l33tbro

"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works." Oscar Wilde.

"End of creativity". Nice bait.

If you're going to try to argue such a gargantuan point, perhaps don't lead with such a paltry example. Of course an AI video slideshow is going to be fairly indistinguishable from a human. It doesn't exactly take Ken Burns or Errol Morris to put together a decent montage. 'Brad & Kelsey tie the knot!' is going to look fairly identical, whoever cut it, because there are very limited parameters for human expression.

Heck, even my very dated Iphone generates decent sappy video sideshows from the image archive.

I'm not sure I agree with this. A senior academic is usually very familiar with the canon. You don't think you will be vaporised if there is no underlying logic and saliency to the arguments in the work you present?

Interested to hear how you think one "bluffs" their way through a philosophy degree. Could you sketch that out?

It makes things more convenient for you. I'm not arguing against that. And, yes, you may have a satisfied client. But the work will not be as interesting, because you have not comprehended all of the ingested material. That is my only point. I'm not sure why this is so upsetting?

So you are satisfied with work where you have not watched all of the material? Fine if that works for you, but I would not think I'd have done a good job.

If something has compiled some great selects for me, I only have material based on what is said. But I don't know how it is said - which to me is everything. Yes, this goes for podcasts too. What I make just won't be as good as if I'd have taken the time to go through everything.

I even notice this with things like NBA highlights. It's clear the editor (or bot) never watched the game. There were moments in it that are interesting and significant. Even small incidents that are actually clutch to the outcome of the match. But it is clear they've quickly compiled all of the goals and bashed out something mediocre which does not tell the story.

"Taste and skill" is my exact point. If you are not watching everything you have captured, then what you make will most likely not be as interesting than if you had.

I think your mistake is to assume editing is like painting, where you can just make something brilliant with a few colours and a canvas. But editing is much more analogous to writing a book. If you have read extensively on Ancient Rome and spent time comprehending the subject, you will create something far more interesting than essentially remixing a few primer books and articles that have suggested to you by an LLM.

People have indeed "been creating amazing things with nothing" works for the expressive arts, but that falls short when the value comes from communicating depth from information.

> wasted hours editing

Editing is a craft. You have to watch everything, otherwise you don't know what you have.

A machine organising stringouts and selects can work for interviews, but not for action. But even then it is only parsing your media for semantic intent. It misses the way things are said, which often imparts a different meaning.

You can use AI features for editing. But it is unlikely you will be making anything very intetesting.

Just get Resolve. It is similar to what FCP was before Apple turned it into glorified iMovie. Only it is far more powerful tham FCP 7 was back then.

Industry-standard NLE's like Premiere or Avid are probably the closest to Resolve. But even those are legacy programs that rest on their moat, whereas Resolve takes far more chances and does far less dumb shit than its competitors. The seamless integration with industry-standard grading software is also... yeah fucking amazing.

It's also free. The paid version unlocks mostly things to do with grading.

It's not really 'vibes'. It's just critical thinking.

> Meanwhile, every AI post on HN seems to display a lot of denial.

They do? I think there's a decent spread of AGI dreamers and impossible-to-impress cynics here.

> Many here seem convinced that AI won’t compete with their current jobs.

Are you sure? Low-level crunching, certainly. But who watches LangSmiths? Monitors chain-of-thought logs? Monitors and signs off on security to comply with intra-company legal protocol etc.

> Arguments are made about current capability gaps instead of rate of improvement.

Because its usefulness is massively overstated (like any bubble). Which you seem to be conflating as perceived uselessness. Nobody says it isn't brilliant. But its capabiities are oversold, not to mention it being completely financially and environmentally unsustainable.

The advancement of the Greater Israel project. US taxpayers directly and indirectly funding the regional expansion of a foreign state led by a genocidal maniac, which has no clear benefit to themselves.

Talk of the chaos and stupidity of Trump just obfuscates this grim political reality. Ie, focusing the narrative on political and operational incompetency misdirects the citizenry from the fact that money from their labor that could go to healthcare, education, and building community is diverted to an aggressive foreign entity.

He is surrounded by very sharp people. They just happen to have undeclared dual allegiances to Israel. Who this war is helping achieving their regional objectives.

The chaos and stupidity narrative only mask and sustain the far grimmer reality of this operation.

Downvote the bots and morons aggressively. Our only salve.

It's utter LLM shite. You can always tell, amongst other things, by the clunky headings. Eg, "The Catalyst: A Broken Neck".

What's the "information density" of a Matisse ot a Pollock?

There's an enormous thematic subtext of surveillance state and paranoia running in the background of The Conversation that is "informationally dense", but if you've grown up mainlining Coco Melon and Tiktok shorts, that "information" is not available to you because you have poorly developed critical faculties.

Yes but the large language STEM salad of "marginal utility of a stranger's story" and the "P2P protocol of kindness" is surely more authoritative than your real world experience.

A preliminary discussion is more efficacious than polling uniformed users.

> but one day they could suddenly start ranting about their own political opinions or crazy beliefs.

Why is this a problem? I don't mean to be confrontational here, but by this I mean: is it about them being "crazy", or us not being able to hold complexity and ambiguity? Politics has to emerge somewhere, and it's not like we have third spaces for these rants in our modern world (save for a few die-hards at your local town-hall meeting).

Also, I think cartoon politics is something that tends to emerge out of somebody's experience. Often it is armor. I think if you learn to not take them at face value, then it can really give you a quick insight (not always accurate) about what makes somebody tick.

Are you arguing that seeing and recording someone are the same act?

Yes, I feel these type of conspiracies were structurally similar, but of a slighly different composition to political conspiracy. But I think what changed is that political conspiracy became activated by the atomisation of culture and the lack of social consensus. As a result, these former examples (ufo, moonlanding, etc) now almost feel quaint and cartoonish, because they are relatively inconsequential compared to the choices people make and socially harmful actions they'll undertake with political conspiracy.

For a few reasons I personally find that the best medicine is just to nod along with these people and watch them give away their ideological hand:

a) You know where they stand and who you are dealing with.

b) They can, however rarely, be forced to actually confront the irrational logic when sharing it.

c) I think it is the compassionate thing to do, as people just often want to spout these theories as a much needed release valve. After all, people believe this stuff often because of a confusion or frustration they have with their own lives.

True. I was being hyperbolic, but I hoped it was clear that I meant that flat-earthers are nowhere near the threat-level of something like a qanon or antivax movement, who are far more politically-activated, willing to take matters into their own hands, and likely to incite actual physical harm through ideological-driven behavior.

Yes but a flat-earther is a useful idiot for precisely zero dangerous social movements. They are irrationally angry at nature, not the establishment.

Yes. It has become mainstream. As soon as Kirk died, people were spouting antisemitic BS conspiracies that 'it was all Israel', even though he was the biggest shill of Israel's policies!

As you say, the medical conspiracies have really evolved since covid. I'm just glad we had covid when we did, because I feel that 5 years later people are so much more ignorant and less willing to all go through something together for the greater good.

With that said, I think the lot of conspiracy that just doesn't really hurt anyone but the believer. Aliens, moon landings, illuminati, etc. Kind of the modern day opiate of the masses.

I totally agree about literacy being huge, and would actually extend it to going beyond literacy.

The literacy crash is alarming, and is no doubt agitating this situation in a major way. However, I think what we are experiencing is something like a kind of siloing of private realities. Not the pearl-clutching 'echo chamber' discourse from 2019. But an increasing lack of social competency amongst younger people that is disallowing them to be present others in the world itself.

This is why I still think it is a power problem. Government, however incompetent, still has the monopoly on control and policy. They have experts yelling at them everyday about these problems. But their answer does seem to be more censorship and surveillance, rather than addressing the causes of these problems. As I mentioned, this only exacerbates the problem and makes it more socially dangerous.

All 5g gay frogs aside, this a power problem and not really a people problem. How many establishment institutions are left that citizens would wish to enthusiastically uphold? We have come to almost expect corruption and these days.

This isn't a justification for irrational conspiracy theory (which are generally harmless, yet occasionally highly catastrophic). It's that the establishment whack-em-all approach is not working, and is probably exacerbating their problem.

Yes my attempt at humor. Which is always a bit risky on this forum :D