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Not to be a downer, but even as someone very optimistic about technology and AI generally, "TikTok but AI" sounds like a societally terrible thing to try and cr

Not to be a downer, but even as someone very optimistic about technology and AI generally, "TikTok but AI" sounds like a societally terrible thing to try and create. What's the benefit of this? Curious if anyone has a solid viewpoint steelmanning any positives they can think of.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
felipeerias 1y ago
At least now we know that AGI is definitely not happening.
- freedomben 1y ago
  Can you explain a bit more? I'm intrigued by your comment, but not seeing the connection
  - felipeerias 1y ago
    I’m just sceptical that OpenAI would be making “TikTok for AI” if they really believed that we are on the verge of creating Artificial General Intelligence.
    - afavour 1y ago
      I just see it as a (sad) reflection of capitalism. Those investors need some short term returns!
      - JacobThreeThree 1y ago
        This does not make any sense. There's far more economic opportunity with AGI.
        afavour 1y ago
        But if it’s more than a few years out then investors will start getting upset. They want money and are short term minded.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        idle_zealot 1y ago
        > There's far more economic opportunity with Is there? Creating AGI sounds like a great way to utterly upend every assumption that our economy and governments are built on. It would be incredibly destabilizing. That's not typically good for business. There's no telling who will profit once that genie is out of the bottle, or if profit will even continue to be a meaningful concept.
        xmprt 1y ago
        I hear this comment a lot and I don't get it. Let's say AGI exists but it costs $100/hr to operate and it has the intelligence of a good PhD student. Does that suddenly mean that the economy breaks down or will the goalposts shift to AGI being "economical" and that PhD level isn't good enough? I still haven't gotten a heard a clear definition of AGI which makes me think that it will break the world.
        dsign 1y ago
        It won't break the world, but it's warranted that it will break the world of people doing labor and getting paid for it. And when you think of it, even being a mediocre (or even moronic) investor is practicing a form of labor, so not even capital ownership is safe in the long run. And yes, generational wealth is a thing but there are tides that slowly shift wealth from A to B (e.g. from USA to China). Have a machine smart enough with even a sliver of motivation (intrinsic or extrinsic) to get some wealth for itself, and just watch what happens...
        fmbb 1y ago
  - na4ma4 1y ago
    > "Come on," he droned, "I've been ordered to take you down to the bridge. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't." Just reminds me of this: <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Chapter_11 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...>
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    Someone else put it best, so I'll direct quote them: >If you genuinely believed you were 2-4 years away from AGI, is Sora slop really the thing you'd release?
groggo 1y ago
It's pretty entertaining. People always like telling stories. Books, comic strips, movies, they're all just telling a story with a different amount of it left up to the viewer's imagination. Lowering the barrier to entry for this type of stuff is so cool. I think you have to be pretty pessimistic to not just think it's really cool. You can find issues with it for sure, and maybe argue that those issues outweigh the benefit, but hard to say it's not going to be fun for some people.
- dukeyukey 1y ago
  It's undeniably cool. But look at Cocomelon on YouTube, it's hard to see how this won't converge to something similar, only infinitely more scalable.
  - maplethorpe 1y ago
    Not to speak for the OP, but I think they would argue that 'Cocomelon' type content would be a great use of the tech.
- afavour 1y ago
  I think it’s really cool… and I’m still concerned about the long term implications of it. We’ve already seen a lot of TV get worse and worse (e.g. more reality tv) in a quest to reduce costs. It’s not difficult to imagine a reality where talented people can’t make great content because it’s cheaper to thump out bargain basement AI slop.
  - eru 1y ago
    We could start by banning cameras, so that people have to draw by hand again. /s
- morleytj 1y ago
  The democratization of storytelling is probably the best argument in favor, I'd agree. Thank you for the response! I do find the actual generation of video very cool as a technical process. I would also say that I can find a lot of things cool or interesting that I think are also probably deleterious to society on the whole, and I worry about the possibility of slop feeds that are optimized to be as addictive as possible, and this seems like another step in that direction. Hopefully it won't be, but definitely something that worries me.
janalsncm 1y ago
> We are giving users the tools and optionality to be in control of what they see on the feed If this works it is a more powerful algorithm shaping mechanism than TikTok’s revealed preference feed. Even if Sora doesn’t take off, it could force TikTok to integrate something similar.
stingraycharles 1y ago
Honestly if I learned anything over the past few decades it’s that I’m typically wrong about these kind of predictions, and society as a whole uses social media in a way that I just don’t comprehend. I would have never guessed a social media app whose biggest feature is “it disappears within 24h!” (even though you can easily screenshot everything) would become as big as it became. Also, remember that it’s not about benefitting society as a whole, it’s about benefitting the investors. If the investors get rich at the cost of society, it’s a win for OpenAI.
- morleytj 1y ago
  Certainly, and that is the more pessimistic view that I have, that this is being developed with a view to introduce product sponsorships and advertisements. I mainly am curious if anyone has the view that there is broader benefit to the development of this, after all, wasn't that the entire mission statement of OpenAI? Quoting from their announcement on their site: > OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. This feels like something constrained by the need to generate a financial return, and not something primarily focused on understanding physics and world models, to be blunt. source: https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/
  - komali2 1y ago
    Aren't they trying to go for-profit and escape that albatross around their neck of "must feasibly be doing social good?"
- eru 1y ago
  > I would have never guessed a social media app whose biggest feature is “it disappears within 24h!” (even though you can easily screenshot everything) would become as big as it became. Or 'everything has to fit into 120 characters' (= Twitter). Or 'replies are designed to be maximally rage bait-y' (= Tumblr).
fennecbutt 1y ago
None. But the people love clout. It's baked into our tribal nature.
idiotsecant 1y ago
The benefit of it is getting users and making money. A corporation is an organism that eats money. It doesn't need a 'why'.
XenophileJKO 1y ago
Isn't it kind of fundamentally better. A huge problem with tiktok is doing stupid things on video. On a site where the premise is fake video. Making stupid videos is a very different societal cost.
- morleytj 1y ago
  You're right that the societal cost is very different. I hadn't thought about people doing the stupid things on video, I think personally I focus on the effects of the consumption moreso. Personally I think the problem with TikTok is largely based in hyperoptimized content specialized to your interest shaping your worldview and isolating your perspective of the world from others, as well as probably being pretty bad for the ability to maintain attention and engage with long form narratives and ideas. I don't really think TikTok is unique here, other than that it's the best in the game at doing it and keeping people's attention. But overall I suppose I just see something like this as potentially worse in those regards, but maybe I'm overly pessimistic.
winkelmann 1y ago
I think a dedicated "TikTok but AI" is infinitely better than AI videos polluting other platforms. Of course, in practice, the latter is already the case, rendering the theoretical benefits of the former kind of moot. Nonetheless, a platform for AI videos with an audience looking for them, rather than the horrible "boomer-slop" that is prevalent on other social media, is welcome in my eyes.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  I don't think this is going to reduce the slop on other sites at all though.
- reaperducer 1y ago
  I think a dedicated "TikTok but AI" is infinitely better than AI videos polluting other platforms. They'll just cross-post. That's been going on since back when Facebook was The Face Book.
raincole 1y ago
As a social experiment to reveal how senseless and pointless pop entertainment could be. (personal rant) I've been in a mild existential crisis since I read Amusing Ourselves to Death. Can one form of entertainment really be more well-regarded than another? Is fine art fundamentally different from pop art? Are there 'finer' pop cultures amongst all pop cultures? I do still think reading The Song of Ice and Fire is more meaningful than scrolling TikTok. The crisis part is that I can't justify this belief with words.
- wrigby 1y ago
  There are two completely distinct differences that jump out to me initially that I think may help justify your feelings: 1: Reading a long book demands focus on a longer timespan than scrolling TikTok, and with focusing on a single thing for a long time, we get a sense of accomplishment. I don’t know how to justify this as valuable, but for some reason I feel that it is. 2: The Song of Ice and Fire (and GoT) were consumed by a huge proportion of people, and you now have this in common with them. This act of consuming entertainment also grants you a way to connect with other humans - you have so much to talk about. Contrast that with an algorithmic feed, which is unique just for you - no one else sees your exact feed. Of course, there are tons of people that see some of the same snippets of content, if their interests overlap with yours, but it’s not nearly as universal as having read the same series of books (and there’s much less to talk about when you’ve seen the same 17-second short form video than when you’ve both invested dozens of hours in reading the same series of books). I don’t think these thoughts fully justify your belief, but hopefully they provide some support to it.
  - raincole 1y ago
    I think the point 2 will rub many people the wrong way (me included) though. That would make reading Fourth Wing or Twilight a more connecting experience than most classics. (Nothing inherently wrong with that, but... you know...)
    - matthewaveryusa 1y ago
      The classics were classic because they were the most available and the most popular stories of their time, and they meant more in an era where creating and disseminating media was difficult. I love to romanticize a world where we go back to the classics to connect with our past and present better, even if just for the sake of efficiency. For better or for worse media is more ephemeral which means getting to a common vocabulary is one step removed. It's really a fun time to be alive.
taneq 1y ago
Lotuses to eat, clearly.
api 1y ago
I’ve been predicting for years that the next stop for “social” media is a purely machine generated slop feed designed to keep people addicted. No human creators at all. The question is whether people will eventually get bored with this stuff or if it actually will mesmerize people for huge fractions of their waking lives. If the latter, I suspect we will outlaw it eventually. It’d be like legalizing hard opiates, literally, but minus the ODs and health damage.
totetsu 1y ago
My steel man would be that it sounds like exactly the kind of ooze that real AGI might arise from as an emergent system.
eru 1y ago
> What's the benefit of this? Curious if anyone has a solid viewpoint steelmanning any positives they can think of. Tiktok makes a lot of money, doesn't it? It definitely draws a lot of eyeballs. Seems pretty clear what the benefit (to the company) is?
muzani 1y ago
I like it. It's not a societal reform or anything. It's just people experimenting, like the Show HN section. There are some fun things in there and it's not as addictive as social media. Instagram does not welcome this and I don't think they should. It is its own lane. And if it's just a place to sweep AI slop into, that's a good thing.
tux1968 1y ago
There will be a cohort of technically savvy youth who enjoy that all the fuddy duddies are self selecting themselves off the platform. There will quickly be a lot of fun memes and exclusionary references and lingo. It will be a hit. Just not with anyone over thirty.
bee_rider 1y ago
Maybe finally this is the social media thing that will cause people on realize it is all too dumb, and get them to disengage? (Although I have thought this about every new development for the last ~15 years so I guess it is not too hopeful).
lukan 1y ago
"What's the benefit of this?" User engagement. That translates into money. Now I can see it can make for a fun party game, but that they seriously go after it, when their game should be leading models to do serious work ... is not a great sign to me.
- rvz 1y ago
  And users paying to generate longer videos. Not only it has the slot-machine like addiction factor, it's going to make lots of money and it will take off very quickly. All OpenAI has to do is to make the video generation much much faster.
  - lukan 1y ago
    It will only take off, if people like it, if it becomes trendy and this will strongly depend on the quality of the generated videos.
baxtr 1y ago
"TikTok but AI" sounds like "Cocaine but for free" to me.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
Steelmanning? It's infinite content, meaning our customers will never run out of new and interesting videos to watch, which will inspire them to feed prompts into our systems too and have it generate more videos. Money can be generated from multiple angles; we can charge a premium for generating videos beyond a small free tier once we've hooked the prompters, we can offer people or companies the option to promote their own videos so they get put into people's feeds, and we can insert generated ads from big corporate sponsors. It'll be lit. Why should a commercial enterprise that has had billions of investments have benefits outside of earning money? Besides the entertainment value that the masses get from making and viewing these, of course.
- suddenlybananas 1y ago
  This is your steelmanning? God it sounds awful.
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    I know, right?
- smartmic 1y ago
  Social media is also a wonderful tool for influencing participants and controlling them in the long term. In other words, behind the economic purposes there is a darker, more profound effect that is dangerous in the hands of a few powerful players. In the case of TikTok, that would be the Chinese state. Why shouldn't US Big Tech also be interested in this kind of power, in addition to the extra revenue?
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    Yup, which is also why various social media owners bent the knee to the administration, and now TikTok is about to become state-controlled too. The long term effects of subtle social media propaganda will become apparent in the years to come. Or, will be vocalized, they already are apparent - I'm convinced social media and related, 24/7 "news" media are a big factor in the right shift in politics worldwide.
krzat 1y ago
Would be fun if this devolved into psychodelic, hypnotic videos that have no cognitively discernable content (like white noise) but evoke an urge to press the like button. I'm just curious if such thing is possible.
- xigoi 1y ago
  Half of TikTok is blurry videos wtere you can’t tell what’s happening overlaid with meaningless text and random noises, so this wouldn’t be much different.
dostick 1y ago
It is a strange choice also because their model aims to be better than others, and obvious choice would be going after filmmaking market, like Veo did. And in presentation they tell about social aspect and scrolling, and how they would limit the scrolling. Are they confused and is it really just three guys working on it.
baq 1y ago
A certificate of having read and understood Brave New World in the last 24 months should be required for being allowed to vote
welferkj 1y ago
>What's the benefit of this? Curious if anyone has a solid viewpoint steelmanning any positives they can think of. Revealed preferences. Keep giving the people exactly what they want (not what they claim to want), in unlimited quantities, until the message is received or we're all dead.
loa_in_ 1y ago
Think of it as Tenor GIF (a reaction gif provider) but if your prompt isn't there it's AI generated and cached (added) to the global library.
xp84 1y ago
Personally, I think TikTok and other video platforms are already awash in AI. So, in my opinion, a platform that is explicitly declared as containing just AI videos is actually less disturbing to me. Every minute spent watching known-fictional AI videos on this platform is a minute not spent watching deceptive imagery disguised as reality on TikTok. Please note that I’m not necessarily commenting on whether the existence of AI generated video is good or bad for our society, because I think it’s pretty moot what we think about it. It’s not going to just go away even if the majority of people here at HN or in general feel that it’s problematic.
NedF 1y ago
> steelmanning The thread replies show what deadbeats Hacker News users are. The worlds knowledge base could be turned to video. Like Khan academy but rather than old out of date videos instant upgrades from rerunning / correcting a prompt. In practice it's not good enough to do this but no more so than other applications. It could be an interesting first iteration. /end steelmaned.
gloosx 1y ago
For the management of this platform, the benefit is pretty obvious – traffic = money, profits, dollars, bucks, cash, coin, funds, capital, benjamins Do they care at all how societally terrible thing it is? They found an addictive way of retaining traffic, and they will be holding to it.
SirMaster 1y ago
Generating shareholder value.
GPerson 1y ago
I’m surprised you can detect that TikTok but AI is societally terrible but are still optimistic about AI. Why is that? As a technical point, AI can already be used on TikTok, and every other platform, so whatever societal terror is coming from Sora 2 already exists due to AI.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

felipeerias 1y ago

At least now we know that AGI is definitely not happening.

freedomben 1y ago
Can you explain a bit more? I'm intrigued by your comment, but not seeing the connection
- felipeerias 1y ago
  I’m just sceptical that OpenAI would be making “TikTok for AI” if they really believed that we are on the verge of creating Artificial General Intelligence.
  - afavour 1y ago
    I just see it as a (sad) reflection of capitalism. Those investors need some short term returns!
    - JacobThreeThree 1y ago
      This does not make any sense. There's far more economic opportunity with AGI.
      - afavour 1y ago
        But if it’s more than a few years out then investors will start getting upset. They want money and are short term minded.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - idle_zealot 1y ago
        > There's far more economic opportunity with Is there? Creating AGI sounds like a great way to utterly upend every assumption that our economy and governments are built on. It would be incredibly destabilizing. That's not typically good for business. There's no telling who will profit once that genie is out of the bottle, or if profit will even continue to be a meaningful concept.
        xmprt 1y ago
        I hear this comment a lot and I don't get it. Let's say AGI exists but it costs $100/hr to operate and it has the intelligence of a good PhD student. Does that suddenly mean that the economy breaks down or will the goalposts shift to AGI being "economical" and that PhD level isn't good enough? I still haven't gotten a heard a clear definition of AGI which makes me think that it will break the world.
        dsign 1y ago
        It won't break the world, but it's warranted that it will break the world of people doing labor and getting paid for it. And when you think of it, even being a mediocre (or even moronic) investor is practicing a form of labor, so not even capital ownership is safe in the long run. And yes, generational wealth is a thing but there are tides that slowly shift wealth from A to B (e.g. from USA to China). Have a machine smart enough with even a sliver of motivation (intrinsic or extrinsic) to get some wealth for itself, and just watch what happens...
        fmbb 1y ago
- na4ma4 1y ago
  > "Come on," he droned, "I've been ordered to take you down to the bridge. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't." Just reminds me of this: <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Chapter_11 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...>
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Someone else put it best, so I'll direct quote them: >If you genuinely believed you were 2-4 years away from AGI, is Sora slop really the thing you'd release?

groggo 1y ago

It's pretty entertaining. People always like telling stories. Books, comic strips, movies, they're all just telling a story with a different amount of it left up to the viewer's imagination. Lowering the barrier to entry for this type of stuff is so cool. I think you have to be pretty pessimistic to not just think it's really cool. You can find issues with it for sure, and maybe argue that those issues outweigh the benefit, but hard to say it's not going to be fun for some people.

dukeyukey 1y ago
It's undeniably cool. But look at Cocomelon on YouTube, it's hard to see how this won't converge to something similar, only infinitely more scalable.
- maplethorpe 1y ago
  Not to speak for the OP, but I think they would argue that 'Cocomelon' type content would be a great use of the tech.
afavour 1y ago
I think it’s really cool… and I’m still concerned about the long term implications of it. We’ve already seen a lot of TV get worse and worse (e.g. more reality tv) in a quest to reduce costs. It’s not difficult to imagine a reality where talented people can’t make great content because it’s cheaper to thump out bargain basement AI slop.
- eru 1y ago
  We could start by banning cameras, so that people have to draw by hand again. /s
morleytj 1y ago
The democratization of storytelling is probably the best argument in favor, I'd agree. Thank you for the response! I do find the actual generation of video very cool as a technical process. I would also say that I can find a lot of things cool or interesting that I think are also probably deleterious to society on the whole, and I worry about the possibility of slop feeds that are optimized to be as addictive as possible, and this seems like another step in that direction. Hopefully it won't be, but definitely something that worries me.

janalsncm 1y ago

> We are giving users the tools and optionality to be in control of what they see on the feed If this works it is a more powerful algorithm shaping mechanism than TikTok’s revealed preference feed. Even if Sora doesn’t take off, it could force TikTok to integrate something similar.

stingraycharles 1y ago

Honestly if I learned anything over the past few decades it’s that I’m typically wrong about these kind of predictions, and society as a whole uses social media in a way that I just don’t comprehend. I would have never guessed a social media app whose biggest feature is “it disappears within 24h!” (even though you can easily screenshot everything) would become as big as it became. Also, remember that it’s not about benefitting society as a whole, it’s about benefitting the investors. If the investors get rich at the cost of society, it’s a win for OpenAI.

morleytj 1y ago
Certainly, and that is the more pessimistic view that I have, that this is being developed with a view to introduce product sponsorships and advertisements. I mainly am curious if anyone has the view that there is broader benefit to the development of this, after all, wasn't that the entire mission statement of OpenAI? Quoting from their announcement on their site: > OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. This feels like something constrained by the need to generate a financial return, and not something primarily focused on understanding physics and world models, to be blunt. source: https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/
- komali2 1y ago
  Aren't they trying to go for-profit and escape that albatross around their neck of "must feasibly be doing social good?"
eru 1y ago
> I would have never guessed a social media app whose biggest feature is “it disappears within 24h!” (even though you can easily screenshot everything) would become as big as it became. Or 'everything has to fit into 120 characters' (= Twitter). Or 'replies are designed to be maximally rage bait-y' (= Tumblr).

fennecbutt 1y ago

None. But the people love clout. It's baked into our tribal nature.

idiotsecant 1y ago

The benefit of it is getting users and making money. A corporation is an organism that eats money. It doesn't need a 'why'.

XenophileJKO 1y ago

Isn't it kind of fundamentally better. A huge problem with tiktok is doing stupid things on video. On a site where the premise is fake video. Making stupid videos is a very different societal cost.

morleytj 1y ago
You're right that the societal cost is very different. I hadn't thought about people doing the stupid things on video, I think personally I focus on the effects of the consumption moreso. Personally I think the problem with TikTok is largely based in hyperoptimized content specialized to your interest shaping your worldview and isolating your perspective of the world from others, as well as probably being pretty bad for the ability to maintain attention and engage with long form narratives and ideas. I don't really think TikTok is unique here, other than that it's the best in the game at doing it and keeping people's attention. But overall I suppose I just see something like this as potentially worse in those regards, but maybe I'm overly pessimistic.

winkelmann 1y ago

I think a dedicated "TikTok but AI" is infinitely better than AI videos polluting other platforms. Of course, in practice, the latter is already the case, rendering the theoretical benefits of the former kind of moot. Nonetheless, a platform for AI videos with an audience looking for them, rather than the horrible "boomer-slop" that is prevalent on other social media, is welcome in my eyes.

SchemaLoad 1y ago
I don't think this is going to reduce the slop on other sites at all though.
reaperducer 1y ago
I think a dedicated "TikTok but AI" is infinitely better than AI videos polluting other platforms. They'll just cross-post. That's been going on since back when Facebook was The Face Book.

raincole 1y ago

As a social experiment to reveal how senseless and pointless pop entertainment could be. (personal rant) I've been in a mild existential crisis since I read Amusing Ourselves to Death. Can one form of entertainment really be more well-regarded than another? Is fine art fundamentally different from pop art? Are there 'finer' pop cultures amongst all pop cultures? I do still think reading The Song of Ice and Fire is more meaningful than scrolling TikTok. The crisis part is that I can't justify this belief with words.

wrigby 1y ago
There are two completely distinct differences that jump out to me initially that I think may help justify your feelings: 1: Reading a long book demands focus on a longer timespan than scrolling TikTok, and with focusing on a single thing for a long time, we get a sense of accomplishment. I don’t know how to justify this as valuable, but for some reason I feel that it is. 2: The Song of Ice and Fire (and GoT) were consumed by a huge proportion of people, and you now have this in common with them. This act of consuming entertainment also grants you a way to connect with other humans - you have so much to talk about. Contrast that with an algorithmic feed, which is unique just for you - no one else sees your exact feed. Of course, there are tons of people that see some of the same snippets of content, if their interests overlap with yours, but it’s not nearly as universal as having read the same series of books (and there’s much less to talk about when you’ve seen the same 17-second short form video than when you’ve both invested dozens of hours in reading the same series of books). I don’t think these thoughts fully justify your belief, but hopefully they provide some support to it.
- raincole 1y ago
  I think the point 2 will rub many people the wrong way (me included) though. That would make reading Fourth Wing or Twilight a more connecting experience than most classics. (Nothing inherently wrong with that, but... you know...)
  - matthewaveryusa 1y ago
    The classics were classic because they were the most available and the most popular stories of their time, and they meant more in an era where creating and disseminating media was difficult. I love to romanticize a world where we go back to the classics to connect with our past and present better, even if just for the sake of efficiency. For better or for worse media is more ephemeral which means getting to a common vocabulary is one step removed. It's really a fun time to be alive.

taneq 1y ago

Lotuses to eat, clearly.

api 1y ago

I’ve been predicting for years that the next stop for “social” media is a purely machine generated slop feed designed to keep people addicted. No human creators at all. The question is whether people will eventually get bored with this stuff or if it actually will mesmerize people for huge fractions of their waking lives. If the latter, I suspect we will outlaw it eventually. It’d be like legalizing hard opiates, literally, but minus the ODs and health damage.

totetsu 1y ago

My steel man would be that it sounds like exactly the kind of ooze that real AGI might arise from as an emergent system.

eru 1y ago

> What's the benefit of this? Curious if anyone has a solid viewpoint steelmanning any positives they can think of. Tiktok makes a lot of money, doesn't it? It definitely draws a lot of eyeballs. Seems pretty clear what the benefit (to the company) is?

muzani 1y ago

I like it. It's not a societal reform or anything. It's just people experimenting, like the Show HN section. There are some fun things in there and it's not as addictive as social media. Instagram does not welcome this and I don't think they should. It is its own lane. And if it's just a place to sweep AI slop into, that's a good thing.

tux1968 1y ago

There will be a cohort of technically savvy youth who enjoy that all the fuddy duddies are self selecting themselves off the platform. There will quickly be a lot of fun memes and exclusionary references and lingo. It will be a hit. Just not with anyone over thirty.

bee_rider 1y ago

Maybe finally this is the social media thing that will cause people on realize it is all too dumb, and get them to disengage? (Although I have thought this about every new development for the last ~15 years so I guess it is not too hopeful).

lukan 1y ago

"What's the benefit of this?" User engagement. That translates into money. Now I can see it can make for a fun party game, but that they seriously go after it, when their game should be leading models to do serious work ... is not a great sign to me.

rvz 1y ago
And users paying to generate longer videos. Not only it has the slot-machine like addiction factor, it's going to make lots of money and it will take off very quickly. All OpenAI has to do is to make the video generation much much faster.
- lukan 1y ago
  It will only take off, if people like it, if it becomes trendy and this will strongly depend on the quality of the generated videos.

baxtr 1y ago

"TikTok but AI" sounds like "Cocaine but for free" to me.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago

Steelmanning? It's infinite content, meaning our customers will never run out of new and interesting videos to watch, which will inspire them to feed prompts into our systems too and have it generate more videos. Money can be generated from multiple angles; we can charge a premium for generating videos beyond a small free tier once we've hooked the prompters, we can offer people or companies the option to promote their own videos so they get put into people's feeds, and we can insert generated ads from big corporate sponsors. It'll be lit. Why should a commercial enterprise that has had billions of investments have benefits outside of earning money? Besides the entertainment value that the masses get from making and viewing these, of course.

suddenlybananas 1y ago
This is your steelmanning? God it sounds awful.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  I know, right?
smartmic 1y ago
Social media is also a wonderful tool for influencing participants and controlling them in the long term. In other words, behind the economic purposes there is a darker, more profound effect that is dangerous in the hands of a few powerful players. In the case of TikTok, that would be the Chinese state. Why shouldn't US Big Tech also be interested in this kind of power, in addition to the extra revenue?
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  Yup, which is also why various social media owners bent the knee to the administration, and now TikTok is about to become state-controlled too. The long term effects of subtle social media propaganda will become apparent in the years to come. Or, will be vocalized, they already are apparent - I'm convinced social media and related, 24/7 "news" media are a big factor in the right shift in politics worldwide.

krzat 1y ago

Would be fun if this devolved into psychodelic, hypnotic videos that have no cognitively discernable content (like white noise) but evoke an urge to press the like button. I'm just curious if such thing is possible.

xigoi 1y ago
Half of TikTok is blurry videos wtere you can’t tell what’s happening overlaid with meaningless text and random noises, so this wouldn’t be much different.

dostick 1y ago

It is a strange choice also because their model aims to be better than others, and obvious choice would be going after filmmaking market, like Veo did. And in presentation they tell about social aspect and scrolling, and how they would limit the scrolling. Are they confused and is it really just three guys working on it.

baq 1y ago

A certificate of having read and understood Brave New World in the last 24 months should be required for being allowed to vote

welferkj 1y ago

>What's the benefit of this? Curious if anyone has a solid viewpoint steelmanning any positives they can think of. Revealed preferences. Keep giving the people exactly what they want (not what they claim to want), in unlimited quantities, until the message is received or we're all dead.

loa_in_ 1y ago

Think of it as Tenor GIF (a reaction gif provider) but if your prompt isn't there it's AI generated and cached (added) to the global library.

xp84 1y ago

Personally, I think TikTok and other video platforms are already awash in AI. So, in my opinion, a platform that is explicitly declared as containing just AI videos is actually less disturbing to me. Every minute spent watching known-fictional AI videos on this platform is a minute not spent watching deceptive imagery disguised as reality on TikTok. Please note that I’m not necessarily commenting on whether the existence of AI generated video is good or bad for our society, because I think it’s pretty moot what we think about it. It’s not going to just go away even if the majority of people here at HN or in general feel that it’s problematic.

NedF 1y ago

> steelmanning The thread replies show what deadbeats Hacker News users are. The worlds knowledge base could be turned to video. Like Khan academy but rather than old out of date videos instant upgrades from rerunning / correcting a prompt. In practice it's not good enough to do this but no more so than other applications. It could be an interesting first iteration. /end steelmaned.

gloosx 1y ago

For the management of this platform, the benefit is pretty obvious – traffic = money, profits, dollars, bucks, cash, coin, funds, capital, benjamins Do they care at all how societally terrible thing it is? They found an addictive way of retaining traffic, and they will be holding to it.

SirMaster 1y ago

Generating shareholder value.

GPerson 1y ago

I’m surprised you can detect that TikTok but AI is societally terrible but are still optimistic about AI. Why is that? As a technical point, AI can already be used on TikTok, and every other platform, so whatever societal terror is coming from Sora 2 already exists due to AI.