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Sora is here

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Re: Sora is here

#161

One of the problems with a 10-month preannouncement is that the competition is ready to trash the actual announcement. Half an hour in, I already see half a dozen barely-concealed posts ranging from downplays to over-demands to non-user criticism.

I think that's just the typical HN cynicism.

Re: Sora is here

#162
Anyone else find this stuff extremely distasteful? "Disrupting" creativity and art feels like it goes against our humanity.

Re: Sora is here

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" has the nice corollary "A thousand words isn't enough to be precise about an image". Now expand that to movies and games and you can get why this whole generative-AI bubble is going to pop.

If you can build a system that can generate engaging games and movies, from an economic (bubble popping or not popping) point of view it's largely irrelevant whether they conform to fine-grained specifications by a human or not.

In other words:

If you find a silver bullet then everything else is largely irrelevant.

Idk if you noticed but that “if” is carrying an insane amount of weight.

Re: Sora is here

#164
I got lucky and got in moments after it launched, managed to get a video of "A pelican riding a bicycle along a coastal path overlooking a harbor" and then the queue times jumped up (my second video has been in the queue for 20+ minutes already) and the https://sora.com site now says "account creation currently unavailable"

Here's my pelican video: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/9/sora/

Re: Sora is here

#166
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hope was that AI would make it easier for people to create new things that haven't been done before, but my fear was that it would just be an endless slop machine. We're living in the endless slop machine timeline and even genuine attempts to make something artistic end up just coming off as more slop. I love this timeline.

Imagine a movie like Napoleon, but instead of needing 100 million and thousands of extras, you just need 5 actors and maybe a budget of 50k. You could get something much more creative or historically accurate than whatever Hollywood deems marketable. I think about AI like any other tool. For example I make music using various software. Are drum machines cheating? Is electronic music computer sloop compared to playing…

The main comparator is Kasane Teto and Suno. Kasane Teto is functionally a piano that uses generative AI for vocal synthesis: https://youtu.be/s3VPKCC9LSs. This is an aid to the creative process. Suno lets you put in a description and completely bypass the creative process by instantly getting to the end: https://youtu.be/UpBVDSJorlU

Kokoro is art. Driveway is content. Art uses the medium and implementation to say something and convey messages. Content is what goes between the ads so the shareholders see a number increase.

I wish there were more things like Kokoro and less things like Driveway.

Re: Sora is here

#167

Hollywood's days are numbered. If you are a creative in this industry, start preparing to transition to another industry or adapt. Your boss is highly likely to be toying around with this. The first entirely AI generated film (with Sora or other AI video tools) to win an Oscar will be less than 5 years away.

I mean thats a bold claim. I'd first let chatgpt win an Oscar for writing the best screenplay, and only then would Sora come into the picture.

Re: Sora is here

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" has the nice corollary "A thousand words isn't enough to be precise about an image". Now expand that to movies and games and you can get why this whole generative-AI bubble is going to pop.

“A frame is worth a billion rays” The last production I worked on averaged 16 hours per frame for the final rendering. The amount of information encoded in lighting, models, texture, maps, etc is insane.

What were you working on? It took a month to render 2 seconds of video?

Re: Sora is here

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And another thing that irks me: none of these video generators get motion right... Especially anything involving fluid/smoke dynamics, or fast dynamic momements of humans and animals all suffer from the same weird motion artifacts. I can't describe it other than that the fluidity of the movements are completely off. And as all genai video tools I've used are suffering from the same problem, I wonder if this is someho…

Neural networks use smooth manifolds as their underlying inductive bias so in theory it should be possible to incorporate smooth kinematic and Hamiltonian constraints but I am certain no one at OpenAI actually understands enough of the theory to figure out how to do that.

How does your conclusion follow from your statement?

Neural networks are largely black box piles of linear algebra which are massaged to minimize a loss function.

How would you incorporate smooth kinematic motion in such an environment?

The fact that you discount the knowledge of literally every single employee at OpenAI is a big signal that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

I don’t even really like OpenAI and I can see that.

Re: Sora is here

#170
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That limits its value for industries like Hollywood, though, doesn't it? And without that, who exactly is going to pay for this?

To me, currently, visual generative ai is an evolution and improvement of stock images, and has effectively the same purpose. People pay for stock images.

Yeah, maybe for some purposes. In business, people sometimes pay for stock images but often don't have the expertise or patience to really spend a lot of time coaching a video into fruition. Maybe for advertising or other contexts where more effort is worth it (not just powerpoints), but it feels like a slim audience.
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