Simple fix, stop hovering the HN frontpage every hour, don't read every news item you come across, it isn't needed, and probably isn't good for our psyche either :)
Some things of course impact your day to day life, but most of these "Hate / Love" articles and news are mostly made to drive clicks, not to actually make your life better.
Tired of, not tired of hearing about it. We should rather pay very close attention to all of it, and add involved people, company and media to databases of such things, to explore the connections. This isn't a joke, they're not playing with monopoly money, and the quick fix to your bed being on fire isn't to hit snooze, it's do do unflinchingly what should have been done from day one. Zero tolerance.
>Simple fix, stop hovering the HN frontpage every hour, don't read every news item you come across, it isn't needed, and probably isn't good for our psyche either :)
A, yes, denial with fix everything.
Like when the AI either costs them their job, or crashes as a bubble and takes the economy and their livelihood with it.
Filtering what information you let affect your brain and mood isn't "denial", it's taking care of what you consume.
Try sitting and reading about death, suicide, harassment, violence exclusively for a week, like if you were a social media moderator, and you'll notice how quickly you're affected by these things, even if it doesn't feel like it in the moment.
> Like when the AI either costs them their job, or crashes as a bubble and takes the economy and their livelihood with it.
Yes, this sucks, regardless of why it happens, it just straight up sucks. In 2008 we had a large financial crisis here, it sucked for most people in the country, either directly or indirectly. But you move forward, find other ways to live your life, adjust what you can and life goes on.
Today obviously is different, but back then it felt impossible things would ever change and return to normal.
Well, my context is Spain, maybe in your country it's differently today, but compared to the times I wrote about in my previous comment, things are a lot better today, and lots of people who previously weren't thriving are today, unemployment gets lower all the time and the economy seems to recover faster than other countries.
> Filtering what information you let affect your brain and mood isn't "denial", it's taking care of what you consume.
But that starts with telling you off. Someone says "I am tired of Y happening so often", and you talk to them like you're their nanny.
> Yes, this sucks, regardless of why it happens
No, the reasons why it happens is why it sucks. And the reasons are of supreme importance, being the reasons, and are also the key to making things better. It starts with paying attention.
> you move forward, find other ways to live your life, adjust what you can and life goes on.
Yes. You say "this sucks", someone tells you how to live your life, you tell them off and move on.
That's truly terrible, and I'm sorry you went through that.
I think we're talking about two different countries here, everything did go back to normal here, and things are today better than ever for most people. I'm sad that that didn't happen where you live too, but it is very rational and real, it's actually what has already happened.
Choosing to not consume the endless deluge of shit is not denial, it's self-care. If AI will take their (or my) job, doomscrolling isn't going to change that. That may be defeatist, but the forces at play are bigger than myself or my internet browsing habits.
How do you get from "I'm tired of the frequency of these scams" to "doomscrolling"?
People discussing things, finding out they're all against being exploited and driven into poverty or death, and coordinating to change that is very powerful. It's the reason we discuss this by being able to read and write, rather than while slaving in a mine.
Why do you think so much slop is generated? In part also to keep that from happening. Because that's what healthy humans normally do, if you let them, if you don't interfere. Just like a wound normally simply heals. These natural and common reactions of humans to such things are the solution, not the problem. Let them actually do their work. If you are exhausted or just apathic, the positive contribution you can still make is to stand aside.
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.
My recommendation has been to ignore any news source that comes out more than once a week. Emergencies requiring you to be up to date are extremely rare. Wait a week and most news will simply vanish as irrelevant or false.
(Ironic saying that on HN, in the comments on an article of extremely dubious merit. I don't always follow my own advice. But I do keep it to a minimum.)
Fraud is still technically illegal. All you need to do is to buy off a prosecutor or two and tell them to do the thing that they haven't seen since their initial job description.
At this point, every AI or LLM “breakthrough” announcement should be assumed to be a lie until the company provides hard proof.
Way too many companies have figured out that exaggerating, misleading, or outright lying gets them headlines, investors, and free marketing long before anyone verifies the claims.
Next month is the IPO of Space-X which will be worth trillions because sending people to mars and building data centers in space is a trillion dollar business now...
Reminds me of a story a friend told me where she was on a date with a man who said he went to Harvard. After looking him up on LinkedIn she discovered he just took some courses at Harvard Extension school where there aren't any admission requirements besides a high school diploma and the ability to pay course fees.
Why is an AI movie startup trying to obtain social proof through the snooty film festival circuit anyway? If this is about "democratizing creation", why not just post the film on Youtube and let the public decide?
What other industry regularly acts in such bad faith with respect to claims made? In the securities industry, material misstatement of fact lands people in jail.
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.
While $500k 90m movie done in two weeks is an accomplishment, looking at the trailer it's very dubious to me on the quality of it. Plot, characters, audio - everything screams "I've already seen this somewhere", there's no substance here, at least for me. And while computer visuals are nice, it's nowhere "Love Sex Robots" quality where they're driven by computer graphics as well.
> While $500k 90m movie done in two weeks is an accomplishment
Is it, though? If all you want is a movie, you can make it for both less money and less time. And if you actually have some modicum of talent, you can make it higher-quality to boot; see Joel Haver, who challenged himself to author, film, edit, and release 12 feature-length films during the course of 2024 on effectively no budget whatsoever (playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-ZRRTsa5SY&list=PLKtIcOP0Wv... ).
True - your comment reminded me of Cube; that was done in 3 weeks, with budget of $350,000 CAD (according to wikipedia). Another favorite of mine - Primer = 5 weeks with budget of $7k.
The cube was not “done” in 3 weeks. Maybe they shot it in 3 weeks, but there were years of pre-production, and at least months of post-production. (According to wikipedia.)
Saying that it was done in 3 weeks is like saying that windows 11 was done in 45 minutes, because that is how long the compilation lasted.
> with budget of $350,000 CAD
“50% of the budget as C$350,000 to C$375,000 in cash and the other 50% as donated services, for a total of C$700,000. Natali considered the cash figure to be deceptive, because they deferred payment on goods and services, and got the special effects at no cost.”
The trailer gave me this weird feeling like I've seen the movie before, even though I obviously haven't. Then it started to dawn on me. Nearly every line in the trailer is a line from another similar action-adventure movie. I bet if you searched a corpus of scripts from all past movies, you'd find each line directly in some other movie. Then I noticed the same thing about the characters. They may look unique at a surface level, but the essence of the characters are all tropes from previous movies. Same for the fight choreography, same for the score. It's as if the movie creator's AI prompt was "Take every movie made in the last 10 years that would have appealed to 14 year old boys and mash them up into another movie with visibly different characters."
This needs to be treated like LLMs, it's obvious that those flaws will be "fixed", we must already assume that this 90m movie will suddenly have the graphics and consistency of a marvel movie, soon enough, it's not like we will not have Kling 7 available in a few years.
Last year many developers were saying that it produces slop and so-on which is genuinely annoying when we know it's months/years to be GUARANTEED to be solved, as theory already proves we can go way further with models (theory means practice eventually), so we must not talk about "now" as in 1 week near but what it will be, as if it's already there imo. Even more annoying about the image gen AI, it's OBVIOUS that it will reach perfect accuracy (at least for human eye), as if we will just throw TRILLIONS of investment by the window and just stop here, nope, this will reach camera level, runtime, instantly rendered.
Else for the job loss, it's like the moment we realize that it can automate 99% of white collar jobs, we would suddenly be surprised when Opus 10 can do it? We shouldn't, we KNOW there will be Opus 10 that reach 99.9% in all benchmarks, like we know we will have Opus equivalent models running on our phones.
I won't be surprised when I see Opus 4.8 equivalent performance running on a 10B model, as this is just logical, I start to kinda hate it that we all act "surprised" with new models every few months as if the science behind it all changed suddenly, no... we just start developing what science is backing up already.
So obviously, music, video, writing... will be produced at a much higher level than humans, soon enough, there is no ceiling with AIs, humans are pretty limited.
What part of the directing and making is fake? Does the film not exist? Was it not made by a team creating and sewing clips together under the direction of someone?
How is that not directing when literally a decent amount of effort was placed into ensuring the output meets desired criteria? It's not like they were using prompts of a couple sentences and rolling with the first result; they were highly detailed and the results expectation-gated.
Directors talk to actors. There is no actor here. At best, this is the equivalent of sending multiple 3000 word emails to a casting agency and letting them figure out what to tell their actors.
I think you need to go look up what film directors do. Getting “the shot” is just one aspect of their lives. You can not tell me directing 1,000s of people to unite behind a common scene is the same as prompting a LTX2.3 workflow. It just isn’t. That’s more like being a cinematographer than a director.
I’m not taking anything away from those that use AI to make videos but to call yourselves directors… rofl.
I suspect their next movie will get nominated for an award at some academy, bonus points if Oscar Micheaux[1] or anyone else with that given name gets mentioned.
As long as BS sells, BS will get produced I guess.
Game of thrones like scenes, with a suicide squad team to save the world. The goofy jokes are about as bad as any recent blockbuster action movie. At 500k at least it's well priced.
> The creators of “Hell Grind” are also making striking claims. The film supposedly took just two weeks and $500,000 to make, per the WSJ. A full 80 percent of that went to compute costs; its creators describe it as a proof-of-concept for how AI can empower creatives who wouldn’t otherwise have the means to make a movie
I thought AI was supposed to be democratizing creativity and putting the power of Hollywood into the hands of regular people? What regular person can afford that kind of price tag? Isn't inference supposed to be cheap?
i dislike your dismissal, i thought it was well written and researched, and did not equivocate but still gave higgsfield a quote in their own words. if you cant get past superficial writing pattern matches to see that this is better than claudeslop its your issue, not the author's.
between this and the 'ai actress' who got press in variety; and with the 'friend.com' bits. The ai industry has gotten good at stunt marketing, or maybe it's payola
The trailer is also awful. A slopfest impossible to follow. The editing is nauseating, the sound design is uninspired and the visual quality is hallucinatory.
Which could fill a niche I suppose, but I doubt it'll ever have market appeal. Not in the current iteration, at best it'll be used as part of a production, e.g. to recreate or de-age older / dead actors, as a replacement or addition to what CGI and similar visual effects are used for right now.
But there will never be a successful, fully AI generated film. I don't believe it, anyway.
If they had been selected for the actual festival, people with respected names would have seen it and talked about how bad it is. But releasing it at some obscure festival that nobody actually goes to wouldn't have been worthy of a company valued at $1.3bn. Pretending to show it at the Cannes festival is the obvious solution. Maximum media attention, none of the criticism
And if it comes out that you lied you still get lots of trailer views, maybe even people checking out the full movie. All numbers you can show off to future investors about how successful your movie was
Instead of chasing a "serious" AI movie, we need a comedy movie that parodies the worst of AI slop, just takes it to ludicrous extremes. That could actually entertain me.
Was hoping to see some detail about just how good/bad the film was at that budget. Disappointed to see it was just harping on how "official" it was, which I doubt many interested in seeing a film care about.
That said, I wonder if in a couple years it'll be capable of making decent films. Maybe by then the costing of AI will be more realistic and people will choose not to spend the money on slop.
Seriously I've seen multiple hypes which were exposed late after false claims spreaded fast and I feel bad for those who don't get to know the truth always
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/cannes-not-show...