[groggo]

It's pretty entertaining.

People always like telling stories. Books, comic strips, movies, they're all just telling a story with a different amount of it left up to the viewer's imagination. Lowering the barrier to entry for this type of stuff is so cool.

I think you have to be pretty pessimistic to not just think it's really cool. You can find issues with it for sure, and maybe argue that those issues outweigh the benefit, but hard to say it's not going to be fun for some people.

[slg]

>Books, comic strips, movies, they're all just telling a story with a different amount of it left up to the viewer's imagination. Lowering the barrier to entry for this type of stuff is so cool.

This response just never feels true to me. Many of the most successful web comics are crude drawings of just stick figures and text[1] with potentially a little color thrown in[2] and like half of the videos I see on TikTok are just a person talking into the forward facing camera of their phone. The barrier to entry in the pre-AI world isn't actually that high if you have something interesting to say. So when I see this argument about lowering the barrier to entry, I can't stop myself from thinking that maybe the problem is that these people have nothing interesting to say, but no one can admit that to themselves so they must blame it on the production values of their content which surely will be improved by AI.

[1] - https://xkcd.com/

[2] - https://explosm.net/

[morleytj]

This is a thing I think about often.

I think people have a mistaken view of what makes some form of storytelling interesting. Perhaps this is my own bias, but something could be incredibly technically proficient or realistic and I could find it utterly uninteresting. This is because the interesting part is in what is unique about the perspective of the people creating it and ideas they want to express, in relation to their own viewpoint and background.

Like you pointed out, many famous and widely enjoyed pieces of media are extremely simple in their portrayal.

[slg]

>Perhaps this is my own bias, but something could be incredibly technically proficient or realistic and I could find it utterly uninteresting. This is because the interesting part is in what is unique about the perspective of the people creating it and ideas they want to express, in relation to their own viewpoint and background.

I completely agree. And now that you mention this, I realize I didn't even point to the most obvious and famous examples of this sort of thing with artists like Picasso and Van Gogh.

If someone criticizes Picasso's or Van Gogh's lack of realism, they are completely missing the point of their work. They easily could have and occasional did go for a more photorealistic look, but that isn't what made them important artists. What set them apart was the ways they eschewed photorealism in order to communicate something deeper.

Similarly, creating art in their individual styles isn't interesting because it shifts the primary goal from communication to emulation. That is all AI art really is, attempts at imitation, and imitation without iteration just isn't interesting from an artistic or storytelling perspective.

[reaperducer]

I can't stop myself from thinking that maybe the problem is that these people have nothing interesting to say

Social media is the new CB radio.

But now with an AI-powered addiction factor so you can never put it down, no matter how bad it is.

Blipverts are next.

[dukeyukey]

It's undeniably cool. But look at Cocomelon on YouTube, it's hard to see how this won't converge to something similar, only infinitely more scalable.

[maplethorpe]

Not to speak for the OP, but I think they would argue that 'Cocomelon' type content would be a great use of the tech.

[sensanaty]

This "barrier of entry" rhetoric reads like a pure buzzword dreamed up by AI pushers with no actual meaning to it. The barrier has NEVER been lower to produce books or comic strips or anything else like that. Hell, look at xkcd, there's nothing technically challenging about it, it's quite literally just stick figures, yet it's massively popular because it's clever and well thought out.

What exactly is this enabling, other than the mass generation of low quality, throwaway crap that exists solely to fatten up Altman's wallet some more?

[groggo]

What about the era of flash cartoons? Remember "End of Ze World"? In a way that's throwaway crap. Or it could have been written as a comic strip, or animated manually. But Flash kinda opened up this whole new world of games and animation. AI is doing the same.

One that comes to mind is a sort of podcast-style of two cats having a conversation, and in each "episode" there's some punchline where they end up laughing about some cat stereotype. Definitely low quality garbage, but I guess what I mean by "barrier of entry" (sorry for the buzzword), is just that this is going to enable a new generation of content, memes, whatever you want to call it.

[eru]

> People always like telling stories. Books, comic strips, movies, they're all just telling a story with a different amount of it left up to the viewer's imagination.

It's not just different amounts, but different kinds. A (good) comic strip isn't just the full text of a book plus some pictures..

[afavour]

I think it’s really cool… and I’m still concerned about the long term implications of it. We’ve already seen a lot of TV get worse and worse (e.g. more reality tv) in a quest to reduce costs. It’s not difficult to imagine a reality where talented people can’t make great content because it’s cheaper to thump out bargain basement AI slop.

[eru]

We could start by banning cameras, so that people have to draw by hand again. /s

[morleytj]

The democratization of storytelling is probably the best argument in favor, I'd agree. Thank you for the response!

I do find the actual generation of video very cool as a technical process. I would also say that I can find a lot of things cool or interesting that I think are also probably deleterious to society on the whole, and I worry about the possibility of slop feeds that are optimized to be as addictive as possible, and this seems like another step in that direction. Hopefully it won't be, but definitely something that worries me.