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Watching these made me think, I'm going to want to go to the theatre a lot more in the future and see fellow humans in plays, lectures and concerts.

Such achievements in technology must lead to cultural change. Look at how popular vinyl has become, why not theatre again.




Do you feel the same way about modern movies? CGI is so ubiquitous and accessible, that most movies use some form of it. It's actually news when a filmmaker _doesn't_ use CGI (e.g. Nolan).

These advancements are just the next step in that evolution. The tech used in movies will be commoditized, and you'll see Hollywood-style production in YouTube videos.

I'm not sure why you think theater will become _more_ popular because of this. It has remained popular throughout the years, as technology comes and goes. People can enjoy both video and theater, no?


I agree, seeing real human actors on stage will always be popular for some consumers. Same for local live musicians.

That said, I helped a friend who makes low budget, edgy and cool films last week. I showed him what I knew about driving Pika.art and he picked it up quickly. He is very excited about the possibility of being able to write more stories and turn them into films.

I think there is plenty of demand for all kinds of entertainment. It is sad that so many creative people in Hollywood and other content creation centers will lose jobs. I think the very best people will be employed, but often partnered with AIs. Off topic, but I have been a paid AI practitioner since 1982, and the breakthroughs of deep learning, transformers, and LLMs are stunning.


We will soon find that story generation is easily automated.


It's already easy automated.


Drop a link to your friend’s work?


I actually suspect one of the new most popular mediums will be actors on a theatre stage doing live performances to a live AI CGI video being rendered behind them - similar to musicians in a live orchestra. It would bring together the nostalgia and wonder of human acting and performance art, while still smoothing and enhancing their live performance into the quality levels and wonder we've come to expect from movie theatre experiences. This will be technologically doable soon.


Imagine movies generated in real-time just for you, with the faces you know, places you know and what not!


That's terrifying and dystopian.


No it's not. Imagine turning on the television when you get home and it's a show all about you (think Breaking Bad, but you're Walter White). You flip to another channel and it's a pornographic movie where you sleep with all the world's most famous movie stars. Flip the channel again and it's all the home movies you wish you had but were never able to make.

This is a future we could once only dream of, and OpenAI is making it possible. Has anyone noticed how anti-progress HN has become lately?


I guess it depends on your definition of progress. None of those examples you listed sound particularly appealing to me. I've never watched a show and thought I'd get more enjoyment if I was at the center of that story. Porn and dating apps have created such unrealistic expectations of sex and relationships that we're already seeing the effects in younger generations. I can only imagine what on-demand fully generative porn will have on issues like porn addiction.

Not to say I don't have some level of excitement about the tech, but I don't think it's unwarranted pessimism to look at this stuff and worry about it's darker implications.


> You flip to another channel and it's a pornographic movie where you sleep with all the world's most famous movie stars.

This is not only dystopian, it's just sad. All these look taken from the first seasons of Black Mirror. I don't know what you think progress is but AI porno and ads are not.


I don't think any well adjusted person ever has actually wanted this


This might be more revealing of you than of people in general. Even when I play tabletop RPGs, a place I could _easily_ play a version of myself, I almost never do. There's nothing wrong with doing so, but most people don't.


That seems depressingly solipsistic. I think part of the appeal of art is that it's other humans trying to communicate with you, that you feel the personality of the creators shining through.

Also I've never interacted with any piece of art or entertainment and thought to myself "this is neat and all, but it would be much improved if this were entirely about me, with me as the protagonist." One watches Breaking Bad because Walter White is an interesting character; he's a man who falls into a life of crime initially for understandable reasons, but as the series goes on it becomes increasingly clear that he is lying to himself about his motivations and that his primary motivation for his escalating criminal life is his deep-seated frustration at the mediocrity of his life. More than anything else, he craves being important. The unraveling of his motivations and where they come from is the story, and that's something you can't really do when you're literally watching yourself shoehorned into a fictional setting.

You seem to regard it as self-evident that art or entertainment would be improved if (1) it's all about you personally and (2) involvement of other real humans is reduced to zero, but I cannot fathom why you would think that (with the exception of the porn example).


Seems like we're pretty close to inserting ourselves into pornographic movies.


We can do that already, you just need a camera


Can also achieve multiple (still) angles, with multiple phones.


Not close, we're there. Look up FaceFusion.


That would suck. I want to see something I haven't seen before.


I guarantee you haven't seen the entire latent space of any large model


Your wish is Sora's(or its successor model's) prompt.


I am a much better software engineer than I am a director. I can guarantee you that I don’t want to see anything that I could prompt.


Your favorite shows, where the season never ends, and the actors never age.


The vinyl narrative is so whack.

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

At its peak, Inflation adjusted Vinyl Sales was $1.4billion in 1979. Then forward to the lowest sales in 2009 at $3.4million. So Vinyl has been so popular it grew to $8.5m by 2021.

That is just nostalgia, not cultural change pushed by the dystopia of AI.


Why is my 14 year old niece now collecting vinyl? I can guarantee it's not nostalgia. There's obviously more at play there even when acknowledging your point about relative market size.


Perhaps it is _anemoia_ - nostalgia for a time you've never known https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/105778238455...

In this case, it's for the harmless charm of an imagined past, but the same forces are at play in some more dangerous forms of social conservatism.


It's a very narrow subgroup.

But things can coexist. It's now easier to create music than ever, and there is more music created by more artists than ever. Most music is forgettable and just streamed as background music. But there is also room for superstars like Taylor Swift.

Things don't have to be either-or.


How many 14 years old do you know who collect vinyl?


The medium is the message. I know several people born post 2000 who are embracing records and tapes.


I started when I was pretty much exactly that age, ten years ago.


> The vinyl narrative is so whack.

"Revenues for the LP/EP format were $1.2B in 2022 and accounted for 7.7% of total revenue of $15.9B for all selected formats for the year"

Adjusted to inflation.

It's my understanding that LP/EP is vinyl as well. Not Just vinyl single.


This has to be it. Vinyl costs like 20$ per, and $8m is like 400k vinyl sales (users often buy more than 1 vinyl so it's a lot less users) which seems too low globally. At 1.2b, it is more like 60m sales which seems more reasonable.


I think a lot of people collect vinyl less for nostalgia reasons and more so to have a physical collection of their music. I think vinyl wins over CDs just due to how it’s larger and the cover art often looks better as a result.




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