It's the same as short-video format for me. Sure, I can watch some TikToks from time to time, but making them, or continuously getting my news from them? Yeah, that's not gonna fly for me. However, for my niblings (age 8-17) that's basically where they're getting all the "current affairs" from. Microtransaction is probably one of the easiest example as well. 15 years ago, anyone who bought games would laugh at you if you said every game that you paid $80 for would also have endless amount of small items that you can buy for real money. Right now? Well, kids that grew up with Fortnite and Roblox just think that's the norm.

GenAI is great at generating "stuff", but what makes good content isn't the quantity. What makes good content is when there's nothing left to take away.

This is the most beautiful sentence I’ve read today.

We won't get them unless we appreciate both teaching and the Humanities more than we do. I was good, but by no means the best (75th percentile, maybe?). I loved doing it, but changed careers to IT because I'd never have been able to support a family on what I was paid.

A culture which pays teachers poorly, treats them with disrespect ("those who can do..."), and relentlessly emphasizes STEM, STEM, STEM is one that's slowly killing itself, no matter how much shiny tech at inflated valuations it turns out.

If a student can say all that they want to say in six sentences then they need to learn more about the topic, and / or think through their opinions more deeply. Teachers who do not take that next step are bad teachers, because they are neither modeling nor encouraging critical thinking.

In some places the majority of teachers are themselves incapable of critical thinking, because those who are leave the profession (or the locale) for the reasons in my comment above.

[Edit to add]: Please note that I say bad teachers, not bad people. Same goes for students / citizens, as well. The ability to think critically is not a determinate of moral worth, and in some ways and some cases might be anti-correlated.

College admissions essays on the other hand had the opposite problem - answering a big question in 500 words. Each sentence needed to pack a punch.

On second thought, you're right. That was easy.

Emailed or texted "thank you" notes don't count. At all.

For many people, myself included, 90%+ work on things like thank-you notes, greetings, invitations, or some types of e-mails, is in coming up with the right words and phrases. LLMs are a great help here, particularly with breaking through the "blank page syndrome".

It's not that different from looking up examples of holiday greetings on-line, or in a book. And the way I feel about it, if an LLM manages to pick just the right words, it's fine to use them - after all, I'm still providing the input, directing the process, and making a choice which parts of output to use and how. Such text is still "mine", even if 90% of it came from GPT-4.

But honestly I don't think "blank page syndrome" is very common for a thank-you card. We're talking about a few sentences expressing appreciation. You don't really have to over-think it. People who don't send thank-yous are mostly just being lazy.

My financial advisor sends out Christmas cards and Birthday cards. They are pre-printed stock cards. I don't even open them. I should tell him not to waste the money. If he even wrote just one sentence that expressed some personal interest, then they would mean something.

These kinds of messages are on the one hand just pro-forma courtesies, but on the other hand they require that that some personal effort is invested, or else they are meaningless.

Absolutely senseless work, perfect job for an LLM.

Author feeds bullet points into ChatGPT which burns CPU cycles producing paragraphs of fluff. Recipient feeds paragraphs of fluff into ChatGPT and asks it to summarise into bullet points.

GOOG, AMZN, and MSFT reportedly need to use nuclear energy to power the LLM farms that we are told we must have.

One must ask who (or what) in this feedback loop of inanity is doing the most hallucinating.

[1] _ https://apnews.com/article/climate-data-centers-amazon-googl...

[2] _ https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-isla...

There's an increasing amount of prose written that will only ever be read by LLMs.

If the spread of AI would make it OK to send prompts instead of generated output, all it would do is to finally allow communicating without all the bullshit.

Related, a paradox of PowerPoint: it may suck as communication tool, but at the same time, most communication would be better off if done in bullet points.

blah blah yes "it's a matter or time" for every one of the myriad shortcomings of the technology to be resolved. If you're a true believer everything is "a matter of time". I'll believe it when I see it.

Then it got increased to 3 min and now 10/60 min

I often turn on subtitles and watch at 2x speed.

I prefer the transcript 100% of the time to video.

For example, I could very easily see GenAI being able to produce 1 million TikTok dance challenges.

Worse, as people attempt to automate novelty, they will be (and have been) repeatedly thwarted by the fact that the implicit patterns of the automation system themselves become patterns to be learned and recognised… which is why all modern popular music sounds so similar that this video got made 14 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

(This is already a thing with GenAI images made by people who just prompt-and-go, though artists using it as a tool can easily do much better).

But go too soon, be too novel, and you're in something like uncanny valley: When Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre was first performed, it was poorly received by violating then-current expectations, now it's considered a masterpiece.

Is that based on a vigorous experience as a content creator on TikTok as a long form content creator or are you going off what you've heard about TikTok, or it's what your feed is full of? (which says more about you/your feed than it does about TikTok)

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheCgBq/ 1.1 M views

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhephfK/ 1.2 M views

or for some more niche stuff which isn't "BIIIG NEWS!! LABOR DAY BREAKFAST GOES HAYWIRE!!!" level of intro:

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheTVsh/ 54.6 k views

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheE9m2/

36.3 k views

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYheoK2G/

416 k views

This voice-over definitely isn't going for attention grabbing

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhe7qTT/ 16 k views

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdmJxq/ 64 k views

okay finally found something that's 5 mins long https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTYhdAfNj/ 270 k views

So thanks for providing a bunch of examples that prove my point, I guess?

Short form videos are often hyper focus and to the point, but there are a lot of vertical video contents that are just ( to use the GenZ term ) brain rot like these as well.

Nobody cares tho bc "they can't pay attention" like it's somehow an entire generation's individual faults they are like that...

Clearly a societal failure there.

Meanwhile, Joe Rogan et al. have 3+ hour long podcasts…

Microtransactions are way older than 15 years. Wizards of the Coast was selling randomized MtG booster packs in 1993. I'm guessing that the earliest loot boxes for kids were baseball card packs, with very similar psychological purpose to today's game cosmetic collectibles.

A physical photo in my hand is sooo limited compared to the same photo in my hand via the screen on my smartphone. Same with a DVD or CD or Disc - all antiquated tech.

Baseball card packs are an innovation. If you read Peanuts, you'll see that they're referred to as "bubble gum cards", because cards were included as promotional items in packs of gum, a "free toy inside" that was compatible with the size and shape of bubble gum. They moved to dedicated packs of cards when people started buying gum to get the cards.

https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1964/04/12

There is a sense in which that is true.

However, we all develop taste, and in a hypothetical world where current AI ends up being the limit for another 10 or 20 years, eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much "there" there as they supposed.

The wild card is that we probably don't live in that world, and it's difficult to guess how good AI is going to get.

Even now, the voice of AI that people are complaining about is just the current default voice, which will probably eventually be looked on about as favorably as bell-bottomed jeans or beehive hairdos. It is driven less by the technology itself than a complicated set of desires around not wanting to give the media nifty soundbites about how mean (or politically incorrect) AI can be, and not wanting to be sued. It's minimal prompt engineering even now to change it a lot. "Make a snappy TikTok video about whatever" is not something the tech is going to struggle with. In fact given the general poverty of the state space I would guess it'll outcompete humans pretty quickly.

Let's be honest: most of us here know there is more 'there' on the myriad university-press books available free on Anna's Archive, than on HN. The reason we still hang out here is desire for socializing, laziness, or pathological doomscrolling; information density doesn't really factor into our choices.

I don’t consume AI media because it’s not very good.

I watched a lot a bad movies and read a lot of bad books as a kid that I can’t stomach now because I’ve read better books and watched better movies. My guess is that kids today would do the same, assuming AI doesn’t improve.

> kids that grew up with Fortnite and Roblox just think that's the norm.

How so? Fortnite and Roblox don’t cost $80, they are free to play with in game purchases.

At least that was my perception when I played Call of Duty with my younger family members.

Buff/Franklin for 2028!

  >  they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years.

The result of this is that I watch more and read garbage and have less joy. Maybe I'm just addicted to the routine, but I definitely consume less. I just think it is the problem when you try to make something for everyone; you just end up making things with no substance, no soul. As they say, diversity is the spice of life, and good god, could I go for some actual flavor.

Similarly (somehow?) for Fortnite, 100% of their microtransactions are cosmetic. It's also free, so it's be akin to telling people you could get AAA quality games for free. The $60+++ group of games make up a vanishingly small chunk of the total market, and are more a relic of 'our' generation. Roblox is a platform, more than a game, so it's its own beast. In general though I think younger gamers have become more demanding, in a good way.

For some reason the LLM seemed to latch on to the idea that one host should say something, and the other host should just repeat a key phrase in the sentence for emphasis -- and say nothing else, and they'd do it like multiple times in a sentence, over and over again throughout the entire thing.

Slightly less weird -- but it seems like the LLM caught on that a good narrative structure for a two-host podcast is that one host is the 'expert' on the topic, and the other host plays dumb and ask questions. Not an unreasonable narrative structure. Except that the hosts would seamlessly, and very weirdly, switch roles constantly throughout the podcast.

And ultimately the result was just a high level summary of the article I had provided. They told me in the intro and the outro about the interesting parts they were going to dive into, but they never actually got around to diving into those parts.

It was interesting. I certainly wouldn't say it was useless, I think the contrived dialogue actually touched on some angles I hadn't considered and I think it was useful. Not in a 'oh shit it's clear to me now' kind of way but it definitely advanced my thinking.

Edit: looks like the subreddit is still called Bard. Well played, Internets. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1g0egad/gemini_vs_not...

cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

To me that's absolutely unlistenable, but to them its interesting and engaging. I find NotebookLM replicates that perfectly. Its not at all the issue that the OP encountered with the Hawaii news service, as those lacked tone and pronounciation, which NotebookLM would not.

Regarding the outcome being a long winded summary, yeah thats what I see about the aforementioned 2 hour podcasts as well. They take the intro paragraph of a wikipedia article, pretend that the topic is a novel mystery they just discovered through hours of scouring microfilm at a municipal library, and then interject each other every other word with nonsense, before getting back to the point for just one sentence.

Are those videos "worth watching"? Are videos of people playing video games "worth watching"? Are videos of people opening products and saying out loud the information written on the box and also easily accessible on the public internet "worth watching"?

I'm not happy about these developments, but that isn't a factor of much concern to the people driving and following these trends, it turns out.

It's been a long time since "quality" and "success" have been decoupled. Which is to say - I hope you like the taste of hats.

Doesn't seem that much different from a fashion magazine interview about what X celebrity likes to wear. Those have been around for quite a long time.

I could throw in an example of how I'll watch boring videos of a couple playing with their birds for 90 minutes on Youtube. You can link me to the Wikipedia page on slow TV (via Norway), and it won't erase the simple, boring, straightforward, fact that it is a phenomenon.

“Other than”? Obviously, as social media didn't exist. “Better than” or “more relevant to the things for which there celebrity status was used to direct attention”? Not particularly.

I'm not sure how watching lightweight videos on subjects you're curious about is any worse than how people wasted time in the past?

Personally I waste time watching videos on outdoor gear, coffee making equipment and PC hardware. I certainy don't regret it because I had no plans to do anything productive with that time either.

I think so, too.

I guess quality was a property of interest in the old days, because the path e.g. for commercial music was: Maximize profit -> Maximize sales -> Maximize what the target audience likes -> Maximize quality.

For TikTok etc. they bypass the market sales stuff and replace it by an 'algorithm', that optimizes for retention, which is tightly coupled to ad revenue. I imagine the algorithm as a function of many arguments.

Just relying on quality is an inefficient approximation in contrast to that.

Agreement to eat said head apparel is predicated upon "infectious energy" (i.e. quality) - NOT success. I'll draft up a more officious document later.

Note: I am the sole arbiter of what constitutes quality.

What blew my mind was that there would be a market to watch other people play video games. You never know what catches on.

I've been really thinking about lawns lately and how much time men and women spend maintaining them, how much pride many of them have in such activity... lawns aren't real tho, it's just a personal park nobody ever uses that we all thought we wanted bc rich ppl had them. Front lawns especially, just for looks, nobody normal ever sits on them even.

Case in point is all the people that live in an apartment - they don't do lawns. They might think they want to and some might even enjoy up keeping a lawn but it's not an activity that's "worth it" in fact there are many reasons not have a lawn, it isn't an activity that justifies itself as so many pretend.

Everything is like that. Almost nothing any of us do adds to humanities' general progress or improves our own situations even.

Mowing a lawn and watching TV are incredibly similar activities if you have a nice lawnmower.

I couldn't agree more. In a broad sense, it's like we've lost contact with our own lives, communities, and cultures. I don't think those things are "dead", but they mean things now which are totally different than what they meant even only a couple of decades ago, and the people living through it sort of know that and kind of say it out loud sometimes even, but can't really wrap their heads around it at the same time and continue to ape the old behaviours (no offence, anyone, I do it too).

"Traditions" live on in a sort of zombie state... we cut the grass, we present the gift cards. It's an odd and fun(ny) moment to be alive.

So like supermarket magazines in video form? I think people would get it.

If you're a content creator today, the best thing you can do to "AI-proof" your work is to inject your personality into it as much as possible. Preferably your physical personality, on video. The future of human content is being as human as possible. AI isn't going to replace that in our lifetimes, if ever.

I have been working on machine learning algorithms for a long time. Since the time when telling someone I worked on AI was a conversation killer, even with technical people.

AI's are going to understand people better than people understand people. That could be in five years, maybe - many things are happening faster than expected. Or in 15 years. But that might be the outside range.

There is something about human psychology where the faster something changes, the less we are aware of the rate of change. We don't review the steps and their increasing rate that happened before we cared about that tech. We just accept the new thing that finally gets our attention like it was a one off event, instead of an accelerating compounding flood, and imagine it isn't really going to change much soon.

--

I know this isn't a popular view.

But what is happening is on the order of the transition to the first multi-cellular creatures, or the first bodies with specialized cells, the first nervous systems, the first brains, the first creatures to use language. Far bigger than advances such as writing or even the Internet. This is a transition to a completely new mode for the substrate of life and intelligence. The lack of dependency on any particular substrate.

"We", the new generation of things we are building, will have none of the limits and inefficiencies of our ancient slow DNA-style life. Or our stark physical bottlenecks on action, communication, or scaling, and our inability to understand or directly edit our own internal traits.

We will have to face many challenges in the coming years. It can't hurt to mindfully face them earlier than later.

The Transformer, well... transforms, at each layer to produce a different representation of the context. What is this but an internal representation? One cannot assess whether that is rich or cognitive without some agreement of what those terms might mean.

LLMs can seemingly convert a variety of languages into an internal representation that encompasses the gist of any of them. This would at least provide a decent argument that the internal representation is 'rich'

As for cognitive? What assessment would you have in mind that would clearly disqualify something as a non-cognitive entity?

I think most people working in this field who are confident feel that they can extend what they know now to make something that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck. If that is achieved, on what basis does anyone have to say "But it's not really a duck"?

I'm ok with people saying AI will be never able to perform that well because it doesn't have X, as long as they accept that if it does, one day, perform that well they accept that either X is present, or that X is not relevant.

In other words: if AIs/robots ever become so advanced that they look, walk, and talk like people, I expect there to be a system which easily determines if the subject has a biological origin or not.

This is way down the line, but in a closer future this will probably just look like verifying someone’s real world identity as a part of the social media account creation process. The alternative is that billion dollar corporations like Meta or YouTube just let their platforms become overrun with AI slop. I don’t expect them to sit on their hands and do nothing.

> Most animals are goal-directed, intentional, sensory-motor agents who grow interior representations of their environments during their lifetime which enables them to successfully navigate their environments. They are responsive to reasons their environments affords for action, because they can reason from their desires and beliefs towards actions.

In addition, animals like people, have complex representational abilities where we can reify the sensory-motor “concepts” which we develop as “abstract concepts” and give them symbolic representations which can then be communicated. We communicate because we have the capacity to form such representations, translate them symbolically, and use those symbols “on the right occasions” when we have the relevant mental states.

(Discrete mathematicians seem to have imparted a magical property to these symbols that *in them* is everything… no, when I use words its to represent my interior states… the words are symptoms, their patterns are coincidental and useful, but not where anything important lies).

In other words, we say “I like ice-cream” because: we are able to like things (desire, preference), we have tasted ice-cream, we have reflected on our preferences (via a capacity for self-modelling and self-directed emotional awareness), and so on. And when we say, “I like ice-cream” it’s *because* all of those things come together in radically complex ways to actually put us in a position to speak truthfully about ourselves. We really do like ice-cream.

Ok, now prove this is true. Can you do so without invoking unobservable properties? If you can, then observable is all that matters, if you cannot then you have no proof.

How can you reliably deny the presence of an experience of another if you cannot prove that experience in yourself?

With the duplicate mother problem, if you cannot tell then there is no reason to believe that it is not a being of equivalent nature. That is not the same as identity, for a layman approach to that viewpoint, see Star Trek: TNG, Season 6, Episode 24. A duplicate Will Riker is created but is still a distinct entity (and one might argue, more original since has been transported one fewer times). Acting the same as is not the same as being the same entity. Nevertheless it has no bearing on whether the duplicate is a valid entity in its own right.

You feel like I'm not living in the real world, but I am the one asking what basis we have for knowing things. You are relying on the presumption that the world reflects what you believe it to be. Epistemology is all about idetifying exactly how much we know about the world.

It follows from that that you cannot exclude something that appears to have a property if you cannot prove it doesn't or even prove it if it does.

Maybe, but very little of the “data” that humans use to build their understanding of humans is recorded and available. If it were it’s not obvious it would be economical to train on. If it were economical it’s not obvious that current techniques would actually work that well and by definition no future techniques are known to work yet. I’m not inclined to say it will never happen but there are a few reasons to predict it’ll prove to be significantly harder to build AI that gets out of the uncanny valley that it’s currently in.

AI today is far ahead of two years ago. Every year for many years before that, deep learning models broke benchmark after benchmark before that breakout.

There is no indication of any slow down. The complete reverse - we are seeing dramatic acceleration of an already fast moving field.

Both research and resources are pouring into major improvements in multi-modal learning and learning via other means than human data. Such as reinforcement learning, competitive learning, interacting with systems they need to understand via simulated environments and directly.

No I’m not, I’m just not assuming that the S curve doesn’t exist. There’s no guarantee that research results in X orders of magnitude of improvement that will result in AI being better at understanding humanity than humans in the 5 to 15 year timeframe. There’s no guarantee that compute will continue to consistently grow in volume and lower in price, and a few geopolitical reasons why it might become rarer and prohibitively expensive for some time. There’s no reason to assume capital will stay as available to further both AI techniques and compute resources should there be any sign that investments might not eventually pay off. There’s also no reason to assume the global regulatory environment will remain amenable to rapid AI development. Maybe the industry threads all these needles, but there’s good reason to predict it’ll prove doesn’t.

As soon as the incredibly obvious, far too obvious realization is had, AI will make huge, tremendous leaps overnight essentially. Til then, these are just machine like software, the best we've ever made but nothing more than that.

Algorithmic content is likely to be even more densely packed with stimuli. At some point, will we find ourselves unable to attend to content produced by a human being because algorithmic content has wrecked our attention span?

it's filled with tech people who are fucking morons thinking that everyone else is really dumb and loves slop and their algorithm will generate infinite content for the masses, making them rich. yet they don't consume it themselves, and aren't smart enough to recognize the cognitive dissonance

anyone who thinks unsupervised AI content is going to replace [insert creative output here] shouldn't be in the HN comment section, they should be using ChatGPT to generate comments they can engage with

instead they're going to get mad about me calling them a fucking moron in this comment. which, like, why get mad, you can go get an LLM to generate a comment that's much nicer and agrees with you

Actually, their handlers should just be better monitoring their internet usage

Well, you're wrong, I know some of them.

if you don't like it, go talk to Claude about it

Claude will even use proper punctuation & grammar which i'm not doing. it's LITERALLY an objective improvement over this comment. why the hell are you engaging with this crap?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42154928

The idea that AI is just going to eat all human creative activity because technology accelerates quickly is not a real argument, nor does it stand up to any serious projections of the future.

The main problem for AI is it doesn't have a coherent creative direction or real output consistency. The second problem is that creativity thrives on novelty but AI likes to output common things. The first is solvable, probably within 5 years, and is going to hollow out creative departments everywhere. The second is effectively unsolvable, though you might find algorithms that mask it temporarily (I'm not sure if this is any different than what humans do).

We're going to end up with "rock star" teams of creative leads who have more agility in discovering novelty and curating aesthetics than AI models. They'll work with a small department comprised of a mix of AI wranglers and artisans that can put manual finishing touches on AI generated output. Overall creative department sizes are probably going to shrink to 20% of current levels but output will increase by 200%+.

If you think it can be 20 times easier to make a movie, then it seems to me that it would be 20 times less impactful to make a creative work, since the market should quickly react to creative success by making a ton of cheap knockoffs of your work until the dead horse is so thoroughly beaten that it's no longer even worth paying an AI to spit out cheap knock-offs

They don't, that's why they're saying 20% of creative departments will remain. The part that will go is the part that's already soulless - making ads in the style of the current trendy drama series or what have you.

> If you think it can be 20 times easier to make a movie, then it seems to me that it would be 20 times less impactful to make a creative work, since the market should quickly react to creative success by making a ton of cheap knockoffs of your work until the dead horse is so thoroughly beaten that it's no longer even worth paying an AI to spit out cheap knock-offs

That seems pretty backwards, given Jevons paradox. The ease of writing knock-off fanfiction didn't mean people stopped writing novels. The average novel probably has a lot less impact now than in the past, but the big hits are bigger than ever.

But aren't you a fool for doing that when you could have written 3 chapters and told an AI to write the rest? If there's no value to working to create art, then logically this is what you should have done.

Is it possible you’re wrong?

If you have a projection that says otherwise, I’d be glad to hear it. But if you don’t, then this idea is merely science fiction.

Making predictions about the future that are based on current accelerating developments are how you get people in the 1930s predicting flying cars by 2000.

When you follow up on technology by browsing HN, and see the latest advancements, its easier to see or hear the differences, because you know at what to look.

If I see on tv some badly encoded video, especially in fog or water surfaces, it immediately stands out, because I was working with video decoding during the time it was of much less quality. Most people will not notice.

Klein Vision AirCar, 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hbFl3nhAD0

Predecesor, the AeroMobil from 2014, from prototypes starting 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroMobil_s.r.o._AeroMobil

The Terrafugia Transition 'roadable aircraft' from 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrafugia_Transition

Moller SkyCar, of course, which never got to free flight, but was built and could fly.

The problems are regulatory, cost, safety, massive amounts of human skill needed, the infrastructure needed, the lack of demand, etc. A Cessna 182 weighs <900 Kg, a Toyota Corolla weighs >1400 Kg and has no wings, no tail. But if we collectively wanted VTOL flying cars enough to put a SpaceX level of talent and money at them, and were willing to pay more, work harder, for less comfort and more maintenance, we could have them. Bit like Hyperloop; a low-pressure tunnel with carriages rushing through it is not impossible, but it's got more failure modes, more cost, more design difficulties and almost no benefits over high speed train and maglev.

I do think there will be some slowdown of the technological development, but I think the situation will be similar to flying cars: regulations, social behavior, etc. will prevent AI from simply devouring everything. Specifically, I expect there to be a system which verifies humanity, and thus popular content will ultimately end up being verified-as-real content.

More on that in this other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42154928

Possibly in the sense of going to a small server where ID is verified and hiding away on Discord from the rest of the internet. That would be more like building a bunker to hide from the flying cars, rather than flying cars never happening.

The elements that identified a painting as human to me had nothing to do with appearance but everything to do with feeling.

Be passionate about what you present - if you can't be, don't bother. Passion is what will distinguish us from the AI - stuff like personality is almost immediately replicated, vocal inflections, funny comments, unusual spoken delivery - that's all within the realm of AI capability. Talking about micro blogging like it's God's gift to the world, not so much an AI thing, it won't feel right with AI.

Given how many podcasts exist, I think you need to be at least 2 standard deviations above mean to even get noticed, 3 to be a moderate success, and 4 to be in the charts.

I'd guess AI is "good enough" to be 1 above average, as the NotebookLM voices sound like people speaking clearly and with some joy into decent microphones in sound isolating studios.

Having experimented with many LLMs (mixtral, sonnet, ChatGPT, Llama, etc.), the coherence is for the most part on point, but their capacity for novelty has been found wanting irrespective of how I tuned the top_k, temperature, or prompts.

That being said, I've seen some very impressive examples of style transference even conveying emotional range in some of the SOTA TTS systems.

Don't get me wrong, I like podcasts, Fall of Civilizations being a personal favorite of mine, it's just that my desire to try and actively listen to them requires that I carve out an hour (or much longer in the case of FoC, worth it) of my free-time to eliminate any distractions and focus. Pretty hard to do when there are so many other things I could be doing with my time besides sitting there trying my best to listen.

Anyway, I bring it up because I'm convinced that the people promoting AI-podcasts are mostly made up of the aforementioned people who just listen to them for noise.

Hey Riddle Riddle, Hello from the magic tavern, Artists on artists on artists on artists are my picks for now.

For the most part, I'm listening pretty actively, but if I'm just sitting there listening without a fairly mindless activity going on, I'll get distracted pretty quickly and find myself looking at my phone...

I also think AI podcasts could become popular one day for people who just want some background noise and bits of trivia every once in a while. I would argue that a lot of YouTube channels I sometimes have in the background just summarize Wikipedia articles and don't have much of a personal touch anyway, so an AI could do the same thing.

I find the format of "Dumdum Host A read some articles about something last night and Dumdum Host B asks questions about it" especially grating, unless it's purely opinion-driven and then I still probably won't care unless I read about the hosts and find out they are probably people with opinions worth listening to.

I'd rather read a book or be with my own thoughts without having them be even more crowded by some randos telling me stuff they think they know

Huh? Most podcasts I listen to feature either experts in the field in question or very skilled journalists compiling the opinions of experts.

I exclusively listen to domain expert podcasts. History experts, policy/economics experts, aforementioned physics experts. Literally event i listen to is hosted by at least one person who is a domain expert. They can branch out and interview experts in other domains but there's always an expert. I honestly can't say (besides the high schoolers which i searched out) the last time i've even test listened to a podcast hosted by semi-charismatic article readers.

I'd recommend you search reddit for lists of podcasts in your desired area. App recommendations are all shit and there's many posts out there

I don't see why that should be true. Podcasts are great when coupled with mindless work like mowing the lawn, weeding the garden, stacking firewood, walking to the shop, driving etc. You can get virtually 100% out of a podcast while performing tasks like this.

Or you know not everyone is the same. Just because you struggle with something doesn’t mean that it is not easy and effortless for others.

I can’t dribble a basketball and walk at the same time, still I won’t make the claim that everyone who claims to enjoy playing basketball is somehow fudging it.

I think people can't be alone with their own minds so they fill every second of there quiet time with someone else's thoughts rather than their own.

Tbh tho, there is nothing that we are supposed to be doing in this world rn anyways, nobody was born to work any of these jobs, we didn't evolve to flip burgers.

This is the old world, don't place too much stake in it, everything will change and then what?

If you want to listen to a podcast, do it. If you want to do something else, do that.

Don't do what you don't want to do, that's all there is too worry about.

For this reason I don't listen to the otherwise highly entertaining CineFix podcast. Example: the recent episode discussing Kill Bill vol 1 contains 624 utterances in 75 mins (8.3 per min). IANAL I know.

Give it time. Progress is fast.

Why pick 2020 as your starting point? That is simply around the time the current set of techniques came about.

We had generative art back in the late 90's - my screensaver has been generative art for over 20 years now.

Obviously generative art has come a long way but people have been working on various approaches to it for at least 30 years.

Similarly, tools could fabricate podcasts years ago that sounded terrible. Now we have NotebookLM doing a "reasonable" job with two cliched-sounding "hosts". In a few years, will they potentially be able to create something akin to a professionally produced podcast given some smart prompting? The progress made so far points to yes, and I haven't seen any evidence so far to be pessimistic about it happening.

It took 30 years in the generative art world to move from cave paintings to the level that we have today because we needed new techniques.

For podcasts we are at the cave paintings level.

If we can get to professional level quality podcasts with the current techniques then we might only be a few years away.

I think it is more likely we will need new techniques which puts us potentially decades away.

If we look at LLMs the improvements over the last 18+ months since gpt4 was released have been minor despite incredible levels of investment.

Then what are you talking about, where can I get it?

I guess that matches the state of AI in general, better than a novice; worse than an expert.

We will have to wait and see what future AIs deliver. Insight and nuance is what I look for in media like that, that's a much harder nut to crack.

So, I can certainly imagine a podcast doing the same to some degree. Maybe not a podcast where AI wrote the script, but, a podcast where AI read a story dramatically doesn't seem too far off or, easier, a podcast that read news to me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693087

It's kind of horrible.

the only real people that believe in that that I’ve seen are ones who are heavily invested in it succeeding

GPT styled LLMs were introduced back in 2018 so SIX years ago.

Have they gotten more COHERENT? Absolutely. Is coherence the same thing as NOVELTY? NOT EVEN REMOTELY. I've played with markov chains in the 90s that were capable of producing surprising content.

Unless there is a radical advancement in the underlying tech, I don't see any indication that they'll be capable of genuine novelty any time in the near future.

Take satire for example. I have yet to see anything come out of an LLM that felt particularly funny. I suppose if the height of humor for you is Dad jokes, reddit level word punnery, and the backs of snapple lids though that might be different.

That is like saying the plane invented by Wright brothers will never go the moon.

The accelerationism argument made a little bit of sense two years ago, but now, after two years of marginal improvements at best? Really?

Would you eat it raw or would you have to boil it down to soften it up and then drink/eat its hat soup?

Isn't it a stovePIPE hat?

I was thinking I'd just unhinge my jaw in the style of 90s Reach Toothbrush commercials or like a human pez dispenser.

It doesn't take much to entertain a substantial population of imbeciles. Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYkbqzWVHZI

Now for the hat...

Fooling people with the promises of AI is pretty simple. People are easy to fool. They like shiny objects.

> If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat.

Come on, we can all see how much faster these things are getting better. In a few years it will be impossible to distinguish them from a real person.

Another few after that video will be the same.

I'm not saying it's a good thing, but clearly it's a thing that will happen.

I think there are a few niche users who just want to listen to the news as an audio book but the whole idea of an LLM generated podcast totally misunderstands why people want a podcast over the normal corporate drivel media.

If anyone has suggestions for podcast collation sites that are for non American content that would be fantastic.

My problems on the modern internet are simply that I can't find interesting things through the slop, period--human or AI generated.

It will be interesting to see if "curation" can actually find a business model this time.

I took the wikipedia article and had NotebookLM generate a podcast from it so I can listen to it on a commute.

The other thing I could've done is search for an existing podcast on Joan of Arc, but I challenge anyone here to search existing podcasts and listen to the first, best reviewed one -- I think you'd find more often than not that the average podcast host is _significantly_ more dry than what the generated hosts present. The podcasts that are incredible are few and far between, and I have no influence over the topics they discuss.

Tldr: I'd prefer my top podcasts more than NotebookLM, but prefer NotebookLM to the average podcast host.

AI podcasts aren't going to be drop in replacements for exactly the length, frequency, personalities, topics, and style of current podcasts. Claiming that's a fault with AI podcasts just indicates a lack of imagination.

this is the wrong standard. there's a long tail of many many many many topics that a Radio Lab will never have the resources or critical mass or staff or turnaround time to cover. AI can serve the long tail like nothing you have ever seen. (because humans are expensive, and deservedly so, but our needs and wants are infinite)

Infectious energy. Interesting.

It doesn't quite stop at podcast hosts either. The simple fact that LLMs will never truly be capable of replacing software developers was one of the core principles behind our team developing The Ac28R - A completely new type of AI capable of bulletproof industrial software. It won’t host a podcast anytime soon, but if you need flawless code for complex projects, it's got you covered!