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slhomme | 3 years ago

As an owner of a Video Production studio, this kind of tech is blowing my mind and makes me equally excited and scared. I can see how we could incorporate such tools in our workflows, and at the same time I'm worried it'll be used to spam the internet with thousands and thousands of souless generated videos, making it even harder to look through the noise.

A fun related experiment, I thought it was fun to see what kind of movies AI would generate, so I created a "This Movie Does Not Exist" website[1] that auto generates fake movies (movie posters + synopsis). It basically uses GPT-3 to generate some story plots, and then uses that as a prompt (with in-between steps) for Stable Diffusion. Results may vary, but it definitely surprises sometimes with movies that look and sound amazing!

[1] This Movie Does Not Exist: https://thismoviedoesnotexist.org/

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skocznymroczny|3 years ago

Reminds me of South Park when Cartman was pretending to be a robot and was made to invent movie prompts

"Adam Sandler is like, in love with some girl, but then it turns out that the girl is actually a Golden Retriever. Or something.""

maxov|3 years ago

I love this! But after trying it a few times I got this result :). So fascinating.

https://thismoviedoesnotexist.org/movie/the-terminator

Brings up the age-old question of how much the learning in these models is just memorization. Though in cases like these it’s hard to tell.

slhomme|3 years ago

Yep, that's because GPT-3 was trained on real existing data, and it's quite a challenge to make sure the story plot is 100% fake. When it's too close from an existing film, it just sometimes gives it the same film title. I have in-between GPT-3 prompts to avoid that as much as possible, but sometimes real movie titles slips through the cracks. Something I hope to improve shortly.

sdenton4|3 years ago

Given Hollywood's proclivity to remake everything on a 20-year cycle, it seems completely appropriate to get a 2023 Terminator reboot in a 1920's style.

WheelsAtLarge|3 years ago

There are only so many stories to tell. The Terminator is a rehash of so many other previous stories. The real art is in putting it together so that it seems new and fresh and gets people exited about it. The Terminator 1920s style looks interesting.

trop|3 years ago

Note to mention "In the Land of Oz: The Search for the Wizard":

https://thismoviedoesnotexist.org/movie/in-the-land-of-oz-th...

Which reads like a bad translation of a bad translation. Like the the old joke about the AI program which was supposed to translate "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" from English to Russian to English, and after the roundtrip came up with "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."

babyshake|3 years ago

Not sure how I feel about an AI generating a movie concept that involves a "rise of the machines".

anshumankmr|3 years ago

The same could technically be said about Disney which is just remaking their entire classical collection but with CGI.

hiidrew|3 years ago

I think some refer to this as the dead internet theory, e.g. AI content creation becomes the majority of media on the internet instead of humans posting (may be wrong in my explanation but think that's the premise).

It's scary to think about it but seems plausible—like if someone can make an app with Tiktok-like ubiquity of only AI content. Although to your point I imagine there will be so much nonsensical noise that curating will become a useful skill, it is today but even more so.

Dragonai|3 years ago

> It's scary to think about it but seems plausible—like if someone can make an app with Tiktok-like ubiquity of only AI content. Although to your point I imagine there will be so much nonsensical noise that curating will become a useful skill, it is today but even more so.

This just gave me a disturbingly vivid vision of exactly what you described. A seemingly likely future where everyone's in their homes scrolling endlessly on a TikTok-like app where there's literally infinite content being generated by the AI all the time, and as people like and dislike certain types of content, the AI just gets better and better at generating new videos...this is honestly kind of terrifying. I have no doubt this will exist one day, and that it'll print money for one company while billions of people are spending all their free time consuming it.

Atheros|3 years ago

People like interacting with other people, not bots. If a few individuals start to feel like they're interacting with too many bots, they'll retreat into small private silos. The human-to-bot ratio on public forums then drops. Then more people realize that they're just talking to bots and further and further it goes until practically no humans are left. That's the dead internet theory.

I really don't think it applies to us in this context though because I think that a decent number of humans don't care whether some content is AI generated. Furry porn is all hand-drawn and people still like it despite it not being real.

moron4hire|3 years ago

>> spam the internet with thousands and thousands of souless generated videos

Unfortunately, that's already happening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7oiHtYCo0w

From what I can see, YouTube has done quite a bit of work to cleanup YouTube Kids, but it's kind of an arms race.

There's this worrying issue in AI ethics discussions where most people seem to assume the problems and dangers of AI are still off in the future, that as long as we don't have the malicious AGI of sci-fi stories, then AI and "lesser" algorithmically generated content isn't harming society.

I think that's not true at all. I think we've seen massive damage to social structures thanks to algorithmic feeds and generated content, already, for years now. I don't think, just because they aren't necessarily neural-network-based, doesn't make them something to not worry about.

So I don't see AI as a particularly, different, worrisome problem. It's an extension of an already existing, worrisome problem that most people have ignored beyond occasionally complaining about election results.

barbariangrunge|3 years ago

I know some extremely hard working independent filmmakers who struggle so hard to get noticed. After this tech goes mainstream in 5 years and gets really good, I don’t know what they’re going to do

elephanlemon|3 years ago

Make blockbusters, because scenes that would be incredibly expensive to shoot now will be practically free with this?

have_faith|3 years ago

From my personal perspective; knowing how something is made affects my interest in it. I guess that's why provenance ascribes value. I value human creativity and so I'll likely always seek out something created by craft than by shortcuts.

electrondood|3 years ago

AI is eating the world, and the vast majority of people are not paying attention.

I don't know what artists, truck drivers, Uber/Lyft/taxi drivers, delivery drivers, programmers, doctors, judges, fast food workers, etc. are going to do.

usefulcat|3 years ago

> I'm worried it'll be used to spam the internet with thousands and thousands of souless generated videos

I agree, and I think when that happens, it will tend to increase the value of curation. High quality curation that is, probably done mostly by hand, as opposed to the at-best-mediocre automated curation that is commonly used.

It could be bad for things like YouTube, for example. I think there will be an arms race between generated video content one one side and automated curation on the other. I mean, you can still leverage viewer choices for curation (looking at what people are watching a lot of), but that is just shifting the burden of curation to users. Few people will be willing to sift through dozens of cheaply generated crap videos to find something they actually want to watch.

ericd|3 years ago

The volume will increase so much that the only choice will be automated curation tools, at least as a first pass. The arms race is on.

cutups|3 years ago

I was thinking about something like this site, but also taking some randomized existing plot outlines to generate specific stills from each part of the plot. Might require isolating character archetypes too?

Great work with this as is!

WheelsAtLarge|3 years ago

Cool toy. One of the most useful side effects of AI right now is idea generation. Market this as an idea generator for movies and such and people will eat it up. Try posting it on the entertainment focused area of Twitter and people will go nuts for it.

klondike_klive|3 years ago

These prompts are way better than the drivel I see on Amazon Prime. Half their movie descriptions don't even tell you anything about the film, they seem to be just a random paragraph from the pitch document.

gcanyon|3 years ago

"Soulless" -- they'll be low quality, both in rendering and in plot/acting, but they'll be anything but soulless. Each will be a labor of love of someone with a dream.

sgrove|3 years ago

You should add a “tweet this movie” button that pre-populates the image and the title! I immediately wanted to share one of the funny suggestions.

sixQuarks|3 years ago

For those who are scared about this technology, it’s good to look at what AI has done to Chess.

The best chess seems to be when AI is used along with humans. I think image and video AI will best be exploited when human input is also taken into account.

There is still something special about human creativity, I think AI will just be another tool to expand that. At least, in the short term I would say 10 years perhaps. AI will probably one day take over all aspects of creativity and humans won’t be able to contribute.

dwohnitmok|3 years ago

> The best chess seems to be when AI is used along with humans.

I don't think this is true anymore. I don't think I've heard about successful centaur chess games in years. I would love to be wrong there though (in particular if anyone knows about how correspondence chess games have been played in the last 2 or 3 years with the availability of Leela Zero and Stockfish NNUE).

dotsam|3 years ago

Don't worry, humans will still be relevant for ~10 years!.

(and then regrettably irrelevant thereafter).

I think it is a legitimate worry, as the pace of progress is considerable. These tools are impressive, and are only going to get more impressive: more people should be talking about where this is headed.

abeppu|3 years ago

I think a key difference here is that with chess, 'goodness' is defined by winning. With content generation, the training methods point towards some form of comparing the generated thing to some observed data, but the 'goodness' of the content from the perspective of potentially competing with or displacing human creators is "do people like to consume it?"

If one trained using e.g. a tiktok like dataset showing viewer response measurements for each video, and do conditional generation on those response values ("prank video watchers are highly likely to watch the full video"), are we really that far from a system that learns to generate content that attracts and hold eyeballs? Not so long ago there were a lot of concerning trend pieces about how youtube had a network of creators making bizarre, disturbing or transfixing videos being watched entirely by young children. Before that, it was clickbait listicles. "Bad" content that can get eyeballs can still wildly steer what humans create and consume. I'm wondering if in 2 years we'll have an enormous number of short videos that we all agree are "bad" but which are nevertheless constantly watched.

looknee|3 years ago

I may be mistaken but I believe that human/machine pairing was dominant for a long while, but the last few years the chess solvers have progressed to a point where they're dominant on their own.

Poker on the other hand I think human players still win vs GTO solvers, but again I may be mistaken here too.

astrange|3 years ago

What does “best” mean here?

AI is the winningest in chess, but the real life purpose of chess is to produce interesting gameplay for people to watch, and so AI is less good than Magnus at that. You’d need the AI to throw games and write press releases.

nonima|3 years ago

>it’s good to look at what AI has done to Chess It completely ruined the game to the point where it's more about memorization than it's ever been.

synu|3 years ago

There are two classes of engines. One is like you describe, faster and faster brute forcing. AlphaZero was much more creative and didn’t use brute force.

fooblaster|3 years ago

top tier chess ais crush human grandmasters and achieve super human performance with no assistance

wayeq|3 years ago

what? Alphazero trained via self play and in ~10 hours became unbeatable by humans

hugozap|3 years ago

Is the generation happening in real time? I'm curious about the costs of running something like this.

slhomme|3 years ago

Yes it's happening real time, so far it's been generated about 8k movies over the last 3 hours. The costs right now are roughly about $150 for the generated images (Stable Diffusion) and $30 for the generated texts (GPT-3).

_tom_|3 years ago

First one I got was "the time traveler's wife" which does exist.

samstave|3 years ago

Ha - getting app too busy errors so can’t see your site…

slhomme|3 years ago

Sorry about this, we're having a hard time handling the heavy traffic coming from Hacker News. Over 4k movies generated in just the last 2hours, this definitely impacts our servers performances, not mentioning our Stable Diffusion and GPT bills! hehe. Currently working to make things smoother!

picsao|3 years ago

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