Comment by Hendrikto
14 hours ago
> No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators didn't grind their own lens.
But Pulp Fiction would not have been a masterpiece if Tarantino just typed “Write a gangster movie.” into a prompt field.
14 hours ago
> No, your favorite movie is not crap because the creators didn't grind their own lens.
But Pulp Fiction would not have been a masterpiece if Tarantino just typed “Write a gangster movie.” into a prompt field.
> But Pulp Fiction would not have been a masterpiece if Tarantino just typed “Write a gangster movie.” into a prompt field.
Doesn’t that prove the point? You could do that right now, and it would be absolute trash. Just like how right now we are nowhere close to being able to make great software with a single prompt.
I’ve been vibecoding a side project and it has been three months of ideating, iterating, refining and testing. It would have taken me immeasurably longer without these tools, but the end result is still 100% my vision, and it has been a tremendous amount of work.
Pulp Fiction, like many Tarantino movies, also gets much of its effect from using existing songs rather than using an all new soundtrack
Songs he likely hand picked and for reasons that even you and I don't know about, instead of songs suggested by an AI with no personal taste.
More to your original point, Tarantino is actually well known for his deliberate uses of rare lenses. He doesn't grind them himself, but he did resurrect a dead lens format for The Hateful Eight:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_Panavision_70
And if he did, why would I prefer using his prompt instead of mine?
"Write a gangster movie that I like", instead of "...a movie this other guy likes".
But because this is not the case, we appreciate Tarantino more than we appreciate gangster movies. It is about the process.
This is exactly the process happening in the music space with Suno. Go to their subreddit, they all talk about how they only listen to ‘their’ songs, for the exact reasons you list.
Its bleak out there.
It is very different with music. Music and images fall into "just shit something and I don't care what is is" category. Most people prompting for things in this category will be satisfied with anything, they might not admit, but the degrees of freedom the model has is infinite. Now when you pin the output, let's say a character you generated, and ask for modifications WHILE KEEPING lots of characteristics, you reduce the degrees of freedom from infinite to a small, very constrained, set of states. There are workarounds but natively llms can't really do this. You ask the model to rotate an image, the hair becomes blue and the sword becames an axe.
With music this is much more pronounced because most people are musically illiterate, so even the basic mistakes while dragging characteristics over diffs becomes invisible. It's an interesting phenomenon I agree, but it says more about lack of taste and illiteracy of the common individual.
But on the point of "thinking hard", with music and artistic production in general, individuals (human with soul, not npc) crave for ideas and perspective. It is the play, the relationship between ideas that are hard to vocalize and describe but can be provocative. Because we cannot describe or understand, we have no choice other than provoke into another a similar contemplation.
But make no mistake, nobody is enjoying llm slop. They have fantasies that now they can produce something of value, or delegate this production. If this becomes true, instantly they lose and everyone goes directly to the source.
Art is specifically about communicating the inconceivable, cannot be delegated. If the tool is sufficient to produce art, then the expression is of the tool itself, now they ARE.
> But because this is not the case, we appreciate Tarantino more than we appreciate gangster movies.
Do we? I don't think people appreciate tarantino more than gangster movies. Don't think people appreciate tarantino more than pulp fiction. Frankly, tarantino doesn't factor in at all.
> It is about the process.
I never considered the process when watching pulp fiction. It's the finished product, not the process, that matters.
Put it this way, we know who tarantino is because of pulp fiction. Not the other way around.
> It's the finished product, not the process, that matters.
I think the point is that the finished product depends on the process.