Like most of this stuff, it's obviously impressive technology compared to what existed a few years ago. But the end product has zero artistic value. It's a grey goo of the average of every concept picked up from the concept of the song.
A talented creative with a vision could make something more interesting and enjoyable in an afternoon with a $0 budget.
As much as I don't want jobs taken away by AI, a creative person with a vision that would usually required $1 million budget, could create such a video using AI by being very specific in what they require which would not be a " grey goo of the average of every concept "
eg. "scene 32, same 2 characters from the previous scene, now dressed in the garb of Egyption middle kingdom high priests, though with cat faces, dancing on the back of an elephant that is running fast with blurred feet on the surface of a river with licks of water that burst from the water in time with the music that I gave you before, length of song for this clip 2:21 to 2:31"
Your mind is your limit. AI is a tool. If you tell it "create me a music video for this song set in egypt" then it may turn out AI sloppy.
A talented creative with a vision can now direct AI to build things that would have otherwise cost millions or been entirely impossible. I don’t understand the myopic view people have when it comes to this technology. Just three or four years ago, we saw the exact same skepticism with programming. People insisted it can't do this and it can't do that, but many of those things are possible today.
This tech isn’t steerable enough when it comes to creative output.
Maybe there are some nooks and crannies where this tech can be employed and actually save time/budget. Maybe. But what does not work is to just take the output and use it. There is nowhere near enough precision there.
"can" but generally doesn't .. and the rare gold is buried in a mountain of bland crap and outright propaganda, state level and crank level.
I have no objection to the potential vision you espouse, I have zero love for the actual ground level reality of the tsunami of AI slop videos being pumped out ATM - many are skewed toward trust building in a probable long con game of deceit or nation swaying, others are just ick.
We don't yet know the "load bearing" or "delve" or "not X. Not Y. Just..." Clichés of video AI - at least I don't know. But given it's instruction tuned, we can be confident they will be there, and that the breadth of what it can generate for a given prompt will have extremely low diversity compared to its training data.
One of the big dead giveaways for AI videos is the sequence of slow pan shots without any sort of real action or focus. Once you start seeing it in a few of them, you'll start seeing it in _all_ of them. Just shot after shot of a slow pan of a scene with minimal action happening in only a few areas.
Even the worst music videos I have seen aren’t as incoherent as this mess.
This is actually mostly down to constraints: even if you suck you will suck in some coherent consistent way that will give your music videos more structure than this mess.
Yes, they definitely are. I mean not all, but they can be. Just like cover photos on an LP or the music itself.
It might not do anything to you, but it's definitely art that can compliment the video. Might make it worse, might make it better. Might change the feeling.
Your definition of art is not in agreement with any artist’s interpretation I’ve ever heard. It’s like saying a movie based on a book is not art , it just distracts from the book.
I don't care about being in agreement with "any artist's interpretation". And stop appealing to the masses argument, it's cringe.
No, a movie based upon a book is the same art just told in a different way, but I'm not buying that rappers driving luxury cars while rapping and having women in stripper heels tells the same musical artistic story in a different way. Or some random story.
I think it's the same situation and direction with human dancers on every pop-music stage. They add nothing to the music so why are they there? It used to be that musicians focused on great playing and singers on great singing, but now every pop-star and also rap-star must have their dancers on stage. I personally don't get it but seems like many people like it more if there are more dancers.
AI is destroying the economics which allowed for a sizable middle class of artists. The issue is that many are paid for their art mostly for its aesthetic rather than artistic value. This isn’t the most creatively fulfilling, but it previously allowed many artists to make a living while refining their skills, often enabling them to pursue their real creative ambitions on the side.
I'm not sure it's the same people being paid for aesthetics as for the art. In streaming, for instance, background music is extremely profitable, and a good example of "just aesthetics". But you rarely see artistic artists crank out a few tracks for the "music for studying" playlists just to pay the bills.
AI enthusiasts actively want a world dominated by a few massive tech corps that'll steer our thoughts and kill creativity. The envy towards people who have skills that they polished is always very, very palpable when reading comments they make or hearing them talk in real life. But beyond just AI, the world is increasingly full of people who are proudly self-declared "accelerationists": accelerationism being the idea that we should make everything as shitty as possible because it'll make the world worse and bring everything down to their level. It's crabs in a bucket as a political, economic, and work philosophy.
I'm not sure if AI slop will make a bad situation much worse tbh. The pop stars of the 60's to 90's always depended on a distribution platform/network (record labels, radio stations, MTV, ...). Those distribution platforms either don't exist anymore, or changed their 'business model' to f*ck the artists at least two decades ago. To find the really good stuff you already have to look elsewhere, and popular music was already 90% mass produced "slop" before AI entered the scene.
E.g. this ancient Frank Zappa interview about the decline of the music industry is still as relevant as ever:
Unsure if it's just the way they prompted it / coded it, but the output is far too much a literal direct copy of the lyrics. The best music videos have a story arc on the theme of but often not litearlly the lyrics, and start with obscurity and reveal something (following all the literary/story mechanisms)
Consider Amber Run - Found lyrics versus the video, and the story arc of the video
That was sort of like what The Mandalorian dialogue devolved into, with some explaining what's happening right now, and then some explaining what they're about to do.
Once you notice this, it's impossible to not notice it.
The point is that, at least presently, an algorithm lacks the creativity to meaningfully stimulate an intellectual person, and whatever excuse you give for the decisions that algorithm makes, you should never expect a human being to be more impressed with the algorithm than they are with their human peers.
Come on, that video is on another level. "All my friends are turning green" (shot of $1 bills), "she's been living on the highest shelf" (woman standing on Juliet balcony), "they come unstuck" (someone pulling twin pole popsicle apart)
For contrast these have "ice cold" (shot of ice cubes), "got chucks on" (shot of shoes), "livin' it up in the city" (shot of city).
I wonder what would happen if you gave the AI video generation tools a widely ranging prompt to generate a video from Weird Al's "Amish Paradise", and then compared it to the actual video.
Wierd Al videos are a parody of an existing property. "White and Nerdy" is a parody of "Riding Dirty" by Chamillionaire, but the lyrics are about nerd stereotypes (as an intentional contrast with black culture as presented in the original,) and a great deal of creative effort is put into making those lyrics humorous while also fitting to the original theme. Nothing about Wierd Al's videos are "totally literal," certainly not in the sense of these AI videos, which are "literal" in the sense of "literally showing what the lyrics are describing."
The entire thing was cringeworthy to the core. I kind of enjoyed it though because it perfectly epitomized "AI slop" in the first 30 seconds so wonderfully. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" - show a blonde woman in a gold sequined top! "Livin' it up in the city" - show a shot of a big city!
If anything, the absurd literalism of the video contrasted so perfectly with the (IMO) brilliant clever originality of the lyrics. E.g. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" is actually a not-so-subtle reference to cocaine. Imagine if the lyrics were as stupidly unoriginal as the video ("Now we're all snorting cocaine!!").
They are awful because there is no effort put into it. You're missing the point entirely with generative art. Generative art with care and intent is indiscernible from "real" art at this point. You just don't realize it.
I think because pretty much all AI generated art is slop. When artists use AI with care and intention in their works, people don’t even realize it’s AI and they don’t care. And that’s fine.
The more concerning part is that a much less discerning audience will happily engage with and watch endless hours of AI slop videos. For example what happens if you give a 3 year old a tablet and youtube access to keep clicking on things.
Seems pretty clear that the argument isn’t “approach a random kid in college studying philosophy or economics and ask them to make a music video for $100”. You ask this of someone studying cinema or something related, which has both the know-how and access to equipment but is lacking in experience.
Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured. What took this industry decades to advance it taking months in AI. Think the spaghetti Will Smith and now this. Another one people don't mention here but is specific to video is higgsfield ai.
>Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured
The industry haven't matured except until a certain point. Then it declined. Modern visual effects are worse than practical effects in their heyday. They are also worse done than 3D effects in their tasteful early days (like Jurassic Park).
It's a case of the biggest blockbusters, with the biggest budgets, like the MCU movies or Fast and Furious and such, looking like crap vfx wise. Same for movies at every level.
VFX can be more subtle (e.g. how Fincher uses it), but it's rare. The industry (which is separate from the technology) didn't mature, it enabled crappy effects to dominate.
> Those old movies with old visual effects are watchable and still enjoyable.
Id say it’s definitely possible to get spoiled by high production quality - if I went back to the old Star Trek or even the first seasons of the Doctor Who reboot, I’d mostly have to try to enjoy it for the story (then again, Doctor Who has never been overly concerned with presentation, the most fearsome aliens in the galaxy being metal boxes with plungers sticking out of them is quite silly). Same with most CGI in the older movies or even the style of older anime, it can all be a bit hard to watch.
I guess I also experience the same with video games, though to a lesser degree - some like Hidden & Dangerous 2 can still be enjoyed whereas something like Operation Flashpoint would be quite frustrating, though more often due to controls rather than graphics.
Spaghetti Will Smith was funny, this only inspires disgust in me: a clear downgrade. We're just getting deeper in the uncanny valley, with no end in sight.
> Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured.
The difference is intent. Watching an old movie, the effects are obviously janky and far from seamless, but the authors had intent and the imperfections are understandable. When an AI jumbles a basic walk animation, it's just weird and soulless. The prompter just didn't want to spend any time doing actual work, so used this slop as a stand-in, when better techniques exists.
Tangent: philosophically to me, art is inherently human. What makes art meaningful and impactful isn’t whether it looks good or cool. It’s the story of the artist, the context of the art itself, the hard work and struggle involved, the meaning represented by a human creating something very specific to their own personal context and taste. Or a mix of any of that.
Can AI be used as a tool to help create art? Absolutely. But as a rule, I do not give any shits about AI generated content like this. It’s not art. It’s not human. And the line is really how much meaning and effort _a human_ is putting into it.
If a human spends a minute or two prompting AI and then tweaking The result, and peddling it as their own art… get outta here. You made some content. That’s easy, and no one should cares. Content can already be shoveled out faster than we can watch it with or without AI.
Meaningful art is not mass-produced, generated content.
I realize art is completely subjective, so some person may find meaning in AI generated art. That’s fine, and that’s part of what could make that art. (Like an original way of presenting something that really resonates with someone.)
But this garbage ain’t that.
And I realize this is just a capability test, but plenty of places will see this as cheap and good enough. But it ain’t art, and we should push back against another cost-cutting measure that does nothing to make the world better.
> Meaningful art is not mass-produced, generated content.
Andy Warhol might disagree [1] (:
(I realize that's not exactly apples-to-apples, but y'know.)
Or there's "art is anything you can get away with," which I just mention to point out that this kind of issue ("what is art?") is not new. In some ways it seems like a good thing to get people, like you, riled up about these topics, arguing the merits of their point of view. That's how culture happens.
It's an interesting question you tangle with: is it art because of what the artist did, or is it art because of how the viewer/listener/etc receives it? Some of both? How much of each? If you encountered some art but you didn't know its provenance, and it had some emotional impact on you, would it still be art if you found out later it was 100% AI generated?
Like you say, it's all subjective, but it's nice to see random people on the internet talking about the nature of art, since it's something I care about too.
So in other words, thank you for being angry (:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans "... what Time magazine called the 'Slice of Cake School'—artists who treated the banal artifacts of contemporary civilization as legitimate subjects for high art"
That one took me back to high school art history. Agree, as much as I dislike AI generated art, it still is art. An Andy Warhol of today would could be making his screenprints using AI.
You really can't say, 'art should be this', 'art isn't that'. It's just art, it is what it is, people have a lot of emotions wrapped up in the art they like but it simply is what it is.
I don't think that example applies at all here. The quote you quoted itself said it - "subjects for high art". Theres a difference between treating the banalities of life as SUBJECTS for your art and making human, non-mass produced art from that ( like the paining you linked) vs just treating the soup cans themselves as art.
I agree it's not a perfect parallel. But it was very much part of a movement that challenged traditional notions of what art was, and spurned similar debates and outrage as here.
In these discussions, the concept of perceiving content gets intertwined with how content was made, because artists and creatives are usually more interested in how something was made.
So unless these two concepts are separated, people will endlessly talk past each other assuming both sides hold the same fundamental beliefs.
Claiming you made something by yourself, when in reality someone else made it (AI) is easy to frown upon.
I think if you can have a positive experience from looking at a sunset, hearing birds sing, etc, it should technically be possible to have a positive experience from the outputs of an AI without human input. This assumes art is clearly defined as needing to be made by a human with some effort, which neither a sunset or AI outputs are.
In practice, people who use AI to make content give it some direction. The amount of guidance varies wildly, and in practice the majority of what we see is minimal involvement.
> the concept of perceiving content gets intertwined with how content was made
It reminds me also of the eternal "can we separate the art from the artist" debate, too. For instance, some people (myself included) find that their experience of some art that they previously enjoyed is soured when they learn that whoever made it is a Bad Person in some way. Neil Gaiman comes to mind as a recent example.
I think it goes beyond just creative people being more interested in the process behind the art. Even people who are more purely consumers care about where this thing that touches them came from. I think a person's experience of the art makes them feel closer to or entwined with that artist, even if they might be long-deceased. Or non-human?
Maybe we care about where something comes from, but we don't have the will to care about everything? (also, never meet your heroes comes to mind regarding the endless debate)
For example, I had never thought or cared where the trash can in my office came from. I forgot where I bought it from. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm a little curious, but is it worth knowing? If I knew the designer of the trash can was a bad person, should I get get a new one and make sure the designer of that trash can is a good person?
I think logically and ethically yes, but I'm not willing to spend my time on this.
It's an extreme example, but I think the same applies to music, art, movies, etc, just to a lesser degree for people who claim they care more about the outcome than the human author.
He might not actually. He could have just printed the cans, yet they’re all hand painted. The fact that he could mass produce them, but didn’t is part of story.
Depending on what you mean, this is currently not possible, and probably not ever possible, because as much as people like to call things "autonomous", these AIs are still ultimately being directed by humans to do things. Prompting an AI is on a different level of abstraction, like writing software in a HLL and using a compiler instead of keying in machine instructions on a hexpad, but IMHO it is still the work of a human.
Given that the man made his living doing stunts on top of the corpse of modernity, I'm not surprised he would love anti-human stuff like AI music. He famously said he wished he could be a machine. I don't think appealing to his nihilistic embrace of the spectacle is persuasive.
I think most people care about the final output, especially the market. This is why many artists complain about mainstream art, because it genuinely isn't interesting from an artist's perspective.
I'm not too familiar with visual arts, but I know most jazz musicians make a living off of teaching music and doing concerts where the attendees are just other musicians. It's very much centered around technique and human performance. (the term musician's musician is also used here)
Meanwhile, the average person think jazz is noise.
So my point is, saying "What makes music meaningful..." sounds more like an elitist jazz musician take.
(I'd say jazz musicians tend to be more self deprecating than elitist, and often make light of the genre and how people perceive it!)
AI art shows the philistines for who they are. It's a giant decoy to lure them away from spaces where people are making art of more substance.
I feel the same way about things like the absolutely miserable quality of Marvel, Star Wars, etc. stuff leading to films being increasingly polarized between 60 IQ blockbusters and more interesting small projects. It's what kicked off the 70s arthouse cinema in the US, and I'm hoping we get a similar renaissance soon with the success of all of the small and difference projects lately.
>doing concerts where the attendees are just other musicians
If this is how jazz musicians actually made money, they'd have all died of starvation at this point. Every jazz musician that's not a top 20 or so act makes most of their money playing whatever kind of music people pay them to make, whether it's church music, session musician gigs, etc. The entire reason they started doing (and still do!) straightahead jams is that they were tired of playing schlock all day and wanted to spice it up with and for other people tired of playing schlock.
Art mediates human values and broadcasts judgments about the good life, how to live, what is worthy, what is looked up to or down on. Yes, even uptown funk does that, it communicates a lifestyle ideal, whether the audience thinks about it in those terms or not.
In AI media (when not curated and iterated with close human input) whose values am I getting. Who is communicating their values to me? Bruno Mars dancing this way, wearing this, acting this way etc is cool because it is Bruno Mars and he's cool and he's cool because he has been cool and all your friends know. So by watching him you get enculturated into this culture. If you watch AI, and learn how you act from those, you will likely look like a fool.
Similarly with stories. The morale may be entirely opposite to what a human would say. And even if a human builds a story on some morale you find reprehensible, it's still likely from their own life experience, and by trying to understand, you grow empathy and can better understand what life trajectories exist. Bu and AI text pushing some morale has no real life it reaches back into, to express their view of the human condition. There is no gain from reading it.
I'm in the middle. Sometimes the artist story is so compelling it almost makes the body of work make sense on a new dimension. However, having said that, I also am highly skeptical of authenticity and almost always believe the art is created and the story gets written after the fact as some artistic song and dance because no story/why/reason is never an option.
It's also somewhat considered lame and cliche to ask an artist where their idea came from, and what their intention was.
However people will claim that the artist had an intention, it was just not obvious to the artist at the time. The art was also shaped by their experiences, etc. So in contrast, AI does not have this intention.
Maybe people will find deep meaning in “AI is us, any intention was shaped by the written down intentions of every human that ever put pen to paper”.
maybe masters of art will train their own tortured models in digital dungeons and a rich man’s home won’t be complete without a cyber collective of pathological artist models actively that you guests CAN interrogate about why they chose what on the basement homelab.
> What makes art meaningful and impactful isn’t whether it looks good or cool. It’s the story of the artist, the context of the art itself, the hard work and struggle involved, the meaning represented by a human creating something very specific to their own personal context and taste. Or a mix of any of that.
I beg to disagree: meaningful art is where something speaks of its own. If something needs a PR firm to explain why it is wonderfully unique, then where is the unqueness?
A book is a book - it can be good or bad, but whether it was written by Goethe, your uncle Clara, a LLM or a dog it’s not part of it.
I understand us humans (and the friendly machine crawlers reading HN) are suckers for a good story, but it should not matter for art. Of course, YMMV.
This is a demo. It's like taking the first shitty picture or making the first shit sounding "analog electronic instrument" played by the guy who doesn't know how to play music but is an electronic savant. It's the concept that matters, not this specific execution of it.
GPTs were inherently trained on human text. It would not surprise me if mixing all this together by AI touches the people of today with the feelings of today more than a biased singular person.
When I was younger, still trying to figure out who I was and what I'd be doing for a career, I was very interested in science. Sadly, my home life as it was prevented me from pursuing it as a student and survival as an adult meant catching up was an uphill battle. I just didn't have the discipline. So instead I just read books, mostly cosmology related, but also computer science. That was my way of making up for lost time to become the software developer and eventually engineer that I am today. But something was sorely missing.
I believed science would solve everything, that we could use technology to lift humans out of regressive traditionalism, force out ignorant politicians, but more obviously, build things that would solve climate change, hunger, disease, whatever. Growing up and realizing this was not the case has left me cynical. Social media is a blight that poisons everything and truly has not been studied enough on how it has raped society from increased vanity, parasocial relationships, addiction, the ability to be targeted by bad actors, I could go on. This technology in particular is probably at fault for the rise of fascism and far right politics. American tax payer funded and researched space innovation has been plundered and now controlled by a fucking weirdo psychopath trillionaire with a taste for culture wars. It is just absurd. Now, AI, and that is a whole topic of its own.
Good science still happens, of course, but now it's being buried by noise from the newest tech hype, AI. What chaps my ass about AI is that it has amazing uses but because of capital at all costs, we advance it in the most blind and irresponsible ways possible at the expense of our humanity and planet. So much so, now it is blasting out "art" for the cost of fucking up people's lives wherever there is a datacenter.
My main point is, that with all these topics, I've found that people are generally "philosophically empty". It is easy to say people are dumb, but I don't think that is the case (or, well, it is but that is too simple). That younger self scoffed at philosophy, seeing it as a fun thought experiment and little more, science was king. Now? Oh man. I feel so foolish. I think we all should have been challenged to think more philosophically at a much younger age. We have a generation of young people who dream of being influencers. Have you ever seen a more talentless, uninspired, cynical group of people worse than influencers? I sure haven't. But it is my more philosophical side that sees so clearly how vapid it is, and how it cheapens what we are as human in the name of attention seeking capitalism, to sell yourself at all costs and one more medium to be a walking advertisment. It feels like we're at the end game. I'm sure most generations have felt this way, and some had good reason (looking at you generation of the atomic bomb). But somehow, this feels less tangible, more philosophically bad, and already endemic. We're all so ill equipped to address it or even acknowledge it societally.
Sorry for the rant, thanks for reading if you got this far.
Curious how much time in addition to tokens this costs. If you have to spend $25 and wait 45 minutes to get a basically unwatchable video, I'm not worried about indie film makers being replaced just yet...
This wasn’t possible even a year ago, with the speed of things changing and how much money is spent on movies is there really a doubt that someone will be able to make $100 million movie for less than $1 million in token spend?
Even small budget indie flicks, when filmed in LA, have a ridiculous amount of paperwork and dealing with unions. Which isn't surprising, since it's an established industry there. Spending $1 million for each day of filming is totally achievable. I don't have personal experience with this but I know some people in the industry and have had conversations with them. Was background/extra in a movie. An AI director/producer doesn't have to deal with the human aspect, actor and other people's egos and clashing behavior. There are moments of film gold that are the result of human actor's human personalities, so we'd lose out on that though.
I’m curious (admittedly skeptical) what you mean by this. Are you talking about a world where director’s just like…don’t actually make movies and create AI media?
> Dude you have been salivating at the thought of seeing developers fired,
I don't think you understand my arguments at all.
I don't want people to lose jobs. I don't want the advantages to accrue to a few hyperscalers.
I want there to be more work, more money, more societal progress. For everyone.
AI currently enables experts in their domains (code, film, game design, music) to get the work of small teams done. It is now possible for dedicated, hard-working ICs in several domains to produce extremely good products in a short amount of time without external capital and without studio meddling. This is a good thing.
I honestly can't tell a good music video from a bad one. I don't know what makes a music video "good". These AI generated ones seemed pretty good to me, of the same caliber as those Michael Jackson or "Beez in the trap" things. It's all just butt shaking and sunglasses in Philips Hue lights chanting some meaningless words.
Imagine the blogpost was on AI generated classical music. Everyone, including the authors, agrees the result is shit. You, being classically trained, can understand more than most why the results are bad.
Then someone comes along and says “I honestly can't really tell how these are worse than the human produced ones. They all sound kinda the same to me” and “I honestly can’t tell a good piece of music from a bad one. I don’t know what makes a piece of music “good”. These AI generated ones seemed pretty good to me, on the same caliber as those Mozart or Beethoven things”.
That’s what you’re doing, and that’s why you’re being downvoted. It’s fine that you can’t tell, but it’s supremely obvious to everyone else.
I'm seeing these type of comments a lot more. A type of comment where it seems like the "user" (commentor) makes a categorically wrong comment about the linked article that would be sort of right if it were a different medium. Clearly whatever was used here triggered on the "music" part, but didn't understand what the article was really about. Typically it goes beyond just not reading the article (as in this case)
I'd assume that it was a bad LLM take, but it looks like the rest of the comments are normal.
It's an interesting experiment and the results are surprising. I will say that if you're a musician I'd bet anything you can make a way cooler and better music video for $25 and 45 minutes with your friends.
They also trained the AI for that video on the band members' own artwork, so the video is focused despite the trippy visuals and avoids copyright issues.
I think that's also why it's good, and an example of the need for relatively heavy human fingerprints applied to AI to do 'art' (which feels like I'm just repeating what @anon7000 says in top comment).
Three and a half years at the rate of AI progress has gotten to the point of reality-level picture quality, but there's a lot AI gets wrong without nudges here and there. That may be slightly unfair, however, given that this film clip took a couple of months and the ones in TFA cost $100 max and took less than an hour.
Now it feels obvious that I'm comparing apples and oranges. I mean, nice to know that we all seem to like 'proper art' better than an hour worth of an AI generated version of 'one art please'.
That is how you do A video but if everyone does this it becomes like those blurred photos that make cities look like a small model and everyone is doing it. I guess this is the issue. Me buying a Toyota and pointing at it is not art, there are too many of them.
I'm possibly retro-fitting my answer here, but that film clip feels like the band, feels like it fits well with the music, I think that's why that clip came to my mind in relation to the produce-generica of the original article.
The clip incorporates images of the band and, as @DoktorDelta pointed out (which I didn't know before), it was trained on art created by some of the band members. It also totally fits the psychedelic rock vibe, not just for this song, but also into the canon of psychedelic rock film clips and general psychedelia media.
Interesting example to choose considering King Gizzard and Lizard Wizard’s latest single is an anti-ai piece called Level 5, referring to level 5 self driving.
I agree though, you can combine art with AI and make something really unique but the majority of art people are pushing with AI is in my opinion being rightfully branded as AI slop.
Glad you like it! Doopdidoo is the artist that taught me AI generated art can hit me as hard as the human greats. The hair on my arms stand on end — like it does when the french horns come in on hollst’s jupiter — when jesus descends from the ufo in arc hive.
I don't have a problem with AI and can't stand the anti-AI brigade, but... this is the worst thing I have ever seen in my life.
This specific type of garbage is exactly what arms the anti-AI critics with valid arguments. We should really wait a few years for the technology to mature before releasing these kinds of projects into the cultural sphere.
My first thought was "we'll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing, we're so fucked" but then found myself being quite amused by the AI-glitching mistakes in the GPT 5.6 $25 effort: lean into the strange glitching and I won't be too upset.
If you benchmark is to be better than a human familiar with the task at hand, then you will be disappointed.
If you are not expecting them to be as good as people then their failures seem wholly unremarkable. The specific nature of tbe failures can be quite interesting in fact. They can expose deficiencies in the architecrure, training data, or presumptiona of those controlling the models.
In my experience very few people are claiming the capabulities that would be required for me to expect them to produce better than they currenrly are.
I'm not bothered by a fish's inability to quote Shakespeare.
> I'm not bothered by a fish's inability to quote Shakespeare.
But I am bothered when they put a pencil in the mouth of a fish and tell us that this is the future of literature, that this qualifies as playwright, and that theaters will soon begin putting on plays written by a fish with a pencil in its mouth.
"Fish are going to make your job, and most jobs, obsolete within the year" I say for the fourth year in a row. I'm pretending to talk to workers, but am actually indirectly addressing my fish investors trying to scare them into thinking fish are too world-changing of an opportunity to pass up.
Every talk show then has to have me on. It would be one thing if I was boasting about the fish, but scared of it? Well then surely there must be something important going on there. I begin:
Taking your logic to its conclusion fishes (or descendants of fish) regularly recite Shakespeare.
However there is a major flaw in your logic. Fishes (or their descendants) reciting Shakespeare is part of natural history. AI making quality music videos is just a prediction (or maybe even just wishful thinking). The former has occurred and has been observed, the later has not. So you are comparing nature with science fiction.
I remember when my friends in middle school were making DBZ fight scene music videos with iMovie and Movie Maker. They were way better than this and did not cost $100.
a) You are allowed to dislike cheap stuff, in fact it is common in western culture to dislike art where it is obvious that the artist cheaped out.
b) Never in the history of western art critique has there been a requirement that the critic is able to do better then the artist (let alone for cheaper). As the saying goes, “I may not be able to pilot a 100000 ton cargo ship, but I can tell when one is stuck in a canal.”
If you don’t count the cost of the phone I think many people could. See, it would look like it cost $100, but that’s still better than using AI to generate something that looks like the temu version of a $500,000 video.
People say this a lot, and I usually think it's said by folks who haven't thought about it much.
As a person who makes a lot of music, I don't care if folks have fun. In fact I am having such a hard time caring hat folks do or how they do it I can't get motivated to book any shows this season.
But the part you're missing is when folks make these things and then say "yeah, you see this thing we're doing? That's what we think -you- are doing." LIke when someone sets up an LLM to shit out some song lyrics, I don't care if they are having fun doing it, but I think it displays a lot of contempt for [insert an songwriting artist youlike here] to claim that the LLM is doing the same thing.
Which is fine and all- I've got plenty of unmitigated contempt for my fellow humans.
And you don't even need a computer to do that- I've released a certain amount of music that is facile and boring and in retrospect understand why folks were dismissive.
But if you want to understand why folks who consider themselves invested in their craft (or even invested in other artists' craft) are dismissive of these things, then you might consider how radically dismissive of craft these kinds of cultural products might seem to artists.
"or i can just not do it", because you can't! To much pride to admit that the bot beats your ass every day of the week ten times over when it comes to making music videos so the cop out is "nah, man, I just don't wanna."
It is jarring to me that most of the dancing seems slightly out of sync with the music. It is like a music video uncanny valley - images look good, but the lack of sync to the sound shatters the illusion entirely.
Well yeah, because music is not a modality of the models involved at all. It's literally just an LLM with the timestamps of each line injected into its context, and then making an API request to image / video generators. I don't really understand what the point of this project even was; stitching together dumber models with bespoke glue logic like this takes us further away from general intelligence and confuses the public.
To me nearly all of the real world dancing looks like that. The dancers could literally be olympic level and I still don't see the connection between their movements and the sounds of the music. Music videos sometimes do sync for me but only on very simple motions, and for whatever reason shuffle dance on video almost always looks great.
How many hours of your life would you say you’ve danced? Have you ever trained at a sport beyond the recreational level, especially highly rhythmic ones like basketball or soccer?
Genuinely curious, because I have friends without any sense of rhythm and it’s interesting how it manifests
For what it’s worth I tried an experiment where I had a similar harness (where LLMs competed head to head playing snake) and made them aware of their budget and it had very little impact. This was cheaper open weight models
For fun, I took that image and put it into a few models and asked it "what is wrong with this genAI image?"
Grok fast came up with a lot of minor quibbles and missed the issue.
Grok expert touched on it with a "Limbs/anatomy ambiguity / This creates a slight "how many legs does this cat actually have?" moment." but then moved on to complain about texturing . Later it summarized the issue as "classic "animal + held object" anatomy problem".
Chatgpt 5.6 instant didn't notice it
Chatgpt 5.6 medium didn't notice it and mainly complained about the background being blurry
Chatgpt 5.6 high (46s) "The biggest error is the cat appears to have six paws"
Google AI mode complained about whiskers and feet placement
Only chatgpt high and marginally grok expert had acceptable answers.
Not a fan really. There are certainly uses for AI, but this is lacking something. Personally I think it works best as a filter or applying a style or effect that is difficult otherwise, or generating fancy ambient or abstract textures etc.
People constantly think the music video I created for Zingara's Unlock Your Keys [1] is AI, but it really is just real footage all around, except for a handful of lines / pulse textures that were created in TouchDesigner.
I am really excited for the possibilities that AI can give us in the future but often I find trying to use it generatively I run into the paradox of choice and end up paralyzed!
1: https://xfeeefeee.net/unlock-your-keys/ tribal dance fusion music video, sfw but does show some skin. Uses lots of slow motion ink in water footage for texture as well.
It's a strange experiment. Claude and GPT aren't generating the video. They're directing and editing it, and they request video from a generative video model using mainly text-to-video. Neither Claude nor GPT can actually watch video content, and the video model generates shoddy quality clips with artifacts, lack of consistency, and where actions aren't synced to the music.
It would be very hard for anyone to make a good music video with the tools Fable and Sol had available to them. They don't have precise control over the clips that get generated, and they can't see or hear the result, other than screenshots. So I'm not sure what the experimenters expected.
I think these videos are a great way to visualize what is wrong with the "personality" of LLMs: they are shallow, unoriginal, overconfindent.
The videos convey this in a more vivid and direct way than any text answer could. I often have the thought that if Claude were a human colleague, I'd avoid having to work with them.
These still seem awful to me. There are weird events in them that take me out of the moment like the record needle suddenly jumping of the record for no apparent reason. But more so I just hate the AI glaze look of all the characters.
> From the start, the production team knew they didn’t want a music video that relied solely on any single technique. With this goal in mind, they worked to blend live action, AI, and a wide range of handcrafted animation styles – 2D, 3D, collage and motion design.
The cutting edge technology is being tested with pelican drawings and video creation. You may argue that this is just testing, but actual mainstream use of this tech won't be far off from these tests.
There's definitely still room for innovation in custom use cases with AI. I like to write and draw comics, but it's very time consuming to make a finished product. Working with tools in default and you'll have a bad time. You have to really guide it and if you're using a longer story to adapt, it'll compress things and lose context during Thinking. Luma labs was the most interesting tool I've seen so far, but there's still a lot of room for growth
Yea this one specifically is mostly fable, remotion skills and allowing it to use Gemini 3.1 pro to understand the video
The Claude one was a 3-prompt to get it to recreate the original “Agent view” announcement video. But wanted to challenge it, hence the bankruptcy mode. But it’s really bad at coming up with jokes and a coherent narrative so had to guide it wit prompts like 5 times or so
Fireship video that was just a single prompt, with allowing it to use my basement gpu which has Higgs installed for the voice clone
The GPT ones are strange. The $25 fable one to me is subjectively better than the others. The $100 fable one is too literal and robotic.
The jevons paradox is you need auteurs to curate vignettes or effects and cut or mask them in etc. That's not really different philosophically when software entered art in other ways. I could see errors/glitches lowering in time but I doubt there will be much acceleration.
As someone who has marketed music, shot music videos, directed music videos, cut music videos together from stock footage: you don’t need auteurs.
You did back when MTV made songs big.
No one actually pays attention to the details of music videos any more. It’s visual chewing gum at best. The reality is that now, if you have something half decent, nice colours, nice lighting and a wee bit of a story, no one is going to care.
The only other route is a huge budget spectacular - but you only get the huge budgets if you label lends you the money to make a huge budget video because they think it will increase the amount of money they make - while extending the amount of time it takes you to recoup.
Ultimately, now, it is just another social media asset, so promo videos are built with that in mind.
> No one actually pays attention to the details of music videos any more. It’s visual chewing gum at best.
Hilarious to hear someone in industry blame their audience for the commodification of the medium. Is every industry like this? Surely nobody goes into creative fields thinking “I can’t wait to feed the masses slop!” Who’s killing our spirit?
He's not wrong though. In the 80s I'd watch video shows and over the course of a week I'd probably see some videos 10 times. And it wasn't background filler - I'd actually be sitting in a chair/couch and watching the videos. Kids don't do this anymore. First many/most songs are made popular through TikTok memes, not videos. And videos really are mostly just played in the background as they do other stuff. No one is just tuning into Yo MTV Raps or Headbangers Ball anymore.
Video killed the radio star. Streaming killed the video. Sure, lots of people use youtube for consuming music, but how many of them truly are watching the videos or just have them on while they do something else without seeing the images? With that in mind, putting anything on screen is just checking the boxes
> need auteurs to curate vignettes or effects and cut or mask them in etc
The problem is that reliable, repeatable professional-grade commercial art and design sensibilities happen in full-time careers. It’s entirely different than fine art, where intense self-exploration and experimentation are a very viable option.
These tools are exacerbating an already difficult creative job market so there’s no reasonable path to get those skills. Our creative professional pipeline is fundamentally broken.
The same thing is happening in software, I see the ladder pulled up and don't feel vulnerable as senior staff. If anything, we face a massive and increasing competency crisis in computing because there is a cult dumb enough to believe acceleration and doomer cases for LLMs.
Though we're finding the studios contracted to do this can bill $50k. I know several studios that previously billed clients six figures for ad campaigns (P&G, HBO, pharma, etc.) are now charging five figures and winning a lion share of the bids now.
Not sure why Wan is the focus of this article and Seedance is a footnote. Wan/LTX/open models are significantly behind Chinese closed source models. (And the Chinese have left the Western models in the dust.)
But why spend the same amount of money on AI instead of humans? My guess is that shooting a music video is probably fun for a lot of artists. And with AI the result is not predictable and might be inconsistent in the dumbest ways.
My guess is that an AI music video would have to be a lot cheaper for artists to consider it outside of making one just because you want to make an AI music video.
Seems like if you build some more scaffolding around it, it wouldn't be bad. I think AI video isn't quite there yet so you probably would want to lean into that. For example you could ask for an animated or cartoon music video so the real shots don't look weird. Also if you gave it some guidance on what a good music video is like it would probably help as well. But yeah idk may be that's not the goal here.
No need to take any pot shots at this trash in terms of aesthetic efficacy in earnest, if y'all know what I mean. But as an experiment, it's interesting. There seems to be an odd consistency to all of them, which reveals a kind of internal logic & coherence of sorts that courses throughout any iteration.
Aesthetically, where can you place these? I feel like the late David Lynch could have used some tropes in his unnerving, unsettling dream sequences (a la the intro dream in "Mulholland Drive" where people are so cheery and upbeat that it feels viscerally disturbing).
That's the consistent feeling that I'm left with watching each one, is just a deep, deep unsettled and uneasy feeling. A scowl on my face the whole time trying to make through each one.
I did crack up seeing a martini glass presented to the camera, then float in place on it's own and the presenter resumes holding it with his other hand.
> I did crack up seeing a martini glass presented to the camera, then float in place on it's own
It's just a cheap video-generation model doing its thing. I wonder if the orchestrator model noticed this and tried "Create a scene with a martini glass. Make no mistakes".
The post itself was technically useful, I found, and they posted their entire project to GitHub https://github.com/hershalb/music-video-arena which I think makes it worthy of a HN post and discussion since it is technical and at least IMHO a very interesting post.
Truly impressive that we're burning trillions of dollars for this abject garbage. I'm so glad people can't buy RAM anymore so that we can shit out some more soulless slop - and this really is the definition of slop - like this
Feel like a lot of comments are missing the point here - the authors weren't trying to make a great music video, they were trying to test independent tool use.
Despite how awful the end result may be, the models did successfully plan and execute a moderately complicated generation and editing process.
Even their demo clips are soundly in the uncanny valley, and I assume normal folks using it and having to pay for each clip will have generally worse results.
I always found the Severus Snape - ALWAYS (Live at Hogwarts) video to be really good for AI. The video was probably created by prompting for each scene, instead of letting the model generate the whole thing. It's a cool of example of what's possible nonetheless.
That's definitely not "let the AI do everything unsupervised", but many short scenes generated with probably much filtering, and then manually edited together.
It's interesting how the Harry Potter fanbase was one of the first to get on the AI video trend, but not too surprising as there was already plenty of HP fanfiction, and no doubt many who wanted to have them visualised.
The interesting irony of using Bruno Mars, who, for my taste, really is something like Human AI.
Uptown Funk is a very enjoyable track -- but if you're familiar with his influences, it can make his music generally stale and unenjoyable. Like Silk Sonic has the technical sound of that era, but it feels like they're treating it like a joke.
The future is pretty obvious. People spending thousands of hours honing the skills of being able to create visual art will dwindle. The same will be true for many creative endeavors. Artists will still exist and some will be able to make a living from it but it will rare. Slop will prevail. Most people will lose the ability or care to try and tell the difference. The attention wars have a lot of time to go. The addicted are kids and teens and young adults at this point and I see little to make me think they break out of it any time soon.
Video can be good if you stick to a garden path of simple scenes with tons of examples in the training material and not a ton of motion between overlapping objects in a scene, and don't really care too much about specifics.
As soon as you want something very specific, or something novel, or anything with a lot of moving objects/people, it falls apart.
They are terrible. Perhaps if one on purposely prompts for a weird imaginary, the result could be less awful even acceptable, like that famous Gucci ad. These videos instead are common scenes with the super cringey AI artifacts.
I think that a lot of posters here are missing the point - this is just the tip of the iceberg, and even simple improvements in prompting (infer the meaning of the lyrics, then generate footage related to that) would create a better result.
There is no going back from this, only forwards, for better or worse.
Awesome! Other commenters are negative but I'm very excited to welcome AI into the artistic community. The more the merrier. Can't wait to see what they come up with!
As a clanker-apologist I gotta say this is the strawman of AI slop brought to life. Letting the machine do literally everything without even supervision and see how it turns out? No surprise at all the results are so bad.
My fav AI video is still Post-Scarcity Blues from a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_t3h2AZ0KY There have been others I've enjoyed since then. But, that one stands out in memory. Work warning: it is occasionally just a bit spicy.
These are pretty terrible, but for me there were at least a few moments where they genuinely became "so bad they're awesome". They actually re-enforced an idea I keep coming back to: sometime soon a real artist is going to use AI to make something amazing, not by aiming for flawless "realism" or some kind of pastiche slop, but by leaning into the weirdness that often comes out of AI.
Slightly off topic, but earlier today I was bored, having a kibitz with Claude, and I asked if it played chess. I was surprised when it confirmed, with a humble yes and disclaimer of its mediocre strength. I then asked if it happened to also play Go, which has been my preference for many years now. I was surprised when it again confirmed yes, but admitted it was even weaker here.
Where I began to feel delightfully uncomfortable was when it asked me if it should build a Go board and start a game. Surely you jest, Mr Claude... I thought.
No. The crazy bastard built a beautiful HTML/SVG board, and before I knew what was going on, there it was. I thought for a moment that fraud rhymes with something. Then before I knew it, I was black (that's courtesy!) and I made my first move expecting nothing, kind of astonished by what was happening. Mind you, I was on a phone. Then it made a move in response, and lo and bloody behold, I was playing a game of Go with Claude, on a 19x19 board made in a few seconds, with formidable aesthetics.
I was enamored enough to overlook that Claude does need some practice. But wow. I guess everyone is impressed by something, but that got me.
I don't care that the results are technologically impressive, the automation of creativity is dystopian. As I watched these videos and tried to compare what different AIs can do with similar budgets, is struck me to how utterly soulless and unenjoyable this whole thing is.
AI has plenty of utility, but this isn't one of them. If anything, I want to see AI automate all of the tedious stuff so that human beings can focus more deeply on art and culture. Automating art and culture is anti-human.
No effort went into that. No talent went into that. The creator doesn't care about the outcome. Nobody wants to watch it. Fucken A, brilliant. The intelligence is artificial.
I'm fascinated by some of the comments in here, that the videos are "awful," "far from good," "embarrassing," etc.
This is technology that was unthinkable before just a couple of years ago. Photorealistic video generated by typing out a description of what you want to see is something from a sci-fi movie. I must be dreaming, this can't be real.
I took a screenshot in the middle of a video, and it's indistinguishable from a photograph: https://imgur.com/a/TyNbd7E
I don't know, maybe I'm just old. I remember hacking the hidden iframe trick to make ajax-style file uploads work in IE7. The advancements I've watched unfold in the past couple of years are still hard to wrap my head around.
No one is criticizing the photorealistic video generation. Yes, AI has gotten very good at that, I don't think anyone is disputing that.
At some point you have to move past your astonishment at the technical achievement alone and judge the result for what it is, on its own merits, as if a human had made it. Especially when the goal of using generative AI is to remove as many human creators and as much human effort from the creative process as possible, and to have as much "art" be as fully AI generated as possible.
People are criticizing these videos because they aren't good. As "art." Which is a problem if this is what all art is supposed to be become.
>I was on an airplane and there was high speed internet on the airplane… it’s fast, I’m watching YouTube clips, I’m on an airplane. It breaks down, they apologize, and the guy next to me is like “This is bullshit..."
>Like how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago?
>Flying is the worst one, people come back from flights, they tell you their story and it’s a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany.
>"It was the worst day of my life! First of all we didn’t board for 20 minutes. And then we got on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there."
>Oh really, what happened next, did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero?
>You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should be constantly going ‘oh my God, wow!’
>You’re sitting in a chair in the sky
>….Here’s the thing, people say there are delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in 5 hours. That used to take 30 years. And a bunch of you would die on the way there. And have a baby. You’d be a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and you take a shit and you’re home.
A talented creative with a vision could make something more interesting and enjoyable in an afternoon with a $0 budget.
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