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Ben Affleck's surprisingly comprehensive take on LLMs for video

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Re: Ben Affleck's surprisingly comprehensive take on LLMs for video

#81

Post by stormfather »

He's partially right. AI won't be able to write an interesting, wholly original script anytime soon. For that it's necessary to live as a human, to experience anguish, loss, fear, hope, etc. Art, true art, will be the last field to be taken over by AI. Has anyone seen a truly poignant AI image yet, that illuminates something about the human experience? One they would put in a museum? I haven't.

However there is such a large body of work already, all the derivative stuff can be made effortlessly. What would happen for instance if you told the AI of 2050 "I want to mix the Brothers Karazamov with the Odyssey, set on Mars after the apocalypse?" I just tried with Sonnet and its not too bad. Maybe a large enough basis of stories has already been told that most AI scripts will feel novel enough to be interesting, even if they are just interpolations in the latent narrative space humans have constructed.

Actors will be wholly unnecessary. A human director will prompt an AI to show more or less of a particular emotion or reaction. Actors are just instruments.

The three most interesting transformations AI will bring are:

1. Allowing a single human "director" to rapidly iterate on script, scenery, characters, edits, etc. One person will be able to prompt their way through a movie for the price of electricity.

2. Movies will become interactive. "Show me this movie but with more romantic tension / with a happy ending / Walt loves Jesse"

3. Holodecks will allow young people to safely experience a much broader range of events and allow them to grow their souls faster, meaning they can make better movies. Modern movies suck because life is too predictable and tech-focused for good writers to emerge. We won't ever put ourselves in real danger, but what if your senior year of high school was to live through the French Revolution in a holodeck? It would change you forever.

Re: Ben Affleck's surprisingly comprehensive take on LLMs for video

#82

Post by tessellated »

xenospn wrote: post #46
spiderice wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write? The answer seems obvious: because it's better. Obviously it isn't better now . But it's easy to imagine a day in the not-too-distant future where AI can shit out 1000 hours of content that is better in every way than what humans create. And it will even feel more human than the human made stuff because the AI will have learned that we like that. What…

Can AI write really funny jokes? honest question

I asked ChatGPT to write about walking the dog in scientific language. It came up with this gem:

"Logging middleware records metrics (distance, stops, events) into a shared datastore for analytics on future walk optimization."

Re: Ben Affleck's surprisingly comprehensive take on LLMs for video

#83

Post by sfmz »

dmortin wrote: post #65

Maybe the main actors, the stars of the movies are safe for now. But background actors who just sit in the background or have some small extra role will be decimated, because those roles can be replaced with AI. Since many actors start with small roles or background work, it will have an effect on the industry if entry jobs are eliminated. In the long run even the main stars can get into trouble, because it may be tr…

80% as good for 1/10000th the price is quite the offer.

Re: Ben Affleck's surprisingly comprehensive take on LLMs for video

#84

Post by globalnode »

spiderice wrote: post #28
bdndndndbve wrote: post #12

My favorite quote on this topic is "Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?" Especially when you're talking about fiction and reading/watching for enjoyment, what does it matter if you can shit out 1000 hours of AI content? Maybe it's good to keep babies entertained? Studios have gotten so into the habit of treating "content" as a fungible commodity, but the fact is that even blockbuster mov…

> Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write? The answer seems obvious: because it's better. Obviously it isn't better now . But it's easy to imagine a day in the not-too-distant future where AI can shit out 1000 hours of content that is better in every way than what humans create. And it will even feel more human than the human made stuff because the AI will have learned that we like that. What…

art is essentially human, warts n all, how can something non-human make human art.

Re: Ben Affleck's surprisingly comprehensive take on LLMs for video

#85

Post by xboxnolifes »

duxup wrote: post #42
aetherson wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the classic expression of the fallacy that the value of something is based on the cost to create it from the seller, not the benefit it brings to the buyer.

I would if that changes for more personal communication? If someone didn’t write something, I’m not sure I have much interest in talking to them about it.

Do you value that they wrote it, or that it's their opinion? Hypothetically, if there was a system to take one's thoughts on a topic and generate text that accurately represents them, would you be interested in reading it if someone sent you their thoughts?

Re: Ben Affleck's surprisingly comprehensive take on LLMs for video

#86

Post by harrisi »

matsemann wrote: post #36
jrflowers wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this analogy. If one piece of software can win a game then a completely different piece of software can win at making movies

But a game is something with an objective measure. Either a move is good or it's not. Can you say the same of parts in a movie, where it's more about taste?

I'm not making any statement about LLMs here, but the counterpoint to this is that you don't need to make what film critics would overwhelmingly call a "good" movie. You need to make things that make money.

I can imagine two options for that: utilize expertise from people that know how to make films that make money, or make so many movies, one or two can make enough money to pay for all the others and then some.

Really, I think it's more about what gets more attention and then you make deals with Roblox and Fortnite or whatever to sell digital goods.

Re: Ben Affleck's surprisingly comprehensive take on LLMs for video

#87

Post by xboxnolifes »

coldtea wrote: post #57
aetherson wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the classic expression of the fallacy that the value of something is based on the cost to create it from the seller, not the benefit it brings to the buyer.

Art is the domain where "the cost to create it from the seller" matters. Now, for those OK with slop, they can have it, but that's called content. Hollywood and SV (and most consumers) conflate the two all the time.

> Art is the domain where "the cost to create it from the seller" matters.

Is it? Or does it boil down to: "This has been done and rehashed multiple times before, it's no longer interesting"? There is tons of recognized art out there that, in literal time spent, could be done in minutes. What is important is what people gain from the art, not the time put into the art.

Re: Ben Affleck's surprisingly comprehensive take on LLMs for video

#88

Post by kleiba »

mkleczek wrote: post #50
kleiba wrote: post #29

The trope of the sci-fi robot has been so engrained into our cultural narrative that I think people constantly underestimate the creative capabilities of AI. People still think in terms of this dichotomy of math/science and art/creativity. But AI has already broken through so many boundaries of what anyone would have believed possible just a few years ago. I hear people complaining about uncanny valley stuff all the…

The point is: art is a means of communicating _between people_. We can appreciate pictures/movies/music generated by machines but at the end of the day we (people) are in a deep need of connection to _other people_. I don't believe replacing people with machines in this context is possible (one might say: by definition). But if it happens it will be the anti-utopian world of loneliness.

This is exactly the kind of argument I think is informed by 20th century ideas of AI. I also think in this form, it greatly exaggerates the issue at hand - AI will not totally replace human-human communication.

Also, since the original context is Hollywood movies, I don't think that there is a lot of "art" in the storytelling of big block busters. Why AI shouldn't be able to write a compelling story needs to be argued more convincingly, I think.

Re: Ben Affleck's surprisingly comprehensive take on LLMs for video

#89

Post by K0balt »

TheAtomic wrote: post #4

Was it? He concludes that LLMs will never write Shakespeare, or create original work of that caliber, or animate an actor the way Ben Guinness could have done it. I'm paraphrasing but isn't this confirmaation bias from a guy now heavily vested in making movies? Move 37 was so astonishing the world champiion Go player, hardly known for theatrics, got up and left the table. It was considered an insanely "original" move…

Idk. LLMs may effectively emulate human creativity up to a point, but in the end they are writing literally the most predictable response.

They don’t start with an emotion, a vision, and then devise creative ways to bring the viewer into that world.

They don’t emotion-test hundreds of ideas to find the most effective way to give the viewer/reader a visceral sense of living that moment.

While they can read sentiment, they do not experience an internal emotional response. Fundamentally, they are generating the most probable string of words based on the data in their training set.

There is no way for them to come up with anything that is both improbable and not nonsensical. Their entire range of “understanding” is based on the statistical probability of the next conceptual fragment.

I’m not saying that it might not be possible for LLMs to come up with a story or script… they do that just fine. But it will literally be the most predictable, unremarkable, innovation-less and uninspiring drivel that can be predicted from a statistical walk through vectors starting at a random point.

There is a reason why AI output is abrasive to read. It is literally written with no consideration given to the reader.

No model of mind of the effect that it will have on the receiver, no interesting and unusual prosaic twists to capture your attention or spur your imagination…. Just a soulless, predictable stream of simulated thoughts that remarkably often turns out to be useful, if uninspiring.

LLMs are fantastic tools for navigating the commons of human culture and making a startling breadth of human knowledge easily accessible.

They are truly amazing tools that can release us from many language manipulation burdens in the capture and sorting of data from diverse and unorganized sources.

They will revolutionize many industries that currently are burdened by extensive human labor in the ingestion, manipulation, and interpretation of data. LLMs are like the washing machine to free our minds from the handwashing of information.

But they are not creative agents in the way that we admire creative genius.

Re: Ben Affleck's surprisingly comprehensive take on LLMs for video

#90

Post by tartoran »

spiderice wrote: post #28
bdndndndbve wrote: post #12

My favorite quote on this topic is "Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?" Especially when you're talking about fiction and reading/watching for enjoyment, what does it matter if you can shit out 1000 hours of AI content? Maybe it's good to keep babies entertained? Studios have gotten so into the habit of treating "content" as a fungible commodity, but the fact is that even blockbuster mov…

> Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write? The answer seems obvious: because it's better. Obviously it isn't better now . But it's easy to imagine a day in the not-too-distant future where AI can shit out 1000 hours of content that is better in every way than what humans create. And it will even feel more human than the human made stuff because the AI will have learned that we like that. What…

Maybe AI will enjoy reading AI generated stuff but humans like flawed human made 'content'. Made by humans for humans (R).
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