All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025) • Hacker News Board

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#71

Post by andyfilms1 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:13 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #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 vide…

While I appreciate your positive experience, if you were unable to write, storyboard, and communicate your idea before AI--than AI is not going to be "the thing" that suddenly turns you into a filmmaker.

You're writing anyway, you just call it prompting. If you feel that the AI is giving you back more than what you're putting in with that writing, you have to ask yourself who's vision the result really is.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#72

Post by belinder » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:13 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #42

chrsw wrote: post #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 othe…

i don't get this "race to the bottom", "to cut costs".. like isn't that a good thing? your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces.

Maybe in the past. In todays world, when something becomes cheaper, the extra revenue goes straight to the executives. The consumer doesn't see it

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#73

Post by narcindin » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

vanviegen wrote: post #69

WackyFighter wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

We call them DJ's and many are quite famous.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#74

Post by exhumet » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #42

chrsw wrote: post #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 othe…

i don't get this "race to the bottom", "to cut costs".. like isn't that a good thing? your things will get cheaper if the cost required to market them reduces.

because the race to the bottom does not and will not benefit us, they will cut costs but whatever it is will still cost you the same or more.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#75

Post by nathias » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

> indirectly harmful by training us to accept a synthetic reality where nothing can be trusted and everything must be questioned.

that's quite the definition of 'harmful'

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#76

Post by ramoz » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

booleandilemma wrote: post #49

ramoz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 th…

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.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#77

Post by Alex2037 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

okay. and?

tilt at this windmill all you like, but the genie is out of the bottle and there's nothing you can do about it but kvetch. you can't ban it, you can't regulate it, no more than the US government could rein in cryptography.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#78

Post by Analemma_ » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

tejohnso wrote: post #38

Analemma_ wrote: post #5

> AI-generated videos have developed their own unique look. There's a visual quality that marks them, a subtle wrongness that your brain picks up on even when you can't articulate exactly what's off. It's the new uncanny valley, and I feel an intense revulsion whenever I encounter it. Yesterday on the comment thread for the "Attention is Bayesian Inference" blog post (which definitely seems to have been written by AI…

That's only relevant until the AI output no longer has a tone that triggers your gag reflex. Then you'll be in the same boat as everyone else, and the "who cares who/what wrote it, if it has good information" question will apply to you as well.

What will actually happen if and when AI output is indistinguishable from human writing is that I will curate a whitelist of people I know personally whom I trust don't use it, only read from them, and everyone else can piss off. I've already stopped using several websites where the SNR has dropped too low because AI usage is rampant, I'd have no problem extending that to the entire internet.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#79

Post by jajuuka » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

The author has a myopic view on Gen AI videos. They only focus on the most extreme examples and then hand wave cat videos as some crisis about reality. We had these exact same alarmists with previous technologies. Human's have an uncanny ability to adapt as their environment changes. Photoshop and 3D didn't destroy our brains and neither will this. Misinformation and the such have never needed AI to be effective. Those prey upon people's already existing biases and thoughts.

The time where this becomes normal and these alarmists become the fringe crazies ranting about the end of civilization cannot come fast enough.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#80

Post by andyfilms1 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

quantummagic wrote: post #64

andyfilms1 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.