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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

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.

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.