Comment by bensyverson
1 day ago
I have videographer friends, and this is exactly what they've been asking for. Their dream is to be able to say "sync the A and B camera footage, chunk the whole interview down into segments, and then pull together the highlights based on this outline."
Not every application of AI is "do the creativity for me."
I would not be surprised if engineers who laid the groundwork for this back then would be happy with this workflow.
I am reminded of an interview I saw about the Stranger Things intro (before mainstream audiences got weird about the show). The producers wanted a practical effects intro, and consulted with people who actually made 1980s intros the show was trying to replicate.
The old guard said the show’s producers were crazy to do it with practical effects and should just use CGI since this was what they would have done, if they had the technology.
Edit: oh god, there is a nearly identical HN post from 2024 from me that I do not remember making. I swear I am not an LLM. I am also hoping that I am not an old man telling his stories over and over either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40453073
Is it that surprising that a bunch of old guys don't have the same energy and excitement as the new ambitious up-and-comers?
George Lucas seemed pretty satisfied when filming the Star Wars prequels to plop himself down in a chair in a room with a giant bluescreen set where he didn't have to walk around and direct in a hot, sandy desert for hours like in the original films. But the movies looked a lot worse for it.
"guy with bad knees recommends we all take the gondola down"
And yet, the prequels are still miles better than the sequels!
Episode III was pretty good despite filming in 2K.
The irony being that a lot of older practical VFX artists aren't able to tell when CGI is terrible. They're often so enamored with what the tech enables, that they're the last to see how quickly it becomes shoddy. Not sure what the equivalent of the hedonic treadmill is for CG, but it ages very rapidly, versus the best practical effects which maintain a charming physicality - even when they're no longer convincing.
> a lot of older practical VFX artists aren’t able to tell when CGI is terrible.
Source? As a CGI VFX artist in a previous life, I disagree vehemently, and I think you’re spinning an untrue narrative. I’ve never met any VFX artists, whether practical or CG (and I’ve met many), who weren’t keenly aware of how bad effects were and how poorly they age. The few practical folks left are way less enamored of CGI than the CGI people, and they were always that way (by definition?), so it seems like you’re mixing them up.
The fact that shoddy effects get used speaks to directors and budgets and production studios and what audiences pay for, it has almost nothing to do with the artists. That said, you’re also comparing bad CGI with good practical effects, which undermines your point. There were plenty of practical effects that lost their charm as fast as any CG ever did, and today there is plenty of CGI that remains convincing; it depends entirely on which effect and which shot in which movie you’re talking about.
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I just watched the entire cycle of Don Quixote films by/about Terry Gilliam. That is a master class in how to ensure that your magnum opus is the worst film you've ever made.
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>Not every application of AI is "do the creativity for me."
However it can lead to AI "doing the creative for them" and them out of a job in the near future.
Sure, in the future everything will have a healthy piss-tint yellow shine. =3
I'm not complaining either, I wouldn't call myself a video editor, but I do end up spending some of my time in Resolve, and anything to remove the dreadful monotonous tasks of editing interviews is welcome. Although Resolve already makes it pretty easy, with the "edit by moving the transcript around" feature which is amazing. Anyway, I'm happy about being able to sick Codex at Resolve now :)
If we can get the environmental impact of this stuff ameliorated (a big if), this is the real benefit of this kind of AI assistance imo- it transforms everyone into a director and frees them from being a surrogate for a director.
See also: 3D modeling. Autodesk Fusion's interface is truly awful and people put years into learning it to do complex things. The MCP server functionality they added, though still in its infancy with Claude and what it can do, vastly lowers the barrier to entry for people just looking to get into making basic things. They can focus on the actual creative process rather than fumbling with the awkward tooling.
A lot of professional skill nowadays is misdirected from ‘knowing how to do the thing’ into ‘learning how to use a computer to do the thing’.
The role of music producer includes a large chunk of ‘knowing how to program synths and samples and drums and effects’. The role of industrial designer includes a lot of ‘knowing how to model things in CAD’. Even roles like academic researchers require skills like ‘formatting LaTeX’.
I’m genuinely quite excited for a shift in human computer interaction which reduces that ‘knowing how to do things on the computer’ tax.
But there are a whole swathe of jobs where a lot of what people do is ‘know how to do the thing on a computer’. Some of that is really because the bureaucracy has been embodied in a computer system so for example the job of handling an insurance claim seems to involve a lot of ‘knowing how to operate the claims computer system’ - actually that person’s skill is ‘knowing how to navigate the claims bureaucracy’.
Completely agree. How many people over the past 20 years have been musically gifted, but found ProTools or Logic impenetrable? The AI unlock is about enabling that creativity, not replacing it.
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AI is elevating one’s capability but not replacing it.
Then you have experience and skills.
Someone with zero skills in music will be able to make a 'song' but a savvy producer would use tools differently and could leverage them to actually make something creative.
Anyone can make an app those days (or a website or whatever) but mileage varies based on one's nature, also the gotchas of someone with zero knowledge of a field could result issues that someone with experience would've noticed and resolved much earlier or avoided completely.
Me with zero knowledge in architecture can "design" my house but I wouldn't trust my plan without someone looking at it.
AI and AGI provides great lengths in empowering but it might also introduce the false feeling of being capable.
Creativity, capability and motivation still takes important place even with AI.
Exactly. Sometimes I just need a 3D printed part to finish a DIY project, I don't want to waste hours designing it. I had my fair share of time playing around with SketchUp when I was a teenager, but that's it.
Blender with fable and Astra is doing pretty amazing things it seems..
Yeah, exactly. I cannot wait to use this to take care of the boring stuff.
That's why there are no assistant editor jobs anymore.
Pretty soon there will be no need for recording and editing .
IIRC House MD was one of the first shows to use digital (5D mkII).
Soon there will be AI generated shows. Perhaps entirely personalized.
Youtube, generate me a TNG episode.
> Youtube, generate me a TNG episode.
It will never be that simple.
For example: the guys on youtube using AI to make new Star Wars movies [1] still did tons of work putting it all together, including the 3d renderings and editing, and they are leaning on old scriptwriting/dialogue from a 1991 Star Wars book. AI is just helping them automate the process and generate some visuals/voice acting, but it still takes a skilled artist with lots of technical knowledge to guide it in the right direction and properly utilize their existing tools/workflows... and most importantly good taste.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4gZR1BDzOw
We can always streamline creativity by allowing agents to post jobs on mechanical Turk
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It's already possible, but in my opinion it will never be popular. In some ways this has already been proven through other media; ChatGPT can easily generate a novel, but how many people are reading pure-AI novels?
Replace “novels” with music and go check YouTube for slop playlists and people happily eating it up.
The problem of AI “art” has never been that it cannot pass for the real thing. There are plenty of people buying slop ebooks on Amazon today. People will gladly generate a new episode of TNG.
And it will be popular because the discerning ones are the minority. Netflix is a multibillion dollar company serving a lot of mediocre stuff that people happily pay for just to turn off their brain for 2 hours every night.
Hence why I don’t care to justify why I avoid AI generated content at all costs, no matter how good it might look, with most people. It might sound snobbish to say, but they just wouldn’t get it.
https://x.com/ratlimit/status/2011250910471815650
… but set it in the Star Wars universe.
And full of product placements...
Resolve has had de-aging filters, and TTS voice synthesis for awhile.
If the chat-bot/spy-ware aren't integrated, than I don't see a problem with LLM plug-in opt-in support. =3
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