Comment by echelon
2 days ago
More content will be made in a single month than all of human history up to this point.
No more Disney-fication, no more Marvel / Star Wars "mass media slop". We'll have media that caters to people's long-tail interests. If you have a passion for Egyptology and Atlantis, you'll be able to watch a steampunk adventure about the Egyptians waging war with the Atlanteans. But perhaps with the serious tone of "The Wire". That would never have been greenlit before, but it'll soon be possible.
Good creators will arise just like good indie music, indie manga/comic, and indie game creators. Discovery will be the problem to solve for creators. There will be an abundance of talent that is finally able to create their vision rather than nepotism their way into one of 500 limited annual roles of autonomy.
Small creators who grow large like VivziePop [1] and PsychicPebbles [2] will be the model for the future of content. They start small on YouTube, grow large, and eventually have their own large-scale distribution and franchises.
The creative world is about to get orders of magnitude better. Not 2x, not 10x, but easily 1,000x.
I hate most movies and tv shows, but love the medium. The problem is most content produced just isn't my vibe. I like super artsy stuff, but also have particular tastes. That's going to change dramatically. Stuff will start fitting the shape of my interest graph.
I'm so excited.
> We'll have media that caters to people's long-tail interests.
This isn't inherently a bad thing but I don't believe it's without its costs, one of which being that with everyone watching (potentially) completely unique media there'll be no shared cultural artifacts to communicate with others about.
VivziePop may have started as a small creator but the recent creations such as Hazbin Hotel have now become things where the enjoyment can be shared with other fans, which in some ways is the secondary purpose of all media. Media enjoyed alone can still be rewarding, media enjoyed with others can be much more than that (except for going to the cinema with strangers, that can disappear immediately).
It seems like a common idea that if we can just generate a practically-infinite stream of media then we've solved some kind of problem with there just not being enough "content" (I hate using the term in this way but it's concise), and while I do sympathise with the points of view from people that can't find things they like, I also don't really believe that "Content is a problem".
More variety itself isn't a problem, but I'm not convinced that in general there's a _lack_ of content. Humans have already reached peak saturation in terms of the sheer amount of text, audio and video that's created every day. No single item of media is itself a problem, but perhaps the total aggregate of everything isn't helpful.
> There will be an abundance of talent that is finally able to create their vision rather than nepotism their way into one of 500 limited annual roles of autonomy.
Is it possible that part of what creates quality is having to collaborate with others? Would Star Wars have been as good as it was without Marcia Lucas?
Yay, I can't wait for entertainment to stop being soulless corporate sequels and reboots and derivatives, and now with an LLM I can now get soulless machine generated sequels and reboots and derivatives!
Sounds like hell. Yeah let’s have everybody live in their own bubble, that’ll work out great (not) and let’s have that bubble be able to be influenced in the tiniest ways so they will consume more products, amazing!
Maybe we can finally get shows/movies that are faithful to the books instead of whatever slop we normally get (Looking at you WoT). Obviously a book != a script (like script for a show/movie, not a code script) but with LLMs I feel confident it could generate a script that could be reviewed directly or review the final video then go back and tweak the script as needed ("Ahh crap, it misunderstood the 'you' in that sentence and the wrong character just spoke in the generated video, let me fix that and re-gen that scene").
Making them faithful to a book will mot necesarilly make them more entertaining or enjoyable. There is a good chance it would make them worse actually.
>Egyptians waging war with the Atlanteans. But perhaps with the serious tone of "The Wire". That would never have been greenlit before
This is quite literally what the Marvel / Star wars mass media slop is, a sort of syncretistic version of every pop culture phenomenon scientifically engineered down to A/B tested audience taste. It's excatly what you're complaining about, never-ending banal stuff. It'll be Disneyfication on steroids.
It's a sort of media masturbation, hooking your brain up to itself and feeding it its own output, what the large studios are already doing with their franchises, just on an individual level. You'll basically sit in your own never-ending Marvel hell, basically D.F Wallace's Infinite Jest.
Art is obviously the opposite, something external and disruptive, a creative act from someone who isn't you.
Somehow I've never made the connection before until your comment, but perhaps DFW imagined the contents of the video tape as essentially the combination of YouTube Shorts and TikTok, an endless stream of tiny dopamine-spiking sensory inputs.
I always imagined it as a single media item with one theme that itself was so ridiculously compelling that viewers couldn't look away (more like a film, perhaps something analogous with the size of IJ itself), but now imagining that it was a practically-infinite stream of short-form content that you didn't even find truly valuable but were compelled to keep watching anyway makes it seem much scarier.
One real example of AI generated video that in my opinion marks the start of common people consuming AI video are the bigfoot vlog vidoes. The first time ever i see normal people watching this and genuinely like it.
> No more Disney-fication, no more Marvel / Star Wars "mass media slop". We'll have media that caters to people's long-tail interests.
Lol. Where do you think these models will get the source data for these amazing generations?
Also, an average person's "long tail" is incredibly boring (I know mine is). You will need someone to create a next Breaking Bad, or a next Discworld, or... Your slop-generating machine will not be able to generate it from a "long tail"
> Where do you think these models will get the source data for these amazing generations?
Doesn't matter one bit, just like mp3 and torrents didn't stop digital music.
If you care, there are already "ethical models", there are synthetic datasets, and soon rights holders will be licensing training data.
But it literally doesn't matter. The entire world will be on board soon. IP holders included.
> Your slop-generating machine
I'm in the industry. We're not talking about LLMs powering this, but writers and directors and VFX artists.
Hollywood is switching to AI rapidly. The problem for the studios is we don't need them anymore. They only existed because distribution and capital were hard. That isn't the case anymore. A skilled team of five can make content on their own.
> Doesn't matter one bit, just like mp3 and torrents didn't stop digital music.
mp3 and torrents are storage and distributions mechanisms, not production ones. This is an inappropriate analogy.
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> A skilled team of five can make content on their own
And a skilled team of one can also make good, creative and unique content by themselves (I'm thinking mostly of the kind of things that end up on YouTube, Nebula, etc.)
> Hollywood is switching to AI rapidly.
I'm curious as to what people think the long term prospect for this really is. If it's true that the number of people involved in the creation of this content goes down then does it get cheaper and more available? Faster to create? But to what end? Who's even paying to engage with it? Presumably not the people that used to work in the production of those things, because they've been displaced by the content generation machines. More and more content will be sold to people that are perhaps less able to afford it.
So many words completely failing to address a single word I wrote
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