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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 26m

And that’s the other problem with AI video. There’s no purpose other than rendering an output, so without human guidance which it’s oddly resistant towards, the render may be photo real and maybe you can eliminate all the AI artifacts.

It will still feel like the student film drinking coffee.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 27m

The student filmmaker isn’t really doing anything wrong, they’re just having their character do what humans with a coffee cup do. But without purpose, it just feels weird and you can’t quite place it.

Now you’ll never not notice that.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 28m

Meanwhile, TV and film directors don’t do that. Instead, the actor is in character, and the camera is often cutting away to other things in between sips, and usually the other character is talking.

Point is, it feels organic.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 30m

I realized it’s because in a student film, they have an actor on a bench with a Starbucks paper cup. So they’re like, “They need to drink coffee,” so the actor does, but that’s the only direction.

And it’s often a static shot with dull staging, say the actor dead center in frame with little else.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 32m

I remember watching a lot of student films or YouTube sketches, and there is something that both those things always seem to get wrong -

People drinking coffee or beer. In student films and YouTube sketches, it always looks really weird, and I couldn’t figure out why for many years. This relates.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 33m

Getting into the nitty gritty with staging is something hard to do with prompts, and AI has been shown to be quite terrible at it.

So you have well rendered videos of Monroe on a dragon that look really off. Because there’s no care with the staging, among other reasons.

There’s little direction.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 36m

That’s another reason Sora clips tend to be very short: AI is horrible about taking direction.

You can ask to show Marylin Monroe riding a dragon in Game of Thrones, and it will give a convincing render, but what about the action and staging?

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 37m

Though with Family Guy cutaways, that’s at least had a writer craft a joke, come up with a nonsensical juxtaposition that’s usually a pop culture reference, and some animators carefully rendered the joke with care, and directed the actors to get the right tone.

AI made me praise Family Guy jokes!

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 41m

Having Marylin Monroe appear on Game of Thrones might be a nice novelty, but that’s all it is.

“Hey isn’t this funny?”

“Haha cool, share it with friends.”

Family Guy cutaway gags have a longer shelf life.

The future of entertainment is not ephemeral novelties done haphazardly.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 46m

Mind you, Steamed Hams is a very weird phrase in a vacuum. But we all get it. Because some humans built a funny sketch around it that was shared with millions of people, not personally generated entertainment.

That gets boring. Watching TV alone is still a social experience!

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 47m

Or a better example, how many remixes of Steamed Hams have we seen?

The fact that even if you’ve never watched The Simpsons, you probably know what I’m talking about is a testament to shared narrative experiences that AI would strip away.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 49m

But also, if you can generate your own Simpsons episodes on the fly, well part of the appeal is sharing the experience.

One reason The Simpsons has endured is we all watched the classic episodes together so I can randomly start singing, “Monorail,” to someone I just met and they’ll get the joke.”

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 52m

But this also shows that tech folk have no idea why people watch or read stories to begin with.

Stories crafted by people to explore ideas we can connect with and learn about ourselves, AI can never do that. It can imitate it, but without purpose, it’s completely disposable.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 56m

And there’s a few reasons Sora clips are very short.

For one, the seams show up really quickly in AI videos.

“It will get better!”

They keep telling me that. But rendering video takes an enormous amount of power, so those two factors mean videos have to be short to look decent.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 58m

The AI entertainment future promised is essentially endless Simpsons episodes you can generate with a few clicks. But like, who wants that?

It sounds good in theory - The Simpsons is brilliant. But in practice? Try watching all of what we have and get back to me.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 1h

The same content over and over gets real tedious. Mind you, The Simpsons still has talented human artists making the show, and a lot of modern episodes are actually really entertaining.

It can’t hold a candle to the classics, but after endless Simpsons episodes, it’s just a slog.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 1h

Last year I tried watching the entirety of the Simpsons from beginning to end. I stopped at I think Season 32, which is rather impressive and depressing now that I think about it.

But after Season 16 or so, they all start to blur together.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 1h

Yeah this is never going to happen.

I did read the article before sharing it, and the author is regurgitating the same AI evangelism I’ve been hearing since the Will Smith Spaghetti video.

“Oh people can create their own shows now!” No, not gonna happen.

My proof? The Simpsons.

Scientific American @sciam.bsky.social · 1d

Despite early, and familiar, copyright growing pains, Sora may be the prelude to AI-generated on-demand TV and movies

Want to See Marilyn Monroe in Game of Thrones? AI Could Make It Soon

Despite early, and familiar, copyright growing pains, Sora may be the prelude to AI-generated on-demand TV and movies

www.scientificamerican.com

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 6h

Yeah, and even if they work out the kinks, there’s still the very real skill regression that seems to happen surprisingly quickly.

I’ve seen so many adults our age forgetting basic communication after outsourcing emails to ChatGPT, which is still relatively new! The speed of regression shocks me.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 7h

Even the most ardent anti-AI folk like you and me can agree conceptually, if AI can help cancer diagnosis or treatment, that’s a good thing.

Problem is it’s so far failed spectacularly, and worse, oncologist who use it are forgetting how to diagnose through conventional means.

Miracle tech my ass.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 1d

The US used to be like that, but I’ve only seen that in movies from the depression era.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 1d

These days the area code is kinda meaningless, it just indicates where you first bought a cellphone.

But also, when you dialed a number a lot, you tended to remember it.

And most phones had a few speed dial buttons you could program to automatically dial a set person’s number.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 1d

Then when I moved to Ithaca when I was ten, the area code was (607) which everyone shared.

Most numbers started with 272 or 273 as the next three in the sequence, so again, you had to memorize four digits and which of those three digits it was.

So not a lot to memorize.

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 1d

So numbers in my town would be (717) 253-xxxx. Easily remembered, and I wouldn’t need to enter 717 unless I was calling long distance (non local calls cost money and my dad was cheap, so calling outside our town was rare so… I memorized a lot of four digit sequences).

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Autistic Max @maxiemoosie.bsky.social · 1d

I was born in Wayne County PA, and in that time, the area code was 717, though it’s since changed to 570, but that’s what I’d tell people who weren’t local.

The next three digits were common in the local areas, in my case, 253. So I had to memorize a 4 digit sequence for my friends.

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