All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)
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The provocative claim that "all AI videos are harmful" has sparked a heated debate, with some commenters arguing that the technology's potential to spread misinformation and impersonate real people is a significant concern. However, others counter that AI-generated videos have a legitimate use case in comedy and meme creation, with one commenter jokingly suggesting Bigfoot as a star of such content. The discussion takes a turn when some participants begin to dissect the role of memes in modern discourse, with some viewing them as a form of psychological manipulation, while others see them as a fundamental aspect of information transmission. As the conversation unfolds, it becomes clear that the debate is not just about AI, but about the complex dynamics of power, influence, and cultural expression in the digital age.
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If AGI is achieved, some of the "they" at the cutting edge get to become feudal lords over massive AI empires that don't need you in them.
Bigfoot comes to mind.
Totally agree with your larger point, btw.
Everything from a simple wave hello by random passersby to pseudonymous manipulative poasting by nation state actors in service to secret purpose is a meme. Understand the actors or you will never be able understand the memes.
AI is, for now, a tool. It's a powerful tool, a potent force multiplier, but there is no agency there. AI labs and governments and big tech companies have agendas and the ways in which they manipulate the output of AI tools is a meme modifier, so you should understand the ways in which different entities want to change the output of the tools you use, in order to correct for anything that deviates from your own intent and understanding.
Psyops are just a particular configuration of meme scale within a culture; if your model of the world is correct and has reliable predictive power, you can correct for things that attempt to warp reality. Understanding how and why different entities warp their communications, whether it's intentional or endemic, is crucial to a reliable model.
Yesterday on the comment thread for the "Attention is Bayesian Inference" blog post (which definitely seems to have been written by AI), a couple people were asking "who cares who/what wrote it, if it has good information", and others were struggling to articulate a response. Well, for me this is the response: it has a specific tone, and every time I see it it activates my gag reflex and I back-button straight out of the page. I'm not interested in examining or deconstructing this response either, as far as I'm concerned it's evolutionarily adaptive and I intend to keep it.
However, 99% of the the "creativity" from what I've seen is done by the AI (how it should look, where the cuts need to happen, the tone, color grading, etc). Which is to say, it's taken from other people's (creative) work.
While a big part of being able to create a good video has much to do with storytelling, the craft of shooting and editing a video is a big part of the creative process as well.
AI video isn't "enabling people to be more creative," it is quite literally removing creativity from the process all together.
Is Pixar Incredibles where a computer algorithm made decisions about exact colors worse than Disney Cinderella where it was hand-drawn animation?
But for example Moana is not worse than Cinderella. Arguably it's better. But the algorithmic choices around perspectives, reflections, etc. Were not really automated. In both cases a lot of people where involved in each scene, and I am confident, they went over every frame, checking the result was what they wanted.
The "enables creativity" argument is ironic since the root of the word is "create" and AI users are literally removing the "create" step from their production process.
The purpose of making music is to make music. So why does it matter what tool you use to do it? Because tools like Logic or Garageband can create lots of sounds for you is that removing creativity? Really shouldn’t music be recorded with a live band every time? Those music production tools are destroying creativity… No. Obviously not. AI does enable creativity. Turns out it also requires a lot of skill to use it to get something good.
Just like with digital effects in movies, plastic surgery, and makeup - if it's done well, there's a good chance I didn't even notice it. If it's clearly noticeable, it's often because it's not done well.
I think you can compare to another "uncreative" way of making music: sampling. The way the Timelords do it in "Doctorin' the Tardis" is pretty terrible (in their case on purpose, I believe). There are plenty of hip hop examples where I think musically not much is added to the music, but the lyrics and maybe the act do add a lot. And then there are bands like Daft Punk that will chop up and recontextualize the samples to the point that it's clearly a completely new thing.
For the middle category, I meant things like Gangsta's Paradise. I really like the song, I think Coolio really adds something. But you can hear much more of "Pasttime Paradise" in there than you can hear "More Spell On You" in Daft Punk's "One More time"
I mention Daft Punk because it's really accessible: there are videos on youtube that can show a layperson like me exactly how they chopped up the samples.
The HN crowd wants everybody sitting at home on UBI suffering trying to be creative. It's like arguing for hand washing clothes to get that full, proper, drawn-out, brain smashing experience.
Now sit at home and be a good boy, take that UBI, create and be productive - but don't make it too easy, don't you dare use AI, bleed for that UBI.
Honestly i prefer that listening marketing bro's on linkedin posting about how AI means X is finished and everyone who learned X needs to pay for their webinar on writing prompts.
This reads like you agree with my sentiment.
I agree. I don't like blaming/crediting a tool, for how it is used.
Some tools may be too dangerous for "just anyone" to use, and there may be justification in restricting access, but I'm not sure the tools should always be banned.
I was just talking about this, with a friend who leans conservative (but not nuttily so). He was telling me about watching all these shows about folks living north of the Arctic Circle, and how everyone walks around with guns, because polar bears look at us as walking snacks. In those cases, the gun is an absolutely necessary tool, and no one even thinks twice about it.
Not so, New York City.
But it would be a life-endangering mistake for someone in NYC to dictate to an Alaskan Inuit, that they can't carry a gun, and it might be a life-endangering mistake for an Alaskan to insist that everyone in NYC walk around with a gun (I won't get into the political arguments, there, be draggones).
I feel like there should be an XKCD for this
I found it just sad, honestly. Nothing against using some AI help to create good cover art, but not even bothering to change the default style screams "low effort".
That's the effect I'm fearing. Sure, AI could probably be used to create new high-quality content by people who really put in the effort, but in reality, it just seems to define a new level of "good enough" that lowers the overall level of quality.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1o0sfzz/chatgpt...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kmao1t/i_asked_ch...
Generic AI music so far does not touch me. I might tolerate it in the background, but I know there is great music being made with the help of AI. (Which is different from letting the AI do it all)
An aimbot in competive playing is indeed cheating and sucks the fun out for others. But if you have fun with single player aimbots, why not. (I know some games integrated autoaim and they can still be fun)
I am a filmmaker. I have made photons-on-glass films for decades.
I have always wanted to make big-budget sci-fi and fantasy films, as have my friends and colleges who went to film school. The barrier to entry is almost impossible to climb. Most of my friends wound up in IATSE or doing commercial work, but never had the chance to follow through on their passion projects.
Ten thousand kids go to film school every year. Very few of them will wind up being able to make what they dream to create. It's a fucking tragedy that all of this ambition withers on the vine.
Getting a large film budget requires connections. You see a lot of nepotism. Sometimes a director who was in the right place at the right time with the right ideas will make it, but that's such a survivor's bias problem. There are orders of magnitude more people that didn't make it. Talented people full of dreams. And that's a tragedy - imagine how many Martin Scorseses, Hayao Miyazakis, Yorgos Lanthimoses, Denis Villeneuves, and Chloe Zhaos we're losing.
AI is the first tool that will level the playing field for truly driven individuals. I mean this with my full heart - this is a great tool for creative and driven people. It's the arrival of the printing press for us.
But the news of this gift has been twisted and soured by the media and by popular influencers who push only a fear agenda.
By trying to make AI films, I have been doxed, sent death threats, insulted, called thousands of names. Every day! People pour out hatred, racist comments, sexist comments - they literally want me (all of us) to DIE because they've been taught to hate this.
I can't even begin to tell you how exhausting this is. Instead, let me focus on the good.
Here's a list of (what I think) are really good AI films. Each of them takes 10+ hours of work:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4 - Made by a film school grad as a demo of real filmmaking combined with AI VFX.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQWRBCt_5E - Created by a Hollywood TV writer for an FX show you've probably seen. Not the best animation or voicing, but you can see how it gives a writer more than just a blank page to convey their thoughts.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZYP5jn5w4 - Music video. Slightly MAGA-coded, but made by a Hollywood VFX person.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U - Made by a film school grad as a Robot Chicken homage. If you're going to tell them "don't use AI", then are you going to get them a job at Disney? Also, all the pieces are hand-rotoscoped, the mouth animations are hand-animated, and every voice is from a hired (and paid) voice actor.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY - Made by a film school grad as a Robot Chicken homage. See previous comment.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_KXYpaTe_8 - Another slightly MAGA-coded music video. Made by the same Hollywood VFX person.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hlx5Rslrzk - Amazing Spider-Man vs. Carnage anime created with ComfyUI and other models.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U - Christmas Grinch anime. It's really funny if you like Jojo and get the references.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKYeDIiqiHs - Totally 100% cursed. Made by a teenager following the comic book's plot. Instead of this teenager spending 100 hours on Fortnite, they made this.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps5Dhc3Lh8U - A Pixar-like short film
These tools do not remove the need for editing, compositing, rotoscoping. You still have to understand film language, character arcs, story, pacing. The human ingredients still have to be there.
By using these models and tools, directors and editors can finally pursue projects that would require many people and potentially very large budgets. Like the Red vs. Blue creators sitting down and making machinima, they can create vivid sci-fi worlds or whatever genre or mood they want to evoke.
AI is a tool. In the hands of an artist, you can make art with AI.
Yes, people are using AI to make slop. Cameras also make slop - selfies, food pics. Your own camera roll is full of garbage.
People are posting slop AI because it's novel. If we'd gone from "no cameras at all" to "smartphones" overnight, you would see so much smartphone camera slop it would be unbearable. We, as a society, had time to develop filters and curation around cameras. That'll eventually happen for AI too.
Cameras can make incredible art in the hands of an artist. They can also make a lot of shit. But we don't demonize the cameras. Soon, our feelings towards AI will become equivalent.
But right now, it's extremely painful to be a creative person using AI.
I -
ABSOLUTELY HATE
ABSOLUTELY DETEST
IT IS MIMETIC VITRIOLPeople have let this stupid meme boil over to the point of sending death threats and doxxing creators. And that is beyond unacceptable.
We need to stop adopting angry slogans of hate and start thinking on a case by case basis with nuance.
This entire conversation needs way more humanity and humility.
And we need to accept that there are good things being created with AI too.
I wonder what happens, though, as the economics shift? It’ll be great, creatively speaking, for people who have a project inside them itching to get out into the world. Those were always the people who made the most interesting art anyway.
But viewership economics aren’t expanding in the same way. Same number of viewers, less patience for feature-length work, less willingness to pay.
If the status quo only generated enough money for an already-small universe of Hollywood professionals to feed their families through their creative work, what happens when even that withers?
Film school, it seems to me, is partly about the access to equipment and talent, but mostly about the time and community expectation to dedicate every waking hour to your creative project.
Art and commerce have always been awkward bedmates, but it makes me a little sad that the price for anyone being able to create is that ~none of them will be able to make money from their creative labor.
Most recent cost cutting has been Hollywood offshoring IATSE jobs to Europe and Asia. 80% of Atlanta's once burgeoning film production has moved away. We have tremendous, multi-billion dollar studio facilities here too.
I do expect AI to eventually be used for saving on VFX costs, pre-production, and even B roll, but I don't think it'll replace principal photography right away. It might be used in more animation projects.
I don't think those budgets will disappear. Rather, I think they will be spent on other projects to increase the slate of offerings.
Meanwhile, completely orthogonal to all of this, the creator economy has been growing tremendously year over year. We have lots of independent creators that are now household names and brands.
Some indie YouTubers that have grown big include:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zach_Hadel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivienne_Medrano
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Haver
All of them were offered network deals.
I suspect we'll see a rise of indie filmmakers and that the field will begin to look more like writing, indie music, or indie games. Anyone can bring their talent and not much capital and make interesting and compelling work.
The problem, as always, will be discovery. A lot of good work will still go unseen. But this is better than the work not being practical or possible.
As long as people capture minds and attention, there will be incredible value in creating and captivating. Artists will get paid. It's just a matter of artists breaking through and finding an audience.
As a programmer with a philosophical bent, I have thought a lot about the implications and ethics of toolmaking.
I concluded long before genAI was available that it is absolutely possible to build tools that dehumanize the users and damage the world around them.
It seems to me that LLMs do that to an unprecedented degree.
Is it possible to use them to help you make worthwhile, human-focused output?
Sure, I'd accept that's possible.
Are the tools inherently inclined in the opposite direction?
It sure looks that way to me.
Should every tool be embraced and accepted?
I don't think so. In the limit, I'm relieved governments keep a monopoly on nuclear weapons.
The people saying "All AI is bad" may not be nuanced or careful in what they say, but in my experience, they've understood rightly that you can't get any of genAI's upsides without the overwhelming flood of horrific downsides, and they think that's a very bad tradeoff.
I agree with them.
They've made dozens of essays and done tons of experiments showing that they think AI is going to be great for our field:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSRrSO7QhXY (scrub through the timelines to the end of these videos to see)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq5JaG53dho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUFlOynaUyk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT3WUa-48Y
Listen to them.
Our entire industry pays attention to them, and they're right!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corridor_Digital
They are literally "react" youtubers who have never worked a single day as professional vfx artists.
This is like saying Jake Paul is the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.
That said, I haven't shown it to anyone... I'm not trying to make anyone mad. But what's the point of working on any music, AI or not, if nobody wants to hear it? This was a bit of a depressing realization for someone who was always fearful of letting anyone listen to my own actual music. It doesn't matter how much I piloted the prompt, or mixed down the stems, and how good the final result is, because at the end of the day, its just AI... I really don't know how to feel about the whole thing - there are legitimate arguments against AI for creative use, it's hard to not feel like a hypocrite or something for even using it..
And as for single-player aimbots, I agree that it doesn't do anyone any harm, but what's the point? It's like running the course of a marathon on a segway. If you're just doing it by yourself, then I suppose it doesn't hurt anyone, but you can't really say that you ran a marathon, can you?
The point of playing video games?
Having fun. You don't achieve anything for real anyway, unless you are playing professional e-sports. And some games can still be fun, with aimbot. There is more to games than precision mouse work. I remember a arcade space shooter, where flying the aircraft was speedy action with dogfights, and you had only to do rough aiming, the rest did the "targeting computer". But I also have seen FPS shooters with that option and people enjoying the action and boom boom boom feeling powerful.
"There are people who get bothered by things like .. lip synced live performances, and manufactured artists"
And that would actually be me as well. But I try to keep an open mind even with the shallowest mainstream popsongs. Not liking it because of the source, but to see if I feel the music. Usually I turn it off a very quickly though, but I still don't talk down to my niece for example who likes it.
It feels insincere and manipulative, especially when I don't know upfront if the content (music, video, text) is from another human being or from AI.
AI will become good enough to write songs better than humans; it's a matter of time. But it feels like someone tries to hack my mind, exploit my human instincts, it doesn't feel like genuine art the way it was for the whole human history - people expressing themselves, creating and sharing something beautiful with each other.
The end result is an automated personalized "enjoy" button, and this is sad.
I'm unconvinced. The process of songwriting is so dependent on being able to listen to what you've made and decide whether you enjoy it or not. We can train a model to imitate popular music, but we can't train a model to enjoy music, because we can't quantify enjoyment and turn it into a data set. You can train an LLM on soup recipes, but you can't train one to taste the soup and tell you whether it's good or not.
That's part of what offends me so much about the notion of AI-assisted "creativity." Creating music should be a way of engaging more deeply with music, but you've discovered a way to pay even less attention to music than before. None of the details in an AI-generated song really matter; they were chosen arbitrarily, because they seemed normal. Indeed, they are so normal that your ear will slide right off of them.
You can't fix a soup that someone else prepared—not as an amateur. You don't know what went into it, so you can't pick out the individual flavours and decide whether they're right or not. They were never "right" for you, because you didn't pick them. It's like ordering a Big Mac, taking it apart, and trying to workshop it into Duck à l'Orange. All you get is a Big Mac with some orange slices on it. Maybe you like Big Macs; maybe you're happy. It's a pretty poor substitute for creativity, though.
There's a thin line between art and business - quite often the goal isn't to have you feel something, it's to sell you product that you pay for, and if by the way you feel something, that's cool.
The touching you emotionally part is due to the quality of the underlying creative work. I'm sure the GP's wife was touched- they put in the work to make something- but the fact is that work they did was enabled by the theft-at-scale of work others have done.
You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale. These models did not come from the ether- they are weighted mathematical averages based on ingesting shit tons of existing creative work, made by people, the vast majority of which was ingested against those creatives' explicit wishes.
Unfortunately most people don't give a shit where things come from as long as they get whatever they want in the end, which is why our economy is almost exclusively run by sociopaths.
I know enough of music creation to know, all music we enjoy is creqted by "theft". Meaning taking a riff from here, a melody from there. And tweaking it. AI just automated it. Not sure, it sucks with the whole buisness modell around it. That only some profit and not the truly creative composers. But that .. is hardly a new thing. There are many, many awesome musicians out there. Always have been. But only some become "superstars". Where a whole industry pushes them so they stay on top no matter what. That's not fair, but AI did not change this.
Human influence is selective. It’s contextual, filtered through taste, memory, culture, and intent. A metal songwriter doesn't subconsciously absorb the entire global corpus of music; they draw from the artists who shaped them, or deliberately subvert something specific. That’s literally the creative process: choosing what to reference, twist, or subvert, reject, counter.
A model doesn't do that. It doesn't choose influences, it doesn’t have tastes, and it doesn't have intent. It just digests everything it's fed into a massive statistical set of averaged patterns that it has found, and then regurgitates them on command so as to "minimize error." Calling that the same thing as human inspiration is like saying a wood chipper is just an automated sculptor because both involve wood going in and differently shaped wood coming out.
The music industry fucks musicians raw, to be sure, but this is not guaranteeing anything for musicians in the slightest, quite the opposite: it just makes it so users of the models can also fuck musicians. How is that good at all? The exploitation of artists at scale being the status quo is not a reason to excuse even more exploitation, that's certifiably insane.
They also draw from the people around them. The music they hear when they are in public spaces. Etc.
Out of curiosity, have you ever done composing?
Anyway, one can create very shallow songs by hand. One can also give empty vague prompts.
Or one can make a complex music arrangement, manual editing of tracks, have some AI generated mixed in, very detailed prompts etc. If that ain't creative to you, that is your opinion. I think different.
She thought it was really special and she cried as we listened to it while holding hands in the car. I can’t play guitar, and I can’t hit some notes with my low singing voice, but I wrote every word and it felt like something really special to the both of us. I don’t really care if people think I “cheated”. To torture the analogy, it’s like cheating in a two player game since I’m not publishing this song to anyone else.
I’ve been having Suno make random instrumental chiptunes, too, and it’s got me interested in buying a MIDI keyboard to play around with. Which 40 years ago people were saying that wasn’t real music, either.
Citation needed
That made me imagine -- in the future when AI is much more advanced, maybe I could just prompt it with say "something sentimental to make my wife cry." I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here? Is this some sort of human emotion exploit, or a legitimate bonding experience?
1. Wives aren't a monolith. The prompt is underspecified, or else individual taste and preciousness is dead.
2. No matter how good the tech today is (or isn't) getting, the responses are very low temperature. The reason it takes a human 4 hours to write the poem is because that is time spent exploring profoundly new structures and effects. Compare this to AI which is purpose-built to hone in on local optima of medians and clichés wherever possible.
> I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here?
Sociologically, devoid of AI discussion, I imagine the limit is the extent to which the ideas expressed in the poem aren't outright fabrications (e.g. complimenting their eyes when really you couldn't care less). As well, it does not sit right with humans if you attempt to induce profound feelings in them by your own less-than-profound feelings; it's not "just the thought," it's also the effort that socially signals the profundity of the thought.
Usually they are. Most people are surprisingly similar and predictable, which is why basic manipulation tactics are so successful. Sure, you have 10% of people who truly are special, but the other 90% has a collective orgasm while listening to whatever is the hottest pop star.
> The reason it takes a human 4 hours to write the poem is because that is time spent exploring profoundly new structures and effects.
Most likely dude spent 4 hours doing exactly the same things that everyone else does when making their first song. It's not like within these 4 hours he discovered a truly new technique of writing lyrics. Each instance of human life that wants to write songs needs to go through exactly the same learning steps, while AI does it just once and then can endlessly apply the results.
> it's not "just the thought," it's also the effort that socially signals the profundity of the thought.
In close relationships yes. When dealing with those you less care about, it's the result that matters.
I mean, we're almost always standing on the shoulders of other people, and we're almost always using tools. But if the output is fully mechanical and automatic without being tailored for the specific person, it's hard to see it as personal in any way.
"Say something sentimental to make my wife cry" you prompt. The computer comes back:
Ok, tell me a few things about your wife. How did you meet? What are her favorite things? Tell me about some great moments in your relationship. Tell me about some difficult moments in your relationship.
Ok, tell me a few things about you. What do you love about your wife? What have you struggled with?
Ten minutes of this kind of conversation and I'll bet the LLM can generate a pretty good hallmark card. It might not make your wife cry but she'll recognize it as something personal and special.
Four hours of this kind of conversation and you might very well get some output that would make your wife cry. It might even make you cry.
The work is adding context. And getting people to add meaningful, soul-touching context is not easy - just ask any therapist.
The effort that you put in is often what people like most about a gift. Don’t try too hard to hack around that.
Are you arguing that's not a real game because of this?
Bravo.
Can an artist be good if they can't draw a good circle by hand? Yes. Except they can't take credit for the goodness of circles that appear in their work, if not drawn by them.
[Edit: "responsibility" -> "credit"]
When AI art was nascent and stable diffusion came out, I put probably 1000 hours into really getting good at using it. I like to compare it to picking up pretty seashells on the sand. When working with those old models where many results were terrible, the prompt was akin to driving to a beach you know has seashells, then generating 100-200 pictures on an A100 was like combing through the beach to see if you find any good ones. Finally you could clean up the couple few that were real gems and get something that looked nice. It may not be artistry, but that doesn’t mean it has zero value at all.
Although let’s be real, most people aren’t going to make a living being a beach comber looking for pretty things that washed up on the shore, when even a kid can do it.
So, I get a good song by throwing spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. Then I can export the stems to the DAW and replace the AI vocals with my own. A little audio processing and mixing later and the whole song is mine.
My wife wrote a song for a story she’s been working on, and honestly her sense of verse and timing gave an output with me writing a simple style prompt that sounded absolutely fantastic. But she’d spent hours writing and refining that song as it’s important to the story.
Replacing the AI vocals with my own would likely work, although there’s a certain note in the chorus that’s beyond my vocal range. I bet if I practiced it and recorded myself singing the chorus 50 times I could get one result that sounded right, though. Thanks for sharing.
You wrote the lyrics. There are professional songwriters with many hit songs who only write lyrics. Some can't even play an instrument, much less compose music. So what do they do? They work with a music composer. They hire a music arranger. They hire a band.
So in this case, you still did the foundational songwriting part yourself, but instead of hiring humans to help you finish it, you hired AI.
Ok. Lets go with that analogy. Whats the problem with someone playing a single player game with an aimbot on? Sure they wont get good at the aiming part. But it feels kinda up to them on if that matters or not.
Additionally, I wouldn't see anything morally wrong with that. Now, if someone entered into a music competition, where only human made music was allow then I agree that this would be "cheating". But what if its not that and the listeners simply are OK with the "aimbotted" music?
People are doing it on the server where all the musicians live, and they have no other place to go, only disconnect.
No actually. Those musicians are free to continue making whatever music that they want and can refuse to listen to the AI music if they dont want to.
The fact that 2 other, unrelated 3rd parties both like to make AI music and listen to AI music is not the musicians area of control here. They do not get to decide what other people like to listen to or make.
> free to continue making whatever music that they want
Never said they weren't.
> can refuse to listen to the AI music if they don't want to
A musician can be a listener, indeed. If you believe a listener has this freedom and will keep it, you're most probably mistaken. No one besides musicians and discerning, ideologically relentless listeners is interested in making NN-generated music distinguishable and supporting the right of filtering it. The goal is to supplant one with the other.
> The fact that 2 other, unrelated 3rd parties both like to make AI music and listen to AI music…
Listeners is not an unrelated party to a musician. They form a vital symbiosis. And it's a zero-sum game, as listener's attention is a limited resource.
> They do not get to decide what other people like to listen to or make.
This is an unrelated point. Who decides what is a separate topic.
The crux of the issue is that we have two types of superficially similar product which are in fact substantially different (hope this does not require clarification) and incomparable in terms of resources necessary for their creation. This begets unprecedented power imbalance and incentives for deceit, biased legislation and other moves to solidify this situation.
I imagine the same idea above holds for media (music, film) as well. When you understand how to prompt and can get the right scene with all the right constraints you are saving time. The human is still composing, editing, and storytelling. The LLM again becomes a relatively interesting but boring tool in your workflow to speed up some aspects.
Right now the power of LLMs is that you can funnel parts of your workflow that they can handle well and you save a lot of time for minimal design cost in terms of how to use them.
https://civitai.com/videos
Is AI music today able to emulate what a brilliant human artist does? Not really. But is it something that artists can leverage creatively? Absolutely.
I'm not going to weigh in on which side I'm on, but I notice the discussion around AI "making creativity too easy" and "devaluing practiced skills" to be similar to the discussion around bots in PVP games.
Expressivity requires intent, which turns out to be rarer and therefore less apt to show up in a benchmark or crowdsourced head-to-head comparison.
I can now instantly visualize anything I think of. That is creative power. The same for code - I can instantly scaffold a frontend I think of in google ai studio. Its not all great and I have to keep the slot machine spinning. But it's empowering.
These "ai kills creativity" arguments are all rather uncreative.
Not disagreeing with you, but you might want to sit down for this...
https://www.ft.com/content/d84c8502-d413-4a26-a59c-494af1197...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45416670
It's too tempting for people to have AI do all the creative work and then take credit for it, and it gives these people the delusion of thinking they're literally artists, authors, bloggers, etc.
There is way more than just a prompt to make something interesting with AI though. For example this test[0] i saw some time ago, includes several different AI systems (Z-Image Turbo with a custom lora for the specific style, Wan 2.2 Time-To-Move for the animation output, After Effects for the control animations and some sort of upscaler.
This involves way more than just a prompt and the video still has a few issues, like the right hand remaining "stuck" on the head, but the way to fix it would most likely be the same as making the motion with perhaps some additional editing work.
IMO AI can make some things easier and/or faster, even allow people to do things that'd be impossible for them before (e.g. i doubt the person who posted the video could make a real live video with actors, etc like the AI video shown) but to do anything beyond simple slop you still need to put in effort and that includes making things close to your vision.
(not getting the 100% exact results is fine because that was always the case with any tech - it isn't like most, if not all, PS1 devs wanted to low res graphics with wobbly polygons and lack of texture filtering, but the better games leaned in what the tech could do)
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1pfl6os/zi...
Creativity involves an extra step, imagining something in your mind eye and then bringing it to life. Not settling for whatever comes out, but demanding more. As you learn any craft your ability to articulate increases beyond happy little accidents into intentional mastery. Not so much with AI.
The argument about killing creativity makes a lot of sense to me. Our brains are inherently lazy and always they seek paths of least resistance. That's the intelligence, basically, strategizing for best outcome with least effort. AI models require ~zero effort to map your prompt to a mere sliver of the entire possibility space. How can we then convince ourselves to spend weeks or years to try to reach some novel art styles, when they require so much manual labor and the attention muscle that we allowed to deteriorate away?
I don't get why this is a big deal? Like 99% of the creativity of taking a video of an ocean is also just taken from the nature. Your creativity was actually a small portion of "information" out of all the bits required to make that video.
AI just lets you get a better result for less effort (for some definitions of "better"), just as a camera lets you get a better result for less effort than a paintbrush and canvas does.
Only if your goal is photorealism, which is one of the least interesting forms of art.
"99% of the creativity of baking is done by the wheat growing in nature. Your creativity of "baking" was a small portion of what was required to make that pastry."
Today, very many humans enjoy spectating computer played chess games, and often comment on the "beauty" of the moves played. Take that for what you will.
I really have to take issue with this statement.
People did do this before AI. Usually cutting people faces out and sticking them on actors faces in existing movies, or subtly doing parody cover, or doing clever edits (Cassette Boy is a notable example) or people were performing it live like the "Epic Rap Battles of History".
All it done is allow people to create these sort of to a higher creative standard, in other cases it allowed people to create memey jokes stuff that they wouldn't otherwise be able to create.
In the 80s/90s you would be complaining about people using tracker software and samples to create music instead of learning to play an instrument. Under your logic someone like FatboySlim isn't a musician.
I'm exaggerating a bit to make the point that the amount of human creativity put into a work of art is not binary. Just pasting a rehashed joke as a genAI video prompt is not much of a creative process.
Yes, some have zero skill and will basically just show up with a pre-determined Spotify playlist. They won't even have mixing/transitions between songs.
Some are in the middle and will be able to do basic transitions between songs (ie, just simple beat matching) and know how to carry a vibe.
At the far end of the spectrum are actual composers that are effectively making new mixes of songs on the fly.
And so you have the problem where someone says "Being a DJ takes a lot of skill" because they're thinking of the last category, while the person hearing that message replies with "How does it take skill to just press Play?" because they're thinking of the first.
Most arguments against gen-AI are bad arguments - you can (and should) admit this even if you (like me) don't respect gen-AI.
However there is a whole small subculture around this. A friend would go hunting for records to sample in Charity shops for old vinyls (this was pre-ebay). This apparently is known a "Digging" and lot of Music Producers, DJs etc would do this to find samples for their sets/albums.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6aQgZFrVKE
Similar you have people using tracker software on old Amigas / Ataris to play sets.
e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkTQ-15jGD0&list=RDCkTQ-15jG...
No. That isn't my logic at all.
> Just pasting a rehashed joke as a genAI video prompt is not much of a creative process.
That isn't what is happening. What people are doing is taking people from different online streaming shows, making new content based on jokes made on those show and turning them into music videos, which are usually a cover of a well known song.
People have been doing this online without AI for quite a while. Usually this was with various music software. All AI does, it make this process easier.
There might be a claim that there is still some human creativity involved, maybe. But it's sort of like amateurs at an open mic night telling memorized jokes that they didn't write compared to a comedian who has spent thousands of hours perfecting stories, jokes, punch lines, timing, and phrasing.
That is only the case with commodities. Not creative works and/or entertainment.
> But it's sort of like amateurs at an open mic night telling memorized jokes that they didn't write compared to a comedian who has spent thousands of hours perfecting stories, jokes, punch lines, timing, and phrasing.
Often these amateurs are often funnier than the professionals. However that of course is subjective.
Sometimes a website that looks like shit does its job better than one that is finely crafted.
Berkshire Hathaway has a text only website with no CSS at all.
It even better if it looks good and works well. You can make sites that do both.
But I just need to get from point A to point B so I have a $10,000 used car.
It depends whether you think the extra cost is worth it.
https://ciechanow.ski/ vs https://debugarguments.app/
"Creating" AI art is analogous to commissioning a work of art from someone else.
Person A put in a request to person B, pers. A receives a mockup or a draft from pers. B, pers. A and B might engage in convos to refine the work, pers. B delivers the final product to pers. A. AI "artists" are person A in that scenario.
Sampling, like FatboySlim, or many other producers, is clearly not person A in that scenario. They're exerting intentional, direct, creative control. Creating AI art is mediated in a way that is far more indirect and stochastic. The creative inputs in AI art is more directly the text in the prompt rather than the output. Editing the output afterwards is creative input afterwards, though. However, sign a work you commissioned from someone else as your own and people will probably roll their eyes, which I think describes most reactions to AI videos.
It is very similar. You are using a piece of software to aid in the creative process. ~
In these cases, you are remixing previous artistic works to create a new one.
> "Creating" AI art is analogous to commissioning a work of art from someone else.
Depends what you are doing and how you are using the AI. So this isn't always the case.
Almost entirely by studying other peoples works, the rest by doing something and getting feedback on it.
Just think of what photography did to portrait painting. The camera and film did all of the color work, the person hitting the button had no need to mix their own pigments anymore. All the creativity was removed.
/s
If that skepticism is well earned then learning it is a benefit, not a harm. It would be harmful not to accept that if it is true.
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