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by captainkrtek 223 days ago
This reads like a reasonable policy. More broadly speaking re: AI content: Sure, boomers scrolling facebook will continue to enjoy their AI slop baby and animal videos, but I think the fact that the term "AI slop" has become so commonplace reflects a bias (generally) against AI-generated content.

Each time I scroll LinkedIn and I see some obviously AI produced images, with garbled text, etc. it immediately turns me off to whatever the content was associated with the image.

I'd be very disappointed to see the arts, including film making, shift away from the core of human expression.

“You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” - Joanna Maciejewka

2 comments

The problem with AI slop isnt the AI part.

It's that not every one has the talent to produce something of quality.

If you give a professional passionate chef, the same ingredients for a full meal, as your average home cook the results will NOT be the same by a far stretch.

Much of "AI slop" is to content what Macdonald's is to food. Its technically edible but not high quality

That’s an interesting way to put it, which asks the bigger question of (perhaps?):

Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “artist”, flooding society with low-quality content using AI trained on the work product of actual artists?

The people doing as such do not have the talent they desire, nor did they do anything to upskill themselves. Its a short cut to an illusion of competency.

> Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “artist”, flooding society with low-quality content using AI trained on the work product of actual artists?

Change the statement to: Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “photographer”, flooding society with low-quality photos using cell phones, never having to learn to develop film, or use focus, or understand lenses...

Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “painter”, flooding society with low-quality paintings because acrylics are cheap, the old masters made their own paint after all...

Why does it matter how it was created? It wasn't Bob Ross's "Joy of Making Incredible Art", it was simply the "Joy of Painting".

And people do enjoy content that, for lack of a better word, is disposable. Look at the "short dramas" or "vertical dramas" industry that is making money hand over fist. The content isnt high brow, but people enjoy it all the same.

> AI trained on the work product of actual artists?

Should we teach people how to play guitar without using the songs of other artists? Should those artists be compensated for inspiring others?

Some of this is an artifact of our ability to sell reproductions (and I would argue that the economics were all around distribution).

There is a long (possibly decades) conversation that were going to have on this topic.

I think in all of those other examples you provide, a person still had to do something.

- take a photo of a subject

- paint something

- pick up a guitar

Whereas asking the computer in the lowest effort possible to do said thing for you “draw me this”, “make a song that sounds like this”, requires zero effort/skill and results in no improvement of your own ability.

> the lowest effort possible

By that rational, Autocad is bad because it doesn't require the same skill as Draftsmen.

Effort, labor, is not a reflection of creativity or skill.

I have a decent sense of design, I can tell you if something looks off, but I say to designers all the time "I cant do what you do, take what I say with a grain of salt". I have rubber ducked non technical people and gotten questions that steered me in better directions...

AI Doesn't make me a good designer, AI doesn't make me a better coder.

Who is going to do a better job framing a house. Someone with 20 years of experience with a hammer and a hand saw or someone who has never built a house with a nail gun and a circular saw.

The AI has no taste, no talent, it simply does what it's told. The crappy content is a result of it producing what it has been asked to produce.

>Do we want a society where everyone can masquerade as an “artist”, flooding society with low-quality content using AI trained on the work product of actual artists?

The internet was sold to us with the promise that everyone could publish, and wasn't that great? So many voices, we will hear wonderful new things!

What happened? Enshittification. The rise of the antivax community. Empowerment of far right white nationalists across what had been the most (lower-case "l") liberal governments in the world. Signal being drowned amdist the noise of a bot-driven ad-hellscape internet.

No. We do not want a society where everyone can masquerade as an artist.

Unless, that is, we hate art.

Agreed. The double-edged sword of "giving everyone a voice" online means we also gave platforms to hate speech, low quality content, dangerous misinformation, the extreme optimization of extracting attention/money from people (ads, algos), etc.

I'm not for censorship, it's more just a reflection on human nature. I'm fairly pessimistic on AI "hopes" given what we've turned the internet into.

I think that's unfair to Mcdonalds
> but I think the fact that the term "AI slop" has become so commonplace reflects a bias (generally) against AI-generated content.

Is that just because we are at the very beginning stages of the technology, though? It is just going to keep getting better, will the bias against AI generated content remain? I know people like to talk as if AI will always have the quality issues it has now, but I wouldn't count on that.

Is it going to get better? Because people have been saying that for years now, and while AI output is somewhat improved, many of the issues with it have not changed.
I'm not convinced that AI image generation _is_ getting better at this point. If anything, it seems to be getting somewhat weirder-looking.

Like, I gather that prompt adherence has improved somewhat, but the actual output still looks _very_ off.

I think still images have improved remarkably, though some things still look off for people (they look too-flawless). Whereas video suffers from the strange fluidity and unnatural motion of things.
> though some things still look off for people (they look too-flawless)

I think _maybe_ there's an uncanny valley problem (and it may vary person to person). I found Stable Diffusion 1.5's output quite _bad_, say, but not as, I dunno, objectionable and wrong-looking as current models.

Video has always been a complete mess, remains a complete mess, I don't see any real path towards it not being a complete mess. It is, in fairness, a _much_ harder problem.

Agreed.

I've also found the proliferation of "AI film director" created "films" funny.

The output is a strung together set of 2-3 second clips telling some story. The characters changing between clips, the scenery changing drastically, etc. There is nothing cohesive. I imagine its a similar "context window"-like problem, if you have to keep many minutes of visual context.