Though I like the novelty of AI generated content, it kind of sucks dead internet theory is becoming more and more prevalent. YouTube (and all of the web) is already being spammed with AI generated slop and "better" video/text/audio models only make this worse. At some point we will cross the threshold of "real" and "generated" content being posted on the web and there's no stopping that.
My hope was that AI would make it easier for people to create new things that haven't been done before, but my fear was that it would just be an endless slop machine. We're living in the endless slop machine timeline and even genuine attempts to make something artistic end up just coming off as more slop.
It might be true for "Creators" etc. but there were things that I always wanted paintings of but I have no talent, time, tools or anything really.
When I first got access to dalle (in '22) the first thing I tried was to get an impressionist style painting of the way I always imagined Bob Dylan's 'Mr. Tambourine Man' I regenerated it multiple times and I got something I was very happy with! I didn't put it on social media, didn't try to make money off it, it's for me .
If you enjoy "art" (nice pictures, paintings, videos now I guess) You can create it yourself! I think people are missing that aspect of it, use it to make yourself happy, make pictures you want to look at!
Even if it's made with AI, it is slop only if you don't add anything original in your prompt, and don't spend much time selecting.
The real competition of any new work is the backlog of decades of content that is instantly accessible. Of course it makes all content less valuable, you can always find something else. Hence the race for attention and the slop machine. It was actually invented by the ad driven revenue model.
We should not project on AI something invented elsewhere. Even if gen AI could make original interesting works, the social network feeds would prioritize slop back again. So the problem is the way we let them control our feeds.
> if you don't add anything original in your prompt
Define "original". You could generate a pregnant Spongebob Squarepants and that would be original, but it would still be noise that doesn't inherently expand the creative space.
> don't spend much time selecting
That's the unexpected issue with the proliferation of generative AI now being accessible to nontechnical people. Most are lazy and go with the first generation that matches the vibe, which is the main reason why we have slop.
The main comparator is Kasane Teto and Suno. Kasane Teto is functionally a piano that uses generative AI for vocal synthesis: https://youtu.be/s3VPKCC9LSs. This is an aid to the creative process. Suno lets you put in a description and completely bypass the creative process by instantly getting to the end: https://youtu.be/UpBVDSJorlU
Kokoro is art. Driveway is content. Art uses the medium and implementation to say something and convey messages. Content is what goes between the ads so the shareholders see a number increase.
I wish there were more things like Kokoro and less things like Driveway.
My hope is that it will be the death of the aggregators and there will be more value in high quality and authentic content. The past 10-15 years has rewarded people who appeal to the aggregation algorithms and get the most views. Hopefully going forward theres going to be more organic, word of mouth recommendations of high quality content.
I felt this same way as image generation was rapidly improving, but I've been caught by surprise and impressed with how resilient we have been in the face of it.
Turns out it's surprisingly, at least for me, to tune out the slop. Some platforms will fall victim to it (Google image search, for one), but new platforms will spring up to take their place.
Put more weight on your subscriptions. I don’t have much AI content in my YouTube suggestions. (Good luck AI generating an interview with Chris Lattner or Stephen Kotkin for example. It won’t work.)
yeah i already have so many AI-generated videos in my feed on all social media it's insane. i spot them from far for now but at some point i'll just be consuming content that took seconds to generate just to get money
