Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | heurist's comments login

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

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

You forget that there's a human behind the prompt, stitching frames and dialogue together.

If they are stitching then I would consider that a form of art.

However, merely describing something is not doing the thing. Otherwise, the business analysists at my company would be software engineers. No, I make the software, and they describe it.

The end-goal here is humanless automation, no? Then I'm not sure your assumption holds up. If there's no human, I question the value.


> If there's no human, I question the value.

You may question the value but if it’s anything like rugs you won’t be in the majority. People pay a significant premium for artisanal handmade rugs but that being said, more than 95% of the rugs people use are machine made because they’re essentially indistinguishable from a handmade one and are much, much cheaper and just as functional.


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.

I don't buy this narrative at all. People like people and increasingly follow artists because of their personality and overall "brand." No one cares about generated AI art or its creator(s), because it's not interesting. It's also not sharable with other humans; see, for example, the frenzy around going to a Taylor Swift concert. The mass appeal and shared interest is part of the draw.

At best, you'll get something like a generic sitcom. The idea that "all visual stimulus will be satisfied by hypertuned AI models" doesn't line up with how people experience the arts, at all.


That may be the case today but kids are starting to grow up with this stuff as part of their lives, and I don't think we can anticipate the reaction as both they and the models grow in tandem. I think human creativity is much deeper than LLMs, but that is from my human perspective and I can't fully rule out that the LLMs may become better at it at some point in the future. I actually think they're already smarter and more creative than most people (though not more than the potential of any given human if they practiced/trained thoroughly).

I fully agree here. I want to be part of an audience, and as part of that audience I always look at the human development of the things to share - artifacts in the case of fine art, or experiences in the case of performative art. The artist will always be more important than their work to me.

I don't want to carry mechanical solutions labelled culture - deterministic enough, despite hallucinations - into the next generation that follows my own. It's an impressive advancement for automation, sure, but just not a value worth sharing as human development.

That being said, I think GenAI could be a valuable addition in any blueprint-/prototype-/wireframing phase. But, ironically, it positions itself in stark contrast to what I would consider my standards to contemporary brainstorming, considering the current Zeitgeist:

  - truthful to history and research (GenAI is marketing and propaganda)
  - aware of resources (GenAI is wasteful computing)
  - materialistic beyond mere capitalistic gains (GenAI produces short-lived digital data output and isn't really worth anything)

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.

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


> 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?


Your droids, they'll have to wait outside

Cryptography-secured/signed generated content / interactions?

worldcoin project solves a lot of this when combined with web of trust, however everyone's knee jerk reaction to worldcoin is pretty bad and so it's annoying to even mention it

I’m not knowledgeable in crypto/worldcoin.

I was rather thinking classical cryptography baked into generative networks.


Worldcoin was intended to solve it but in practice it's not being used that way. Not enough adoption by users or websites.

Maybe in the future?

I'm a worldcoiner but so far it's just been free money.


i mean it's in its infancy, if there's a critical need for it, which i think there will be soon, i think it'll get more popular

US citizens still use paper Social Security Cards. The point where there is a "critical need" recognized by the relevant parties may be further off than you believe.

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.


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.

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.

I am 10,000% ready for forums to make a comeback. The internet hasn't been good since 2010

I got into hiking.

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.

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

Shrug. Maybe it's an argument to de-modernize more things in order to bring daily life back to the environments we're healthier and happier in.

Edit: In particular, I'm not convinced the internet was a net positive. Running water and sewage systems, sure. But what has 24/7 smartphone access actually done for our societies? Most people today don't seem any better off than they were in the 80s and 90s, and in many ways that actually matter, they seem worse off. Sure, they have access to way more information than our predecessors ever did... but it's not like we built a better world off it. Mostly the internet has accelerated the concentration of wealth towards the top, increased anxiety across the world, and significantly contributed to the global downfall of representative democracies, to name a few. Sometimes modernity can just be a collection of pathologies with a few beneficial side effects.


Why should I care?

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


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.


There could be AI agents in this thread right now

And you wouldn’t even know it


If you can't tell, does it matter?

I really don’t think it does

Mission fucking accomplished?

https://xkcd.com/810/


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?


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

IRC is more active than forums, but I miss forums

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

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

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

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

Beware of sampling bias. Slop will always be slop.

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

That already happened, even without AI.


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

Really depends on who is responding. Emails that require a lot of effort to respond to are less likely to get a response in general, I've found.


Prying the answers you need out of your co workers and customers is a skill. I hate it but someone has to do it so it might as well be me.

Repeat the unanswered questions, add helper questions etc. I've discovered no way to avoid it.


I have near-FAANG base plus bonus working as a manager/tech lead at non-FAANG in a series B tech startup focused on industrial production (keeping it vague). It is well funded by tech elites and pays more than a comparable company would pay, and I've been here for a few years. I don't have anywhere near FAANG equity potential.


The primary answer to your question is because it's expensive to switch.


When I was starting out a bit more than a decade ago, I was on an agile/scrum software team in a hardware company. The team was fine but I found the process painful. I ejected as soon as a new director realized he could do algebra with the story points and began plotting stories quarters out. I've never been on a scrum team since and am happier for it. As a manager now, I would push back on scrum in almost every situation (and have).


The problem with "agile" is that everybody claims to do it. Companies with a healthy environment cram their procedures into agile-derived names, and keep the healthy environment, while unhealthy ones also cram their procedures into agile-derived names, and use their universality as an excuse to never improve.

I think scrum is irremediable, but even then, some places only practice it pro-forma: divide the work into tickets at the beginning of the sprint, rewrite the tickets into what they did at the end, and go home happy.


If you use direnv you always know your environment is loaded (assuming you've formed the script properly and allowed direnv to run it). And that's what you want. It's a way to keep your workspaces distinct in the terminal environment. You set what you need to set to be able to do what you need to do from any particular directory.


I've never felt secure enough to check out like this, even when my position was effectively locked in. I always want to improve and attain something bigger, so I look for problems beyond my scope when the work isn't coming to me. I feel comfort thinking I know how to take an idea through the full execution cycle due to my practice in seeking and solving problems. But it is hard for me to relax and let go.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: