4 ms·

> We are on the cusp of a completely new way to generate and consume content. Copyright laws will have to be rewritten. Once this pandora box is open it can't b

> We are on the cusp of a completely new way to generate and consume content. Copyright laws will have to be rewritten. Once this pandora box is open it can't be closed. The question is not if but why We don't need more content, we need more curated and higher quality content. Random by definition has a very low probability of producing quality. Case in point: The walking dead. It's already an infinite variation of the same topic but the good bits ended after season 2...

dougabug 5y ago
Sure, but how is this different from all the blogs, vlogs, social media, and the Internet in general (with an assist from smartphones, digital cameras, game engines, camera drones, and real-time ray tracing GPUs) allowing humanity to create an unprecedented global flood of content now? Or the problem of finding something satisfying to watch out literally tens of thousands of shows on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, AppleTV+, etc? That’s why we have critics, reviews, review aggregators, search engines, recommendation engines, community discussion boards… Clearly, the answer to an AI generated problem (pretty much anyone being able to content previously requiring massive budgets) is more AI! We can evolve content critics to help people navigate a world of practically unlimited content to find stuff they enjoy. Also, consider all the potentially great films that never got made because even the best filmmakers can only get a fraction of their ideas actually produced.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > Also, consider all the potentially great films that never got made because even the best filmmakers can only get a fraction of their ideas actually produced. and that's a good thing. Consider how many bad movies were not made thanks to this! IMO, content creation should be harder, not easier. If it becomes too easy, the quality goes toward hobbyist level, which is not what I want to pay for. Also, bad content was a thing on its own, take for example Troma films, they are entertainingly bad, not just repetitive and dull bad. > Or the problem of finding something satisfying to watch out literally tens of thousands of shows on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, AppleTV+, etc? the problem is exactly the mass amount of content created to lure people in. But do I really want to watch another iteration of the superhero trope? No, I don't. I wanna watch something that I've never seen before. Imagine a book written to mimic the style of my favourite writers on my favourite topic: Sci-fi. On paper it sounds like a dream, but in reality it would be a terrible, confusing, incoherent and ultimately a trying-too-hard-to-match-my-taste product. Like when Data reads his poems on TNG and when asked why people seemed distracted, Laforge answers "Well, your poems were clever, Data, and your Haiku was clever, and your sonnet was clever. But did it evoke an emotional response? To be honest, no" Of course Data being Data, he knows he's clever and he knows he's an amateur poet and wants to hear the truth about his works. But do we want to pay for content generated by the machines so that they can learn to imitate us better? [1] I sincerely don't want to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice EDIT: with [1] I mean that I don't want to pay streaming content publishers to improve their algorithm so that they can mass produce more dull content for people to consume (and pay) If they really want to improve things, they should pay people to make less shows and/or movies but better. Shows like "Another life" (6% on Rotten Tomatoes) would not exist if they were shot on real sets that take time, money, permits and a lot people to recreate.
  - dougabug 5y ago
    Uh, you’re not actually required to watch something just because it exists. Some subset of people not liking content isn’t, in and of itself, reason to stifle peoples ability to create said content. The job of a literature professor is not to protect Literature by ensuring that inadequate students are never allowed to write. If some combination of AI and community driven filtering can prevent sub-par works from entering your queue, you are no worse off. On the other hand, some scripts like Severance, which languished for years on the best-scripts-never-made list, would likely never have been (finally) made but for the vast expansion of content creation due to the rise of streaming. In fact, if only a dozen movies were allowed to be made each year, they would probably all be Marvel movies or something with similar mass appeal. Most of the truly innovative work appears at the margins, hence expanding the margins is more likely to yield groundbreaking art (along with a ton of crap).
    - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      > Uh, you’re not actually required to watch something just because it exists believe it or not, if the money goes all in one direction, you're at one point between a rock and a hard place when it's about choice. > The job of a literature professor is not to protect Literature by ensuring that inadequate students are never allowed to write. But the job of a film production company is not to produce as much content as possible, but taking the financial risk to produce something that will make an impression.
  - Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    > IMO, content creation should be harder, not easier. > If it becomes too easy, the quality goes toward hobbyist level, which is not what I want to pay for. IMO coding should be harder, not easier. If it becomes too easy, the quality goes toward hobbyist level, which is not what I want to pay for.
    - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      code is already hobbyist level. it rarely escaped the mid-low quality level since it became a mass produced product.
lukebuehler 5y ago
The holy grail is to generate content for you! The future will combine these tool with data about you—aesthetic preferences, story arches you respond to well, your current mood—-and generate content on the fly. I assume there will still be people working on the skeleton or basic structure of such content, but the rest will be filled in by these tools.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > The future But probably not in my lifetime. > aesthetic preferences, story arches you respond to well, your current mood that's not how content consumption works. > will still be people working on the skeleton or basic structure of such content That's not a real issue, we are still writing stories based on very few skeletons and very few archetypes, invented millennia ago (and maybe they are even older of the ones we discovered).
  - lukebuehler 5y ago
    How does content consumption work then? Would you not say there are clear characteristics, like your preferred genres, that matter quite a bit whether you will like a movie or not?
    - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      > How does content consumption work then? simplified, there are two main branches: - those who consume everything, kinda like maximizing the investment or "it makes me company" - those who consume things that need to pass some kind filter generated content would (maybe) reward the first group, but without some very good hit they will probably go back to downloading stuff, but not the second. At least not yet and not in the foreseeable future. There's a difference between computer aided content and computer generated. Jurassic park wouldn't exist as it is without technology advancements, but the novel was already good. Another example by Crichton is WestWorld. The original was written and directed by Crichton himself in 1973, the original movie is great, the second chapter is good, the tv-show is visually astonishing, but after 2 seasons, I stopped watching it. The material taken from the first two movies had ended and nothing really interesting have come out after from the writers (IMO). Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth) is a great book from 1864 and I honestly prefer the movie from 1959 than the its latest 3D incarnation from 2008. Not because older is better, but because the 1959 version is more centered around the story and it aged better. Probably because Indiana Jones hadn't come out yet and the director didn't try to imitate it.
danielbarla 5y ago
Technologies like this can lower the cost of production, opening the door to more competition essentially due to a larger talent pool. Quality can also go up as a result, not just quantity.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > Technologies like this can lower the cost of production Seriously, is writing "infinite variations of the ending in Sopranos season 6" the limiting factor here? The cost of production is already low, what's costly is distribution, for the distributor. Make your movie and put it on YouTube it's already a thing.
  - Jeff_Brown 5y ago
    > The cost of production is already low The Sopranos cost 2 million dollars per episode. HBO will not be afford to produce an infinite number of those using their existing methods any time soon.
    - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      > The Sopranos cost 2 million dollars per episode well, actors like to be paid... you can make an infinite amount of breaking bad episodes without Brian Cranston, Aaron Paul, Bob Odenkirk, Giancarlo Esposito, and Jonathan Banks, but I guess people won't be so keen to pay to watch them. But even if you use digital avatars, you have to pay them the same amount of money to use their image, because that's what people want to see, there's no way around it. Besides, the Sopranos is a great show because they spend 2 million on each episode. I'm sure you can recreate the same quality with a couple hundred dollars, but I'm also quite sure most of us regular humans couldn't.

dougabug 5y ago

Sure, but how is this different from all the blogs, vlogs, social media, and the Internet in general (with an assist from smartphones, digital cameras, game engines, camera drones, and real-time ray tracing GPUs) allowing humanity to create an unprecedented global flood of content now? Or the problem of finding something satisfying to watch out literally tens of thousands of shows on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, AppleTV+, etc? That’s why we have critics, reviews, review aggregators, search engines, recommendation engines, community discussion boards… Clearly, the answer to an AI generated problem (pretty much anyone being able to content previously requiring massive budgets) is more AI! We can evolve content critics to help people navigate a world of practically unlimited content to find stuff they enjoy. Also, consider all the potentially great films that never got made because even the best filmmakers can only get a fraction of their ideas actually produced.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> Also, consider all the potentially great films that never got made because even the best filmmakers can only get a fraction of their ideas actually produced. and that's a good thing. Consider how many bad movies were not made thanks to this! IMO, content creation should be harder, not easier. If it becomes too easy, the quality goes toward hobbyist level, which is not what I want to pay for. Also, bad content was a thing on its own, take for example Troma films, they are entertainingly bad, not just repetitive and dull bad. > Or the problem of finding something satisfying to watch out literally tens of thousands of shows on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, AppleTV+, etc? the problem is exactly the mass amount of content created to lure people in. But do I really want to watch another iteration of the superhero trope? No, I don't. I wanna watch something that I've never seen before. Imagine a book written to mimic the style of my favourite writers on my favourite topic: Sci-fi. On paper it sounds like a dream, but in reality it would be a terrible, confusing, incoherent and ultimately a trying-too-hard-to-match-my-taste product. Like when Data reads his poems on TNG and when asked why people seemed distracted, Laforge answers "Well, your poems were clever, Data, and your Haiku was clever, and your sonnet was clever. But did it evoke an emotional response? To be honest, no" Of course Data being Data, he knows he's clever and he knows he's an amateur poet and wants to hear the truth about his works. But do we want to pay for content generated by the machines so that they can learn to imitate us better? [1] I sincerely don't want to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice EDIT: with [1] I mean that I don't want to pay streaming content publishers to improve their algorithm so that they can mass produce more dull content for people to consume (and pay) If they really want to improve things, they should pay people to make less shows and/or movies but better. Shows like "Another life" (6% on Rotten Tomatoes) would not exist if they were shot on real sets that take time, money, permits and a lot people to recreate.
- dougabug 5y ago
  Uh, you’re not actually required to watch something just because it exists. Some subset of people not liking content isn’t, in and of itself, reason to stifle peoples ability to create said content. The job of a literature professor is not to protect Literature by ensuring that inadequate students are never allowed to write. If some combination of AI and community driven filtering can prevent sub-par works from entering your queue, you are no worse off. On the other hand, some scripts like Severance, which languished for years on the best-scripts-never-made list, would likely never have been (finally) made but for the vast expansion of content creation due to the rise of streaming. In fact, if only a dozen movies were allowed to be made each year, they would probably all be Marvel movies or something with similar mass appeal. Most of the truly innovative work appears at the margins, hence expanding the margins is more likely to yield groundbreaking art (along with a ton of crap).
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > Uh, you’re not actually required to watch something just because it exists believe it or not, if the money goes all in one direction, you're at one point between a rock and a hard place when it's about choice. > The job of a literature professor is not to protect Literature by ensuring that inadequate students are never allowed to write. But the job of a film production company is not to produce as much content as possible, but taking the financial risk to produce something that will make an impression.
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  > IMO, content creation should be harder, not easier. > If it becomes too easy, the quality goes toward hobbyist level, which is not what I want to pay for. IMO coding should be harder, not easier. If it becomes too easy, the quality goes toward hobbyist level, which is not what I want to pay for.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    code is already hobbyist level. it rarely escaped the mid-low quality level since it became a mass produced product.

lukebuehler 5y ago

The holy grail is to generate content for you! The future will combine these tool with data about you—aesthetic preferences, story arches you respond to well, your current mood—-and generate content on the fly. I assume there will still be people working on the skeleton or basic structure of such content, but the rest will be filled in by these tools.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> The future But probably not in my lifetime. > aesthetic preferences, story arches you respond to well, your current mood that's not how content consumption works. > will still be people working on the skeleton or basic structure of such content That's not a real issue, we are still writing stories based on very few skeletons and very few archetypes, invented millennia ago (and maybe they are even older of the ones we discovered).
- lukebuehler 5y ago
  How does content consumption work then? Would you not say there are clear characteristics, like your preferred genres, that matter quite a bit whether you will like a movie or not?
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > How does content consumption work then? simplified, there are two main branches: - those who consume everything, kinda like maximizing the investment or "it makes me company" - those who consume things that need to pass some kind filter generated content would (maybe) reward the first group, but without some very good hit they will probably go back to downloading stuff, but not the second. At least not yet and not in the foreseeable future. There's a difference between computer aided content and computer generated. Jurassic park wouldn't exist as it is without technology advancements, but the novel was already good. Another example by Crichton is WestWorld. The original was written and directed by Crichton himself in 1973, the original movie is great, the second chapter is good, the tv-show is visually astonishing, but after 2 seasons, I stopped watching it. The material taken from the first two movies had ended and nothing really interesting have come out after from the writers (IMO). Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth) is a great book from 1864 and I honestly prefer the movie from 1959 than the its latest 3D incarnation from 2008. Not because older is better, but because the 1959 version is more centered around the story and it aged better. Probably because Indiana Jones hadn't come out yet and the director didn't try to imitate it.

danielbarla 5y ago

Technologies like this can lower the cost of production, opening the door to more competition essentially due to a larger talent pool. Quality can also go up as a result, not just quantity.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> Technologies like this can lower the cost of production Seriously, is writing "infinite variations of the ending in Sopranos season 6" the limiting factor here? The cost of production is already low, what's costly is distribution, for the distributor. Make your movie and put it on YouTube it's already a thing.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  > The cost of production is already low The Sopranos cost 2 million dollars per episode. HBO will not be afford to produce an infinite number of those using their existing methods any time soon.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > The Sopranos cost 2 million dollars per episode well, actors like to be paid... you can make an infinite amount of breaking bad episodes without Brian Cranston, Aaron Paul, Bob Odenkirk, Giancarlo Esposito, and Jonathan Banks, but I guess people won't be so keen to pay to watch them. But even if you use digital avatars, you have to pay them the same amount of money to use their image, because that's what people want to see, there's no way around it. Besides, the Sopranos is a great show because they spend 2 million on each episode. I'm sure you can recreate the same quality with a couple hundred dollars, but I'm also quite sure most of us regular humans couldn't.