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I can simultaneously appreciate the write-up for gaming a competition while also dreading how it basically describes the incentives for contributing to the AI-e

I can simultaneously appreciate the write-up for gaming a competition while also dreading how it basically describes the incentives for contributing to the AI-enshittification of the internet.

davekiss 2y ago
Sigh… you know, there's a bit of "can't beat 'em, join 'em" happening here, for sure, but let me be optimistic for a second. This story wouldn't have happened without AI. I genuinely used the tools to tell the story I wanted to tell. There was something about the way friction was removed with the typical narration round-trips that actually made the storytelling better, easier, less painful… and I truly don't believe anything authentic was lost in that process. My hope is tools like these can make storytelling easier for everyone.
- eth0up 2y ago
  I read the story because of the AI part. Over the last two weeks I've been working for the first time with GPT and Perplexity and am a mixture of fascinated, exuberant and ready to drink a gallon of whiskey from frustration. I'm particularly intrigued by the creative things that can be accomplished with mutual diligence between user and AI. As a bit of a moron, I can now easily accomplish what otherwise would be too daunting. It's great..., when it works. What a smart person can accomplish under such conditions is frightening, in bith good and ungood ways. I'm hoping to go the API route soon and move toward a more free-thinking version geared as a research assistant. Anyway, I'd say that's some pretty clever teamwork. Well done and thanks for sharing. Just get some better slippery sauce and if you're gonna squirt it on all beneath the heavens, go with Ballistol (I misspelled it in my other comment) - the fairies will thank ye.
- probably_wrong 2y ago
  > This story wouldn't have happened without AI. I don't think that's the optimistic take you present it to be. To me the post reads as the story of someone for whom art is the least important part in an art contest and treats the artistic part as an afterthought ("I just wanted to adhere to recording content that prioritized the weighted breakdown"). I'm not going to pretend that the contest attracted the top artistic minds of this generation, but anyone who actually put care into the art part has lost to someone who made an art pipeline. Extrapolate to the art world and suddenly there's less real art because the money out there to fund it is going to AI programmers checking a spreadsheet.
  - davekiss 2y ago
    Did you see my fairy entry? Heavily artistic, thoughtful, and cinematic, leaning into my passion for the art of telling stories through video that I've kept close for almost 20 years now. It lost. The judges selected the entries they felt were the best fit. The argument for this contest is that AI enabled _more_ thoughtful art to exist, not less.
    - ornornor 2y ago
      We’ll never know but I suspect you might have won with that entry if you didn’t spray WD40 into the environment (which it might warn against doing on the can). Even though this submission might have been better than the rest they couldn’t possibly select it for obvious reasons. Just like they wouldn’t have selected doing something dangerous with WD40 etc irrespective of production value, creativity, etc
- panta 2y ago
  I think that there is some value in that friction. It used to tell us, the readers, that the narrator believed enough in what he wanted to tell to invest some non-negligible amount of time and energy. The final effect was that it maintained a sane ratio of stories worth reading over stories worth nothing. It kept a decent signal-to-noise ratio. In the future stories worth reading will be lost in a sea of regurgitated garbage.
- pcthrowaway 2y ago
  This wasn't intended as a criticism of you, it's a criticism of how incentives motivate the devaluation of artistic works of humans. I didn't particularly like any of the videos, even the fairy one, no offence. This probably speaks more to the nature of the competition than the videos themselves (I could care less about WD-40, though I'm sure a really good video could sweep me away, similarly to how I'm often genuinely impressed by the creativity of superbowl commercials, even for products I don't care about). But I can definitely understand the thought process and also liked your write-up. My compliments to your art, which is your writing and your description of your thought process, and your creative solution to a challenge within an economic framework where you need money to survive and can justify outsourcing other typically human endeavors to the robots in pursuit of financial compensation. But that economic framework, the incentives, and the replacement of that human touch with AI output is depressing, and the thought that most things we encounter online and in media will be AI-generated in the future is terrifying. That's not a commentary on what you did, and again, you also wrote an excellent article about it which I highly doubt was mostly written by AI. As you said (perhaps in another comment) you spent more time on the article than the actual competition. That effort shows. And it stands out among a sea of low-effort, AI-generated blog content even now on the Internet. But when you talk about "AI making storytelling easier" there's also an admission that we're moving to a world in which, in many situations, lower-effort content and AI-generated content are becoming more worthwhile under the reality where maximizing the ratio of monetary reward to time investment is necessary and expected.
krageon 2y ago
The content produced adhered to the requirements and is amusing. It allowed the creativity of a single person to be applied in a larger way to more things. This is exactly an example of how AI wouldn't enshittify the internet.
RockRobotRock 2y ago
I see where you're coming from, but I think it's just a story about a guy who outsmarted the system. He used math and AI to realize that his odds were actually pretty good, but him realizing he could submit multiple submissions is the important part. Using ElevenLabs for TTS definitely helped him win, but he could have also paid voice actors on Fiverr. He could have found royalty free music anywhere. Basically, there's a lot of AI enshittification going on, but this isn't one of them. Just seems like a bit of fun.
bart_spoon 2y ago
If the AI is being judged as a winner, than by definition isn’t it superior to the typical human produced content, at least in this case? Seems like the opposite of enshittification.
- pcthrowaway 2y ago
  I think you misunderstood my comment. The videos didn't win because of AI. A real person narrating, with a video set to a soundtrack of a real musician's music could very well be superior. But the author of this post saved a lot of time in the interest of dominating the competition by using AI instead. While I can appreciate that the process of assembly and curation of AI-produced components is an art (much as collage is an art form), I'm still dismayed by how AI 'art' is replacing real art (as the components of this collage, if you will). To me, the difference between real art and AI output is human intent. There's a context, a though, a mood. What AI produces can't be art in the same sense, because there's no human behind it, who can explain their reasoning for why they used a specific stroke in one place. And real-world incentives diminish the value of the human element, which is why we're heading to a "dead internet" fast.
mock-possum 2y ago
Do you think someone else could have won without AI? The author didn’t exactly win the grand prize here - he cleaned up the smaller prizes because other people weren’t so good at reading comprehension or competitive analysis. The only role AI even played here was the audio, not the concept or the video or the edits. I’m not quite sure what your complaint is I guess.

I can simultaneously appreciate the write-up for gaming a competition while also dreading how it basically describes the incentives for contributing to the AI-enshittification of the internet.

davekiss 2y ago

Sigh… you know, there's a bit of "can't beat 'em, join 'em" happening here, for sure, but let me be optimistic for a second. This story wouldn't have happened without AI. I genuinely used the tools to tell the story I wanted to tell. There was something about the way friction was removed with the typical narration round-trips that actually made the storytelling better, easier, less painful… and I truly don't believe anything authentic was lost in that process. My hope is tools like these can make storytelling easier for everyone.

eth0up 2y ago
I read the story because of the AI part. Over the last two weeks I've been working for the first time with GPT and Perplexity and am a mixture of fascinated, exuberant and ready to drink a gallon of whiskey from frustration. I'm particularly intrigued by the creative things that can be accomplished with mutual diligence between user and AI. As a bit of a moron, I can now easily accomplish what otherwise would be too daunting. It's great..., when it works. What a smart person can accomplish under such conditions is frightening, in bith good and ungood ways. I'm hoping to go the API route soon and move toward a more free-thinking version geared as a research assistant. Anyway, I'd say that's some pretty clever teamwork. Well done and thanks for sharing. Just get some better slippery sauce and if you're gonna squirt it on all beneath the heavens, go with Ballistol (I misspelled it in my other comment) - the fairies will thank ye.
probably_wrong 2y ago
> This story wouldn't have happened without AI. I don't think that's the optimistic take you present it to be. To me the post reads as the story of someone for whom art is the least important part in an art contest and treats the artistic part as an afterthought ("I just wanted to adhere to recording content that prioritized the weighted breakdown"). I'm not going to pretend that the contest attracted the top artistic minds of this generation, but anyone who actually put care into the art part has lost to someone who made an art pipeline. Extrapolate to the art world and suddenly there's less real art because the money out there to fund it is going to AI programmers checking a spreadsheet.
- davekiss 2y ago
  Did you see my fairy entry? Heavily artistic, thoughtful, and cinematic, leaning into my passion for the art of telling stories through video that I've kept close for almost 20 years now. It lost. The judges selected the entries they felt were the best fit. The argument for this contest is that AI enabled _more_ thoughtful art to exist, not less.
  - ornornor 2y ago
    We’ll never know but I suspect you might have won with that entry if you didn’t spray WD40 into the environment (which it might warn against doing on the can). Even though this submission might have been better than the rest they couldn’t possibly select it for obvious reasons. Just like they wouldn’t have selected doing something dangerous with WD40 etc irrespective of production value, creativity, etc
panta 2y ago
I think that there is some value in that friction. It used to tell us, the readers, that the narrator believed enough in what he wanted to tell to invest some non-negligible amount of time and energy. The final effect was that it maintained a sane ratio of stories worth reading over stories worth nothing. It kept a decent signal-to-noise ratio. In the future stories worth reading will be lost in a sea of regurgitated garbage.
pcthrowaway 2y ago
This wasn't intended as a criticism of you, it's a criticism of how incentives motivate the devaluation of artistic works of humans. I didn't particularly like any of the videos, even the fairy one, no offence. This probably speaks more to the nature of the competition than the videos themselves (I could care less about WD-40, though I'm sure a really good video could sweep me away, similarly to how I'm often genuinely impressed by the creativity of superbowl commercials, even for products I don't care about). But I can definitely understand the thought process and also liked your write-up. My compliments to your art, which is your writing and your description of your thought process, and your creative solution to a challenge within an economic framework where you need money to survive and can justify outsourcing other typically human endeavors to the robots in pursuit of financial compensation. But that economic framework, the incentives, and the replacement of that human touch with AI output is depressing, and the thought that most things we encounter online and in media will be AI-generated in the future is terrifying. That's not a commentary on what you did, and again, you also wrote an excellent article about it which I highly doubt was mostly written by AI. As you said (perhaps in another comment) you spent more time on the article than the actual competition. That effort shows. And it stands out among a sea of low-effort, AI-generated blog content even now on the Internet. But when you talk about "AI making storytelling easier" there's also an admission that we're moving to a world in which, in many situations, lower-effort content and AI-generated content are becoming more worthwhile under the reality where maximizing the ratio of monetary reward to time investment is necessary and expected.

krageon 2y ago

The content produced adhered to the requirements and is amusing. It allowed the creativity of a single person to be applied in a larger way to more things. This is exactly an example of how AI wouldn't enshittify the internet.

RockRobotRock 2y ago

I see where you're coming from, but I think it's just a story about a guy who outsmarted the system. He used math and AI to realize that his odds were actually pretty good, but him realizing he could submit multiple submissions is the important part. Using ElevenLabs for TTS definitely helped him win, but he could have also paid voice actors on Fiverr. He could have found royalty free music anywhere. Basically, there's a lot of AI enshittification going on, but this isn't one of them. Just seems like a bit of fun.

bart_spoon 2y ago

If the AI is being judged as a winner, than by definition isn’t it superior to the typical human produced content, at least in this case? Seems like the opposite of enshittification.

pcthrowaway 2y ago
I think you misunderstood my comment. The videos didn't win because of AI. A real person narrating, with a video set to a soundtrack of a real musician's music could very well be superior. But the author of this post saved a lot of time in the interest of dominating the competition by using AI instead. While I can appreciate that the process of assembly and curation of AI-produced components is an art (much as collage is an art form), I'm still dismayed by how AI 'art' is replacing real art (as the components of this collage, if you will). To me, the difference between real art and AI output is human intent. There's a context, a though, a mood. What AI produces can't be art in the same sense, because there's no human behind it, who can explain their reasoning for why they used a specific stroke in one place. And real-world incentives diminish the value of the human element, which is why we're heading to a "dead internet" fast.

mock-possum 2y ago

Do you think someone else could have won without AI? The author didn’t exactly win the grand prize here - he cleaned up the smaller prizes because other people weren’t so good at reading comprehension or competitive analysis. The only role AI even played here was the audio, not the concept or the video or the edits. I’m not quite sure what your complaint is I guess.