Live data from Hacker News

How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a can of WD-40

davekiss.com

221–229 of 229 posts

Re: How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a can of WD-40

#221
post #110

A gamed a contest into a brief TV career once. A British computer TV show ran a content on their web site, but it was a fast-paced multiple-choice Flash game. I just opened three accounts. Ran through it with the first two to figure out all the right answers, then got perfect scores on the third. The prize was to co-present the show one time, but apparently they got so much positive feedback they made me permanent, u…

A fellow super brain finalist on hn?

Was that the name of the contest? I don't remember now! There are some pages about it in archive.org but very hard to find.

Re: How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a can of WD-40

#222

I can simultaneously appreciate the write-up for gaming a competition while also dreading how it basically describes the incentives for contributing to the AI-enshittification of the internet.

If the AI is being judged as a winner, than by definition isn’t it superior to the typical human produced content, at least in this case? Seems like the opposite of enshittification.

I think you misunderstood my comment. The videos didn't win because of AI. A real person narrating, with a video set to a soundtrack of a real musician's music could very well be superior.

But the author of this post saved a lot of time in the interest of dominating the competition by using AI instead.

While I can appreciate that the process of assembly and curation of AI-produced components is an art (much as collage is an art form), I'm still dismayed by how AI 'art' is replacing real art (as the components of this collage, if you will).

To me, the difference between real art and AI output is human intent. There's a context, a though, a mood. What AI produces can't be art in the same sense, because there's no human behind it, who can explain their reasoning for why they used a specific stroke in one place. And real-world incentives diminish the value of the human element, which is why we're heading to a "dead internet" fast.

Re: How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a can of WD-40

#223

I can simultaneously appreciate the write-up for gaming a competition while also dreading how it basically describes the incentives for contributing to the AI-enshittification of the internet.

Sigh… you know, there's a bit of "can't beat 'em, join 'em" happening here, for sure, but let me be optimistic for a second. This story wouldn't have happened without AI. I genuinely used the tools to tell the story I wanted to tell. There was something about the way friction was removed with the typical narration round-trips that actually made the storytelling better, easier, less painful… and I truly don't believe…

This wasn't intended as a criticism of you, it's a criticism of how incentives motivate the devaluation of artistic works of humans.

I didn't particularly like any of the videos, even the fairy one, no offence. This probably speaks more to the nature of the competition than the videos themselves (I could care less about WD-40, though I'm sure a really good video could sweep me away, similarly to how I'm often genuinely impressed by the creativity of superbowl commercials, even for products I don't care about).

But I can definitely understand the thought process and also liked your write-up. My compliments to your art, which is your writing and your description of your thought process, and your creative solution to a challenge within an economic framework where you need money to survive and can justify outsourcing other typically human endeavors to the robots in pursuit of financial compensation.

But that economic framework, the incentives, and the replacement of that human touch with AI output is depressing, and the thought that most things we encounter online and in media will be AI-generated in the future is terrifying. That's not a commentary on what you did, and again, you also wrote an excellent article about it which I highly doubt was mostly written by AI.

As you said (perhaps in another comment) you spent more time on the article than the actual competition. That effort shows. And it stands out among a sea of low-effort, AI-generated blog content even now on the Internet. But when you talk about "AI making storytelling easier" there's also an admission that we're moving to a world in which, in many situations, lower-effort content and AI-generated content are becoming more worthwhile under the reality where maximizing the ratio of monetary reward to time investment is necessary and expected.

Re: How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a can of WD-40

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This story wouldn't have happened without AI. I don't think that's the optimistic take you present it to be. To me the post reads as the story of someone for whom art is the least important part in an art contest and treats the artistic part as an afterthought ("I just wanted to adhere to recording content that prioritized the weighted breakdown"). I'm not going to pretend that the contest attracted the top artisti…

Did you see my fairy entry? Heavily artistic, thoughtful, and cinematic, leaning into my passion for the art of telling stories through video that I've kept close for almost 20 years now. It lost. The judges selected the entries they felt were the best fit. The argument for this contest is that AI enabled _more_ thoughtful art to exist, not less.

We’ll never know but I suspect you might have won with that entry if you didn’t spray WD40 into the environment (which it might warn against doing on the can). Even though this submission might have been better than the rest they couldn’t possibly select it for obvious reasons. Just like they wouldn’t have selected doing something dangerous with WD40 etc irrespective of production value, creativity, etc

Re: How I won $2,750 using JavaScript, AI, and a can of WD-40

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprisingly annoyed that I cannot guess what word you you are censoring, and AI wasn't helping much, mind spoiling it for me? Also, I don't think you have to censor words here in general.

Looks like "motherfucking" to me, just missing a couple asterisks.

I failed to account for HN parsing asterisks to make text italic, eating up the leading and trailing one I believe.
Post reply on HN