[maerF0x0]

Unsure if it's just the way they prompted it / coded it, but the output is far too much a literal direct copy of the lyrics. The best music videos have a story arc on the theme of but often not litearlly the lyrics, and start with obscurity and reveal something (following all the literary/story mechanisms)

Consider Amber Run - Found lyrics versus the video, and the story arc of the video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj6V_a1-EUA

[anonova]

Literal music videos are still fun and a valid creative direction, e.g., Vance Joy's "Riptide": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ_1HMAGb4k

[Waterluvian]

The thing about art is that literally everything is a "valid creative direction." But that doesnt make everything immune from derision.

[NuclearPM]

I don’t understand what your point is.

[RIMR]

The point is that, at least presently, an algorithm lacks the creativity to meaningfully stimulate an intellectual person, and whatever excuse you give for the decisions that algorithm makes, you should never expect a human being to be more impressed with the algorithm than they are with their human peers.

[nomel]

Or, in the opposite direction, with literal lyrics to match the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMmXCyrV_WQ&list=RDXMmXCyrV_...

[therein]

Coincidence that both songs reference Michelle Pfeiffer or was that free connotation at work?

[m463]

  ...
  This hit, that ice cold
  Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold
  This one for them hood girls
  ...

- https://genius.com/Mark-ronson-uptown-funk-lyrics

[therein]

Probably nobody will see this as I replied much later but apparently Michelle Pfeiffer and other middle aged singers are a codename for cocaine.

So "white gold" makes a lot of sense now.

[therein]

...

I just wanna, I just wanna know

If you're gonna, if you're gonna stay

I just gotta, I just gotta know

I can't have it, I can't have it any other way

I swear she's destined for the screen

Closest thing to Michelle Pfeiffer that you've ever seen, oh

...

- https://genius.com/Vance-joy-riptide-lyrics

[titanomachy]

Free association?

[therein]

Yeah.

[bee_rider]

That’s neat. It especially works because the words are a little bit nonsensical, so interpreting them literally becomes unexpected.

[wzdd]

Come on, that video is on another level. "All my friends are turning green" (shot of $1 bills), "she's been living on the highest shelf" (woman standing on Juliet balcony), "they come unstuck" (someone pulling twin pole popsicle apart)

For contrast these have "ice cold" (shot of ice cubes), "got chucks on" (shot of shoes), "livin' it up in the city" (shot of city).

[dolebirchwood]

Those shots all matched the banality of Uptown Funk's lyrics.

[threetonesun]

The retired dragon(s) were honestly my favorite part simply because of how absurd they were.

[Forgeties79]

That’s not really the same thing.

[dataviz1000]

In an interview, an adult actress was asked about the things she says during scenes. She said she describes what is happening literally at any moment.

This is what LLM models do.

[BLKNSLVR]

That was sort of like what The Mandalorian dialogue devolved into, with some explaining what's happening right now, and then some explaining what they're about to do.

Once you notice this, it's impossible to not notice it.

[Jtarii]

Also what all of Nolan's dialogue is.

[BLKNSLVR]

I'm yet to watch The Odyssey, I'll let you know how much your pointing it out ruined it for me ;)

[nsxwolf]

Weird Al videos are often totally literal and extremely fun as a result.

https://youtu.be/N9qYF9DZPdw?is=tU_8p-hDZv9gjAJ6

[krapp]

Wierd Al videos are a parody of an existing property. "White and Nerdy" is a parody of "Riding Dirty" by Chamillionaire, but the lyrics are about nerd stereotypes (as an intentional contrast with black culture as presented in the original,) and a great deal of creative effort is put into making those lyrics humorous while also fitting to the original theme. Nothing about Wierd Al's videos are "totally literal," certainly not in the sense of these AI videos, which are "literal" in the sense of "literally showing what the lyrics are describing."

[IanCal]

Lots of the shots in white and nerdy are literally showing what the lyrics are describing, is there another level to them with references I’ve missed?

[krapp]

It's Riding Dirty but it it's about a guy who does anything but.

It's a song about how white people find black culture cool but are themselves stereotypically uncool.

It's a song about nerd culture and celebrating that, wherein a white nerd makes the same kinds of boasts that black rappers do in their music, but about nerd stuff.

It's layered, as any good parody has to be, with cultural references. When Al mows the lawn, he isn't just mowing the lawn because the lyrics say he's mowing the lawn, he's mowing the lawn because that's a sterotype of white people, and the intent is to show how uncool Al is and how unlikely he is to fit into the culture he aspires to. Note that when Key and Peele show up they lock the door on their convertible. This is a joke because their convertible is down and locking it while literally useless is an expression of their frustration with Al's nerdiness, it's also something white people stereotypically do around black people. The candles behind him are arranged like a Pac-Man. Al mentions that his rims don't spin not because the rims of the car in the frame aren't spinning but because he's a nerd and why would a nerd have spinning rims?

In "Amish Paradise" there's a part where Al sweats profusely. This is both a reference to the hard physical labor employed by the Amish and to the original Gangster's Paradise video.

The levels you're missing are irony, cultural awareness and genre awareness. The context is what makes the humor work.

[IanCal]

There’s two sides to what you’ve said - I’d forgotten lots of the things like trying to lock the car doors, which is an additional point although the scene is still pretty direct.

The other things you’re saying are about the song and storytelling there which is not relevant here. We’re talking about the translation from the song and lyrics to a video. The things I’d remembered about the video were very direct translations from the lyrics, because the lyrics are very clear and to the point.

> Al mentions that his rims don't spin not because the rims of the car in the frame aren't spinning but because he's a nerd and why would a nerd have spinning rims?

Right, a thing in the lyrics.

[krapp]

I feel like people are being purposely obtuse here. OK. If you want to believe that satire and parody only consist of blindly showing things mentioned in the lyrics in order to imply that these AI generated videos are equivalent in art and skill to what Wierd Al does, I won't even try to stop you.

But most people are going to understand the difference between the two and see that argument for the reach that it is.

[automatic6131]

That's because White and Nerdy isn't a standalone song (if it was, it would be rubbish). It only has value as referential humour and self deprecating parody. So by being literal, it's using juxtaposition to emphasise the humour: It's funny when the nerd is pointing at the old JS logo and star trek's klingon icon because one would typically expect there to be something related to black culture, as in the start of the music video.

If it wasn't a parody of an existing song, and the popular genre, it would be complete garbage. Nothing about the song would work.

[IanCal]

I think you're mixing up the lyrics and the video.

> It's funny when the nerd is pointing at the old JS logo and star trek's klingon icon

The lyrics are funny. The video is almost entirely converting each near standalone statement into a very direct scene. "I'm fluent in javascript as well as klingon" is the funny line about his nerdiness, and the video is literally just him pointing to those logos.

Key and Peele locking the car doors is one of the few things that happens that's in the video and not explicitly said in the lyrics.

[walrus01]

I wonder what would happen if you gave the AI video generation tools a widely ranging prompt to generate a video from Weird Al's "Amish Paradise", and then compared it to the actual video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg

[userbinator]

It seems no one has called themselves "Weird AI" and started making AI parodies of Weird Al's videos yet...

[maerF0x0]

I definitely read that as weird ai and was confused when I saw a normal, but dope, video

[latexr]

They are funny, which is the point of Weird Al. The overwhelming majority of music and music videos are not comedic.

[rcpt]

Genghis Khan

https://youtu.be/P_SlAzsXa7E

[nalekberov]

Fun fact (if you care): Back in the '90s, pretty much every music video produced in Azerbaijan literally matched the lyrics.

[hn_throwaway_99]

The entire thing was cringeworthy to the core. I kind of enjoyed it though because it perfectly epitomized "AI slop" in the first 30 seconds so wonderfully. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" - show a blonde woman in a gold sequined top! "Livin' it up in the city" - show a shot of a big city!

If anything, the absurd literalism of the video contrasted so perfectly with the (IMO) brilliant clever originality of the lyrics. E.g. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" is actually a not-so-subtle reference to cocaine. Imagine if the lyrics were as stupidly unoriginal as the video ("Now we're all snorting cocaine!!").

[postsantum]

> The best music videos have a story arc on the theme of but often not litearlly the lyrics

If the music is crazy popular, you can still do it. See Land Down Under

[deadbabe]

Sometimes you can fix this by swapping one tracks music video with another, and letting the syncopation happen naturally.

[FailMore]

Yes, LLMs are way to literal - it is a problem.

Claude can right great code, but it’ll throw comments into the code about why we chose this approach instead of the random one I discussed with it - when the comment is of no use to a future developer.

It points at some sort of theory of mind problem in LLMs imo.

[calgoo]

I think these videos are actually a good representation of vibe coding... If you let the agent do its own thing, it works... but once you start looking at the details (just like in the video) you can see where the issues are.