7 ms·

There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning: Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and fac

There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning: Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task. In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market. You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators, because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world where the presence of AI video is widely known. Of course this doesn’t apply to every job, and indeed many jobs have already been “replaced” by AI. But any analysis which isn’t reflectively factoring in the reception of AI into the background is too simplistic.

keiferski 1y ago
Just to further elaborate on this with another example: the writing industry. (Technical, professional, marketing, etc. writing - not books.) The default logic is that AI will just replace all writing tasks, and writers will go extinct. What actually seems to be happening, however, is this: - obviously written-by-AI copywriting is perceived very negatively by the market - companies want writers that understand how to use AI tools to enhance productivity, but understand how to modify copy so that it doesn’t read as AI-written - the meta-skill of knowing what to write in the first place becomes more valuable, because the AI is only going to give you a boilerplate plan at best And so the only jobs that seem to have been replaced by AI directly, as of now, are the ones writing basically forgettable content, report-style tracking content, and other low level things. Not great for the jobs lost, but also not a death sentence for the entire profession of writing.
- zarzavat 1y ago
  The assumption here is that LLMs will never pass the Turing test for copywriting, i.e. AI writing will always be distinguishable from human writing. Given that models that produce intelligible writing didn't exist a few years ago, that's a very bold assumption.
  - keiferski 1y ago
    No, I’m sure they will at some point, but I don’t think that eliminates the actual usefulness of a talented writer. It just makes unique styles more valuable, raises the baseline acceptable copy to something better (in the way that Bootstrap increased website design quality), and shifts the role of writer to more of an editor. Someone still has to choose what to prompt and I don’t think a boilerplate “make me a marketing plan then write pages for it” will be enough to stand out. And I’d bet that the cyborg writers using AI will outcompete the purely AI ones. (I also was just using it as a point to show how being identified as AI-made is already starting to have a negative connotation. Maybe the future is one where everything is an AI but no one admits it.)
    - zarzavat 1y ago
      Why couldn't an AI do all of that? > And I’d bet that the cyborg writers using AI will outcompete the purely AI ones. In the early days of chess engines there were similar hopes for cyborg chess, whereby a human and engine would team up to be better than an engine alone. What actually happened was that the engines quickly got so good that the expected value of human intervention was negative - the engine crunching so much information than the human ever could. Marketing is also a kind of game. Will humans always be better at it? We have a poor track record so far.
      - oblio 1y ago
        Intellectuals have a strong fetish for complete information games such as chess. Reality and especially human interaction are basically the complete opposite.
      - slowlyform 1y ago
        I tried asking chatgpt for brainrot speech and all examples they gave me sound very different from what the new kids on the internet are using. Maybe language will always evolve faster than whatever amount of Data openAI can train their model with :).
      - CuriouslyC 1y ago
- jaynetics 1y ago
  As someone who used to be in the writing industry (a whole range of jobs), this take strikes me as a bit starry-eyed. Throw-away snippets, good-enough marketing, generic correspondence, hastily compiled news items, flairful filler text in books etc., all this used to be a huge chunk of the work, in so many places. The average customer had only a limited ability to judge the quality of texts, to put it mildly. Translators and proofreaders already had to prioritize mass over flawless output, back when Google Translate was hilariously bad and spell checkers very limited. Nowadays, even the translation of legal texts in the EU parliament is done by a fraction of the former workforce. Very few of the writers and none of the proofreaders I knew are still in the industry. Addressing the wider point, yes, there is still a market for great artists and creators, but it's nowhere near large enough to accommodate the many, many people who used to make a modest living, doing these small, okay-ish things, occasionally injecting a bit of love into them, as much as they could under time constraints.
  - anon191928 1y ago
    What I understand is AI leads certain markets to be smaller in terms of economics. Wayy smaller actually. Only few industry will keep growing because of this.
    - cj 1y ago
      Specifically markets where “good enough” quality is acceptable. Translation is an good example. Still need humans for perfect quality, but most use cases arguably don’t require perfect. And for the remaining translators their job has now morphed into quality control.
  - nostrademons 1y ago
    I think this is a key point, and one that we've seen in a number of other markets (eg. computer programming, art, question-answering, UX design, trip planning, resume writing, job postings, etc.). AI eats the low end, the portion that is one step above bullshit, but it turns out that in a lot of industries the customer just wants the job done and doesn't care or can't tell how well it is done. It's related to Terence Tao's point about AI being more useful as a "red team" member [1]. This has a bunch of implications that are positive and also a bunch that are troubling. On one hand, it's likely going to create a burst of economic activity as the cost of these marginal activities goes way down. Many things that aren't feasible now because you can't afford to pay a copywriter or an artist or a programmer are suddenly going to become feasible because you can pay ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini at a fraction of the cost. It's a huge boon for startups and small businesses: instead of needing to raise capital and hire a team to build your MVP, just build it yourself with the help of AI. It's also a boon for DIYers and people who want to customize their life: already I've used Claude Code to build out a custom computer program for a couple household organization tasks that I would otherwise need to get an off-the-shelf program that doesn't really do what I want for, because the time cost of programming was previously too high. But this sort of low-value junior work has historically been what people use to develop skills and break into the industry. And juniors become seniors, and typically you need senior-level skills to be able to know what to ask the AI and prompt it on the specifics of how to do a task best. Are we creating a world that's just thoroughly mediocre, filled only with the content that a junior-level AI can generate? What happens to economic activity when people realize they're getting shitty AI-generated slop for their money and the entrepreneur who sold it to them is pocketing most of the profits? At least with shitty human-generated bullshit, there's a way to call the professional on it (or at least the parts that you recognize as objectionable) and have them do it again to a higher standard. If the business is structured on AI and nobody knows how to prompt it to do better, you're just stuck, and the shitty bullshit world is the one you live in. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44711306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44711306
- Scarblac 1y ago
  Seems a bit optimistic to me. Companies may well accept a lower quality than they used to get if it's far cheaper. We may just get shittier writing across the board. (and shittier software, etc)
jhbadger 1y ago
>You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators, because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world where the presence of AI video is widely known. But that's because, at present, AI generated video isn't very good. Consider the history of CGI. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was common to complain about how the move away from practical sets in favor of CGI was making movies worse. And it was! You had backgrounds and monsters that looked like they escaped from a video game. But that complaint has pretty much died out these days as the tech got better (although Nolan's Oppenheimer did weirdly hype the fact that its simulated Trinity blast was done by practical effects).
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  Do you get the feeling that AI generated content is lacking something that can be incrementally improved on? Seems to me that it's already quite good in any dimension that it knows how to improve on (e.g. photorealism) and completely devoid of the other things we'd want from it (e.g. meaning).
  - keiferski 1y ago
    Yeah if you look at many of the top content creators, their appeal often has very little to do with production value, and is deliberately low tech and informal. I guess AI tools can eventually become more human-like in terms of demeanor, mood, facial expressions, personality, etc. but this is a long long way from a photorealistic video.
  - tomrod 1y ago
    It's missing random flaws. Often the noise has patternd as a result of the diffusion or generation process.
    - arcane23 1y ago
      Yeah, I was thinking about this. Humans vary depending on a lot of factors. Today they're happy, tomorrow they're a bit down. This makes for some variation which can be useful. LLMs are made to be reliable/repeatable, as general experience. You know what you get. Humans are a bit more ... -ish, depending on ... things.
MichaelZuo 1y ago
That’s the fundamental issue with most “analysis”, and most discussions really, on HN. Since the vast vast majority of writers and commentators are not literal geniuses… they can’t reliably produce high quality synthetic analysis, outside of very narrow niches. Even though for most comment chains on HN to make sense, readers certainly have to pretend some meaningful text was produced beyond happenstance. Partly because quality is measured relative to the average, and partly because the world really is getting more complex.
- inquirerGeneral 1y ago
  [dead]
- nprateem 1y ago
  Oh come on. I may not be a genius but I can turn my mind to most things. "I may not be a gynecologist, but I'll have a look."
  - MichaelZuo 1y ago
    Turning your mind to something doesn’t automatically lead to producing high quality synthetic analysis? It doesn’t even seem relevant how good you are at step 1 for something so many steps later.
antirez 1y ago
To understand why this is too optimistic, you have to look at things where AI is already almost human-level. Translations are more and more done exclusively with AI or with a massive AI help (with the effect of destroying many jobs anyway) at this point. Now ebook reading is switching to AI. Book and music album covers are often done with AI (even if this is most of the times NOT advertised), and so forth. If AI progresses more in a short timeframe (the big "if" in my blog post), we will see a lot of things done exclusively (and even better 90% of the times, since most humans doing a given work are not excellence in what they do) by AI. This will be fine if governments immediately react and the system changes. Otherwise there will be a lot of people to feed without a job.
- apwell23 1y ago
  > Book and music album covers are often done with AI These suck. Things made with AI just suck big time. Not only are they stupid but they have negative value on your product. I cannot think of single purely AI made video, song or any form of art that is any a good. All AI has done is falsely convince ppl that they can now create things that they had no skills to do before AI.
  - jordanpg 1y ago
    Of course, your opinion may be subject to selection bias (i.e., you are only judging the art that you became aware was AI generated).
    - WesleyLivesay 1y ago
      Reminds me of the issue with bad CGI in movies. The only CGI you notice is the bad CGI, the good stuff just works. Same for AI generated art, you see the bad stuff but do not realize when you see a good one.
      - apwell23 1y ago
        care to give me some examples from youtube ? I am talking about videos that ppl on youtube connected to for the content in the video ( not AI demo videos).
andai 1y ago
This only works in a world where AI sucks and/or can be easily detected. I've already found videos where on my 2nd or 3rd time watching I went, "wait, that's not real!" We're starting to get there, which is frankly beyond my ability to reason about. It's the same issue with propaganda. If people say a movie is propaganda, that means the movie failed. If a propaganda movie is good propaganda, people don't talk about that. They don't even realize. They just talk about what a great movie it is.
d3nj4l 1y ago
> AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators If you seriously think this, you don’t understand the YouTube landscape. Shorts - which have incredible view times - are flooded with AI videos. Most thumbnails these days are made with AI image generators. There’s an entire industry of AI “faceless” YouTubers who do big numbers with nobody in the comments noticing. The YouTuber Jarvis Johnson made a video about how his feed has fully AI generated and edited videos with great view counts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDRH4UBQesI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDRH4UBQesI What you’re missing is that most of these people aren’t going onto Veo 3, writing “make me a video” and publishing that; these videos are a little more complex in that they have separate models writing scripts, generating voiceover, and doing basic editing.
- keiferski 1y ago
  These videos and shorts are a fraction of the entire YouTube landscape, and actual creators with identities are making vastly, vastly more money - especially once you realize how YouTube and video content in general is becoming a marketing channel for other businesses. Faceless channels have functionally zero brand, zero longevity, and no real way to extend that into broader products in the way that most successful creators have done. That was my point: someone that has an identity as a YouTuber shouldn’t worry too much about being replaced by faceless AI bot content.
jostylr 1y ago
One thing to keep in mind is not so much that AI would replace the work of video creators for general video consumption, but rather it could create personalized videos or music or whatever. I experimented with creating a bunch of AI music [1] that was tailored to my interests and tastes, and I enjoy listening to them. Would others? I doubt it, but so what? As the tools get better and easier, we can create our own art to reflect our lives. There will still be great human art that will rise to the top, but the vast inundation of slop to the general public may disappear. Imagine the fun of collaboratively designing whole worlds and stories with people, such as with tabletop role-playing, but far more immersive and not having to have a separate category of creators or waiting on companies to release products. 1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbB9v1PTH3Y86BSEhEQjv9EkwJyuSvR80 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbB9v1PTH3Y86BSEhEQjv...
j45 1y ago
Poorly made videos are poorly made videos. Whether poor videos made by a human directly, or poorly made by a human using AI. The use of software like AI to create videos with sloppy quality and reaults reflects on their skill. Currently the use of AI leans towards sloppy because of the lower digital literacy of content creators with AI, and once they get into it, realizing how much goes into videos.
danielvaughn 1y ago
Another flaw is that humans won’t find other things to do. I don’t see the argument for that idea. If I had to bet, I’d say that if AI continues getting more powerful, then humans will transition to working on more ambitious things.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bamboozled 1y ago
  If it became magic smart, then I don’t see why we couldn’t use it to enhance ourselves and become Transhuman?
  - johnecheck 1y ago
    There are a number of reasons you might not be able to. Most likely? It's ridiculously expensive and you're poor.
    - cesarvarela 1y ago
      Techonolgy has been deflationary so far, the rich get it first but eventually it reaches everyone.
      - crote 1y ago
        Only when it is profitable for the rich.
        bamboozled 1y ago
        Agree, Insulin is a prime example.
- johnecheck 1y ago
  This is very similar to the 'machines will do all the work, we'll just get to be artists and philosophers' idea. It sounds nice. But to have that, you need resources. Whoever controls the resources will get to decide whether you get them. If AI/machines are our entire economy, the people that control the machines control the resources. I have little faith in their benevolence. If they also control the political system? You'll win your bet. A few humans will work on more ambitious things. It might not go so well for the rest of us.
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
It's becoming a negative label because they aren't as good. I'm not saying it will happen, but it's possible to imagine a future in which AI videos are generally better, and if that happens, almost by definition, people will favor them (otherwise they aren't "better").
- techpineapple 1y ago
  I mean, I can imagine any future, but the problem with “created by AI” is that because it’s relatively inexpensive, it seems like it will necessarily become noise rather than signal, if a person could pop out a high quality video in a day, in which case signal will revert to the celebrity that is marketing it rather than the video itself.
- glhaynes 1y ago
  I'm not on Facebook, but, from what I can tell, this has arguably already happened for still images on it. (If defining "better" as "more appealing to/likely to be re-shared by frequent users of Facebook.")
yoavm 1y ago
Perhaps this will go the way the industrial revolution did? A knife handcrafted by a Japanese master might have a very high value, but 99.9% of the knives are mass produced. "Creators" will become artisans - appreciated by many, consumed by few.
variadix 1y ago
Re: YT AI content. That is because AI video is (currently) low quality. If AI video generators could spit out full length videos that rivaled or surpassed the best human made content people wouldn’t have the same association. We don’t live in that world yet, but someday we might. I don’t think “human made” will be a desirable label for _anything_, videos, software, or otherwise, once AI is as good or better than humans in that domain.
gopalv 1y ago
> because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world The negative label is the old world pulling the new one back, it rarely sticks. I'm old enough to remember the folks saying "We used to have the paint the background blue" and "All music composers need to play an instrument" (or turn into a symbol).

keiferski 1y ago

Just to further elaborate on this with another example: the writing industry. (Technical, professional, marketing, etc. writing - not books.) The default logic is that AI will just replace all writing tasks, and writers will go extinct. What actually seems to be happening, however, is this: - obviously written-by-AI copywriting is perceived very negatively by the market - companies want writers that understand how to use AI tools to enhance productivity, but understand how to modify copy so that it doesn’t read as AI-written - the meta-skill of knowing what to write in the first place becomes more valuable, because the AI is only going to give you a boilerplate plan at best And so the only jobs that seem to have been replaced by AI directly, as of now, are the ones writing basically forgettable content, report-style tracking content, and other low level things. Not great for the jobs lost, but also not a death sentence for the entire profession of writing.

zarzavat 1y ago
The assumption here is that LLMs will never pass the Turing test for copywriting, i.e. AI writing will always be distinguishable from human writing. Given that models that produce intelligible writing didn't exist a few years ago, that's a very bold assumption.
- keiferski 1y ago
  No, I’m sure they will at some point, but I don’t think that eliminates the actual usefulness of a talented writer. It just makes unique styles more valuable, raises the baseline acceptable copy to something better (in the way that Bootstrap increased website design quality), and shifts the role of writer to more of an editor. Someone still has to choose what to prompt and I don’t think a boilerplate “make me a marketing plan then write pages for it” will be enough to stand out. And I’d bet that the cyborg writers using AI will outcompete the purely AI ones. (I also was just using it as a point to show how being identified as AI-made is already starting to have a negative connotation. Maybe the future is one where everything is an AI but no one admits it.)
  - zarzavat 1y ago
    Why couldn't an AI do all of that? > And I’d bet that the cyborg writers using AI will outcompete the purely AI ones. In the early days of chess engines there were similar hopes for cyborg chess, whereby a human and engine would team up to be better than an engine alone. What actually happened was that the engines quickly got so good that the expected value of human intervention was negative - the engine crunching so much information than the human ever could. Marketing is also a kind of game. Will humans always be better at it? We have a poor track record so far.
    - oblio 1y ago
      Intellectuals have a strong fetish for complete information games such as chess. Reality and especially human interaction are basically the complete opposite.
    - slowlyform 1y ago
      I tried asking chatgpt for brainrot speech and all examples they gave me sound very different from what the new kids on the internet are using. Maybe language will always evolve faster than whatever amount of Data openAI can train their model with :).
    - CuriouslyC 1y ago
jaynetics 1y ago
As someone who used to be in the writing industry (a whole range of jobs), this take strikes me as a bit starry-eyed. Throw-away snippets, good-enough marketing, generic correspondence, hastily compiled news items, flairful filler text in books etc., all this used to be a huge chunk of the work, in so many places. The average customer had only a limited ability to judge the quality of texts, to put it mildly. Translators and proofreaders already had to prioritize mass over flawless output, back when Google Translate was hilariously bad and spell checkers very limited. Nowadays, even the translation of legal texts in the EU parliament is done by a fraction of the former workforce. Very few of the writers and none of the proofreaders I knew are still in the industry. Addressing the wider point, yes, there is still a market for great artists and creators, but it's nowhere near large enough to accommodate the many, many people who used to make a modest living, doing these small, okay-ish things, occasionally injecting a bit of love into them, as much as they could under time constraints.
- anon191928 1y ago
  What I understand is AI leads certain markets to be smaller in terms of economics. Wayy smaller actually. Only few industry will keep growing because of this.
  - cj 1y ago
    Specifically markets where “good enough” quality is acceptable. Translation is an good example. Still need humans for perfect quality, but most use cases arguably don’t require perfect. And for the remaining translators their job has now morphed into quality control.
- nostrademons 1y ago
  I think this is a key point, and one that we've seen in a number of other markets (eg. computer programming, art, question-answering, UX design, trip planning, resume writing, job postings, etc.). AI eats the low end, the portion that is one step above bullshit, but it turns out that in a lot of industries the customer just wants the job done and doesn't care or can't tell how well it is done. It's related to Terence Tao's point about AI being more useful as a "red team" member [1]. This has a bunch of implications that are positive and also a bunch that are troubling. On one hand, it's likely going to create a burst of economic activity as the cost of these marginal activities goes way down. Many things that aren't feasible now because you can't afford to pay a copywriter or an artist or a programmer are suddenly going to become feasible because you can pay ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini at a fraction of the cost. It's a huge boon for startups and small businesses: instead of needing to raise capital and hire a team to build your MVP, just build it yourself with the help of AI. It's also a boon for DIYers and people who want to customize their life: already I've used Claude Code to build out a custom computer program for a couple household organization tasks that I would otherwise need to get an off-the-shelf program that doesn't really do what I want for, because the time cost of programming was previously too high. But this sort of low-value junior work has historically been what people use to develop skills and break into the industry. And juniors become seniors, and typically you need senior-level skills to be able to know what to ask the AI and prompt it on the specifics of how to do a task best. Are we creating a world that's just thoroughly mediocre, filled only with the content that a junior-level AI can generate? What happens to economic activity when people realize they're getting shitty AI-generated slop for their money and the entrepreneur who sold it to them is pocketing most of the profits? At least with shitty human-generated bullshit, there's a way to call the professional on it (or at least the parts that you recognize as objectionable) and have them do it again to a higher standard. If the business is structured on AI and nobody knows how to prompt it to do better, you're just stuck, and the shitty bullshit world is the one you live in. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44711306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44711306
Scarblac 1y ago
Seems a bit optimistic to me. Companies may well accept a lower quality than they used to get if it's far cheaper. We may just get shittier writing across the board. (and shittier software, etc)

jhbadger 1y ago

>You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators, because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world where the presence of AI video is widely known. But that's because, at present, AI generated video isn't very good. Consider the history of CGI. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was common to complain about how the move away from practical sets in favor of CGI was making movies worse. And it was! You had backgrounds and monsters that looked like they escaped from a video game. But that complaint has pretty much died out these days as the tech got better (although Nolan's Oppenheimer did weirdly hype the fact that its simulated Trinity blast was done by practical effects).

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
Do you get the feeling that AI generated content is lacking something that can be incrementally improved on? Seems to me that it's already quite good in any dimension that it knows how to improve on (e.g. photorealism) and completely devoid of the other things we'd want from it (e.g. meaning).
- keiferski 1y ago
  Yeah if you look at many of the top content creators, their appeal often has very little to do with production value, and is deliberately low tech and informal. I guess AI tools can eventually become more human-like in terms of demeanor, mood, facial expressions, personality, etc. but this is a long long way from a photorealistic video.
- tomrod 1y ago
  It's missing random flaws. Often the noise has patternd as a result of the diffusion or generation process.
  - arcane23 1y ago
    Yeah, I was thinking about this. Humans vary depending on a lot of factors. Today they're happy, tomorrow they're a bit down. This makes for some variation which can be useful. LLMs are made to be reliable/repeatable, as general experience. You know what you get. Humans are a bit more ... -ish, depending on ... things.

MichaelZuo 1y ago

That’s the fundamental issue with most “analysis”, and most discussions really, on HN. Since the vast vast majority of writers and commentators are not literal geniuses… they can’t reliably produce high quality synthetic analysis, outside of very narrow niches. Even though for most comment chains on HN to make sense, readers certainly have to pretend some meaningful text was produced beyond happenstance. Partly because quality is measured relative to the average, and partly because the world really is getting more complex.

inquirerGeneral 1y ago
[dead]
nprateem 1y ago
Oh come on. I may not be a genius but I can turn my mind to most things. "I may not be a gynecologist, but I'll have a look."
- MichaelZuo 1y ago
  Turning your mind to something doesn’t automatically lead to producing high quality synthetic analysis? It doesn’t even seem relevant how good you are at step 1 for something so many steps later.

antirez 1y ago

To understand why this is too optimistic, you have to look at things where AI is already almost human-level. Translations are more and more done exclusively with AI or with a massive AI help (with the effect of destroying many jobs anyway) at this point. Now ebook reading is switching to AI. Book and music album covers are often done with AI (even if this is most of the times NOT advertised), and so forth. If AI progresses more in a short timeframe (the big "if" in my blog post), we will see a lot of things done exclusively (and even better 90% of the times, since most humans doing a given work are not excellence in what they do) by AI. This will be fine if governments immediately react and the system changes. Otherwise there will be a lot of people to feed without a job.

apwell23 1y ago
> Book and music album covers are often done with AI These suck. Things made with AI just suck big time. Not only are they stupid but they have negative value on your product. I cannot think of single purely AI made video, song or any form of art that is any a good. All AI has done is falsely convince ppl that they can now create things that they had no skills to do before AI.
- jordanpg 1y ago
  Of course, your opinion may be subject to selection bias (i.e., you are only judging the art that you became aware was AI generated).
  - WesleyLivesay 1y ago
    Reminds me of the issue with bad CGI in movies. The only CGI you notice is the bad CGI, the good stuff just works. Same for AI generated art, you see the bad stuff but do not realize when you see a good one.
    - apwell23 1y ago
      care to give me some examples from youtube ? I am talking about videos that ppl on youtube connected to for the content in the video ( not AI demo videos).

andai 1y ago

This only works in a world where AI sucks and/or can be easily detected. I've already found videos where on my 2nd or 3rd time watching I went, "wait, that's not real!" We're starting to get there, which is frankly beyond my ability to reason about. It's the same issue with propaganda. If people say a movie is propaganda, that means the movie failed. If a propaganda movie is good propaganda, people don't talk about that. They don't even realize. They just talk about what a great movie it is.

d3nj4l 1y ago

> AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators If you seriously think this, you don’t understand the YouTube landscape. Shorts - which have incredible view times - are flooded with AI videos. Most thumbnails these days are made with AI image generators. There’s an entire industry of AI “faceless” YouTubers who do big numbers with nobody in the comments noticing. The YouTuber Jarvis Johnson made a video about how his feed has fully AI generated and edited videos with great view counts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDRH4UBQesI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDRH4UBQesI What you’re missing is that most of these people aren’t going onto Veo 3, writing “make me a video” and publishing that; these videos are a little more complex in that they have separate models writing scripts, generating voiceover, and doing basic editing.

keiferski 1y ago
These videos and shorts are a fraction of the entire YouTube landscape, and actual creators with identities are making vastly, vastly more money - especially once you realize how YouTube and video content in general is becoming a marketing channel for other businesses. Faceless channels have functionally zero brand, zero longevity, and no real way to extend that into broader products in the way that most successful creators have done. That was my point: someone that has an identity as a YouTuber shouldn’t worry too much about being replaced by faceless AI bot content.

jostylr 1y ago

One thing to keep in mind is not so much that AI would replace the work of video creators for general video consumption, but rather it could create personalized videos or music or whatever. I experimented with creating a bunch of AI music [1] that was tailored to my interests and tastes, and I enjoy listening to them. Would others? I doubt it, but so what? As the tools get better and easier, we can create our own art to reflect our lives. There will still be great human art that will rise to the top, but the vast inundation of slop to the general public may disappear. Imagine the fun of collaboratively designing whole worlds and stories with people, such as with tabletop role-playing, but far more immersive and not having to have a separate category of creators or waiting on companies to release products. 1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbB9v1PTH3Y86BSEhEQjv9EkwJyuSvR80 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbB9v1PTH3Y86BSEhEQjv...

j45 1y ago

Poorly made videos are poorly made videos. Whether poor videos made by a human directly, or poorly made by a human using AI. The use of software like AI to create videos with sloppy quality and reaults reflects on their skill. Currently the use of AI leans towards sloppy because of the lower digital literacy of content creators with AI, and once they get into it, realizing how much goes into videos.

danielvaughn 1y ago

Another flaw is that humans won’t find other things to do. I don’t see the argument for that idea. If I had to bet, I’d say that if AI continues getting more powerful, then humans will transition to working on more ambitious things.

deleted 1y ago
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bamboozled 1y ago
If it became magic smart, then I don’t see why we couldn’t use it to enhance ourselves and become Transhuman?
- johnecheck 1y ago
  There are a number of reasons you might not be able to. Most likely? It's ridiculously expensive and you're poor.
  - cesarvarela 1y ago
    Techonolgy has been deflationary so far, the rich get it first but eventually it reaches everyone.
    - crote 1y ago
      Only when it is profitable for the rich.
      - bamboozled 1y ago
        Agree, Insulin is a prime example.
johnecheck 1y ago
This is very similar to the 'machines will do all the work, we'll just get to be artists and philosophers' idea. It sounds nice. But to have that, you need resources. Whoever controls the resources will get to decide whether you get them. If AI/machines are our entire economy, the people that control the machines control the resources. I have little faith in their benevolence. If they also control the political system? You'll win your bet. A few humans will work on more ambitious things. It might not go so well for the rest of us.

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago

It's becoming a negative label because they aren't as good. I'm not saying it will happen, but it's possible to imagine a future in which AI videos are generally better, and if that happens, almost by definition, people will favor them (otherwise they aren't "better").

techpineapple 1y ago
I mean, I can imagine any future, but the problem with “created by AI” is that because it’s relatively inexpensive, it seems like it will necessarily become noise rather than signal, if a person could pop out a high quality video in a day, in which case signal will revert to the celebrity that is marketing it rather than the video itself.
glhaynes 1y ago
I'm not on Facebook, but, from what I can tell, this has arguably already happened for still images on it. (If defining "better" as "more appealing to/likely to be re-shared by frequent users of Facebook.")

yoavm 1y ago

Perhaps this will go the way the industrial revolution did? A knife handcrafted by a Japanese master might have a very high value, but 99.9% of the knives are mass produced. "Creators" will become artisans - appreciated by many, consumed by few.

variadix 1y ago

Re: YT AI content. That is because AI video is (currently) low quality. If AI video generators could spit out full length videos that rivaled or surpassed the best human made content people wouldn’t have the same association. We don’t live in that world yet, but someday we might. I don’t think “human made” will be a desirable label for _anything_, videos, software, or otherwise, once AI is as good or better than humans in that domain.

gopalv 1y ago

> because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world The negative label is the old world pulling the new one back, it rarely sticks. I'm old enough to remember the folks saying "We used to have the paint the background blue" and "All music composers need to play an instrument" (or turn into a symbol).