a TikTok for you, because of both the weight of those videos in the training data, and because of how these models work.

For those in the know, there's been substantial trends going back a decade now of low effort, slop content being driven further and further into irrelevance because for every hundred lazy grindset people trying to generate income, you have one person who knows things and has studied them, who has insight to offer, and figures out the remaining parts by trial and error; how to shoot video well, how to light a set, all of that. And those people naturally move to the top of engagement. You might, MIGHT, catch early accounts or new users who haven't found interesting people yet... but the algorithms on most of these sites, paradoxically, are going to identify those interests and then drive users towards more interesting people talking about them, because that's what the vast majority of users want.

It doesn't need to be important, or like... pillars of civilization type knowledge, this applies to any topic you can think of, no matter how insipid you think it might be. If I was interested in collector Barbie dolls, would that algorithm draw me towards a video of a Barbie enthusiast who owns hundreds of them and has studied the topic to death, or to a content mill churning out detritus of some AI generated Barbie-girl woman, talking in TikTok narrator voice, about how her dolls are so cool and neat? And like, sure, maybe you can make the AI video thing so good that it can reproduce the same room, the same presenter, with perfect features and clarity hosting a collection of dolls you somehow manage to keep in the AI's memory, all of that is difficult, but solvable, in theory anyway. How do you give your AI presenter with her AI dolls anything even remotely interesting to say about the dolls she doesn't collect, in the room that doesn't exist?

[jaredklewis]

This makes great sense to me, but just curious if you or others have a theory as for why Google routinely directs me to “content mill” churned “detritus” as opposed to engaging expert content?