Meta Movie Gen

https://ai.meta.com/research/movie-gen/?_fb_noscript=1

by brianjking • 2 years ago

1107 1007 2 years ago

ai.meta.com

brianjking• 2 years ago

Additional Links: https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/1842188252541043075 https://ai.meta.com/static-resource/movie-gen-research-paper

From Twitter/X:

Today we’re premiering Meta Movie Gen: the most advanced media foundation models to-date.

Developed by AI research teams at Meta, Movie Gen delivers state-of-the-art results across a range of capabilities. We’re excited for the potential of this line of research to usher in entirely new possibilities for casual creators and creative professionals alike.

More details and examples of what Movie Gen can do https://go.fb.me/kx1nqm

Movie Gen models and capabilities Movie Gen Video: 30B parameter transformer model that can generate high-quality and high-definition images and videos from a single text prompt.

Movie Gen Audio: A 13B parameter transformer model that can take a video input along with optional text prompts for controllability to generate high-fidelity audio synced to the video. It can generate ambient sound, instrumental background music and foley sound — delivering state-of-the-art results in audio quality, video-to-audio alignment and text-to-audio alignment.

Precise video editing: Using a generated or existing video and accompanying text instructions as an input it can perform localized edits such as adding, removing or replacing elements — or global changes like background or style changes.

Personalized videos: Using an image of a person and a text prompt, the model can generate a video with state-of-the-art results on character preservation and natural movement in video.

We’re continuing to work closely with creative professionals from across the field to integrate their feedback as we work towards a potential release. We look forward to sharing more on this work and the creative possibilities it will enable in the future.

msp26• 2 years ago

Any chance of this being released open weights? Or is the risk of bad PR too high (especially near a US election)?

It being 30B gives me hope.

thawab• 2 years ago

Meta text to image model cm3leon[0], was announced july 2023. It wasn't released yet, I think this one might take a while.

[0] https://ai.meta.com/blog/generative-ai-text-images-cm3leon/

KolmogorovComp• 2 years ago

I don't think they will ever release it considering it's likely much worse than flux.

diggan5• 2 years ago

Any chance of this being released open weights?

Considering that Facebook/Meta releases blog posts titled "Open Source AI Is the Path Forward" but then refuses to actually release any Open Source AI, I'm guessing the answer is a hard "No".

They might release it under usage restrictions though, like they did with Llama, although probably only the smaller versions, to limit the output quality.

causal7• 2 years ago

They have released a ton of open source? Llama 3 includes open training code, datasets, and models. Not to mention open-sourcing the foundation of most AI research today, pytorch.

imjonse• 2 years ago

That and the NFSW finetunes that will inevitably follow; unlike the text-gen finetunes these could really cause trouble with deepfakes.

littlestymaar3• 2 years ago

Deepfakes are already a reality, the technology is already there and good enough for harm, the genie is not going back to the bottle.

In fact, the more realistic the deepfakes become, the less harmful actual revenge porn and stolen sex videos can be, because of plausible deniability.

happyraul• 2 years ago

Hippos can't actually swim though.

diggan5• 2 years ago

Was my first reaction too when seeing the video at the top. But then after thinking about it, it makes sense as an example, you want to showcase things that aren't real but look realistic. A hippo swimming looks real, but it isn't as they don't swim.

elpocko• 2 years ago

I have watched some films recently, and they are full of weird mistakes. A bunch of balloons can't lift your house into the air. DeLoreans can't actually travel through time. Gamma rays don't give you superhuman strength. A 6502 CPU couldn't power an advanced AI for killer robots from the future. So unrealistic.

awfulneutral• 2 years ago

Haha, this is the first thing I thought of too. I knew adult hippos walk on the bottom, but from looking at existing videos it looks like small (baby/pygmy) hippos do too, they don't float at the surface like this.

TrackerFF• 2 years ago

All the vids have that instantly recognizable GenAI "sheen", for the lack of a better word. Also, I think the most obvious giveaway are all the micro-variations that happen along the edges, which give a fuzzy artifact.

Rinzler893• 2 years ago

All the vids have that instantly recognizable GenAI "sheen"

That's something that can be fixed in a future release or you can fix it right now with some filters in post in your pipeline.

surfingdino4• 2 years ago

"That's something that can be easily fixed in a future release (...)"

This has been the default excuse for the last 5+ years. I won't hold my breath.

atrus• 2 years ago

I think the big blind spot people have with these models is that the release pages only show just the AI output. But anyone competently using these AI tools will be using them in step X of a hundred step creative process. And it's only going to get worse as both the AI tools improve and people find better ways to integrate them into their workflow.

derefr2• 2 years ago

Not even filters; every text2image model ever created thusfar, can be very easily nudged with a few keywords into generating outputs in a specific visual style (e.g. artwork matching the signature style of any artist it has seen the some works from.)

This isn't an intentional "feature" of these models; rather, it's kind of an inherent part of how such models work — they learn associations between tokens and structural details of images. Artists' names are tokens like any other, and artists' styles are structural details like any other.

So, unless the architecture and training of this model are very unusual, it's gonna at least be able to give you something that looks like e.g. a "pencil illustration."

DebtDeflation• 2 years ago

At least all the humans in these videos seem to have the correct number of fingers, so that's progress. And Moo Deng seems to have a natural sheen for some reason so can't hold that against them. But your point about the edges is still a major issue.

dageshi2• 2 years ago

Yeah but... it's good enough?

There were movies with horrible VFX that still sold perfectly well at the time.

jsheard5• 2 years ago

An important contrast is that early VFX offered strong control with weak fidelity, and these prompt-based AI systems offer high fidelity with weak control. Intent matters if you want to make something more than a tech demo or throwaway B-roll and you can't communicate much intent in a 30 word prompt, assuming the model even follows the prompt accurately.

blargey2• 2 years ago

I wonder how much RLHF or other human tweaking of the models contributes to this sort of overstauration / excess contrast in the first place. The average consumer seems to prefer such features when comparing images/video, and use it as a heuristic for quality. And there have been some text-to-image comparisons of older gen models to newer gen, purporting that the older, more hands-off models didn't skew towards kitschy and overblown output the way newer ones do.

jensensbutton• 2 years ago

I don't think that's a bug. I think that helps us separate truth from fiction as we navigate the transition to this new world.

ffsm8• 2 years ago

Ever heard of post processing? Because no, you can't trust these signals to always exist with AI content.

lopis• 2 years ago

I assure you that's not enough. These are high quality videos. Once they get uploaded to social media, compression mostly makes imperfections go away. And it's been shown that when people are not expecting AI content, they are much less likely to realize they are looking at AI. I would 100% believe most of these videos were real if caught off guard.

ddtaylor3• 2 years ago

I regularly catch my kids watching AI generated content and they don't know it.

mikae12• 2 years ago

it's been shown that when people are not expecting AI content, they are much less likely to realize they are looking at AI.

At this point, looking at a big tech SoMe feed I would expect that everything is, or at least could be, gen AI content.

jetrink2• 2 years ago

A friend who lives in North Carolina sent me a video of the raging floodwaters in his state- at least that's what the superimposed text claimed it was. When I looked closer, it was clearly an Indian city filled with Indian people and Indian cars. He hadn't noticed anything except the flood water. It reminded me of that famous selective attention test video[1]. I won't ruin it for those who haven't seen it, but it's amazing what details we can miss when we aren't looking for them. I suspect this is made even worse when we're casually viewing videos in a disjointed way as on social media and we're not even giving one part of the video our full attention.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

valval2• 2 years ago

The way I see it, it won’t take long before human eyes won’t be able to distinguish AI generated content from original.

The only regret I have about that is losing video as a form of evidence. CCTV footage and the like are a valuable tool for solving crimes. That’s going to be out the window soon.

mikehollinger• 2 years ago

compression mostly makes imperfections go away

The ultimate compression is to reduce the video clip to a latent space vector representation to be rendered on device. :)

Just give us a few more revs of Moore’s law for that to be reasonable.

edit: found a patent… https://patents.google.com/patent/US11388416B2/en

newaccount74• 2 years ago

I thought the movements were off. The little girl on the beach moves like an adult, the painter looks like a puppet, and everything is in slow motion?

declan_roberts• 2 years ago

They look like some commercial promo video, which makes sense since that's probably what they were trained on.

the_af2• 2 years ago

To me they seem off, but off in the same sense real humans in ads always seem off. E.g. the fake smile of the smiling girl. That's what people look like in ads.

Workaccount23• 2 years ago

It's my understanding that the AI sheen is done on purpose to give people a "tell". It is totally possible right now to at least generate images with no discernible tell.

spookie5• 2 years ago

It is totally possible right now to at least generate images with no discernible tell.

I have yet to find examples of this

hoosieree• 2 years ago

Video autotune.

dekhn• 2 years ago

That sheen looks (to me) like some of the filters that are used by people who copy videos from TV and movie and post them on (for example) facebook reels.

There's an entire pattern of reels that are basically just ripped-off-content with enough added noise to (I presume) avoid content detection filters. Then the comments have links to scam sites (but are labelled as "the IMDB page for this content").

CSSer2• 2 years ago

The idea that Meta’s effectively stolen content is tainted by a requirement to avoid collecting stolen content is laughably ironic.

alana314• 2 years ago

I'm thankful to be able to recognize that sheen, though I think it will go away soon enough

demaga• 2 years ago

It is maybe recognizable in most cases, but definitely not instantly nor easily. I could definitely see nobody noticing one of those clips used in an otherwise non-AI video production.

forgetfulness• 2 years ago

A lot look like CGI, but I wouldn't be able to tell that they weren't created by an actual animator.

sixothree• 2 years ago

I did some images generation and found a LORA for VHS footage. It's amazing what "taking away the sheen" can do to make an image look strikingly real.

Loughla• 2 years ago

The ATV turning in mid air was a giveaway as well. Physics seems to be a basic problem for these type of videos.

wongarsu• 2 years ago

The bubble released into the air is also pretty good until at the end where bubbles appear out of thin air.

But overall the physics are surprisingly good. In the videos from text we a person moving covered in a bedsheet, a mirror doing vaguely mirror-like things, a monkey moving in water and creating plausible waves, shadows moving over a 3d object with the sloth in the pool and plausible fire. Those are all classic topics to tackle in computer-generated graphics, all casually handled by a model that isn't explicitly trained on physical simulation.

In a twist of irony it's the simplest of those (the mirror) that's the most obviously wrong.

programjames• 2 years ago

I think that's because they're still using mean-squared error in their loss function.

jsheard5• 2 years ago

If nothing else it will produce some amazing material for this account, once the content farms get their hands on it: https://x.com/FacebookAIslop

niles• 2 years ago

Crashes Firefox mobile. Looks pretty impressive on Chrome! Apparently hosted only

lwansbrough• 2 years ago

This is really something. The spatial and temporal coherence is unbelievable.

sourraspberry• 2 years ago

Impressive.

Always important to bear in mind that the examples they show are likely the best examples they were able to produce.

Many times over the past few years a new AI release has "wowed" me, but none of them resulted in any sudden overnight changes to the world as we know it.

VFX artists: You can sleep well tonight, just keep an eye on things!

bbor5• 2 years ago

Tbf, the biggest private infrastructure project in the history of humanity is now underway (Microsoft GPU centers), the fastest app to reach #1 on the App Store was released (ChatGPT), and it’s dominating online discourse. Many companies have used LLMs to justify layoffs, and /r/writers and many, many fanart subreddits already talk of significant changes to their niches. All of this was basically at 0 in 2022, and 100 by early 2023. It’s not normal.

Everyone should sleep well tonight, but only because we’ll look out for each other and fight for just distribution of resources, not because the current job market is stable. IMO :)

123yawaworht456• 2 years ago

Many companies have used LLMs to justify layoffs

they are not allowed to call the recession a recession until January 20

chucky_z2• 2 years ago

VFX artists cannot sleep well, they're already being displaced with AI or being forced to use it to massively increase their output.

Here's an example thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/1e4zdj7/in_the_climate...

I am not trying to be negative, however it is the reality that ML/LLM has eliminated entire industries. Medical transcription for example is essentially gone.

sionisrecur2• 2 years ago

I don't see it as that much of a problem. It's like washing machines taking away people's job of washing clothes, what are they gonna do with their time now? Maybe something more productive.

dagmx2• 2 years ago

That thread you linked doesn’t seem to align at all with your claims though? The majority of comments do not make the claim that they’re using any GenAI elements.

As someone who’s worked in the industry previously and am quite involved still, very few studios are using it because of the lack of direction it can take and the copyright quagmire. There are lots of uses of ML in VFX but those aren’t necessarily GenAI.

GenAI hasn’t had an effect on the industry yet. It’s unlikely it will for a while longer. Bad business moves from clients are the bigger drain, including not negotiating with unions and a marked decline in streaming to cover lost profits.

burkaman2• 2 years ago

Yes, and like pretty much every AI release I've seen, even these cherry-picked examples mostly do not quite match the given prompt. The outputs are genuinely incredible, but if you imagine actually trying to use this for work, it would be very frustrating. A few examples from this page:

Pumpkin patch - Not sitting on the grass, not wearing a scarf, no rows of pumpkins the way most people would imagine.

Sloth - that's not really a tropical drink, and we can't see enough of the background to call it a "tropical world".

Fire spinner - not wearing a green cloth around his waist

Ghost - Not facing the mirror, obviously not reflected the way the prompter intended. No old beams, no cloth-covered furniture, not what I would call "cool and natural light". This is probably the most impressively realistic-looking example, but it almost certainly doesn't come close to matching what the prompter was imagining.

Monkey - boat doesn't have a rudder, no trees or lush greenery

Science lab - no rainbow wallpaper

This seems like nitpicking, and again I can't underestimate how unbelievable the technology is, but the process of making any kind of video or movie involves translating a very specific vision from your brain to reality. I can't think of many applications where "anything that looks good and vaguely matches the assignment" is the goal. I guess stock footage videographers should be concerned.

This all matches my experience using any kind of AI tool. Once I get past my astonishment at the quality of the results, I find it's almost always impossible to get the output I'm looking for. The details matter, and in most cases they are the only thing that matters.

psb217• 2 years ago

The one thing that immediately stood out to me in the ghost example was how the face of the ghost had "wobbly geometry" and didn't appear physically coupled to the sheet. This and the way the fruit in the sloth's drink magically rested on top of the drink without being wedged onto the edge of the glass as that would require were actually some of the more immediate "this isn't real" moments for me.

the_clarence• 2 years ago

On the contrary I dont think theres anything special with their examples. It probably represent well most output. Think of image generation and the insane stuff people can produce with it. There's no "oh yeah this is just cherry picked"

syntaxing• 2 years ago

I find the edit video with text the most fascinating aspect. I can see this being used for indie films that doesn’t have a CGI budget. Like the scene with the movie theater, you can film them on lounge chairs first and then edit it to seem like a movie theater.

ForHackernews• 2 years ago

Why bother? Actors cost money and scheduling is difficult. Do the whole thing in AI - the model will be trained on better actors than your indie cast, anyway.

M4v3R• 2 years ago

It will be a loong time before AI can produce lead actors that are believable, act exactly the way you as a director want and tell the story you want to tell, so I think at least for now you'll still need the actors for the lead roles. But I can totally this being used for generating people/stuff in the background of certain shots in a low budget movie.

zappchance• 2 years ago

Consistentency between scenes is one possible reason.

gen32• 2 years ago

100% agree, the background replace that puts the guy into a stadium would be fully usable as a cut in a movie/tv show, and the background is believable enough that no one would bat an eye. If you use it properly, I expect a quality uplift on indie films/shorts. Your limit is your creativity

redundantly• 2 years ago

Your limit is your creativity

And how many tokens you can afford.

mrandish6• 2 years ago

Your limit is your creativity

In the professional creative tools business, "Now the only limit is your creativity" has been a popular marketing tagline for decades, especially for products based on new enabling technologies. It's common enough that a wry corollary has developed in response, which goes: "Unfortunately, for a lot of people that's a pretty big limit."

jeltz3• 2 years ago

I personally expect a decrease in quality. Without limits people tend to get less creative. Sure, there is some balance here in that tools also enable new things to be done which are not possible without tools but working around limits has often inspired some of the most creative works.

ErigmolCt2• 2 years ago

In some ways it opens up creative possibilities

quest88• 2 years ago

That's very impressive.

Jean-Papoulos• 2 years ago

Website doesn't work on Firefox and videos don't play on Edge. They should consider asking the AI to make a correct website before having it make hippos swim.

loufe• 2 years ago

The entire page load is completely broken on Edge for me. Bizarre

littlestymaar3• 2 years ago

It works fine for me on Firefox on Linux, weird.

aphit• 2 years ago

All works fine for me here in Edge, odd.

bob1029• 2 years ago

Not working in Safari on my MBP either.

HelloMcFly• 2 years ago

I use Edge at work: the videos played without issue (version 129.0.2792.65 on Windows).

I use Firefox on my personal device: the website worked fine though took an extra "hiccup" to load compared to Edge (version 131.0 on Windows).

chillingeffect• 2 years ago

Yeah it doesn't play the video for me on S10+. I can't imagine what they're doing to break that. It's just another disposable consumerist craze anyway.

voidUpdate2• 2 years ago

Some of these look really obviously bad, like the guy spinning the fire and the girl running along the beach. And it completely failed at the bubbles

Quarrelsome• 2 years ago

doesn't need to be movie quality, just needs to be tiktok quality and this totally passes the bar.

Are you ready to become a penguin in all of your posts to maximise aquatic engagement? I am.

voidUpdate2• 2 years ago

I've become a robot and a demon to maximise engagement, its called being a vtuber

nsagent• 2 years ago

Interesting perspective, considering a paper ByteDance just released yesterday [1] has much worse video quality. If your comparison is to real videos, then for sure the quality isn't great. If instead you compare to other released research, the this model is one of the best released thus far.

[1] https://epiphqny.github.io/Loong-video/

add-sub-mul-div• 2 years ago

Okay, let's give it a participation trophy for being the best of the slop category.

beezlebroxxxxxx5• 2 years ago

Yeah, some were impressive, but others looked quite bad. The guy running in the desert looked like a guy floating over the ground only sporadically making contact with the sand. The footfalls in a lot of these videos look pretty janky or "soft".

The clothing changes also have pretty rough edges, or just look like they're floating over the original model. The 3D glasses one looked atrocious. The lighting changes are also pretty lacking.

Bloedcoins4• 2 years ago

I have not had the same feeling as you and i do look at ai art for quite. awhile.

Are you still impressed though?

tiborsaas3• 2 years ago

The spinning fire was one that could easily fool me if a 0.5 shot was in a music video. Context is everything.

cs702• 2 years ago

Impressive.

It's only going to get better, faster, cheaper, easier.[a]

Sooner than anyone could have expected, we'll be able to ask the machines: "Turn this book into a two-hour movie with the likeness of [your favorite actor/actress] in the lead role."

Sooner than anyone could have expected, we'll be able to have immersive VR experiences that are crafted to each person.

Sooner than anyone could have expected, we won't be able to identify deepfakes anymore.

We sure live in interesting times!

---

[a] With apologies to Daft Punk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAjR4_CbPpQ

mywacaday• 2 years ago

Are we only a few years away from one person/small group made movies where the dialog, acting, location and special effects can be tweaked endlessly for a relatively low cost. If I was a studio exec I'd be worried.

Workaccount23• 2 years ago

If I was a human I'd be worried.

adamc18• 2 years ago

I wouldn't be. How is any of this going to lead to meaningful art?

I don't think you get "The Green Mile" from something like this.

lairv• 2 years ago

I'm not sure, I see a common pattern with autonomous vehicle, text to image, llms: the last 10% are hard to achieve

ActionHank4• 2 years ago

I doubt it and if we were no one would be earning money anymore and wouldn't have cash to pay for the cost to run these services.

void-pointer• 2 years ago

Or this is the top, and the only thing AI will be able to generate is boring and uninspiring clips.

Ever notice how they never show anyone moving quickly in these clips?

cle• 2 years ago

Studio execs don't do any of that stuff anyway. It's the long list of people in the movie credits who should be worried.

sangnoir2• 2 years ago

If I was a studio exec I'd be worried

Counterpoint: home "studio" recording has been feasible for decades, but music execs are not ruffled. Sure, you get a Billie Eilish debut album once a generation, but the other 99.99% of charting music is from the old guard. The media/entertainment machine is so much bigger than just creating raw material.

kingofthehill98• 2 years ago

But mostly just porn.

spacebanana74• 2 years ago

I think AI porn is overhyped. We've had the ability to create realistic photos and short vids for over a year now and onlyfans creators are still doing fine. AI porn is just a niche for stuff that humans don't want to perform.

mon_in_the_moon• 2 years ago

You sound like two minute papers.

ben_w6• 2 years ago

In enthusiasm perhaps, but when I play that in my own head with the voice of Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér, he doesn't script his videos like that. I can't recall a single instance of him using triple repetition like that.

throwawayk7h• 2 years ago

what a time to be alive.

keiferski4• 2 years ago

This sounds gimmicky and worth watching once or twice, then forgetting about. Worthwhile art will continue to be created from a specific person's/group's vision, not an algorithmically generated sum of personal preferences.

dyauspitr5• 2 years ago

You’ll never be able to tell them apart.

sionisrecur2• 2 years ago

Isn't a specific person's vision basically their personal preferences?

heurist5• 2 years ago

I rarely watch movies or read books twice anymore. There's too much content already. The challenge with purely human art at this point is that it will be silenced by the perpetual flood of half-assed generated work. There will be room in elite art circles for more, but at some point the generated stuff will be so ubiquitous (and even meaningful) that anyone without connections is going to have a tough time building an audience for their handcrafted work, unless it happens to be particularly controversial or 'difficult' to make. The demand for visual stimulus will be satisfied by hypertuned AI models. Generative AI is not there quite yet but there's no reason to think it won't be better than 90%+ of purely human content within a decade given the pace of development over the last few years.

javier123454321• 2 years ago

Exactly, there will be a lower barrier to entry, but making content that stands out will require the same (or more) effort.

ajkjk• 2 years ago

"we will be able to" -> "someone with a financial interest in my believing them says that we will be able to"

indigoabstract• 2 years ago

It looks impressive, yet I'm not feeling very impressed. If only I could get as high as you do from watching those demo reels.

Out of curiosity, what is it that people do with these things? Do they put them on TikTok?

sangnoir2• 2 years ago

It looks impressive, yet I'm not feeling very impressed.

The demos was made by nerds (said with love) with a limited time window. Wait until the creatives get a hold of the tool.

ratedgene• 2 years ago

We are super cooked! I love the future!!!!

nakedrobot2• 2 years ago

that sounds awful. we need to start asking ourselves just because we can, do we need to fulfill all of our prurient desires?

animanoir2• 2 years ago

this user is a prime example of "consoooooooooooooom!!!!!!!!!!"

conductr• 2 years ago

Sooner than anyone could have expected, we'll be able to ask the machines: "Turn this book into a two-hour movie with the likeness of [your favorite actor/actress] in the lead role."

I've been doing this with ChatGPT, except it's more of a "turn into a screenplay" then "create a graphic of each scene" and telling it how I want each character to look. It's works pretty well but results in more of a graphic novel than a movie. I'm definitely been waiting for the video version to be available!

sensanaty2• 2 years ago

Does anyone other than PMs when thinking up user stories do shit like this or finds this kinda stuff desirable? It just sounds like a business person who doesn't have a life other than selling their product trying to think up "real user" usecases every time.

bakugo• 2 years ago

Nope. This is just like when cryptobros would regularly insist that cryptocurrencies would replace banks by the end of the decade. It's safe to assume that anyone who makes such wild predictions is a bagholder who stands to gain financially from said wild predictions coming true, even though they never will.

thunderbird120• 2 years ago

Frankly, yes.

Many creative works these days require the effort and input of so many people, so much time, and so much money that they can't have a specific creative vision. Mediums like book, comics, indie movies, and very low budget indie games, where the the end product was created by the smallest number of people, have the most potential to be interesting and creative. They can take risks. This doesn't mean they will be good, most aren't, but it means that the range of quality is much broader, with some having a chance to shine in ways which big budget projects just can't. The issue with small teams and small budgets is that they are inherently limited in what they can create. Better tools allows smaller groups of people to make things that previously would have required an entire studio but without diluting the creative vision.

Will this also result in a tidal wave of low effort garbage? Of course it will. But that can be ignored.

indymike• 2 years ago

The giant crab-like thing in the background of the Hippo swimming (if a hippo could swim) is the stuff of nightmares.

bbor5• 2 years ago

Incredible, simply incredible. You know a paper is seminal when all the methods seem obvious in hindsight! Though I’m not caught up on SOTA, so maybe some of this is obvious in normal-sight, too.

RIP Pika and ElevenLabs… tho I guess they always can offer convenience and top tier UX. Still, gotta imagine they’re panicking this morning!

  Upload an image of yourself and transform it into a personalized video. Movie Gen’s cutting-edge model lets you create personalized videos that preserve human identity and motion.

Given how effective the still images of Trump saving people in floodwater and fixing electrical poles have been despite being identifiable as AI if you look closely (or think…), this is going to be nuts. 16 seconds is more than enough to convince people, I’m guessing the average video watch time is much less than that on social media.

Also, YouTube shorts (and whatever Meta’s version is) is about to get even worse, yet also probably more addicting! It would be hard to explain to an alien why we got so unreasonably good at optimal content to keep people scrolling. Imagine an automated YouTube channel running 24/7 A/B experiments for some set of audiences…

nanna• 2 years ago

Absolutely terrifying. Please stop.

vouaobrasil13• 2 years ago

Absolutely agree. It's very terrifying and will likely cause mass disruption because it will disintegrate the social fabric that is held together by people needing other people for stuff.

Sgt_Apone• 2 years ago

Absolutely. What's even the purpose of this thing? Who is it really serving?

thriwster2• 2 years ago

It is also an automated loom. But now we techno creatives are the luddites.

clvx• 2 years ago

Off topic but some day you could live off grid with your own solar fusion mini reactor powering your own hardware that enables creating your own stories, movies and tales. No more need of streaming services. Internet would be to obtain news, goods and buy greatest and latest (or not) data to update your models. Decentralization could be for once not as painful as it is now; however, I still believe every single hardware vendor would try to hook to the internet and make you install an app. Looking forward to this AI revolution for sure.

adamc18• 2 years ago

I'm not. The likelihood that such movies (for example) would have anything significant to say about being human seems very low.

If one watches movies, reads books, etc. just to pass the time, maybe this would be some kind of boon. But for those of us looking for meaningful commentary on life, looking to connect with other human beings, this would be some circle of hell. It's some kind of solipsism.

CuriouslyC2• 2 years ago

That doesn't follow at all. If I come up with a meaningful story and use AI to generate clips and stich them together to tell it, that's real art.

If you disagree with that, you're basically saying La Jetee isn't art, which would be a hard sell.

zarzavat• 2 years ago

I wouldn't be so sure. AI can ingest far more information about humans than a human ever could. It has read our stories and understands our languages. AI might have more to say about humans than we do ourselves.

Of course AI can never truly experience being human, it has no emotions, but it is excellent at mimicry and it can certainly provide a meaningful outside perspective.

Is there anything to say about humanity that is not in the training corpus already?

93po4• 2 years ago

95% of television and movies, to me, are completely uninteresting and not worth watching. the property of being human-made has a pretty low success rate for basically anyone

diego_sandoval• 2 years ago

They used to say that the Internet would make people smarter and more knowledgeable.

That prediction became true for like 5% of the population, everyone else is probably stupider than they were before, thanks to social media.

Similarly, I think your prediction will apply to a small subset of humanity.

TranquilMarmot5• 2 years ago

To me, this feels like a very dystopian take. I watch movies, read books, and listen to music because they are a way to connect with fellow human beings. Taking the human out of the equation also removes any meaning for me.

I get that this is kind of a fundamental line in the sand for most of the "AI art" going around, and it seems like most people fall on one side or the other. "I consume art for entertainment" vs "I interact with art to experience the human condition".

I also don't want to say that AI Art has no value, because I think as a tool to help artists realize their vision it can be very useful! I just don't think that art entirely made by AI is interesting.

pennomi• 2 years ago

Surely if you’ve watched an amazing show you’re likely to share it with a friend, no? I see this bringing likeminded people together in tight, niche communities.

codeduck• 2 years ago

those penguins are incredibly buoyant.

thinkingemote• 2 years ago

Are any image / video generation tools giving just the output or the layers, timelines, transitions, audio as things to work with in our old fashioned toolsets?

The problem: In my limited playing of these tools they don't quite make the mark and I would easily be able to tweak something if I had all the layers used. I imagine in the future products could be used to tweak this to match what I think the output should be....

At least the code generation tools are providing source code. Imagine them only giving compiled bytecode.

swatcoder• 2 years ago

Keep in mind that these technologies produce more stuff like what they've been trained on, and they need tremendous amounts of training data to pull that off.

It so happens that there are innumerable samples of prose and source code and rendered songs and videos and images to use as this training data.

But that's not so much the case for professional workflows (outside of software development).

If the tools can evolve to generating usefully detailed and coherent media projects instead of just perceptually convincing media assets, it's going to be a while before they get there.

botanical76• 2 years ago

They definitely do not give you an Adobe After Effects project. This is because of the way they are trained. I suspect a vast proportion of its training data is not annotated with the corresponding layers, timelines, etc so the model is unable to reproduce it like that. You basically just get video AFAIK.

vunderba2• 2 years ago

If you have experience as a graphic designer, you can get very far with any layer based graphic tools like Krita or Affinity in conjunction with proper inpainting against generative image models - in fact that's InvokeAI's entire target user base.

woodson• 2 years ago

There are some approaches that use an LLM to generate “scripts” (you can think of them as a DSL) for composing/arranging media, essentially driving other models to generate parts of the media. One example is WavJourney: https://audio-agi.github.io/WavJourney_demopage/

39896880• 2 years ago

They all have dead eyes. It's creepy.

tempusalaria• 2 years ago

We live in the future. I just hope we consumers get easy access to these video tools at some point. I want to make personal movies from my favorite books

HumblyTossed• 2 years ago

I'm not impressed with the quality. Did they mean to make it look so cartoony?

brokensegue• 2 years ago

A lot of them don't look cartoony to me. Better then previous video generators

Hard_Space• 2 years ago

Yet another one-shot, single-clip Instagram machine that can't do a follow-on shot natively.

As it stands, the only chance you have of depicting a consistent story across a series of shots is image-to-video, presuming you can use LoRAs or similar techniques to get the seed photos consistent in themselves.

skerit• 2 years ago

I made a silly 1-hour long movie with friends +/- 20 years ago, on DV tape. I would love to use this to actually be able to implement all the things we wanted to achieve back then

tikkun• 2 years ago

FAQs I found:

Is it available for use now? Nope

When will it be available for use? On FB, IG and WhatsApp in 2025

Will it be open sourced? Maybe

What are they doing before releasing it? Working with filmmakers, improving video quality, reducing inference time

kleiba• 2 years ago

To all the folks with negative opinions of this work: you guys are nuts! This work is incredible. Is it the end of the line yet? Of course not, but come on! This is unbelievably cool, and who of you would have predicted any of this ten years ago?

KevinGlass• 2 years ago

It's incredible in the same way an AK-47 is incredible. This sort of thing is going to uproot all of culture and god knows what happens after that.

vouaobrasil13• 2 years ago

For me, peace in society, a nice world where humans can share what they create, and nature outside and preserved are all much better than "cool", and this "cool" tool threatens all of the above.

wiseowise• 2 years ago

So I’m probably going to be too closed minded about this: but who the f*ck asked for this and did anyone consider consequences of easily accessible AI slop generation?

It’s already nearly impossible to find quality content on the internet if you don’t know where to look at.

tiborsaas3• 2 years ago

I did and I'm quite happy that this is happening :) It's unleashing a new computing era when you just have to lean back, close your eyes and your vision can materialize without a Hollywood production crew.

NexRebular• 2 years ago

And it's great as anyone can use it in whichever way they want since machine generated content does not have copyright protections.

We will finally achieve the dream of everything being in public domain!

oblio3• 2 years ago

It's only going to be worse and aggregators aka gatekeepers will increase in value immensely.

OrangeMusic• 2 years ago

who the f*ck asked for this

Have you heard of the quip "Because we can"?

nthdesign• 2 years ago

My kids both have creative hearts, and they are terrified that A.I. will prevent them from earning a living through creativity. Very recently, I've had an alternate thought. We've spent decades improving the technology of entertainment, spending billions (trillions?) of dollars in the process. When A.I. can generate any entertainment you can imagine, we might start finding this kind of entertainment boring. Maybe, at that point, we decide that exploring space, stretching our knowledge of physics and chemistry, and combating disease are far more interesting because they are real. And, through the same lens, maybe human-created art is more interesting because it is real.

solaris152000• 2 years ago

I had a similar thought. I knew someone who lived a life of crime, for a long time he was very poor like most criminals, but for a while made it big. He could buy anything he wanted, he always liked suits so bought very nice suits. But they meant nothing to him, he couldn't enjoy them, as he didn't earn then.

I wonder if it will be the same with AI. When you can have anything for nothing, it has no value. So the digital world will have little meaning.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 2 years ago

That's my optimistic belief as well but I've also been disappointed at every turn. The future feels like a nihilistic joke constantly competing to plot the most disappointing course forward.

More likely the average person will happily lap up AI generated slop.

dyauspitr5• 2 years ago

He might be an exception because most people would have no problems riding around in a million dollar car whether they earned it or not.

jppittma2• 2 years ago

Or maybe, the limiting factor in one's ability to create art will be... creativity rather than the technical skills necessary to make movies, draw, or pluck strings.

judge2020• 2 years ago

The issue is that the human performance of those things is precisely how creativity is expressed. You can tell an AI to write a story you envision but if there’s nothing unique in the presentation (or it copies the presentation from existing media to a large extent) you still end up with boring output.

ativzzz• 2 years ago

A lot of creativity is generated by spending countless hours sharpening

the technical skills necessary to make movies, draw, or pluck strings

AI will (hopefully) be an accelerator for the people still putting in the hours. At least it is for coding

vouaobrasil13• 2 years ago

Nah, creativity cannot be separated from the means. "The medium is the message". It is precisely the interaction of technical skill and the mind that creates something truly wonderful.

sonofhans2• 2 years ago

Creativity isn’t magic, it’s a skill. There is no creativity without the application of it. By definition creativity produces something. Without skills it’s not possible to produce anything.

The act of creating teaches you to be better at creating, in that way and in that context. This is why people with practice and expertise (e.g., professional artists, like screenwriters and musicians) can reliably create new things.

mattgreenrocks2• 2 years ago

The discipline and care to get good at it are what the things that spur creativity.

adventured3• 2 years ago

99% of humanity have very little interest in creating. They're mimics, they're fine with copying, hitting repost, et al. You see this across all social media without exception (TikTok being the most obvious mimic example, but it's the same on Reddit as well). You see it in day to day life. You see it in how people spend their time. You see it in how people spend their money. And none of this is new.

The public can create vast amounts of spectacular original content right now using Dalle, MidJourney, Stable Diffusion - they have very little interest in doing so. Only a tiny fraction of the population has demonstrated that it cares what-so-ever about generative media. It's a passing curiosity for a flicker of an instant for the masses.

The hilariously fantastical premise of: if we just give people massive amounts of time, they'll dedicate their brains to creativity and exploration and live exceptionally fulfilling lives - we already know that's a lie for the masses. That is not what they do at all if you give them enormous amounts of time, they sit around doing nothing much at all (and if you give them enormous amounts of money to go with it, they do really dumb things with it, mostly focused on rampant consumerism). The reason it doesn't work is because all people are not created equal, all people are not the same, all brains are not wired the same, the masses are mimics, they are unable & unwilling to originate as a prime focus (and nothing can change that).

jancsika• 2 years ago

You: escape the oppressive technical limitations of scoring a piece for an orchestra through novel use of technology.

Csound: To make a sine tone, we'll describe the oscillator in a textfile as if it were a musical instrument. You can think of this textfile as a blueprint for a kind of digital orchestra. Later we'll specify how to "play" this orchestra using another text file, called the score.

Fricken• 2 years ago

You don't need any special technical skills to write the next great American novel. Few people actually do it. Talent and dedication are as elusive as ever.

Animats2• 2 years ago

"And, through the same lens, maybe human-created art is more interesting because it is real."

Most human-created art is rather bad. I used to go to a lot of art openings, and we'd look at some works and ask "will this have been tossed in five years?"

causal7• 2 years ago

Being pleasing to the eye is often not the point. Technical ability is a small part of the art experience. That's one reason a lot of people hate calling image gens "art" - it's so flashy without substance. But it's also a reason I don't think generative AI is much of a threat to the human practice of art-making.

That said, AI is probably a threat to roles in the entertainment industry. But it's also worth noting that much of the creativity was being sucked out of entertainment well before AI arrived.

teaearlgraycold• 2 years ago

Unless we have god-like robotics I don't see AI making physical art any time soon. We can print out photos but people still buy paintings. We can 3D print but people still buy sculptures. People are paid to design and build beautiful buildings and interiors.

And of course if you can combine skills with sculpture with graphic design you're getting more specialized and are more likely to make a living - even if the field of graphic design is decimated by AI. That's generally how I feel about my skills as a programmer. I'm not just a programmer. So even if AI does most of the work with coding I can still write code for income as long as it's not the only reason I'm getting paid.

CooCooCaCha• 2 years ago

The idea that we won’t care about art is frankly strange. But I think people will still need to make interesting art regardless of the tools.

So far AI doesn’t seem very good at the creative element.

sk11001• 2 years ago

Earning a living through creativity doesn't work for the majority of people anyway even without AI in the picture. Creative expression is a thing that exists for its own sake, the people who make a living out of it are lucky outliers.

vouaobrasil13• 2 years ago

And so what if they are outliers? It is precisely the outliers that spice up our artistic wealth to make it truly interesting.

briandear• 2 years ago

We heard this same argument when cameras were invented. Yet some of the most valuable paintings in the world were created in the 20th century.

We heard it again when electronic music started becoming a thing.

Formula 1 wouldn’t exist if the blacksmiths had their way.

The unknown scares people because they are afraid of their known paradigms being shattered. But the new things ahead are often beyond anything of which we could ever dream.

Be optimistic.

vouaobrasil13• 2 years ago

One must not use analogy to analyze individual technologies. People were afraid of the camera, yes, but the camera does not attempt to replace painting. AI attempts to replace photography, painting, and all sorts of art with something that looks like the real thing. Photography never tried to do that, as photographs don't look anything like paintings.

beezlebroxxxxxx5• 2 years ago

And, through the same lens, maybe human-created art is more interesting because it is real.

Conversations I have with people in real life almost always come back to this point. Most people find AI stuff novel, but few find it particularly interesting on an artistic level. I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.

I always find the breathless joy that some people express at this stuff with confusion. To me, the very instant someone mentions "AI generated" I just instantly find it un-interesting artistically. It's not the same as photoshop or using digital art suites. It's AI generated. Insisting on the bare minimum human involvement as a feature is just a non-starter for me if something is presented as art.

I'll wait to see if the utopian vision people have for this stuff comes to fruition. But I have enough years of seeing breathless positivity for some new tech curdle into resignation that it's ended up as ad focused, bland, MBA driven, slop, that I'm not very optimistic.

vouaobrasil13• 2 years ago

I think the main point is that art is interesting precisely because it can transmit human experience. It's communication from another human being. AI "media" completely lacks that. It's more of an expression of the machine-soul, which is tempting us to continue its development until it takes over.

visarga3• 2 years ago

Insisting on the bare minimum human involvement as a feature is just a non starter for me if something is presented as art

You can make the guidance as superficial or detailed as you like. Input detailed descriptions, use real images as reference, you can spend a minute or a day on it. If you prompt "cute dog" you should expect generic outputs. If you write half a screen with detailed instructions, you can expect it to be mostly your contribution. It's the old "you're holding it wrong" problem.

BTW, try to input an image in chatGPT or Claude and ask for a description, you will be amazed how detailed it can get.

schmidtleonard3• 2 years ago

"AI generated" I just instantly find it un-interesting artistically

How familiar are you with what is possible and how much human effort goes towards achieving it?

https://civitai.com/images

Photography, digital painting, 3D rendering -- these all went through a phase of being panned as "not real art" before they were accepted, but they were all eventually accepted and they all turned out to have their own type of merit. It will be the same for AI tools.

xanderlewis• 2 years ago

I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.

Well put. This is also my experience. And I'm no AI doom-monger or neo-Luddite.

mattgreenrocks2• 2 years ago

I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.

Yes, I've noticed this. The people who are excited about it usually come off as opportunistic (hence the "breathless joy"), and not really interested in letting whatever art/craft they want to make deeply change them. They just want the recognition of being able to make the thing without the formative work. (I hesitate to point this out, anticipating allegations of elitism.)

Plus, really online people tend to dominate online discussions, giving the impression that the public will be happy to consume only AI generated things. Then again, the public is happy to consume social media engagement crap, so I'm very curious what the revealed preference is here.

The value in learning this stuff is that it changes you. I'll be forever indebted to my guitar teacher partially because he teaches me to do the work, and that evidence of doing the work is manifest readily, and to play the long, long game.

aliasxneo• 2 years ago

I think a key piece here is that I often consume art from the mindset of, "What was the creator thinking?" What is their worldview? What social situations pushed them to express things in this way?

For video, it's possible AI can feed into the overall creative pipeline, but I don't see it replacing the human touch. If anything, it opens up the industry to less-technical people who can spend more time focusing on the human touch. Even if the next big film has AI generation in it, if it came from someone with a fascinating story and creative insight, I'll still likely appreciate it.

nitwit005• 2 years ago

People find even randomly generated stuff artistic. I remember the San Francisco Chronicle review of an art piece, which was random cracks in rock caused by heating.

I sort of wondered how you could claim to be the creator of the art when your kiln did all the work, but I suppose they did the important labor of putting it in there.

wraptile3• 2 years ago

I feel the opposite. I don't care how the sausage was made as long as it's a good sausage. Art was never about the creation process. In fact, before the internet most would never see the process at all. Just go to your local museum and you'll never know how most of pieces were made and that's a good thing. Art is all about the effect on the viewer.

AuryGlenz• 2 years ago

I only really hear about people being ecstatic about AI online, by people who are, for lack of a better term, really online, and who do not have the skills, know-how, or ability, to make art themselves.

I generate a lot of art using Stable Diffusion/Flux of my spouse, kids, friends, etc. I was a professional photographer for nearly 10 years - I quit just last year.

phainopepla2• 2 years ago

I suspect the demand for human creative output will shrink, as AI generated content will be so cheap and prevalent, even as it will only ever be an imitation of human art. The same way that most people eat terrible, flavorless tomatoes from the supermarket, instead of the harder to grow heirloom varieties.

But I don't think human creativity is going anywhere. Unless there is some breakthrough that moves it far beyond anything we've seen so far, AI will always be trailing behind us. Human creativity might become a more boutique product, like heirloom tomatoes, but there will always be people who value it.

throwaway2203• 2 years ago

There might be more creating it than there are those valuing it

GaggiX• 2 years ago

Most of my entertainment is watching dudes sitting in their chairs talking into a microphone. I find it more entertaining than the billion dollar entertainment industry.

batch12• 2 years ago

I think there will be a body that certifies artistic content as organic similar to food. This will create a premium offering for organic content and a lower tier AI /uncertified level.

mrtksn• 2 years ago

AI content is already very dull, the text is dull the music is dull the images and videos are also dull. No one is interested in AI Seinfeld or this short movie that AI created. Their only audience is just people admiring what the machines come to be able to do.

Any AI content that's good, and there are a few of them, actually has plenty of human creativity in it.

There are some AI artist that begin to emerge or there are some AI generated personas out there who are interesting but they are interesting only because the people behind it made it interesting.

I am not fatalistic at all for the creatives. AI is going to wipe out the producers and integrators(people that specialize in putting things together, like coders who code when tasked, painters who paint when commissioned, musicians that play once provided with the score), not the creatives.

The GOTCHA, IMHO, will be people not developing skills because the machine can do it but I guess maybe they will the skills that make the machine sing.

righthand• 2 years ago

So we’ll automate away entertainment jobs but none of the cool science jobs will be automated? I don’t understand how this proposed world will have an available work for scientists but not entertainers.

supriyo-biswas• 2 years ago

At least for Meta, this has implications for keeping people engaged in their metaverse.

farts_mckensy7• 2 years ago

Science is never going to supplant art. They serve two very different functions in society. What I hope is that performance art and experiences that can't be easily replicated by AI become more mainstream. Things like ARGs and multimedia storytelling, where there is a back and forth participatory sort of process between the audience and the creator.

Fluorescence• 2 years ago

Cheaper more effective entertainment is likely to only cause more problems: it will be more addictive, better at hijacking our brains and attention, better at pushing the propaganda goals of the author, better at filling traditional "human needs" of relationships that forever separates us from each other into a civilisation of Hikikomori.

I have little faith in an optimistic view of human nature where we voluntarily turn more toward more intellectual or worthy pursuits.

On one hand, entertainment has often been the seed that drives us to make the imagined real, but the adjacent possible of rewarding adventure/discovery/invention only seems to get more unaffordable and out of reach. Intellectual revolutions are like gold rushes. They require discovery, that initial nugget in a stream, the novel idea that opens a door to new opportunities that draws in the prospectors. Without fresh opportunity, there is no enthusiasm and we stew in our juices.

I suspect the only thing that might save us from total solipsistic brain-in-vat immersion in entertainment... is something like glp-1 type antagonists. If they can help us resist a plate of Danish maybe they can protect us from barrages of Infinite Jest brain missiles from Netflix about incestuous cat wizards or whatever. Who knows what alternatives this new permanently medicated society, Pharma-Sapiens, might pursue instead though.

petesergeant• 2 years ago

We'll be able to start fuzz testing the human brain. A horror film that uses bio-feedback to really push the bits that are actually terrifying you, in real-time. Campaign videos that lean in to the bit that your lizard brain is responding to.

schmorptron2• 2 years ago

I believe you're right too. The internet and smartphones are great technology in general, and can do pretty great things but what they've ended up doing was screwing with the reward mechanisms in my brain since I was a teenager. Most optimized use case.

Reading these threads sometimes feels like a bad idea, because you just get new sad ideas on how things will almost certainly be used to make it worse than just the ones you can come up on your own.

hindsightbias2• 2 years ago

They will be creating for a very small crowd. It will be nice for me, because I can't stand all the blockbuster movies that prioritize stretching physics with unrealistic special effects over plot and dialog.

I think the musicians that are barely hanging on at this point would prefer to create over having to slog around on tours to pay their health insurance. But nobody is paying for creation.

Alex-Programs• 2 years ago

Maybe, at that point, we decide that exploring space, stretching our knowledge of physics and chemistry, and combating disease are far more interesting because they are real.

It's a compelling thought - we all like hope - and I think it might be realistic if all of humanity were made up of the same kind of people who read hacker news.

But is this not what the early adopters of the internet thought? I wasn't there - this is all second hand - but as far as I know people felt that, once everyone gained the ability to learn anything and talk to anyone, anywhere, humanity would be more knowledgeable, more thoughtful, and more compassionate. Once everyone could effortlessly access information, ignorance would be eliminated.

After all, that's what it was like for the early adopters.

But it wasn't so in practice.

I worry that hopeful visions of the future have an aspect of projecting ourselves onto humanity.

kypro• 2 years ago

Why would humans explore space when AIs are more intelligent and more physically able to?

Seems more likely we'll just plug ourselves into ever more addicting dopamine machines. That's certainly the trend so far anyway.

hcarvalhoalves• 2 years ago

Art and entertainment are different things.

earth_walker• 2 years ago

Paint didn't replace charcoal. Photography didn't replace drawings. Digital art didn't replace physical media. Random game level generation didn't replace architecture.

AI generated works will find a place beside human generated works.

It may even improve the market for 'artsy' films and great acting by highlighting the difference a little human talent can make.

It's not the art that's at risk, it's the grunt work. What will shift is the volume of human-created drek that employed millions to AI-created drek that employs tens.

boogieknite2• 2 years ago

Im hopeful US will have some subsidy for real creative works like ive seen in europe.

My limited understanding is that AI could generate Netflix top 10 hits that mostly recycle familiar jokes. The creators made a great product, but i expect anyone who attended film school would rather try something new, only issue is Netflix wont foot the bill (i know, they take a few oscar swings a year now).

Recent examples: TV Glow, Challengers, Strange Darling. All movies with specific, unique perspectives, visuals, acting choices, scripts, shots, etc. Think about the perspective in The Wire, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm. There is plenty of great work that obviously is nearly impossible to reproduce by an AI and i hope that AI "art" is taxed in a way that funds human projects.

zoogeny5• 2 years ago

Consider another angle.

I follow a lot of the new AI gen crowd on Twitter. This community is made up of a lot of creative industry people. One guy who worked in commercials shared a recent job he was on for a name brand. They had a soundstage, actors, sound people, makeup, lighting, etc. setup for 3 days for the shoot. Something like 25 people working for 3 days. But behind that was about 3 months of effort if one includes pre-production and post-production. Think about editing, color correction, sound editing, music, etc.

Your creative children may live in a world where they can achieve a similar result themselves. Perhaps as a small team, one person working on characters, one person doing audio, one person writing a script. Instead of needing tens of thousands of dollars of rented equipment and 25 experts, they will be able to take ideas from their own head and realize them with persistence and AI generation.

I honestly believe these new tools will unlock potential beyond what we can currently imagine.

Miraste• 2 years ago

That will be the end of creative work. Marketing and promotion is already the most difficult part of any creative endeavor. With literally unlimited trash being produced, it'll become impossible.

pcurve• 2 years ago

If the barrier to entry is low for high quality production and anyone is able to make good looking videos, I wonder how audience perception would evolve for judging and valuing what is considered 'good'.

hyperG3• 2 years ago

We have already been through this with music.

It doesn't really work that way. Over time, it really does just devalue the art form in a sense because now anyone can make a recording.

Electronic music is really the best example. In 1995 it took thousands of dollars to have a fully working studio to even produce any track. By 2005, anyone could do this in their bedroom for basically nothing. In 1995 the cost acted as a filter so only those with talent would bother. Once anyone could do it, all electronic music recordings were devalued by the infinite supply.

I thought there would be 1000 Richard James once this happened. Maybe there even are but I have never heard them because there is so much shit to sift through I really don't even listen to electronic music anymore. I don't think there are though. 900 them probably are doing something else because there is no money left in the art form, 90 are making some other style of music with better financial prospects and the 10 that are, I will never hear of or be able to find.

echoangle5• 2 years ago

If I imagine a random person on the street, they certainly aren’t enjoying fine human arts because it’s made by a real person. They are scrolling TikTok and don’t care if it’s AI generated or not, if they even notice. The people actually caring about art because it is art are maybe 20% of the population.

alex_suzuki2• 2 years ago

I think 20% is being generous… more like 2%.

layer84• 2 years ago

Creativity is about having original ideas. So far, AI isn’t that good at that, and neither at maintaining a consistent idea throughout a production. Will AI be able to come up with a compelling novel series, music album, video game, movie or TV series in ten years? Possibly, but there’s also a good chance that it won’t.

elwell3• 2 years ago

The same can be said about plain old I.

energy123• 2 years ago

Most creatives work in at-risk jobs like freelance writing, SEO, digital advertising, logo design

hackable_sand4• 2 years ago

Are they gonna stay scared as adults? Lmao

Are you?

atleastoptimal• 2 years ago

How would you know it's real? AI art could be portrayed as real and most people wouldn't care if it has a stronger emotional effect.

mlboss2• 2 years ago

It is easy to do really creative work now but it is even easier to just browse instagram or tiktok. The real winner in the new world will be people with discipline who can use these tech to create stuff without too much capital or resources.

WhyOhWhyQ5• 2 years ago

Why would anybody create stuff that the AI companies are just going to instantly subsume and reproduce far more cheaply? There is not going to be a meaningful economy based on creativity in the next 50 years, any more than there is one now. And then it is going to be far worse. The actual "winners" are just going to be the people who through arbitrary processes like fortunate birth or lucky circumstances are granted admission into elite institutions.

wraptile3• 2 years ago

Recently I've been cutting back on TV in favor of non fiction reading and I feel you have a point. Entertainment comes in many forms and tbh all of them are interesting and rewarding in their own ways so I'm not worried of AI ruining entertainment for us. That's the least of our actual worries and I'm honestly surprised people find this issue so important.

I guess visualizing AI doing political or social damage or AGI mind control is a bit harder than your favorite show being gone.

mvdtnz• 2 years ago

I have yet to see any AI produce a single morsel of content of any kind that I would class as even remotely entertaining. So we'll see.

spaceman_20204• 2 years ago

It really bugs me that the first bits AI has targeted are the parts people actually enjoy doing for fun.

As things stand, AI is okay at writing, art/photos, coding, and now, videos.

These are all things people like doing. Even coding is something a lot of people get a ton of pleasure from.

sroerick• 2 years ago

I haven’t had any luck being able to effectively generate compositions with text to image / text to video. Prompts like “subject in the lower third of the frame” have thus far completely failed me. I’m sure this will change in the future but this seems pretty fundamental for any ‘AI Powered Film’ to function the way a film director would.

Curious if anybody has a solution or if this works for that

Animats2• 2 years ago

Likely results:

- Every script in Hollywood will now be submitted with a previs movie.

- Manga to anime converters.

- Online commercials for far more products.

sroussey2• 2 years ago

Scripts with AI low quality “movie” with blocking etc is an interesting concept.

Manga to anime already exists.

Commercials, particularly for social/online, already happening as well.

danielbln5• 2 years ago

Previsband storyboarding will benefit tremendously from this, though ultimately it will be usable for B-roll or second unit stuff. And then? We'll see if this tech levels out or up.

wseqyrku• 2 years ago

Looking at bolt.new I think all the Studio/IDE type of apps are going to look like that. Could be video or code or docs etc.

I can see myself paying a little too much to have a local setup for this.

jcims4• 2 years ago

One thing I've noticed with the set of music generation tools (eg Udio, Suno) is that there's a sort of profound attachment to songs that you create. I've never made music the old fashioned way so I'm guessing the same could be true for that as well, but there are songs I've made on Udio that I personally think are amazing but nobody else really responds to. Conversely I can see similar levels of pride and attachment from others for songs they have created that don't do anything for me.

It's going to be interesting to see how that plays out when you can make just about any kind of media you wish. (Especially when you can mix this as a form of 'embodiment' to realize relationships with virtual agents operated by LLMs.)

SamBorick• 2 years ago

I've never made music the old fashioned way so I'm guessing the same could be true for that as well

Yes, it is. You should try it.

grepfru_it• 2 years ago

It’s the same feeling. No different from rebuilding that crazy synth you made one night, succeeding, and then being able to improv/vamp with it during a live session. It is a creative process and I urge anyone who finds the high level aspect of music creation to pursue the lower levels

corytheboyd2• 2 years ago

I personally think are amazing but nobody else really responds to.

Welcome to making music lol. Since there is so much of it, you have to make the absolute best to even be considered. And then, because so many people make the absolute best, people only care about the persona making the music (as great as you are, you aren’t Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Damon Albarn). Your friends will never care about your music just because you are friends, don’t fall into that trap. Also nobody cares about music without good lyrics, because again, there is just so much instrumental content out there that sounds the same, lyrics differentiate it with a human, emotional element.

Just make stuff for fun. Listen to it every now and then and feel the magic of “hehe I made that”

changing19997• 2 years ago

Also nobody cares about music without good lyrics

Well, that's an exaggeration if I've ever seen one. Firstly, so much of current chart music has atrocious lyrics. And secondly, instrumental music is very popular.

changing19997• 2 years ago

"Music is about communication" (John Lennon, IIRC). Don't expect people to profoundly connect to music that is nothing more than a collection of regurgitated ideas.

Not to sound too crass, but a parallel could be drawn to smelling one's own farts and wondering why no one else appreciates the smell.

TranquilMarmot5• 2 years ago

"I microwaved this frozen pizza while I was desperately craving pizza, so it was perfect to me. Why does my friend who usually eats hand-crafted pizza not think it's as good?!"

tavavex• 2 years ago

Don't expect people to profoundly connect to music that is nothing more than a collection of regurgitated ideas.

Music is one of the worse examples to pick for claiming that people don't regurgitate in art. Everything in music builds off one another, and a lot of music (especially music that's seen as lower quality) is described as being just collections of cliches. The reason why "sad music" sounds sad isn't because there's something about instrument choices, key, chords, melody, tempo etc that is measurably intrinsically "sad" - it's because these are stereotypes that the creator has combined together to invoke a certain association in the listeners. If you were extra cynical, you could describe the entire musical field as people largely conditioning themselves over generations to like certain qualities of sound and hate others.

And that applies to almost all art. Basically everything people make is based on stuff that came before that - and it's frustrating to encounter hubris that assumes there's some magical creative process going on inside human brains that will never ever be even approximated by any other means.

vunderba2• 2 years ago

One thing I've noticed with the set of music generation tools (eg Udio, Suno) is that there's a sort of profound attachment to songs that you create.

With all due respect, how could there be when at the click of a button you can generate entire songs? You didn't come up with the chord progression, the structure, the melodic motifs, or the lyrics.

My attachment to my works is directly proportional to the amount of effort it took to create them.

s3p• 2 years ago

I think OP is saying they really enjoy the song. Not that they feel it is their magnum opus.

wantsanagent• 2 years ago

Imagine you've had an idea bouncing around in your head, or even an emotion, for a long time and you've never been able to express it. Then one day you push a button and a piece of art captures what you've been feeling perfectly.

It's not the craft that drives attachment in this case but the emotional resonance of something that you think should exist finally existing.

throwup2383• 2 years ago

You didn't come up with the chord progression, the structure, the melodic motifs, or the lyrics.

Both Suno and Udio allow paid subscribers to upload their own clips to extend from. It works for setting up a beat or extending a full composition from a DAW.

Suno's is more basic than Udio's which allows in painting and can create intros as well as extensions, but the tools are becoming more and more powerful for existing musicians. With Udio you can remix the uploaded clip so you can create the cord progression and melody using one set of instruments or styles (or hum it) and transform it into another.

I also use this feature all the time to move compositions from one service to the other. Suno is better at generating intros and interesting melodies while Udio is better at the editing afterwards.

GrantS• 2 years ago

You can absolutely specify your own lyrics and structure to Suno.

takinola3• 2 years ago

I can imagine a painter two hundred years ago saying the same thing about photographs. How can you feel attachment to a picture when you did not make each brush stroke?

jcims4• 2 years ago

I have no explanation.

It’s not a sense of pride or accomplishment. I don’t know what it is. Maybe a small amount of pride. It’s hard to say. But there is a definite connection that feels different listening to songs i requested vs those that other people have.

Kiro• 2 years ago

This is not unique to AI. People simply don't care about your stuff. Ask any regular artist or game developer.

scudsworth6• 2 years ago

link a song you prompted that you personally think is amazing

scudsworth6• 2 years ago

https://www.udio.com/creators/jcims

yeah its not surprising that you wouldn't volunteer this, man

dpcan• 2 years ago

You know it’s going to happen:

“I want a funny road trip movie staring Jim Carey and Chris Farley, based in Europe, in the fall, where they have to rescue their mom played by Lucille ball from making the mistake of marrying a character played by an older Steve Martin.”

10 minutes later your movie is generated.

If you like it, you save it, share it, etc.

You have a queue of movies shared by your friends that they liked.

Content will be endless and generated.

adventured3• 2 years ago

It'll require tens to hundreds of hours to script the flow of the AI content, to edit, make adjustments, clean it up, make the scenes link together smoothly, fix small glitches. Even with far more advanced AI, it won't come together like a movie people would enjoy watching, without vast human labor involved.

Sub one percent of people are going to be willing to put in the hours to do it.

The bulk of the spammed created content will be: the masses very briefly playing with the generative capabilities, producing low quality garbage that after five minutes nobody is interested in and then the masses will move on to the next thing to occupy a moment of their time. See: generative image media today. So few people care about the crazy image creation abilities of MidJourney or Flux, that you'd think it didn't exist at all (other than the occasional related headline about deepfakes and or politics).

halyax7• 2 years ago

Much of those editing steps could be streamlined and/or straight up automated so that estimate will come way down over time

candiddevmike2• 2 years ago

The content bubble apocalypse, where no one is ever watching the same thing and we lose all cultural connections to each other. At least until someone figures out an algorithm/prompt to influence the content, yvan eht nioj style.

adventured3• 2 years ago

The opposite will occur. Very little will change from how people consume content today. There won't be endless amounts of quality content, there will still be very little high quality content. There will be brief bursts of large amounts of garbage that nobody pays attention to (as a small percentage of people flirt with generative media and quickly lose interest; and the vast majority never bother at all).

The extreme majority will all watch the same things just as they do today. High quality AI content will be difficult to produce and will be nearly as limited in the future as any type of high quality content is today. The masses will stick to the limited, high quality media and disregard that piles of garbage. Celebrity will also remain a pull for content, nothing about that will ever change (and celebrity will remain scarce, which will assist in limiting what the masses are interested in).

By and large people only want to go where other people are at. Nothing about AI will change that, it's a trait that is core to humanity. The way that applies to content is just the same as it does a restaurant: content is a mental (and sometimes physical) destination experience just as a restaurant or vacation trip is.

birracerveza• 2 years ago

Rick & Morty introduced the concept of interdimensional cable in 2014. Ten years later, it's a reality. Crazy stuff.

ActionHank4• 2 years ago

I don't know about you, but my friends and family are boring af. I wouldn't want to watch their queue of noise.

I do hope that more talented people will have more leverage to create without the traditional gatekeeping, but I also doubt this will happen as the gatekeepers are all funding AI tooling as well.

chankstein382• 2 years ago

My girlfriend and I already sometimes use Suno like this for music. Just generate a bunch of songs under a specific genre (our favorite right now is nordic folk, dubstep) and just listen through. If we want to learn about or remember something, we make a Suno song about it. The songs are almost all bangers too so it's not even a chore to listen through!

heurist5• 2 years ago

Generation failed: I'm sorry, but I cannot generate videos of real people. Please try another prompt.

7734128• 2 years ago

Also no violence, or alluding to conspiracies, or historical events.

oulipo• 2 years ago

Impressive, yet more burning GPUs and pushing CO2 in the atmosphere just for stupid stuff that is only of interest to rich western people...

I'd rather have those people work on climate change solutions

dyauspitr5• 2 years ago

No thank you, I not going to let my beloved progressives be dragged into Luddism just so you can feel a little better about yourself through insignificant changes without a meaningful impact on the environment. Anything with true lasting effects will have to be top down like renewable resources/energy, EVs, viable alternatives to plastic, nuclear energy etc.

The argument should never be about reducing energy usage, rather it should be about how we generate that energy in a clean, renewable way.

dievskiy• 2 years ago

Impressive, yet more burning GPUs and pushing CO2 in the atmosphere just for stupid stuff that is only of interest to rich western people

Better to spend 10x amount of energy on humans that will give the same result?

Bloedcoins4• 2 years ago

At least companies are behind it which can actually put the money were its needed and compensate it.

At least microsoft and google are on a co2 neutral race.

And all of these clusters doing something can also do research and partially do.

Its valid critisism, but we need to stop co2 production on a lot of other industries before we do that for datacenters. Datacenters save a lot more co2 (just think about not having to drive to a bank to do bank business).

kkielhofner• 2 years ago

burning GPUs and pushing CO2 in the atmosphere

My startup develops AI for the nuclear power industry to drive process, documentation, and regulatory efficiency. We like to say "AI needs nuclear and nuclear needs AI".

Big tech has finally realized/gone public that casually saying things like "we're building our next 1GW datacenter" is uhh, problematic[0].

For some time now there has been significant interest/activity in wiring up entire datacenters to nuclear reactors (existing Gen 2, SMRs, etc):

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-huang-says-nuclear-pow...

https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpow...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-signs-groundbreaking-en...

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/10/oracle-is-designing-a-data-c...

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4913714-google-ceo-eye...

[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/07/12/g-s1-9545/ai-brings-soaring-e...

Zpalmtree• 2 years ago

utter loser mentality

joshdavham• 2 years ago

I wonder if one day we’ll have generative recommender systems where, instead of finding videos the algorithm thinks you’ll like, it just generates them on the spot.

turblety• 2 years ago

Why do these video generation ones never become usable to the public. Is it just they had to create millions of videos and cherry pick only a handful of decent generations? Or is it just so expensive there's no business model for it?

My mind instantly assumes it a money thing and they're just wanting to charge millions for it, therefore out of reach for the general public. But then with Meta's whole stance on open ai models, that doesn't seem to ring true.

FileSorter• 2 years ago

There are usable ones

runwayml.com

pika.art

hailuoai.com

grumbel2• 2 years ago

klingai.com

lumalabs.ai

causal7• 2 years ago

I'd guess 1 in 10 model demos turn out to be useful product, at best.

This and Sora are particularly annoying, though, for how they put together these huge flashy showcases like they're announcing some kind of product launch and then... nothing. Apparently there's value in just flexing your AI-making muscle now and then.

93po4• 2 years ago

to be fair, Sora was one of the most mind blowing technology showcases of my life, and openai is successful at raising tons of money

ActionHank4• 2 years ago

Cost vs profitability is a big factor and those that don't have a product on the market are heavily cherry picking their demos.

zoogeny5• 2 years ago

There are a few available to the public. runway.ai and kling are a couple that I see heavily used on Twitter.

I pay for runway right now for experiments and it works. The problem is that maybe 1 out of 10 prompts result in something useable. And when I say useable I have pretty low standards. Since the model pumps out 5 or 10 second clips you have to be pretty creative since the models still struggle with keeping any kind of consistency between shots. Things like lighting, locations, characters can all morph within/between cips.

The issue isn't quality exactly, it is like 80% there. When it works, it is capable of blowing your mind. You can get something that looks like it is a bonafide Hollywood shot. But that is a single 5 second or 10 second clip. So far there is no easy way to reliably piece those together to make even a 1 minute long TikTok.

The real problem is the cost. Since you have to sometimes do 10 prompts to get a single acceptable shot it is like a 10x multiplier on the cost per second of video. That can get very expensive for even short experiments.

hackernewds2• 2 years ago

How much do you pay? Imagine if they could charge premium prices to studio's like $100k/user

that's probably where the quality is, but not the billions

yurylifshits• 2 years ago

Hi zoogeny (and anyone else here) — you can try our new app Nim to address the Runway problems you describe https://alpha.nim.video

We offer both image-to-video (same situation as Runway, need a few attempts to make something awesome) and video-to-video (under the name "Restyle 2.0") - this is our newest tool and is highly reliable, i.e. you can get complex motion (kissing, handshakes, boxing, skateboarding, etc) with controllable changes to input video (changing outfits, characters, backgrounds, styles).

Unlike Runway and Kling, we currently offer a smiple UNLIMITED plan for just $10/mo. Check it out! https://alpha.nim.video

dvngnt_• 2 years ago

GTA IV Real Life - Runway Gen 3 AI shows the potential to turn low-fidelity source to something life-like https://youtu.be/FGBSzSO8k6A it would be really cool to this to work locally at playable rates

jonplackett2• 2 years ago

Kling’s new one 1.5 model is WAY better than anything else I’ve tried. Makes runway look terrible. Really good temporal consistency and even gets hair and clothes and stuff right.

They also just added the ability to do lip sync to a moving head and it gets the lighting right too - runways lip sync breaks if there’s any movement at all.

I’m gonna stop pumping Kling on this comment thread now - until they start paying me to advertise!

chankstein382• 2 years ago

Came here to say this... These companies all want patted on the back for how cool their video models are but we're still waiting on Sora since like last year. More and more publish these "look at us" papers but don't publish the models or even give us access to them.

They do exist, Luma AI DreamMachine is pretty cool. As well as Kling, Minimax, etc. But they aren't anything like Sora or this appear to be. They work but these, while likely cherry-picked, are still a whole new breed of video generation. But who knows if we'll ever actually get to use them or if we're just supposed to reflect on them and think about how cool and impressive Facebook and OpenAI are.

ddtaylor3• 2 years ago

I'm confused the demo let me press a button and generate a video, was it not supposed to?

mitthrowaway26• 2 years ago

I didn't see a button for that. Just "download paper". Did I miss it?

altairprime2• 2 years ago

At “the public” Internet scale, if a hundred million people click Generate, imagine if Meta ends up paying a million dollars instantaneously.

- How many clicks of Generate are budgeted for?

- How many clicks should each user’s quota be?

- How much advertising revenue will be earned per click?

- Why should they give away a million dollars?

Right now, AI costs for this are so high that offering this feature ‘for free’ would bankrupt a small country in a matter of days, if everyone on Meta used it once. It doesn’t particularly matter what the exact cost is: it’s simply not tolerable to anyone who owes payment for the services provided.

This is also why the AI industry is trying to figure out how to shift as much AI processing as possible to devices without letting users copy their models to profit off of the training research spend.

tqi3• 2 years ago

Meta owns their data centers, so I don't think that framing is quite right. Increased traffic might cost marginally more in terms of electricity usage, but I think mostly what would happen is the service would degrade.

afh14• 2 years ago

Just release the model and anyone can run locally, there is no cost except for the end user. Meta has the cash flow to do this if they wanted.

layer84• 2 years ago

Consistency and continuity is the main problem. Take a look at the “Super Panavision” AI videos on YouTube.

Those videos are a good measure for monitoring AI video improvement.

jonplackett2• 2 years ago

KlingAI is pretty good - but only 5 second clips for their v 1.5 model which is much better than 1.0

I made this with it (after training a Flux Lora on myself)

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGdJ6uSh1/

Also interesting - blog post from someone who actually got to use Sora https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/actually-using-sora/

TLDR; it’s still quite frustrating to use

nephy• 2 years ago

McDonald’s art.

deng• 2 years ago

These are not movies, these are clips. The stock photo/clip industry is surely worried about this, and probably will sue because 100% these models were trained on their work. If this technology ever makes movies, it'll be exactly like all the texts, images and music these models create: an average of everything ever created, so incredibly mediocre.

sethammons2• 2 years ago

I imagine a movie maker where you say "use model A and put them in scene 32f, add a crowd and zoom in on A. They should look very worried." Then they can just play with it. Then save a scene, onto the next. Since AI can continue an animation, I don't see why it can't faithfully recreate given models with more development

jkolio2• 2 years ago

There have been several AI short film festivals, as well as several AI music videos that have been produced. The caveats are that quality varies, the best ones simply employ solid production in general (good editing, strong directorial vision, etc), and I don't know that anything feature length is out or even in the works.

DirkH• 2 years ago

What'll happen in both industries is the same that will happen everywhere else: adopt or die. The huge winners will be those that creatively use this new tool without 100% relying on it to do everything.

spaceman_20204• 2 years ago

the problem is that these stock footage companies are up against the richest corporations to ever exist. Legal recourse will take a monumental amount of money and time.

Hate to say this, but as things stand, tech companies stand to become all pervasive and all powerful if AI keeps growing the way it has

devonsolomon• 2 years ago

I’ve long ago heard it said that the two drivers of technology innovation are the military and porn. And, welp, I don’t see any use of this to the military.

Krei-se• 2 years ago

This is totally awesome - the tech is out there and whether you use it to make videos or solve long human / world problems is up to you.

Yeah, we might get the bad killer robots. But it's more likely this will make it unnecessary to wonder where on this blue planet you can still live when we power the deserts with solar and go to space. Getting clean nutrition and environment will be within reach. I think that's great.

As with all technology: Yes a car is faster than you. And you can buy or rent one. But it's still great to be healthy and able to jog. So keep your brains folks and get some skills :)

whiplash4515• 2 years ago

« out there » is slightly optimistic.

The model is not released and probably won’t be for a while.

And it probably costs Meta-scale infra to fine-tune to your needs.

idunnoman1222• 2 years ago

It will be as interesting as our dreams. So maybe personally interesting, like for a small group sitting around a table and taking the piss. But it’s not gonna make a global sensation.

Jiahang• 2 years ago

student here ，i learn cs and management. And i really Puzzled what i learn now can help me have better life in this era of rapid development of technology.

karel-3d• 2 years ago

Why don't videos like this ever trend?

#cabincrew

#scarletjohanson

#amen

9999000009992• 2 years ago

Very cool.

But I'm worried about this tech being used for propaganda and dis information.

Someone with a 1K computer and enough effort can generate a video that looks real enough. Add some effects to make it look like it was captured by a CCTV or another low res camera.

This is what we know about, who knows what's behind NDAs or security clearances.

nuz• 2 years ago

Same was thought to happen about images but it hasn't. People quickly debunk AI generated content presented as real in replies or community notes. Not a real issue.

9999000009992• 2 years ago

Maybe maybe not. As is simple false journalism has caused issues on Facebook in certain countries ( to put it lightly).

It's only going to look more realistic in time...

FrequentLurker• 2 years ago

They didn't post any examples where it fails?

smusamashah2• 2 years ago

I was looking for that landslide effect (as seen even in Sora and Kling) where land seems moving very disproportionally to everything else. It makes me motion sick. I have not seen those Sora demo videos a second time for that reason.

These are smooth, consistent, no landslide (except sloth floating in water, the stones on right are moving at much higher rate than the dock coming closer), no things appearing out of nowhere. Editing seems not as high quality (the candle to bubble example).

To me, these didn't induce nausea while being very high quality makes it best among current video generators.

pookha• 2 years ago

Facebook just spent 40 billion dollars on their AI infrastructure. Can they recoup those costs with stuff like this (especially after the VI debacle)? I doubt it. AI has been a wild ass jagged wasteland of economic failure since the 1950's and should be used with extreme caution by these companies...Like is it worth peoples time to spend ten\fifteen dollars (they have to eventually charge for this) to let AI create a, to be freank, half-assed valley of the uncanny movie? I respect the technology and what they're trying to accomplish but this just seems like they're going completely all in on an industry that's laid waste to smarter people than Mark.

crakhamster01• 2 years ago

In Facebook's case they have more to gain than just nifty gen AI features - better ads, content recommendations, etc. The investment in AI infra is a moat, and is why FB's ad platform has proven to be much more resilient to tracking changes than their competitors (e.g. Snap).

hcks2• 2 years ago

You're right, Meta shouldn't invest in a breakthrough technology. They should focus on what really matters: delivering short term value to shareholders

heurist5• 2 years ago

I've been saying for years that generated content is an impending tsunami that's going to drown out all real human voices online. The internet may become effectively unusable as a result for anything other than entertainment.

boogieknite2• 2 years ago

This is interesting and i see some of this now. Even here on HN and other forums i thought were mostly "human". Even one of my group chats i can tell one of my friends is using ai responses, but one of the other members cant tell and replies earnestly.

I am grossed out by this. my instinct is to avoid ai slop. The interesting part to me is: What next? Where do we go? Will it be that "human" forums are pushed further into obscurity of the internet? Or will go so far as that we all start preferring meeting in person? Im clueless here

whiplash4515• 2 years ago

Cryptography-secured/signed generated content / interactions?

danlugo92• 2 years ago

I got into hiking.

sethammons2• 2 years ago

Your droids, they'll have to wait outside

the_gipsy2• 2 years ago

Even one of my group chats i can tell one of my friends is using ai responses, but one of the other members cant tell and replies earnestly.

Too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?

Aeolun2• 2 years ago

Humans will start to notice this shit. I used openai to help me edit my stories originally, but then when I started reading other stories it quickly became evident to me that people just generated them entirely with AI.

ChatGPT is way too happy to overuse the word cacophony.

jowea5• 2 years ago

My hot take is that we will have some small obscure forums with people, some social media flooded with AI content and other social media where you need to register with government ID and facescan.

StefanBatory• 2 years ago

Vetting people into groups will become much more common, I think. Unless you can verify that person, ideally by knowing them irl, don't talk to them online.

skywhopper2• 2 years ago

The only problem is that all the AI slop is not actually entertaining either.

danielbln5• 2 years ago

Beware of sampling bias. Slop will always be slop.

chpatrick• 2 years ago

I think it will just become the new baseline abd people will still value anything better than that.

TiredOfLife• 2 years ago

The internet may become effectively unusable as a result for anything other than entertainment.

That already happened, even without AI.

okdood64• 2 years ago

What was useful and usable about the internet before that isn't now?

cedws• 2 years ago

The Internet used to be a sort of hideaway for nerdy people to hang out and have fun. Ever since the invention of the smartphone, possibly before (see “Eternal September”) it’s gone to shit. These days I would rather spend time offline.

Are there any other Internet-based hideaways to retreat to? Somewhere where ads, clout chasing, and AI slop doesn’t exist?

shortrounddev24• 2 years ago

IRC is more active than forums, but I miss forums

GreenWatermelon• 2 years ago

Come to Tildes.net! We're comfy small community with a single rule: don't be an asshole.

nl• 2 years ago

Why should I care?

Have you seen what most humans say? If an AI says more intelligent things I'm all for it.

nojs• 2 years ago

Mission fucking accomplished?

https://xkcd.com/810/

jowea5• 2 years ago

AIs say what the people giving them orders tell them to.

And until we get AGI, AI talk will necessarily be some combination of hallucinations, unintelligent, vapid, etc.

spaceman_20204• 2 years ago

There could be AI agents in this thread right now

And you wouldn’t even know it

solardev2• 2 years ago

Maybe that's a good thing. The internet never reached its potential as being the connective fabric of humanity. Mostly it's just marketing and spam. If the internet died and we all went back to smaller communities, that really wouldn't be the worst thing IMO. We're not really evolved for global communications at scale anyway.

danielbln5• 2 years ago

We're not evolved for most things in modern life, that's not really much of an argument.

shortrounddev24• 2 years ago

Would be nice if we were able to go to communities of human verified users. Smaller in scope than social media

Andrex2• 2 years ago

Maybe we should abandon HTTP and create a new protocol just for humans. HHTTP.

mike_hearn2• 2 years ago

The paper that comes with this is nearly as crazy as the videos themselves. At a cool 92 pages it's closer to a small book than a normal scientific publication. There's nearly 10 pages of citations alone. I'll have to work through this in the coming days, but here's a few interesting points from the first few sections.

For a long time people have speculated about The Singularity. What happens when AI is used to improve AI in a virtuous circle of productivity? Well, that day has come. To generate videos from text you need video+text pairs to train on. They get that text from more AI. They trained a special Llama3 model that knows how to write detailed captions from images/video and used it to consistently annotate their database of approx 100M videos and 1B images. This is only one of many ways in which they deployed AI to help them train this new AI.

They do a lot of pre-filtering on the videos to ensure training on high quality inputs only. This is a big recent trend in model training: scaling up data works but you can do even better by training on less data after dumping the noise. Things they filter out: portrait videos (landscape videos tend to be higher quality, presumably because it gets rid of most low effort phone cam vids), videos without motion, videos with too much jittery motion, videos with bars, videos with too much text, video with special motion effects like slideshows, perceptual duplicates etc. Then they work out the "concepts" in the videos and re-balance the training set to ensure there are no dominant concepts.

You can control the camera because they trained a dedicated camera motion classifier and ran that over all the inputs, the outputs are then added to the text captions.

The text embeddings they mix in are actually a concatenation of several models. There's MetaCLIP providing the usual understanding of what's in the request, but they also mix in a model trained on character-level text so you can request specific spellings of words too.

The AI sheen mentioned in other comments mostly isn't to do with it being AI but rather because they fine-tune the model on videos selected for being "cinematic" or "aesthetic" in some way. It looks how they want it to look. For instance they select for natural lighting, absence of too many small objects (clutter), vivid colors, interesting motion and absence of overlay text. What remains of the sheen is probable due to the AI upsampling they do, which lets them render videos at a smaller scale followed by a regular bilinear upsample + a "computer, enhance!" step.

They just casually toss in some GPU cluster management improvements along the way for training.

Because the MovieGen was trained on Llama3 generated captions, it's expecting much more detailed and high effort captions than users normally provide. To bridge the gap they use a modified Llama3 to rewrite people's prompts to become higher detail and more consistent with the training set. They dedicated a few paragraphs to this step, but it nonetheless involves a ton of effort with distillation for efficiency, human evals to ensure rewrite quality etc.

I can't even begin to imagine how big of a project this must have been.

rolux3• 2 years ago

Having read the paper, I agree that this is an enormous effort, but I didn't see anything that was particularly surprising from a technical point of view - and nothing of Singularity-level significance. The use of AI to train AI - as a source of synthetic data, or as an evaluation tool - is absolutely widespread. You will find similar examples in almost any AI paper dealing with a system of comparable scale.

mike_hearn2• 2 years ago

Yeah I know, but you sometimes see posts on HN that talk as if AI isn't already being used for self-improvement. I guess the subtlety is that people tend to imagine some sort of generic recursive self-improvement, and overlook the more tightly focused ways it's being used.

gcr2• 2 years ago

    > Upload an image of yourself and transform it
    > into a personalized video. Movie Gen’s
    > cutting-edge model lets you create personalized
    > videos that preserve human identity and motion.

A stalker’s dream! I’m sure my ex is going to love all the videos I’m going to make of her!

Jokes aside, it’s a little bizarre to me that they treat identity preservation as a feature while competitors treat that as a bug, explicitly trying not to preserve identity of generated content to minimize deepfake reputation risk.

Any woman could have flagged this as an issue before this hit the public.

PhearTheCeal• 2 years ago

When I read that text my first thought was making some videos of my mom that passed away, since so few videos of her exist and pictures don't capture her personality

schlick• 2 years ago

This is a Black Mirror episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back

garrettgarcia2• 2 years ago

The fact that your first thought was how you could use this amazing tech to remember a lost family member who you love, and OP's first thought was that it could be used for evil so it shouldn't exist says a ton about each of you.

thwarted• 2 years ago

How would videos created from photos, photos that didn't capture her personality, show her personality?

dagmx2• 2 years ago

Meta aren’t exactly known for responsible use of technology.

I would expect nothing less of Zuck than to imbue a culture of “tech superiority at all costs” and only focus on the responsible aspect when it can be a sales element.

typeofhuman• 2 years ago

I'm surprised this hasn't already been done (or I'm not aware of it)...

Step 1. Train AI on pornographic videos

Step 2. Feed AI images of your ex

Step 3. Profit

azinman23• 2 years ago

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/08/technology/deepfake-ai-nu...

bozhark• 2 years ago

why be weird and use real people for reference?

why be extra weird and use a personal reference?

roywiggins2• 2 years ago

it very much has been done

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake_pornography

kredd2• 2 years ago

Pretty much anyone that I’ve talked to that somewhat works in AI industry, the attitude is “let it rip right now, and deal with the consequences as it’s going to happen one way or another”. I’m not sure where I stand on this issue, but the reality is, it’s inevitable whether we want it or not.

osmsucks• 2 years ago

Ah, the usual "if we don't do it, someone else will".

tivert• 2 years ago

but the reality is, it’s inevitable whether we want it or not.

The "inevitability" of it is mostly a function of the (self-serving) belief that it is inevitable.

Basically, you just cited a bunch of moral cop-outs.

lostmsu• 2 years ago

Your dream $11.99 kitchen knife! Perfect for stabbing! IT IS REAL!

* product made without use of AI or any unnatural components. pure mountain iron

gcr2• 2 years ago

joking aside, i do think that as AI continues to pervade public consciousness, we will start to see some creators market their products as being "AI-free" or somesuch, for better or worse. It's like lemon market virtue signaling.

meiraleal3• 2 years ago

One positive aspect of it is that at some point people will just not care about nudes. Which is better for the victims of rageporn, not worse.

darepublic2• 2 years ago

The problem with gen AI right now is it still feels fairly obvious. There are numerous YouTube channels that primarily rely on gpt for the visuals. And I don't like them.

AzzyHN• 2 years ago

Obvious to many, but not most, if Facebook is anything to go by

tiborsaas3• 2 years ago

I know people who use it day to day in their production workflow for ads and installations. You'd never know if they wouldn't break it down for you. Imagine 1 second scenes which happens so fast your bran just accepts it as "hand made" or professional job. 90% of it was generative AI, but the "good news" is that it still required a human editor who just happened to save a ton of time to make something that wasn't commercially viable because the client wouldn't paid for it otherwise.

animanoir2• 2 years ago

wow more useless tech

smusamashah2• 2 years ago

One extra clip on their blog post

https://ai.meta.com/blog/movie-gen-media-foundation-models-g...

zoogeny5• 2 years ago

I wonder how they will package this as a product. I mean, there is some advantage to keeping the tool proprietary and wrapping it in a consumer product for Instagram/Facebook.

What I hope (since I am building a story telling front-end for AI generated video) is that they consider b2c and selling this as a bulk service over an api.

takinola3• 2 years ago

The obvious use case for Meta is content generation. They provide the tools to content creators who create new content to post on Facebook/Instagram which increases Meta’s ad inventory

alexawarrior4• 2 years ago

It is important to note, no matching audio dialog, or even an attempt at something like dialog. This seems to be way beyond current full video generation models.

modeless• 2 years ago

Did I miss it or did they not say anything about letting people actually use these models, let alone open sourcing them?

intended11• 2 years ago

Man, everyone is happy with these advancements, and they are impressive.

I’m here looking at users and wondering - the content pipelines are broader, but the exit points of attention and human brains are constant. How the heck are you supposed to know if your content is valid?

During a recent apple event, someone on YT had an AI generated video of Tim Cook announcing a crypto collaboration; it had a 100k users before it was taken down.

Right now, all the videos of rockets falling on Israel can be faked. Heck, the responses on the communities are already populated by swathes of bots.

It’s simply cheaper to create content and overwhelm society level filters we inherited from an era of more expensive content creation.

Before anyone throws the sink at me for being a Luddite or raining on the parade - I’m coming from the side where you deal with the humans who consume content, and then decide to target your user base.

Yes, the vast majority of this is going to be used to create lovely cat memes and other great stuff.

At the same time, it takes just 1 post to act as a lightning rod and blow up things.

Edit:

From where I sit, there are 3 levels of issues.

1) Day to day arguments - this is organic normal human stuff

2) Bad actors - this is spammers, hate groups, hackers.

3) REALLY Bad actors - this is nation states conducting information warfare. This is countries seeding African user bases with faked stories, then using that as a basis for global interventions.

This is fake videos of war crimes, which incense their base and overshadow the harder won evidence of actual war crimes.

This doesn’t seem real, but political forces are about perception, not science and evidence.

yieldcrv• 2 years ago

I only care about being able to express myself more easily

Maybe get a job where interviewers are biased against my actual look and pedigree

Just ignore everyone else’s use of the tool

mitthrowaway26• 2 years ago

Just ignore everyone else’s use of the tool

That's precisely the hard part!

AyyEye• 2 years ago

The Information Bomb. There's a reason military types and spooks are joining the boards of OpenAI and friends.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203092.The_Information_B...

After the era of the atomic bomb, Virilio posits an era of genetic and information bombs which replace the apocalyptic bang of nuclear death with the whimper of a subliminally reinforced eugenics. We are entering the age of euthanasia.

BizarroLand• 2 years ago

There is some credence to the idea that the third reich was only possible due to mass media. Radio, television, and movie theatres broadcasting and rebroadcasting information onto a populace that did not have experience with media overload and therefore had no resistance to it.

Not attempting to justify their actions or the outcomes, just that media itself is and has been long known to be a powerful weapon, like the fabled story of a city besieged by a greater army, who opened their gates to the invaders knowing that the invaders were lead by a brilliant strategist.

The invader strategist, seeing the gates open, deduced that there must be a giant army laying in wait and that the gates being open were a trap, and so they turned and left.

Had they entered they would have won easily, but the medium of communication, an open gate before an advancing horde, was enough in and of itself to turn the tide of a pitched battle.

When we reach the point where we can never believe what we see or hear or think on our own, how will we ever fight?

coldcode• 2 years ago

Also, cost. How many do you have to generate to get something you want? Does it take 1 or a 100 attempts to get something reasonable, and what does it cost for each attempt? Might not affect Hollywood, but someone has to pay for this to be profitable for Meta. How many 5-Gigawatt power stations will be required (what OpenAI wants to build all over the country) if lots of people use this?

intended11• 2 years ago

Hopefully this becomes the limiting factor, however generating more power isn’t that hard - and it doesn’t solve the rate of production issue.

paganel• 2 years ago

A State-actor could have already done that manipulation using CGI or something. The answer is not to trust the people and persons who one sees as not to be trusted. As per your Israel example, I don’t personality trust them because I have low levels of trust in genocidal regimes, so even if IDF-asset Gal Gadot were to come to my door and tell me that I won a million dollars I would just slam-shut the door in her face, never mind her and her ilk trying to convince me and people like me through videos posted on the internet of whatever it is they are trying to convince people of.

Again, plain common sense just works, most of the times.

csomar• 2 years ago

The solution to that is to make models both open weight and open source. That will equalize the level playing field.

rolisz• 2 years ago

How will that help? How will uncle Joe be able to tell fake videos better with an open source model?

bee_rider6• 2 years ago

So what’s the plan to level the playing field in that case? Give everybody an equal amount of compute and ask them what sort of propaganda they’d like to have theirs contribute to?

tsimionescu4• 2 years ago

We are at a crossroads of technology, where we're still used to the idea that audio and video are decent proof that something happened, in a way in which we don't generally trust written descriptions of an event. Generative AI will be a significant problem for a while, but this assumption that audio/video is inherently trustable will relatively soon (in the grand scheme of things) go away, and we'll return to the historical medium.

We've basically been living in a privileged and brief time in human history for the last 100-200 years, where you could mostly trust your eyes and years to learn about events that you didn't directly witness. This didn't exist before photography and phonograms: if you didn't witness an event personally, you could only rely on trust in other human beings that told you about it to know of it actually happened. The same will soon start to be true again, if it isn't already: a million videos from random anonymous strangers showing something happening will mean nothing, just like a million comments describing it mean nothing today.

This is not a brave new world of post-truth such as the world has never seen before. It is going back to basically the world we had before photo, video, and sound recordings.

bee_rider6• 2 years ago

That’s an interesting thought.

I think I would not like to live in a world in which democracy isn’t the predominant form of government. The ability of the typical person to understand and form their own opinions about the world is quite important to democracy, and journalism does help with that. But I guess the modern version of image and video heavy journalism wasn’t the only thing we had the whole time; even as recent as the 90’s (I’m pretty sure; I was just a kid), newspapers were a major source. And somehow America was invented before photojournalism, but of course that form of democracy would be hard for us to recognize nowadays…

It is only when we got these portable video screens that stuff like YouTube and TikTok became really important news sources (for better or worse; worse I would say). And anyway, people already manage to take misleading or out of context videos, so it isn’t like the situation is very good.

Maybe AI video will be a blessing in disguise. At some point we’ll have to give up on believe something just because we saw it. I guess we’ll have to rely on people attesting to information, that sort of thing. With modern cryptography I guess we could do that fairly well.

Edit: Another way of looking at it: basically no modern journalist or politician has a reputation better than an inanimate object, a photos or video. That’s a really bizarre situation! We’re used to consulting people on hard decisions, right? Not figuring out everything by direct observation.

dguest• 2 years ago

It's not all the way back as long as solid encryption exists: Tim Cook could digitally sign his announcements, and assuming we can establish his signature (we had signatures and stamps 200 years ago) video proof still works.

So we're not going all the way back, but the era of believing strangers because they have photographic or video proof is drawing to a close.

kurthr• 2 years ago

I'd argue it's a step or two more manipulative. Not only do bad actors have the ability to generate moving images which are default believed by many, they also have the ability to measure the response over large populations, which lets them tune for the effect they want. One step more is building response models for target groups so that each can receive tailored distraction/outrage materials targeted to them. Further, the ability to replicate speech patterns and voice for each of your trusted humans with fabricated material is already commonplace.

True endstage adtech will require attention modeling of individuals so that you can predict target response before presenting optimized material.

It's not just a step back, it's a step into black. Each person has to maintain an encrypted web of trust and hope nobody in their trust ring is compromised. Once they are, it's not clear even in person conversations aren't contaminated.

whiplash4515• 2 years ago

Interesting thought. An alternative is a world where we can securely sign captured medium.

ixtli• 2 years ago

I feel as though i am honor-bound to say that this isn't new and we havent really been living in a place where we can trust in the way you claim. Its simply that every year it rapidly becomes more and more clear that there is no "original". you're not wrong i just think its important for people who care about such things to realize this the result of a historical process which has been going on longer than we've all been alive. in fact, it likely started at the beginning of the 100-200 year period you're talking about, but its origins are much much older than that.

read simulacra and simulation: https://0ducks.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/simu...

or this essay from pre-war germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...

intended11• 2 years ago

Which was the era of insular beliefs, rank superstition and dramatically less use of human potential.

I feel that it’s not appreciated, that we are (were) part of an information ecosystem / market, and this looks like the dawn of industrial scale information pollution. Like firms just dumping fertilizer into the waterways with no care to the downstream impacts, just a concern for the bottom line.

stann• 2 years ago

Yeah... African users... oh poor infantile, gullible, creatures... so incapable of discerning truth from falsehood are the ones to be fooled by generative AI...I get the gist

smallerize• 2 years ago

It's just something to put ads next to. Selling ad spots is the business, and investors demand an increase even if they already have 3.5 billion pairs of eyeballs. https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/

echoangle5• 2 years ago

This will just lead to people not taking videos as evidence anymore. Just like images of war crime aren’t irrefutable evidence due to staging and photoshop, videos will lose their worth as evidence. Which is actually a good thing in some instances. If someone blackmails you with nudes/explicit videos, you can just ignore it and claim it’s fake.

staticman2• 2 years ago

Before photography was invented, mass communications was all just words on paper, right?

How would you know that the British burned down the white house in 1812? Anyone could fake a paper document saying it so. (Except many people were illiterate.)

As far as I can see you need institutions you can trust.

intended11• 2 years ago

Everyone is focusing on photography.

1) it’s not the tech. It’s the rate of production. You had only 1 newspaper, no mass media, and boatloads of time in the 1800s

2) Before photography was created we lived in a world steeped in superstition, inequality and ignorance. A tiny economy compared to what we have today.

3) humanity changed with the advent of photography. It ushered in a new standard of proof that modern society depends on to this day.

baxtr• 2 years ago

If this was true, why haven’t we seen it with manipulated pictures?

Maybe I’m not well informed but there seem to be no example for the issues you describe with photos.

I believe it’s actually worse than you think. People believe in narratives, in stories, in ideas. These spread.

It has been like this forever. Text, pictures, videos are merely ways to proliferate narratives. We dismiss even clear evidence if it doesn’t fit our beliefs and we actively look for proof for what we think is the truth.

If you want to "fight" back you need to start on the narrative level, not on the artifact level.

intended11• 2 years ago

We have seen it with manipulation of pictures.

Hell - look of the fate of the rest of the world online. They’re basically thrown to the fucking wolves.

Minorities are lynched around the world after viral forwards. Autocrats are stronger than ever and authoritarian regimes have flourished like never before.

Trust and safety tools are vastly stronger for English than any other language. See the language resource gap (lost in translation, Nicholas and Bhatia)

In America, the political divide has reached levels unimaginable. People live in entirely different realities.

Images from democrats sides are dismissed as faked and lies take so long to discredit that the issue has passed on, tiring fact checkers and the public.

The original fake news problem of Romanian advert farms focused entirely on conservative citizens.

pk-protect-ai• 2 years ago

It is really amazing how consistent this model is in demo videos about world object details over time. This spatial comprehension is really spooky and super amazing at the same time. I hope Meta will release this model with open weights and open code, as they have done for the LLaMA models.

ein0p2• 2 years ago

Problem is, the moment they release weights someone will fine tune it to generate porn, including CP. So I wouldn’t hold my breath for the weights release - no legal dept will sign off on something with this much fallout potential.

chasing• 2 years ago

Periodic generative AI reminder:

It will not make you creative. It will not give you taste or talent. It is a technical tool that will mostly be used to produce cheap garbage unless you develop the skills to use it as a part of your creative toolkit -- which should also include many, many other things.

Juliate• 2 years ago

Impressive but meh.

Impressive on the relative quality of the output. And of the productivity gains, sure.

But meh on the substance of it. It may be a dream for (financial) producers. For the direct customers as well (advertisement obviously, again). But for creators themselves (who are to be their own producers at some point, for some)?

On the maker side, art/work you don't sweat upon has little interest and emotional appeal. You shape it about as much as it shapes you.

On the viewer side, art that's not directed and produced by a human has little interest, connection and appeal as well. You can't be moved by something that's been produced by someone or something you can't relate to. Especially not a machine. It may have some accidental aesthetic interest, much like generative art had in the past. But uninhabited by someone's intent, it's just void of anything.

I know it's not the mainstream opinion, but Generative AI every day sounds more and more like cryptocurrencies and NFTs and these kinds of technologies that did not find _yet_ their defining problem to which they could be a solution.

azinman23• 2 years ago

Unless I'm missing something, this technology's harmful potential outweighs the good. What is the great outcome from it that makes society better? MORE content? TikTok already shows that you can out-influence Hollywood/governments in 10 seconds with your smartphone. Heck, you can cause riots through forwarding text messages on WhatsApp [1]. Not everything that can be done should be done, and I think this is just too harmful for people to work on. I wish we'd globally ban it.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/whatsapp-in-india-scourge-of-violence-...

paul79864• 2 years ago

I agree with Neil Degrasse Tyson AI will kill the Internet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAuDmBYwLq4

Though maybe there's hope if..

1. All deepfake image & video tech are enforced to add watermark labels & all websites that publish are force to label fake too.

2. Crazy idea but a govt issued Internet ID (ID.me is closest to that now with having to use to file taxes with the IRS) where your personal repuation and credit score are affected by publishing fake/scam/spam crap on the Internet ..affectively helping to destroy it. I want good actors on the web not ones that are out for a buck and in turn destroying it.

echoangle5• 2 years ago

1. will never happen, it’s way too interesting that people won’t try to make an open source version where the watermark can easily be removed by users. Unless you actually criminalize it and put people in jail multiple years for building anything close to deepfakes, you won’t be able to prevent that.

edmundsauto2• 2 years ago

TikTok already shows that you can out-influence Hollywood/governments in 10 seconds with your smartphone

I can accept the premise that TikTok is trying to do this. Do we have any objective measurement on how effective it has been?

azinman23• 2 years ago

There’s literally non stop article and studies on misinformation of every category. The evidence is beyond abundant.

I’m not suggesting TikTok themselves is trying to do this, but it (and twitter, instagram, facebook, etc etc) is shaping people’s world views.

moomoo11• 2 years ago

This is great. Honestly imagine we get to a point this technology makes most things so demystified we move on to things that are more difficult.

Like cool a movie doesn’t need to cost $200 million or whatever.

Imagine if those creative types were freed up to do something different. What would we see? Better architecture and factories? Maybe better hospitals?

tyjen• 2 years ago

While we're still a fair distance away from creating polished products capable of replacing Hollywood gatekeeping; the bursting of the creative dam is on the horizon and it's exciting! I'm looking forward to when you can write a script and effectively make your own series or movie. Tweaking it as you go to fit your vision without the exhausting a large amount of resources, capital, and human networking to produce similar products pre-AI.

ramshanker• 2 years ago

It feels like in the field of AI, a major advancement happens every month now!

benabbott• 2 years ago

Things are about to get weird. We can't control this at any level:

At the level of image/video synthesis: Some leading companies have suggested they put watermarks in the content they create. Nice thought, but open source will always be an option, and people will always be able to build un-watermarked tools.

At the level of law: You could attempt to pass a law banning image/video generation entirely, or those without watermarks, but same issue as before– you can't stop someone from building this tech in their garage with open-source software.

At the level of social media platforms: If you know how GANs work, you already know this isn't possible. Half of image generation AI is an AI image detector itself. The detectors will always be just about as good as the generators- that's how the generators are able to improve themselves. It is, I will not mince words, IMPOSSIBLE to build an AI detector that works longterm. Because as soon as you have a great AI content classifier, it's used to make a better generator that outsmarts the classifier.

So... smash the looms..?

dinfinity2• 2 years ago

The challenge is to determine what is real, not what is fake.

I think cryptographic signing and the classic web of trust approaches are going to prove the most valuable tools in doing so, even if they're definitely not a panacea.

lytedev• 2 years ago

This comes up a lot. Because synthesis is so generally feasible plus the existence of very powerful editing tools for things like movies and whatnot, I'm guessing that it will simply become the norm to assume that any image, sound, movie, or whatever may be fake. I expect there won't be a way to verify something was synthesised or "real-synthesized" (since images and videos are ultimately synthesized themselves, just from reality instead of other synthesized content). Even with signing and web of trust we can only verify who is publishing something, but not the method of synthesis.

williamcotton3• 2 years ago

The web of trust doesn't seem to scale! All of the online social platforms trend towards centralization for identify verification.

In my (historically unpopular) opinion we have two optional choices outside of but still allowing for this anonymous free-for-all:

A private company like Facebook uses a privileged system of identification and authentication based on login/password/2FA and relying on state-issued identification verification,

OR, what I feel is better, a public institution that uses a common system based on PKI and state-issued identification, eg, the DMV issuing DoD Common Access Cards.

Trusting districts and nation-states could sign each other's issuing authorities.

The benefits are multifaceted! It helps authenticate the source of deep fakes. It helps fight astroturfing, foreign or otherwise. It helps to remove private companies fueled by advertising revenue from being in a privileged position of identification, etc, etc.

I totally understand any downvotes but I would prefer if you instead engaged me in this conversation if you disagree.

I'd love to have this picked apart instead of just feeling bummed out.

farleykr• 2 years ago

I think pretty soon we will get to the point where there’s some sort of significant boundary at all levels between online and real life because the only way to be sure you’re seeing something real is to be interacting with it in real life. The internet will not be something you visit on a web browser to get information but will become a place you go where you will simply have to acknowledge that nothing is real. Obviously that’s a concern now but I wonder if we’ll get to a point where it’s taken for granted at large that whatever you see on the internet just isn’t real. And I wonder what implications that will have.

afro88• 2 years ago

It is, I will not mince words, IMPOSSIBLE to build an AI detector that works longterm

Like pretty much any tool involving detection of / protection from erroneous things, it's forever a cat and mouse game. There will always be new viruses, jailbreaks, banned content, 0-days etc. AI detection is no different.

layer84• 2 years ago

Just stop taking any video you see at face value? People managed without videos before video cameras were available, and the written word was never reliable to start with. Maybe the future won’t be that different?

slg• 2 years ago

Except that time "before video cameras" didn't coincide with a time in which everyone had a magic device in our pocket that allowed anyone to send a firehose of propaganda our way.

If yellow newspapers were able to push us to war despite us knowing that "the written word was never reliable to start with", what will be the impact of the combination of this technology and the internet used against a population that has been conditioned over generations to trust video.

hoten• 2 years ago

good advice for internet citizens (too bad the uptake will be too slow). but doesn't address how courts and law should function.

mitthrowaway26• 2 years ago

So this is basically a regression to a 19th-century level in terms of being able to trust and understand reporting on the world beyond our own front door. People managed before photographic and video evidence was a thing; you could use eyewitness reports from trusted friends and news on the official telegraphs, to the extent that those were trustworthy. But it's certainly still a big step backward from the 20th century, that brief window of time where it was much easier to record physical evidence of an event than to fake it.

mikeshi42• 2 years ago

I agree the cat is out of the bag, but GANs do not work like that. One of the common failure modes in training a GAN is that the discriminator gets too powerful too quickly and the generator then can no longer learn.

Hard to say anything is impossible off of one point - but discrimination afaik is generally seen as the easier problem of the two, given you only need to give a binary output as opposed to a continuous one.

elwell3• 2 years ago

IMPOSSIBLE to build an AI detector that works longterm

    return Math.random() < Math.pow(0.5, (new Date()).getFullYear() - 2023) ? "Not AI" : "AI";

This should increase in accuracy over time.

mitthrowaway26• 2 years ago

It turns out that "return 'AI'" is a better strategy when the probability is above 50%: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/msJA6B9ZjiiZxT6EZ/lawful-unc...

tintor2• 2 years ago

Possible option is for cameras to digitally sign the original video as it is being recorded.

mistercheph2• 2 years ago

Oi mate, you 'ave a license for producing cryptographic signatures to embed on that footage?

cloverich• 2 years ago

My favorite idea that nobody is talking about is how news organizations are about to get a second life. As soon as it becomes actually impossible to distinguish AI content from human content, news organizations will have the opportunity to provide that layer of analysis in a way that potentially can't be (easily) automated. They are ironically against it but IDK maybe they should be excited about it. Would love someone to poke holes in this.

Y_Y• 2 years ago

I have the same suspicion, though I wonder if they won't immediately try to "cut open the golden goose" and decide that misusing why about it trust for short term gain is favorable (for the person making the decision, if not the organization).

sleepybrett3• 2 years ago

Nice thought, but open source will always be an option, and people will always be able to build un-watermarked tools.

Thats why you make it punishable by potential prison time if you create/disseminate an non watermarked video generated in this way.

bitbasher• 2 years ago

If social media was the scourge of the last decade, the next decade's scourge will be artificial content.

Digital minimalism is looking more and more attractive.

bamboozled5• 2 years ago

Sitting in my workshop drinking a cup of tea on a break from making some new saw horses and reading these comments. I’m just so grateful I can do something with my hands, I’m delighted, couldn’t be happier.

If the world ends tomorrow. I’m ok so long as I’m not wasting it on Instagram shit post filled with fake content when it goes down.

rootedbox• 2 years ago

Did this website kill anyone else’s phone?

mucle6• 2 years ago

The text to modify a video looks so cool

tomw1808• 2 years ago

Why does it look ... fake?

Before you downvote, don't get this as a belittling the effort and all the results, they are stunning, but as a sincere question.

I do plenty of photography, I do a lot of videography. I know my way around Premiere Pro, Lightroom and After Effects. I also know a decent amount about computer vision and cg.

If I look at the "edited" videos, they look fake. Immediately. And not a little bit. They look like they were put through a washing machine full of effects: too contrasty, too much gamma, too much clarity, too low levels, like a baby playing with the effect controls. Can't exactly put my fingers on, but comparing the "original" videos to the ones that simply change one element, like the "add blue pom poms to his hands", it changes the whole video, and makes the whole video a bit cartooney, for lack of a better word.

I am simply wondering why?!

Is that a change in general through the model that processes the video? Is that something that is easy to get rid of in future versions, or inherently baked into how the model transforms the video?

slashdave• 2 years ago

The models produce a form of average video, but with artificial sharpness added for a form of consistency. A truly and consistently original image requires something these models do not have, which is a world model.

davedx• 2 years ago

This is just the landing page for a research paper? It's hard to understand what the actual production capabilities of this are.

jmakov• 2 years ago

Wonder what a AI generated movie from the same script as original would look like.

yorozu• 2 years ago

(commented on wrong thread somehow)

mistercheph2• 2 years ago

Wrong thread :)

phkahler• 2 years ago

The kids kite is flying backwards....

seydor• 2 years ago

I can finally watch Star Wars the Smurfs edition

greybox• 2 years ago

At what point did someone look at this and think: "Ah yes, this will be good for humanity right now" ?

oblio3• 2 years ago

That person would have been fired :-(

afh14• 2 years ago

Seems to have great potential in the VFX industry, for one thing.

tim3332• 2 years ago

I don't think it works like that. It's more "Hey! This tech can make funky videos"

tqi3• 2 years ago

A lot of folks in this thread have mentioned that the problem with the current generation of models is that only 1 in (?) prompts returns something useful. Isn't that exactly what a reward model is supposed to help improve? I'm not an ML person by any means so the entire concept of reward models feels like creating something from nothing, so very curious to understand more.

jprete2• 2 years ago

Bear in mind these systems have already been through the reward-based training, and these are the results that are good enough to show in public.

deisteve3• 2 years ago

I'm not so sure how much that is relevant to Meta Movie Gen. I've tried all the tools: Luma, Runway, Kling

Luma is by far the worst and relatively compared to Runway and Kling by far produces the worst quality and unstable video. Runway has that distinctive "photo in the foreground with animated background" signature that turns many off.

Kling and Runway share that same "picture stability" issue that is rampant requiring several prompts before getting something usable (note I don't even include Luma because its output just isn't competitive imho).

This Meta Movie Gen seems to make heavy usage of SAM2 model which gets me super excited as I've always thought that would bring about that spatiotemporal golden chalice we always wanted, evident by the prompt based editing and tracking of objects in the scene (incredible achievement btw).

Until I have the tool ready to try I will withhold any prejudgements but from my own personal experiences with generative video, this Meta movie gen is quite possibly SOTA.

I simply have not seen this level of stability and confidence in output. Resolutional quality aside (which already Kling and Runway are at top of the game), the sheer amount of training data that Meta must have at disposal must be far more than what Kling (scrapes almost the entirety of Western content, copyrights be damned) and Runway can ever hope to acquire, plus the top notch talented researchers and deep learning experts they house and feed, makes me very optimistic that Meta and/or Google will achieve SOTA across the board.

Microsoft on the other hand has been puttering along by going all in on OpenAI (above, below and beside) which has been largely disappointing in terms of deliverability and performance and trying to stifle competition and protect its feeble economic moat via the recently failed regulatory capture attempt.

TLDR: this is quite possibly SOTA and Meta/Google have far more training data then anybody in the existing space. Luma is trash.

gitaarik6• 2 years ago

Which AI's allow you to keep training the model? Most are pre-trained without you knowing how. If you use an open source LLM, you could probably do it, but then you already need to have a lot more understanding of it, and be more technical, and have proper hardware. Most AI's I have seen and worked with don't have an option to keep training it. You just use the model as-is, possibly with a initial prompt to tell the AI in what kind of fashion it should respond.

sleepybrett3• 2 years ago

It should be federal law that any video created with GenAI should be watermarked both stenographically and visually. (Same goes for images and audio.. not sure what can be done about ascii)

rolux3• 2 years ago

Stenography is writing in shorthand. What you mean is steganography.

You can also watermark plain text by generating "invisible" patterns.

Of course, in all these cases, the watermarks are trivial to remove: just re-encode the output with an open model. Which is why I hope there will be no federal law that tries to enforce something that is categorically unenforceable.

sleepybrett3• 2 years ago

yes sorry, i think autocorrect got me when I wsn't looking.

If the feds catch you removing watermarks you go to prison. Problem solved.

qwery2• 2 years ago

What can you even say about this stuff? It's another incremental improvement, good job Mark. These new video clips of yours are certainly something. I don't know how you do it. Round of applause for Mark!

I will now review some of the standout clips.

That alien thing in the water is horrifying. The background fish look pretty convincing, except for the really flamboyant one in the dark.

I guess I should be impressed that the kite string seems to be rendered every frame and appears to be connected between the hand and the kite most of the time. The whole thing is really stressful though.

drunk sloth with weirdly crisp shadow should take the top slot from girl in danger of being stolen by kite.

man demonstrates novel chain sword fire stick with four or five dimensions might be better off in the bin...

The camera is behind a man. The man is shirtless, wearing a green cloth around his waist. He is barefoot. With a fiery object in each hand, he creates wide circular motions. A calm sea is in the background. The atmosphere is mesmerizing, with the fire dance.

This just reads like slightly clumsy lyrics to a lost Ween song.

hcks2• 2 years ago

Round of applause for this useless unsubstantiated comment

chaos_emergent• 2 years ago

it's totally wild that your first response is shitting on flaws rather than having your jaw drop at machines producing coherent videos from text.

This is _the worst that machines will ever be at this task_, and most of the improvements that need to be made are a matter of engineering ingenuity, which can be translated to research dollars.

salmonet• 2 years ago

This is Hacker News. That comment was way more positive than I expected for something like this and so I assumed this must be pretty awesome

qwery2• 2 years ago

It certainly wasn't my intent to trash the whole thing, so I'm sorry it came across that way. They've done well. They combined a whole bunch of techniques in a new way, or at least in a better way than we've seen before. I don't think you should be surprised to see these results today.

This is _the worst that machines will ever be at this task_

This is wrong. We've seen worse and we've seen far, far worse -- what I mean is that we've seen plenty of iterative development in video generation. Even if you only consider machine-learning based video from text prompts. Then consider other generative systems as well as other video research and technology like motion interpolation, depth map generation, etc.. It's an extremely active field.

cageface• 2 years ago

The fact that this is the worst machines are at something doesn’t necessarily imply they will eventually get much better at it.

mempko• 2 years ago

Hippos can't swim. Things are about to get weird where people will start believing strange things. We already have people believing Trump helped people during the hurricane, with images of him wading through water (that are clearly AI generated if you look close enough). We are going to get a form of model collapse at not just the AI level, but societal one.

garrettgarcia2• 2 years ago

Harry Potter-style moving pictures are now a reality.

swayvil• 2 years ago

Just feed it a book?

throw3108222• 2 years ago

The porntential is immense.

Seriously though. This is the company that is betting hard on VR goggles. And these are engines that can produce real time dreams, 3d, photographic quality, obedient to our commands. No 3d models needed, no physics simulations, no ray tracing, no prebuilt environments and avatars. All simply dreamed up in real time, as requested by the user in natural language. It might be one of the most addictive technologies ever invented.

afh14• 2 years ago

Or a multi billion dollar fluke like the Metaverse. Time will tell.

complianceowl2• 2 years ago

Hahahaha. I think Websters Dictionary may be interested in hiring you.

skywhopper2• 2 years ago

That’s not how dictionaries work.

jiggawatts• 2 years ago

Did you just pornify a word?

jsyang00• 2 years ago

Meta is already a target for regulators - they are going to have to be very careful around this. I think this is why the "metaverse" is still more likely to be decentralized than created by a tech giant. Even if Meta wanted to take a libertarian, "dream whatever you want", stance or even a "dream whatever you want so long as it is more or less legal" stance, they would see a regulatory deluge come pouring down on them. There is no way VR will be able to go mainstream without a drawn out fight over content prohibitions. I think the early internet was a bit of a historical outlier in this sense, where it happened to come about when a relatively laissez-faire attitude towards censorship was prevailing and people did not realize the full impact it would have. That is not the case now. People understand on all sides that this technology has the potential to revolutionize our systems of social relations once again, and I suspect that they will be fighting tooth and nail to shape that outcome as they most desire.

throw3108222• 2 years ago

There is no way VR will be able to go mainstream without a drawn out fight over content prohibitions

Could be, but it's a bit dystopian to imagine that the government would have a say on the images you can generate- locally and in realtime- and send straight to your own eyes, don't you think? Dystopian and very difficult to enforce, too.

TranquilMarmot5• 2 years ago

Sorry, but it's probably just going to be used for ads.

zyl1n• 2 years ago

All the pieces are in place to create a primitive holodeck. I hope meta continues to invest/burn billions in this space.

knicholes• 2 years ago

Just wait until content is generated based on dopamine release rates or brain signals instead of through text.

sanj• 2 years ago

Hippos don't float.

zamadatix• 2 years ago

When the comments range from "it's the demise of the world" to "it doesn't look quite right" (and everything in-between) you get a sense of just how early we are into this decade's "big new tech thing".

lucasyvas• 2 years ago

Well I wouldn't have called it, but I think Meta is in the lead. They beat Apple to AR and affordable VR. Their AI tooling has basically caught up to OpenAI and at this rate will pass them - is anyone else even playing? Maybe their work culture is just better suited to realizing these technologies than the others.

They're not really showing signs of slowing down either. Hey, Zuck, always thought you were kind of lame in the past. But maybe you weren't a one trick pony after all.

the8472• 2 years ago

is anyone else even playing?

Deepmind. Protein folding and solving math problems is just less sexy.

TranquilMarmot5• 2 years ago

Most of the comments here talking about bad actors using this for misinformation, but they're ignoring what Meta does- it collects your information and it sells ads.

Especially based on the examples on this site, it's not a far reach to say that they will start to generate video ads of you (yes, YOU! your face! You've already uploaded hundreds of photos for them to reference!) using a specific product and showing how happy you are because you bought it. Imagine scrolling Instagram and seeing your own face smelling some laundry detergent or laughing because you took some prescription medicine.

bilekas• 2 years ago

This just seems to serpent eating its own tail and distopian to me, Facebook, a company where people share their own content like videos and pictures now generating content from nothing but AI. To what end?

bhouston• 2 years ago

Where can I download this model? Meta is the open source AI company right?

thriwster2• 2 years ago

Meta is not the open source AI company. LLaMa (or whatever capitialization that was) was leaked. They ran with that because hey it makes them stand out vs your "Open""AI" and Anthropic etc. But if strategy changes they will happily close the drawbridge. In other words it is a corporation and has no inherent persistent ethics.

eth0up• 2 years ago

Alright, I may or may not be a moron, but none of my versions of Firefox can connect to this site because 'some HSTS shit'.

Anyone able to update/inform a dinosaur?

terminatornet• 2 years ago

does anyone have an example of an AI generated video that's more than 10 seconds long that doesn't look like garbage? All of these tools seem to generate a weirdly zooming shot of something that turns a little bit and that's about it.

Anything longer than a single clip is just a bunch of these clips stitched together.

famahar2• 2 years ago

I've kinda given up on the internet at this point. It's sad but comforting. My social networks are just my friends and I've started to get back into reading books and long form blogs. Don't want to be exposed to this endless slop. Every day it gets harder to find something that was so easy before. It's all being buried by endless content. I'm hoping some non AI generative content branch of the internet will be created. Don't know if something like that is possible. Curation seems like the next best step.

vouaobrasil13• 2 years ago

I was thinking exactly that: a coalition of people who refuse to use AI, and who refuse to interact with or support others who do use AI. I actually work for Photography Life, and we have already committed to 100% AI free: no generative AI for articles and no gen AI for photos either. I also have a 100% AI-free commmitment on my YouTube channel. Procreate for iPad believes in no AI as well.

But we need more supporters. Place AI-free banners on your site if you have one and send me the link. Encourage others to declare their support against AI. Writing and art is about communicating what humans make because it transmits experience! We have to come together and refuse as much as possible to support those who use AI! Feel free to contact me if you want to collaborate!

deisteve3• 2 years ago

coalition makes it sound like its in the millions all coordinating together like these guys : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

underlipton3• 2 years ago

Turning it into a prohibition-style movement where using AI taints you forever unless your confess your sins and pledge total abstinence seems like the opposite for the group that wants to present itself as a return to sanity and moderation. It would be better to say, "Do what you want elsewhere, but we don't do that here."

If you want to go full-radical, bombing a few data centers would probably be more effective than being mean to randos who used Midjourney a few times.

martin82• 2 years ago

How do you protect your community from the inevitable arrival of trolls who try to blend in and poison your photo collections with AI generated ones, only so they can say "see? it's so good, they don't even notice!"

mrcwinn• 2 years ago

And yet here you are.

vouaobrasil13• 2 years ago

There's nothing wrong with using existing platforms to declare the problems of said platforms. To me the "and yet you are using the internet"-type replies sound rather defensive and shallow. The truth is, sometimes it is possible to dismantle the master's house using the master's tools. Do we not complain about our governments using the countries we live in or the tools provided by the government?

People who point out the deficiencies of technology sometimes must use said technology. Nothing wrong with that.

latexr4• 2 years ago

Mr Gotcha strikes again.

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

vagab0nd• 2 years ago

Imagine a herd of AI agents, indistinguishable from real human, are to interact with you and the content you create. Are you ok with it? Would you even care that they are not real people? Or maybe you'd even prefer them sometimes?

Because that's where we are headed.

chasd002• 2 years ago

If the AI agents are indistinguishable from humans then it doesn’t matter how you feel about them.

bko2• 2 years ago

It's just a technology. Much like you can still buy "hand made" shoes, there will be people that create curated hand made content. And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?

I really don't understand why there is so much negativity for a new technology. It's never explained, just taken as a fact and people bemoaning the new state of the world.

wilted-iris• 2 years ago

Technology is not neutral.

latexr4• 2 years ago

And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?

It does, yes. To use your own analogy, if one pays for an artisanal product and is served something out of a production line in a factory, that is fraud.

It's never explained

You’re not paying attention, it is often explained. One huge reason is that it devalues the work of artists who are already struggling to make any money by using their own work as a base without compensation. It’s not hard to find explanations if you really care to spend 5 seconds typing it into a search engine. Heck, I bet that if you asked an LLM, it’d tell you.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/zn2e3c/eli5_why_do...

javajosh• 2 years ago

Subjectively, I find that the infusion of AI content makes the general internet experience worse. Have you ever researched something to find a video that is AI generated with an AI generated voice? It is the SEO spam of video. I think that platforms will go through several phases in their relationship to AI: first, they will like the artificially increased "content creator" numbers. Second, they will like the increase in short term engagement. Third, they will very much dislike the sharp decrease in long term engagement as the market finds whoever can filter low-quality results the best.

mxfh• 2 years ago

It's that I can't be forced to care about stuff the people that commissioned it, didn't even bother read, review or fact check.

Everything feels like the laziest grind imaginable. For every Harry Potter goes to Berghain, there is an infinite amount of slop making it harder to find good content. Not even mentioning the biases baked into the model and copyright/IP issues and limitations.

To me generated content triggers the same cringy feelings, like those unrequested flash holiday e-cards in your mailbox in 2010. At least those wellmeaning people didn't know better back then.

itishappy2• 2 years ago

I distinguish between content and high effort content. I like both! AI generated content is fine, whatever, but slap an AI generated scene into a woodworking video and you bet it matters to me.

I'm surprised you've never heard any explanations. Here are my personal thoughts on the matter (har har):

https://chatgpt.com/share/6700aac4-8854-8004-b785-0784c6bfee...

koe123• 2 years ago

I feel as though people are concerned over a hypothetical.

Can anyone show me AI generated content that has fully replaced the alternative?

If this does exist, what exactly is the value that was lost if the “real” thing was so easily replaced?

taytus• 2 years ago

I'll tell you why. I think it's fair to say that most of the people who visit this site are technologists.

Most of us love technology. So why are people reacting like this?

Because we know how this will be used. We know of grifters and quick-buck schemes. We know that, unfortunately, the web as we know it is rapidly dying. We know of the scammers calling you with your loved ones' cloned voices.

We know how powerful this tech is, how easy it is, and how it will be misused.

huimang2• 2 years ago

And if they use AI and you can't tell the difference, does it really matter?

Yes. It devalues artists further (on top of only existing due to grand scale theft of art). It also is slop devoid of intention.

If that's not enough, it's ecologically devastating. I would rather not waste millions of gallons of water on slop that gets generated and thrown away.

jajko• 2 years ago

You are saying reality and fake reality are alike, because hey can you spot the difference?

Whole effin' Matrix movies premise was about that, remainder of human civilization rather went to suicidal fight than go back to more comfy fake illusion of reality.

When I watch videos from friends or generally people, I am interested in their actual experiences, not lies they try to push about how they wanted their experiences to look like. That's frankly pathetic, you may of course not share the same view but luckily its dominant view in this world.

When Mad max movies made most of their fights in real desert and it showed, god damn I had huge respect for all involved, thats an art. Green background just doesn't cut it.

You also recharge in same way looking at phone wallpaper (or look at it in VR) of some mountains of forest, or actually being there and touching the trees and rock? One is cheap fake junk, another is proper awesome reality that makes you feel alive like nothing. Can't grok why the fuck do I need to even explain this to somebody, my 4 year old son gets it very well.

jayd16• 2 years ago

Well ok, but there's plenty of crap knockoffs that you need to worry about when buying shoes. It's not about being anti-technology. It's about new content being lower quality. You can tell but it takes effort that wasn't necessary before.

mejutoco• 2 years ago

It is not about the technology being bad. IMO it is just a tool. The problem is that tool enables the pollution of good content because it makes so easy to spam everything. It feels like it will undo all the progress of pagerank and original google, and we will be back to altavista/internet portals days with curation.

traceroute662• 2 years ago

if they use AI and you can't tell the difference

Except you can tell the difference and you will always be able to tell the difference. Its the nature of the beast.

Throwing a bunch of content at AI and telling it to curate it is never going to be the same as a human that intimately knows it.

Its the same with GPT coding. You can always tell the difference between what the machine spat out in 20 seconds and what a knowledgable human would produce.

Artifical Intelligence is by definition artificial.

andrepd• 2 years ago

Yeah there's literally no reason why anyone should be wary at the harmful effects of social media and of AI slop.

unconed• 2 years ago

Never before has there been a technology that allows one to fake competency to this degree. This is occurring at a time when some people are bemoaning the general state of knowledge, the capacity for institutions to deliver on their goals and their mission, and the overall intelligence of the people supposedly in charge.

Along comes a tool that promises to take some of the hardest, most challenging tasks, like photorealistic art, or high quality code engineering, and replace them with slop.

Experts look at that slop and see garbage. Only people without experience, without a trained eye, without taste in code, will think it's great.

It represents a tyranny of juniors and entryists. Where "fake it until you make it" will never even reach the second part of that phrase.

The main thing that AI does, is make anything that comes out of it worthless. Infinite supply with nobody curating it.

makeitdouble3• 2 years ago

reading books

The harder part to me: "books" aren't great in average.

There's an ocean of garbage books basically mass produced by ghost writers, solely targeted at milking a socially hot topic or grifting.

There's an obesity epidemic ? Let's make 3000 new books repackaging classic diets under new catchy titles and see which sticks. AI is coming ? Let's throw money at anyone with a vaguely related blog and expand their 3 hot takes into 300 pages with a nice title and cover.

At the end of the day what we get in long form is often a stretched version of what was fitting into 3 tweets before they tried to monetize it in a book deal.

oscillatingpie• 2 years ago

There's more than a lifetime of good literature, good non-fiction, good genre fiction to read. No one is making you read dross.

beezlebroxxxxxx5• 2 years ago

The harder part to me: "books" aren't great in average.

If all you're looking for is any book, then sure. But if you have specific interests in mind, or you actually take the time to get beyond an HBR listicle of the "5 best books for [x] topic", you can find so many good books. Too many too read in a lifetime. It's just insane how many great books there are given how many books there are already and are published every year. Even just subscribing to a pub like the NYRB or LRB and reading the reviews/essays has made my TBR list explode with interesting books. Then you have the smaller academic or niche presses that are publishing some great, serious, academic or weirdo fiction stuff, stuff that has no marketing whatsoever.

At the end of the day what we get in long form is often a stretched version of what was fitting into 3 tweets before they tried to monetize it in a book deal.

Those books are very easy to spot. You can safely ignore 99% of Business, Productivity, Nutrition (add fitness), and pop-science, books, as you already noted. A lot of pre-internet books on those topics are fascinating, though, because they're usually written nothing at all like a blog post, and as examples that there has been very little world-changing written in those topics in the last 30-40 years.

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

Forums linked to real-world activities, with people posting real pictures, are doing fine. For example I'm on several car forums and life is all good there.

Bonus when there are "verified members" zones: for example on a car forum where another owner of a car of the same brand has to vet you in, certifying he saw you in real-life with a car from that brand.

Curation seems like the next best step.

I don't disagree.

bongodongobob• 2 years ago

The drama on this site regarding AI is absolutely hilarious. You'd think this group would be excited about game changing technology but well over half the crowd is crying over it. You deciding the Internet is broken or whatever is a you thing. The rest of humanity will continue to use, enjoy, and create new interesting stuff with it. As if most shit on the Internet hasn't been mostly trash to begin with. Even in the late 90s most of it was useless. Learn to adapt or drop out and cry I guess. Get a hobby. These tears over mind blowing tech is pathetic.

phito• 2 years ago

Sounds like they struck a nerve to make you this aggressive... I think the tech is cool. I also think it's making the web worse, because people use that tech to abuse the system.

gitaarik6• 2 years ago

Indeed, seems like a lot of people are getting old and conservative here ;)

bloqs• 2 years ago

Please try to take a less aggressive tone on HN, lest this become reddit

nocturnes• 2 years ago

It's possible to accept that a new tool is incredibly technically impressive while expressing concerns over how it may be deployed. Now feels like the right time to be having those conversations.

internet1010102• 2 years ago

It's cool and I use it sometimes. But I am jaded and have seen the next big thing come and go time and time again. I'll partake but I'm not going to be the one that eats the biscuit.

vachina• 2 years ago

Focus on in real life experiences, stop consuming low effort media.

WuxiFingerHold• 2 years ago

That was unavoidable. Your (and mine, btw.) reaction is healthy. I hope more people start to withdraw more from the virtual world. Once they do, many will recognize that it's become an addiction: The good feelings of discovering new things on the internet is gone long ago. What is left is the bad feeling, when we don't distract ourselves with it. A typical sign for addiction.

Back to the topic: I'm still worried by the huge danger of mass delusion. Commercially, but much more politically. How easy will it be to create fake movies of war scenes. There've been fake photos around for a long time. By setting up real scenarios and of course by "photoshopping". Now, there's not much left we can trust.

The good and only way out of this to learn to not trust anything you see on the internet or television. We need new ways of trusted communication.

the_gipsy2• 2 years ago

You're just getting old, man.

shinycode• 2 years ago

I feel that there always will be people loving their craft. Maybe their price will go higher but it also means they might work on more interesting projects because the crap ones will be generated by AI. It also means that commercials, ads will be customized for each person with all the informations gathered on that person, maybe every time. Dynamic video Ads, AI will unlock this potential (and I hope AI will also unlock the potential to definitely filter itself)

ur-whale• 2 years ago

I've started to get back into reading books and long form blogs

How do you know the books and blogs you're reading weren't generated by an AI?

famahar2• 2 years ago

Well there's countless books before AI, before the internet, before the computer to read. Blogs are a bit tricky but I just have to trust that the blogs I follow are writers that love writing and don't care about making mass appeal content.

jongjong• 2 years ago

Sadly, something I've realized is that, as the junk gets more abundant, most people's taste seems to get worse.

It's not only because of AI, it was a pre-existing trend. Just look at music, books, movies (can't really call them films anymore). Humans are becoming as soulless as machines. The machines are shaping us in their image, human consciousness will be extinct long before humanity becomes extinct physically.

danielbln5• 2 years ago

Is this a quote from Plato? Sure reads like something every single generation that aged out of the prime time has said.

saturn8601• 2 years ago

The cost of 'quality' is going up and people don't fully realize that they can't afford it anymore because it is being hidden from them.

Put another way: Anything that has benefited from Moore's law or the drop in energy prices (which itself benefits from moore's law)has been deflationary while anything that requires humans in the loop has become inflationary.

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/...

Music/Movies: In the future, the common person will have endless amount of AI slop to meet whatever they feel like watching. Sounds like abundance right? Well the rich will have real human actors/singers do performances at their behest and only they can afford it.

Books: This is already happening: AI will provide the answer to any question but people will not have the mental fortitude to derive the solution by learning the first principles manually. Its much easier for AI to provide you the direct answer instead of a breakdown of how it got to the answer and why. That requires enormous mental concentration(ie. learning). As a result they will further be enslaved by the AI and the few wealthy people will have access to humans that can truly teach them anything they want. An AI teacher for all is not the same as a human teacher.

stroupwaffle• 2 years ago

Yeah it’s tough. Could get the people to curate the content. Bookmarks used to be a sacred thing. I’m sure if we band together, the best sites are already known to someone, somewhere.

But yeah, read a book. Practice poetry. Go analog. It’s very rewarding!

ErigmolCt2• 2 years ago

We need a more thoughtful internet

_w1tm• 2 years ago

I'm hoping some non AI generative content branch of the internet will be created.

Social media has been filled with disinformation and bot generated slop for well over a decade. AI or not, the internet is turning into shit until we come up with ways to filter it out. Maybe we need to build a section of internet where we use identity verification, the anonymous internet has all been turned suspect by malicious actors.

petabyt2• 2 years ago

I'm sick of seeing this generative stuff. It's at least 50% of the content I see online these days. At this point it's so refreshing to see real photography and art, made by real humans. I hope we never lose that.

ninetyninenine2• 2 years ago

You’re not sick of it. Because 50 percent of the stuff you think isn’t generative actually is.

You love a lot of this generative stuff you just hate idea of knowing it’s generated.

petabyt2• 2 years ago

Sorry, but I've been doing photography for so many years I can easily tell the difference. I don't care if you don't believe me though. But yes, this is also about authenticity. There's a big difference between something that happened and something that didn't.

tracerbulletx• 2 years ago

The most powerful example for me is actually the rain one because it will probably be good enough for lower key effects shots like that to replace a lot of jobs there. More complex generations might look goofy for a while, but if it's good for sky replacement, pyrotechnics, and other line of work effects shots its going to be heavily disruptive.

woggy• 2 years ago

It's already bad, but the amount of garbage that is going to flood YouTube now is going to make it unusable.

cpill• 2 years ago

oh yeah, YouTube is a pristine environment right now

oblio3• 2 years ago

Yeah, but it's going to become 100x worse.

And for the average person, 1000x worse.

bamboozled5• 2 years ago

I’m already sick of all the bullshit thumbnails to be honest. It’s at the point where I feel like giving up my premium subscription.

gitaarik6• 2 years ago

You would maybe like this YouTube click-bait reducing browser plugin:

https://dearrow.ajay.app/

bufferoverflow• 2 years ago

No, it won't. Youtube is kind-of like Reddit or HN. "Good" stuff floats to the top, "bad" stuff disappears into nothing.

coolandsmartrr• 2 years ago

That quality filter may come from highly-tuned personalization.

I remember seeing low-quality but viral content on YouTube, so I kept telling it "Don't Recommend This" for quite a while (month-ish). Now it's better, but the recommendation algorithm needs a lot of samples labeled negative.

kristopolous• 2 years ago

You sure about that?

https://m.youtube.com/feed/trending

presentation• 2 years ago

In general this is true but I find the pandering that creators do to please the algorithm to make them produce worse videos, which is frustrating.

null0pointer• 2 years ago

“Good” is not what “the algorithm” is selecting for.

pparanoidd• 2 years ago

nobody is forcing you to subscribe to ai video channels. the creators you currently enjoy won't just start making ai videos?

reneberlin• 2 years ago

We humans are so excessively dependent on vision input and with entertaining through visuals, too. But more and more all those visuals become meaningless to me and it all just feels like fast-food-junk to me.

As any pre-schooler will be able to produce anything (watch out parents) imaginable in seconds doesn't make it better to me or is of any real value.

Ok, i needed to edit it again to add: maybe this IS the value of it. We can totally forget about phantasizing stories with visuals (movies) because nobody will care anymore.

baby2• 2 years ago

Yeah I agree, I never understood the appeal of photography, it's so easy, you don't need to paint for hours to produce something original, you just need to buy a camera and click on a button. That's it. And people pay for that, I don't get it.

lurking_swe2• 2 years ago

is it easy? i’m not a photographer but i enjoy taking pictures as a hobby. Your opinion baffles me haha. People always wonder why their iphone can’t shoot photos that look as good as the iphone camera reviews.

https://www.austinmann.com/trek/iphone-16-pro-camera-review-...

Understanding why your camera performs well in certain conditions and how to tweak the camera, is a mini-science all of its own. Also i think the reason photography is appreciated is because of composition.

Knowing where to position yourself, and at what moment, can make photographs turn out magical. Your eyes are processing millions of frames a second, but a photographer often gets just ONE chance to capture some scenes. Some people appreciate the “art” in that. :)

Here’s a thought experiment. Do you consider all wedding photographers to be of equal value? If not, why? Anyone can do it according to you. just click a button. Something to think about…

acjohnson55• 2 years ago

I honestly thought that, too, until I got my first digital camera and started trying to take photos that I liked as much as other ones I saw. Then I realized how much of a craft it is and I gained a much deeper appreciation.

golergka2• 2 years ago

If this is sarcasm which aims to highlight the problem with parent comment, I wholeheartedly agree.

ShrigmaMale• 2 years ago

they’re junk food-y visuals too. i don’t know how to describe it beyond looking like a cross between fisher-price and a light dose of shrooms.

barumrho• 2 years ago

Thinking about abuse potential, is there such a thing as irreversible finger-printing of media generated like this? So that even bad actors couldn't hide the fact that it was generated by AI.

dragonwriter3• 2 years ago

is there such a thing as irreversible finger-printing

No.

brenschluss• 2 years ago

Here's an idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39166038#39173769

gorgoiler• 2 years ago

Photo sharing websites (including Facebook) used to be wrappers around ImageMagick with extra features. I love how the backbone of their training involves calling out to ffmpeg. It gives a little hope to those of us who, too, are working on a smaller scale but with similar techniques.

Scale? I have access to an H100. Meta trained their cat video stuff on six thousand H100s.

They mention that these consume 700W each. Do they pay domestic rates for power? Is that really only $500 per hour of electricity?

Culonavirus• 2 years ago

They're all investing into their own sources of power. I'm sure Zuck has a few deals in place too.

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-considering-nuclear-p...

Both its competitors, Amazon and Microsoft, have already announced electricity deals with nuclear power stations.
In March, Amazon inked a $650 million deal to buy electricity from the Susquehanna nuclear power station, per the Financial Times.
Then, in September, Microsoft signed a 20-year deal to purchase energy from Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant, the plant's owner, Constellation Energy, said in a statement.

bamboozled5• 2 years ago

Seems like it mops the floor with Sora

_sys49152• 2 years ago

change style to pencil sketch = absolute gamechanger. (penguins vid)

thats the most amenable approach to ai filmmaking ive seen available yet.

id have to see wayyy more pencil sketch conversions to see exactly whats going on....

...but that right there is the easiest way to hack making movies - with the most control.....so far...

anonzzzies• 2 years ago

So can we try it? Announcements are no good.

nektro• 2 years ago

everyone who worked on this should be ashamed

ribcage• 2 years ago

AI destroying mankind has always been a theme, but it's probably not going to be in the form of a physical war. This picture generation will probably have a very negative impact on mankind. Imagination is one of the driving forces of mankind, and so is our desire to realize the things we desire. When these generators become a common thing, human imagination and intelligence will start inevitably degrading. Nobody will bother painting pictures, making music, making video games or movies, when anyone can just see and hear whatever they want instantly. And people will brobably work all day long just so come home and pay to use these generators. This has the potential to destroy mankind by destryoing the human spirit.

lpapez• 2 years ago

People have been saying the same thing about Internet streaming of music for example.

It didn't destroy musicians, just changed how they make their money.

Musicians today generally publish music for free, and make money from concerts and merch sales instead (the publishing platforms generate money from ads around the publishing).

Nothing will change about that with the onset of AI generated music - most music is already free today, so you pay for personal experience (i.e. a concert) instead.

ryukoposting• 2 years ago

Music streaming didn't replace the artist themself, only the way their art was delivered. Music streaming also didn't posess the ability to interfere with democracy.

alex_suzuki2• 2 years ago

What about an endless supply of custom-tailored pr0n? Apart from the spirit, might simply wipe out actual physical reproduction.

ksynwa• 2 years ago

Facebook is already flooded with very strange (to put it kindly) AI boomer engagement bait AI images. I cannot help but think about how much worse the problem could get with AI generated videos. But they are not cheap to make right now.

Aeolun2• 2 years ago

Why are there so many websites that are essentially static HTML that make my phone stutter?

The video’s look cool, but I can’t really enjoy reading about them if my phone freezes every 2 seconds.

runeks• 2 years ago

Which browser?

arendtio• 2 years ago

And which device.

Over the years, adding many simultaneous videos to websites has become quite common, and I have always marveled at how well many devices can handle this.

Nevertheless, it is pretty demanding for the hardware, and many smartphones are not made for such tasks.

_heimdall• 2 years ago

I'm seeing weird bank on a Pixel 6a / chromium browser as well. I'm on mobile so I can't check the source, but this can't just be static HTML.

When I scroll the page, sections of text are missing then pop in, randomly though not as a scroll driven animation. It almost feels like something is blocking the browser's render loop and it can't catch up to actually paint the text. That'd be an insane bug on such a simple page, though I put nothing past react these days if they used it here.

joquarky• 2 years ago

I'm also having trouble with the page.

I wish web browsers had a "pause" button for scripts so I can just scroll to the bottom, let everything load and then hit pause and "freeze" the page contents so I can read without distractions.

I also feel like the quality of web UX is in rapid decline, and nobody wants to hire competent web developers who grok the fundamentals anymore.

fasa99• 2 years ago

Q: Why are there so many websites that are essentially static HTML that make my phone stutter?

A: because your phone is a potato

The first free tech support from HN is free, subsequent questions will be $29.99 per.

baxuz• 2 years ago

Took over 20s to settle on a Galaxy s21.

kosolam• 2 years ago

Must be because Facebook use php

aDyslecticCrow• 2 years ago

Your comment makes no sense

Eikon• 2 years ago

Your comment uses php.

rudasn• 2 years ago

It's actually quite usable and fast if you turn javascript off.

Kailhus• 2 years ago

Not so much stutter here but definitely some layout shifts as images/video elements load :/

hnben• 2 years ago

maybe the companies, who make them, have not enough know-how in web-development.

shortrounddev24• 2 years ago

I strongly believe this technology is bad

lozzo• 2 years ago

When I was little I used to think it was a shame that I could not show my dreams. I could tell my parents what I dreamt but not show them what I saw (or thought I saw while dreaming). Getting closer

brisky• 2 years ago

Was this trained on personal facebook video data?

Meta Movie Gen

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