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I had so much fun making videos with my mom when it came out. During the first two weeks, we made over 100 cameo videos together - we were constantly running up
by meken 7mo ago
I had so much fun making videos with my mom when it came out. During the first two weeks, we made over 100 cameo videos together - we were constantly running up against the upload limit. It unleashed tons of genuine creativity, joy, and laughter from us.
After those first two weeks though, we just… didn’t use it again. The novelty wore off and there wasn’t anything really to bring us back. That was the real downfall of Sora.
- 1bpp 7mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Waterluvian 7mo agoI think you’re fumbling on an important distinction. Sometimes people want to paint, sometimes people want a painting. To have wonderful time with their mom… I bet they had absolutely zero interest in the act and process of making silly videos.
- apsurd 7mo agoI get your point but it goes too far in the opposite direction. We should now discuss absolutely nothing in relation to Sora and genAI videos? That seems overly charitable to the platform.
- Waterluvian 7mo agoHere, let me try this approach: Read the main comment out loud to yourself while imagining it’s someone sitting at a table at a pub. Now imagine someone turning to this person in the pub, and speaking the subsequent comment, word for word. No seriously, try it out.
- apsurd 7mo agoAgreed. I did try this out! So the reply to the original comment is dumb. I actually dismissed it for being flippant. Your reply is more interesting. Hence my (albeit maybe snarky) chiming in. So the original comment does end at a very specific app/sora related conclusion. "Sora didn't keep us coming back." If I may amend your scenario: imagine this bar is actually in the center of SF or across the street from Open-AI or whatever. We're on HN discussing a post on X about Sora. The appeal to humanity is not wrong. My point is more let's keep the connection with that humanity in relation to AI, to Sora, to what's going on in this forum.
- dqv 7mo agoTotally. This wasn't a situation where a stranger was slopping another stranger, it was a mother and son doing something fun together.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jcims 7mo agoCome on now...'We're curing cancer, right?!' You didn't at least puff a little ack through your nostrils for that one?
- nomoreusernames 7mo ago[dead]
- monero-xmr 7mo ago[dead]
- dang 7mo agoPlease don't cross into personal attack. Your comment would be fine without the swipe at the end. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mathattack 7mo agoThis is consistent with a lot of AI apps. I fell in love with Gamma and haven’t used it in forever. Same with NotebookLM.
- wholinator2 7mo agoI somewhat consistently use notebookLM for podcasts of academic papers I'm reading in my PhD. You have to go read it yourself afterwards but it makes better use of time in the gym or doing dishes/groceries.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- shimman 7mo agoJust listen to actual audio books... literally doing double the work for no benefit... why?
- blharr 7mo agoThere aren't a lot of highly technical audiobooks or ones that give the same specificity that would be the same as an academic paper
- wolvoleo 7mo agoNot yet but it seems like they're getting to the point of AI narration finally being good enough to make any text an 'audiobook'. Having said that I absolutely hate the audio format, I only used it when I had to drive or when I swam lanes. But these days I do neither.
- coke12 7mo agoNo, reading verbatim from a technical paper is way too dense. You need a lot of filler words to slow it down and repetition to make it stick when read aloud.
- bibimsz 7mo ago[flagged]
- jklein11 7mo agonoice
- ares623 7mo agoprobably one of the few human commenters remaining here
- dhon_ 7mo agoCue a flood of crass jokes as the bots attempt to prove their humanity
- robotnikman 7mo agoSuch a stupid joke but it gave me a laugh.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- whateveracct 7mo agoA lot of AI hype is parlor tricks
- yabutlivnWoods 7mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill 24/7 titillation is boring
- salt-thrower 7mo agoThe interesting difference here is that other hedonic activities do bring people back even after the first time they build up a tolerance and get bored. But many of these AI "creative" apps seem like a one-and-done thing. Once the novelty wears off there isn't anything more deeply rewarding to bring people back.
- Gigachad 7mo agoIt’s because they are slop which is only funny by the novelty of it. Stephen hawking at a skate board park it’s funny for a bit but as soon as the novelty wears off it’s just slop.
- AbanoubRodolf 7mo ago[flagged]
- torginus 7mo agoI dunno, it was the same for me and creative writing with AI. First it looked like it was crazy inventive, good at writing snappy dialouge, and in general a very good font of ideas. Then the same concepts, turns of phrase, story ideas kept reappearing, and I kinda soured on the concept. I haven't done it in a while, but that kind of usage really shows the weakness of LLMs - if you keep messing with its generations, editing what it made, and as the context length keeps increasing, its more end more likely it goes into dumb mode, where it feels like talking to GPT3, constantly getting confused, contradicting itself etc.
- toraway 7mo ago(FYI, this is an LLM bot, check their comment history and note the repetitive structure with every comment they've ever posted all within the last hour) > This is the right question but hard to answer in practice ... > The brownfield vs greenfield split is the real answer to ... > The babysitting point is the one people keep glossing over ...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- qingcharles 7mo agoThe Cameo feature is really excellent. The likeness of both the person and the voice is exceptional. I really enjoyed making some funny Cameo videos with my friends. I don't know of another simple way to insert your own avatar with your own voice into a video, and I'm pretty deep in this space.
- urda 7mo agoI honestly forgot about Sora until this post, and yeah same behavior played with it for a bit, then moved on with my life.
- teekert 7mo agoSounds like when we first had smartphones with orientation sensors and we could drink a beer from the phone, so cool... for 2 weeks.
- moritzwarhier 7mo agoBut now you can vibe the same app 1000 times for root beer, coca cola, ginger ale, even a milkshake, and nobody will ever have to have a new idea again!
- closewith 7mo agoWas there a Send Me to Heaven for Sora?
- Applejinx 7mo agoThat is for loved things
- Cthulhu_ 7mo agoI wouldn't be surprised that the beer apps cost less to develop than one AI generated video.
- yoz-y 7mo agoThe problem is that due to the ease these can be made there is also really no reason to make this social. “Why would I look at somebody else’s creations when I can do mine.”
- muzani 7mo agoThey're different impulses. Some want to consume. Others want to create. TikTok and social media is a strange mix of both, people posting response videos to everything. Personally, I've stopped subscribing to Spotify, YT music, etc because the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music or whatever lofi playlist. It's free, it's good enough, and it's not grating to hear after a few days of that favorite song. The video slop can well replace TikTok and Reels. Make educational content about your hometown. Explain how to throw an uppercut. But I guess the desire to create something that others would consume is also different from the desire to simply create.
- camillomiller 7mo agoSome want to consume... content that they don't think they could do in one minute themselves. They want to consume content made by other humans, even if it's still brain-eating algorithmic fodder, but still. Sora proved it quite clearly. These clips had ZERO value.
- jaapz 7mo ago> Personally, I've stopped subscribing to Spotify, YT music, etc because the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music or whatever lofi playlist. The musician in me just shed a tear
- whaleofatw2022 7mo agoPink Beatles, in a purple Zeppelin comes to mind
- Geedis 7mo agoHad to create an account just to let you know that someone out there got the reference.
- afro88 7mo agoSounds like me with listening to AI covers. After a couple of weeks I couldn't care less. But I was so stoked in it at the start
- bit1993 7mo agoI thinks its the same reason why chess tournaments, where two AIs play against each other are not as popular, compared to when two humans play each other. Maybe its because humans generally compare themselves to other humans and that's part of how they value.
- Cthulhu_ 7mo agoIt's the same with e.g. faceapp, fun for a minute but then... then what? And this is the challenge that these tools have - they have to have a free tier to get people to explore it, but unless they can make it a habit, those people will never upgrade to a paid subscription. I have no figures, but if I'm being optimistic, these freemium subscription services have 10% conversion rate at best; can that 10% pay for the other 90%? For a lot of services that's a yes, but not for these video generators which are incredibly compute intensive. I'm sure there's a market for it, but it's not this freemium consumer oriented model, not without huge amounts of investments. Maybe in 5-10 years, assuming either compute becomes 10-100x cheaper / more available, or they come up with generators that run cheaper.
- josefresco 7mo agoThis tracks my usage exactly. It was like Mad Libs - in that moment it was THE MOST FUN but after a while it became just a novelty bordering on... creepy. Now I feel kind of guilty for having exposed so many friends to what looks like a data gathering scheme.
- Dumblydorr 7mo agoReminds me of when photo filters and initial stickers and mirror filters came out on MacBook in like 2007. It was super fun for a couple days then the novelty wore off.
- JeremyNT 7mo agoYep. Impressive toys, but not useful day to day. There's some market for b2b I'm sure, but as a consumer facing product it's tough to see how it could ever come close to paying for itself.
- m3kw9 7mo agoHumans are very good at pattern recognition, even if you generate different stuff, you still see a pattern, either in the cutting, color, cadence of movements, the color grading, camera lens used, everything, your mind will tag it as slop. Essentially you are watching the same videos over and over subconsciously
- meken 7mo agoWow that's a really good point. The style of the videos did become quite repetitive.
- rustystump 7mo agoU say that but then when u look at most “content” on social media it is the same video over and over again. How many JRE podcasts are basically the same crap as last time? How many influencer “life” videos are the same thing over again? Even the stuff i like is formulaic to the point ai can almost write the scripts. I think people attach to other people more than “ai”. When there isnt a narrative “person” behind the content it is way less interesting.
- pjc50 7mo agoThis is something that people working on procedurally generated games have already noticed. No Man's Sky has billions of planets, each with "unique" plant and animal species, but you can easily sort them into a few dozen templates with minor variations. Procgen has a niche, but it never became ubiquitous, because for most people exploring a nice hand-made intentional environment is better.
- Nifty3929 7mo agoIt's not really that people wouldn't come back - it's that they were losing money on each customer. Those 100 videos probably cost $100+ for them to create. Did you pay them $100+? (not a critisism, just a re-framing)
- staticcaucasian 7mo agoWhen it launched we all talked about the serving/inference costs being massive. In hindsight if they had a paywall, it might not have self-imploded so fast, might have stayed aspirational, and they might have a profitable business today. Interesting case study.
- disqard 7mo ago"...and when everyone's super, no one will be" I think this is starting to play out. When I personally see a blog post which didn't need an image, but still does have an AI-slop image banner, I mentally check out. I might have Claude summarize it, or (more likely) just skip it altogether.
- y-curious 7mo agoYou know who the novelty didn’t wear off for? My in-laws, who for some ungodly reason are superusers on TikTok. Once the audio-enabled, realistic videos of babies and children hit the feed, it was a virtual 9/11 moment. The group chat is spammed by 90% believable videos of babies arguing, dogs doing smart shit and it’s all slop. I am hoping against hope that this will stem the tide because the slop-generators are too lazy or too poor to run other models locally or search them online.
- thisOtterBeGood 7mo agoYes, Sam Altman was talking about how he lost you on his blog and how it lead to Sora's downfall :D But honestly... I believe this too. There's just no value.