Yea I've already purchased some of these apps so I was not going to thrilled if they pulled an Adobe and made me pay for an overpriced subscription on top of it >:(
Exactly what I was thinking. I bought Pixelmator Pro 3 days ago… But I am happy, as I have absolutely no need for the others, except for the free ones.
It's not outrageous, for sure, specially if you happen to have a use case for all the bundled apps. But things change if you consider that the one time payment for Logic Pro equals about 18 months of the subscription. In my case, I bought Logic Pro in 2013 for 180€. Obviously a subscription seems expensive no matter what the price is.
If a students needs Logic Pro for 3 months for a class then they can get it (with the other apps) for $9 total ($6 if you count the free month). That makes more sense than a one time fee of $200. On the other hand, if you're planning to use the software for over a decade like yourself then $200 is very cheap.
Indeed, and considering the 14 years of free Logic upgrades I'm surprised they bothered charging the initial $199! (I do remember being a bit miffed that it was $199 regardless of my existing license for the giant $999 box that was Logic Studio.)
The notion that someone keeping what they earn is "theft" while having something forcibly taken from them via taxation isn't, is wild.
I agree everyone should pay taxes, including billionaires, but this is like saying if my neighbor doesn't give me his couch, he's stealing from me. It's just logically (and morally) wrong.
Your reasoning is ignoring that billionaires disproportionately benefit from public investments (tax money). Therefore, when they avoid paying taxes, they're taking more from the community than they are putting back in: this is theft, and degrades society for everyone (even billionaires, in the long run).
Better neighbor analogy: your neighbor asks for small favors all the time, and you provide. One day you ask him for one and he leaves the neighborhood entirely instead of obliging.
The government gets a percentage of your income, this is the agreement that everyone makes.
For simplicity we only do this when a sale of an asset is made.
Claiming that adjusting this timing is theft is ridiculous, Larry Page has a debt that hasn't come due for his profits is all. Adjusting the timing on the payments of that debt isn't theft.
Per capita the rich get the best deal BTW as billionaires don't exist by a few orders of magnitude without the benefits of society. Sure they pay more taxes but they also benefit massively in comparison to most people in absolute terms of benefit.
>>The government gets a percentage of your income, this is the agreement that everyone makes.
Forgive me if I do not accept the proposition that the non-wealthy had equal influence in the decision how to fund the government. The wealthy decided 'wages earned' would be the determining factor to fund the government, not wealth. I guess I would have done the same if I had so much wealth I didn't need to earn a wage.
However it is accomplished, all citizens should share the same impact on their lives ( wealth being the best approximation I can think of ) in contributing to the annual cost of funding the government.
Put another way: it is immoral for the wealthiest and most powerful in society to shift the burden of paying for government away from themselves and onto the rest of society.
Historically it was fine because dividends were significant and counted as income.
Unfortunately everyone realized the stock market is a shell game where there is no price limit and capital gains doesn't kick in until you sell and even then at a reduced rate...
This proposed tax is an EXTRA tax on billionaires only. The “all taxation is theft” position is pretty indefensible in modern society, but this explicit “No, fuck you in particular!” tax is ALSO indefensible.
That is a hole we could fix tomorrow by eliminating the step up on death. No need to introduce a new global financial surveillance regime for tracking asset ownership for wealth tax purposes just to fix that.
Fuck billionaires. The fact that individual people possess so much wealth is poisonous to society. It is the easiest thing in the world for a billionaire to become a not-billionaire and they will still be stupendously wealthy.
I've never really understood the knee-jerk hatred toward billionaires. The reality is that while I'm sure some fraud/corruption exists, for the most part, they cannot steal money from you. They have to make something so good, a person chooses to part with their money to acquire it.
The government on the other hand, can just tax you (often without cause or justification) and offer nothing in return for what they took by force.
Yet you'll find many people decrying billionaires as the great evil while silent on governments who are in many ways, far far worse.
It's more about the concentrated power that billionaires (shouldn't) have. I didn't care that Elon Musk had $100b+ until he started using it to buy social media platforms and influence national politics.
Of course, you were concerned about how the folks who previously ran Twitter used it to influence national politics, right? You're concerned about such influence by the folks who run each of the four major networks, the folks who run the major newspapers, etc.
What is this concentrated power you speak about? In many areas, they have exactly the same power as everyone else. They get only one vote each election day. They have to queue up at the Post Office, grocery store, etc just like everyone else.
Now you're right that they have more money and they can spend it. Some things like hiring a lawyer to sue someone are too expensive for an average person but accessible to billionaires. Rich people can do things with taxes loopholes that aren't practical for the average schmoe.
It is true that they often have power at their company and sometimes they use it overtly or covertly. But even this can be limited because they have to work with partners and other shareholders. The CEO of a big publicly traded company can't just break the rules because they're on a power trip.
> They have to queue up at the Post Office, grocery store, etc just like everyone else
Don't be obtuse. The people we're talking about don't go to the Post office, or the grocery store, and they certainly don't queue up. They don't even queue up at the airport, they have private planes, private security, private everything.
And "they only get one vote each election day". Voting is the least amount of political influence that a person can have.
Actually, you're the one being obtuse. The point isn't that they use Instacart to avoid the lines. The point is that everyone can use Instacart or the USPS mobile app and everyone pretty much pays the same price. The point is that there's no special level of power that's available only to people with a billion dollars.
There's this mythology built around great wealth and it's largely false. They can't just snap their fingers and make things happen as if by magic. There's no special magic power that only they get. They have to pay for what they want and just like normal humans, they can only spend the money once.
I don't know how you can't see it, but people who have gobs of wealth absolutely have more options (and more powerful options) than people who don't. For just one small example, they can purchase equity in non-public companies. If a regular person wanted to invest in OpenAI, they couldn't. But if a billionaire wants to throw down $10b, they can.
Just like how someone who has $200k can get a mortgage to buy a house, whereas someone with only $20k cannot. That's economic power that comes from having wealth to leverage.
Except if you buy, borrow, and die you don't pay taxes.
Elon Musk only paid taxes because he had stock options that were going to expire. Otherwise he just doesn't sell shares thus not triggering a taxable event and not paying taxes.
Massive numbers of jobs as billionaires by definition are building highly successful large companies. Being on the cutting edge of science and technology. Improvements to all of our lives from better goods and services.
If you hate billionaires, then stop buying any goods off Amazon or from any other billionaire owned company. My guess is your quality of life will drop precipitously.
I don't hate billionaires. They just shouldn't have that much money. NO ONE should have that much money. In fact, back in the 80s, virtually no one did. Remember when Bill Gates was the richest person in the world in 1995? And he had $13b of MSFT stock. Now the 10 richest people all have 10-20x that. That's not inflation (which is only 3x since then), that's an incredible increase of wealth concentrated in their hands, that gives them the power to light our industrial society on fire if they want. And some of them do want.
Right, so a sensible society would tax capital gains more than labor, but since we didn't do that, the lion's share went to the already wealthy. For no reason other than being wealthy.
California should tax its' most valuable asset, its land. It's immovable.
Of course, they did the exact opposite with prop 13 many decades ago, creating a land owning class with disproportionately low tax rates.
In California, if you make or do something valuable, you have to pay increasing proportions of the rewards to the government. But the longer you (and your ancestors) simply own land and do nothing, the lower your tax rate.
Ah yes Flash. I had just started learning how to build static HTML sites and was going down the road of learning flash instead just as I saw Steve Jobs came out in opposition of it.
I decided to turn back to regular HTML/CSS and then PHP.
Turned out to be the right move but I still kinda to miss those old flash sites.
Standards wonks love dancing on Flash's grave, but overlook the massive dent in culture that we lost.
Maybe vibe coding will unlock a similar indie ethos for a future generation, but the frameworkification of the web and centralization of the App Stores has been bad for the last 20y of creativity.
This is slightly off topic, but something I find myself wondering pretty regularly: if ads are pretty much universally hated by every human on earth, why do companies continue running them?
I get the obvious answer: "they work"
But do they? Do big companies have a real data-driven model to demonstrate annoying ads leading to sales?
While anecdotal, I can think of a number of specific times ads slipped through my ad blocker and I went out of my way to avoid buying anything from those companies.
I recently read about 'in thread' ads, like on Twitter, as being not as effective unless they are 'brand recognition' ads. Like, they will help you decide which one to pick when you are staring at two fungible brands on the shelf, but they will not convince you to buy something you have never heard about before, especially not from a direct click through. So while Ads work is true, in many ways, they don't in many others. The brand damage you can get from having those in-thread ads is also real: Ads target the user, not the thread, but by showing up, users associate advertisers with the thread. If you were in some argument about dictators taking over, and suddenly a product pops up, you may assign the negative energy you have toward dictators to that brand as well.
The core of what the author is saying is true, I've experienced it myself (not a promotion, but a raise).
Taking on more than your responsibility is one way to do it, another (with some overlap) is to become indispensable.
In some cases, this means doing more work than your job entails, but not always. It can be something as simple as automating a task that someone else was doing by hand.
When you start stacking up little things that make you more valuable to the company, it's in its own best interest to find ways to keep you (via promotions, raises, benefits, etc).
There isn't a guarantee of anything here, but it definitely sets you up for success.
A thousand times more than sitting around whining that something isn't your job or that the company is being mean.
One of the arguments I keep seeing from people churning out AI video is that the tech is enabling people "creative freedom" that's been made possible now even without the technical know how.
However, 99% of the the "creativity" from what I've seen is done by the AI (how it should look, where the cuts need to happen, the tone, color grading, etc). Which is to say, it's taken from other people's (creative) work.
While a big part of being able to create a good video has much to do with storytelling, the craft of shooting and editing a video is a big part of the creative process as well.
AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together.
I was involved in a conversation about cheating in video games the other day, and the topic shifted to AI use in music. Someone said, "using AI is like using an aimbot for music." I absolutely love that comparison since it highlights the shortcut past creativity/skill to get a computerized best result while also associating it with blatant cheating.
The "enables creativity" argument is ironic since the root of the word is "create" and AI users are literally removing the "create" step from their production process.
I made my wife a song about how we met using Suno. It took me about 4 hours to get the lyrics just right, rewriting them (without AI help, it’s terrible with lyrics), plugging them in, seeing how they sounded, fixing them some more to get the verse so it sounded right.
She thought it was really special and she cried as we listened to it while holding hands in the car. I can’t play guitar, and I can’t hit some notes with my low singing voice, but I wrote every word and it felt like something really special to the both of us. I don’t really care if people think I “cheated”. To torture the analogy, it’s like cheating in a two player game since I’m not publishing this song to anyone else.
That made me imagine -- in the future when AI is much more advanced, maybe I could just prompt it with say "something sentimental to make my wife cry." I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here? Is this some sort of human emotion exploit, or a legitimate bonding experience?
It’s rarely the thought that counts. It’s the committed effort. Presents aren’t just nice because they needed those socks. More importantly, they’re a signifier that you consider the person to be worth thinking about. You value them enough to spend time and effort thinking about them. Then you followed through. This is why we don’t just give people money as a present.
The effort that you put in is often what people like most about a gift. Don’t try too hard to hack around that.
I'm going to draw this example out to make it more realistic.
"Say something sentimental to make my wife cry" you prompt. The computer comes back:
Ok, tell me a few things about your wife. How did you meet? What are her favorite things? Tell me about some great moments in your relationship. Tell me about some difficult moments in your relationship.
Ok, tell me a few things about you. What do you love about your wife? What have you struggled with?
Ten minutes of this kind of conversation and I'll bet the LLM can generate a pretty good hallmark card. It might not make your wife cry but she'll recognize it as something personal and special.
Four hours of this kind of conversation and you might very well get some output that would make your wife cry. It might even make you cry.
The work is adding context. And getting people to add meaningful, soul-touching context is not easy - just ask any therapist.
1. Wives aren't a monolith. The prompt is underspecified, or else individual taste and preciousness is dead.
2. No matter how good the tech today is (or isn't) getting, the responses are very low temperature. The reason it takes a human 4 hours to write the poem is because that is time spent exploring profoundly new structures and effects. Compare this to AI which is purpose-built to hone in on local optima of medians and clichés wherever possible.
> I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here?
Sociologically, devoid of AI discussion, I imagine the limit is the extent to which the ideas expressed in the poem aren't outright fabrications (e.g. complimenting their eyes when really you couldn't care less). As well, it does not sit right with humans if you attempt to induce profound feelings in them by your own less-than-profound feelings; it's not "just the thought," it's also the effort that socially signals the profundity of the thought.
Usually they are. Most people are surprisingly similar and predictable, which is why basic manipulation tactics are so successful. Sure, you have 10% of people who truly are special, but the other 90% has a collective orgasm while listening to whatever is the hottest pop star.
> The reason it takes a human 4 hours to write the poem is because that is time spent exploring profoundly new structures and effects.
Most likely dude spent 4 hours doing exactly the same things that everyone else does when making their first song. It's not like within these 4 hours he discovered a truly new technique of writing lyrics. Each instance of human life that wants to write songs needs to go through exactly the same learning steps, while AI does it just once and then can endlessly apply the results.
> it's not "just the thought," it's also the effort that socially signals the profundity of the thought.
In close relationships yes. When dealing with those you less care about, it's the result that matters.
I think expended effort is what counts here for these types of interactions, and how much of that effort is tailored to the specific person.
I mean, we're almost always standing on the shoulders of other people, and we're almost always using tools. But if the output is fully mechanical and automatic without being tailored for the specific person, it's hard to see it as personal in any way.
It's more like going into a video game and tuning the difficulty all the way down so you are virtually invincible. It's taking the fun out of the game for some, but for others that's the only way to play it.
And you know what? I’ve got a medically complicated kid with a million doctor’s appointments and a full time job. I often switch the games down to the easiest mode. Then sometimes a new Dark Souls comes out and I relish every moment, if I’ve got the time.
I’ve been having Suno make random instrumental chiptunes, too, and it’s got me interested in buying a MIDI keyboard to play around with. Which 40 years ago people were saying that wasn’t real music, either.
It was special and you didn't cheat: you wrote the lyrics and they meant something to you and your wife, which is what matters. If you asked someone else to set the music for you, it would still be music about something meaningful to you both. The AI part of this is pretty meaningless, but you made it meaningful by putting something real into it and sharing that with another person.
I do like the idea that another person commented of exporting the stems and actually singing the vocal portion of the song. It’d be fun to sing again (I sang some in high school), but I feel I never would have been able to come up with the tune in the first place if I’d started from zero.
Maybe we can distinguish craftmanship from creativity. This case can then be cast as one of deploying creativity without embodying the traditional craftmanship (ability to play guitar, sing low notes). I don't see that as illegitimate, so long as no false credit is taken about the said guitar playing, low note singing.
Can an artist be good if they can't draw a good circle by hand? Yes. Except they can't take credit for the goodness of circles that appear in their work, if not drawn by them.
I think it’s also potentially a sense of taste, like being a music producer vs a music creator.
When AI art was nascent and stable diffusion came out, I put probably 1000 hours into really getting good at using it. I like to compare it to picking up pretty seashells on the sand. When working with those old models where many results were terrible, the prompt was akin to driving to a beach you know has seashells, then generating 100-200 pictures on an A100 was like combing through the beach to see if you find any good ones. Finally you could clean up the couple few that were real gems and get something that looked nice. It may not be artistry, but that doesn’t mean it has zero value at all.
Although let’s be real, most people aren’t going to make a living being a beach comber looking for pretty things that washed up on the shore, when even a kid can do it.
I've been doing this. I've been a poet/songwriter for a while, but I'm no musician. This lowers the bar and provides a great deal of relief from the "creative boilerplate" necessary when booting up a song from zero using a DAW, especially for me, a non-musician.
So, I get a good song by throwing spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. Then I can export the stems to the DAW and replace the AI vocals with my own. A little audio processing and mixing later and the whole song is mine.
That’s a good idea actually! The AI did a fantastic job of making a tune that sounded good and matched the style I was going for, then a lot of the iteration was changing the verses because I discovered there’s a lot of lyrics that sound extremely “cringe” when you listen back. Like nails on a chalkboard, a “you know it when you hear it” situation.
My wife wrote a song for a story she’s been working on, and honestly her sense of verse and timing gave an output with me writing a simple style prompt that sounded absolutely fantastic. But she’d spent hours writing and refining that song as it’s important to the story.
Replacing the AI vocals with my own would likely work, although there’s a certain note in the chorus that’s beyond my vocal range. I bet if I practiced it and recorded myself singing the chorus 50 times I could get one result that sounded right, though. Thanks for sharing.
As a semi-professional musician, sounds fair to me.
You wrote the lyrics. There are professional songwriters with many hit songs who only write lyrics. Some can't even play an instrument, much less compose music. So what do they do? They work with a music composer. They hire a music arranger. They hire a band.
So in this case, you still did the foundational songwriting part yourself, but instead of hiring humans to help you finish it, you hired AI.
Grand Theft Auto V launched with auto-aim ('aimbot') as default in 2013. It is one of the most successful games in history, bringing joy to many people.
Are you arguing that's not a real game because of this?
I disagree. The point of playing a shooter game is to have fun and be competitive while abiding by the rules of the game. Using aimbot is circumventing the whole purpose.
The purpose of making music is to make music. So why does it matter what tool you use to do it? Because tools like Logic or Garageband can create lots of sounds for you is that removing creativity? Really shouldn’t music be recorded with a live band every time? Those music production tools are destroying creativity… No. Obviously not.
AI does enable creativity. Turns out it also requires a lot of skill to use it to get something good.
People just enjoy and value the process of making music.
Just like you could enjoy the process of drawing, or doing sports.
Given the amount of talented musicians that do not live off their art, most of the time they value the process and the result and if other people like it too and pay for it it’s even better. Most music is not produced to give emotions to other but to the musician. It happens we share the same emotions that the musician sometimes.
So if you remove the process or devalue it, it’s touching the artist in its heart and values because most of them worked on their craft for years.
One person using more software to "make" music does not remove the process or devalue music for another person who wants to use less software to make music. Replace music with anything in this reasoning.
Actually with AI the music is made for you. I don’t have to learn how to play the piano the guitar or anything. I just prompt what kind of instrument I want to. Is that still « making music » ? Idk, for me it’s not the same. In the end I’m not a musician. I just enjoy music. But I can understand that the reality of some people is different from mine as regards to what is « making music ». My view or use of AI does not invalidates theirs.
Absolutely and I hope you understand my point as well. Actually I’ve never been able to learn an instrument and I always wanted to make music. I’m all in to make music without having to learn anything complicated. Other people might not have the same definition of mine or like what I could produce without their craft.
Exactly right. It's like arguing there is only one way to make food for enjoyment. It's pure snobbery to proclaim there's only one proper way to do X thing along these lines. Making art is just the same, there is no right way to do it.
The HN crowd wants everybody sitting at home on UBI suffering trying to be creative. It's like arguing for hand washing clothes to get that full, proper, drawn-out, brain smashing experience.
Now sit at home and be a good boy, take that UBI, create and be productive - but don't make it too easy, don't you dare use AI, bleed for that UBI.
>Now sit at home and be a good boy, take that UBI, create and be productive
Honestly i prefer that listening marketing bro's on linkedin posting about how AI means X is finished and everyone who learned X needs to pay for their webinar on writing prompts.
> Turns out it also requires a lot of skill to use it to get something good.
I agree. I don't like blaming/crediting a tool, for how it is used.
Some tools may be too dangerous for "just anyone" to use, and there may be justification in restricting access, but I'm not sure the tools should always be banned.
I was just talking about this, with a friend who leans conservative (but not nuttily so). He was telling me about watching all these shows about folks living north of the Arctic Circle, and how everyone walks around with guns, because polar bears look at us as walking snacks. In those cases, the gun is an absolutely necessary tool, and no one even thinks twice about it.
Not so, New York City.
But it would be a life-endangering mistake for someone in NYC to dictate to an Alaskan Inuit, that they can't carry a gun, and it might be a life-endangering mistake for an Alaskan to insist that everyone in NYC walk around with a gun (I won't get into the political arguments, there, be draggones).
I agree. My problem with AI produced media is that a lot of the things I've seen are really bad. If someone uses AI, but has taste and takes the time to curate and fix the output, then the output can be fine.
Just like with digital effects in movies, plastic surgery, and makeup - if it's done well, there's a good chance I didn't even notice it. If it's clearly noticeable, it's often because it's not done well.
I think you can compare to another "uncreative" way of making music: sampling. The way the Timelords do it in "Doctorin' the Tardis" is pretty terrible (in their case on purpose, I believe). There are plenty of hip hop examples where I think musically not much is added to the music, but the lyrics and maybe the act do add a lot. And then there are bands like Daft Punk that will chop up and recontextualize the samples to the point that it's clearly a completely new thing.
There were plenty of hiphop examples where the samples are recontextualized as well, then Puff Daddy came along and attempted to rap over virtually unchanged Led Zeppelin songs and everyone ate it up. AI Is doing the same thing to music that he did decades ago. ruin it.
I didn't mean to say all hiphop is like what I mention. I'm 100% sure that hiphop also does sampling in really interesting ways, I'm just not as familiar with the examples. This was not not meant as a diss, and I wasn't saying all hiphop does things the same way. I was just mentioning examples that I'm personally familiar with of "Sampling Slop", "Different kind of creativity", and "Using Sampling as a completely new instrument".
For the middle category, I meant things like Gangsta's Paradise. I really like the song, I think Coolio really adds something. But you can hear much more of "Pasttime Paradise" in there than you can hear "More Spell On You" in Daft Punk's "One More time"
I mention Daft Punk because it's really accessible: there are videos on youtube that can show a layperson like me exactly how they chopped up the samples.
During Christmas shopping, I saw several books and board games with illustrations in the signature ChatGPT cartoon style [1, 2] as cover art. (As well as a coloring book that was literally only ChatGPT images) They were sold both in comic shops and large book stores.
I found it just sad, honestly. Nothing against using some AI help to create good cover art, but not even bothering to change the default style screams "low effort".
That's the effect I'm fearing. Sure, AI could probably be used to create new high-quality content by people who really put in the effort, but in reality, it just seems to define a new level of "good enough" that lowers the overall level of quality.
AI isn't being used the same way as a drum loop or an electronic instrument, It's being used to vertically integrate services like Spotify so that they don't have to pay as much for content. Maybe you have found a place for generative AI in your workflow that fosters creativity, but this is not how it's being used the vast majority of the time.
The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made. There is no cheating when there is feeling.
Generic AI music so far does not touch me. I might tolerate it in the background, but I know there is great music being made with the help of AI. (Which is different from letting the AI do it all)
An aimbot in competive playing is indeed cheating and sucks the fun out for others. But if you have fun with single player aimbots, why not. (I know some games integrated autoaim and they can still be fun)
It feels insincere and manipulative, especially when I don't know upfront if the content (music, video, text) is from another human being or from AI.
AI will become good enough to write songs better than humans; it's a matter of time. But it feels like someone tries to hack my mind, exploit my human instincts, it doesn't feel like genuine art the way it was for the whole human history - people expressing themselves, creating and sharing something beautiful with each other.
The end result is an automated personalized "enjoy" button, and this is sad.
> AI will become good enough to write songs better than humans; it's a matter of time.
I'm unconvinced. The process of songwriting is so dependent on being able to listen to what you've made and decide whether you enjoy it or not. We can train a model to imitate popular music, but we can't train a model to enjoy music, because we can't quantify enjoyment and turn it into a data set. You can train an LLM on soup recipes, but you can't train one to taste the soup and tell you whether it's good or not.
That's part of what offends me so much about the notion of AI-assisted "creativity." Creating music should be a way of engaging more deeply with music, but you've discovered a way to pay even less attention to music than before. None of the details in an AI-generated song really matter; they were chosen arbitrarily, because they seemed normal. Indeed, they are so normal that your ear will slide right off of them.
You can't fix a soup that someone else prepared—not as an amateur. You don't know what went into it, so you can't pick out the individual flavours and decide whether they're right or not. They were never "right" for you, because you didn't pick them. It's like ordering a Big Mac, taking it apart, and trying to workshop it into Duck à l'Orange. All you get is a Big Mac with some orange slices on it. Maybe you like Big Macs; maybe you're happy. It's a pretty poor substitute for creativity, though.
> But it feels like someone tries to hack my mind, exploit my human instincts, it doesn't feel like genuine art the way it was for the whole human history - people expressing themselves, creating and sharing something beautiful with each other.
There's a thin line between art and business - quite often the goal isn't to have you feel something, it's to sell you product that you pay for, and if by the way you feel something, that's cool.
People care about authenticity, though. There are people who get bothered by things like fake DJs, ghostwritten songs, lip synced live performances, and manufactured artists (such as many kpop groups).
And as for single-player aimbots, I agree that it doesn't do anyone any harm, but what's the point? It's like running the course of a marathon on a segway. If you're just doing it by yourself, then I suppose it doesn't hurt anyone, but you can't really say that you ran a marathon, can you?
Having fun. You don't achieve anything for real anyway, unless you are playing professional e-sports. And some games can still be fun, with aimbot. There is more to games than precision mouse work. I remember a arcade space shooter, where flying the aircraft was speedy action with dogfights, and you had only to do rough aiming, the rest did the "targeting computer". But I also have seen FPS shooters with that option and people enjoying the action and boom boom boom feeling powerful.
"There are people who get bothered by things like .. lip synced live performances, and manufactured artists"
And that would actually be me as well. But I try to keep an open mind even with the shallowest mainstream popsongs. Not liking it because of the source, but to see if I feel the music. Usually I turn it off a very quickly though, but I still don't talk down to my niece for example who likes it.
> The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made.
The touching you emotionally part is due to the quality of the underlying creative work. I'm sure the GP's wife was touched- they put in the work to make something- but the fact is that work they did was enabled by the theft-at-scale of work others have done.
You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale. These models did not come from the ether- they are weighted mathematical averages based on ingesting shit tons of existing creative work, made by people, the vast majority of which was ingested against those creatives' explicit wishes.
Unfortunately most people don't give a shit where things come from as long as they get whatever they want in the end, which is why our economy is almost exclusively run by sociopaths.
"You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale"
I know enough of music creation to know, all music we enjoy is created by "theft". Meaning taking a riff from here, a melody from there. And tweaking it. AI just automated it. Not sure, it sucks with the whole buisness modell around it. That only some profit and not the truly creative composers. But that .. is hardly a new thing. There are many, many awesome musicians out there. Always have been. But only some become "superstars". Where a whole industry pushes them so they stay on top no matter what. That's not fair, but AI did not change this.
This argument always hinges on pretending that "humans being influenced by other humans" is the same thing as "a model ingesting millions of works without permission," and it just isn’t. Not even remotely.
Human influence is selective. It’s contextual, filtered through taste, memory, culture, and intent. A metal songwriter doesn't subconsciously absorb the entire global corpus of music; they draw from the artists who shaped them, or deliberately subvert something specific. That’s literally the creative process: choosing what to reference, twist, or subvert, reject, counter.
A model doesn't do that. It doesn't choose influences, it doesn’t have tastes, and it doesn't have intent. It just digests everything it's fed into a massive statistical set of averaged patterns that it has found, and then regurgitates them on command so as to "minimize error." Calling that the same thing as human inspiration is like saying a wood chipper is just an automated sculptor because both involve wood going in and differently shaped wood coming out.
The music industry fucks musicians raw, to be sure, but this is not guaranteeing anything for musicians in the slightest, quite the opposite: it just makes it so users of the models can also fuck musicians. How is that good at all? The exploitation of artists at scale being the status quo is not a reason to excuse even more exploitation, that's certifiably insane.
"A metal songwriter doesn't subconsciously absorb the entire global corpus of music; they draw from the artists who shaped them"
They also draw from the people around them. The music they hear when they are in public spaces. Etc.
Out of curiosity, have you ever done composing?
Anyway, one can create very shallow songs by hand. One can also give empty vague prompts.
Or one can make a complex music arrangement, manual editing of tracks, have some AI generated mixed in, very detailed prompts etc. If that ain't creative to you, that is your opinion. I think different.
If it were just an average, we'd only get gray sludge. Models learn the manifold distribution - they don't just mix existing works; they discover the hidden rules by which those works were created. This is reverse-engineering of human culture, and that's exactly why control over the latent space is so critical - otherwise, we surrender culture to an algorithm that has "learned the rules" but has no concept of meaning
AI music models are a tool. They're only as good as the person doing the steering and curation.
I am a filmmaker. I have made photons-on-glass films for decades.
I have always wanted to make big-budget sci-fi and fantasy films, as have my friends and colleges who went to film school. The barrier to entry is almost impossible to climb. Most of my friends wound up in IATSE or doing commercial work, but never had the chance to follow through on their passion projects.
Ten thousand kids go to film school every year. Very few of them will wind up being able to make what they dream to create. It's a fucking tragedy that all of this ambition withers on the vine.
Getting a large film budget requires connections. You see a lot of nepotism. Sometimes a director who was in the right place at the right time with the right ideas will make it, but that's such a survivor's bias problem. There are orders of magnitude more people that didn't make it. Talented people full of dreams. And that's a tragedy - imagine how many Martin Scorseses, Hayao Miyazakis, Yorgos Lanthimoses, Denis Villeneuves, and Chloe Zhaos we're losing.
AI is the first tool that will level the playing field for truly driven individuals. I mean this with my full heart - this is a great tool for creative and driven people. It's the arrival of the printing press for us.
But the news of this gift has been twisted and soured by the media and by popular influencers who push only a fear agenda.
By trying to make AI films, I have been doxed, sent death threats, insulted, called thousands of names. Every day! People pour out hatred, racist comments, sexist comments - they literally want me (all of us) to DIE because they've been taught to hate this.
I can't even begin to tell you how exhausting this is. Instead, let me focus on the good.
Here's a list of (what I think) are really good AI films. Each of them takes 10+ hours of work:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQWRBCt_5E - Created by a Hollywood TV writer for an FX show you've probably seen. Not the best animation or voicing, but you can see how it gives a writer more than just a blank page to convey their thoughts.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U - Made by a film school grad as a Robot Chicken homage. If you're going to tell them "don't use AI", then are you going to get them a job at Disney? Also, all the pieces are hand-rotoscoped, the mouth animations are hand-animated, and every voice is from a hired (and paid) voice actor.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKYeDIiqiHs - Totally 100% cursed. Made by a teenager following the comic book's plot. Instead of this teenager spending 100 hours on Fortnite, they made this.
These tools do not remove the need for editing, compositing, rotoscoping. You still have to understand film language, character arcs, story, pacing. The human ingredients still have to be there.
By using these models and tools, directors and editors can finally pursue projects that would require many people and potentially very large budgets. Like the Red vs. Blue creators sitting down and making machinima, they can create vivid sci-fi worlds or whatever genre or mood they want to evoke.
AI is a tool. In the hands of an artist, you can make art with AI.
Yes, people are using AI to make slop. Cameras also make slop - selfies, food pics. Your own camera roll is full of garbage.
People are posting slop AI because it's novel. If we'd gone from "no cameras at all" to "smartphones" overnight, you would see so much smartphone camera slop it would be unbearable. We, as a society, had time to develop filters and curation around cameras. That'll eventually happen for AI too.
Cameras can make incredible art in the hands of an artist. They can also make a lot of shit. But we don't demonize the cameras. Soon, our feelings towards AI will become equivalent.
But right now, it's extremely painful to be a creative person using AI.
I -
ABSOLUTELY HATE
ABSOLUTELY DETEST
THE "ALL AI IS BAD" MEME
IT IS MIMETIC VITRIOL
People have let this stupid meme boil over to the point of sending death threats and doxxing creators. And that is beyond unacceptable.
We need to stop adopting angry slogans of hate and start thinking on a case by case basis with nuance.
This entire conversation needs way more humanity and humility.
And we need to accept that there are good things being created with AI too.
I agree with you on pretty much all that you’ve said here. Thank you especially for the recommended viewing!
I wonder what happens, though, as the economics shift? It’ll be great, creatively speaking, for people who have a project inside them itching to get out into the world. Those were always the people who made the most interesting art anyway.
But viewership economics aren’t expanding in the same way. Same number of viewers, less patience for feature-length work, less willingness to pay.
If the status quo only generated enough money for an already-small universe of Hollywood professionals to feed their families through their creative work, what happens when even that withers?
Film school, it seems to me, is partly about the access to equipment and talent, but mostly about the time and community expectation to dedicate every waking hour to your creative project.
Art and commerce have always been awkward bedmates, but it makes me a little sad that the price for anyone being able to create is that ~none of them will be able to make money from their creative labor.
Hollywood budgets aren't growing, but they're not shrinking either.
Most recent cost cutting has been Hollywood offshoring IATSE jobs to Europe and Asia. 80% of Atlanta's once burgeoning film production has moved away. We have tremendous, multi-billion dollar studio facilities here too.
I do expect AI to eventually be used for saving on VFX costs, pre-production, and even B roll, but I don't think it'll replace principal photography right away. It might be used in more animation projects.
I don't think those budgets will disappear. Rather, I think they will be spent on other projects to increase the slate of offerings.
Meanwhile, completely orthogonal to all of this, the creator economy has been growing tremendously year over year. We have lots of independent creators that are now household names and brands.
I suspect we'll see a rise of indie filmmakers and that the field will begin to look more like writing, indie music, or indie games. Anyone can bring their talent and not much capital and make interesting and compelling work.
The problem, as always, will be discovery. A lot of good work will still go unseen. But this is better than the work not being practical or possible.
As long as people capture minds and attention, there will be incredible value in creating and captivating. Artists will get paid. It's just a matter of artists breaking through and finding an audience.
As a longtime musician, I fervently believe in doing the best you can with the tools you have.
As a programmer with a philosophical bent, I have thought a lot about the implications and ethics of toolmaking.
I concluded long before genAI was available that it is absolutely possible to build tools that dehumanize the users and damage the world around them.
It seems to me that LLMs do that to an unprecedented degree.
Is it possible to use them to help you make worthwhile, human-focused output?
Sure, I'd accept that's possible.
Are the tools inherently inclined in the opposite direction?
It sure looks that way to me.
Should every tool be embraced and accepted?
I don't think so. In the limit, I'm relieved governments keep a monopoly on nuclear weapons.
The people saying "All AI is bad" may not be nuanced or careful in what they say, but in my experience, they've understood rightly that you can't get any of genAI's upsides without the overwhelming flood of horrific downsides, and they think that's a very bad tradeoff.
I created a jazz fusion supergroup in Suno capable of impossibly tight jamming. I believe the synth player has 8 arms. I'm not even selling it as an output of my own creativity - even though I partially feel like it was - but rather, it was just fun to make! I had a ton of fun with it, even downloaded stems and mixed a lot in a DAW. I still LOL at how fresh some of it is. Suno rocks. Top 40 is garbage anyways, and the best music out right now are live bands, imo, so I don't feel that I'm encroaching on anyone else's artistic opportunity (hopefully) by doing these Suno projects.
That said, I haven't shown it to anyone... I'm not trying to make anyone mad. But what's the point of working on any music, AI or not, if nobody wants to hear it? This was a bit of a depressing realization for someone who was always fearful of letting anyone listen to my own actual music. It doesn't matter how much I piloted the prompt, or mixed down the stems, and how good the final result is, because at the end of the day, its just AI... I really don't know how to feel about the whole thing - there are legitimate arguments against AI for creative use, it's hard to not feel like a hypocrite or something for even using it..
> Someone said, "using AI is like using an aimbot for music."
Ok. Lets go with that analogy. Whats the problem with someone playing a single player game with an aimbot on? Sure they wont get good at the aiming part. But it feels kinda up to them on if that matters or not.
Additionally, I wouldn't see anything morally wrong with that. Now, if someone entered into a music competition, where only human made music was allow then I agree that this would be "cheating". But what if its not that and the listeners simply are OK with the "aimbotted" music?
> where all the musicians live, and they have no other place to go, only disconnect.
No actually. Those musicians are free to continue making whatever music that they want and can refuse to listen to the AI music if they dont want to.
The fact that 2 other, unrelated 3rd parties both like to make AI music and listen to AI music is not the musicians area of control here. They do not get to decide what other people like to listen to or make.
> free to continue making whatever music that they want
Never said they weren't.
> can refuse to listen to the AI music if they don't want to
A musician can be a listener, indeed. If you believe a listener has this freedom and will keep it, you're most probably mistaken. No one besides musicians and discerning, ideologically relentless listeners is interested in making NN-generated music distinguishable and supporting the right of filtering it. The goal is to supplant one with the other.
> The fact that 2 other, unrelated 3rd parties both like to make AI music and listen to AI music…
Listeners is not an unrelated party to a musician. They form a vital symbiosis. And it's a zero-sum game, as listener's attention is a limited resource.
> They do not get to decide what other people like to listen to or make.
This is an unrelated point. Who decides what is a separate topic.
The crux of the issue is that we have two types of superficially similar product which are in fact substantially different (hope this does not require clarification) and incomparable in terms of resources necessary for their creation. This begets unprecedented power imbalance and incentives for deceit, biased legislation and other moves to solidify this situation.
To use the video game analogy, I think it's more about PVP vs "bots" as opposed to PVP vs "humans". A lot of PVP games (especially battle royale style) struggle with the question of whether to include dumb AI characters as "fodder" for people to play against. The PVP purists, pro players, and streamers tend to be against bots because they think the game should be a pure test of human skill. Normie players, less skilled players, and players who just don't have the time to master the game tend to like to play against a mix of bots and humans. Some people just don't like PVP and would prefer to just play against bots only.
I'm not going to weigh in on which side I'm on, but I notice the discussion around AI "making creativity too easy" and "devaluing practiced skills" to be similar to the discussion around bots in PVP games.
The long history of art shows a story of technology developments and how artists have creatively applied them as new techniques and mediums.
Is AI music today able to emulate what a brilliant human artist does? Not really. But is it something that artists can leverage creatively? Absolutely.
AI can do the most basic first pass of creation. For a senior engineer writing code is a relatively small part of the job. There is a paradox where complete novices can churn out content / code that looks decent, but is superficially empty or a maintenance nightmare waiting to happen if the complexity increases even a little. On the other hand, for senior engineers, it is truly useful. If you treat the AI like a modestly skilled junior developer and actually still design your software it just does a lot of the boring boiler plate for you. You are still doing almost everything important. When you understand the code and could write it yourself you can almost always keep the LLM on track towards your objective, achieve appropriate code quality, and finish the task quicker. They are also really decent at refactoring and doing boilerplate. Especially in languages like C++ with a lot of boilerplate.
I imagine the same idea above holds for media (music, film) as well. When you understand how to prompt and can get the right scene with all the right constraints you are saving time. The human is still composing, editing, and storytelling. The LLM again becomes a relatively interesting but boring tool in your workflow to speed up some aspects.
Right now the power of LLMs is that you can funnel parts of your workflow that they can handle well and you save a lot of time for minimal design cost in terms of how to use them.
The analogy is great, but it breaks down when we talk about professional use. An aimbot in multiplayer is evil because it ruins the game for others. But an aimbot in game development (e.g., procedural aiming animation) is just a tool. The problem with current AI video is that the model often shoots not where the director wants, but where it's easiest to hit (the template)
There's literally no problem at all with using aimbots, the problem is when you're playing with other people and lie about it. In fact, many games have built in aimbots simply because it's a fun mechanic (Ion Fury and Borderlands: Pre-Sequel are two that come to mind.)
Using AI to create music is like having your mom buy you a surfer wardrobe in the 80s/90s even though you lived in landlocked midwest or a skater wardrobe even though you didn't skate.
No, comparing to an aimbot is too charitable. Using AI for music is at best like watching a gaming stream and you barely choosing the game, though not the streamer.
Sorry that isn't true. Lots of smaller communities online, especially around small streamers make small meme style videos. Usually these are mocking someone doing something dumb online, or jokes/memes about the show etc. These are similar to parody videos online that were hugely popular on YouTube back in the early 2010s.
People did do this before AI. Usually cutting people faces out and sticking them on actors faces in existing movies, or subtly doing parody cover, doing clever edits (Cassette Boy is a notable example) or people were performing and recording it like the "Epic Rap Battles of History".
All it done is allow people to create these sort of to a higher creative standard, in other cases it allowed people to create jokey stuff that they wouldn't otherwise be able to create.
People using this technology in this manner is clearly creative. They are using the tech to make something new and unique for a particular audience.
In the 80s/90s you would be complaining about people using tracker software and samples to create music instead of learning to play an instrument. Under your logic someone like FatboySlim isn't a musician.
I have another example. Web development. Dealing with css and designing exact objects or elements in websites was a pain meaning needs technical expertise, time and good idea to be expressed. LLMs made it easier. Still the website created by a dilettante can never compete with one from a creative mind.
If I have $500,000 I can buy a car that’s meticulously hand-crafted with hand-stitched leathers and fine woods in the interior with an engine built by hand by a single person.
But I just need to get from point A to point B so I have a $10,000 used car.
Or you could get one with a better service history, the paint job and interior is in better condition, and it has the optional extras and a recent cam belt change for $12,000.
It depends whether you think the extra cost is worth it.
Under your logic someone playing a CD is a musician.
I'm exaggerating a bit to make the point that the amount of human creativity put into a work of art is not binary. Just pasting a rehashed joke as a genAI video prompt is not much of a creative process.
I think a lot of people mean "Wedding DJ" or "Radio DJ".
However there is a whole small subculture around this. A friend would go hunting for records to sample in Charity shops for old vinyls (this was pre-ebay). This apparently is known a "Digging" and lot of Music Producers, DJs etc would do this to find samples for their sets/albums.
Discussions about "DJs" are difficult because there's a WIDE range of skills behind what we call a DJ.
Yes, some have zero skill and will basically just show up with a pre-determined Spotify playlist. They won't even have mixing/transitions between songs.
Some are in the middle and will be able to do basic transitions between songs (ie, just simple beat matching) and know how to carry a vibe.
At the far end of the spectrum are actual composers that are effectively making new mixes of songs on the fly.
And so you have the problem where someone says "Being a DJ takes a lot of skill" because they're thinking of the last category, while the person hearing that message replies with "How does it take skill to just press Play?" because they're thinking of the first.
> Under your logic someone playing a CD is a musician.
No. That isn't my logic at all.
> Just pasting a rehashed joke as a genAI video prompt is not much of a creative process.
That isn't what is happening. What people are doing is taking people from different online streaming shows, making new content based on jokes made on those show and turning them into music videos, which are usually a cover of a well known song.
People have been doing this online without AI for quite a while. Usually this was with various music software. All AI does, it make this process easier.
Any time something is made easier and you get more of it, it becomes worth less.
There might be a claim that there is still some human creativity involved, maybe. But it's sort of like amateurs at an open mic night telling memorized jokes that they didn't write compared to a comedian who has spent thousands of hours perfecting stories, jokes, punch lines, timing, and phrasing.
> Any time something is made easier and you get more of it, it becomes worth less.
That is only the case with commodities. Not creative works and/or entertainment.
> But it's sort of like amateurs at an open mic night telling memorized jokes that they didn't write compared to a comedian who has spent thousands of hours perfecting stories, jokes, punch lines, timing, and phrasing.
Often these amateurs are often funnier than the professionals. However that of course is subjective.
Using samples is not the same as AI or creating AI videos. Nor is using photoshop or an editing suite.
"Creating" AI art is analogous to commissioning a work of art from someone else.
Person A put in a request to person B, pers. A receives a mockup or a draft from pers. B, pers. A and B might engage in convos to refine the work, pers. B delivers the final product to pers. A. AI "artists" are person A in that scenario.
Sampling, like FatboySlim, or many other producers, is clearly not person A in that scenario. They're exerting intentional, direct, creative control. Creating AI art is mediated in a way that is far more indirect and stochastic. The creative inputs in AI art is more directly the text in the prompt rather than the output. Editing the output afterwards is creative input afterwards, though. However, sign a work you commissioned from someone else as your own and people will probably roll their eyes, which I think describes most reactions to AI videos.
> Using samples is not the same as AI or creating AI videos. Nor is using photoshop or an editing suite.
It is very similar. You are using a piece of software to aid in the creative process.
In these cases, you are remixing previous artistic works to create a new one.
> "Creating" AI art is analogous to commissioning a work of art from someone else.
Depends what you are doing and how you are using the AI. So this isn't always the case.
If all they did was "Take Thriller but make it look like an anime". I would agree. But there is obviously more happening than that.
> Sampling, like FatboySlim, or many other producers, is clearly not person A in that scenario. They're exerting intentional, direct, creative control. Creating AI art is mediated in a way that is far more indirect and stochastic.
No often I've created some basic stuff and you really have to tell it exactly what you want, often make sure it has the right images, fonts etc.
I could do the exactly the same in GIMP. It would just take me longer as I will have to watch a YouTube tutorial for the 5th time on how to add a text shadow to some text as I use GIMP about like twice a week and forget how to do stuff.
So what is the difference between me providing commands via a prompt to make an image, as opposed to using a mouse and keyboard in GIMP? How I am inputting the instructions? There is a bit more abstraction.
However one is considered creative by you and another isn't, because there is a slight loss of direct control.
Similar with these AI parodies there is obviously a lot of work done in getting the AI to produce the output they want. Especially considering some of the characters are obscure individuals.
There is a creative process taking place. Just because you've used AI (which at the end of the day is a piece of software) doesn't invalidate that process taking place. It doesn't mean the creative process is done by the AI either.
It's both... I think it can cut both ways... I was largely on your side, as most of the AI stuff I've seen is just annoying more than anything. Then the "Star Wars: Beggar's Canyon" video completely changed my mind. The voice generation is clear and inflection appropriate... the cuts, sequence, and overall effects are clearly put together in a consistent way.
I can only imagine how much work that video was, but is really the first thing I've seen as AI video that gives me hope... and obviously a work of passion and a lot of effort to get such a great final result.
Thanks for name dropping this video, I hadn't heard of it. Maybe I'm just getting old but this felt as empty to me as most other GenAI stuff does. The tech is getting better but I'd still prefer a no-budget fan film that looks worse but has heart (and visual consistency) to something like this. I can meet halfway and say that perhaps this is a modern version of someone being able to play with their action figures and micromachines and show others what they were imagining and that lowering barriers to sharing such things should be celebrated. To mirror my youtube comment though, I'm worried that this sort of thing will stop being a tool to storyboard and play around and will just become the final product for studios who could do so much more.
This was already the direction for studios though... Improvements to CGI and vault filming have cut costs dramatically relying on tech.
The clip mentioned likely took a few green screen segments, a lot of training data and many tries to get the clips needed for that sohrt story. B it's a lot more work at current state of the tech than just entering a single prompt.
It’s almost like people that use the tools to the best of their ability will produce higher quality outputs. This is a new tool like we’ve never seen before with a low skill floor to use it. We don’t know what the skill ceiling is yet.
If you're correct, creative people have nothing to worry about then. Creative people will still stand out and have a role. But the world already has an oversupply of creativity, and a need for a lot more of boring, uncreative things. A plumber, mechanic, or programmer, all need minimal creativity -- 99% perspiration, and 1% inspiration, as they say.
Yes, that's exactly right. It's why I, and many other creatives I know, are not worried about AI. Our annoyance comes more from it dominating the conversation rather than actual perceived risk.
I'm sure there's a creative way to respond to the annoyance. One slightly worrying factoid is that chess players said the same thing about early chess engines, and them being no match for human creativity. Time will tell.
With chess, there is a known, specific end goal, and the "creativity" comes with how you arrive there. With an artwork, the end goal is entirely decided by the artist, there is no "win state" to reward.
That's not what people who play chess thought. The creativity wasn't in the goal, but how you arrived there. The "beauty" of the steps that you took on the way to the goal. They believed that it was human creativity and sense of beauty that would never be encapsulated in a computer program. They turned out to be incorrect, but maybe you're right and things are different in a wider domain, we'll see.
Not sure exactly you mean, or who you are referring to as being correct. Not sure the relevance of anything being a game, the question is the intersection of computation and interacting with humans. Having been there at the time, I saw the snide dismissals of computers playing chess, they were "simply playing by rote", they were just glorified calculators who could never understand the beautiful moves played by human grandmasters. And this was actually true at the time... it just didn't stay true.
Today, very many humans enjoy spectating computer played chess games, and often comment on the "beauty" of the moves played. Take that for what you will.
Do you have any source for your claim that there is an oversupply of creativity? My gut feeling is that not all creativity is created equal, and there is a small amount of truly impressive creative works that are not simply retreads of existing ideas.
I mean, a lot of "creatives" fund their art by doing work like making icons, thumbnails, jingles, website designs, corporate logos, etc. Things that can, and are being done by AI. This will have downstream effect on creativity since we aren't using the efficiency that AI provides for the greater good of society. Koenigsegg might sell one or two more cars though, so there's that.
> AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together.
This is very much not the case with the Stable Diffusion/Wan/general open diffusion models space.
The amount of effort and creativity that goes on in creating complex workflows, custom LoRAs, fine-tunes etc is genuinely a new area of art imho. Sure a lot of it is going to produce things that most people might not consider "art", but it's unfair to lump the work happening in this space with people randomly prompting Sora and dumping it on TikTok.
Those aspects aren’t the only “creative” aspects of filmmaking.
What if someone used AI to say something important or get across a different perspective?
99% of people in the world do not have the time/money/connections to achieve a film vision. They were locked out of the ability to create their vision - creating an high concept or production-heavy film has been the most privileged position in the world - until now.
Agree entirely - creativity emerges through the process of work, or is "discovered" through work. If AI does the work, it fundamentally can not be a creative process.
There is a lot of content whose final value ultimately doesn’t justify the time that would be spent on creating it. Worse, there is sometimes only a specific window of time where a content has entertainment value and it quickly drops off after you leave that window.
For example, someone recently created an entire anime style video of the United States invading Venezuela and capturing Maduro. It came out awesome! But… to make a similar quality video by hand would have easily taken a team of humans several months at best. By then, the news cycle would have moved on, and the delivered video would have even less value being watched so distant from the event that inspired it. People wouldn’t care anymore, and it wouldn’t have as much impact.
AI is the perfect solution for delivering such a video exactly when you need it. To me, this is one of the more acceptable uses of AI, to make fun throwaway content that you just laugh about for a few moments and then move on with your life. Having a human dedicate a large amount of their time to make such videos would be sad, and it’s better if they preserve their effort for more serious artistic works that are timeless in their value.
I think there is some tenuous analog between today's AI, and yesteryear's music synthesizers and "modern art". Regarding music, I understand synthesizers were created to mimic real instruments, whereas artists used its capabilities not to mimic, but to create entirely new sounds. My limited understanding of modern art (and without a search I don't distinguish between expressionism, impressionism or any other isms because of my ignorance of the differences) is that it was a reaction to the modern world, and an expression of something that could not be anything other than a creation of the human mind. AI may be helping people to copy existing aesthetics, but I'm hoping/waiting for it to enable people to take it in a completely novel direction that can only be augmented human expression.
I don’t agree with your music synthesizer analogy. I own a synthesizer, however I don’t possess any musical talent whatsoever. I cannot for the life of me produce anything remotely listenable from the thing. I know how to use it, but cannot make good music. You just need to look at some street performer banging on a plastic bucket and entertaining a circle of people to realise that the ability to make music is orthogonal to having the right tools.
AI art is more like me pressing the demo button on the synth, looking you in the eye as it plays the preset tune and saying “I made this”
Would you scream at a child that shows you a beautiful shell they found on the beach -- "you didn't make that!" -- why assume that everyone's ego is entwined with sharing?
No, because the child is behaving as a curator which is a valuable act. I never hear ai “artists” claim to be curators, they always claim to be creatives.
Photographers were not initially respected as artists -- they are now. The history of this cultural evolution is well documented. It is easier than typing a prompt to take a picture with a smartphone, yet the respect for photography somehow remains. It is definitely a cultural problem.
Not only are they removing creativity but they're eroding the medium with a flood of high quanity/low quality of misinformation or fakes. My youtube feed is innundated in AI generated talks, audiobooks, history etc. The audiobooks may be okay but I can't trust any AI generated content. At this point I wish I could just fiter it out. Just yesterday I saw a video by Yuval Noah Harari and almost towards the end I realize it's AI slop. It has nothing to do with the author except for his syntehtized voice. The content is not even vetted by a human, it's being created faster than users can consume it. For now I can spot these AI channels and attempt to avoid them but am not sure how long this is going to last.
A lot of digital tech produces more waste than actual value. Just look at your email inbox: odds are, the overwhelming majority of emails you get aren't useful correspondence from real people.
A lot of technological advancements (or use scare quotes here) that claimed to let “regular people” be creative just end up passifying us and relinquishing our creativity. Why play the guitar, the record player already does it better. Why learn to juggle, some kid in <supposedly whiz-genius country> already does that.
Of course of course of course, people have been inspired by play in bands and to learn to juggle. But the trajectory seems to be to move away from small intimiate creative offerings, like playing music in your living room, to passively recieving Taylor Swift into your earbuds.
We need to disambiguate what you mean by "AI" here. If you're referring to people typing prompts in a frontier web UI, maybe. But if you're using local models, you can do quite a bit more, ComfyUI workflows can get crazy. Multi-region controlnet guided generations with IP adapters and loras, etc.
The art gatekeepers want to try and paint everyone using AI creatively as monkeys mashing ignorantly on keyboards, taking the unmodified output and parading it around like Picasso. The reality is that is to AI art as bathroom dick graffiti is to manual art.
>However, 99% of the the "creativity" from what I've seen is done by the AI (how it should look, where the cuts need to happen, the tone, color grading, etc). Which is to say, it's taken from other people's (creative) work.
I don't get why this is a big deal? Like 99% of the creativity of taking a video of an ocean is also just taken from the nature. Your creativity was actually a small portion of "information" out of all the bits required to make that video.
A video of an ocean (or anything) is not, inherently, art, or creative. But also...if you're taking a video of the ocean, it's probably because you want to capture/share a video of the ocean, which an AI generated video is not.
Unless you're making a very particular type of video, you likely want to capture aspects of the water's movement, color, sound, or interactions without much care about faithfully capturing a video of the literal ocean. The former part is a big portion of what turns a video of the ocean from not inherently being art to being as much of art as you make it so. Saying the only reason would be to share the literal ocean forces the art out, not in.
"99% of the creativity of baking is done by the wheat growing in nature. Your creativity of "baking" was a small portion of what was required to make that pastry."
I find the mental gymnastics like this around AI discourse really confusing. Taking a still video of the ocean isn't "creativity". And if a video of an ocean is truly creative it's likely not attributed to "nature".
Taking still photos of anything is widely considered a creative activity. There's usually only a small amount of creativity involved. Sometimes more. Same goes for AI generated anything. You can have low effort photos and high effort photos, low effort AI generated pictures and high-effort AI generated pictures.
AI just lets you get a better result for less effort (for some definitions of "better"), just as a camera lets you get a better result for less effort than a paintbrush and canvas does.
It produces an image, just like painting does. It does so quicker and "better" than humans. But it also requires less creative input and allows less creative freedom.
Yes, 99% of people are uncreative and use the creative freedom this way. Besides, many truly creative people won't even touch it, some because of the ethics and others because it's not up to their standard yet. Does it really look surprising to you?
>AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together.
That's quite a leap of thought and doesn't follow from the first part at all.
Put a different way, would you say Fiverr enables people to be more creative?
Using AI to create an artistic work has more in common with commissioning art than creating it. Just instead of a person, you're paying the owners of a machine built on theft because it's cheaper and more compliant. It isn't really your creativity on display, and it certainly isn't that of the model or the hosting company.
The smallest part of any creative work is the prompt. The blood and the soul of it live in overcoming the constraints and imperfections. Needing to learn how to sing or play an instrument isn't an impediment to making music, it's a fundamental aspect of the entire exercise.
>would you say Fiverr enables people to be more creative?
That's not what GP said. They said that using a model removes creativity. That's a ridiculous leap from their premise, especially considering that it's misleading at best.
>The smallest part of any creative work is the prompt.
Like most people who never actually played with it, you seem to assume that prompting is all you can do, and repeat the tiresome and formulaic opinions. That's not worth discussing in the 1000th time honestly. Instead, I encourage you to actually study it in depth.
I agree. This is not about creativity, but about producing something that kinda looks like professional art. People assume that creative output has to pass some bar, so that other people can appreciate it. But you can also produce interesting art with very simple techniques. XKCD is an example that comes to mind.
I've been making music videos with a very satisfying creative process: Use AI to make a ton of images, pick the very best ones, and carefully arrange them in the right order. Example: https://youtu.be/r-_dJNgt3SM
I think most people have the ability to express themselves through art, but if their first experience of trying to make something is using AI tools, they will never discover that they can make something genuine that reflects their experience.
Having watched both. Yes the Incredibles are much much worse. Especially if we focus on the color palette. You could have not picked a worse example.
But for example Moana is not worse than Cinderella. Arguably it's better. But the algorithmic choices around perspectives, reflections, etc. Were not really automated. In both cases a lot of people where involved in each scene, and I am confident, they went over every frame, checking the result was what they wanted.
Additionally, hand-coloring wasn't necessarily a more pure creative choice anyway. It was dictated by material conditions such as the availability of pigments, studio constraints, time pressures, etc.
This feels like an incredibly disingenuous comparison and I suspect you know that. But just to play along, real artists had to design the character models, real filmmakers had to decide which shots to capture, real editors had to put that together to make a cohesive story. Also they almost certainly went through color grading after having completed the rendering, so the colors are certainly selected by humans to produce a nice looking composition.
Or you could argue that it’s simply lifting from other people’s creativity. Like making a song entirely of sampled sounds from other songs with a key change.
If you think this for one ai you must think it for all.
I can now instantly visualize anything I think of. That is creative power. The same for code - I can instantly scaffold a frontend I think of in google ai studio. Its not all great and I have to keep the slot machine spinning. But it's empowering.
These "ai kills creativity" arguments are all rather uncreative.
No, you are given someone else vision of anything you want. If you are being 100 % honest with yourself, the output of a prompt would never be exactly what you imagined. This is where YOUR creativity dies. Yes, you create, but you create through the filter of someone else. If this ceiling of creativity is enough for you, good. You will never break through it anyway, by design.
idk we are sure getting close and this stuff isnt even good yet. 1 example - I nearly one-shotted all the images for my blog https://backnotprop.com/blog and i felt creatively empowered as they came out better than I imagined (but aligned in general design)
My writing is not good at all. Much like your bland resume experience. But I never really needed that - I was Accenture's youngest senior manager while you were a consultant there.
> the output of a prompt would never be exactly what you imagined
There is way more than just a prompt to make something interesting with AI though. For example this test[0] i saw some time ago, includes several different AI systems (Z-Image Turbo with a custom lora for the specific style, Wan 2.2 Time-To-Move for the animation output, After Effects for the control animations and some sort of upscaler.
This involves way more than just a prompt and the video still has a few issues, like the right hand remaining "stuck" on the head, but the way to fix it would most likely be the same as making the motion with perhaps some additional editing work.
IMO AI can make some things easier and/or faster, even allow people to do things that'd be impossible for them before (e.g. i doubt the person who posted the video could make a real live video with actors, etc like the AI video shown) but to do anything beyond simple slop you still need to put in effort and that includes making things close to your vision.
(not getting the 100% exact results is fine because that was always the case with any tech - it isn't like most, if not all, PS1 devs wanted to low res graphics with wobbly polygons and lack of texture filtering, but the better games leaned in what the tech could do)
Do an experiment. Take any single photograph and try to recreate any aspect of it with the AI. For example, try to match overall vibe of the color palette _exactly_ as it is on your photo. Or try to match the exact camera angle. Or exact composition. How many slot spins did it take? How many would it take to match multiple aspects of a single image?
Creativity involves an extra step, imagining something in your mind eye and then bringing it to life. Not settling for whatever comes out, but demanding more. As you learn any craft your ability to articulate increases beyond happy little accidents into intentional mastery. Not so much with AI.
The argument about killing creativity makes a lot of sense to me. Our brains are inherently lazy and always they seek paths of least resistance. That's the intelligence, basically, strategizing for best outcome with least effort. AI models require ~zero effort to map your prompt to a mere sliver of the entire possibility space. How can we then convince ourselves to spend weeks or years to try to reach some novel art styles, when they require so much manual labor and the attention muscle that we allowed to deteriorate away?
Painters don't imagine something and through shear technical skills translate what is in their head to a canvas. Their style emerges through constant, repetitive work and iteration. The work itself creates the art, not an idea. An idea is just fuel.
Except you’re not the one doing the creating. It would be like me hiring an artist to execute my vision and then calling myself artistic. Empowering, maybe, but it’s closer to the illusion of power. You control a genie, but you don’t have the power yourself. And it’s worse than that, because in reality the genie is controlled by some mega corp, and not by you at all, and suddenly you need this genie to do all your thinking for you because you’ve forgotten how.
I don't care to call myself an artist. Nor is it about "being an artist" - subjective anyways and _could_ be defined as the ability to bring to life the things you think; of which AI is a tool.
At least those people are aware of where they sit and who they depend on, and they're not hiding it. A movie producer doesn't pretend to have created the movie by himself, someone who uses AI to write their blog posts on the other hand...
It's too tempting for people to have AI do all the creative work and then take credit for it, and it gives these people the delusion of thinking they're literally artists, authors, bloggers, etc.
Disagree. I'm someone who thinks in pictures, which might sound like a great skill for a visual artist to have, but I can't draw for crap. I'm not even very proficient with digital art tools. Through some trial and error, I found that music was a much better creative output for me. If generative AI was around during my formative years, I might have just been satisfied creating slop art and stopped there.
AI (as it currently exists) will never be "creative" in the sense that it can only imitate or interpolate between past works. At some point we'll recognize that AI generated works are boring and predictable. AI will probably never invent a new musical genre or artform since it can only reproduce or recombine works from the past. I wonder what happens when the internet is so full of AI generated slop that that the only things worth "training" on were made in the time before AI generation became a thing. Will AI generations be full of dated references to a time gone by?
People may say it increases creativity but I see it more as lowering the bar to produce things. The same could be said for a lot of inventions like photography made producing images easier and I'm sure a lot of portrait painters lost their jobs to photographers. I think the danger is that we may see a very rapid erosion of jobs in the creative space that won't be easy to transition into new fields which I feel will have a detrimental effect on our society.
I am currently working on a script with my uncle who is a professional playwright, my grandfather wrote for Benny Hill. So it runs in my family.
Biting the bullet, I have accurately had it generate the scene of the cafe. Generating visual imagery of how I imagine it; a cyber dystopian gothic cafe with wandering goths.
It's capped to ten seconds and that alone would've costed me a fair sum to even get a small render without revisions.
I could now technically pitch this with the AI works and get the funding required to hire actual animators/actors or spend my savings myself giving it to an artist depicting the theme and style; not that I could afford it.
How is creativity lost in that scenario? AI is a tool, it shouldn't be a do-everything, I created the script and it's generated the visual mock.
Personally I wouldn't want it to create the whole show and would personally prefer real folk to do the magic but for my own personal consumption it's given me the excitement and further drive to continue.
I don't think using GenAI to storyboard and pitch is inherently bad. There's long historical precedent for folks using existing film and music in demo reels to explain the feeling and tone they're going for (e.g. WW2 footage for Star Wars storyboarding reels IIRC). In isolation what you explained sounds fine, there may even be some argument that parts of this fall under fair use which may diffuse certain training attribution copyright challenges. Where things start to fall apart for me would be if your story/script and resulting prompts start to rely on GenAI upstream. And as you say, when the end product itself starts to lean on this tech as a shortcut.
> how it should look, where the cuts need to happen, the tone, color grading, etc
That's not creativity. That's skill. A person can think of something (creativity) and not know how to bring it to life without the skills to do so. The creator still needs to have a creative vision, and communicate that vision effectively at the very least.
Of course, there's also people that are just cranking out slop, but I'd argue there's no creativity there, other than finding creative ways to copy others. But that's been a problem since forever.
It's not like these discussions haven't have quite a lot of precedence. I bought a 4-track tape "portastudio" back in the 90s, but it didn't make me a good producer- years of playing music with dozens of groups did that. And I bought a canon xl1, but that didn't make the movies I was making more compelling than if I'd had budget to shoot on 16mm.
Creativity and good craft come from struggling to communicate an idea; anything that short circuits that will make you a worse artists.
AI is, to me, like claming that because you have access to a forklift going to the gym is no longer useful- you're missing both the aesthetic and material reasons why folks have been doing things.
What's worse- people claim a forklift is better than, say, working out and then say to the folks who were working out "this is what you're doing and it is dumb to spend all that effort doing it". That's nothing new either- I get why folks look at a lot of my early, cracked FruityLoop-based work from 2002 with some disdain-- it misses all of the nuances and trade-craft knowledge that I gained playing in bands over the following 20 years.
And I know how it sounds because I can hear it in the products of other young musicians: I play a lot of jazz with kids in their 20s who have way better chops than I ever will and who have a lot of the real book memorized. That real book allows them to pick up the tunes super fast, but they don't have a lot of the nuance that the 70 year olds I sometimes get to play with have in their playing.
I use AI for the dumbest stuff, like writing contracts for mechanical licensing. It's shit, because I'm just looking to copy some already-written document without paying a lawyer. I can't see see why folks would -want- to use it to make documents that no one else had previously thought would be worth writing and to me it very much seems like it can only produce, by definition, derivative works.
Musicians are terrible about that. I love being in a cover band, because I usually like the people and playing. But absent that, simply being able to "poof here's 'your' cover of Stariway" seems super boring, almost soul crushing.
And paying AI do the creative parts- that's like paying someone to have sex with my partner because I wanted to spend my nights playing video games instead of woodshedding on pedal steel guitar :D
Just think of what photography did to portrait painting. The camera and film did all of the color work, the person hitting the button had no need to mix their own pigments anymore. All the creativity was removed.
> 99% of the “creativity” is done by the AI…it's taken from other people's (creative) work.
Yes, and prior to AI, 99% of creativity was also taken from other peoples work. This is how creativity works. Man has no ideas in a vacuum.
As humans we take influences in from what we’ve seen and when we “create” things we’re simply combining things together, resulting in output falling somewhere on the spectrum from a 1:1 copy to somewhat novel.
If you can’t spot the influences in a painting or song or piece of graphic design, it’s simply because you aren’t deeply familiar with prior works in the field at the time.
Oh boy, it’s this again. You’re essentially admitting to having had no meaningful experiences in your entire life, as you’re incapable of imagining doing anything other than consuming content. Good art says something about the world, not other art.
How ironic that your response, "Good art says something about the world" is also just repeating a meme you've heard, a no-true-scotsman fallacy wrapped in an old cliche.
It's a meaningless, religious statement. Good art is impossible to define, and everything says something about the world.
I too can repeat tired memes to support my position, ie. Good artists copy, great artists steal.
The truth is, the process of creation starts with something called inspiration. Inspiration is theft. Again, man has no ideas in a vacuum.
As you believe you've led a far more interesting life than me (!), please cite some examples of what you believe to be "good" art. Then let's investigate how devoid of any influences it actually is.
Well, your claim was 99%, and you’re making the claim so the burden of proof is on you, so you first: Give me ninety-nine examples that support your position and explain why for each of them, and then I’ll give my one and do the same and we can see who has the stronger body of evidence.
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