Comment by angusturner
7 hours ago
I think its a useful exercise to try and name a cultural artifact (picture, video, game, music, book, etc) that was improved, or made substantially possible, by this technology. Ideally something that has moved you or provoked a lasting response.
Conversely, try to think of examples where Generative AI has betrayed a lack of creativity or care from the creator, and thus left a sour or ambivalent or impression.
I find the former impossibly hard, and the latter depressingly easy. Do others feel the same?
There are tons of cool, creative, funny and wow stuff being done with AI. A third of my Instagram feed is AI creators and some of the stuff they do is mind blowing, but even when it's not super impressive, some of it is just so creative and well done. Saiyenfeld is amazing (DBZ Seinfeld mashup by grickusai). It's taking a medium that is familiar, putting a spin on it and doing it well. You can do things that you couldn't do otherwise. People with interesting concepts can finally get them out of their head into something really interesting. People are so doomer and depressed, but they purposely don't see the stuff that is just fucking fun. I spend all day with a 5090 and courses and I still can't make stuff as good, creative, cool or funny as these people who actually have those talents and they are just fuddling through with token services.
If you want to get inspired go to civitai and look through the top stuff and be wowed. Maybe they didn't draw it, but they figured out how to make it happen and when you look at enough generated stuff you can tell the average from the holy shit. It's easy to get inspired by what people can come up with and want to do something yourself, which is a positive impact I'd say.
I'm glad you feel this way.
I can't personally relate, and I think its kind of telling that I'm being down-voted for simply asking people to engage with this thought experiment.
I agree, I don't understand why this technology has so much energy put into it. Just because we can doesn't mean we should?
By Genie specifically? Or by generative AI in general?
If you mean world models like Genie,I don't know. If you mean the latter, I have definitely used software that I have enjoyed that I do not believe would have been possible without generative AI.
Fluxer is the first Discord competitor that when you show to someone they can't say "well Discord does X better", and it was largely made using AI.
Herdr is designed for AI usage, but I actually really like it even for just normal terminal multiplexing. It was surely made with a lot of AI.
I have seen people make incredible things at my work that have actually solved multi-year long pain points that we've never had the resources to address before.
I have used AI to patch and revive a bunch of small services like chat bots or web services and such that I had made and had decayed into failure over the years.
Sure, it's easy to point at people using AI as a megaphone for their lack of care. But I don't think it's impossibly hard to find people doing good things with it either.
> Fluxer is the first Discord competitor that when you show to someone they can't say "well Discord does X better", and it was largely made using AI.
Didn't know that before, but considering its abysmal failures to scale, yeah in hindsight it does make a lot of sense. (one of) My group(s) tried to move and we came back to Discord rather quickly.
Software might be the exception, but I think some skepticism is still warranted.
When software is hard there's a kind of filter; a good piece of software means a human/team behind it with grit and care and user empathy. You can have some* confidence in the continued stability and maintenance of the software. (*relatively speaking, and with huge error bars).
Without knowing the details of Fluxer, if someone tells me about a vibecoded Discord clone, my immediate thoughts are like: - how much thought and care went into this? - how much work from Discord has been cannibalized? - will the authors be around next week to keep maintaining and making improvements and thinking deeply about their users?
I have also seen a lot of fantastic demos and stuff with AI coding. I use AI coding all day. I just think there's a weird gap still, where code and images and text are all "cheap", but none of this has translated into anything I personally use or care about.
They're not really promising to do that. It's not even clear this model will be meaningfully commercialized. The key line is "Understanding and simulating the world is a crucial aspect of building AGI". This model will be used for research and robotics, and maybe the training of further models.
Without getting into a larger argument about whether this is the correct approach to building AGI, I think its reasonable to ask people to engage with how this technology gets used in practice, besides its nominal purpose of "building AGI".
The predominant way people engage with this technology right now is through slop content in their instagram feeds.
(Btw I say all this as someone that has worked on generative models for 10 years).
Unironically, Tung Tung Tung Sahur and some funny music video about p(doom). But yeah that’s basically it.
Throw a gifted storyteller at any medium and they will produce something worth paying attention to. AI generated content has not had that moment yet. I'm not sure it will ever, but it's worth thinking about.
It took the medium of film ~50 years to find Hitchock and ~75 to find Spielberg.
I have thought about it.
I'm encouraging others to do the same and be honest with themselves about the direction we're headed.