> But Pulp Fiction would not have been a masterpiece if Tarantino just typed “Write a gangster movie.” into a prompt field.
Doesn’t that prove the point? You could do that right now, and it would be absolute trash. Just like how right now we are nowhere close to being able to make great software with a single prompt.
I’ve been vibecoding a side project and it has been three months of ideating, iterating, refining and testing. It would have taken me immeasurably longer without these tools, but the end result is still 100% my vision, and it has been a tremendous amount of work.
More to your original point, Tarantino is actually well known for his deliberate uses of rare lenses. He doesn't grind them himself, but he did resurrect a dead lens format for The Hateful Eight:
This is exactly the process happening in the music space with Suno. Go to their subreddit, they all talk about how they only listen to ‘their’ songs, for the exact reasons you list.
It is very different with music. Music and images fall into "just shit something and I don't care what is is" category.
Most people prompting for things in this category will be satisfied with anything, they might not admit, but the degrees of freedom the model has is infinite. Now when you pin the output, let's say a character you generated, and ask for modifications WHILE KEEPING lots of characteristics, you reduce the degrees of freedom from infinite to a small, very constrained, set of states. There are workarounds but natively llms can't really do this. You ask the model to rotate an image, the hair becomes blue and the sword becames an axe.
With music this is much more pronounced because most people are musically illiterate, so even the basic mistakes while dragging characteristics over diffs becomes invisible. It's an interesting phenomenon I agree, but it says more about lack of taste and illiteracy of the common individual.
But on the point of "thinking hard", with music and artistic production in general, individuals (human with soul, not npc) crave for ideas and perspective. It is the play, the relationship between ideas that are hard to vocalize and describe but can be provocative. Because we cannot describe or understand, we have no choice other than provoke into another a similar contemplation.
But make no mistake, nobody is enjoying llm slop. They have fantasies that now they can produce something of value, or delegate this production. If this becomes true, instantly they lose and everyone goes directly to the source.
Art is specifically about communicating the inconceivable, cannot be delegated. If the tool is sufficient to produce art, then the expression is of the tool itself, now they ARE.
> But because this is not the case, we appreciate Tarantino more than we appreciate gangster movies.
Do we? I don't think people appreciate tarantino more than gangster movies. Don't think people appreciate tarantino more than pulp fiction. Frankly, tarantino doesn't factor in at all.
> It is about the process.
I never considered the process when watching pulp fiction. It's the finished product, not the process, that matters.
Put it this way, we know who tarantino is because of pulp fiction. Not the other way around.
Yes, let's go back to when BigCo just removed mountains to get at coal, Dick Cheney's friends all got rich in Iraq and the Sacklers sold us all pills because they had convinced the relevant agencies that doing so was in accordance with the laws, rules and policies and well, the rest is history.
All this crap has been happening forever. It may very well be happening more now (probably is, IMO), but it's happening in the open. It's all being litigated. Every capricious decision that would have sailed right over the heads of the non-thinking morons with a simple stamp of approval, maybe a small lawsuit in particularly offensive cases, is now being scrutinized and seriously litigated, because the agencies and other "legitimizers" involves have burned through their stored trust, and now everyone is watching everything they do.
Living without it isn't hard IMO. It's more of a convenience. Most of the servers I ever login to only have one non-root user anyway. When I need root, I switch to root.
Whether you like it or not, we are burning a lot of electricity on datacenters. That is a fact. And energy consumption is likely going to significantly increase in the near future. If we can reduce that energy usage, that is a good thing and a big improvement.
I do not think I even understand your complaint. Different people can work on different problems. We do not have to pick only one.
LOL. You can say that about the whole country that claims to be god’s nation and espouse Christian valaues, while doing the exact opposite most of the time.
> I've since learned that anything heavily regulated like hospitals and banks will have security procedures catering to compliance, not actual security.
This is the key insight. Nobody cares at all about actual security. It is all about checklists and compliance.
I love HN because everyone is so different outside of the core purpose of the site. Sometimes people reference art, or a book or something, that I'd never would think to exist.
Llainwire was my top artist listens throughout 2023, so it’s always funny to bump into reactions that feel totally different from my world/my peers.
But Pulp Fiction would not have been a masterpiece if Tarantino just typed “Write a gangster movie.” into a prompt field.
reply