My point is that falling in love with an actor is (usually) falling in love with an idea or image, not an actual person, and in that way it's not that much different than jacking off.
Obviously just performative signalling that doesn't really do much. You can't definitively tell if AI was used, so the rule can never realistically be enforced.
Then again, the Oscars are surely almost entirely vibes based anyway. So it's hardly some internally consistent system of merit in the first place.
I wish we could stop the slide of the term "performative" into meaninglessness.
Just because something is hard or even impossible to enforce, doesn't mean you don't state that it is not allowed and that there are consequences for being caught. That's a common fallacy that overly engineering-minded people fall into.
We're humans. We care about things. There is nothing strange about me asking you not to do something that I can't stop you from doing.
That is incoherent. Laws that are not consistently enforced are by definition ineffective. For starters, you can at least grant that the law was ineffective for those who violated it and didn't get caught, an inevitable consequence of "intermittent" enforcement. More than that, inconsistent application of the law incentivizes more sophisticated ways to evade it, which means the people who do get caught are simply the ones with less money, resources, connections, etc. If your rejoinder here is that the law still functions as a deterrent to some degree, the onus is on you to prove that.
Let's also acknowledge that you're straying further and further from the central point of this particular discussion. This is not simply about "intermittent" enforcement. Enforcement of this rule will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, as the technology gets more sophisticated.
If you consider low-stakes crimes, typically to get to a steady state of effectiveness you need at least some sort of bootstrapped period of ubiquitous enforcement. If that's impossible then I'm not sure you ever get to effectiveness.
If we're talking high-stakes, death-penalty-lottery-if-you-break-the-rules type stuff, then I think actually detection rate (i.e. consistent enforcement) is the biggest predictor of reduced rates, not severity of punishment.
Sure, but even giving 100% of the benefit of the doubt you're raising, it still doesn't follow that it is purely "performative" to formally establish a rule just because it may soon become impossible to identify rule-breakers without whistle-blowers or intel.
Your premise is fallacious - at best, it is partially enforceable (like I said: whistle-blowers, intel), which gives it teeth (not necessarily much, but more than zero, which makes it useful to some non-zero extent).
Even at worst, it expresses intent, which has meaning to humans. We are humans. I can't force you to do anything, but I can ask you to. Don't disparage what it means to be humans talking to each other - it's one of the few things we have left on Earth.
> Even at worst, it expresses intent, which has meaning to humans. We are humans. I can't force you to do anything, but I can ask you to. Don't disparage what it means to be humans talking to each other - it's one of the few things we have left on Earth.
You're having trouble staying on topic. Each pathetic attempt strays further and further from the central question here, which is the use of AI in films and the Academy's decision to impose certain rules around that. The issue is whether this is a meaningless gesture or if it will have real consequences in terms of determining this technology's implementation. What's more troubling is, you haven't demonstrated an understanding of Wittgenstein in the first place yet you confidently cite him to substantiate your circular argument. I'm not particularly concerned with what you think is relevant or not to the discussion as you are guilty of begging the question. Citing Wittgenstein doesn't help you here. If you think it does, you are stuck in the weeds of a language game. Your reply wasn't an adequate counterargument; it was a pretentious non sequitur.
How are there consequences for being caught if it's impossible to detect?
Moreover, why stop here? There are many great rules that are impossible to enforce. Why not a rule that the author isn't allowed to have any racist thoughts when writing the material?
We can't read minds, but it sure is a nice thing to care about, don't you think?
It doesn’t always have to have consequences when it’s a curated access club like the Oscars. It’s ok to have cultural norms that aren’t enforced by consequences, at the very least some of the ethical participants will follow them. I know that I try to follow the spirit of the clubs I participate in, and if they don’t have these types of statements often I just don’t know what the community thinks is ok.
It breaks down when assholes join, or the overly self-interested. This mindset permeates America today, but there are still many collective organizations that don’t need punitive measures. These are less common but when you find them, it’s often a positive signal.
I guess the Best Visual Effects category is going to be tough to judge, but don't you think it might be quite hard to win the Best Actress Academy Award if your AI-generated heroine can't come get the trophy?
Also, "truth" is a thing that exists, and just because you can't always tell if somebody cheated the rules or not, does not mean the rules are "performative signalling".
I don't think AI-generated 'avatars' are anywhere close to being Oscar-worthy as things stand, so it seems kind of a moot point (hence the 'signalling' thing).
If they ever get that good, I would just say you can't really fight the market. If AI content is good enough that people want it, then the Oscars just get left behind after a while. But that's fine, and up to them.
> Also, "truth" is a thing that exists, and just because you can't always tell if somebody cheated the rules or not, does not mean the rules are "performative signalling".
I don't really understand. If you can't hope to discover the truth, in what way is it not performative or signalling?
> If they ever get that good, I would just say you can't really fight the market. If AI content is good enough that people want it
It might be "good enough" that you can't see the difference, which is not equivalent to "people want it". Maybe if people knew that "it"'s not the real thing, they'd assign lower value to "it".
Our startup works in video editing. It's not that difficult to foresee that you might be a true fan of [insert your favorite podcaster or content creator], and maybe some AI models would enable $podcaster to duplicate themselves "perfectly", but as a true fan you'd still feel betrayed to learn you just listened to 2 hours of slop that $podcaster was not involved in.
"Ha! You say you're vegan but I just tricked you into eating meat-disguised-as-veggies" isn't the most convincing gotcha.
Can you explain how an Oscar-worthy piece of writing would somehow be able to contain blatant AI-generated content? How would it have already passed the good-enough-for-an-Oscar filter?
The younger generation also increasingly pays less attention to traditional mainstream entertainment and media, as now they can create more of it with AI.
Edit: funny to see the anti-AI crowd showing up again, how predictable... you can downvote but you can't stop the truth! Legacy entertainment is dying, and will soon become irrelevant.
I’m downvoting because it’s an unusual (and probably false) claim made with no evidence — particularly your clause after “as” needs a more substantive defense. Can you convince me a bit that you speak for the younger generation?
It's much easier to tell if athletes are doping than to 'detect' AI in text that's already Oscar-for-writing level good. I would suggest the latter is quite literally impossible.
I have always heard that dopers are consistently ahead of testing regimes. I don’t think it is easier to tell than AI, which always seems pretty obvious to me.
You have to consider that any AI content worthy of the Oscar shortlist is going to be very high-quality, and likely intensely hand/human-tweaked in the first place. It's not from the general population of all AI content out there.
> I have always heard that dopers are consistently ahead of testing regimes
I don't know about that, even the very biggest names with the most funding quite often get dinged for it. I suppose I'm not really saying that the detection rate for doping is high, though, just that it's much higher than AI detection in high-quality content (which I would suggest is approximately zero).
Aren't most cgi acting already unable to be nominated for acting award - even when theres much more deliberate human involvement in the cgi acting? Or maybe they could have been nomination but never was? I see no ambiguity here: if there's no actor that performed anything for the genAI result there's no actor to be nominated. Does this need clarification?
> banned ai from winning writing awards
I'm going to be looking into how this is enforced/investigated. Again: a human must claim they wrote the script.
Given the latest court ruling in March that AI works can't be copyrighted, this makes a lot of sense. The movie itself can't be copyrighted if it uses AI (although there is still some unresolved issues around how much AI).
Hah, no. Just because AI was employed in the production to some extent doesn't mean it can't be copyrighted. It is not so black and white. You are not describing the situation accurately.
I would expect that ruling to be overturned at some point. AI is going to be how people work. And saying it can the copyrighted is going to look increasingly absurd, like saying anything produced with Adobe tools can’t be copyrighted.
I actually agree with you. Between lobbying from the AI companies, artists when they realize it's a tool they can use to enhance their own work, and probably the movie makers themselves when the realize how much their own people want to use it, it will either be overturned or the laws will be much clearer.
agreed, as AI is more widely adopted in cinematography i assume they will start adding categories specifically for it... hate the idea of them ever competing directly against actual humans performing
The rationale (which, again, I'm not arguing for or against) is that mocap performances are not strictly speaking totally the actors, because mocap has to be cleaned and can be (and very often is) edited and tweaked after the fact by animators. Not to mention there are often required liberties taken because a model cannot line up one to one with an actor anatomically.
In a sense, mocap performances are done by a team of animators where one animator puppeted a model in real time.
Every last motion Gollum makes was Serkis doing it, including when he's jumping up on rocks and climbing down head-first. The animators certainly deserve credit for the facial expressions and the rest of the work of the digital costume, but he physically acted the part.
The Oscars and Hollywood are already quite irrelevant. Looking down on AI and its potential to produce better entertainment is just a sign that they’re scared of its potential.
I found some more details about this, for anyone interested. It looks like critics of Tron's visual effects mistakenly thought the computer was generating it all for them, with little human input, when it was actually quite a laborious process.
"Tron’s offices were trailers in the Disney parking lot, recalls Chris Wedge, then an animator for MAGI, who worked on Tron’s light cycle sequences. “[That’s] because the Disney animation department didn’t believe that this was animation,” he says. “They thought it was computers just making effects. They just didn’t understand anything about it.”"
"Tron’s distinctive glowing circuitry was achieved through a technique called backlight animation, which involves making a negative of each frame and hand-painting the glowing areas. There were 75,000 frames to do; more than half a million pieces of artwork."
"Star Wars and Alien both feature 3D wireframe graphics projected on screens. Only a few companies could produce such images, each of which had their own room-sized computer and their own custom-built software. The process was still cumbersome. “We had to figure out how to position and render objects 24 times to make one second of perceived movement on the screen,” says Bill Kroyer, Tron’s head of computer animation. Tron’s animators had to map out the CGI scenes on graph paper, then calculate the coordinates and angles for each element in each frame."
> It looks like critics of Tron's visual effects mistakenly thought the computer was generating it all for them, with little human input,
I no longer remember the details but I certainly didn't get the impression that "human input" vs "no human input" was the actualy criterion.
And this line to me is meaningless unless we have specific definitions of what the Christ Wedge meant by "animation" and "just effects"
> “[That’s] because the Disney animation department didn’t believe that this was animation,” he says. “They thought it was computers just making effects. They just didn’t understand anything about it.”"
This reminds me of when Tron was disqualified from getting an Oscar for visual effects because the production team “cheated” with computer graphics.
Good. The intangibles of art are undeniable.
- emotional connection
- aesthetics
- zeitgeist
- lived experience
- artist journey
You're free to fall in love with your sexbot, but it's still just jerking off.
And what is falling in love with an actor? Not jerking off?
It's certainly a lot less messy!
My point is that falling in love with an actor is (usually) falling in love with an idea or image, not an actual person, and in that way it's not that much different than jacking off.
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Let's not start comments with "Shhh" on HN, ok? Leave it for reddit.
Obviously just performative signalling that doesn't really do much. You can't definitively tell if AI was used, so the rule can never realistically be enforced.
Then again, the Oscars are surely almost entirely vibes based anyway. So it's hardly some internally consistent system of merit in the first place.
I wish we could stop the slide of the term "performative" into meaninglessness.
Just because something is hard or even impossible to enforce, doesn't mean you don't state that it is not allowed and that there are consequences for being caught. That's a common fallacy that overly engineering-minded people fall into.
We're humans. We care about things. There is nothing strange about me asking you not to do something that I can't stop you from doing.
There is absolutely no fallacy in the statement you're responding to. Laws are meaningless if they cannot be consistently enforced.
Actually, laws can be really effective even if they are only enforced intermittently.
That is incoherent. Laws that are not consistently enforced are by definition ineffective. For starters, you can at least grant that the law was ineffective for those who violated it and didn't get caught, an inevitable consequence of "intermittent" enforcement. More than that, inconsistent application of the law incentivizes more sophisticated ways to evade it, which means the people who do get caught are simply the ones with less money, resources, connections, etc. If your rejoinder here is that the law still functions as a deterrent to some degree, the onus is on you to prove that.
Let's also acknowledge that you're straying further and further from the central point of this particular discussion. This is not simply about "intermittent" enforcement. Enforcement of this rule will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, as the technology gets more sophisticated.
I'm not sure how true this is.
If you consider low-stakes crimes, typically to get to a steady state of effectiveness you need at least some sort of bootstrapped period of ubiquitous enforcement. If that's impossible then I'm not sure you ever get to effectiveness.
If we're talking high-stakes, death-penalty-lottery-if-you-break-the-rules type stuff, then I think actually detection rate (i.e. consistent enforcement) is the biggest predictor of reduced rates, not severity of punishment.
Sure, but even giving 100% of the benefit of the doubt you're raising, it still doesn't follow that it is purely "performative" to formally establish a rule just because it may soon become impossible to identify rule-breakers without whistle-blowers or intel.
Well what purpose does the rule serve if it can't be enforced, if not signalling/norming?
Your premise is fallacious - at best, it is partially enforceable (like I said: whistle-blowers, intel), which gives it teeth (not necessarily much, but more than zero, which makes it useful to some non-zero extent).
Even at worst, it expresses intent, which has meaning to humans. We are humans. I can't force you to do anything, but I can ask you to. Don't disparage what it means to be humans talking to each other - it's one of the few things we have left on Earth.
> Even at worst, it expresses intent, which has meaning to humans. We are humans. I can't force you to do anything, but I can ask you to. Don't disparage what it means to be humans talking to each other - it's one of the few things we have left on Earth.
Isn't that what... signalling is?
And laws can be completely useless when enforced intermittently.
Laws that are enforced and more importantly are enforceable have a much higher rate of making a difference. The same works here.
> "Laws are meaningless if they cannot be consistently enforced."
Laws, per se, are not meaningless. How effective they are is utterly irrelevant in this context; it's another question altogether.
Haha, okay. This is a galaxy brain take if I ever heard one.
Naturally, as it's derived from Wittgensteinian [1] readings. Colloquialisms don't fare well in the domain of philosophy of law.
1. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein]
You're having trouble staying on topic. Each pathetic attempt strays further and further from the central question here, which is the use of AI in films and the Academy's decision to impose certain rules around that. The issue is whether this is a meaningless gesture or if it will have real consequences in terms of determining this technology's implementation. What's more troubling is, you haven't demonstrated an understanding of Wittgenstein in the first place yet you confidently cite him to substantiate your circular argument. I'm not particularly concerned with what you think is relevant or not to the discussion as you are guilty of begging the question. Citing Wittgenstein doesn't help you here. If you think it does, you are stuck in the weeds of a language game. Your reply wasn't an adequate counterargument; it was a pretentious non sequitur.
Allow me to skip your drivel to the only point worth addressing:
> "The issue is whether [...] it will have real consequences in terms of determining this technology's implementation."
It certainly has consequences regarding this technology's implementation at the Academy.
That just doesn't follow.
How are there consequences for being caught if it's impossible to detect?
Moreover, why stop here? There are many great rules that are impossible to enforce. Why not a rule that the author isn't allowed to have any racist thoughts when writing the material?
We can't read minds, but it sure is a nice thing to care about, don't you think?
It doesn’t always have to have consequences when it’s a curated access club like the Oscars. It’s ok to have cultural norms that aren’t enforced by consequences, at the very least some of the ethical participants will follow them. I know that I try to follow the spirit of the clubs I participate in, and if they don’t have these types of statements often I just don’t know what the community thinks is ok.
It breaks down when assholes join, or the overly self-interested. This mindset permeates America today, but there are still many collective organizations that don’t need punitive measures. These are less common but when you find them, it’s often a positive signal.
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I guess the Best Visual Effects category is going to be tough to judge, but don't you think it might be quite hard to win the Best Actress Academy Award if your AI-generated heroine can't come get the trophy?
Also, "truth" is a thing that exists, and just because you can't always tell if somebody cheated the rules or not, does not mean the rules are "performative signalling".
I don't think AI-generated 'avatars' are anywhere close to being Oscar-worthy as things stand, so it seems kind of a moot point (hence the 'signalling' thing).
If they ever get that good, I would just say you can't really fight the market. If AI content is good enough that people want it, then the Oscars just get left behind after a while. But that's fine, and up to them.
> Also, "truth" is a thing that exists, and just because you can't always tell if somebody cheated the rules or not, does not mean the rules are "performative signalling".
I don't really understand. If you can't hope to discover the truth, in what way is it not performative or signalling?
> If they ever get that good, I would just say you can't really fight the market. If AI content is good enough that people want it
It might be "good enough" that you can't see the difference, which is not equivalent to "people want it". Maybe if people knew that "it"'s not the real thing, they'd assign lower value to "it".
Our startup works in video editing. It's not that difficult to foresee that you might be a true fan of [insert your favorite podcaster or content creator], and maybe some AI models would enable $podcaster to duplicate themselves "perfectly", but as a true fan you'd still feel betrayed to learn you just listened to 2 hours of slop that $podcaster was not involved in.
"Ha! You say you're vegan but I just tricked you into eating meat-disguised-as-veggies" isn't the most convincing gotcha.
It prevents anyone from blatantly using AI. If they want to use it anyway and risk getting found out, sure. That's still a big difference.
Can you explain how an Oscar-worthy piece of writing would somehow be able to contain blatant AI-generated content? How would it have already passed the good-enough-for-an-Oscar filter?
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The younger generation also increasingly pays less attention to traditional mainstream entertainment and media, as now they can create more of it with AI.
Edit: funny to see the anti-AI crowd showing up again, how predictable... you can downvote but you can't stop the truth! Legacy entertainment is dying, and will soon become irrelevant.
I’m downvoting because it’s an unusual (and probably false) claim made with no evidence — particularly your clause after “as” needs a more substantive defense. Can you convince me a bit that you speak for the younger generation?
You can't definitively tell if athletes are doping, or students are cheating, it should then be allowed.
It's much easier to tell if athletes are doping than to 'detect' AI in text that's already Oscar-for-writing level good. I would suggest the latter is quite literally impossible.
I have always heard that dopers are consistently ahead of testing regimes. I don’t think it is easier to tell than AI, which always seems pretty obvious to me.
You have to consider that any AI content worthy of the Oscar shortlist is going to be very high-quality, and likely intensely hand/human-tweaked in the first place. It's not from the general population of all AI content out there.
> I have always heard that dopers are consistently ahead of testing regimes
I don't know about that, even the very biggest names with the most funding quite often get dinged for it. I suppose I'm not really saying that the detection rate for doping is high, though, just that it's much higher than AI detection in high-quality content (which I would suggest is approximately zero).
How do you know that it's easier? How do you prove athletes who have not been caught doping were in fact not doping?
I don't think they banned it, they just reiterated their existing rules that only real humans can receive awards.
> banned ai from winning acting
Aren't most cgi acting already unable to be nominated for acting award - even when theres much more deliberate human involvement in the cgi acting? Or maybe they could have been nomination but never was? I see no ambiguity here: if there's no actor that performed anything for the genAI result there's no actor to be nominated. Does this need clarification?
> banned ai from winning writing awards
I'm going to be looking into how this is enforced/investigated. Again: a human must claim they wrote the script.
Given the latest court ruling in March that AI works can't be copyrighted, this makes a lot of sense. The movie itself can't be copyrighted if it uses AI (although there is still some unresolved issues around how much AI).
Hah, no. Just because AI was employed in the production to some extent doesn't mean it can't be copyrighted. It is not so black and white. You are not describing the situation accurately.
I literally said: "although there is still some unresolved issues around how much AI"
Which is really the crux of the issue.
I would expect that ruling to be overturned at some point. AI is going to be how people work. And saying it can the copyrighted is going to look increasingly absurd, like saying anything produced with Adobe tools can’t be copyrighted.
I actually agree with you. Between lobbying from the AI companies, artists when they realize it's a tool they can use to enhance their own work, and probably the movie makers themselves when the realize how much their own people want to use it, it will either be overturned or the laws will be much clearer.
Obvious decision for any institution with at least a modicum of artistic self-respect.
agreed, as AI is more widely adopted in cinematography i assume they will start adding categories specifically for it... hate the idea of them ever competing directly against actual humans performing
They already have categories for animation and post visual effects. They just don't necessarily show those awards during the broadcast
I would be surprised if it weren't already de facto banned, like how motion capture performances are essentially banned from Best Actor/Actress awards
Why should motion capture be banned from those awards?
I didn't say should, I said are.
The rationale (which, again, I'm not arguing for or against) is that mocap performances are not strictly speaking totally the actors, because mocap has to be cleaned and can be (and very often is) edited and tweaked after the fact by animators. Not to mention there are often required liberties taken because a model cannot line up one to one with an actor anatomically.
In a sense, mocap performances are done by a team of animators where one animator puppeted a model in real time.
I don't know, but Andy Serkis was robbed of a Best Supporting Actor nomination because Gollum was regarded as "just a CG Character".
Half of Andy Serkis' job portraying Gollum was done by animators, even though Serkis provided the basic facial expressions.
I would've given him the best voice acting award though.
Every last motion Gollum makes was Serkis doing it, including when he's jumping up on rocks and climbing down head-first. The animators certainly deserve credit for the facial expressions and the rest of the work of the digital costume, but he physically acted the part.
There was a comparable controversy with The Exorcist because Linda Blair was dubbed.
Someone should tell Valerie Cherish.
The Oscars and Hollywood are already quite irrelevant. Looking down on AI and its potential to produce better entertainment is just a sign that they’re scared of its potential.
Remember when they tried to ban computers from winning best special effects? Tron, famously.
I found some more details about this, for anyone interested. It looks like critics of Tron's visual effects mistakenly thought the computer was generating it all for them, with little human input, when it was actually quite a laborious process.
"Tron’s offices were trailers in the Disney parking lot, recalls Chris Wedge, then an animator for MAGI, who worked on Tron’s light cycle sequences. “[That’s] because the Disney animation department didn’t believe that this was animation,” he says. “They thought it was computers just making effects. They just didn’t understand anything about it.”"
"Tron’s distinctive glowing circuitry was achieved through a technique called backlight animation, which involves making a negative of each frame and hand-painting the glowing areas. There were 75,000 frames to do; more than half a million pieces of artwork."
"Star Wars and Alien both feature 3D wireframe graphics projected on screens. Only a few companies could produce such images, each of which had their own room-sized computer and their own custom-built software. The process was still cumbersome. “We had to figure out how to position and render objects 24 times to make one second of perceived movement on the screen,” says Bill Kroyer, Tron’s head of computer animation. Tron’s animators had to map out the CGI scenes on graph paper, then calculate the coordinates and angles for each element in each frame."
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jul/05/tron-steven-lis...
> It looks like critics of Tron's visual effects mistakenly thought the computer was generating it all for them, with little human input,
I no longer remember the details but I certainly didn't get the impression that "human input" vs "no human input" was the actualy criterion.
And this line to me is meaningless unless we have specific definitions of what the Christ Wedge meant by "animation" and "just effects"
> “[That’s] because the Disney animation department didn’t believe that this was animation,” he says. “They thought it was computers just making effects. They just didn’t understand anything about it.”"
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