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All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

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11–20 of 337 posts

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#11
post #4

There is one use case that is brilliant: comedy and meme videos. Bigfoot comes to mind.

I completely disagree. Meme's are a basic form of psyop, and are being using by intelligence agencies, the military, old media and new media, to warp our brains, and make us biological robots. Comedy is used much the same.

It wasn't always this way. Comedy has deep, deep roots as a channel for speaking truth to power. Only in recent decades does it seem we've discovered that you can flip the parity on both aspects and run it in reverse.

Totally agree with your larger point, btw.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#12

This isn’t a crisis. The author is describing a good thing. When the day comes that the author can fulfill his dream that will not be a good day. And AI videos will be even more dangerous then.

The author is right that AI video is being used to propagandize and rot minds at scale in a way sort of unthinkable a couple years ago. Short-form video content wasn't good for us beforehand, but any balance has been fully upturned.

(I think that's all intrinsic to genAI in a way the author doesn't want to confront, but there is a crisis)

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#13

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…

Now do hand drawn cartoons vs 3d rendered cartoons.

Is Pixar Incredibles where a computer algorithm made decisions about exact colors worse than Disney Cinderella where it was hand-drawn animation?

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#14
> There's no easy solution to this crisis.

Put down the phone, close that youtube, tik tok or whatever tab.

Don't try to explain to your relatives which video is AI and which is not, explain to them that everything on the internet is bullshit and trolling, AI or not it does not matter it's all bullshit to sell ads.

Tell them they are better off watching TV, even Fox news.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#15
AI generated videos are being used in more and more ads. To cut costs I’m sure. The result is that ads that were just annoying are now terrible and jarring.

When I hear talk about AI risks I mostly hear things like runaway super intelligence doing whatever it wants and leaving humanity in the lurch. But what about more realistic concerns, like accelerating the race to the bottom by cheaply and poorly ripping off other people’s work and forcing everyone else to do the same just to keep up?

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#16
99% of everything is bad, so that unsurprisingly includes AI videos.

But i've seen several good videos made using AI, including pretty much everything NeuralViz[0] on YouTube makes, but also some that have been posted in older comments here in HN. Igorrr's ADHD music video[1] was also made using AI and fit the music perfectly.

The common aspect with these "good" uses though is that they do not let the AI do 99% of the job (as mentioned in another comment) but they still involve editing, writing/scripting, acting (NeuralViz for example uses his webcam to act both the motion and voice in his videos and uses AI to change them) and to some extent leaning into the "weirdness" that AI videos have instead of ignoring it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralViz (i high recommend watching them in upload order because they all build into the same "universe" and often make references to older videos)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGIvO4eh190

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#17
post #4

There is one use case that is brilliant: comedy and meme videos. Bigfoot comes to mind.

I completely disagree. Meme's are a basic form of psyop, and are being using by intelligence agencies, the military, old media and new media, to warp our brains, and make us biological robots. Comedy is used much the same.

It's the other way around. Psyops are just memes. You should view everything communicated to you as a meme - a complex, semantically rich packet of information that implies the content and the intent arising from the agenda and context of the communicator.

Everything from a simple wave hello by random passersby to pseudonymous manipulative poasting by nation state actors in service to secret purpose is a meme. Understand the actors or you will never be able understand the memes.

AI is, for now, a tool. It's a powerful tool, a potent force multiplier, but there is no agency there. AI labs and governments and big tech companies have agendas and the ways in which they manipulate the output of AI tools is a meme modifier, so you should understand the ways in which different entities want to change the output of the tools you use, in order to correct for anything that deviates from your own intent and understanding.

Psyops are just a particular configuration of meme scale within a culture; if your model of the world is correct and has reliable predictive power, you can correct for things that attempt to warp reality. Understanding how and why different entities warp their communications, whether it's intentional or endemic, is crucial to a reliable model.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#18
I have an idea for a movie. Its kind of an epic idea - more about the characters, story and the feeling. I want to get the idea across as close as possible to what is in my head.

AI has given me the opportunity to do it. I just have to keep prompting to get the exact feeling and I can share my idea.

I don't like these curmudgeonly takes.. I'm sure this "All AI Videos Are Harmful" take will age just like how "All videos are harmful" and "All cartoons are harmful" have aged.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#19

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…

Now do hand drawn cartoons vs 3d rendered cartoons. Is Pixar Incredibles where a computer algorithm made decisions about exact colors worse than Disney Cinderella where it was hand-drawn animation?

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.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#20

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…

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.
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