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All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

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Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what people who play chess thought. The creativity wasn't in the goal, but how you arrived there. The "beauty" of the steps that you took on the way to the goal. They believed that it was human creativity and sense of beauty that would never be encapsulated in a computer program. They turned out to be incorrect, but maybe you're right and things are different in a wider domain, we'll see.

To be clear, Chess is a game, so yes they are still correct.

Not sure exactly you mean, or who you are referring to as being correct. Not sure the relevance of anything being a game, the question is the intersection of computation and interacting with humans. Having been there at the time, I saw the snide dismissals of computers playing chess, they were "simply playing by rote", they were just glorified calculators who could never understand the beautiful moves played by human grandmasters. And this was actually true at the time... it just didn't stay true.

Today, very many humans enjoy spectating computer played chess games, and often comment on the "beauty" of the moves played. Take that for what you will.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#282

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…

We need to disambiguate what you mean by "AI" here. If you're referring to people typing prompts in a frontier web UI, maybe. But if you're using local models, you can do quite a bit more, ComfyUI workflows can get crazy. Multi-region controlnet guided generations with IP adapters and loras, etc. The art gatekeepers want to try and paint everyone using AI creatively as monkeys mashing ignorantly on keyboards, taking…

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Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years and years ago I became friends with someone who has started a series of companies and created at least one game with each of them (Web, mobile, mobile, crypto, web again). While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution. His ideas are great, in my opinion, though perhaps not unique. However, each success or failure, has come down to the execution. A coupl…

Creativity is a series of small decisions over the course of the entire execution. To write a poem is not to have it fully-formed in your head. You go down and edit and see what turns up and what new interesting ideas come out of that.

Oh, this is an excellent way to phrase it. Thank you!

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#284
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what does any of that have to do with my comment?

>> they all seem really creative initially but rapidly lose their luster and become repetitive.

Did you really interpret my statement as "AI content producers are being so creative and then quitting posting"?

I'm not talking about people posting good content and then stopping posting.

I guess its fair to say that "become repetitive" was unclear, what I should have said was "reveals itself to be repetitive."

I'm saying that these AI generated world building channels produce lots of content that looks creative and exciting at first but over time reveals itself to be repetitive and lacking in creativity.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creativity is a series of small decisions over the course of the entire execution. To write a poem is not to have it fully-formed in your head. You go down and edit and see what turns up and what new interesting ideas come out of that.

I'm very sympathetic to this view, and it would be a nice counter to claims of AI creativity, but I'm not convinced this is the only way creativity can express itself. There are examples of strokes of genius, hence the term. I suppose you could say such strokes of genius are the outcomes of a lifetime of creative work but that seems different from your example of editing a poem.

Strokes of genius could be considered the "exception that proves the rule".

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the mental gymnastics like this around AI discourse really confusing. Taking a still video of the ocean isn't "creativity". And if a video of an ocean is truly creative it's likely not attributed to "nature".

Taking still photos of anything is widely considered a creative activity. There's usually only a small amount of creativity involved. Sometimes more. Same goes for AI generated anything. You can have low effort photos and high effort photos, low effort AI generated pictures and high-effort AI generated pictures. AI just lets you get a better result for less effort (for some definitions of "better"), just as a camera…

> a camera lets you get a better result for less effort than a paintbrush and canvas does

Only if your goal is photorealism, which is one of the least interesting forms of art.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#287

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 th…

>But i've seen several good videos made using AI, including pretty much everything NeuralViz[0] on YouTube makes

We can safely dismiss your whole argument then :)

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very sympathetic to this view, and it would be a nice counter to claims of AI creativity, but I'm not convinced this is the only way creativity can express itself. There are examples of strokes of genius, hence the term. I suppose you could say such strokes of genius are the outcomes of a lifetime of creative work but that seems different from your example of editing a poem.

Strokes of genius could be considered the "exception that proves the rule".

We are operating deep in the grey area here so I suppose that case could be made. Personally, I see creativity as more of a life long process which can express itself in a multitude of ways including strokes of genius and the daily iterative grind. I don't think any creative act occurs in a vacuum but I also think that there are moments where big things occur.

AI, as it stands, does not have a lifespan over which for creativity to occur.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a bunch of these scifi world building short video channels now. IMO they all seem really creative initially but rapidly lose their luster and become repetitive. Sora makes the hard parts easy and the easy parts hard. I don't think any of these content producers will be remembered in the future. :/

Years and years ago I became friends with someone who has started a series of companies and created at least one game with each of them (Web, mobile, mobile, crypto, web again). While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution. His ideas are great, in my opinion, though perhaps not unique. However, each success or failure, has come down to the execution. A coupl…

>While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution.

It's even trickier: execution is irrelevant too (if that means great execution, a polished well executed product). What matters is a works-well-enough for adoption product, plus luck, connections, funding (to continue existing and undercutting), marketing, and things like that.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#290
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> they all seem really creative initially but rapidly lose their luster and become repetitive.

Did you really interpret my statement as "AI content producers are being so creative and then quitting posting"? I'm not talking about people posting good content and then stopping posting. I guess its fair to say that "become repetitive" was unclear, what I should have said was "reveals itself to be repetitive." I'm saying that these AI generated world building channels produce lots of content that looks creative an…

The parent's argument regains relevance if we change "stopped posting" to "stopped posting good stuff and started posting repeatitive shit" though.

Human youtube channels do that all the time.

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