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I think people are setting themselves up for failure if they index their happiness or sense of self satisfaction to their ability to discern what AI-generated c

I think people are setting themselves up for failure if they index their happiness or sense of self satisfaction to their ability to discern what AI-generated content is or not. Soon, we’ll have no idea what’s AI-generated or not. I care about good, tight story telling. In the case of this ad.. it’s okay?

galleywest200 10mo ago
Part of watching films and animations was that seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself. When all they did was enter a prompt that takes some of the magic away. If all you care about is just the story then maybe you personally will be satisfied but a lot of people cared about the animations, cinematography, etc, and all of the work that went into that.
- phantasmish 10mo ago
  I think digital effects still rarely look as good as the peak of Hollywood practical effects (call it… idk, Alien in 1979 through Independence Day in ‘96 or so, roughly, and yes I know ID4 also had computer fx in addition to lots of miniatures and models) Having to do things for-real also kept things grounded. Modern action movies are often cartoon-like with supposedly human characters stringing together super-human moves that’d leave a real person with dislocated shoulders, broken bones, and brain damage, because they’re actually just CG, no human involved. [EDIT] OMG, or take Bullitt (1968) versus, say, the later Fast and the Furious sequels (everything past Tokyo Drift). The latter are basically Pixar's Cars with more-realistic textures. They're cartoons with live-action talking segments. Very little actual driving is depicted. Bullitt may have used the movie-magic of editing, but someone did have to actually drive a car, for every shot of a car driving. Or at least they had to set up a car with a dummy to convincingly crash. What you're seeing is heightened, but basically within the realm of reality. Or take A Bridge Too Far. It's a bit of a mess! Make it CG and it'd be outright bad. But ho-lee-shit do they blow up a lot of stuff, like, you cannot even believe how much. And look at all those tanks and armored vehicles they got! And planes! And extras! Those are all 100% real! AND ALL THE KABOOMS! And it all looks better than CG, to boot. The spectacle of it (plus some solid performances) saves the movie. Make all the FX CG and it'd be crap. Imagine a Jackie Chan movie with CG stunts. What is even the point. It'd be trash.
  - ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
    > Alien in 1979 I think this might be your nostalgia. The thing looks different in different scenes, and there's a scene that feels like it's a guy inside from the way it moves. So I disagree that Alien is peak special effects. (still peak over things. Peak ambience for sure)
    - phantasmish 10mo ago
      I didn't pick perfect examples, I picked useful ones for bounding the rough time period. Both examples are transitional. Alien nails it like 80% of the time (I've watched it twice in the last year, in 4k on a wall-size screen, so it's fresh for me). It's an early, major example of getting it damn near perfect pretty often. Not every shot's great—like, about two-thirds of the shots of the exterior of the landing craft look like a miniature, not as glaring as a Showa-era Godzilla or anything, but you can tell—but it's still a better average than modern computer-heavy movies. It's one of the earliest that's exhibiting the potential of peak pre-CG special effects, if not nailing it all the time. But, very few movies nail it all the time, including modern ones doing the computer graphics thing.
    - latexr 10mo ago
      There’s an argument to be made that by watching higher image quality versions, you’re losing on the experience. I.e. the blurriness helped the effect. Their nostalgia and your (presumably) more recent viewing are then two different watching experiences. https://youtube.com/watch?v=xbZMqS-fW-8&t=11m15s https://youtube.com/watch?v=xbZMqS-fW-8&t=11m15s
  - TheOtherHobbes 10mo ago
    This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real) vs Furiosa (a lot of CGI.) But only bad CGI is visible. I guarantee you have watched CGI footage and not noticed. At all. The problem over the last decade or so hasn't been the technical limits of CGI, but studio unwillingness to spend enough on it to make it good. And directors have also become less creative. You can find UK newsreels from the 50s on YouTube, and some of the direction and editing are superb - a beautiful mix of abstraction, framing, and narrative. Most modern directors don't have that kind of visual literacy. The emphasis is more on spectacle and trying to bludgeon audiences into submission, not on tastefulness and visual craft.
- neom 10mo ago
  That's very romantic. The golden age of both cinema and animation was an assembly line, often an exploitative one. Most frames were the by product of industrial labor, done by people with little autonomy, low wages, no creative input... the human element was already highly concentrated among a very small elite, and, the majority of the labor pool was treated as mechanical/replaceable input. "seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself." Sure, but, it's not reeeaaally “a human did it.” It is more “a small number of visible artists did it.”
  - seinecle 10mo ago
    I would be interested in a book telling the history of cinema and animation that you describe
    - neom 10mo ago
      https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Line-Untold-Animation-Simpson/dp/0813124077 https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Line-Untold-Animation-Simpson... and https://archive.org/details/hollywoodcartoon00barr https://archive.org/details/hollywoodcartoon00barr
  - maplethorpe 10mo ago
    But nevertheless, a human did still do it. How gruelling and exploitative the process was, or how many humans it took, is beside the point. The fact that the image existed meant that there was an attainable skill that a person could learn in order to do that same thing, and that was inspiring. Since the days of cave paintings, that experience has been available to all humans. In the year 2025, it died, and I will never experience it again.
- prodigycorp 10mo ago
  Good film making is good film making. I am a creative. I incorporate AI into videos that I make subtly and with a huge amount of care. I know I put more time and care into my craft than most others. Nobody knows what involved AI and what didn’t. At the end of the day, if you care about your work, it shows.
- mikkupikku 10mo ago
  I get it, but it also doesn't matter. I liked anime when it was drawn by hand because I liked looking at all the things people could draw. But it doesn't matter what I like; virtually all anime is now rendered from 3d computer models, particularly any sort of machinery or whenever the camera rotates or transforms in space showing off the 3d structure of things. That stuff used to be drawn by hand but now nobody does that. It's not coming back.
thesuitonym 10mo ago
I can almost see your point, but there are two big problems: 1) To date, there has been no example of AI that is good. It's not even close. And 2) Why should I be interested in a story nobody was interested in telling? If you don't want to make a video, or tell a story, or write a song, then...just don't. Why even have an AI do it?
- em-bee 10mo ago
  what if you write the story yourself, and use AI only to visualize it?
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - jsheard 10mo ago
    What does a visualization being to the table over a book, if it's executed in the most generic way possible? The decisions made when adapting one medium to another are what does or doesn't make it worthwhile. Unless your goal is purely to capture people who don't and won't read, as cheaply and cynically as possible.
    - em-bee 10mo ago
      there is a big difference between sending the story to the AI and saying "visualize this" vs carefully describing exactly how the visualization should look like and effectively only using the AI to render your vision.
      - Planktonne 10mo ago
        Is there a big difference? There might be in process, but I've yet to be impressed by one in results.
        em-bee 10mo ago
        well the question is rather, what is the difference of AI use vs say a 3D modelling application? assuming you have the 3D assets already designed. you then take a model, and instruct the application that this model is to move from point A to point B, using a pathfinding algorithm while avoiding obstacles. once done, render the result in a video. now do the same with AI. is the human contribution really that much different?
foxyv 10mo ago
I think the objections with AI will change based on the quality of the AI generated work. What people don't want is to wade through a million gallons of poorly generated slop to see one good movie. They also don't want to have to deal with thousands of zero effort AI videos just to find one good video generated by a human being. If the actual result of AI is an unlimited supply of adequate media personalized to our tastes, I don't foresee there being any objection. Right now, it's honestly just shovelware on a scale that hasn't been seen before. No one likes shovelware except maybe toddlers.
johnnyanmac 10mo ago
>I care about good, tight story telling. Agreed, wake me when that happens. If we ever get to that point...im still ambivalent. I also get exposed to media to form community. And Ai very explicly wants to tear down communities and create a factory of slop. Even if we can get some good Ai storytelling, I'm not sure if a tree fighting the flood is enough. It's going to topple eventually as the roots get washed out >In the case of this ad.. it’s okay? I thought it was cute. I can nitpick, but it gave a feeling of family and community, and how you can't form that by devouring your peers. The McDonald's ad meanwhile : "the world's going to shit, use McDonald's as your apocalypse bunker! (no loitering tho)". Heck, it feels like the kind of ad Fallout or Outer Worlds would make on an in-game TV.

galleywest200 10mo ago

Part of watching films and animations was that seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself. When all they did was enter a prompt that takes some of the magic away. If all you care about is just the story then maybe you personally will be satisfied but a lot of people cared about the animations, cinematography, etc, and all of the work that went into that.

phantasmish 10mo ago
I think digital effects still rarely look as good as the peak of Hollywood practical effects (call it… idk, Alien in 1979 through Independence Day in ‘96 or so, roughly, and yes I know ID4 also had computer fx in addition to lots of miniatures and models) Having to do things for-real also kept things grounded. Modern action movies are often cartoon-like with supposedly human characters stringing together super-human moves that’d leave a real person with dislocated shoulders, broken bones, and brain damage, because they’re actually just CG, no human involved. [EDIT] OMG, or take Bullitt (1968) versus, say, the later Fast and the Furious sequels (everything past Tokyo Drift). The latter are basically Pixar's Cars with more-realistic textures. They're cartoons with live-action talking segments. Very little actual driving is depicted. Bullitt may have used the movie-magic of editing, but someone did have to actually drive a car, for every shot of a car driving. Or at least they had to set up a car with a dummy to convincingly crash. What you're seeing is heightened, but basically within the realm of reality. Or take A Bridge Too Far. It's a bit of a mess! Make it CG and it'd be outright bad. But ho-lee-shit do they blow up a lot of stuff, like, you cannot even believe how much. And look at all those tanks and armored vehicles they got! And planes! And extras! Those are all 100% real! AND ALL THE KABOOMS! And it all looks better than CG, to boot. The spectacle of it (plus some solid performances) saves the movie. Make all the FX CG and it'd be crap. Imagine a Jackie Chan movie with CG stunts. What is even the point. It'd be trash.
- ekjhgkejhgk 10mo ago
  > Alien in 1979 I think this might be your nostalgia. The thing looks different in different scenes, and there's a scene that feels like it's a guy inside from the way it moves. So I disagree that Alien is peak special effects. (still peak over things. Peak ambience for sure)
  - phantasmish 10mo ago
    I didn't pick perfect examples, I picked useful ones for bounding the rough time period. Both examples are transitional. Alien nails it like 80% of the time (I've watched it twice in the last year, in 4k on a wall-size screen, so it's fresh for me). It's an early, major example of getting it damn near perfect pretty often. Not every shot's great—like, about two-thirds of the shots of the exterior of the landing craft look like a miniature, not as glaring as a Showa-era Godzilla or anything, but you can tell—but it's still a better average than modern computer-heavy movies. It's one of the earliest that's exhibiting the potential of peak pre-CG special effects, if not nailing it all the time. But, very few movies nail it all the time, including modern ones doing the computer graphics thing.
  - latexr 10mo ago
    There’s an argument to be made that by watching higher image quality versions, you’re losing on the experience. I.e. the blurriness helped the effect. Their nostalgia and your (presumably) more recent viewing are then two different watching experiences. https://youtube.com/watch?v=xbZMqS-fW-8&t=11m15s https://youtube.com/watch?v=xbZMqS-fW-8&t=11m15s
- TheOtherHobbes 10mo ago
  This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real) vs Furiosa (a lot of CGI.) But only bad CGI is visible. I guarantee you have watched CGI footage and not noticed. At all. The problem over the last decade or so hasn't been the technical limits of CGI, but studio unwillingness to spend enough on it to make it good. And directors have also become less creative. You can find UK newsreels from the 50s on YouTube, and some of the direction and editing are superb - a beautiful mix of abstraction, framing, and narrative. Most modern directors don't have that kind of visual literacy. The emphasis is more on spectacle and trying to bludgeon audiences into submission, not on tastefulness and visual craft.
neom 10mo ago
That's very romantic. The golden age of both cinema and animation was an assembly line, often an exploitative one. Most frames were the by product of industrial labor, done by people with little autonomy, low wages, no creative input... the human element was already highly concentrated among a very small elite, and, the majority of the labor pool was treated as mechanical/replaceable input. "seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself." Sure, but, it's not reeeaaally “a human did it.” It is more “a small number of visible artists did it.”
- seinecle 10mo ago
  I would be interested in a book telling the history of cinema and animation that you describe
  - neom 10mo ago
    https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Line-Untold-Animation-Simpson/dp/0813124077 https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Line-Untold-Animation-Simpson... and https://archive.org/details/hollywoodcartoon00barr https://archive.org/details/hollywoodcartoon00barr
- maplethorpe 10mo ago
  But nevertheless, a human did still do it. How gruelling and exploitative the process was, or how many humans it took, is beside the point. The fact that the image existed meant that there was an attainable skill that a person could learn in order to do that same thing, and that was inspiring. Since the days of cave paintings, that experience has been available to all humans. In the year 2025, it died, and I will never experience it again.
prodigycorp 10mo ago
Good film making is good film making. I am a creative. I incorporate AI into videos that I make subtly and with a huge amount of care. I know I put more time and care into my craft than most others. Nobody knows what involved AI and what didn’t. At the end of the day, if you care about your work, it shows.
mikkupikku 10mo ago
I get it, but it also doesn't matter. I liked anime when it was drawn by hand because I liked looking at all the things people could draw. But it doesn't matter what I like; virtually all anime is now rendered from 3d computer models, particularly any sort of machinery or whenever the camera rotates or transforms in space showing off the 3d structure of things. That stuff used to be drawn by hand but now nobody does that. It's not coming back.

thesuitonym 10mo ago

I can almost see your point, but there are two big problems: 1) To date, there has been no example of AI that is good. It's not even close. And 2) Why should I be interested in a story nobody was interested in telling? If you don't want to make a video, or tell a story, or write a song, then...just don't. Why even have an AI do it?

em-bee 10mo ago
what if you write the story yourself, and use AI only to visualize it?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- jsheard 10mo ago
  What does a visualization being to the table over a book, if it's executed in the most generic way possible? The decisions made when adapting one medium to another are what does or doesn't make it worthwhile. Unless your goal is purely to capture people who don't and won't read, as cheaply and cynically as possible.
  - em-bee 10mo ago
    there is a big difference between sending the story to the AI and saying "visualize this" vs carefully describing exactly how the visualization should look like and effectively only using the AI to render your vision.
    - Planktonne 10mo ago
      Is there a big difference? There might be in process, but I've yet to be impressed by one in results.
      - em-bee 10mo ago
        well the question is rather, what is the difference of AI use vs say a 3D modelling application? assuming you have the 3D assets already designed. you then take a model, and instruct the application that this model is to move from point A to point B, using a pathfinding algorithm while avoiding obstacles. once done, render the result in a video. now do the same with AI. is the human contribution really that much different?

foxyv 10mo ago

I think the objections with AI will change based on the quality of the AI generated work. What people don't want is to wade through a million gallons of poorly generated slop to see one good movie. They also don't want to have to deal with thousands of zero effort AI videos just to find one good video generated by a human being. If the actual result of AI is an unlimited supply of adequate media personalized to our tastes, I don't foresee there being any objection. Right now, it's honestly just shovelware on a scale that hasn't been seen before. No one likes shovelware except maybe toddlers.

johnnyanmac 10mo ago

>I care about good, tight story telling. Agreed, wake me when that happens. If we ever get to that point...im still ambivalent. I also get exposed to media to form community. And Ai very explicly wants to tear down communities and create a factory of slop. Even if we can get some good Ai storytelling, I'm not sure if a tree fighting the flood is enough. It's going to topple eventually as the roots get washed out >In the case of this ad.. it’s okay? I thought it was cute. I can nitpick, but it gave a feeling of family and community, and how you can't form that by devouring your peers. The McDonald's ad meanwhile : "the world's going to shit, use McDonald's as your apocalypse bunker! (no loitering tho)". Heck, it feels like the kind of ad Fallout or Outer Worlds would make on an in-game TV.