There is also VA which provides deep (though not pure) blacks, clear text and decent response time though you get some slight smearing on high contrast edges.
Personally i prefer VA to IPS by far because IPS looks washed out to me.
I guess they were inspired by a very similar law in Greece from 2002[0] where in an attempt to outlaw illegal gambling done in arcades a poorly written law outlawed all games (the article mentions it was in was in public places but IIRC the law was for both public and private and the government pinky promised that they'll only act on public places). I remember reading that some internet cafes were raided by the police too :-P.
> the output of a prompt would never be exactly what you imagined
There is way more than just a prompt to make something interesting with AI though. For example this test[0] i saw some time ago, includes several different AI systems (Z-Image Turbo with a custom lora for the specific style, Wan 2.2 Time-To-Move for the animation output, After Effects for the control animations and some sort of upscaler.
This involves way more than just a prompt and the video still has a few issues, like the right hand remaining "stuck" on the head, but the way to fix it would most likely be the same as making the motion with perhaps some additional editing work.
IMO AI can make some things easier and/or faster, even allow people to do things that'd be impossible for them before (e.g. i doubt the person who posted the video could make a real live video with actors, etc like the AI video shown) but to do anything beyond simple slop you still need to put in effort and that includes making things close to your vision.
(not getting the 100% exact results is fine because that was always the case with any tech - it isn't like most, if not all, PS1 devs wanted to low res graphics with wobbly polygons and lack of texture filtering, but the better games leaned in what the tech could do)
99% of everything is bad, so that unsurprisingly includes AI videos.
But i've seen several good videos made using AI, including pretty much everything NeuralViz[0] on YouTube makes, but also some that have been posted in older comments here in HN. Igorrr's ADHD music video[1] was also made using AI and fit the music perfectly.
The common aspect with these "good" uses though is that they do not let the AI do 99% of the job (as mentioned in another comment) but they still involve editing, writing/scripting, acting (NeuralViz for example uses his webcam to act both the motion and voice in his videos and uses AI to change them) and to some extent leaning into the "weirdness" that AI videos have instead of ignoring it.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralViz (i high recommend watching them in upload order because they all build into the same "universe" and often make references to older videos)
I've been a big fan of https://www.youtube.com/@PosyMusic/videos for many years now. The posts there are alawys a little treat - you never quite know when the next one is going to come or what it's going to be... but it'll sure be creative (and fun!) without any of the typical YouTube channel baggage. They do the video, sound, and music creation+editing themselves - being a sound professional by day (among other things).
Anyways, the reason I bring this channel up is they had a video ~2 years back about trying out various AIs to help them in their creative process. Stuff like "using an AI audio generator to quickly make short sounds to sample in their song" for hard to find/make sounds type stuff. Exactly along the lines of "they do not let AI do 99% of the job" you were saying, instead treating it as just another tool in the toolbox. Also, intentionally, the examples like sampling were where the originality comes with what you do with the content you source rather than the content standing on its own. They also spent time creating icon sets to help explicitly label how AI was used in making the material (partly/fully) and encouraged artists that do incorporate AI into part of their workflow to label how so accordingly (2 years ago - so this was still somewhat novel to discuss).
You won't be able to find that video on the channel linked above, though the icons are still on GitHub. Not because the content made with the help of AI was bad, people like the songs the same as his other content (when not explicitly told it was made with the help of AI), but because there was so much hate on the video (and via email etc) for just mentioning that other artists could look at trying to use AI in certain parts of their workflows too that he felt the need to take it down.
That makes me sad. I also love Posy's content, I'm using his cursors right now, and this new knowledge that there is some of it I cannot see gives me real consumerist FOMO anxiety. A little digging and I couldn't find anything. I don't suppose you remember any keywords?
I forgot how he introed it with the over the top AI visual and saying "I'll be hated for this" and then ends with a funny continuation of that opening.
There are a bunch of these scifi world building short video channels now. IMO they all seem really creative initially but rapidly lose their luster and become repetitive.
Sora makes the hard parts easy and the easy parts hard. I don't think any of these content producers will be remembered in the future. :/
Years and years ago I became friends with someone who has started a series of companies and created at least one game with each of them (Web, mobile, mobile, crypto, web again). While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution. His ideas are great, in my opinion, though perhaps not unique. However, each success or failure, has come down to the execution. A couple of projects ran out of funding (Didn't execute fast enough). One was a flash game around the same time Apple stuck a knife in Flash, bad timing. Another was backed by a major publisher and was largely a success and the company was sold after 2 proven products shipped.
AI "democratizing" creativity is the biggest crock of lies. Everyone has ideas. Even people who aren't typically thought of as "creative". Ask anyone who watched the last season of Game of Thrones if they thought it could be better and I bet most of them will have "ideas" for how to make it better. Hell, the show runners had IDEAS. But the execution of season 8 was awful, and execution is where an "idea guy" becomes someone who created a product/story worth remembering.
LLMs remove the execution process, which is why they are so attractive to everyone who has ever had an idea and why they are abhorrent to nearly everyone who has ever executed on an idea. Lots of people thin execution is just busy work, but execution is also a major component of being creative.
Creativity is a series of small decisions over the course of the entire execution. To write a poem is not to have it fully-formed in your head. You go down and edit and see what turns up and what new interesting ideas come out of that.
I'm very sympathetic to this view, and it would be a nice counter to claims of AI creativity, but I'm not convinced this is the only way creativity can express itself. There are examples of strokes of genius, hence the term.
I suppose you could say such strokes of genius are the outcomes of a lifetime of creative work but that seems different from your example of editing a poem.
We are operating deep in the grey area here so I suppose that case could be made. Personally, I see creativity as more of a life long process which can express itself in a multitude of ways including strokes of genius and the daily iterative grind. I don't think any creative act occurs in a vacuum but I also think that there are moments where big things occur.
AI, as it stands, does not have a lifespan over which for creativity to occur.
The problem runs deeper: AI doesn't just remove execution, it replaces it with probabilistic averaging. Mastery of execution in film or code consists of thousands of micro-decisions, like light a bit to the left or pause a bit longer. Current diffusion models make these thousands of decisions for you based on what usually looks good. Democratization won't happen when the Make it Beautiful button works, but when we have tools to control these thousands of micro-decisions without needing to learn to draw pixels by hand. Right now we have randomization, not democratization
>While watching him I learned the lesson that being an "idea guy" is worthless. It is all about execution.
It's even trickier: execution is irrelevant too (if that means great execution, a polished well executed product). What matters is a works-well-enough for adoption product, plus luck, connections, funding (to continue existing and undercutting), marketing, and things like that.
More than half of my YouTube subscriptions are channels that once posted neat stuff and stopped - and most of them are from years ago. And before that i was into webcomics back when they were a popular online trend, i was following the updates of several of them and most of them have disappeared these days (and i don't even remember their names).
People stop doing things all the time, i'm not sure that means much.
Did you really interpret my statement as "AI content producers are being so creative and then quitting posting"?
I'm not talking about people posting good content and then stopping posting.
I guess its fair to say that "become repetitive" was unclear, what I should have said was "reveals itself to be repetitive."
I'm saying that these AI generated world building channels produce lots of content that looks creative and exciting at first but over time reveals itself to be repetitive and lacking in creativity.
But your argument could be made against anything novel. You love the first 3 seasons of Chopped or Hell’s Kitchen but eventually you figure out the repetitive story arc, you know how each show will unfold halfway through, same kinds on conflict, etc… the show either becomes background while folding clothes or you stop watching entirely. The novelty wears off-for better or worse.
I mean look at house hunters international. Every segment is the sssme. “I need an extra room for overseas family, I want to live by the beach, I need a roof deck but I teach ESL to blind monks and children. My budget is $400”. And then they’ll have some silly hang up about the reliability of elevators in general or maybe they absolutely can’t get over the east facing window. It’s 100% formulatic yet perfect as background.
I dunno where I’m going with this but those AI videos you say you liked… the novelty wore off.
I would argue that the 1% of AI videos that are "good" are not worth the travesties that it fosters. Deceased celebrities featured in embarrassing / absurd situations and the scourge of fake news are enough for me to realize that this technology is extremely net negative.
I would be alright with making these more expensive to make though, so they don't overrun youtube. Also i'm sure the person that made this had to do a lot of work. It wasn't just a few prompts
It features a bunch of internationally known figures (mainly world leaders) in drag (or gender-swapped). So obviously something not achievable without AI video generation
I think it's interesting as a gimmick, but generally really don't like AI-generated videos. My main issue with them is more to do with capitalism than AI video generation though.
Yeah I like NeuralViz too. Honestly the writing is what makes it funny in the first place. The AI imagery just adds that extra weirdness on top. Like my faves being the street interviews an the gluron that reviews the Zillow page etc
NeuralViz is one of the best examples of a very creative and skilled person using generative AI to create great content that would not be possible without it. Doopiidoo is another example.
I love Igorrr, but still have mixed feelings about the AI-assisted video. They were capable of making videos weird and unhinged in the past without its use.
> 99% of everything is bad, so that unsurprisingly includes AI videos.
You're probably not wrong, although there's probably also a spread in % between mediums of creation that is worth exploring since a couple % difference could compound.
Even ignoring the above, the issue is WRT rates of creation. I'm no good at drawing. For me to make a bad drawing might take some time. I'll need sleep. And food. I can only make so many bad drawings a day. AI can just work nonstop to make slop. The main strength, if you'd call it that, of automation (AI in this case), is the ability to quickly crank out crap. It is flooding the internet with crap at accelerating rates. The internet/humanity doesn't have enough tools today to deal with the flood of garbage. If AI could make physical crap, we'd quickly end up like that garbage episode of Futurama.
Actually we have a way to filter out that crap, that's what Google, Meta, TikTok, etc... have perfected over decades. The internet is huge and full of crap, and we get to see very little of it. Suggestions from, say, YouTube are generally high quality, few AI slop, vacation videos from random people, or penises. I don't mean good as in moral values, but I mean a production value beyond what you can do by writing a few lines in an AI prompt: decent picture and sound, a well written script, etc...
As more and more AI slop floods the internet, people will start to notice more and more and downvote it down to oblivion and really good content will surface. It may or may not be made with the help of AI, but it won't be sloppy. We are already seeing that, active communities don't have much AI slop, dead communities have plenty, kind if like these abandoned forums that are full of spam no one reads.
People are getting tired of AI slop, it is becoming as recognizable as a photoedit made in 5 minutes in MS-Paint, and it has about the same value. Good for over the top memes where being ugly is part of the charm, but not for anything serious.
I agree that the major platforms have the tools to filter it out. I disagree that those tools are doing that. The primary intent of algos is around engagement, not quality content. We might be able to say the end result is similar (users are engaging on the internet when they wouldn't otherwise if they were getting garbage), but I don't think it's the same. Users aren't being spoon fed high quality content for the brain. They're getting addictive, engagement content to keep them parked on their phones. If content was nutrition for the brain, algos are feeding people candy instead of vegetables. Maybe it's not actual garbage, but most people are not "eating well" with the current approach to content curation by algos.
I saw one recently that was cool. Basically a cinematic for Arthas’ purging of Stratholme from WarCraft. However the entire time I was just thinking “oh that’s cool, looks alright” but none of the “wow the artist that did Uther’s model nailed it” or “Oh great music choice, I wonder who the composer was.”
For entertainment, I have few concerns. It will compete or fail to compete for attention. For degrading the value of video evidence, accelerating propaganda and fraud, and for making people just feel unsure of what is likely real or fake, that is what I am concerned with.
And modern desktops do not even documentation, there are all sorts of shortcuts and small features in Windows, for example, that seem to be passed around between people like computer game cheats instead of being documented somewhere :-P
I've seen this logic (and similar) posted often and i disagree. By this logic, for example, i should find Windows 3.1 the best UI but actually i think Windows 2000 was peak Windows. Similarly i think Snow Leopard to be peak Mac OS X (i include macOS here) and while it was the first Mac OS X i used, i think i was old enough at the time to not be affected by nostalgia much (and it wasn't that long ago).
Also there are certainly better UIs than others, otherwise people wouldn't complain about software having bad UIs (see GIMP, older versions of Blender, etc).
I wonder how much of it is the seeds of principles of beauty being planted, then watered over time, and finally sprouting at a ripe age.
For example, I also am old enough to have used DOS before Windows 3.1 came out, which was my first GUI. When Windows 95 came out, it was a clear improvement, but retained the same principles as Windows 3.1 began. Windows 98 iterated on it, and Windows 2k perfected it in my eyes.
So that when Windows XP came out, it abandoned the principles, going for a look that felt cartoonish and childish to me, but for others was perhaps casual and inviting. It was during this time that I discovered Compiz and other Linux eye candy, and although it abandoned the fundamental principles that Win 3.1 planted, it almost admitted this with pride, submitting a new set of principles altogether.
So when Windows Vista came out, clearly trying to compete in the arena of that new set of principles of beauty, I was ambivalent but mostly impressed. That's when I found out about Mac OS X, which Compiz et al. were clumsily imitating, and I fell in love with them, which I realized had perfected those principles before Microsoft and Linux even began to imitate them.
It almost seems like the same concept as the original purpose of MMA (mixed martial arts). There is a perfection particularly to a set of principles. You can be the best at boxing, or the best at Brazilian Jui-Jitsu, and it's almost comparing apples to oranges because they're so fundamentally different that they don't actually mix well (the current UFC being proof that the experiment has failed and created a monster).
It's the same reason movies exist like Home Front: it's that age old question, "who would win if ...", in this case London gangsters vs Southern American gangsters. Or Freddy vs Jason, or Alien vs Predator. I wish I could remember more, because those are some of the most interesting types of movies, with different real human cultures being pit against each other. Like David and Goliath, the top champions of two cultures facing off for the world to see.
I think MacPaint is one of the most beautifully designed GUIs ever created.
> the entire Unity engine set of games written in garbage-collected C#, including a freaking BAFTA winner in Outer Wilds.
Some of those games (though not all of them, unfortunately) try to work around C#'s garbage collector for performance reasons using essentially adhoc memory allocators via object pools and similar approaches. This is probably what this part...
---
And if you ever do think about these, it’s usually because you are trying to do something performance-oriented and you have to pretend you are managing your own memory. It is common for many games that have been written with garbage collected languages to try to get around the inadequacies of not being able to manage your own memory
---
...is referring to.
> Casey, meanwhile, has worked on a low-level game development video series for a decade and... never actually shipped a game?
These videos are all around 90-120 minutes long, each posted with gaps between them since the previous (my guess is whenever Casey had time) and the purpose and content of these videos is pedagogical so he spends time explaining what he does - they aren't just screencasts of someone writing code.
If you combine the videos and assuming someone works on it 6h/day with workdays alone it'd take around 8-9 months to write whatever is written there but this also ignores the amount of time spent on explanations (which is the main focus of the videos).
So it is very misleading to use the series as some sort of measure for what it'd take Casey (or anyone else, really) to make a game using "low level" development.
Sorry but that makes no sense, there is nothing in "Microsoft's kingdom" here, Wine -as you certainly know- is independent. The most Microsoft can do is change the API in backwards incompatible ways - but that'd affect Windows too, so there is little incentive to do that (and attempts such as Metro/UWP/etc to change the core ways of working with Windows didn't prove popular with most gamedevs).
And even if Microsoft does that, it isn't any different than the 2394923th time a library breaks its API on Linux - Linux as an operating system isn't some monolithic project, it is a combination of hundreds of separate projects that for the most part work together like -sometimes misshapen- bricks on a wall. Wine/Proton is just another of those bricks (and history has shown that it tends to be among the more stable ones).
Imagine in R2 you ask it to write a pong game in C using SDL, in R3 you ask it to write a CMakefile, in R4 you ask it to make the paddles red and green but then around R6 you want to modify the structure and you realize what a catastrophic mistake on your sanity cmake was, so you ask it to use premake for R3 instead so that R6 will only show how to update the premake file for that, wiping clean the existence of cmake (from the discussion and your project).
Isn't discussion editing a standard feature in chat interfaces? I've been using koboldcpp since i first tried LLMs (mainly because it is written in C++ and largely self-contained) and you can edit the entire discussion as a single text buffer, but even the example HTTP server for llama.cpp allows editing the discussion.
And yeah it can be useful for coding since you can edit the LLM's response to fix mistakes (and add minor features/tweaks to the code) and pretend it was correct from the get go instead of trying to roleplay with someone who makes mistakes you then have to correct :-P
Personally i prefer VA to IPS by far because IPS looks washed out to me.
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