Quote:
Originally Posted by Firebot
I take it you don't watch Pixar / Disney movies? 
Was your girlfriend's reaction to the video genuine? While you may have been turned off as soon as you realize it's AI, most people don't notice very obvious quirks or ignore them and just enjoy the video and do enjoy it. |
I get that a lot of this GenAI stuff is what makes you money and so it's a personal subject for you, but this is a swing-and-a-miss on the point I'm making. Pixar and Disney are
explicitly fictional and you go in with that understanding upfront. Nobody thinks a talking cat or a singing rat actually exists,
suspension of disbelief is the whole point.
Cute or surprising animal videos work because they're real moments that
accidentally happened. The appeal is "holy sh-t, haha, that actually occurred". Of course you can synthesize an animal doing something it
already does. Or you could make it drive the goddamned Dakar Rally for all it matters. Once the authenticity is gone, the charm is gone. It's not about whether someone enjoyed it for three seconds while scrolling. It's about replacing genuine moments with a cheap simulation and calling it the same thing, and it's why people tend to react negatively when they find out something is generative AI.
Here, let me put this another way: Would you value a collection of photos and videos of your family the same way if they were entirely AI generated?
Imagine your parents are long gone and you're looking through a photo album of you with your mom and dad. A candid shot at the dinner table on Christmas eve. Warm, familiar moments. The images are extremely convincing; they look real, but you know they aren't. They
never happened -- or at least -- not
exactly like this. They're pretty good general representations of family Christmas eve dinners past, but not exactly any one moment.
Do those images carry the same value as real photos of real moments you actually lived?
Would you be fine if every photo of your kids was run through AI so they finally smiled nicely for the camera? Or would you rather have the real thing; awkward expressions, bad lighting, and all, because that's what actually existed?
That's the difference. The authenticity isn't just a technical detail to be hand-waved away,
it's the whole point of the thing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Russic
I'm noticing this happening with music a lot lately. AI music is getting quite good and most people can't tell the difference (90%+ according to some loose studies).
There's lots of people who enjoy a song and feel a thing, only to become quite upset when they find out it's AI or has AI elements. But it leads to an interesting question that you're getting at: does it matter?
There was a song I loved back in the 90s, and one day the artist gave an interview and essentially said they hated the song and it was written as a joke to see if idiots would like anything. Turns out they were correct. 
Every day the music sweatshop that is Nashville, Tennessee churns out hundreds of popular songs that people love all over the world. Many of them aren't about anything in particular... just a room of 4 guys finding words that rhyme so they can send a word doc over to the person who's going to sing it before they can break for lunch.
My point is, even knowing all that, 99% of people probably don't care. They just like the song. If it sparks something inside them, is it a problem that it came from somewhere insincere?
And if it doesn't matter that it came from somewhere insincere, does it matter if it comes from a robot? |
People reacting emotionally
before they know the source proves almost nothing, there's a lot of daylight between "I experienced a feeling" and "this has artistic value", those aren't the same things at all.
The Nashville example actually sort of proves the point I'm getting at, a lot of that music already feels pretty disposable
because it's engineered for familiarity and mass-market appeal. People might enjoy it, but nobody pretends it's saying something profound or it's in any way significant. Authorship and intent are important, even a cynical joke song still has a point of view, even if that so happens to be contempt for the audience.
If you
only care about whether something "sparks a feeling" in the moment, then no, it probably doesn't matter. If -- on the other hand -- you care about art as communication, as evidence that another human mind was here and had something to say, then it matters a lot, and it's
why artists take such issue with AI being used in this way. Maybe most people won't care, but most people don't care about a lot of stuff, and I'm not so sure that's such a good thing.