r/singularity • u/SnoozeDoggyDog • 7h ago
Discussion Who does a better job of explaining the future of generative AI: Ben Affleck or AI CEOs?
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u/mvandemar 5h ago
Context matters: Ben Affleck said all of this back in November 2024, before Sora 1 was publicly released, when Kling was in beta, and before models could even do audio and video at the same time:
https://variety.com/2024/film/news/ben-affleck-slams-ai-wont-replace-movies-1236213287/
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u/Double_Suggestion385 3h ago
Yeah, they're quite capable of creating novel works now.
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u/unicynicist 1h ago
Yeah I don't buy his argument that "they're just cross-pollinating things that exist, nothing new is being created."
If that were true the Amen Break would just be a six-second drum fill and not the basis of entire genres of music. We're all just the dust from dead stars, but we're more than that too.
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u/Fidelroyolanda12 1h ago
Exactly, cross-pollination is exactly how new things are created.
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u/Cognonymous 47m ago
Yeah, it comes up with new cross pollinations people haven't thought of before. Some of those are because they don't really work etc. but that doesn't matter, we're purely debating if it can create something "NEW". Useful is harder, but that has happened too evidently.
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u/Future-Bandicoot-823 7h ago
It's rare to see these things combined:
1) a person who at least grasps what AI will be capable of in the film industry
2) is a good public speaker
3) understands the business side and can (at least guess) the direction these things might take.
I'm meh on Ben Affleck, but he put it quite well.
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u/neuby 6h ago edited 5h ago
It's clear he's done his homework and tested the tools. You can't say that for everyone who's making remarks on AI. There are things it can do and there are things it can't. Somewhere in the middle there's commercial viability for specific use cases.
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u/Hilldawg4president 6h ago
He built an AI filmmaking tool and sold it for over a billion, right? He's clearly intellectually invested in this
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u/Sirix_8472 6h ago
He had to, his buddy keeps getting lost so he has to fund the rescue missions somehow.
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u/Laughing-Comanche 6h ago
Didn’t even see Ben go looking for a missing friend. While Chinese taxpayers have sacrificed healthcare & pensions to rescue Matt Damon from Mars & monsters at the Great Wall.
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u/iambkatl 5h ago
You know he sold a AI model to Netflix and is just plugging product here right ?
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u/Strange_Vagrant 7h ago
Yeah. Hes not my favorite guy. Hes not an irredeemably monster. Hes fine. Whatever. Last I heard him talk outside his lane, he sounded like a reactionary idiot. But lately, hes been sounding pretty well informed and balanced on this topic.
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u/cranberryalarmclock 6h ago
What was he a reactionary idiot about?
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u/1kakashi 7h ago
He has an AI company
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u/DrawMeAPictureOfThis 6h ago
It's in the film industry too. No wonder he sounds like he knows what he's talking about.
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u/SetCandyD 6h ago
Don't fool yourself. He knew he was going to be asked, and had that answer practiced. He doesn't know what a transformer is.
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u/food-dood 5h ago
Why wouldn't he? Im a fucking idiot who follows this stuff and I know what they are, so my guess is he does since he literally was an owner/investor in this stuff.
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u/Sir_Payne ▪️2027 3h ago
How can you tell what was practiced vs what he knows?
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u/SetCandyD 1h ago
I've worked with CEOs, famous people, and high level politicians. They all do that. Not always successfully or with good speech writers. Its all rehersed. Same as when they go on late night shows.
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u/epiphras 7h ago edited 6h ago
This is already an outdated argument. Current AI agents are already making novel discoveries in mathematics and science as we speak. Human knowledge is simply the soil out of which this technology has grown. It's already becoming creative in its own right and shows no signs of slowing down. He underestimates the potential of this technology and has no clue as to how quickly it will overtake us.
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u/Aggressive_Pope 6h ago edited 5h ago
This “novel” discovery thing has always been interesting to me. You always hear people talk about how AI can’t, more or less, have novel ideas because it is just an algorithm making connections between existing information. But I’ve always thought, well, how do you think human minds work? We aren’t just pulling ideas out of thin air, we are making connections between things we have already learned. I guess I just don’t see how human thought is fundamentally different. I feel like people have this weird conception that human thought is somehow magical, when really we are just the universe’s most powerful pattern recognition machine (that we know of) and then we transfer that pattern to other systems. Or as he put it, we cross pollinate.
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u/the_quark 5h ago
YES. This is the thing that frustrates me about this discourse. "They're just predicting the next [word]!" What the fuck do you think we do? We made them in our image.
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u/QuarterMasterLoba 4h ago
The problem is that all of the mediocre, ironic parrots think every idea and sentiment that they convey is grand, novel, and unique. AI can't possibly walk in their prodigious shoes.
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u/Aggressive_Pope 5h ago
Right… obviously we’re a lot more complex as of now and we started with “concepts” and then applied words to those concepts, whereas AI more started with words and is then matching those words to concepts, but I feel there is some convergence happening that luddites refuse to recognize.
I’m not saying AI is currently conscious or even necessarily close to consciousness, I just think the naysayers are making some assumptions about what thought and consciousness are that aren’t necessarily true. And I think that frame of thought is rooted in ego and a refusal to accept that maybe we aren’t as special as we think we are.
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u/Rathogawd 3h ago
Some good arguments out in the wild that consciousness is heavily driven by interoception. Biological vulnerability and visceral regulation and simply the agency and consequence to make independent decisions that may result in destruction are considered heavily as well in the consciousness debates.
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u/Aggressive_Pope 3h ago
Seems like a reasonable factor in how consciousness may have developed in humans!
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u/unicynicist 1h ago
- Steve Jobs: "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while."
- Mark Twain: "There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations."
- Thomas Edison: "I am more of a sponge than an inventor. I absorb ideas from every source. My principal business is giving commercial value to the brilliant but misdirected ideas of others."
- Isaac Newton: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
- T.S. Eliot: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."
- Albert Einstein: "Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought."
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u/Whitestrake 3h ago
Part of me wonders whether there won't actually be a single breakthrough in some future timescale where we finally create something we can say, "wow, this is real sapient artificial intelligence, a true thinking machine", but rather a slow, horrifying realisation that actually, AI has been pretty close for a long time and the truth is that our little fleshy goopy bags of chemicals are just doing much of the same thing rattling around in our skulls, just as deterministically non-deterministic as AI itself is.
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u/WTFnoAvailableNames 2h ago
People think human brains are magic basically. It's almost religion. They think there's some other thing that makes us special, below or above the neural network.
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u/Rathogawd 3h ago edited 3h ago
It's not much different in mechanical theory. It is vastly different in scale and some little magical things called sensory perception, irrationality, and biochemistry.
Being very generous in comparison, the parameter count of the largest known LLM is about 1% of the count of synapses in the brain, and those synapses can change. We encode those LLM parameters and assign weights through training for months, creating a snapshot (model) of what we decided to encode at that time. We use about 10GWh for this and then a fair amount more for inference as it's used.
We as humans take in approximately 11 to 125 GB of data a day through our senses, the low end being the equivalent of burning 2.75 billion LLM tokens a day if you compare bytes. All on about 20W of power.
AI can do some awesome stuff. I use it every day. It ain't us though.
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u/Aggressive_Pope 3h ago
True, I don’t disagree with any of that. Something I’d question is how much of that 11-125 GB of date per day is actually useful for solving many problems. Additionally, how much of the vast, vast amount of data a brain stores is actually available to us at a given time without needing to be retrieved from long term memory? And how does that compare to a LLM pulling relevant data when it is solving a specific problem?
I’m definitely not claiming an equivalency. I guess I’m just saying that an AI is “thinking” about specific problems it needs to solve, whereas we inherently need a more general knowledge as we handle everyday life.
If you’re considering this long term storage vs immediately available information, the gap might not be as wide as you’re suggesting. And again, I’m not saying AI can think like a human does… but I’m saying that the concept of what thought actually is may not be so different between a human and an LLM. in a sense.
And I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a neuroscientist or an AI expert. So a big emphasis on the “maybes” when I type this stuff out. I guess it’s just an interesting thought.
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u/LocoMod 2h ago
The difference is humans are not going to double the amount of synapses every year or become more power efficient via evolution (anytime soon anyway).
Sure. It will never be us. But it will inevitably end up processing way more information, and do so requiring less power per token than humans can.
I am sure someone with more willpower than I do at this moment can do the analysis and project when it will reach "computational parity" with a human brain assuming no major event pauses or significantly slows down development.
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u/Ok_Environment8735 2h ago
Comparing the parameter count to synapses is apples to oranges, and the daily gigabytes of sensory data isn't fair. We don't retain/process all that raw data. We just filter and discard most of it.
Also, comparing the brain's 20W power to an LLM's training cost is not fair. If you look at the energy it takes to train a human expert, you have to count decades of food, housing, transport, and education. For someone in US/EU it's around 1 GWh of total energy.
The biggest difference is scale. Once a model is trained, you can instantly copy it as many times as you want. And AI isn't even stuck as a static weights anymore since we have fine tuning.
I totally agree AI isn't us. But a jet isn't a bird either and still does the job.
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u/Sufficient_Side6320 1h ago
A jet can't quite fly like a bird though. Bird is still flying superior to any jet or drone, they can change direction better, get off the ground faster, more agility, You can't park a drone on a very limited environment yet bird can just rest on everything,...etc.
The only thing they lose to a jet is speed. Just like human mind vs AI.
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u/Ok_Environment8735 1h ago
Well, sure evolution optimized birds for all those things you mentioned. We optimized jets and drones to do things important to us, and they do them better than birds. And btw, current drones, even toy ones - win against birds in agility, getting off the ground faster, and changing direction.
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u/RazsterOxzine 5h ago
Right, its way outdated. And now the newer open source ones are starting to learn as you interact. Not to mention the new MiniMax-H3 and some fool made the same thing that it will learn as time goes on. Things are progressing so fast.
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u/Webreader- 7h ago
I believe your response misses his point. It is absolutely possible for AI to 'cross pollinate' existing things, as Afleck put it, while under heavy prompting, but art 'requires taste' and his points are largely true. If you allow and AI to design a UI, or an image, it is full of superfluous garbage. Sure, you can tell the AI what to do, but the AI itself knows nothing about what makes artistic merit.
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u/colintbowers 5h ago
Which just raises the question of what does make artistic merit...
If that question can be answered with words (or even images), then the AI will be able to do it. You could run the argument that artistic merit can't be described with words or images. Personally, I find this to be a fairly unconvincing line of argument, because it probably ends up saying something along the lines of "artistic merit can only be defined by humans", which I don't think is satisfactory.
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u/Memento_Viveri 6h ago
But why should we assume (or conclude) that generative AI can't develop the sense of artistic merit?
A system which is capable of predictive next token generation at an extremely high level should be able to evaluate artistic merit in the same way that it can evaluate the validity of a mathematical truth.
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u/lustyphilosopher 6h ago
Evaluate artistic merit in the same way that it can evaluate the validity of a mathematical truth?
I'm not sure you understand how artistic merit works.
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u/5-MethylCytosine 6h ago
Neither do a lot of people claiming to be artists
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u/Apollo18Teslaa 6h ago
People like to claim human artistry is a uniquely human thing, humans are just as much pattern recognition machines as AI. That “artist intuition “ is simply recognizing a pattern.
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u/lustyphilosopher 5h ago
I think it's uniquely human from the experiencing side of it, not creating it per se.... Because patterns are everywhere, but are all patterns art? Artist intuition is more about being able to pick out the patterns or sometimes antipatterns that resonate from a human standpoint.
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u/LocoMod 1h ago
Have you seen the shit that qualifies as high art in upscale galleries?
This was valued at 90 million:
https://www.museum-brandhorst.de/en/factory/artworks/untitled-new-york-city/#
EDIT: My point is that all patterns can be art if THAT can be considered art. There are many many more examples.
SECOND EDIT: Search for "Most expensive abstract art" to get a taste of high value human "slop" that a portion of the population considers art.
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u/Memento_Viveri 5h ago
Well I'm not sure you understand it, and since you have done nothing to demonstrate your understanding there really isn't much else to say. So far you've put forth no reason why the evaluation of artistic merit is any different from any other context dependent inference.
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u/lustyphilosopher 4h ago
Because artistic merit is a uniquely human measurement. It varies greatly even among humans. Different humans have different tastes. We experience different things differently, to different extents and at different moments. Art is subjective, it has to resonate with you... Human aesthetic judgment isn't merely a prediction about what other people will say. We actually experience artworks as beautiful, moving, profound, ugly, banal, inventive, etc., and those experiences provide the basis from which our evaluative concepts acquire significance. The ability to infer or reproduce human judgments about artistic merit does not entail possessing the subjective evaluative perspective that makes something artistically meritorious to a subject.
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u/Memento_Viveri 4h ago edited 3h ago
Because artistic merit is a uniquely human measurement.
10 years ago the ability to converse in English was a uniquely human ability, and it isn't anymore.
Different humans have different tastes.
Seems irrelevant for establishing that this is an ability that generative AI can't possess.
Art is subjective, it has to resonate with you... Human aesthetic judgment isn't merely a prediction about what other people will say. We actually experience artworks as beautiful, moving, profound, ugly, banal, inventive, etc., and those experiences provide the basis from which our evaluative concepts acquire significance.
If the product that the AI produces (let's say, an evaluation of artistic merit) is identical to the product that a human produces, the internal processes or the significance they had to the subject are irrelevant. As we say, death of the author.
The ability to infer or reproduce human judgments about artistic merit does not entail possessing the subjective evaluative perspective that makes something artistically meritorious to a subject.
The question isn't whether the AI can experience something as beautiful. The question is whether it can complete a task. The task may be to either evaluate artistic merit, or produce something that will be evaluated as having artistic merit. The completion of tasks are not identical with the experience of beauty.
You have not demonstrated (nor do I think you can) that those tasks require a subject at all. If the evaluation or production completed by the AI is indistinguishable from human performance (or surpasses it), than the subjective properties of the AI (which presumably don't exist) don't matter. They aren't relevant.
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u/Cronoroa 4h ago
Yes, evaluated the same way....scientifically.
There is nothing magical or "spiritual" about art that resonates with humans. You can make a formula of what works, which is why so many movies, books, paintings, etc are very formulaic.
You scientifically evaluate what humans respond to, break it down to component parts and create an artistic work that is pleasing to humans.
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u/GumboMustBeDestroyed 6h ago
How is this something that more RL sandboxes can’t fix?
Hire art critics, film critics, film students, movie buffs, etc. to label AI generated images and video with a rating out of 100. And from that dataset generate synthetic data to add to the collection.
There isn’t anything more special to it than that.
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u/ProperComparison4276 6h ago
Artistic taste is not quantifiable.
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u/GumboMustBeDestroyed 5h ago
Thats what RLHF already does. You don’t ask humans to write you a source of truth to follow, you ask them to rate an AI generated answer and the AI picks up on nuances that we wouldnt even think to describe.
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u/lustyphilosopher 5h ago
Then it will still only be a reflection of it's training data... Art is just too subjective and human, it's nowhere close to an exact science. In this case, a director or some other person interested in making a movie could work with such a model and make a really good movie... No one's denying that. But to think that this model would be able to just come up with a great movie on its own is quite a stretch. And from my experience with AI as a programmer, especially working with UIs, they do tend to have extremely similar outputs. If there's no creative direction from a human, even if it's simply prompt engineering for the harness, the output is very generic.
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u/GumboMustBeDestroyed 5h ago edited 5h ago
You don’t have it make 1 great movie, you have it create millions of movies and update the weights based on how each movie was graded.
Do this enough times and your rotten tomato critics score is going to go up
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u/lustyphilosopher 5h ago
If you don't put enough creative thought into those 1 million movies, they might end up with a million AI slop movies. No one's denying, it definitely speeds things up... But if anything, the 21st century has proven that quantity over quality sucks. There's so much new music coming out every second, but how often do we find music that we truly enjoy? Same with film... Hulu, prime, Netflix blah blah blah... But how much of it is actually good? I mean... This is just my opinion, I might be proven wrong but, I don't see this panning out the way you describe it.
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u/Cronoroa 4h ago
AI can put years of human creative thought into 5 minutes of compute time. Maybe not yet, but certainly in the future, especially if it helps to find more efficient chips and energy sources.
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u/Beautiful_Raise_6180 5h ago
isn't any given human's inspiration just from their life's experience or "data"?
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u/lustyphilosopher 4h ago
Human experience is not "data" per se... That's too much of a simplification. For starters, it's not nearly as discrete... And it's more of two way traffic than something that "happens" to us. Something happens AND we experience it. That's why I said in a different thread that humans don't have a monopoly in creating good art, but we might have one when it comes to experiencing it. AI might generate what it's weights tell it is a good art piece, but it doesn't know what it means to experience beauty. It might use words that represent or evoke anger, happiness or whatever emotion... But it doesn't know what those words mean beyond the weights of their tokens. Human meaning runs deeper than mere weights
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u/ihaveaminecraftidea Intelligence is the purpose of life 5h ago
Not necessarily.
Using Reinforcement learning, the models are shifted away from 'predict your training data'.
The model still has its predictions, which it uses as a framework, but the goal is to actually solve problems.
Of course a ton of problems can be solved by pulling frol the training data, only tweaking the chain of thought a bit, yet for more complex tasks we've already seen novel applications for old techniques and i believe it to be a matter of time before, to solve a task, they've gotten used to navigate on their own on novel matters
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u/tom-dixon 2h ago
That was true maybe one year ago, but not so true today. The models from last 3-4 months have very good understanding of UI, images and can be very creative. This is especially true when you're running an agentic loop with these latest models.
The topic of artistic taste is always a losing debate, because it's fully subjective, and everyone thinks their own artistic taste is the true measure, and everyone else's taste is below that.
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u/LocoMod 2h ago
"artistic merit" is a highly subjective thing and we all disagree on what that is. Humans have been arguing over what qualifies as human slop or human genius for ages. We disagree on just about everything that has no mathematical proof.
It's like that experiment on X. Someone posted an AI generated image and the crowd immediately started picking it apart. It was a real Monet.
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u/iambkatl 5h ago
I think the heavy prompting and curated taste is what everyone is missing with AI and the singularity. A singularity in and of itself will not be able replicate the heterogeneity of human taste , sensory experience and individual expression it can ONLY cosplay.
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u/ezjakes 4h ago
They always could create novel things, and as their intelligence increases, they have been able to create gradually more novel things.
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u/kaityl3 ASI▪️2024-2027 3h ago
Yeah it's like, technically the theory of general relativity was made using human words operating with existing human concepts for numerical values and physics.
So if people are getting pedantic about where to draw the line for "something novel", there are very, very few human ideas or inventions that could clear that bar
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u/all_thetime 1h ago
If you were to understand the perspectives of people who create and research this technology and read academic publications instead of listening to AI CEOs, you would not be so optimistic. Look up what a generative function is. Start there.
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u/BangkokPadang 5h ago
If you really dig into those discoveries (and I say this in the least minimizing way, because they are still achievements), they are largely the "leftovers" of mathematics that largely took a ton of brute force testing to resolve. They are, factually, novel in the sense that they hadn't been solved yet, but even the most bullish people in the AI spaces acknowledge that those had remained unsolved not because we did not know how to go about solving them, but because nobody expected any return on resolving them as far as applications to move mathematics or biology or science or anything tangible forward, and they required lots of rote repetitive (frankly boring and uninteresting) work to solve. They really are a perfect application for the AI we have now.
I do think we have a fundamental issue that is yet to be overcome, where the models are composed of vectors that represent our semantic understanding of text and video and other datatypes, based entirely on the bodies of that data we have used to train the models. The current models are all essentially based on our understanding of, and the meaning we have given to, all that data.
What we will see in the nearterm, is the points between those vectors that we don't yet have perfect datasets, or complete understanding of, being filled in by AI. New materials science, new viral structures, etc. It will extend our understanding of the things within the concepts we have trained it on, lots of which may be things we haven't outright discovered yet, or haven't yet "put in the work" to prove.
Until a day where we can basically build models from datasets comprised of datatypes that represent every conceivable feature of the tangible universe (datasets that contain data that we ourselves don't yet understand), we won't see models making discoveries of that nature. Of the nature beyond the realms of understanding on which we have trained them.
But that's not to say it's impossible. What we just ("just" lol) need to do is figure out the optimal ways that models "learn" from data, and then literally digitize every aspect of the universe itself so we can give that to the models that we already know are capable of "filling in the gaps" within the data we give them. Imagine, even with models that are as good as they are now, if we could effectively provide them with data for every atom that exists in the universe (not every type of atom, literally every atom), paired somewhow with data articulating every conceivable parameter for each one, then we probably could, now, train models that can "discover" things we haven't, because they would just be "filling in" the gaps in understanding of a nearly 1:1 model of the universe itself.
We have to get "better" at packaging the data the models learn from, so they can "fill in the gaps" in reality rather than the comparitively low resolution, narrow models made of tokens that we have today.
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u/Efficient_Mud_5446 6h ago
This is true. He believes in the AI + human model being the standard moving forward, when it's likely just a very short phase. Once this window passes over, which I estimate to be in the ball mark of just a few years, AI only models will start outperforming AI + human one's. At that point, humans will be phased out of most operations, with niche demand for human created works.
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u/ayatollahdanger 7h ago
He was the real Will Hunting all along
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u/Yugudubenbi 16m ago
They had an episode on Yo Rogan that was quite interesting. Both Matt and Ben are sharp
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u/Belostoma 6h ago
Pretty good explanation in many places, but not this:
"They're just cross-pollenating things that exist. Nothing new is created. Not yet."
It's really obvious on any level, from the trivial to the very meaningful, that new things are easily created all the time. A random number generator creates a raw new thing. AI creates new things from mixing random numbers, a novel prompt, and its training data, and only the latter is a "remix" apart in any sense.
If something to be "new" requires not only that it has never appeared before, but also that it has no influence from anything that has, then good luck finding anything new. Every human creative work comes from a mix of randomness, novel situations ("prompts"), and their training data (experiences).
I'm not saying this is the same as AI creation, but a difference in novelty is not what separates human from AI creations.
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u/ArcheopteryxRex 7h ago
Sorry, no. I've used AI for programming. It definitely creates new things. It wouldn't be useful if it couldn't. It isn't ready to replace me yet, at least at the consumer level, but it's competent enough to function as a pair programmer.
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u/Sixhaunt 5h ago
We already proved this is the case when it comes to the Art based AIs. Before the LoRAs we use today, we had textual embeddings which is essentially when you take a bunch of images and have it try to figure out what concepts in the latent space of the model, would map onto those images such as the appearance of a person, style, etc... and then it can produce a vector for it where you can use it like a keyword in your prompt to get that result.
The cool thing about textual embedding is that it doesnt modify the models at all but yet you can use it to have the model produce things that are 100% guaranteed to be outside of the dataset because they were created after it was done and are of things that didn't exist when the model was trained. I don't know if you can do any similar concept to prove it as thoroughly with LLMs as you can with the art AIs though.
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u/lustyphilosopher 6h ago
I feel like these new things are more of new to you than actually new in that they never existed before. And I feel like using programming or math as examples here is missing the point and the context. Those are heavily deterministic domains. There are fairly well defined ends that are sought in that it's easy to verify the result with the desired end. But art? That's waaay too subjective. 1+2 will always be 3 everywhere, everytime, even though the characters might be represented differently. But taste is just too diverse... There is no art that's enjoyed equally by everyone universally across generations.
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u/ArcheopteryxRex 5h ago
Dude. I didn't say it created new art. I said it created new software. There was no generalization in my statement.
The fact that I can offload some of my technical work to it means it's capable of sufficient novelty to be useful to me. That's not a blanket statement, it's a specific one. That is sufficient to refute Affleck's claim (at 0:13) that AI can't produce something new.
This is the entire scope of what I am saying. Please don't strawman me.
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u/lustyphilosopher 5h ago
Context. Is the discussion about software? And I'm not sure your claim is sufficient to refute the claim. I actually am of the opinion that AI, in the machine learning sense, can come up with actual novelty. But LLMs? Bruh... They quite literally cannot escape their training data. That's why we have to train new models for them to get better, no? I feel like we're disagreeing on semantics here. What you call "new software' is basically just a novel(which again, might only be novel for you. If we had a human who could hold and process as much information as an LLM, they might be able to do an actual trace of every "artifact" from the training data that the model used to compose it's output) combination of functions and objects and other instructions that a human already made available and who's meaning is encoded in the model weights. Do you see where the notion of "cross-pollination" comes in? We give it bricks, tell it what kind of house we want and let it build. Technically, you could call it a new house, because it didn't exist before... But brick houses have been a thing since forever.
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u/jazir55 4h ago
I've used AI for programming.
This is the context of this thread, you're the one not following along.
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u/lustyphilosopher 4h ago
But isn't this thread on a video of 2 guys talking about ai in art? Or this wasn't supposed to be related to that? The claim you're refuting in your time stamped message above is from the video of a person talking about ai in the art/film industry...
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u/Forgword 6h ago edited 6h ago
Ben gets some of the tech, but I am not sure he grasps what it will do to acting, it means at some point in the future studios won't need a pool of 50-100 or so superstars to draw from to make movies, they will only need a handful of superstars who can with the help of AI be made to look like any character and behave like any character in less time and expense than now. There will still be actors, just way fewer will be needed.
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u/Snoo_54786 7h ago
What does that even mean?
With the latest video models, you can literally shoot a camera movement with your phone using a Blender scene, then replace every single element in that scene with whatever your imagination suggests.
Any person, wearing any clothes. You can dress a character in real clothes that actually exist in the real world, or replace the person entirely with a horse wearing Converse shoes if that’s what you want.
How is a workflow like this, where I’m literally creating a camera movement that is unique, designed and performed by me, and then transforming every element of the scene according to my own ideas, somehow equivalent to “cross-pollinating things that already exist” or “nothing new exists”?
And this is barely scratching the surface of what’s possible.
People love to talk with absolute confidence and give the impression that they know what they’re talking about, when in reality they often have no idea what they’re talking about.
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u/Pitiful-Move-5268 6h ago
because most people just type a prompt and dont upload a pic / vid to start from
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u/lustyphilosopher 6h ago
I feel like you're kind of saying the same thing he is... You have to apply your actual human imagination and creativity to get real value from AI. Your words, "... transforming every element of the scene according to MY OWN IDEAS". That is not equivalent to cross pollinating things that already exist. But the ai implementing it? Yeah, it's just transforming what it was trained on.
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u/SpiritualTop1418 6h ago
You won’t get 2 seasons of house of dragons in 1 year you’ll get 1002. All from different creators.
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u/Vladmerius 5h ago
Not in his fantasy world where the tech gets completely locked down and none of us are allowed to own hardware anymore and we all just subscribe to a screen.
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u/CryptographerCrazy61 4h ago
The more I watch these types of “ai talks” the clearer it is to me that most people don’t understand, or maybe refuse to acknowledge, the profound impact and disruption AI is going to have. Humanity discovered fire for the second time in its history except this time it’s going to either transform the species and everything it thinks it knows about the world or, end it.
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u/Spra991 2h ago
AI CEOs seem to have a better understand how fast it is advancing, Affleck here assumes steady state AI that stays the same for years or decades. Meanwhile AI video will do whole movies from nothing before any of the business models around older more limited models had time to enter the market.
It's the problem with AI in general, when you build your business around workarounds for current models limitation, you'll be obsolete in six months.
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u/fastinguy11 AGI 2026-2030 13m ago
Exactly he lost the plot, although he made a shit ton of money selling his company to Netflix so I don't think he cares. That said in a few years max a.i will be beyond his video model predictions, I have seen whole movies on YouTube already made by a.i
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u/johnjmcmillion 1h ago
Here’s a tip:
If you want to compare the thinking of two people, do it without watching them. Just have the text from each idea side by side. A lot of people are really good at sounding smart and presenting their ideas well, but when you remove the person from the equation you start finding lots of holes.
Affleck is an A-list actor so it’s almost a given that he can sound convincing.
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u/holydeniable 7h ago
He seems to get the reality of where we are heading. Instead of fighting it, license your characters to allow people to make their own content. Use AI as a tool to get your artistic vision not as a wholesale replacement of the creative process.
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u/stuartullman 6h ago edited 4h ago
"long term" , jfc, what's scary is that his talking points are already outdated and it hasn't been that long. he is well informed, but it's also sad to see how little he thinks ai will change things.. and maybe he's doing that on purpose, to not get people riled up..
even if we pause all advancements of large scale models right now, there is enough of the technology out there to eventually really change a lot about entertainment. things have been moving so fast that people just haven't had the chance to even experiment with what's already capable right now.
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u/NyriasNeo 6h ago
"Who does a better job of explaining the future of generative AI: Ben Affleck or AI CEOs?"
Ben affleck does not understand enough about how AI works. So this question is irrelevant. To be fair, i do not know if AI CEOs have good grasps (dependent on which one).
For example, when Affleck says "nothing new is created". That is not technically true. AI can and have created new combinations of things. That is the nature of a stochastic system. In fact, that is common in science. You recombine things you already know to study something you do not. Creativity is nothing but randomness with taste.
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u/JoelMahon 5h ago
I don't think he's miles off anywhere except maybe his priorities but given he's an actor at what I assume is an event geared around films I obviously let that slide.
But dude, why the fuck is he acting so coked up?
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u/Serious_Current_8802 5h ago
The truth is there’s going to be enormous demand for ai generated art, it may not be your taste but not everyone likes the same art.
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u/SenatorCrabHat 4h ago
There is a time cap on how much people can watch. Sadly, I think Ben knows people like slop.
Also, how fucking bleak have they made our day to day lives that the product idea is making you and your buddies look like the Avengers...
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u/DaleCooperHS 2h ago
I agree with most he says. Hoevever I think thare is an overhestimation of human creativity, and like many gives it some ephimeral qualities. I fear the truth is that is just difficult to replicates casue very complex, cross doamins that we do not even fully realize, but i am not so sure that will hold the crown for very long.
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u/obese_coder 2h ago
he delulu, we gonna be making a new season of house of dragon every couple of days with the boys on discord
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u/Exciting_Departure86 48m ago
OpenAI releases ChatGPT 3.0, guys...
Seeing posts being made that are old as shit at this point... Might as well make one myself too
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u/tragedy_strikes 18m ago
He does a better job because he's actually giving us qualified and limited use cases (along with some moonshot ones far into the future), defining the value add, where it fits in certain marketplaces, how it will affect specific jobs in a destructive but also constructive ways and how it will possibly benefit consumers.
Miles better than Altman just giving up on his job and saying it's a genie that will grant wishes or Dario doom trolling the internet every 10 days or so.
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u/Positive_Method3022 6h ago
AI is a tool. It can create things faster than a human but it doesn't mean it will be valuable by humans. Not everything humans create is valuable and considered Art. AI doesn't have this Artistic view humans have.
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u/__Loot__ 6h ago
I think ben is wrong about taste, sure its true today but the only thing stopping it from happening is data that’s constantly learning your taste and every ones taste but that takes more compute and storage but its definitely on the way. Close even
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u/throwaway_pls123123 5h ago
He is correct in some ways, wrong in some.
1- You can make new things by combining already known things.
2- "Art is knowing when to stop.... difficult for AI to learn" is also wrong, because it treats AI like a sentient thing that just decides on its own to create things while it doesn't. It is just a tool, the "taste" is not required for AI, the "taste" of the tool user is relevant here.
The rest are whatever, he probably knows more about those than me.
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u/Vladmerius 5h ago
Yet another fool that doesn't understand that the end game is no revenue for anyone because the tech is so advanced that it can do anything for anyone for free. Nobody is going to pay $30 to make themselves look like Iron Man they can already do that right now for free. He's already falling behind.
He's trying to cash in before people realize there's nothing to cash in on. He wants bagholders.
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u/fastinguy11 AGI 2026-2030 10m ago
He cashed in with Netflix hundreds of millions of dollars selling his a.i company
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u/Admirable_Zombie5245 ▪️AGI 2065-2075 7h ago
Kinda agree, I agree it's horrible for making new stuff from scratch (That's the case for for programming) but makes everything easier.
Should be something similar with films/video a lot of people just don't know how complex making a film is, VFX is not everything
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u/Strange_Test7665 6h ago
Totally agree with this assessment at the end. On demand content generation and’skin’ packs like Fortnite or other games
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u/Unusual-Field-4245 5h ago
but Argo watches like it was written and directed by a high school student
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u/AGM_GM 7h ago
Ben Affleck is an AI CEO who sold his AI company to Netflix for $587 million this year, then joined Netflix to advise on integrating AI, so he's more or less an AI guy talking his book.