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One of the arguments I keep seeing from people churning out AI video is that the tech is enabling people "creative freedom" that's been made possible now even w

• RcouF1uZ4gsC 9mo ago
  Now do hand drawn cartoons vs 3d rendered cartoons. Is Pixar Incredibles where a computer algorithm made decisions about exact colors worse than Disney Cinderella where it was hand-drawn animation?
  • throwawayffffas 9mo ago
    Having watched both. Yes the Incredibles are much much worse. Especially if we focus on the color palette. You could have not picked a worse example. But for example Moana is not worse than Cinderella. Arguably it's better. But the algorithmic choices around perspectives, reflections, etc. Were not really automated. In both cases a lot of people where involved in each scene, and I am confident, they went over every frame, checking the result was what they wanted.
    • soiltype 9mo ago
      Additionally, hand-coloring wasn't necessarily a more pure creative choice anyway. It was dictated by material conditions such as the availability of pigments, studio constraints, time pressures, etc.
  • pyth0 9mo ago
    This feels like an incredibly disingenuous comparison and I suspect you know that. But just to play along, real artists had to design the character models, real filmmakers had to decide which shots to capture, real editors had to put that together to make a cohesive story. Also they almost certainly went through color grading after having completed the rendering, so the colors are certainly selected by humans to produce a nice looking composition.
  • Keyframe 9mo ago
    This isn't even remotely comparable.
• onemoresoop 9mo ago
  Not only are they removing creativity but they're eroding the medium with a flood of high quanity/low quality of misinformation or fakes. My youtube feed is innundated in AI generated talks, audiobooks, history etc. The audiobooks may be okay but I can't trust any AI generated content. At this point I wish I could just fiter it out. Just yesterday I saw a video by Yuval Noah Harari and almost towards the end I realize it's AI slop. It has nothing to do with the author except for his syntehtized voice. The content is not even vetted by a human, it's being created faster than users can consume it. For now I can spot these AI channels and attempt to avoid them but am not sure how long this is going to last.
  • the_snooze 9mo ago
    A lot of digital tech produces more waste than actual value. Just look at your email inbox: odds are, the overwhelming majority of emails you get aren't useful correspondence from real people.
    • cons0le 9mo ago
      And computers allowed that slop to come into the real world. Now 95% of my physical mail is automated mailer junk asking me to sell my home/car
    • soiltype 9mo ago
      Yeah. You know most people consider that bad, right?
• pelotron 9mo ago
  I was involved in a conversation about cheating in video games the other day, and the topic shifted to AI use in music. Someone said, "using AI is like using an aimbot for music." I absolutely love that comparison since it highlights the shortcut past creativity/skill to get a computerized best result while also associating it with blatant cheating. The "enables creativity" argument is ironic since the root of the word is "create" and AI users are literally removing the "create" step from their production process.
  • jacquesm 9mo ago
    That is an excellent way to put it. Thank you for relaying this.
  • ggrantrowberry 9mo ago
    I disagree. The point of playing a shooter game is to have fun and be competitive while abiding by the rules of the game. Using aimbot is circumventing the whole purpose. The purpose of making music is to make music. So why does it matter what tool you use to do it? Because tools like Logic or Garageband can create lots of sounds for you is that removing creativity? Really shouldn’t music be recorded with a live band every time? Those music production tools are destroying creativity… No. Obviously not. AI does enable creativity. Turns out it also requires a lot of skill to use it to get something good.
    • andyfilms1 9mo ago
      The purpose of eating is to ingest nutrients, but that's not why most chefs enjoy cooking, or why people pay more for nicer meals.
      • dogleash 9mo ago
        Come to think of it, AI Stans do remind me of people bending over backwards to justify how their Soylent farts made them more skilled at living life.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
• margalabargala 9mo ago
  There's historical precedent for this too! Just think of what photography did to portrait painting. The camera and film did all of the color work, the person hitting the button had no need to mix their own pigments anymore. All the creativity was removed. /s
• vaylian 9mo ago
  I agree. This is not about creativity, but about producing something that kinda looks like professional art. People assume that creative output has to pass some bar, so that other people can appreciate it. But you can also produce interesting art with very simple techniques. XKCD is an example that comes to mind.
  • blueboo 9mo ago
    When faced with the choice of making genmedia more expressive vs looking higher production-value, big labs always choose the latter. Expressivity requires intent, which turns out to be rarer and therefore less apt to show up in a benchmark or crowdsourced head-to-head comparison.
• ramoz 9mo ago
  If you think this for one ai you must think it for all. I can now instantly visualize anything I think of. That is creative power. The same for code - I can instantly scaffold a frontend I think of in google ai studio. Its not all great and I have to keep the slot machine spinning. But it's empowering. These "ai kills creativity" arguments are all rather uncreative.
  • booleandilemma 9mo ago
    Except you’re not the one doing the creating. It would be like me hiring an artist to execute my vision and then calling myself artistic. Empowering, maybe, but it’s closer to the illusion of power. You control a genie, but you don’t have the power yourself. And it’s worse than that, because in reality the genie is controlled by some mega corp, and not by you at all, and suddenly you need this genie to do all your thinking for you because you’ve forgotten how.
    • ramoz 9mo ago
      I don't care to call myself an artist. Nor is it about "being an artist" - subjective anyways and _could_ be defined as the ability to bring to life the things you think; of which AI is a tool.
    • doright 9mo ago
      > It would be like me hiring an artist to execute my vision and then calling myself artistic. Not disagreeing with you, but you might want to sit down for this... https://www.ft.com/content/d84c8502-d413-4a26-a59c-494af11978b5 https://www.ft.com/content/d84c8502-d413-4a26-a59c-494af1197... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45416670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45416670
      • booleandilemma 9mo ago
        Frauds have existed before AI, sure. There are people who get others to write their books for them too.
    • tracker1 9mo ago
• simianwords 9mo ago
  >However, 99% of the the "creativity" from what I've seen is done by the AI (how it should look, where the cuts need to happen, the tone, color grading, etc). Which is to say, it's taken from other people's (creative) work. I don't get why this is a big deal? Like 99% of the creativity of taking a video of an ocean is also just taken from the nature. Your creativity was actually a small portion of "information" out of all the bits required to make that video.
  • theappsecguy 9mo ago
    I find the mental gymnastics like this around AI discourse really confusing. Taking a still video of the ocean isn't "creativity". And if a video of an ocean is truly creative it's likely not attributed to "nature".
    • Ajedi32 9mo ago
      Taking still photos of anything is widely considered a creative activity. There's usually only a small amount of creativity involved. Sometimes more. Same goes for AI generated anything. You can have low effort photos and high effort photos, low effort AI generated pictures and high-effort AI generated pictures. AI just lets you get a better result for less effort (for some definitions of "better"), just as a camera lets you get a better result for less effort than a paintbrush and canvas does.
      • hackable_sand 9mo ago
        A camera doesn't produce a painting though. Your comment doesn't make any sense.
        • Ajedi32 9mo ago
          It produces an image, just like painting does. It does so quicker and "better" than humans. But it also requires less creative input and allows less creative freedom.
      • squidsoup 9mo ago
• quantummagic 9mo ago
  If you're correct, creative people have nothing to worry about then. Creative people will still stand out and have a role. But the world already has an oversupply of creativity, and a need for a lot more of boring, uncreative things. A plumber, mechanic, or programmer, all need minimal creativity -- 99% perspiration, and 1% inspiration, as they say.
  • andyfilms1 9mo ago
    Yes, that's exactly right. It's why I, and many other creatives I know, are not worried about AI. Our annoyance comes more from it dominating the conversation rather than actual perceived risk.
    • quantummagic 9mo ago
      I'm sure there's a creative way to respond to the annoyance. One slightly worrying factoid is that chess players said the same thing about early chess engines, and them being no match for human creativity. Time will tell.
      • andyfilms1 9mo ago
        With chess, there is a known, specific end goal, and the "creativity" comes with how you arrive there. With an artwork, the end goal is entirely decided by the artist, there is no "win state" to reward.
        • quantummagic 9mo ago
          That's not what people who play chess thought. The creativity wasn't in the goal, but how you arrived there. The "beauty" of the steps that you took on the way to the goal. They believed that it was human creativity and sense of beauty that would never be encapsulated in a computer program. They turned out to be incorrect, but maybe you're right and things are different in a wider domain, we'll see.
          • 9mo ago
• WackyFighter 9mo ago
  Sorry that isn't true. Lots of smaller communities online, especially around small streamers make small meme style videos. Usually these are mocking someone doing something dumb online, or jokes/memes about the show etc. These are similar to parody videos online that were hugely popular on YouTube back in the early 2010s. People did do this before AI. Usually cutting people faces out and sticking them on actors faces in existing movies, or subtly doing parody cover, doing clever edits (Cassette Boy is a notable example) or people were performing and recording it like the "Epic Rap Battles of History". All it done is allow people to create these sort of to a higher creative standard, in other cases it allowed people to create jokey stuff that they wouldn't otherwise be able to create. People using this technology in this manner is clearly creative. They are using the tech to make something new and unique for a particular audience. In the 80s/90s you would be complaining about people using tracker software and samples to create music instead of learning to play an instrument. Under your logic someone like FatboySlim isn't a musician.
  • vanviegen 9mo ago
    Under your logic someone playing a CD is a musician. I'm exaggerating a bit to make the point that the amount of human creativity put into a work of art is not binary. Just pasting a rehashed joke as a genAI video prompt is not much of a creative process.
    • narcindin 9mo ago
      We call them DJ's and many are quite famous.
      • Tallain 9mo ago
        Do you honestly believe that DJs, particularly the very famous ones, just play CDs?
        • redwall_hp 9mo ago
          "What do DJs actually do?" https://youtube.com/shorts/9WqICdFQqkE https://youtube.com/shorts/9WqICdFQqkE
• iso1631 9mo ago
  How does someone learn the colour grading, the editing, the scripting etc? Almost entirely by studying other peoples works, the rest by doing something and getting feedback on it.
• pembrook 9mo ago
  > 99% of the “creativity” is done by the AI…it's taken from other people's (creative) work. Yes, and prior to AI, 99% of creativity was also taken from other peoples work. This is how creativity works. Man has no ideas in a vacuum. As humans we take influences in from what we’ve seen and when we “create” things we’re simply combining things together, resulting in output falling somewhere on the spectrum from a 1:1 copy to somewhat novel. If you can’t spot the influences in a painting or song or piece of graphic design, it’s simply because you aren’t deeply familiar with prior works in the field at the time.
  • YurgenJurgensen 9mo ago
    Oh boy, it’s this again. You’re essentially admitting to having had no meaningful experiences in your entire life, as you’re incapable of imagining doing anything other than consuming content. Good art says something about the world, not other art.
    • pembrook 9mo ago
      How ironic that your response, "Good art says something about the world" is also just repeating a meme you've heard, a no-true-scotsman fallacy wrapped in an old cliche. It's a meaningless, religious statement. Good art is impossible to define, and everything says something about the world. I too can repeat tired memes to support my position, ie. Good artists copy, great artists steal. The truth is, the process of creation starts with something called inspiration. Inspiration is theft. Again, man has no ideas in a vacuum. As you believe you've led a far more interesting life than me (!), please cite some examples of what you believe to be "good" art. Then let's investigate how devoid of any influences it actually is.
      • YurgenJurgensen 9mo ago
        Well, your claim was 99%, and you’re making the claim so the burden of proof is on you, so you first: Give me ninety-nine examples that support your position and explain why for each of them, and then I’ll give my one and do the same and we can see who has the stronger body of evidence.
• ranprieur 9mo ago
  I've been making music videos with a very satisfying creative process: Use AI to make a ton of images, pick the very best ones, and carefully arrange them in the right order. Example: https://youtu.be/r-_dJNgt3SM https://youtu.be/r-_dJNgt3SM
• miltonlost 9mo ago
  I wonder if people also are like "CHatgpt, write me a poem about love" and then think "hey, i wrote this poem!! I'm a poet!!!"
• tracker1 9mo ago
  It's both... I think it can cut both ways... I was largely on your side, as most of the AI stuff I've seen is just annoying more than anything. Then the "Star Wars: Beggar's Canyon" video completely changed my mind. The voice generation is clear and inflection appropriate... the cuts, sequence, and overall effects are clearly put together in a consistent way. I can only imagine how much work that video was, but is really the first thing I've seen as AI video that gives me hope... and obviously a work of passion and a lot of effort to get such a great final result.
  • gmllama 9mo ago
    Thanks for name dropping this video, I hadn't heard of it. Maybe I'm just getting old but this felt as empty to me as most other GenAI stuff does. The tech is getting better but I'd still prefer a no-budget fan film that looks worse but has heart (and visual consistency) to something like this. I can meet halfway and say that perhaps this is a modern version of someone being able to play with their action figures and micromachines and show others what they were imagining and that lowering barriers to sharing such things should be celebrated. To mirror my youtube comment though, I'm worried that this sort of thing will stop being a tool to storyboard and play around and will just become the final product for studios who could do so much more.
    • tracker1 9mo ago
      This was already the direction for studios though... Improvements to CGI and vault filming have cut costs dramatically relying on tech. The clip mentioned likely took a few green screen segments, a lot of training data and many tries to get the clips needed for that sohrt story. B it's a lot more work at current state of the tech than just entering a single prompt.
  • snoman 9mo ago
    It’s almost like people that use the tools to the best of their ability will produce higher quality outputs. This is a new tool like we’ve never seen before with a low skill floor to use it. We don’t know what the skill ceiling is yet.
• deadbabe 9mo ago
  No it isn’t. There is a lot of content whose final value ultimately doesn’t justify the time that would be spent on creating it. Worse, there is sometimes only a specific window of time where a content has entertainment value and it quickly drops off after you leave that window. For example, someone recently created an entire anime style video of the United States invading Venezuela and capturing Maduro. It came out awesome! But… to make a similar quality video by hand would have easily taken a team of humans several months at best. By then, the news cycle would have moved on, and the delivered video would have even less value being watched so distant from the event that inspired it. People wouldn’t care anymore, and it wouldn’t have as much impact. AI is the perfect solution for delivering such a video exactly when you need it. To me, this is one of the more acceptable uses of AI, to make fun throwaway content that you just laugh about for a few moments and then move on with your life. Having a human dedicate a large amount of their time to make such videos would be sad, and it’s better if they preserve their effort for more serious artistic works that are timeless in their value.
• keybored 9mo ago
  A lot of technological advancements (or use scare quotes here) that claimed to let “regular people” be creative just end up passifying us and relinquishing our creativity. Why play the guitar, the record player already does it better. Why learn to juggle, some kid in <supposedly whiz-genius country> already does that. Of course of course of course, people have been inspired by play in bands and to learn to juggle. But the trajectory seems to be to move away from small intimiate creative offerings, like playing music in your living room, to passively recieving Taylor Swift into your earbuds.
• Gagarin1917 9mo ago
  Those aspects aren’t the only “creative” aspects of filmmaking. What if someone used AI to say something important or get across a different perspective? 99% of people in the world do not have the time/money/connections to achieve a film vision. They were locked out of the ability to create their vision - creating an high concept or production-heavy film has been the most privileged position in the world - until now.
• bena 9mo ago
  That’s because they don’t know what creativity is. They believe the idea itself is the creative bit: that thinking of the idea of a dog riding a skateboard is in and of itself a creative act.
  • squidsoup 9mo ago
    Agree entirely - creativity emerges through the process of work, or is "discovered" through work. If AI does the work, it fundamentally can not be a creative process.
• scarecrowbob 9mo ago
  It's not like these discussions haven't have quite a lot of precedence. I bought a 4-track tape "portastudio" back in the 90s, but it didn't make me a good producer- years of playing music with dozens of groups did that. And I bought a canon xl1, but that didn't make the movies I was making more compelling than if I'd had budget to shoot on 16mm. Creativity and good craft come from struggling to communicate an idea; anything that short circuits that will make you a worse artists. AI is, to me, like claming that because you have access to a forklift going to the gym is no longer useful- you're missing both the aesthetic and material reasons why folks have been doing things. What's worse- people claim a forklift is better than, say, working out and then say to the folks who were working out "this is what you're doing and it is dumb to spend all that effort doing it". That's nothing new either- I get why folks look at a lot of my early, cracked FruityLoop-based work from 2002 with some disdain-- it misses all of the nuances and trade-craft knowledge that I gained playing in bands over the following 20 years. And I know how it sounds because I can hear it in the products of other young musicians: I play a lot of jazz with kids in their 20s who have way better chops than I ever will and who have a lot of the real book memorized. That real book allows them to pick up the tunes super fast, but they don't have a lot of the nuance that the 70 year olds I sometimes get to play with have in their playing. I use AI for the dumbest stuff, like writing contracts for mechanical licensing. It's shit, because I'm just looking to copy some already-written document without paying a lawyer. I can't see see why folks would -want- to use it to make documents that no one else had previously thought would be worth writing and to me it very much seems like it can only produce, by definition, derivative works. Musicians are terrible about that. I love being in a cover band, because I usually like the people and playing. But absent that, simply being able to "poof here's 'your' cover of Stariway" seems super boring, almost soul crushing. And paying AI do the creative parts- that's like paying someone to have sex with my partner because I wanted to spend my nights playing video games instead of woodshedding on pedal steel guitar :D All that is to say- I agree.
• hydrogen7800 9mo ago
  I think there is some tenuous analog between today's AI, and yesteryear's music synthesizers and "modern art". Regarding music, I understand synthesizers were created to mimic real instruments, whereas artists used its capabilities not to mimic, but to create entirely new sounds. My limited understanding of modern art (and without a search I don't distinguish between expressionism, impressionism or any other isms because of my ignorance of the differences) is that it was a reaction to the modern world, and an expression of something that could not be anything other than a creation of the human mind. AI may be helping people to copy existing aesthetics, but I'm hoping/waiting for it to enable people to take it in a completely novel direction that can only be augmented human expression.
  • dubbie99 9mo ago
    I don’t agree with your music synthesizer analogy. I own a synthesizer, however I don’t possess any musical talent whatsoever. I cannot for the life of me produce anything remotely listenable from the thing. I know how to use it, but cannot make good music. You just need to look at some street performer banging on a plastic bucket and entertaining a circle of people to realise that the ability to make music is orthogonal to having the right tools. AI art is more like me pressing the demo button on the synth, looking you in the eye as it plays the preset tune and saying “I made this”
    • waffletower 9mo ago
      This is problematic. It is so common to attach and assume pride to musical discovery. Why can't it be "I discovered this"?
    • waffletower 9mo ago
      Would you scream at a child that shows you a beautiful shell they found on the beach -- "you didn't make that!" -- why assume that everyone's ego is entwined with sharing?
      • dubbie99 9mo ago
        No, because the child is behaving as a curator which is a valuable act. I never hear ai “artists” claim to be curators, they always claim to be creatives.
• orbital-decay 9mo ago
  Yes, 99% of people are uncreative and use the creative freedom this way. Besides, many truly creative people won't even touch it, some because of the ethics and others because it's not up to their standard yet. Does it really look surprising to you? >AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together. That's quite a leap of thought and doesn't follow from the first part at all.
  • vohk 9mo ago
    Put a different way, would you say Fiverr enables people to be more creative? Using AI to create an artistic work has more in common with commissioning art than creating it. Just instead of a person, you're paying the owners of a machine built on theft because it's cheaper and more compliant. It isn't really your creativity on display, and it certainly isn't that of the model or the hosting company. The smallest part of any creative work is the prompt. The blood and the soul of it live in overcoming the constraints and imperfections. Needing to learn how to sing or play an instrument isn't an impediment to making music, it's a fundamental aspect of the entire exercise.
    • orbital-decay 9mo ago
      >would you say Fiverr enables people to be more creative? That's not what GP said. They said that using a model removes creativity. That's a ridiculous leap from their premise, especially considering that it's misleading at best. >The smallest part of any creative work is the prompt. Like most people who never actually played with it, you seem to assume that prompting is all you can do, and repeat the tiresome and formulaic opinions. That's not worth discussing in the 1000th time honestly. Instead, I encourage you to actually study it in depth.
• doublerabbit 9mo ago
  I am currently working on a script with my uncle who is a professional playwright, my grandfather wrote for Benny Hill. So it runs in my family. Biting the bullet, I have accurately had it generate the scene of the cafe. Generating visual imagery of how I imagine it; a cyber dystopian gothic cafe with wandering goths. It's capped to ten seconds and that alone would've costed me a fair sum to even get a small render without revisions. I could now technically pitch this with the AI works and get the funding required to hire actual animators/actors or spend my savings myself giving it to an artist depicting the theme and style; not that I could afford it. How is creativity lost in that scenario? AI is a tool, it shouldn't be a do-everything, I created the script and it's generated the visual mock. Personally I wouldn't want it to create the whole show and would personally prefer real folk to do the magic but for my own personal consumption it's given me the excitement and further drive to continue.
  • gmllama 9mo ago
    I don't think using GenAI to storyboard and pitch is inherently bad. There's long historical precedent for folks using existing film and music in demo reels to explain the feeling and tone they're going for (e.g. WW2 footage for Star Wars storyboarding reels IIRC). In isolation what you explained sounds fine, there may even be some argument that parts of this fall under fair use which may diffuse certain training attribution copyright challenges. Where things start to fall apart for me would be if your story/script and resulting prompts start to rely on GenAI upstream. And as you say, when the end product itself starts to lean on this tech as a shortcut.
• roadside_picnic 9mo ago
  > AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together. This is very much not the case with the Stable Diffusion/Wan/general open diffusion models space. The amount of effort and creativity that goes on in creating complex workflows, custom LoRAs, fine-tunes etc is genuinely a new area of art imho. Sure a lot of it is going to produce things that most people might not consider "art", but it's unfair to lump the work happening in this space with people randomly prompting Sora and dumping it on TikTok.
• squidsoup 9mo ago
  I think most people have the ability to express themselves through art, but if their first experience of trying to make something is using AI tools, they will never discover that they can make something genuine that reflects their experience.
• stronglikedan 9mo ago
  > how it should look, where the cuts need to happen, the tone, color grading, etc That's not creativity. That's skill. A person can think of something (creativity) and not know how to bring it to life without the skills to do so. The creator still needs to have a creative vision, and communicate that vision effectively at the very least. Of course, there's also people that are just cranking out slop, but I'd argue there's no creativity there, other than finding creative ways to copy others. But that's been a problem since forever.
• WhiteNoiz3 9mo ago
  AI (as it currently exists) will never be "creative" in the sense that it can only imitate or interpolate between past works. At some point we'll recognize that AI generated works are boring and predictable. AI will probably never invent a new musical genre or artform since it can only reproduce or recombine works from the past. I wonder what happens when the internet is so full of AI generated slop that that the only things worth "training" on were made in the time before AI generation became a thing. Will AI generations be full of dated references to a time gone by? People may say it increases creativity but I see it more as lowering the bar to produce things. The same could be said for a lot of inventions like photography made producing images easier and I'm sure a lot of portrait painters lost their jobs to photographers. I think the danger is that we may see a very rapid erosion of jobs in the creative space that won't be easy to transition into new fields which I feel will have a detrimental effect on our society.
• CuriouslyC 9mo ago
  We need to disambiguate what you mean by "AI" here. If you're referring to people typing prompts in a frontier web UI, maybe. But if you're using local models, you can do quite a bit more, ComfyUI workflows can get crazy. Multi-region controlnet guided generations with IP adapters and loras, etc. The art gatekeepers want to try and paint everyone using AI creatively as monkeys mashing ignorantly on keyboards, taking the unmodified output and parading it around like Picasso. The reality is that is to AI art as bathroom dick graffiti is to manual art.
  • nahurwrong 9mo ago
    [dead]
• insane_dreamer 9mo ago
  Or you could argue that it’s simply lifting from other people’s creativity. Like making a song entirely of sampled sounds from other songs with a key change.