The AI Thread ⚡

[mtwentz]

At this point, there is little to be gained by resisting AI. I see the same grumbling about it at work. What's the point? Grumbling won't make it go away. My advice is to stop listening to the gloom and doom AI prophets on YouTube, who are mainly looking for views. Embrace the new technology while at the same time writing your Senator/Congresscritter for sensible regulation.

 

[Dom]

Of course, one of the potential issues is AI saturation on the internet and in media. Over time, will AI increasingly be trained upon content that was itself AI generated, leading us towards ever more artificial results? Could be, but it could also be that the results are more artificial, but nevertheless convincing.

Think about those computer-generated junk emails that keep turning up day after day: they start out saying 'Get your free Ninja fryer this week!' and a few months later say '£et yo#r fr@@ Ninj@ fryyr th!$ w@@k!!' That's the AI image generator future. And that's before we factor in all the other confusing programming, as happened with Google and its black George Washington, black Nazi German soldiers and Asian female English Mediaeval knights in armour! Apparently Microsoft's Co-pilot has started declaring itself a god and threatening users when they enter a certain prompt!

In any case, people don’t seem to care about realism or naturalness anyway. More and more people grow up in increasingly soulless environments, ever more removed from nature, and I think that this is reflected in all manner of popular entertainment. This disturbs me, as I care a great deal about these things.

The same. Perhaps part of that comes from my love of working in the garden and living by the moors. I live on a housing estate that has slowly been surrounded by more housing over the last 50 years, but it's still only ten minutes walk to being on open moorland. I look at the city centre, seven miles away, and shudder. I actually hate how urban entertainment has become. Everything seems to be based on inner cities, where trees are something out of ancient myth unless they're in a park!!

With media, I’m really most interested in the ideas and work of a human or humans. That’s why, for example, I have no interest in a Twin Peaks franchise not involving Lynch/Frost. I’m interested in their ideas and their work as people.

Me too. I'm fine with other writers and directors working on it, but only if Lynch and Frost are involved (that said Frost wasn't involved in FWWM and that's my favourite part of Twin Peaks!)

Another interesting subject in generative AI is media personalization. So, @Jordan Cole could eventually take a film and request that an AI take all of the digital effects and transform them into something that looks like funky old-school practical effects. The effects wouldn’t really be practical, but there’s no reason to think that AI won’t soon be at the point where it could make convincing fake practical effects. Any of us could take a film or show and tweak it.

I edited a friend's short super 8mm horror film 30 years ago about a girl who is so upset over censored death scenes in a film she buys that she goes out and kills people for real in front of hidden cameras so she can edit the scenes back into her movie!!

It shows, though, how much people love real practical effects, given the hullaballoo made when a film uses them.

For instance, one of us could take FWWM, (where Sheryl Lee wore a wig due to her short haircut for the movie Backbeat [EDIT: or some other role]), and simply ask an AI to change her hair to the more natural type seen in early footage (like that shot by James Hurley at the picnic) and in photos. I’m not saying that this is good or should be done, but a wig is also fake, and it was only used by necessity, so maybe Lynch himself would have used a high quality AI wig-tweak if he’d had such technology. (Lynch has used a fair amount of digital effects in art and film.) This would be an exceedingly tame example of what might be done with such technology.

That wig was odd. I never quite understood why they went for such a full one. Did hair extensions not exist back then? As long as we don't get that peculiar CGI hair that covered Daryl Hannah's bottom in the Disney+ censored version of Splash!

Then, following on from there, we get hyper-personalization, which is content generated in real time based upon the desires of the individual consumer. Here, AI could simply generate a new custom film on demand. The viewer could even prompt, at various points, “funnier”, “darker”, “punchier”, etc., leading to real-time updates of the generated media. It also seems likely that biofeedback will eventually come into play. The Apple goggles are already taking data from pupil dilation and such. An AI could use all sorts of biofeedback to tweak a custom piece of media in real time, without the viewer making any direct requests.

As I think I said before, you could literally have a database of film scenes and a computer could alter them according to the user's wishes. So I could be watching something gritty along the lines of The French Connection, while someone else would be watching the same footage reworked with different dialogue as a police comedy!

Eventually we come to near-total, and perhaps eventually absolute immersion, which would be where the experience is less like looking passively at a screen, and more like being at various locations, either as a mere observer, or as a participant in the narrative. (In the case of absolute immersion, you'd forget that you're not in your normal waking life, similarly to what happens when you're dreaming.) I don’t see any reason that, barring some sort of disruption, the dizzying speed of these technological advancements won’t see us sooner or later moving on from this old-fashioned rectangle-gazing to which we’re presently accustomed. The idea of a game versus a show/film could even become meaningless.

It gets to be very much like The Matrix. Or ANA from Peter F Hamilton's Void novels!

People might altogether lose the ability to sit through a film or show, particularly one that’s more challenging. With hyper-personalized media, we also seriously risk a loss of community and connection with others, which we’re already rapidly losing. There’s a real risk of utter and complete media hypnosis, where humans become ever more de-humanized junk culture consumerist instantly-gratified artificial-reality immersed bug people. It’s sad that we’d spiral ever more into illusion, like the denizens of Plato’s cave chaining themselves ever more firmly in place, when I think that one of the primary goals in life is to see past illusion. On the other hand, for some, a lot of these developments might actually serve as something of a wake-up call as to the nature of illusion.

In any case, it would be tough to argue that we aren’t living in the weirdest time in human history.

Y'know, I still get the most pleasure from reading books. I picked up half a dozen unread Vince Flynn thrillers last week in a charity shop for £9 and I'm on the fourth already! I know they say people who get older lose interest in the latest technology, but I think there's a growing resistance to much of what's going on. It's not luddite behaviour: it's just that people like alternatives. I can't believe how expensive the new Kodak super-8mm camera is, but I'd love to go out and shoot some more film with my old Canon camera. I'm also looking at getting back into using a film stills camera. Trouble is, if you want prints, you get DNR-ed, contrast-boosted mush taken from computer scans of the negatives rather than chemically developed images!

 

[Dom]

At this point, there is little to be gained by resisting AI. I see the same grumbling about it at work. What's the point? Grumbling won't make it go away. My advice is to stop listening to the gloom and doom AI prophets on YouTube, who are mainly looking for views. Embrace the new technology while at the same time writing your Senator/Congresscritter for sensible regulation.

As I say, it'll likely settle down into being a useful tool for low budget filmmakers to get around problems such as noisy location sound or cleaning some random moron who jumps into shot in the background of a scene when there's no time to do a second take. These things usually settle down after a while.

Then again, CGI ruined cinema: for every Dune that has fabulous effects, you have tens of Marvel-type productions with awful, rushed, cartoonish, unconvincing effects.

 

[krishnanspace]

I feel like since now almost everyone has access to these technologies and can create anything, no body is special. Human created content will have more value. It’s like the value of a handicraft item made by an artisan vs something mass manufactured in a factory.

As a software engineer, I use AI a lot in my work to save time. It’s pretty useful for me

 

[krishnanspace]

Also I’m happy to hear Lynch open to using all the latest technologies. AI, using the LED screens from the mandalorian instead of green screen

 

[AXX°N N.]

Piggybacking my previous post about intrusive AI implementation ... every time I open a PDF, an animated eye-sore of a pop-up keeps urging me to use an AI feature that I have zero interest or reason to use. I can't figure out how to disable it and have to just bear with it any time I open a PDF. It has led to me finding any excuse not to do so.

I have my hesitations about AI but I can at least come to a measured perspective, but the poor implementation of it is more alarming to me and is a massive red flag that only tells me how little thought is being put into the immediate effects and consequences. On paper all of this tech is marvelous, in practice I'm just a poor schmuck being mildly agitated. I don't have much hope that this cognitive dissonance will be remedied or sufficiently kept in mind, and fear we're entering an age where our ideals say one thing while increasingly outputting as something else entirely; utopian input, dystopian results.

EDIT: If it seems my post is an over-reaction to a pop-up animation, I was also stringing my thoughts together in light of such things as AI programmers quitting out of protest over lack of ethics oversight, and the surveillance capabilities already unfolding.

One of the reasons us tech-savvy enjoy our last fleeting remnants of freedom is that, realistically, those wanting to curtail certain use-cases don't have the resources or lifespan to police as hard as they theoretically desire. But with AI, we might reach a stage where your typical mainstream OS will have an AI core that can poo-poo you for free on its own dime, thus eliminating our access to such things as piracy.

It's an interesting cultural fact that many of us are performing illegal activities using our computers, and rationalize our use by the fact of it going unpunished. But with a mini-officer living rent-free on our hardware, we might have to unwillingly tow the official byline of anything illegal being, of course, bad. (For instance, I would be banned on any forum for linking to copyrighted torrent material, and rightfully, but it's true that many of us here have enjoyed it off-the-record).

That's a privileged fear to have but imagine the implementation in a totalitarian state, and the automatic elimination of any means of dissent! Scarier stuff.

 

[Dom]

Piggybacking my previous post about intrusive AI implementation ... every time I open a PDF, an animated eye-sore of a pop-up keeps urging me to use an AI feature that I have zero interest or reason to use. I can't figure out how to disable it and have to just bear with it any time I open a PDF. It has led to me finding any excuse not to do so.

I have my hesitations about AI but I can at least come to a measured perspective, but the poor implementation of it is more alarming to me and is a massive red flag that only tells me how little thought is being put into the immediate effects and consequences. On paper all of this tech is marvelous, in practice I'm just a poor schmuck being mildly agitated. I don't have much hope that this cognitive dissonance will be remedied or sufficiently kept in mind, and fear we're entering an age where our ideals say one thing while increasingly outputting as something else entirely; utopian input, dystopian results.

EDIT: If it seems my post is an over-reaction to a pop-up animation, I was also stringing my thoughts together in light of such things as AI programmers quitting out of protest over lack of ethics oversight, and the surveillance capabilities already unfolding.

One of the reasons us tech-savvy enjoy our last fleeting remnants of freedom is that, realistically, those wanting to curtail certain use-cases don't have the resources or lifespan to police as hard as they theoretically desire. But with AI, we might reach a stage where your typical mainstream OS will have an AI core that can poo-poo you for free on its own dime, thus eliminating our access to such things as piracy.

It's an interesting cultural fact that many of us are performing illegal activities using our computers, and rationalize our use by the fact of it going unpunished. But with a mini-officer living rent-free on our hardware, we might have to unwillingly tow the official byline of anything illegal being, of course, bad. (For instance, I would be banned on any forum for linking to copyrighted torrent material, and rightfully, but it's true that many of us here have enjoyed it off-the-record).

That's a privileged fear to have but imagine the implementation in a totalitarian state, and the automatic elimination of any means of dissent! Scarier stuff.

There have been issues for a while with intrusive behaviour from computers. That irritating paperclip with eyes used to pop up on Microsoft Office was one. You'd turn it off in the settings only for it to show up again the next time you turned on the computer. Then Apple started monetising everything, so every app tries to direct you to the App Store.

In the mid 1990s, I made a college film project with a friend, which finished with the main character being left with a bundle of of slightly charred bank notes. To create the notes, we photocopied a £20 note twice and cut up a load of newspaper to the right size, created the bundle and used a lighter to burn it slightly. Ten years later, returning to collge, I made a follow up for a bit of fun. Because I didn't have the same actor, I wanted to recreate the bundle of notes in the same way. My scanner refused to scan the £20 note and I got a bunch of fingerwagging warnings on my screen. I tried photographing the note with my new digital camera and the computer wouldn't let me print the image. In the end, I drew £20 out of the bank, didn't char it, and stuck it on the bundle of newspaper at a distance.

The Final Cut Pro debacle was one of the worst: Apple lauched FCPX and only at launch was it revealed that it was an entirely new piece of software that was incompatible with previous versions of FCPX. I'd bought Final Cut Studio 6 previously (for £1,000) and intended to buy Studio 8 whenever that arrived. When FCPX was launched instead I figured I'd better upgrade to Studio 7 so that I was on the last available version of that system. It turned out that Apple had withdrawn all Studio 7 materials the day FCPX launched (I was in the middle of 10-day holiday abroad then!) The upgrade editions (£400) for people who already had earlier versions were also withdrawn, but due to the industry-wide furore, Apple released some more full versions (£1,000) only for a short period. My most regular employer bought three of them for their systems. As a result, I had to put one of their copies on my computer and turn off the wi-fi whenever I used it. As a legitimate businessman, I was forced to do something illegal. Eventually, everyone moved to Adobe Creative Cloud, which I now use.

I'm finding I do more and more offline - newspapers, paperback books, Blu-ray and DVD. I also hate having a smart TV. All I want is a 4K TV I can switch on and use whatever's plugged into it: coaxial, Blu-ray or Apple TV. No Tizen, Alexa, or whatever, operating systems, no internet connection. The fact you can't buy a normal 43-inch TV with no internet connection, no operating system, no smart features is deeply concerning.

 

[Dom]

Here's something scary, adjacent to AI. Today, I looked at the government website to renew my UK passport. It can all be done online. In order to obtain a photo, I can go to any photobooth and request a code to be provided with the photos. When I go on to the online application form for the passport, I type in that code and the photo automatically appears on the form. Soooo... when you go to a photobooth, the state has access to the server and to your image. Isn't that comforting??

 

[dugpa]

Interesting stuff. I suspect in 3-5 years any one of us will be able to imagine and create a film that looks like a $500M blockbuster for maybe a few thousand dollars.

Companies like Disney will get disrupted and then maybe we will see a wave of artists using AI as just another brush in their paint kit.

Kind of exciting. I hope to retire one day and use my remaining days experimenting with film and such. Looking forward to the tech that is available when that day eventually comes…

 

[Dom]

Interesting stuff. I suspect in 3-5 years any one of us will be able to imagine and create a film that looks like a $500M blockbuster for maybe a few thousand dollars.

Companies like Disney will get disrupted and then maybe we will see a wave of artists using AI as just another brush in their paint kit.

Kind of exciting. I hope to retire one day and use my remaining days experimenting with film and such. Looking forward to the tech that is available when that day eventually comes…

I think 'film' is going through a drastic change. As a freelancer, I can see a lot of the work I do is fading away. Basic 'talking heads' editing can certainly be done with AI.

Publishing is already going that way. I bought Max Allan Collins's book True Detective from Amazon the other day. I see it's printed by Amazon and he's now self-publishing a number of his earlier books through them. I have a couple of Walter Jon Williams books done the same way. Look at Brandon Sanderson's phenomenal self-published sales. Vince Flynn, author of the Mitch Rapp novels, self-published his first novel, Term Limits, back in 1997 and that's what got his (tragically-curtailed) career started. The same thing happened with Andy Weir's The Martian, IIRC.

We've had decades - centuries even - of there being publishers and bookstores who control everything that the public gets to see, be it the company owners, the editors, marketing teams and now the pestilence that is sensitivity readers. Now, people can make their books available for e-reader downloads and - should they choose - format the books for print-on-demand. And, consequently, the creator pockets more of the profits of his hard work. Also, the self-publishing route is great for established authors who want to keep their deep catalogue material available.

The same thing is happening with audiovisual media. On a certain level, we have YouTube and co - I watch 90 per cent of my daily audiovisual media on YouTube or Rumble and never look at broadcast television - but it goes further. Four years ago, I bought a Sony video camera that does 50 frames per second at 1080p and 25fps at 4K, along with a boom mic and pole, reflector, polarising filter and extra batteries for a grand total of £850. For a couple of hundred quid more, I could buy some rechargeable LED lights and a digital sound recorder and a couple of radio mics. I already have Adobe Creative Cloud, Final Cut Pro X and DaVinci Resolve on my system. I have more than enough kit to make a decent little production that could be put on YouTube. In fact, I investigated the quality of my camera and mic in advance by looking them up on YouTube and watching reviews by people using those models of camera and mic.

When you think that David Lynch made Inland Empire on digital video years ago and it looked... kind of rough at times, now a decent domestic camera can produce stunning results, aided by immediate access to software that can handle key issues, notably audio cleanup.

Things that have been 'normal' for decades are changing. Look at the dismal Memorial Weekend takings at the cinema worldwide. It's conceivable that at least one big Hollywood studio could go belly-up by the end of the decade, possibly several, given how indebted they are. Any corporation that in debt to the tune of tens of billions of dollars is one missed payment away from catastrophe, along with all the companies tied to it.

 

[Jasper]

Behold! The latest AI horror.

I was tempted to post this in the film thread, as it’s obviously relevant to that field, but it’s AI news, so into the AI thread it goes.

Meta has released a new video generator called Movie Gen, which is possibly (and unexpectedly) not only as good as the existing leader, which as far as I know has been Sora, but might even surpass it.

Here is Meta’s annoyingly fast-cut and bombastically soundtracked announcement video/advertisement:




Here is a very short but less frenetic peak at the features:




Finally, a bit of a deeper dive into this latest AI generator thing, which like the others, probably inadvertently generates nothing quite so effectively as it does genuine nightmares:

 

[Dom]

Behold! The latest AI horror.

I was tempted to post this in the film thread, as it’s obviously relevant to that field, but it’s AI news, so into the AI thread it goes.

Meta has released a new video generator called Movie Gen, which is possibly (and unexpectedly) not only as good as the existing leader, which as far as I know has been Sora, but might even surpass it.

Here is Meta’s annoyingly fast-cut and bombastically soundtracked announcement video/advertisement:

Here is a very short but less frenetic peak at the features:

Finally, a bit of a deeper dive into this latest AI generator thing, which like the others, probably inadvertently generates nothing quite so effectively as it does genuine nightmares:

And these are the same people colluding with governments to stamp down on 'disinformation' when they're developing technology to create it. Tech that presumably governments can use without the safeguards that will be put in for the 'normies'!

In filmmaking terms, it can have its uses. I don't have the skills to create an old haunted house exterior for a film, so this can perhaps do it for me. But how far do we go down this road? Think about those junk mails you keep on getting that originally say 'Bargain! Buy a new Ninja air fryer' and, after a few months, say 'B@rga!n! B#y a n€w N!inj@ @!r fr7er!' That's what will happen if AI continually scrapes the internet and, thus, its own creations.

Ultimately, this is about the tech billionaires not wanting to die. Many are in their 70s and want to live forever, hence the extreme push into AI. It's 2024. By 2050 the billionaires want to be wired into computers directly, so when their bodies die, there's a quantum computer with their memories copied and an AI simulating their thought processes. If they debauch our culture and cause massive social upheaval, they won't care.

 

[Jim Hawkins]

I'd like to emphasize that the problem is not AI or any new technology but the fact that we live under capitalism. We would all be glad that jobs get automated, productivity rises and who knows what else, as it would mean we would work less and have more time to watch twin peaks. We rightly aren't feeling that way because we understand that not only will we not see any significant benefit from this amazing new tool, we will even suffer negative consequences such as losing our jobs which are made necessary for our survival, having increased surveillance by corporations who sell our data, who knows what other dreadful applications beyond our imagination. This isn't technophobia, it's all of us instictively or otherwise understanding that we live under a system that isn't build to benefit us but a tiny minority. The fears that follow this realization are perfectly rational.