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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

#91
post #54
post #29

The trope of the sci-fi robot has been so engrained into our cultural narrative that I think people constantly underestimate the creative capabilities of AI. People still think in terms of this dichotomy of math/science and art/creativity. But AI has already broken through so many boundaries of what anyone would have believed possible just a few years ago. I hear people complaining about uncanny valley stuff all the…

I use AI coding assistants every day and while they're helpful, they're nothing more than a glorified autocomplete.

I beg to differ. No autocomplete in the traditional sense can take a human language description of something you want to achieve and produce code that implements just that. Or at least, some version of that. And if you're not happy, you can refine - either by hand, or by having a dialog with the AI.

You can also give it buggy code and it can critique it.

That's an order of magnitude more advanced than autocomplete.

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

#92

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…

> (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 their small exposure that kind of aligns with this[1].

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/getting-a-lot-of-boss-baby-vi...

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

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write? The answer seems obvious: because it's better. Obviously it isn't better now . But it's easy to imagine a day in the not-too-distant future where AI can shit out 1000 hours of content that is better in every way than what humans create. And it will even feel more human than the human made stuff because the AI will have learned that we like that. What…

art is essentially human, warts n all, how can something non-human make human art.

It can't, what it can do is mimic other human art and generate it 10000x faster.

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

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI tools will continue to get better, and they'll really shine when they can enable increasingly smaller teams of people to execute on their creative vision. Existing non-AI tools have already helped enable tiny teams to create media which is enjoyed by millions of people; the biggest and most recent example is how Source2 is used to animate Skibidi Toilet. But there's still room for increasing accessibility. The big…

When do estimate there to be quality AI generated content better than say the 90th percentile of Hollywood output?

The bar could drop too...

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

#95
post #91
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use AI coding assistants every day and while they're helpful, they're nothing more than a glorified autocomplete.

I beg to differ. No autocomplete in the traditional sense can take a human language description of something you want to achieve and produce code that implements just that. Or at least, some version of that. And if you're not happy, you can refine - either by hand, or by having a dialog with the AI. You can also give it buggy code and it can critique it. That's an order of magnitude more advanced than autocomplete.

Advanced autocomplete is still autocomplete.

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

#96
post #78

One thing I'd really like AI to do (and Ben Afflect touched during his talk) is that once AI is cheap enough to run at home, I'd like to feed it all David Lynch movies/TV shows, and ask it to produce a Twin Peaks season 4.

And you'd never get anything close to what Lynch would make, you'd get the equivalent of fan fiction.

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

#97

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…

??? Show me a movie in the last decade where the premise of it couldn't be generated by some AI prompt. (I'll even make it easier by stating that said AI prompt can be generic and to some degree trivial; i.e. not the premise explicitly laid out in the prompt).

This feels almost like a request made in bad faith. I don't exactly know what quintessence of inspiration is required too put together any given movie - but lets take Portrait de la jeune fille en feu[1]. It's regarded as a masterwork on relationships and as visually stunning, judgements I agree with. The skill in its craft is in drawing out how the technique of painting lingers on details of humans in the same way that humans linger on them. On how the emphasis of an element (a stroke, a gaze) can overcome its humble character in the context of the moment. The overall plot of the movie is unremarkable - the reason it is a masterpiece lies in the how the actors are able to draw each other out and how the team putting together the look of the movie is able to reflect their relationship in tone and vibe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_a_Lady_on_Fire

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

#98

Excellent art might be attributed less to genius and more to a selection process and creator-audience feedback loops. We might be falling into a bit of survivorship bias when missing that excellent art is the product of a variety of processes, not just human inspiration. Machines can probably replicate much of that process, for better or worse.

Artists are very rarely concerned with their audience. Good Art, capital A, is the unique expression of a singular consciousness - you can't produce that by catering to an audience. That's just a product (see Warhol).

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

#99
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can AI write really funny jokes? honest question

I asked ChatGPT to write about walking the dog in scientific language. It came up with this gem: "Logging middleware records metrics (distance, stops, events) into a shared datastore for analytics on future walk optimization."

Train it to attribute its failure to land on wokeness, have it generate designs for merch that communicate this idea, and book an appearance on JRE and it'll have completed the arc of a lot of short run comics.

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

#100
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is: art is a means of communicating _between people_. We can appreciate pictures/movies/music generated by machines but at the end of the day we (people) are in a deep need of connection to _other people_. I don't believe replacing people with machines in this context is possible (one might say: by definition). But if it happens it will be the anti-utopian world of loneliness.

This is exactly the kind of argument I think is informed by 20th century ideas of AI. I also think in this form, it greatly exaggerates the issue at hand - AI will not totally replace human-human communication. Also, since the original context is Hollywood movies, I don't think that there is a lot of "art" in the storytelling of big block busters. Why AI shouldn't be able to write a compelling story needs to be argue…

When it comes to blockbuster movies AI could certainly create them, they're so formulaic that you could probably even get away with Markov chains.
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