5 ms·

I think most are vastly underestimating the impact of Synthetic AI media - this is at least as big as the invention of film/photography (century-level shift) an

by fab1an 4y ago

I think most are vastly underestimating the impact of Synthetic AI media - this is at least as big as the invention of film/photography (century-level shift) and maybe as big as the invention of writing (millenia-level shift). Once you really think through the consequences of the collapse of idea and execution, you likely to tend think the latter... What we're seeing now are toy-era seeds for what's possible - e.g. I've been making a completely Midjourney-generated "interactive" film called SALT: https://twitter.com/SALT_VERSE/status/1536799731774537733 https://twitter.com/SALT_VERSE/status/1536799731774537733 That would have been completely impossible just a few months ago. Incredibly exciting to think what we'll be able to do just one year from now..

deviner 4y ago
It doesn't bring anything new, just enhanced on top of what already exists, not even close to photography or film.
seydor 4y ago
As big as the invention of CGI Still, humans use art to communicate intent, and we still consider AIs to be 'things' , no agency or intent. Being an artist just became a lot harder, because no amount of technical prowess can make you stand out. It s all about the narrative now
- wonnage 4y ago
  Art has always been about more than technical prowess; it's fundamentally an exploration of new ways to tickle neurons. For more practical purposes like product design, anyone will tell you that actually drawing stuff is akin to typing in code, it can take a while but it's not the hard part
- schroeding 4y ago
  > we still consider AIs to be 'things' Do we, though? You and I do, sure. Most people here will, probably. But at least one counter-example was on display a few weeks ago, the guy from Google that told the press that their text completion engine was "alive" and "had agency". From my friends I talked about this (which are not in IT), most believed him. YMMV, but I seriously believe a good chunk of the population thinks we already have thinking A(G)I. I don't think there is a "we" here, anymore. :/
  - seydor 4y ago
    Do you think you 'll see an AI in jail anytime soon? If not, then it's nowhere nearly "a good chunk of the population"
    - schroeding 4y ago
      Do we see pets in jail? No, but most people wouldn't say they are things (even though, in German law, they literally are), they are more or less intelligent beings with agency. I don't see the correlation, to be honest. A good chunk (but still a minority) of the people believing something doesn't automatically change the law, anyway, does it? :/
      - seydor 4y ago
        pets do get euthanized/ muzzled if they are found 'guilty' against humans because we do think they have agency . Sometimes we blame the owner for things they could have done, but there are cases where it's beyond their control. For the same reason we don't jail kids but sometimes they do get punishment. We do thing kids and pets have agency, but not full agency. At the current stage i don't think there is any AI that can be punished, or anyone that would credibly claim that an AI must be punished. Its maker will always be punished instead. Well true but i think that chunk is quite small. It's one thing to nonchalantly say "this is alive" and a very different thing when you have to deal with the consequences.
        schroeding 4y ago
        > It's one thing to nonchalantly say "this is alive" and a very different thing when you have to deal with the consequences. Yeah, fully agreed! Chatbots and "creative" ML systems are in the weird spot where they can't physically kill or hurt people, like e.g. a self-driving car, and perform tasks that "feel" like they need intelligence. It's also absolutely quite possible that the "chunk" is way smaller than I think, I'm just blindly extrapolating from my social bubble :D
nerdponx 4y ago
Is it? I seriously doubt it. Other than "you can't trust anything you don't see with your own eyes", what kind of shift is it? People lived like that for literally millennia before photography, audio, and video recording. At absolute worst, we are only undoing about 150 years of development, and only "kind of" and only in certain scenarios. Moreover, people were making convincing edits of street signs, etc. literally 20 years ago using just Photoshop. What does this really change at a fundamental level? Okay, so you can mimic voices and generate video, rather than just static images. But people have been making hoax recordings and videos for longer than we've had computers. I think the effects of this stuff will be: 1) making it easier/cheaper to create certain forms of art and entertainment media, 2) making it easier to create hoaxes, and 3) we will eventually need to contend with challenges to IP law. That's about it. I think it will create a lot of value for a lot of people (sibling comment makes a good point about this being equivalent to CGI), but I don't see the big societal shift you're claiming that this is.
- kertoip_1 4y ago
  > people were making convincing edits of street signs, etc. literally 20 years ago using just Photoshop You needed to have tools, skill, resources and time to do such things. You don't need to have that anymore. Anyone can do anything on any scale. It's something what SpaceX did. Ofc it was possible to launch a rocket before SpaceX, but few really could afford that. Now that prices are low, that opens infinite number of new space exploration possibilities.
  - time_to_smile 4y ago
    > You don't need to have that anymore. Anyone can do anything on any scale. I have yet to see an example of "Synthetic AI media" that was both realistic and not immediately recognizable as being synthetically generated. And if you think being 99% there means we're very close to 100% just remember how long it's taken self driving cars to close the gap (we actually don't know how long since they still haven't succeeded in this).
    - pretendscholar 4y ago
anonAndOn 4y ago
This thought occurred to me recently while skimming the formulaic and indistinguishable programming on Netflix. It won't be long before a GPT-3 script is fed to an image generator and out comes the components of a movie or TV show. The product will undoubtedly need some human curation and voice acting, but the possibility of a one-person production studio is on the horizon.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  And it will probably suck just as bad as any of the low-effort formulaic movie or music that humans like to produce.
- flycaliguy 4y ago
  It makes me wonder if all these musician’s catalogs that have been purchased as a whole lately are even more powerful than before. Owning a piece of every bit of media that contains a slice of David Bowie for example would be extremely valuable. Consider the gaming world’s concept of “whales”. Customers willing to spend disproportionately enormous amounts of money in game. Can you sell these whales a unique, personalized David Bowie album that is about, I don’t know, maybe the customer’s own life story?
- cercatrova 4y ago
  You're right, it's already on Show HN right now.
paisawalla 4y ago
Agreed, it really does not seem far off now to imagine a world where I can request artifacts like "This episode of Law & Order, but if Jerry Orbach never left the show" "Final Fantasy VII as an FPS taking place in the Call of Duty universe" "A 3D printable part that will enable automatic firing mode for {a given firearm}"
- Theory42 4y ago
  All without AGI!
time_to_smile 4y ago
> toy-era seeds I think what we have is a toy and will remain a toy, just like Eliza was 60 years ago. Academically fascinating, and given the constraints of the era, genuinely remarkable, but still a long way from really being useful. I'm already getting bored of seeing 95% amazing 5% wtf AI generated images, I can't fathom how anyone else remains excited about this stuff so long. My slack is filled with impressive-but-not-quite-right images of all sorts of outrageous scenarios. But that's the catch. These diffusion models are stuck creating wacky or surreal images because those contexts are essential allowing you to easily ignore how much these generates miss the mark. Synthetic AI media won't even been as disruptive as photoshop, let alone the creation of written language.
- flycaliguy 4y ago
  No matter what happens, it sure is thrilling to witness this debate. You might be right, you might be wrong. Personally I think a line can now be drawn that starts at the first cave drawing and ends in 2022. Something has fundamentally shifted, a true paradigm shift before our eyes.
Melatonic 4y ago
Doubt it - but it will become another great tool for artists to use.
magicalhippo 4y ago
> I've been making a completely Midjourney-generated "interactive" film called SALT I stumbled over Midjourney the other day through these music videos[1][2] generated by Midjourney from the songs lyrics, and I immediately thought we're not far away from this being viable for a cartoon-like film. Interesting times ahead. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bulNXhYXgFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bulNXhYXgFI [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVj_AEhpVbA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVj_AEhpVbA
kasperni 4y ago
Take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/ if you want to see what midjourney is capable of. Some of them are extremely impressive [1][2][3][4] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/x0kv8s/testp_just_broke_uncanny_valley/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/x0kv8s/testp_ju... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/wz1am0/homer_simpson_by_van_gogh/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/wz1am0/homer_si... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/x10som/the_amount_of_detail_in_testp_blows_me_away/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/x10som/the_amou... [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/x12nqz/robert_de_niro_as_a_heman_figure_plus_more_testp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/x12nqz/robert_d...

by fab1an 4y ago

deviner 4y ago

It doesn't bring anything new, just enhanced on top of what already exists, not even close to photography or film.

seydor 4y ago

As big as the invention of CGI Still, humans use art to communicate intent, and we still consider AIs to be 'things' , no agency or intent. Being an artist just became a lot harder, because no amount of technical prowess can make you stand out. It s all about the narrative now

wonnage 4y ago
Art has always been about more than technical prowess; it's fundamentally an exploration of new ways to tickle neurons. For more practical purposes like product design, anyone will tell you that actually drawing stuff is akin to typing in code, it can take a while but it's not the hard part
schroeding 4y ago
> we still consider AIs to be 'things' Do we, though? You and I do, sure. Most people here will, probably. But at least one counter-example was on display a few weeks ago, the guy from Google that told the press that their text completion engine was "alive" and "had agency". From my friends I talked about this (which are not in IT), most believed him. YMMV, but I seriously believe a good chunk of the population thinks we already have thinking A(G)I. I don't think there is a "we" here, anymore. :/
- seydor 4y ago
  Do you think you 'll see an AI in jail anytime soon? If not, then it's nowhere nearly "a good chunk of the population"
  - schroeding 4y ago
    Do we see pets in jail? No, but most people wouldn't say they are things (even though, in German law, they literally are), they are more or less intelligent beings with agency. I don't see the correlation, to be honest. A good chunk (but still a minority) of the people believing something doesn't automatically change the law, anyway, does it? :/
    - seydor 4y ago
      pets do get euthanized/ muzzled if they are found 'guilty' against humans because we do think they have agency . Sometimes we blame the owner for things they could have done, but there are cases where it's beyond their control. For the same reason we don't jail kids but sometimes they do get punishment. We do thing kids and pets have agency, but not full agency. At the current stage i don't think there is any AI that can be punished, or anyone that would credibly claim that an AI must be punished. Its maker will always be punished instead. Well true but i think that chunk is quite small. It's one thing to nonchalantly say "this is alive" and a very different thing when you have to deal with the consequences.
      - schroeding 4y ago
        > It's one thing to nonchalantly say "this is alive" and a very different thing when you have to deal with the consequences. Yeah, fully agreed! Chatbots and "creative" ML systems are in the weird spot where they can't physically kill or hurt people, like e.g. a self-driving car, and perform tasks that "feel" like they need intelligence. It's also absolutely quite possible that the "chunk" is way smaller than I think, I'm just blindly extrapolating from my social bubble :D

nerdponx 4y ago

Is it? I seriously doubt it. Other than "you can't trust anything you don't see with your own eyes", what kind of shift is it? People lived like that for literally millennia before photography, audio, and video recording. At absolute worst, we are only undoing about 150 years of development, and only "kind of" and only in certain scenarios. Moreover, people were making convincing edits of street signs, etc. literally 20 years ago using just Photoshop. What does this really change at a fundamental level? Okay, so you can mimic voices and generate video, rather than just static images. But people have been making hoax recordings and videos for longer than we've had computers. I think the effects of this stuff will be: 1) making it easier/cheaper to create certain forms of art and entertainment media, 2) making it easier to create hoaxes, and 3) we will eventually need to contend with challenges to IP law. That's about it. I think it will create a lot of value for a lot of people (sibling comment makes a good point about this being equivalent to CGI), but I don't see the big societal shift you're claiming that this is.

kertoip_1 4y ago
> people were making convincing edits of street signs, etc. literally 20 years ago using just Photoshop You needed to have tools, skill, resources and time to do such things. You don't need to have that anymore. Anyone can do anything on any scale. It's something what SpaceX did. Ofc it was possible to launch a rocket before SpaceX, but few really could afford that. Now that prices are low, that opens infinite number of new space exploration possibilities.
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  > You don't need to have that anymore. Anyone can do anything on any scale. I have yet to see an example of "Synthetic AI media" that was both realistic and not immediately recognizable as being synthetically generated. And if you think being 99% there means we're very close to 100% just remember how long it's taken self driving cars to close the gap (we actually don't know how long since they still haven't succeeded in this).
  - pretendscholar 4y ago

anonAndOn 4y ago

This thought occurred to me recently while skimming the formulaic and indistinguishable programming on Netflix. It won't be long before a GPT-3 script is fed to an image generator and out comes the components of a movie or TV show. The product will undoubtedly need some human curation and voice acting, but the possibility of a one-person production studio is on the horizon.

nerdponx 4y ago
And it will probably suck just as bad as any of the low-effort formulaic movie or music that humans like to produce.
flycaliguy 4y ago
It makes me wonder if all these musician’s catalogs that have been purchased as a whole lately are even more powerful than before. Owning a piece of every bit of media that contains a slice of David Bowie for example would be extremely valuable. Consider the gaming world’s concept of “whales”. Customers willing to spend disproportionately enormous amounts of money in game. Can you sell these whales a unique, personalized David Bowie album that is about, I don’t know, maybe the customer’s own life story?
cercatrova 4y ago
You're right, it's already on Show HN right now.

paisawalla 4y ago

Agreed, it really does not seem far off now to imagine a world where I can request artifacts like "This episode of Law & Order, but if Jerry Orbach never left the show" "Final Fantasy VII as an FPS taking place in the Call of Duty universe" "A 3D printable part that will enable automatic firing mode for {a given firearm}"

Theory42 4y ago
All without AGI!

time_to_smile 4y ago

> toy-era seeds I think what we have is a toy and will remain a toy, just like Eliza was 60 years ago. Academically fascinating, and given the constraints of the era, genuinely remarkable, but still a long way from really being useful. I'm already getting bored of seeing 95% amazing 5% wtf AI generated images, I can't fathom how anyone else remains excited about this stuff so long. My slack is filled with impressive-but-not-quite-right images of all sorts of outrageous scenarios. But that's the catch. These diffusion models are stuck creating wacky or surreal images because those contexts are essential allowing you to easily ignore how much these generates miss the mark. Synthetic AI media won't even been as disruptive as photoshop, let alone the creation of written language.

flycaliguy 4y ago
No matter what happens, it sure is thrilling to witness this debate. You might be right, you might be wrong. Personally I think a line can now be drawn that starts at the first cave drawing and ends in 2022. Something has fundamentally shifted, a true paradigm shift before our eyes.

Melatonic 4y ago

Doubt it - but it will become another great tool for artists to use.

magicalhippo 4y ago

> I've been making a completely Midjourney-generated "interactive" film called SALT I stumbled over Midjourney the other day through these music videos[1][2] generated by Midjourney from the songs lyrics, and I immediately thought we're not far away from this being viable for a cartoon-like film. Interesting times ahead. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bulNXhYXgFI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bulNXhYXgFI [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVj_AEhpVbA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVj_AEhpVbA

kasperni 4y ago

Take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/ if you want to see what midjourney is capable of. Some of them are extremely impressive [1][2][3][4] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/x0kv8s/testp_just_broke_uncanny_valley/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/x0kv8s/testp_ju... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/wz1am0/homer_simpson_by_van_gogh/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/wz1am0/homer_si... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/x10som/the_amount_of_detail_in_testp_blows_me_away/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/x10som/the_amou... [4] https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/x12nqz/robert_de_niro_as_a_heman_figure_plus_more_testp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/x12nqz/robert_d...