[enos_feedler]

Buried in this interview is a great insight about the limits of AI:

"Just viewing all of Treadwell’s material would have taken me at least ten days, but I had four assistants who went through everything, melting it down to about twelve hours of footage. I gave them precise instructions about what I was looking for, but sometimes scrutinised what they had put aside and found extraordinary moments they had dismissed. The shots of the fox paws on the tent had been discarded because they were too shaky, but I thought it was very beautiful imagery."

Benedict Evans often compares LLMs as "infinite interns" and when I started reading this passage my mind immediately went to the idea of "What if Werner used LLMs to filter this footage?" But the following sentences reveal a truth that I've discovered personally and that is apparent here: When creating something original there is something only accessible to the human mind of the creator. The creator needs to have direct experience with the materials that make up the creation to bring out its full vision. The more of the process you replace with interns (or assistants, here), the more the creation is compromised and doesn't fulfill its possibility.

[atoav]

The problem I see is that LLMs have the tendency to pull everything towards the mean of whatever you ask it to. But the really, really good stuff is often totally out there on the fringes.

You can get some good results with really precise instructions, but this requires someone who has already thought a lot about what they are after.

[enos_feedler]

Coming up with precise instruction about what we are after isn't always possible. In many cases we only know what we are after once we see it. And if you can't express what you are after into tokens you can't outsource that choice to anyone else except your own direct experience of the process.

[AngryData]

Yeah I think LLM story lines will probably have the exact same problem as story lines made in commitee. They end up as average and predictable results that might not be bad but almost never become something great.

Subverting expectations by itself can make or break a movie, but it takes real insight to not just be "lol random spork, im edgy" or just baffling, as we have seen in many soon forgotten works.

[sdwr]

Art is communication. If you can convey the message to an intern on a post-it, what's the point!

My favorite art is the kind that describes to people how they already feel.

[andyfilms1]

Absolutely. One of the major purposes of art is as a way to communicate things that can not be put into words. And if that's the case, how could one ever hope to create it with a prompt?