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The younger generation loves short-form, to-the-point stuff. Which is the exact opposite of what the current crop of GenAI makes. In a tiktok video, every sente
by mjr00 2y ago
The younger generation loves short-form, to-the-point stuff. Which is the exact opposite of what the current crop of GenAI makes. In a tiktok video, every sentence, every word counts because there's a time limit. If people don't engage with your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. The video linked in another post starts off with 15 seconds of complete fluff. You'd have better engagement if you have a guy opening with BIIIG NEWS!! LABOR DAY BREAKFAST GOES HAYWIRE!!! and hook people.
GenAI is great at generating "stuff", but what makes good content isn't the quantity. What makes good content is when there's nothing left to take away.
- tehkadz 2y ago[dead]
- tokioyoyo 2y agoIsn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to generate attention-grabbing videos? Also, "the first three seconds" isn't exactly the case anymore. There's a push for algorithm to favour videos that are longer than 1+ minutes. Which, to my understanding, is TikTok's way of fighting for YouTube's userbase.
- mjr00 2y agoThe videos are longer in total length, but you've never seen the average TikTok/Insta user if you think people are letting videos play for more than a few seconds before scrolling onto the next one. This is why movie trailer videos now have a "trailer for the trailer" in the opening seconds with like "THE TRAILER FOR SONIC 3... STARTS NOW" with all of the most attention-grabbing scenes frontloaded.
- mvdtnz 2y ago> Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to... blah blah yes "it's a matter or time" for every one of the myriad shortcomings of the technology to be resolved. If you're a true believer everything is "a matter of time". I'll believe it when I see it.
- tokioyoyo 2y agoDepends on the technology. It’s hard to look at the progress from December of 2022 till today, and think we won’t go further. Image generation is getting better every day. Parts of the video generation pipelines are also advancing.
- frigidnonce 2y agohttps://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agothe counterpoint is since then we've killed all the easy ways to scale. the datasets can't get bigger because it's already the whole Internet. model sizes can't grow that much because you start running into RAM constraints. efficiency definitely can be improved, but probably not more than 100x on our current architectures.
- staunton 2y agoI'm also pretty aure you'll see it eventually... Consider the possibility that this is both a bubble waiting to pop, as well as the stuff that will shape the future. Kind of like the Internet around the year 2000.
- FireBeyond 2y agoSimilar on IG, which is why a lot of the photographers on my feed will post five or six images, "Which is your favorite, 1-6? Comment below!" because they get the engagement, synthetic or otherwise, of you clicking through each image, and then commenting.
- throwaway2037 2y agoI am curious to see this pattern in action. Can you share some @-usernames for these photographers?
- FireBeyond 2y agoshotwithfilm, thechrishau
- Yizahi 2y agoYoutubers also adopted this trick. The best pattern currently is to voice a random question in the middle of the video or present themselves as "I'm not sure about this, please correct me in the comments" as transparent plan to entice people to comment. I even bought it a first few dozen times, but now when every single creator does it, it is kinda tiring.
- cogman10 2y agoCounterpoint, GenAI is great at copying styles and typically works best with shorter content. For example, I could very easily see GenAI being able to produce 1 million TikTok dance challenges.
- AstralStorm 2y agoWhich will make them completely worthless by dilution and not stand out. Oops.
- namaria 2y agoNovelty grabs people's attention. A system based on the statistical analysis of past content won't do novelty. This seems like a very basic issue to me.
- ben_w 2y agoNovelty itself is easy, the hard part is the kind of novelty that is familiar enough to be engaging while also unusual enough to attract all the people bored by the mainstream. Worse, as people attempt to automate novelty, they will be (and have been) repeatedly thwarted by the fact that the implicit patterns of the automation system themselves become patterns to be learned and recognised… which is why all modern popular music sounds so similar that this video got made 14 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I (This is already a thing with GenAI images made by people who just prompt-and-go, though artists using it as a tool can easily do much better). But go too soon, be too novel, and you're in something like uncanny valley: When Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre was first performed, it was poorly received by violating then-current expectations, now it's considered a masterpiece.
- AnthonBerg 2y agoA system that digs out undiscovered mechanisms to drape novelty on based on where the statistical analysis says it’s already been, that would do it though.
- ljsprague 2y agoI ... don't think there's a time limit on TikToks unless you mean that 60 minutes is a time limit. Are you thinking of Vine?
- ffsm8 2y agoThat's a pretty new thing though, in 2020 it was 1 min I believe, and most people skipped after 15-30s Then it got increased to 3 min and now 10/60 min
- NemoNobody 2y agoSeconds - that's all the time I give something. If it looks draggy I will skip ahead to like halfway thru the video and if the person isn't in the middle of explaining something that they have clearly spent half the time extrapolating, that's it. They get no more time. I often turn on subtitles and watch at 2x speed. I prefer the transcript 100% of the time to video.
- mjr00 2y agoIf you want people to watch your content there's definitely a time limit. I don't mean anything imposed by the platform; I just mean if people aren't interested within 3 seconds, they're scrolling to the next video in their feed.
- StableAlkyne 2y agoI miss Vine
- davkan 2y agoIs that true of tiktoks in general? I feel like a lot of the short form videos out there purposefully bait the watcher and drag on for 3/4 of their runtime.
- simplyluke 2y agoWhat's funny is every GenAI "incredible email/essay" would be better communicated with the prompt used to generate it.
- jerf 2y ago"Your essay must be at least X words" has always been an impediment to truly good writing skills, but now it's just worthless.
- portaouflop 2y agoI never had that requirement outside the first years of school- where it’s more about writing practice than writing actual essays. After it was always “must be below X pages”
- bluGill 2y agoX words is supposed to be a proxy for do enough research that you have something to say with depth. A history of the world in 15 minutes better cover enough ground to be worth 15 minutes - as opposed to 1 minute and then filler words. Of course filler is something everyone who writes such a thing and comes up a few words short does - but you are supposed to go find something more to say.
- desdenova 2y agoWhen I was a lazy kid, and there was a requirement to fill a number of lines/pages, I'd just write with bigger letters.
- QuadmasterXLII 2y agoI eventually flipped from moaning about word count minimums to whining about conference page limits but it took a long, long time- well into grad school. The change came when I finally had something to say.
- eszed 2y agoThe way I explained it when I taught English 101 to first-year university students: any substantive question can generate an answer of a paragraph or a life's work; in this assignment I expect you to go into this much depth. Of course, good expository writing is as to-the-point as possible, so the first hurdle for most students was eliminating the juvenile trick of padding out their prose with waffle to meet an arbitrary word-count. Giving a word-count to an AI seems (currently) to activate the same behavior. I've not yet seen an AI text that's better writing than a college freshman could be expected to produce.
- fragmede 2y ago> If people don't engage with your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. Is that based on a vigorous experience as a content creator on TikTok as a long form content creator or are you going off what you've heard about TikTok, or it's what your feed is full of? (which says more about you/your feed than it does about TikTok) https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheCgBq/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheCgBq/ 1.1 M views https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhephfK/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhephfK/ 1.2 M views or for some more niche stuff which isn't "BIIIG NEWS!! LABOR DAY BREAKFAST GOES HAYWIRE!!!" level of intro: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheTVsh/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheTVsh/ 54.6 k views https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheE9m2/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheE9m2/ 36.3 k views https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheoK2G/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheoK2G/ 416 k views This voice-over definitely isn't going for attention grabbing https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhe7qTT/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhe7qTT/ 16 k views https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdmJxq/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdmJxq/ 64 k views okay finally found something that's 5 mins long https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdAfNj/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdAfNj/ 270 k views
- neom 2y agoI've never used tiktok and this post was... enlightening. The ClickUP HR guys are actually pretty funny... but wtf is this from that first channel you posted... lol? https://www.tiktok.com/@luckypassengers/video/7439577511953993003 https://www.tiktok.com/@luckypassengers/video/74395775119539... - I mean, she's not wrong.
- mjr00 2y agoAll of those immediately have something attention-grabbing within the first few seconds: picture of Mars' surface, run map showing funny human shape, text with "Gen Z programmers are crazy" prefacing the anecdote, going immediately into the IT-related rap, guy holding a big and cool-looking stick, "dealing with your 10x coworker" immediately showing the point of the video. The only one that doesn't is the SQL one I guess but that's a very low view count (relatively) on a niche channel. So thanks for providing a bunch of examples that prove my point, I guess?
- fragmede 2y ago
- quickthrowman 2y agoShort form video content is absolutely terrible, every time I watch one I have an extremely strong urge to verify whatever I heard in the video, so I just avoid watching them altogether. I’m not sure how anything of value can be 45 seconds long with absolutely no context, outside of comedy.
- illusive4080 2y agoGenAI is obnoxiously verbose
- dopfk09320k 2y agoI don't think this is entirely true. Have you seen these "Internet Story told by TTS Voice-over a Minecraft parkour Video" ( which are what my niblings watching ) ? I noticed a lot of the story is dragged on for over minutes. These are the stories that I read in text in about 5 second. Short form videos are often hyper focus and to the point, but there are a lot of vertical video contents that are just ( to use the GenZ term ) brain rot like these as well.
- NemoNobody 2y agoThe younger generation has had their brain's development hacked by corporate advertising and can't help themselves but prefer the content they have been all but brainwashed to prefer - this was done deliberately and intentionally and obviously to much detriment to the young of today. Nobody cares tho bc "they can't pay attention" like it's somehow an entire generation's individual faults they are like that... Clearly a societal failure there.
- xanderlewis 2y ago> The younger generation loves short-form, to-the-point stuff. Meanwhile, Joe Rogan et al. have 3+ hour long podcasts…
- HKH2 2y agoAnd they have a clips channel for the younger generations.
- noobermin 2y agoWhen I was a kid, I loved having breakfast made for me by other people as I couldnt cook. As a small child, one would say I expected it. It doesn't mean when I become an adult that would continue to be the case.