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> Now expand that to movies and games and you can get why this whole generative-AI bubble is going to pop. What will save it is that, no matter how picky you a

> Now expand that to movies and games and you can get why this whole generative-AI bubble is going to pop. What will save it is that, no matter how picky you are as a creator, your audience will never know what exactly was that you dreamed up, so any half-decent approximation will work. In other words, a corollary to your corollary is, "Fortunately, you don't need them to be, because no one cares about low-order bits". Or, as we say in Poland, "What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't mourn."

jsheard 2y ago
> What will save it is that, no matter how picky you are as a creator, your audience will never know what exactly was that you dreamed up, so any half-decent approximation will work. Part of the problem is the "half decent approximations" tend towards a clichéd average, the audience won't know that the cool cyberpunk cityscape you generated isn't exactly what you had in mind, but they will know that it looks like every other AI generated cyberpunk cityscape and mentally file your creation in the slop folder. I think the pursuit of fidelity has made the models less creative over time, they make fewer glaring mistakes like giving people six fingers but their output is ever more homogenized and interchangable.
- randomcatuser 2y ago
  a somewhat counterintuitive argument is this: AI models will make the overall creative landscape more diverse and interesting, ie, less "average"! Imagine the space of ideas as a circle, with stuff in the middle being more easy to reach (the "cliched average"). Previously, traversing the circle was incredibly hard - we had to use tools like DeviantArt, Instragram, etc to agglomerate the diverse tastes of artists, hoping to find or create the style we're looking for. Creating the same art style is hiring the artist. As a result, on average, what you see is the result of huge amounts of human curation, effort, and branding teams. Now reduce the effort 1000x, and all of a sudden, it's incredibly easy to reach the edge of the circle (or closer to it). Sure, we might still miss some things at the very outer edge, but it's equivalent to building roads. Motorists appear, people with no time to sit down and spend 10000 hours to learn and master a particular style can simply remix art and create things wildly beyond their manual capabilities. As a result, the amount of content in the infosphere skyrockets, the tastemaking velocity accelerates, and you end up with a more interesting infosphere than you're used to.
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    And as AI oversaturates the cliched average, creators will have to get further and further away from the average to differentiate themselves. If you pour a lot of work into your creation you want to make it clear that it isn't some cliched AI drivel.
    - skydhash 2y ago
      You will basically have to provide a video showcasing your workflow.
      - krainboltgreene 2y ago
        I promise you that the artists can outlive the VC money.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    To extend the analogy, imagine the circle as a probability distribution; for simplicity, imagine it's a bivariate normal joint distribution (aka. Gaussian in 3D) + some noise, and you're above it and looking down. When you're commissioning an artist to make you some art, you're basically sampling from the entire distribution. Stuff in the middle is, as you say, easiest to reach, so that's what you'll most likely get. Generative models let more people do art, meaning there's more sampling happening, so the stuff further from the centre will be visited more often, too. However, AI tools also make another thing easier: moving and narrowing the sampling area. Much like with a very good human artist, you can find some work that's "out there", and ask for variations of it. However, there are only so many good artists to go around. AI making this process much easier and more accessible means more exploration of the circle's edges will happen. Not just "more like this weird thing", but also combinations of 2, 3, 4, N distinct weird things. So in a way, I feel that AI tools will surface creative art disproportionally more than it'll boost the common case. Well, except for the fly in the ointment that's the advertising industry (aka. the cancer on modern society). Unfortunately, by far most of the creative output of humanity today is done for advertising purposes, and that goal favors the common, as it maximizes the audience (and is least off-putting). Deluge of AI slop is unavoidable, because slop is how the digital world makes money, and generative AI models make it cheaper than generative protein models that did it so far. Don't blame AI research for that, blame advertising.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > I think the pursuit of fidelity has made the models less creative over time (...) their output is ever more homogenized and interchangable. Ironically, we're long past that point with human creators, at least when it comes to movies and games. Take sci-fi movies, compare modern ones to the ones from the tail end of the 20th century. Year by year, VFX gets more and more detailed (and expensive) - more and better lights, finer details on every material, more stuff moving and emitting lights, etc. But all that effort arguably killed immersion and believability, by making scenes incomprehensible. There's way too much visual noise in action scenes in particular - bullets and lighting bolts zip around, and all that detail just blurs together. Contrast the 20th century productions - textures weren't as refined, but you could at least tell who's shooting who and when. Or take video games, where all that graphics works makes everything look the same. Especially games that go for realistic style, they're all homogenous these days, and it's all cheap plastic. (Seriously, what the fuck went wrong here? All that talk, and research, and work into "physically based rendering", yet in the end, all PBR materials end up looking like painted plastic. Raytracing seems to help a bit when it comes to liquids, but it still can't seem to make metals look like metals and not Fischer-Price toys repainted to gray.) So I guess in this way, more precision just makes the audience give up entirely. > they will know that it looks like every other AI generated cyberpunk cityscape and mentally file your creation in the slop folder. The answer here is the same as with human-produced slop: don't. People are good at spotting patterns, so keep adding those low-order bits until it's no longer obvious you're doing the same thing everyone else is. EDIT: Also, obligatory reminder that generative models don't give you average of training data with some noise mixed up; they sample from learned distribution. Law of large numbers apply, but it just means that to get more creative output, you need to bias the sampling.
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    Video games (the much larger industry of the two, by revenue) seems to be closer to understanding this. AAA games dominate advertising and news cycles, but on any best-seller list AAA games are on par with indie and B games (I think they call them AA now?). For every successful $60M PBR-rendered Unreal 5 title there is an equally successful game with low-fidelity graphics but exceptional art direction, story or gameplay. Western movie studios may discover the same thing soon, with the number of high-budget productions tanking lately.
- samatman 2y ago
  Empirically, we've passed the point where that's true, for someone not being lazy about it. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-art-turing https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-ar... In other words, someone willing to tweak the prompt and press the button enough times to say "yeah, that one, that's really good" is going to have a result which cannot in fact be reliably binned as AI-generated.
  - lmm 2y ago
    I mean, no? None of the AI-generated images managed to be indistinguishable. Some people were much better than others at spotting the differences. He even quotes, at length, an artist giving a detailed breakdown of what's wrong with one of the images he thought was good.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Did you read the article? Respondents performed barely better than chance. Sure, no one was actually 100% wrong[0]. Just almost always wrong, with a noticeable bias towards liking AI art more. The detailed breakdown you mention? Maybe it's accurate to that artist's thought process, maybe it's more of a rationalization; either way, it's not a general rule they, or anyone, could apply to any of the other AI images. Most of those in the article don't exhibit those "telltale signs", and the one that does - the Victorian Megaship - was actually made by human artist with no AI in the mix. EDIT: Another image that stands out to me is Riverside Cafe. Myself, like apparently a lot of other people, going by articles' comments, assumed it's a human-made one, because we vaguely remembered Vang Gogh painted something like it. He did, it's called Café Terrace at Night - and yet, despite immediately evoking the association, Riverside Cafe was made by AI, and is actually nothing like Café Terrace at Night at any level. (I find it fascinating how this work looks like a copy of Van Gogh at first glance, for no obvious reason, but nothing alike once you pause to look closer. It's like... they have similar low-frequency spectra or something?) EDIT2: Played around with the two images in https://ejectamenta.com/imaging-experiments/fourifier/ https://ejectamenta.com/imaging-experiments/fourifier/. There are some similarities in the spectra, I can't put my finger on them exactly. But it's probably not the whole answer. I'll try to do some more detailed experimentation later. -- [0] - Nor should you expect it - it would mean either a perfect calibration, or be the equivalent of flipping a coin and getting heads 30 times in a row; it's not impossible, but you shouldn't expect to see it unless you're interviewing fewer people than literally the entire population of the planet.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > I think the pursuit of fidelity has made the models less creative over time, they make fewer glaring mistakes like giving people six fingers but their output is ever more homogenized and interchangeable. That may be true of any one model (though I don’t think it really is, either, I think newer image gen models are individually capable of a much wider array of styles than earlier models), but it is pretty clearly not true of the whole range of available models, even if you look at a single model “family” like “SDXL derivatives”.
dartos 2y ago
Your eye sees just about every frame of a film… People may not think they care, but obviously they do. That’s why marvel movies do better than DC ones. People absolutely care about details in their media.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Fair point, particularly given the example. My conclusion wrt. Marvel vs. DC is that DC productions care much less about details, in exactly the way I find off-putting. Not all details matter, some do. And, it's better to not show the details at all, than to be inconsistent in them. Like, idk., don't identify a bomb as a specific type of existing air-fuel ordnance and then act about it as if it was a goddamn tactical nuke. Something along these lines was what made me stop watching Arrow series.
  - dartos 2y ago
    > Not all details matter, some do This is a key observation, unfortunately generally solving for what details matter is extremely difficult. I don’t think video generation models help with that problem, since you have even less control of details than you do with film. At least before post.
- famouswaffles 2y ago
  The visuals are the absolute bottom of why DC movies have performed worse over the years. The movies have just had much worse audience and critical reception.
naasking 2y ago
I was just going to say this. If you have an artistic vision that you simply must create to the minutest detail, then like any artist, you're in for a lot of manual work. If you are not beholden to a precise vision or maybe just want to create something that sells, these tools will likely be significant productivity multipliers.
- whstl 2y ago
  Exactly. So far ChatGPT is not for writing books, but is great for SEO-spam blogposts. It is already killing the content marketing industry. So far Dall-E is not for making master paintings, but it's great for stock images. It might kill most of the clipart and stock image industry. So far Udio and other song generators are not able to make symphonies, but it's great for quiet background music. It might kill most of the generic royalty-free-music industry.
hammock 2y ago
It’s like how there are two types of movie directors (or creative directors in general), the dictatorial “100 takes until I get it exactly how I envision it” type, and the “I hired you to act, so you bring the character to life for me and what will be will be” type Right now AI is more the latter, but many people want it to be the former
- troupo 2y ago
  AI is neither. A director letting actors "just be" knows exactly what he/she wants, and choses actors accordingly. Just as the directors that want the most minute detail. Clint Eastwood tries to do at most one take of a scene. David Fincher is infamous for his dozens of takes. AI is neither Fincher nor Eastwood.
wcfrobert 2y ago
Do artist really have a fully formed vision in their head? I suspect the creative process is much more iterative rather than one-directional.
- skydhash 2y ago
  No one can have a fully formed vision. But intent, yes. Then you use techniques to materialize it. Word is a poor substitute for that intent, which is why there’s so many sketches in a visual project.
  - maxglute 2y ago
    And why physical execution frequently significantly departs from sketches and concept art. The amount of intent that doesn't get translated is pretty staggering in both physical and digital pipelines in many projects.
Ar-Curunir 2y ago
That's just sad, and why people have a derogative stance towards generative AI: "half-decent" approximation removes all personality from the output, leading to a bunch of slop on the internet.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  It does indeed, but then many of those people don't notice they're already consuming half-decent, personality-less slop, because that's what human artists make too, when churning out commercial art for peanuts and on tight deadlines. It's less obvious because people project personality onto the content they see, because they implicitly assume the artist cared, and had some vision in mind. Cheap shit doesn't look like cheap shit in isolation. Except when you know it's AI-generated, because this removes the artist from the equation, and with it, your assumptions that there's any personality involved.
  - whatevertrevor 2y ago
    I'm not so sure, one of the primary complaints about IP farming slop that major studios have produced recently is a lack of firm creative vision, and clear evidence of design by committee over artist direction. People can generally see the lack of artistic intent when consuming entertainment.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      That's true. Then again, complaints about "lack of firm creative vision, and clear evidence of design by committee over artist direction" is something I've seen levied against Disney for several years now; importantly, they started before generative AI found its way into major productions. So, while GenAI tools make it easier to create superficially decent work that lacks creative intent, the studios managed to do it just fine with human intelligence only, suggesting the problem isn't AI, but the studios and their modern management policies.
msabalau 2y ago
Half decent approximations work a lot better in generating the equivalent of a stock illustrations of a powerpoint slide. Actual long form art like a movie works because it includes many well informed choices that work together as a whole. There seems to be a large gap between generating a few seconds of video vaguely like one's notion, and trying to create 90 minutes that are related and meaningful. Which doesn't mean that you can't build from this starting place build more robust tools. But if you think that this is a large, hard amount of work, it certainly could call into question optisimitic projections from people who don't even seem to notice that there is work need at all.

jsheard 2y ago

> What will save it is that, no matter how picky you are as a creator, your audience will never know what exactly was that you dreamed up, so any half-decent approximation will work. Part of the problem is the "half decent approximations" tend towards a clichéd average, the audience won't know that the cool cyberpunk cityscape you generated isn't exactly what you had in mind, but they will know that it looks like every other AI generated cyberpunk cityscape and mentally file your creation in the slop folder. I think the pursuit of fidelity has made the models less creative over time, they make fewer glaring mistakes like giving people six fingers but their output is ever more homogenized and interchangable.

randomcatuser 2y ago
a somewhat counterintuitive argument is this: AI models will make the overall creative landscape more diverse and interesting, ie, less "average"! Imagine the space of ideas as a circle, with stuff in the middle being more easy to reach (the "cliched average"). Previously, traversing the circle was incredibly hard - we had to use tools like DeviantArt, Instragram, etc to agglomerate the diverse tastes of artists, hoping to find or create the style we're looking for. Creating the same art style is hiring the artist. As a result, on average, what you see is the result of huge amounts of human curation, effort, and branding teams. Now reduce the effort 1000x, and all of a sudden, it's incredibly easy to reach the edge of the circle (or closer to it). Sure, we might still miss some things at the very outer edge, but it's equivalent to building roads. Motorists appear, people with no time to sit down and spend 10000 hours to learn and master a particular style can simply remix art and create things wildly beyond their manual capabilities. As a result, the amount of content in the infosphere skyrockets, the tastemaking velocity accelerates, and you end up with a more interesting infosphere than you're used to.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  And as AI oversaturates the cliched average, creators will have to get further and further away from the average to differentiate themselves. If you pour a lot of work into your creation you want to make it clear that it isn't some cliched AI drivel.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    You will basically have to provide a video showcasing your workflow.
    - krainboltgreene 2y ago
      I promise you that the artists can outlive the VC money.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  To extend the analogy, imagine the circle as a probability distribution; for simplicity, imagine it's a bivariate normal joint distribution (aka. Gaussian in 3D) + some noise, and you're above it and looking down. When you're commissioning an artist to make you some art, you're basically sampling from the entire distribution. Stuff in the middle is, as you say, easiest to reach, so that's what you'll most likely get. Generative models let more people do art, meaning there's more sampling happening, so the stuff further from the centre will be visited more often, too. However, AI tools also make another thing easier: moving and narrowing the sampling area. Much like with a very good human artist, you can find some work that's "out there", and ask for variations of it. However, there are only so many good artists to go around. AI making this process much easier and more accessible means more exploration of the circle's edges will happen. Not just "more like this weird thing", but also combinations of 2, 3, 4, N distinct weird things. So in a way, I feel that AI tools will surface creative art disproportionally more than it'll boost the common case. Well, except for the fly in the ointment that's the advertising industry (aka. the cancer on modern society). Unfortunately, by far most of the creative output of humanity today is done for advertising purposes, and that goal favors the common, as it maximizes the audience (and is least off-putting). Deluge of AI slop is unavoidable, because slop is how the digital world makes money, and generative AI models make it cheaper than generative protein models that did it so far. Don't blame AI research for that, blame advertising.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> I think the pursuit of fidelity has made the models less creative over time (...) their output is ever more homogenized and interchangable. Ironically, we're long past that point with human creators, at least when it comes to movies and games. Take sci-fi movies, compare modern ones to the ones from the tail end of the 20th century. Year by year, VFX gets more and more detailed (and expensive) - more and better lights, finer details on every material, more stuff moving and emitting lights, etc. But all that effort arguably killed immersion and believability, by making scenes incomprehensible. There's way too much visual noise in action scenes in particular - bullets and lighting bolts zip around, and all that detail just blurs together. Contrast the 20th century productions - textures weren't as refined, but you could at least tell who's shooting who and when. Or take video games, where all that graphics works makes everything look the same. Especially games that go for realistic style, they're all homogenous these days, and it's all cheap plastic. (Seriously, what the fuck went wrong here? All that talk, and research, and work into "physically based rendering", yet in the end, all PBR materials end up looking like painted plastic. Raytracing seems to help a bit when it comes to liquids, but it still can't seem to make metals look like metals and not Fischer-Price toys repainted to gray.) So I guess in this way, more precision just makes the audience give up entirely. > they will know that it looks like every other AI generated cyberpunk cityscape and mentally file your creation in the slop folder. The answer here is the same as with human-produced slop: don't. People are good at spotting patterns, so keep adding those low-order bits until it's no longer obvious you're doing the same thing everyone else is. EDIT: Also, obligatory reminder that generative models don't give you average of training data with some noise mixed up; they sample from learned distribution. Law of large numbers apply, but it just means that to get more creative output, you need to bias the sampling.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  Video games (the much larger industry of the two, by revenue) seems to be closer to understanding this. AAA games dominate advertising and news cycles, but on any best-seller list AAA games are on par with indie and B games (I think they call them AA now?). For every successful $60M PBR-rendered Unreal 5 title there is an equally successful game with low-fidelity graphics but exceptional art direction, story or gameplay. Western movie studios may discover the same thing soon, with the number of high-budget productions tanking lately.
samatman 2y ago
Empirically, we've passed the point where that's true, for someone not being lazy about it. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-art-turing https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-ar... In other words, someone willing to tweak the prompt and press the button enough times to say "yeah, that one, that's really good" is going to have a result which cannot in fact be reliably binned as AI-generated.
- lmm 2y ago
  I mean, no? None of the AI-generated images managed to be indistinguishable. Some people were much better than others at spotting the differences. He even quotes, at length, an artist giving a detailed breakdown of what's wrong with one of the images he thought was good.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Did you read the article? Respondents performed barely better than chance. Sure, no one was actually 100% wrong[0]. Just almost always wrong, with a noticeable bias towards liking AI art more. The detailed breakdown you mention? Maybe it's accurate to that artist's thought process, maybe it's more of a rationalization; either way, it's not a general rule they, or anyone, could apply to any of the other AI images. Most of those in the article don't exhibit those "telltale signs", and the one that does - the Victorian Megaship - was actually made by human artist with no AI in the mix. EDIT: Another image that stands out to me is Riverside Cafe. Myself, like apparently a lot of other people, going by articles' comments, assumed it's a human-made one, because we vaguely remembered Vang Gogh painted something like it. He did, it's called Café Terrace at Night - and yet, despite immediately evoking the association, Riverside Cafe was made by AI, and is actually nothing like Café Terrace at Night at any level. (I find it fascinating how this work looks like a copy of Van Gogh at first glance, for no obvious reason, but nothing alike once you pause to look closer. It's like... they have similar low-frequency spectra or something?) EDIT2: Played around with the two images in https://ejectamenta.com/imaging-experiments/fourifier/ https://ejectamenta.com/imaging-experiments/fourifier/. There are some similarities in the spectra, I can't put my finger on them exactly. But it's probably not the whole answer. I'll try to do some more detailed experimentation later. -- [0] - Nor should you expect it - it would mean either a perfect calibration, or be the equivalent of flipping a coin and getting heads 30 times in a row; it's not impossible, but you shouldn't expect to see it unless you're interviewing fewer people than literally the entire population of the planet.
dragonwriter 2y ago
> I think the pursuit of fidelity has made the models less creative over time, they make fewer glaring mistakes like giving people six fingers but their output is ever more homogenized and interchangeable. That may be true of any one model (though I don’t think it really is, either, I think newer image gen models are individually capable of a much wider array of styles than earlier models), but it is pretty clearly not true of the whole range of available models, even if you look at a single model “family” like “SDXL derivatives”.

dartos 2y ago

Your eye sees just about every frame of a film… People may not think they care, but obviously they do. That’s why marvel movies do better than DC ones. People absolutely care about details in their media.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Fair point, particularly given the example. My conclusion wrt. Marvel vs. DC is that DC productions care much less about details, in exactly the way I find off-putting. Not all details matter, some do. And, it's better to not show the details at all, than to be inconsistent in them. Like, idk., don't identify a bomb as a specific type of existing air-fuel ordnance and then act about it as if it was a goddamn tactical nuke. Something along these lines was what made me stop watching Arrow series.
- dartos 2y ago
  > Not all details matter, some do This is a key observation, unfortunately generally solving for what details matter is extremely difficult. I don’t think video generation models help with that problem, since you have even less control of details than you do with film. At least before post.
famouswaffles 2y ago
The visuals are the absolute bottom of why DC movies have performed worse over the years. The movies have just had much worse audience and critical reception.

naasking 2y ago

I was just going to say this. If you have an artistic vision that you simply must create to the minutest detail, then like any artist, you're in for a lot of manual work. If you are not beholden to a precise vision or maybe just want to create something that sells, these tools will likely be significant productivity multipliers.

whstl 2y ago
Exactly. So far ChatGPT is not for writing books, but is great for SEO-spam blogposts. It is already killing the content marketing industry. So far Dall-E is not for making master paintings, but it's great for stock images. It might kill most of the clipart and stock image industry. So far Udio and other song generators are not able to make symphonies, but it's great for quiet background music. It might kill most of the generic royalty-free-music industry.

hammock 2y ago

It’s like how there are two types of movie directors (or creative directors in general), the dictatorial “100 takes until I get it exactly how I envision it” type, and the “I hired you to act, so you bring the character to life for me and what will be will be” type Right now AI is more the latter, but many people want it to be the former

troupo 2y ago
AI is neither. A director letting actors "just be" knows exactly what he/she wants, and choses actors accordingly. Just as the directors that want the most minute detail. Clint Eastwood tries to do at most one take of a scene. David Fincher is infamous for his dozens of takes. AI is neither Fincher nor Eastwood.

wcfrobert 2y ago

Do artist really have a fully formed vision in their head? I suspect the creative process is much more iterative rather than one-directional.

skydhash 2y ago
No one can have a fully formed vision. But intent, yes. Then you use techniques to materialize it. Word is a poor substitute for that intent, which is why there’s so many sketches in a visual project.
- maxglute 2y ago
  And why physical execution frequently significantly departs from sketches and concept art. The amount of intent that doesn't get translated is pretty staggering in both physical and digital pipelines in many projects.

Ar-Curunir 2y ago

That's just sad, and why people have a derogative stance towards generative AI: "half-decent" approximation removes all personality from the output, leading to a bunch of slop on the internet.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
It does indeed, but then many of those people don't notice they're already consuming half-decent, personality-less slop, because that's what human artists make too, when churning out commercial art for peanuts and on tight deadlines. It's less obvious because people project personality onto the content they see, because they implicitly assume the artist cared, and had some vision in mind. Cheap shit doesn't look like cheap shit in isolation. Except when you know it's AI-generated, because this removes the artist from the equation, and with it, your assumptions that there's any personality involved.
- whatevertrevor 2y ago
  I'm not so sure, one of the primary complaints about IP farming slop that major studios have produced recently is a lack of firm creative vision, and clear evidence of design by committee over artist direction. People can generally see the lack of artistic intent when consuming entertainment.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    That's true. Then again, complaints about "lack of firm creative vision, and clear evidence of design by committee over artist direction" is something I've seen levied against Disney for several years now; importantly, they started before generative AI found its way into major productions. So, while GenAI tools make it easier to create superficially decent work that lacks creative intent, the studios managed to do it just fine with human intelligence only, suggesting the problem isn't AI, but the studios and their modern management policies.

msabalau 2y ago

Half decent approximations work a lot better in generating the equivalent of a stock illustrations of a powerpoint slide. Actual long form art like a movie works because it includes many well informed choices that work together as a whole. There seems to be a large gap between generating a few seconds of video vaguely like one's notion, and trying to create 90 minutes that are related and meaningful. Which doesn't mean that you can't build from this starting place build more robust tools. But if you think that this is a large, hard amount of work, it certainly could call into question optisimitic projections from people who don't even seem to notice that there is work need at all.