You'll get hammered for this on HN, but the web was magical and weird with Flash around, and now it feels quite vanilla and boring. I long for the days of weird experimental art and goofy animations and bonkers UIs.
It was a fun and experimental time for sure. Way more stuff was weird in a good way. Standards hadn’t settled. All kinds of fun stuff was created in Flash that could not have been built with the standardized web tech of the day. I don’t really miss Flash but I do miss the early internet sometimes and Flash was part of that. (Remember when it was FutureSplash?)
I would be remiss if I didn’t post the most early-Internet-type thing I’ve encountered in a long time. Dungeon Soup.
I would rather say, that now the web feels like being handed turds at every turn, and needing to wear a hazmat suit, if one wants to stay clean. Not what I would call boring. More like infuriating.
You're right to be tired of it, and of course I haven't tired these specific features yet, but Davinci was already lowering the barrier to entry for filmmakers, and if 21 works as they say it will, then you're looking at a major lowering of said barrier.
If you have baseline epistemic hygiene there's nothing wrong with using an LLM for advice.
If you have baseline epistemic hygeine you'd also recognized this as a B2B sales pitch: Axa sell group health, employee-assistance, and corporate wellbeing products.
I guess one can argue it's a novel form of (secular) divination, like tarot, except you have no idea what sort of intentions have shaped the AI during fine tuning, and by trusting it too much, you basically get puppeteered subtly by these companies.
Despite progress in natural sciences and tech, the answer to what's the good life is still up for judgment and values, it's not some neutral factual thing that simply falls out of AI training. Without fine tuning, supervised and RLHF, it could just as much role play a deranged psycho giving out life advice. To the extent that it isn't doing that, it's just adhering to whatever the company thought will land them in the least (legal and media) trouble. They had no way of actually tying it to life outcomes. It's more about what the user will like best in the moment. Which is a lot of affirmation and glazing. This is not unique to AI though, self help books can have the same failure mode especially when picked based on what feels nice to read.
Baseline epistemic hygiene would tend to preclude taking llm advice seriously, on any personal matter of consequence, in my view.
However "baseline" epistemic hygiene seems to be a somewhat distant goal for the vast majority now we live in an infosphere essentially comprising a Darwinian nightmare of competing agnotological agendas.
There is a handover premium that you pay when you churn which often exceeds whatever savings you think you might find. Inertia and institutional knowledge are two of the biggest drags, not to mention morale, hidden costs recruiting fees, ramp time, and customer relationships.
It's fake bottom-line thinking that optimizes a few items while ignoring second and third-order effects.
Now, Cannes specifically – and entertainment generally – is rife with hucksters and people who started off as hucksters only to later become credible. Culture jamming is often looked back on as innovative!
But the difference between this and, say, Adbusters is that Adbusters and artists in general tend to punch up, whereas this – regardless of merit – is looked at by other artists as punching down, simply because it doesn't carry any intangibles.
And art is intangibles.
Time, culture, sweat, friction, a personal POV; art is an inherently human-to-human communication tool anyway. When you strip all of that away you lose something, in the same way a Big Mac is not the same as your mom's spaghetti.
I think that AI filmmakers, if they believe they can make films of high critical and/or or commercial success, need to avoid engaging in culture jamming and take a more honest approach. "This is my chosen medium" and then develop in public while treating the intangibles as legitimate, instead of something to be hacked around.
> Higgsfield, a San Francisco startup valued at $1.3 billion..
I don't think these are filmmakers. They aren't here for the art, they're here to find product market fit and, increase revenue, and raise another round at higher valuation.
False equivalence. A large studio production still retains the voice and editorial oversight of its director, which is why you can differentiate between films by their directors. There are undoubtedly many filmmakers who collaborate on such productions. Whether or not you believe such projects produce good work, you cannot deny the people involved are artists.
This company is not that. They're a venture backed silicon valley startup. Not a film studio. Not a production house. Their business is not about films, it's about raising venture capital, and (maybe) providing an exit to their investors. Whether they do it by producing a blockbuster movie or some other thing is immaterial, and they'll pivot towards whatever is the most expedient path. They're an "AI tools" company.
> A large studio production still retains the voice and editorial oversight of its director, which is why you can differentiate between films by their directors
None of that really matters. Ultimately films are rated based on how much they make at the box office, which is a function of the content, audience preferences and marketing. A director becomes well known by the impact of their production, not the other way around. Really doesn't matter - to the majority spending to see a given film - who the director was, beyond as a marker to find/avoid similar works in the future. If a director makes a crappy film with humans, they'll be known as a crappy director. And if they make a good film using AI, they'll be known as a good director (UNLESS there are a lot of specifically anti-AI people in the crowd AND it's known the film was made using primarily AI). And the good director will be praised for the artistry they put into the work.
Well, before we get too far ahead of our skis, let's wait until someone makes a good film with AI. This company didn't, nor will they. It's not their business. Whether anyone ever will is an open question.
No one is suggesting apathy here, I'd suggest direct action if anything, but being mindful of what content you consume isn't "apathy", that sounds like the words of a coward :)
I think being constantly outraged over stuff happening to no one I personally know for twenty years that will never affect my daily life has become too exhausting for me to keep it up, and I'm not convinced my learning about it is helping anyone. It's not changing how I vote.
Apply whatever insult you want to it, but I'm finished.
Making a data center in my home town? I'm going to do anything I can to stop it.
Entertainment companies serving slop instead of art? Meh, I'll just rewatch old favorites.
I agree. That's why I was careful to mention that I'm still trying to stay informed about things I think will actually affect me personally.
If the only thing that changes from me reading headlines is my emotional state and not my decisions, I'm going to just stop with the headlines because they exacerbate anxiety and insomnia and my family needs my attention more.
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