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All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

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Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#321

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…

Or you could argue that it’s simply lifting from other people’s creativity. Like making a song entirely of sampled sounds from other songs with a key change.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#322
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale" I know enough of music creation to know, all music we enjoy is created by "theft". Meaning taking a riff from here, a melody from there. And tweaking it. AI just automated it. Not su…

This argument always hinges on pretending that "humans being influenced by other humans" is the same thing as "a model ingesting millions of works without permission," and it just isn’t. Not even remotely. Human influence is selective. It’s contextual, filtered through taste, memory, culture, and intent. A metal songwriter doesn't subconsciously absorb the entire global corpus of music; they draw from the artists who…

"A metal songwriter doesn't subconsciously absorb the entire global corpus of music; they draw from the artists who shaped them"

They also draw from the people around them. The music they hear when they are in public spaces. Etc.

Out of curiosity, have you ever done composing?

Anyway, one can create very shallow songs by hand. One can also give empty vague prompts.

Or one can make a complex music arrangement, manual editing of tracks, have some AI generated mixed in, very detailed prompts etc. If that ain't creative to you, that is your opinion. I think different.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. My problem with AI produced media is that a lot of the things I've seen are really bad. If someone uses AI, but has taste and takes the time to curate and fix the output, then the output can be fine. Just like with digital effects in movies, plastic surgery, and makeup - if it's done well, there's a good chance I didn't even notice it. If it's clearly noticeable, it's often because it's not done well. I thin…

There were plenty of hiphop examples where the samples are recontextualized as well, then Puff Daddy came along and attempted to rap over virtually unchanged Led Zeppelin songs and everyone ate it up. AI Is doing the same thing to music that he did decades ago. ruin it.

I didn't mean to say all hiphop is like what I mention. I'm 100% sure that hiphop also does sampling in really interesting ways, I'm just not as familiar with the examples. This was not not meant as a diss, and I wasn't saying all hiphop does things the same way. I was just mentioning examples that I'm personally familiar with of "Sampling Slop", "Different kind of creativity", and "Using Sampling as a completely new instrument".

For the middle category, I meant things like Gangsta's Paradise. I really like the song, I think Coolio really adds something. But you can hear much more of "Pasttime Paradise" in there than you can hear "More Spell On You" in Daft Punk's "One More time"

I mention Daft Punk because it's really accessible: there are videos on youtube that can show a layperson like me exactly how they chopped up the samples.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#324
The author nailed the problem but missed the technical root cause: lack of controllability. Current models (Sora, Veo, Runway) are probabilistic generators. They are optimized to output a plausible image, not the specific image a director needs. Spammers and scammers don't care about specifics, they just need a "talking head" or a "burning city." An artist however needs a specific angle, specific lighting, and character consistency. Until we solve the problem of reliable latent space control (something like ControlNet, but for video and on steroids), AI video will remain a tool for generating digital noise, not cinema

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#325

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…

The problem runs deeper: AI doesn't just remove execution, it replaces it with probabilistic averaging. Mastery of execution in film or code consists of thousands of micro-decisions, like light a bit to the left or pause a bit longer. Current diffusion models make these thousands of decisions for you based on what usually looks good. Democratization won't happen when the Make it Beautiful button works, but when we have tools to control these thousands of micro-decisions without needing to learn to draw pixels by hand. Right now we have randomization, not democratization

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#327

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…

I was involved in a conversation about cheating in video games the other day, and the topic shifted to AI use in music. Someone said, "using AI is like using an aimbot for music." I absolutely love that comparison since it highlights the shortcut past creativity/skill to get a computerized best result while also associating it with blatant cheating. The "enables creativity" argument is ironic since the root of the wo…

The analogy is great, but it breaks down when we talk about professional use. An aimbot in multiplayer is evil because it ruins the game for others. But an aimbot in game development (e.g., procedural aiming animation) is just a tool. The problem with current AI video is that the model often shoots not where the director wants, but where it's easiest to hit (the template)

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#328
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made. There is no cheating when there is feeling. Generic AI music so far does not touch me. I might tolerate it in the background, but I know there is great music being made with the help of AI. (Which is different from letting the AI do it all) An aimbot in competive playing is indeed cheating and sucks t…

> The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made. The touching you emotionally part is due to the quality of the underlying creative work. I'm sure the GP's wife was touched- they put in the work to make something- but the fact is that work they did was enabled by the theft-at-scale of work others have done. You can square this with your own ethics…

If it were just an average, we'd only get gray sludge. Models learn the manifold distribution - they don't just mix existing works; they discover the hidden rules by which those works were created. This is reverse-engineering of human culture, and that's exactly why control over the latent space is so critical - otherwise, we surrender culture to an algorithm that has "learned the rules" but has no concept of meaning

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#329
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.

We once built pyramids, massive castles, temples and churches which took hundreds of years to build. We don't build those things any more. Same happened to music and art. There's this eternal sloppification of everything, although at the same time things get on average better and cheaper for more people to enjoy. Quantity beats quality, i.e. capitalism optimizes for scalability.

The end game is quite sad, which will be some kind of neural device which just directly manipulates brain signals for happiness, and everything physical will be just gray goo. It's more scalable to make you think the world is beautiful, than to actually make it beautiful. We are almost there already, because we experience the world through a screen, which shows us happy things, while we care less and less about the real world around us.

Re: All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)

#330

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…

It's both... I think it can cut both ways... I was largely on your side, as most of the AI stuff I've seen is just annoying more than anything. Then the "Star Wars: Beggar's Canyon" video completely changed my mind. The voice generation is clear and inflection appropriate... the cuts, sequence, and overall effects are clearly put together in a consistent way. I can only imagine how much work that video was, but is re…

It’s almost like people that use the tools to the best of their ability will produce higher quality outputs. This is a new tool like we’ve never seen before with a low skill floor to use it. We don’t know what the skill ceiling is yet.
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