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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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are very clear themes and currents running through his work - fears around industrialisation and technology (electricity and machinery are recurring motifs), explorations of identity, exploitation both sexual and societal, the facade of the American dream, the cost of pursuing a creative life. I'm only scratching the surface there. Lynch does actually talk about his work quite a bit, but he prefers to talk abou…

> There are very clear themes and currents running through his work - fears around industrialisation and technology (electricity and machinery are recurring motifs), explorations of identity, exploitation both sexual and societal, the facade of the American dream, the cost of pursuing a creative life. I'm only scratching the surface there. I agree there are recurring themes. That doesn't conflict with anything I've c…

> That doesn't conflict with anything I've claimed.

It absolutely does - you said "His stuff is 90% atmosphere" and "weird for the sake of weird", both complete nonsense.

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

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (so far) This parenthetical is doing a lot of work here. Also, you make a lot of claims that just don't seem to reflect what I've seen. Many human-made movies are cookie cutter plots (ie the new Twisters), and many AI prompts return seemingly novel results. Whether or not that are actually novel isn't all that relevant, since humans aren't databases that have memorized all the source material.

> Also, you make a lot of claims that just don't seem to reflect what I've seen. Can you say more about my claims? Yes, many human creations are re-hashes of old creations. All AI creations are re-hashes. As you say - they seem "novel" to a particular human, but in aggregate they are what they are - re-hashes. There's a meme about how people with limited exposure to something will over-associate the relevance of thei…

> many human creations are re-hashes of old creations

But the meaningful creations, those that drive our culture forward, are those that build on the foundations of something old, and create something new.

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

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're mis-reading what he says. People create new stuff, AI (so far) remixes old stuff. Down the line you will be able to order a remix of succession and AI should be able to do that for you but it won't be able to add any interesting additional spin - it's just gonna make it to order (obviously a big deal! which he says). >implying the non-AI content we have nowadays is highly creative and unique You just inserted…

People create new stuff? People remix old stuff. The movie industry is a joke as far as "new stuff" is concerned.

> The movie industry is a joke as far as "new stuff" is concerned

There's a whole world of cinema that exists outside of hollywood.

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

#174

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…

We already have procedurally generated content in games - and quite a few of those seem to be pretty popular.

PCG and NN-generated are definitely not the same thing though. I've done both, and most PCG is made using plain-old programming and art assets-- it's just more flexible to configure at runtime. Anyone I've seen trying to do real on-the-fly game content generation using generative AI is either a) making flexible but useless NPC dialog, or b) basically using it as an expensive random number generator because it's nowhere close to good enough to create immediately usable game assets that reliably work with a game.

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

#175

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…

> isn't this confirmaation bias from a guy now heavily vested in making movies?

LLM-created video is absolutely nowhere close to competing with Hollywood. As it stands, the closer you get to the top of the movie business, the more profitable LLM-generated shit is. He has every reason to embrace LLMs in movie production-- so much so that I expect most famous people speaking out about this are basically being spokespeople for SAG and secretly pressuring people that work for them to squeeze every bit of productivity out of these tools that they can.

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

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are very clear themes and currents running through his work - fears around industrialisation and technology (electricity and machinery are recurring motifs), explorations of identity, exploitation both sexual and societal, the facade of the American dream, the cost of pursuing a creative life. I'm only scratching the surface there. I agree there are recurring themes. That doesn't conflict with anything I've c…

> That doesn't conflict with anything I've claimed. It absolutely does - you said "His stuff is 90% atmosphere" and "weird for the sake of weird", both complete nonsense.

> It absolutely does

No, it doesn't. His work can have recurring themes and still be weird for the sake of weird and mostly atmosphere. Those things are not at all mutually exclusive.

> both complete nonsense.

Not really, it's more that you're likely offended in that I'm reducing so significantly a work you clearly find a lot of meaning in and enjoy discussing.

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

#177
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheaper movies in terms of cost are often better than expensive movies because they have a humanity that shows through. Let me know when an AI can make a Jon Carpenter movie

This. Christopher Nolan, but yes. AI can never capture the subtlety of the (failings) of the human mind/memory and the implications. It would have to learn it somehow and I don't see a method with which that can be taught.

How are people so certain that there is something humanity does which is unmodelable?

There is an ancient hubris in this: the belief that there is something in humanity beyond physics, that we possess a soul or something else which defies mathematical/scientific comprehension.

I would like to believe in our specialness like this too, but I don't understand how someone can confidently proclaim that "AI can never capture" something humans do.

Whatever it is we think AI can never learn about us, is it unlearnable by humans too (i.e. inborn, instinctive)? Or is it learnable by humans, but inexplicable, unlearnable by a machine observing the behavior en masse?

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

#178

"AI will never write Shakespeare"... https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/chatgpt-or-shakesp... "Readers Couldn’t Tell the Difference—and Even Preferred A.I.-Generated Verse"

Did you actually read the article you posted? Few quotes: - "Beyond the themes and emotions, ChatGPT’s poems were also simpler in terms of their overall structure and composition." - "Understanding poems written by humans requires deep, critical thinking—and that’s a big part of poetry’s appeal, the researchers write in the paper. But modern readers don’t seem to want to do this labor, instead preferring texts that g…

Fair enough but I don't see any reason to think the complexity and structure wouldn't improve over time.

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

#179
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Real…

The thing people love about Gen AI is not needing to understand the dozens, if not hundreds, of deliberate and unconscious artistic decisions an artist makes when creating a piece by hand. It's great to be able to think of a core idea, refine the overall aesthetic, and then work out some details. It's freeing, fun, and nearly useless for making high-end media.

Thousands of deliberate artistic decisions go into making a TV show, let alone a Hollywood movie. Think about everything from the subtlest cuts in the tailored costumes for every character, what each part of each hair style will look like in different scenarios, how all of that stuff is lit in the subtlest ways and what shade of almost black you want for the matte and whether the rim light needs to be a different color to make it work... all for each shot. That's the precision required to make even generic high-end media, and the need to manipulate those things with perfect accuracy doesn't go away when you're using Gen AI to make it. People will probably be more critical of Gen AI output than traditional media.

I know of a big, moneyed studio that tried to replace their concept artists with a group of prompt engineers and promptly fired them two months later after the art directors just couldn't take it anymore. They wanted someone that could precisely make exactly what they wanted after 3 hours in two attempts rather than someone who could make 100 polished versions they had to review in 5 minutes, but took 6 hours to get one version that really met their needs because each revision was imprecise and yielded other undesirable results even with control nets, inpainting, loras, and all that. Beyond that, since it was in a flat raster format, it was literally useless for anything else. It's not like Gen AI has no role in that workflow-- a traditional artist might use something like that for ideation and reference-- but modifying the flat raster output of Stable Diffusion, et al would be even more difficult than roughing it out from scratch in many cases and yield an inferior product.

When it came down to it, having people that knew how to precisely execute an artistic vision tuned to produce the output studios know will make them money. And that's concept art, not the stuff that gets put on screen, which has to be a whole lot more precise and for a 90 minute movie, you need 129,600 perfect polished still images, and those will come from a pool of at least that many more which editors can compose into a piece. Not having it in LOG, have separated AOVs for precise grading, color correction and compositing, etc are all huge impediments.

It's no different than giving a completed mp3 of a song to a talented music producer and expecting them to turn that audio into a hit song (not cut it up into samples using traditional techniques to make something new, not use it as inspiration to re-make the song, to take the audio in that mp3 and use that audio) in a fraction of the time it would take them to do it from scratch. They'd just laugh at the suggestion.

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

#180
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. An LLM can produc…

Are you saying a Psychiatrist would need to experience humiliation and pain to be able to help patients? aren't some psychiatrist also BS'ing their patients, because they are either not well-trained, are focused on money, or are just tired of hearing the same problems.

I’d not bet against AI psychology as a useful tool for some. The privacy that it offers could easily offset the lack of innovative thought. Psychology interviews are by design predictable, droll, and interviewee driven. It might work.
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