Tangent: philosophically to me, art is inherently human. What makes art meaningful and impactful isn’t whether it looks good or cool. It’s the story of the artist, the context of the art itself, the hard work and struggle involved, the meaning represented by a human creating something very specific to their own personal context and taste. Or a mix of any of that.
Can AI be used as a tool to help create art? Absolutely. But as a rule, I do not give any shits about AI generated content like this. It’s not art. It’s not human. And the line is really how much meaning and effort _a human_ is putting into it.
If a human spends a minute or two prompting AI and then tweaking The result, and peddling it as their own art… get outta here. You made some content. That’s easy, and no one should cares. Content can already be shoveled out faster than we can watch it with or without AI.
Meaningful art is not mass-produced, generated content.
I realize art is completely subjective, so some person may find meaning in AI generated art. That’s fine, and that’s part of what could make that art. (Like an original way of presenting something that really resonates with someone.)
But this garbage ain’t that.
And I realize this is just a capability test, but plenty of places will see this as cheap and good enough. But it ain’t art, and we should push back against another cost-cutting measure that does nothing to make the world better.
> Meaningful art is not mass-produced, generated content.
Andy Warhol might disagree [1] (:
(I realize that's not exactly apples-to-apples, but y'know.)
Or there's "art is anything you can get away with," which I just mention to point out that this kind of issue ("what is art?") is not new. In some ways it seems like a good thing to get people, like you, riled up about these topics, arguing the merits of their point of view. That's how culture happens.
It's an interesting question you tangle with: is it art because of what the artist did, or is it art because of how the viewer/listener/etc receives it? Some of both? How much of each? If you encountered some art but you didn't know its provenance, and it had some emotional impact on you, would it still be art if you found out later it was 100% AI generated?
Like you say, it's all subjective, but it's nice to see random people on the internet talking about the nature of art, since it's something I care about too.
So in other words, thank you for being angry (:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans "... what Time magazine called the 'Slice of Cake School'—artists who treated the banal artifacts of contemporary civilization as legitimate subjects for high art"
I don't have a problem with AI and can't stand the anti-AI brigade, but... this is the worst thing I have ever seen in my life.
This specific type of garbage is exactly what arms the anti-AI critics with valid arguments. We should really wait a few years for the technology to mature before releasing these kinds of projects into the cultural sphere.
If you benchmark is to be better than a human familiar with the task at hand, then you will be disappointed.
If you are not expecting them to be as good as people then their failures seem wholly unremarkable. The specific nature of tbe failures can be quite interesting in fact. They can expose deficiencies in the architecrure, training data, or presumptiona of those controlling the models.
In my experience very few people are claiming the capabulities that would be required for me to expect them to produce better than they currenrly are.
I'm not bothered by a fish's inability to quote Shakespeare.
> I'm not bothered by a fish's inability to quote Shakespeare.
But I am bothered when they put a pencil in the mouth of a fish and tell us that this is the future of literature, that this qualifies as playwright, and that theaters will soon begin putting on plays written by a fish with a pencil in its mouth.
a) You are allowed to dislike cheap stuff, in fact it is common in western culture to dislike art where it is obvious that the artist cheaped out.
b) Never in the history of western art critique has there been a requirement that the critic is able to do better then the artist (let alone for cheaper). As the saying goes, “I may not be able to pilot a 100000 ton cargo ship, but I can tell when one is stuck in a canal.”
If you don’t count the cost of the phone I think many people could. See, it would look like it cost $100, but that’s still better than using AI to generate something that looks like the temu version of a $500,000 video.
"or i can just not do it", because you can't! To much pride to admit that the bot beats your ass every day of the week ten times over when it comes to making music videos so the cop out is "nah, man, I just don't wanna."
People say this a lot, and I usually think it's said by folks who haven't thought about it much.
As a person who makes a lot of music, I don't care if folks have fun. In fact I am having such a hard time caring hat folks do or how they do it I can't get motivated to book any shows this season.
But the part you're missing is when folks make these things and then say "yeah, you see this thing we're doing? That's what we think -you- are doing." LIke when someone sets up an LLM to shit out some song lyrics, I don't care if they are having fun doing it, but I think it displays a lot of contempt for [insert an songwriting artist youlike here] to claim that the LLM is doing the same thing.
Which is fine and all- I've got plenty of unmitigated contempt for my fellow humans.
And you don't even need a computer to do that- I've released a certain amount of music that is facile and boring and in retrospect understand why folks were dismissive.
But if you want to understand why folks who consider themselves invested in their craft (or even invested in other artists' craft) are dismissive of these things, then you might consider how radically dismissive of craft these kinds of cultural products might seem to artists.
That is how you do A video but if everyone does this it becomes like those blurred photos that make cities look like a small model and everyone is doing it. I guess this is the issue. Me buying a Toyota and pointing at it is not art, there are too many of them.
I'm possibly retro-fitting my answer here, but that film clip feels like the band, feels like it fits well with the music, I think that's why that clip came to my mind in relation to the produce-generica of the original article.
The clip incorporates images of the band and, as @DoktorDelta pointed out (which I didn't know before), it was trained on art created by some of the band members. It also totally fits the psychedelic rock vibe, not just for this song, but also into the canon of psychedelic rock film clips and general psychedelia media.
They also trained the AI for that video on the band members' own artwork, so the video is focused despite the trippy visuals and avoids copyright issues.
I agree though, you can combine art with AI and make something really unique but the majority of art people are pushing with AI is in my opinion being rightfully branded as AI slop.
Unsure if it's just the way they prompted it / coded it, but the output is far too much a literal direct copy of the lyrics. The best music videos have a story arc on the theme of but often not litearlly the lyrics, and start with obscurity and reveal something (following all the literary/story mechanisms)
Consider Amber Run - Found lyrics versus the video, and the story arc of the video
Come on, that video is on another level. "All my friends are turning green" (shot of $1 bills), "she's been living on the highest shelf" (woman standing on Juliet balcony), "they come unstuck" (someone pulling twin pole popsicle apart)
For contrast these have "ice cold" (shot of ice cubes), "got chucks on" (shot of shoes), "livin' it up in the city" (shot of city).
The point is that, at least presently, an algorithm lacks the creativity to meaningfully stimulate an intellectual person, and whatever excuse you give for the decisions that algorithm makes, you should never expect a human being to be more impressed with the algorithm than they are with their human peers.
That was sort of like what The Mandalorian dialogue devolved into, with some explaining what's happening right now, and then some explaining what they're about to do.
Once you notice this, it's impossible to not notice it.
I wonder what would happen if you gave the AI video generation tools a widely ranging prompt to generate a video from Weird Al's "Amish Paradise", and then compared it to the actual video.
Wierd Al videos are a parody of an existing property. "White and Nerdy" is a parody of "Riding Dirty" by Chamillionaire, but the lyrics are about nerd stereotypes (as an intentional contrast with black culture as presented in the original,) and a great deal of creative effort is put into making those lyrics humorous while also fitting to the original theme. Nothing about Wierd Al's videos are "totally literal," certainly not in the sense of these AI videos, which are "literal" in the sense of "literally showing what the lyrics are describing."
The entire thing was cringeworthy to the core. I kind of enjoyed it though because it perfectly epitomized "AI slop" in the first 30 seconds so wonderfully. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" - show a blonde woman in a gold sequined top! "Livin' it up in the city" - show a shot of a big city!
If anything, the absurd literalism of the video contrasted so perfectly with the (IMO) brilliant clever originality of the lyrics. E.g. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" is actually a not-so-subtle reference to cocaine. Imagine if the lyrics were as stupidly unoriginal as the video ("Now we're all snorting cocaine!!").
They are awful because there is no effort put into it. You're missing the point entirely with generative art. Generative art with care and intent is indiscernible from "real" art at this point. You just don't realize it.
I think because pretty much all AI generated art is slop. When artists use AI with care and intention in their works, people don’t even realize it’s AI and they don’t care. And that’s fine.
The more concerning part is that a much less discerning audience will happily engage with and watch endless hours of AI slop videos. For example what happens if you give a 3 year old a tablet and youtube access to keep clicking on things.
Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured. What took this industry decades to advance it taking months in AI. Think the spaghetti Will Smith and now this. Another one people don't mention here but is specific to video is higgsfield ai.
>Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured
The industry haven't matured except until a certain point. Then it declined. Modern visual effects are worse than practical effects in their heyday. They are also worse done than 3D effects in their tasteful early days (like Jurassic Park).
> Those old movies with old visual effects are watchable and still enjoyable.
Id say it’s definitely possible to get spoiled by high production quality - if I went back to the old Star Trek or even the first seasons of the Doctor Who reboot, I’d mostly have to try to enjoy it for the story (then again, Doctor Who has never been overly concerned with presentation, the most fearsome aliens in the galaxy being metal boxes with plungers sticking out of them is quite silly). Same with most CGI in the older movies or even the style of older anime, it can all be a bit hard to watch.
I guess I also experience the same with video games, though to a lesser degree - some like Hidden & Dangerous 2 can still be enjoyed whereas something like Operation Flashpoint would be quite frustrating, though more often due to controls rather than graphics.
Spaghetti Will Smith was funny, this only inspires disgust in me: a clear downgrade. We're just getting deeper in the uncanny valley, with no end in sight.
> Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured.
The difference is intent. Watching an old movie, the effects are obviously janky and far from seamless, but the authors had intent and the imperfections are understandable. When an AI jumbles a basic walk animation, it's just weird and soulless. The prompter just didn't want to spend any time doing actual work, so used this slop as a stand-in, when better techniques exists.
Not a fan really. There are certainly uses for AI, but this is lacking something. Personally I think it works best as a filter or applying a style or effect that is difficult otherwise, or generating fancy ambient or abstract textures etc.
People constantly think the music video I created for Zingara's Unlock Your Keys [1] is AI, but it really is just real footage all around, except for a handful of lines / pulse textures that were created in TouchDesigner.
I am really excited for the possibilities that AI can give us in the future but often I find trying to use it generatively I run into the paradox of choice and end up paralyzed!
1: https://xfeeefeee.net/unlock-your-keys/ tribal dance fusion music video, sfw but does show some skin. Uses lots of slow motion ink in water footage for texture as well.
It's an interesting experiment and the results are surprising. I will say that if you're a musician I'd bet anything you can make a way cooler and better music video for $25 and 45 minutes with your friends.
Curious how much time in addition to tokens this costs. If you have to spend $25 and wait 45 minutes to get a basically unwatchable video, I'm not worried about indie film makers being replaced just yet...
I’m curious (admittedly skeptical) what you mean by this. Are you talking about a world where director’s just like…don’t actually make movies and create AI media?
This wasn’t possible even a year ago, with the speed of things changing and how much money is spent on movies is there really a doubt that someone will be able to make $100 million movie for less than $1 million in token spend?
Even small budget indie flicks, when filmed in LA, have a ridiculous amount of paperwork and dealing with unions. Which isn't surprising, since it's an established industry there. Spending $1 million for each day of filming is totally achievable. I don't have personal experience with this but I know some people in the industry and have had conversations with them. Was background/extra in a movie. An AI director/producer doesn't have to deal with the human aspect, actor and other people's egos and clashing behavior. There are moments of film gold that are the result of human actor's human personalities, so we'd lose out on that though.
I'm seeing these type of comments a lot more. A type of comment where it seems like the "user" (commentor) makes a categorically wrong comment about the linked article that would be sort of right if it were a different medium. Clearly whatever was used here triggered on the "music" part, but didn't understand what the article was really about. Typically it goes beyond just not reading the article (as in this case)
I'd assume that it was a bad LLM take, but it looks like the rest of the comments are normal.
I honestly can't tell a good music video from a bad one. I don't know what makes a music video "good". These AI generated ones seemed pretty good to me, of the same caliber as those Michael Jackson or "Beez in the trap" things. It's all just butt shaking and sunglasses in Philips Hue lights chanting some meaningless words.
These still seem awful to me. There are weird events in them that take me out of the moment like the record needle suddenly jumping of the record for no apparent reason. But more so I just hate the AI glaze look of all the characters.
It is jarring to me that most of the dancing seems slightly out of sync with the music. It is like a music video uncanny valley - images look good, but the lack of sync to the sound shatters the illusion entirely.
To me nearly all of the real world dancing looks like that. The dancers could literally be olympic level and I still don't see the connection between their movements and the sounds of the music. Music videos sometimes do sync for me but only on very simple motions, and for whatever reason shuffle dance on video almost always looks great.
How many hours of your life would you say you’ve danced? Have you ever trained at a sport beyond the recreational level, especially highly rhythmic ones like basketball or soccer?
Genuinely curious, because I have friends without any sense of rhythm and it’s interesting how it manifests
The cutting edge technology is being tested with pelican drawings and video creation. You may argue that this is just testing, but actual mainstream use of this tech won't be far off from these tests.
For fun, I took that image and put it into a few models and asked it "what is wrong with this genAI image?"
Grok fast came up with a lot of minor quibbles and missed the issue.
Grok expert touched on it with a "Limbs/anatomy ambiguity / This creates a slight "how many legs does this cat actually have?" moment." but then moved on to complain about texturing . Later it summarized the issue as "classic "animal + held object" anatomy problem".
Chatgpt 5.6 instant didn't notice it
Chatgpt 5.6 medium didn't notice it and mainly complained about the background being blurry
Chatgpt 5.6 high (46s) "The biggest error is the cat appears to have six paws"
Google AI mode complained about whiskers and feet placement
Only chatgpt high and marginally grok expert had acceptable answers.
> From the start, the production team knew they didn’t want a music video that relied solely on any single technique. With this goal in mind, they worked to blend live action, AI, and a wide range of handcrafted animation styles – 2D, 3D, collage and motion design.
Slightly off topic, but earlier today I was bored, having a kibitz with Claude, and I asked if it played chess. I was surprised when it confirmed, with a humble yes and disclaimer of its mediocre strength. I then asked if happened to also play Go, which has been my preference for many years now. I was surprised when it again confirmed yes, but admitted it was even weaker here.
Where I began to feel delightfully uncomfortable was when it asked me if it should build a Go board and start a game. Surely you jest, Mr Claude... I thought.
No. The crazy bastard built a beautiful HTML/SVG board, and before I knew what was going on, there it was. I thought for a moment that fraud rhymes with something. Then before I knew it, I was black (that's courtesy!) and I made my first move expecting nothing, kind of astonished by what was happening. Mind you, I was on a phone. Then it made a move in response, and lo and bloody behold, I was playing a game of Go with Claude, on a 19x19 board made in a few seconds, with formidable aesthetics.
I was enamored enough to overlook that Claude does need some practice. But wow. I guess everyone is impressed by something, but that got me.
No need to take any pot shots at this trash in terms of aesthetic efficacy in earnest, if y'all know what I mean. But as an experiment, it's interesting. There seems to be an odd consistency to all of them, which reveals a kind of internal logic & coherence of sorts that courses throughout any iteration.
Aesthetically, where can you place these? I feel like the late David Lynch could have used some tropes in his unnerving, unsettling dream sequences (a la the intro dream in "Mulholland Drive" where people are so cheery and upbeat that it feels viscerally disturbing).
That's the consistent feeling that I'm left with watching each one, is just a deep, deep unsettled and uneasy feeling. A scowl on my face the whole time trying to make through each one.
I did crack up seeing a martini glass presented to the camera, then float in place on it's own and the presenter resumes holding it with his other hand.
> I did crack up seeing a martini glass presented to the camera, then float in place on it's own
It's just a cheap video-generation model doing its thing. I wonder if the orchestrator model noticed this and tried "Create a scene with a martini glass. Make no mistakes".
There's definitely still room for innovation in custom use cases with AI. I like to write and draw comics, but it's very time consuming to make a finished product. Working with tools in default and you'll have a bad time. You have to really guide it and if you're using a longer story to adapt, it'll compress things and lose context during Thinking. Luma labs was the most interesting tool I've seen so far, but there's still a lot of room for growth
I always found the Severus Snape - ALWAYS (Live at Hogwarts) video to be really good for AI. The video was probably created by prompting for each scene, instead of letting the model generate the whole thing. It's a cool of example of what's possible nonetheless.
That's definitely not "let the AI do everything unsupervised", but many short scenes generated with probably much filtering, and then manually edited together.
It's interesting how the Harry Potter fanbase was one of the first to get on the AI video trend, but not too surprising as there was already plenty of HP fanfiction, and no doubt many who wanted to have them visualised.
The GPT ones are strange. The $25 fable one to me is subjectively better than the others. The $100 fable one is too literal and robotic.
The jevons paradox is you need auteurs to curate vignettes or effects and cut or mask them in etc. That's not really different philosophically when software entered art in other ways. I could see errors/glitches lowering in time but I doubt there will be much acceleration.
As someone who has marketed music, shot music videos, directed music videos, cut music videos together from stock footage: you don’t need auteurs.
You did back when MTV made songs big.
No one actually pays attention to the details of music videos any more. It’s visual chewing gum at best. The reality is that now, if you have something half decent, nice colours, nice lighting and a wee bit of a story, no one is going to care.
The only other route is a huge budget spectacular - but you only get the huge budgets if you label lends you the money to make a huge budget video because they think it will increase the amount of money they make - while extending the amount of time it takes you to recoup.
Ultimately, now, it is just another social media asset, so promo videos are built with that in mind.
> No one actually pays attention to the details of music videos any more. It’s visual chewing gum at best.
Hilarious to hear someone in industry blame their audience for the commodification of the medium. Is every industry like this? Surely nobody goes into creative fields thinking “I can’t wait to feed the masses slop!” Who’s killing our spirit?
He's not wrong though. In the 80s I'd watch video shows and over the course of a week I'd probably see some videos 10 times. And it wasn't background filler - I'd actually be sitting in a chair/couch and watching the videos. Kids don't do this anymore. First many/most songs are made popular through TikTok memes, not videos. And videos really are mostly just played in the background as they do other stuff. No one is just tuning into Yo MTV Raps or Headbangers Ball anymore.
Video killed the radio star. Streaming killed the video. Sure, lots of people use youtube for consuming music, but how many of them truly are watching the videos or just have them on while they do something else without seeing the images? With that in mind, putting anything on screen is just checking the boxes
> need auteurs to curate vignettes or effects and cut or mask them in etc
The problem is that reliable, repeatable professional-grade commercial art and design sensibilities happen in full-time careers. It’s entirely different than fine art, where intense self-exploration and experimentation are a very viable option.
These tools are exacerbating an already difficult creative job market so there’s no reasonable path to get those skills. Our creative professional pipeline is fundamentally broken.
The same thing is happening in software, I see the ladder pulled up and don't feel vulnerable as senior staff. If anything, we face a massive and increasing competency crisis in computing because there is a cult dumb enough to believe acceleration and doomer cases for LLMs.
Though we're finding the studios contracted to do this can bill $50k. I know several studios that previously billed clients six figures for ad campaigns (P&G, HBO, pharma, etc.) are now charging five figures and winning a lion share of the bids now.
Not sure why Wan is the focus of this article and Seedance is a footnote. Wan/LTX/open models are significantly behind Chinese closed source models. (And the Chinese have left the Western models in the dust.)
But why spend the same amount of money on AI instead of humans? My guess is that shooting a music video is probably fun for a lot of artists. And with AI the result is not predictable and might be inconsistent in the dumbest ways.
My guess is that an AI music video would have to be a lot cheaper for artists to consider it outside of making one just because you want to make an AI music video.
Seems like if you build some more scaffolding around it, it wouldn't be bad. I think AI video isn't quite there yet so you probably would want to lean into that. For example you could ask for an animated or cartoon music video so the real shots don't look weird. Also if you gave it some guidance on what a good music video is like it would probably help as well. But yeah idk may be that's not the goal here.
The post itself was technically useful, I found, and they posted their entire project to GitHub https://github.com/hershalb/music-video-arena which I think makes it worthy of a HN post and discussion since it is technical and at least IMHO a very interesting post.
Even their demo clips are soundly in the uncanny valley, and I assume normal folks using it and having to pay for each clip will have generally worse results.
Awesome! Other commenters are negative but I'm very excited to welcome AI into the artistic community. The more the merrier. Can't wait to see what they come up with!
Video can be good if you stick to a garden path of simple scenes with tons of examples in the training material and not a ton of motion between overlapping objects in a scene, and don't really care too much about specifics.
As soon as you want something very specific, or something novel, or anything with a lot of moving objects/people, it falls apart.
I think that a lot of posters here are missing the point - this is just the tip of the iceberg, and even simple improvements in prompting (infer the meaning of the lyrics, then generate footage related to that) would create a better result.
There is no going back from this, only forwards, for better or worse.
They are terrible. Perhaps if one on purposely prompts for a weird imaginary, the result could be less awful even acceptable, like that famous Gucci ad. These videos instead are common scenes with the super cringey AI artifacts.
I'm fascinated by some of the comments in here, that the videos are "awful," "far from good," "embarrassing," etc.
This is technology that was unthinkable before just a couple of years ago. Photorealistic video generated by typing out a description of what you want to see is something from a sci-fi movie. I must be dreaming, this can't be real.
I took a screenshot in the middle of a video, and it's indistinguishable from a photograph: https://imgur.com/a/TyNbd7E
I don't know, maybe I'm just old. I remember hacking the hidden iframe trick to make ajax-style file uploads work in IE7. The advancements I've watched unfold in the past couple of years are still hard to wrap my head around.
>I was on an airplane and there was high speed internet on the airplane… it’s fast, I’m watching YouTube clips, I’m on an airplane. It breaks down, they apologize, and the guy next to me is like “This is bullshit..."
>Like how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago?
>Flying is the worst one, people come back from flights, they tell you their story and it’s a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany.
>"It was the worst day of my life! First of all we didn’t board for 20 minutes. And then we got on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there."
>Oh really, what happened next, did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero?
>You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should be constantly going ‘oh my God, wow!’
>You’re sitting in a chair in the sky
>….Here’s the thing, people say there are delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in 5 hours. That used to take 30 years. And a bunch of you would die on the way there. And have a baby. You’d be a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and you take a shit and you’re home.
No one is criticizing the photorealistic video generation. Yes, AI has gotten very good at that, I don't think anyone is disputing that.
At some point you have to move past your astonishment at the technical achievement alone and judge the result for what it is, on its own merits, as if a human had made it. Especially when the goal of using generative AI is to remove as many human creators and as much human effort from the creative process as possible, and to have as much "art" be as fully AI generated as possible.
People are criticizing these videos because they aren't good. As "art." Which is a problem if this is what all art is supposed to be become.
As a clanker-apologist I gotta say this is the strawman of AI slop brought to life. Letting the machine do literally everything without even supervision and see how it turns out? No surprise at all the results are so bad.
My fav AI video is still Post-Scarcity Blues from a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_t3h2AZ0KY There have been others I've enjoyed since then. But, that one stands out in memory. Work warning: it is occasionally just a bit spicy.
These are pretty terrible, but for me there were at least a few moments where they genuinely became "so bad they're awesome". They actually re-enforced an idea I keep coming back to: sometime soon a real artist is going to use AI to make something amazing, not by aiming for flawless "realism" or some kind of pastiche slop, but by leaning into the weirdness that often comes out of AI.
I don't care that the results are technologically impressive, the automation of creativity is dystopian. As I watched these videos and tried to compare what different AIs can do with similar budgets, is struck me to how utterly soulless and unenjoyable this whole thing is.
AI has plenty of utility, but this isn't one of them. If anything, I want to see AI automate all of the tedious stuff so that human beings can focus more deeply on art and culture. Automating art and culture is anti-human.
No effort went into that. No talent went into that. The creator doesn't care about the outcome. Nobody wants to watch it. Fucken A, brilliant. The intelligence is artificial.
Tangent: philosophically to me, art is inherently human. What makes art meaningful and impactful isn’t whether it looks good or cool. It’s the story of the artist, the context of the art itself, the hard work and struggle involved, the meaning represented by a human creating something very specific to their own personal context and taste. Or a mix of any of that.
Can AI be used as a tool to help create art? Absolutely. But as a rule, I do not give any shits about AI generated content like this. It’s not art. It’s not human. And the line is really how much meaning and effort _a human_ is putting into it.
If a human spends a minute or two prompting AI and then tweaking The result, and peddling it as their own art… get outta here. You made some content. That’s easy, and no one should cares. Content can already be shoveled out faster than we can watch it with or without AI.
Meaningful art is not mass-produced, generated content.
I realize art is completely subjective, so some person may find meaning in AI generated art. That’s fine, and that’s part of what could make that art. (Like an original way of presenting something that really resonates with someone.)
But this garbage ain’t that.
And I realize this is just a capability test, but plenty of places will see this as cheap and good enough. But it ain’t art, and we should push back against another cost-cutting measure that does nothing to make the world better.
> Meaningful art is not mass-produced, generated content.
Andy Warhol might disagree [1] (:
(I realize that's not exactly apples-to-apples, but y'know.)
Or there's "art is anything you can get away with," which I just mention to point out that this kind of issue ("what is art?") is not new. In some ways it seems like a good thing to get people, like you, riled up about these topics, arguing the merits of their point of view. That's how culture happens.
It's an interesting question you tangle with: is it art because of what the artist did, or is it art because of how the viewer/listener/etc receives it? Some of both? How much of each? If you encountered some art but you didn't know its provenance, and it had some emotional impact on you, would it still be art if you found out later it was 100% AI generated?
Like you say, it's all subjective, but it's nice to see random people on the internet talking about the nature of art, since it's something I care about too.
So in other words, thank you for being angry (:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans "... what Time magazine called the 'Slice of Cake School'—artists who treated the banal artifacts of contemporary civilization as legitimate subjects for high art"
All of this can be said about photography, too.
And, yes, most photography ain't art, or at least not meaningful art. Just like most of my attempts at drawing ain't meaningful art either.
Btw, by your high standards most human produced music videos ain't art either. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potboiler
> most human produced music videos ain't art either
Sounds accurate to me
I don't have a problem with AI and can't stand the anti-AI brigade, but... this is the worst thing I have ever seen in my life.
This specific type of garbage is exactly what arms the anti-AI critics with valid arguments. We should really wait a few years for the technology to mature before releasing these kinds of projects into the cultural sphere.
I don't think its that bad, you are just hater
If you benchmark is to be better than a human familiar with the task at hand, then you will be disappointed.
If you are not expecting them to be as good as people then their failures seem wholly unremarkable. The specific nature of tbe failures can be quite interesting in fact. They can expose deficiencies in the architecrure, training data, or presumptiona of those controlling the models.
In my experience very few people are claiming the capabulities that would be required for me to expect them to produce better than they currenrly are.
I'm not bothered by a fish's inability to quote Shakespeare.
> I'm not bothered by a fish's inability to quote Shakespeare.
But I am bothered when they put a pencil in the mouth of a fish and tell us that this is the future of literature, that this qualifies as playwright, and that theaters will soon begin putting on plays written by a fish with a pencil in its mouth.
Not everything is a war between those in favor and those against…
The article is not about video quality.
Eh, I'd like to see YOU make a better music video for $100 or less!
This is such a bad argument:
a) You are allowed to dislike cheap stuff, in fact it is common in western culture to dislike art where it is obvious that the artist cheaped out.
b) Never in the history of western art critique has there been a requirement that the critic is able to do better then the artist (let alone for cheaper). As the saying goes, “I may not be able to pilot a 100000 ton cargo ship, but I can tell when one is stuck in a canal.”
If you don’t count the cost of the phone I think many people could. See, it would look like it cost $100, but that’s still better than using AI to generate something that looks like the temu version of a $500,000 video.
or i can just not do it? this absolute garbage of a music video is not worth a single cent, let alone a $100.
"or i can just not do it", because you can't! To much pride to admit that the bot beats your ass every day of the week ten times over when it comes to making music videos so the cop out is "nah, man, I just don't wanna."
What do you mean, I thought it was fun.
Feel free to not make your own music videos, but I am not sure why you would be so upset about other people having fun.
People say this a lot, and I usually think it's said by folks who haven't thought about it much.
As a person who makes a lot of music, I don't care if folks have fun. In fact I am having such a hard time caring hat folks do or how they do it I can't get motivated to book any shows this season.
But the part you're missing is when folks make these things and then say "yeah, you see this thing we're doing? That's what we think -you- are doing." LIke when someone sets up an LLM to shit out some song lyrics, I don't care if they are having fun doing it, but I think it displays a lot of contempt for [insert an songwriting artist youlike here] to claim that the LLM is doing the same thing.
Which is fine and all- I've got plenty of unmitigated contempt for my fellow humans.
And you don't even need a computer to do that- I've released a certain amount of music that is facile and boring and in retrospect understand why folks were dismissive.
But if you want to understand why folks who consider themselves invested in their craft (or even invested in other artists' craft) are dismissive of these things, then you might consider how radically dismissive of craft these kinds of cultural products might seem to artists.
This is how you do AI music videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njk2YAgNMnE
Lean into the not-quite-but-almost uncanny-valley-ness. Make it a feature, not a bug.
Released October 2022? That’s a very human piece of art even if the images may have been generated by an algorithm
That is how you do A video but if everyone does this it becomes like those blurred photos that make cities look like a small model and everyone is doing it. I guess this is the issue. Me buying a Toyota and pointing at it is not art, there are too many of them.
I'm possibly retro-fitting my answer here, but that film clip feels like the band, feels like it fits well with the music, I think that's why that clip came to my mind in relation to the produce-generica of the original article.
The clip incorporates images of the band and, as @DoktorDelta pointed out (which I didn't know before), it was trained on art created by some of the band members. It also totally fits the psychedelic rock vibe, not just for this song, but also into the canon of psychedelic rock film clips and general psychedelia media.
They also trained the AI for that video on the band members' own artwork, so the video is focused despite the trippy visuals and avoids copyright issues.
Along the same lines this one leans into it and makes something absolutely unique and wild: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dHAP3E5e2jc
Behind the scenes here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UhOc0VXo7II
I agree though, you can combine art with AI and make something really unique but the majority of art people are pushing with AI is in my opinion being rightfully branded as AI slop.
Reminds me of when autotune came out and everyone and their dog had autotune songs
Unsure if it's just the way they prompted it / coded it, but the output is far too much a literal direct copy of the lyrics. The best music videos have a story arc on the theme of but often not litearlly the lyrics, and start with obscurity and reveal something (following all the literary/story mechanisms)
Consider Amber Run - Found lyrics versus the video, and the story arc of the video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj6V_a1-EUA
Literal music videos are still fun and a valid creative direction, e.g., Vance Joy's "Riptide": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ_1HMAGb4k
Come on, that video is on another level. "All my friends are turning green" (shot of $1 bills), "she's been living on the highest shelf" (woman standing on Juliet balcony), "they come unstuck" (someone pulling twin pole popsicle apart)
For contrast these have "ice cold" (shot of ice cubes), "got chucks on" (shot of shoes), "livin' it up in the city" (shot of city).
The thing about art is that literally everything is a "valid creative direction." But that doesnt make everything immune from derision.
I don’t understand what your point is.
The point is that, at least presently, an algorithm lacks the creativity to meaningfully stimulate an intellectual person, and whatever excuse you give for the decisions that algorithm makes, you should never expect a human being to be more impressed with the algorithm than they are with their human peers.
That’s neat. It especially works because the words are a little bit nonsensical, so interpreting them literally becomes unexpected.
Coincidence that both songs reference Michelle Pfeiffer or was that free connotation at work?
Free association?
That’s not really the same thing.
In an interview, an adult actress was asked about the things she says during scenes. She said she describes what is happening literally at any moment.
This is what LLM models do.
That was sort of like what The Mandalorian dialogue devolved into, with some explaining what's happening right now, and then some explaining what they're about to do.
Once you notice this, it's impossible to not notice it.
> The best music videos have a story arc on the theme of but often not litearlly the lyrics
If the music is crazy popular, you can still do it. See Land Down Under
Weird Al videos are often totally literal and extremely fun as a result.
https://youtu.be/N9qYF9DZPdw?is=tU_8p-hDZv9gjAJ6
I wonder what would happen if you gave the AI video generation tools a widely ranging prompt to generate a video from Weird Al's "Amish Paradise", and then compared it to the actual video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg
I definitely read that as weird ai and was confused when I saw a normal, but dope, video
Wierd Al videos are a parody of an existing property. "White and Nerdy" is a parody of "Riding Dirty" by Chamillionaire, but the lyrics are about nerd stereotypes (as an intentional contrast with black culture as presented in the original,) and a great deal of creative effort is put into making those lyrics humorous while also fitting to the original theme. Nothing about Wierd Al's videos are "totally literal," certainly not in the sense of these AI videos, which are "literal" in the sense of "literally showing what the lyrics are describing."
Sometimes you can fix this by swapping one tracks music video with another, and letting the syncopation happen naturally.
The entire thing was cringeworthy to the core. I kind of enjoyed it though because it perfectly epitomized "AI slop" in the first 30 seconds so wonderfully. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" - show a blonde woman in a gold sequined top! "Livin' it up in the city" - show a shot of a big city!
If anything, the absurd literalism of the video contrasted so perfectly with the (IMO) brilliant clever originality of the lyrics. E.g. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" is actually a not-so-subtle reference to cocaine. Imagine if the lyrics were as stupidly unoriginal as the video ("Now we're all snorting cocaine!!").
Fun fact (if you care): Back in the '90s, pretty much every music video produced in Azerbaijan literally matched the lyrics.
These are awful. It’s like Suno music. Seems convincing if you half listen. As soon as you pay attention you notice all the cracks.
Unless I'm misunderstanding the article, or your comment, the models were responsible for generating the music _videos_.
The music itself is Uptown Funk... which was a very successful song in 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPf0YbXqDm0)
The videos are indeed awful though.
Yes, I know what the music is. The videos are awful. I meant that watching them is an equivalent experience to listening to music generated by Suno.
They are awful because there is no effort put into it. You're missing the point entirely with generative art. Generative art with care and intent is indiscernible from "real" art at this point. You just don't realize it.
Generative art with care and intent is art.
The intent and care is the whole point. It is the difference between slop and art whether generative or not.
I completely agree and this is a very unpopular opinion outside of people who actually are artists.
I think because pretty much all AI generated art is slop. When artists use AI with care and intention in their works, people don’t even realize it’s AI and they don’t care. And that’s fine.
They're just saying that like Suno Music, if you look closely the cracks show. They're not saying the music is AI generated.
The more concerning part is that a much less discerning audience will happily engage with and watch endless hours of AI slop videos. For example what happens if you give a 3 year old a tablet and youtube access to keep clicking on things.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ai-baby-slop-9.7166873
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/us/ai-videos-children-you...
Or for an "Adult" audience, I'm sure you could get an AI to create videos of "OW, My balls!" from Idiocracy.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Dh4l!,f_auto,q_auto:...
https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/D4E22AQEqLntg_DW7vg/fee...
Lmao yeah I’d rather give $100 to a college kid to film a bunch of shit and then splice it together. Would be significantly more interesting.
What college kid would do that for $100? Seems like a lot of work.
They might do it for free if they enjoy it or for a class, but purely for the money, not even close to being worth their time.
Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured. What took this industry decades to advance it taking months in AI. Think the spaghetti Will Smith and now this. Another one people don't mention here but is specific to video is higgsfield ai.
>Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured
The industry haven't matured except until a certain point. Then it declined. Modern visual effects are worse than practical effects in their heyday. They are also worse done than 3D effects in their tasteful early days (like Jurassic Park).
Those old movies with old visual effects are watchable and still enjoyable. This is never good, interesting or enjoyable.
> Those old movies with old visual effects are watchable and still enjoyable.
Id say it’s definitely possible to get spoiled by high production quality - if I went back to the old Star Trek or even the first seasons of the Doctor Who reboot, I’d mostly have to try to enjoy it for the story (then again, Doctor Who has never been overly concerned with presentation, the most fearsome aliens in the galaxy being metal boxes with plungers sticking out of them is quite silly). Same with most CGI in the older movies or even the style of older anime, it can all be a bit hard to watch.
I guess I also experience the same with video games, though to a lesser degree - some like Hidden & Dangerous 2 can still be enjoyed whereas something like Operation Flashpoint would be quite frustrating, though more often due to controls rather than graphics.
Ehh, they did what they could at the time.
Survivorship bias.
Not disagreeing with you that these are unwatchable, but it’s a little rose-tinted to think that (non-AI) slop didn’t exist a long time ago.
It's logical for slop to exist. It's bad when slop production is automated.
At least non-AI slop had a human behind it.
The AI slop isn't making itself either.
Spaghetti Will Smith was 3 years ago, so it’s taking a little longer than months.
Any day now LLMs will develop taste
Don't many people have poor taste?
guess that's what AI trained itself on
It is remixing what the industry created, not advancing past it. OpenAI even ended Sora in under a year. Anthropic doesn't even bother.
Yes, I imagine in six months or so this will be far better.
Nonsense. Ray Harryhausen's work today is still incredible, by any standard.
Spaghetti Will Smith was funny, this only inspires disgust in me: a clear downgrade. We're just getting deeper in the uncanny valley, with no end in sight.
> Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured.
The difference is intent. Watching an old movie, the effects are obviously janky and far from seamless, but the authors had intent and the imperfections are understandable. When an AI jumbles a basic walk animation, it's just weird and soulless. The prompter just didn't want to spend any time doing actual work, so used this slop as a stand-in, when better techniques exists.
Not a fan really. There are certainly uses for AI, but this is lacking something. Personally I think it works best as a filter or applying a style or effect that is difficult otherwise, or generating fancy ambient or abstract textures etc.
People constantly think the music video I created for Zingara's Unlock Your Keys [1] is AI, but it really is just real footage all around, except for a handful of lines / pulse textures that were created in TouchDesigner.
I am really excited for the possibilities that AI can give us in the future but often I find trying to use it generatively I run into the paradox of choice and end up paralyzed!
1: https://xfeeefeee.net/unlock-your-keys/ tribal dance fusion music video, sfw but does show some skin. Uses lots of slow motion ink in water footage for texture as well.
It's an interesting experiment and the results are surprising. I will say that if you're a musician I'd bet anything you can make a way cooler and better music video for $25 and 45 minutes with your friends.
> None of the music videos were great
Glad they acknowledge this.
Curious how much time in addition to tokens this costs. If you have to spend $25 and wait 45 minutes to get a basically unwatchable video, I'm not worried about indie film makers being replaced just yet...
"not great" is a huge understatement
It's sickening we're running out of compute for this shit lol. I don't blame the author though, it is what it is.
If it wasn't this it'd be for mining shitcoins.
Directors and editors using Seedance can fire the film studio.
This is a fundamental shift in how storytelling is funded and made, not in who does the driving.
Same as is happening with code.
>funded and made
I’m curious (admittedly skeptical) what you mean by this. Are you talking about a world where director’s just like…don’t actually make movies and create AI media?
Same thing.
Dude you have been salivating at the thought of seeing developers fired, now film studios, for months now. Give it a rest, this is unhealthy.
This wasn’t possible even a year ago, with the speed of things changing and how much money is spent on movies is there really a doubt that someone will be able to make $100 million movie for less than $1 million in token spend?
> This wasn’t possible even a year ago
Just because it’s possible now, doesn’t mean it’s worth doing.
Do you... Have a lot of professional experience with making $100 million-budget movies?
Even small budget indie flicks, when filmed in LA, have a ridiculous amount of paperwork and dealing with unions. Which isn't surprising, since it's an established industry there. Spending $1 million for each day of filming is totally achievable. I don't have personal experience with this but I know some people in the industry and have had conversations with them. Was background/extra in a movie. An AI director/producer doesn't have to deal with the human aspect, actor and other people's egos and clashing behavior. There are moments of film gold that are the result of human actor's human personalities, so we'd lose out on that though.
I'm classically trained and I honestly can't really tell how these are worse than the human produced ones. They all look kinda the same to me.
Classically trained in music videos??
I'm seeing these type of comments a lot more. A type of comment where it seems like the "user" (commentor) makes a categorically wrong comment about the linked article that would be sort of right if it were a different medium. Clearly whatever was used here triggered on the "music" part, but didn't understand what the article was really about. Typically it goes beyond just not reading the article (as in this case)
I'd assume that it was a bad LLM take, but it looks like the rest of the comments are normal.
No, as in classical music. The analog kind.
So, how is that relevant to the part that is generated by AI?
I honestly can't tell a good music video from a bad one. I don't know what makes a music video "good". These AI generated ones seemed pretty good to me, of the same caliber as those Michael Jackson or "Beez in the trap" things. It's all just butt shaking and sunglasses in Philips Hue lights chanting some meaningless words.
Presumably they went to college for it, yeah. Film schools, eg https://cinema.usc.edu/ or https://tisch.nyu.edu/
This absolutely is the opposite of what I want to see in a music video
Good creator of AI music videos (with human editing etc) is "ALFfx Visual DJ"
Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lWArXcsxYo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn-4lIFhybA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kjUEan_fgM
Most of their videos have a similar retro-futurism look
These still seem awful to me. There are weird events in them that take me out of the moment like the record needle suddenly jumping of the record for no apparent reason. But more so I just hate the AI glaze look of all the characters.
It is jarring to me that most of the dancing seems slightly out of sync with the music. It is like a music video uncanny valley - images look good, but the lack of sync to the sound shatters the illusion entirely.
To me nearly all of the real world dancing looks like that. The dancers could literally be olympic level and I still don't see the connection between their movements and the sounds of the music. Music videos sometimes do sync for me but only on very simple motions, and for whatever reason shuffle dance on video almost always looks great.
How many hours of your life would you say you’ve danced? Have you ever trained at a sport beyond the recreational level, especially highly rhythmic ones like basketball or soccer?
Genuinely curious, because I have friends without any sense of rhythm and it’s interesting how it manifests
When the line was "don't believe me just watch"
And then the clip was literally just an arm wearing a watch!
That's freaking hilarious!
It's like someone playing charades
the giant cartoon dragon with a sign that says "retired" made me guffaw
The results are pretty bad for a top stars music video. But it's pretty impressive for not very important short clips like insert shorts of cheap Ads.
I'm scared because that's the most labor intensive area. Top talents will survive but all the volume industry will collapse.
The cutting edge technology is being tested with pelican drawings and video creation. You may argue that this is just testing, but actual mainstream use of this tech won't be far off from these tests.
OP really figured out the secret to getting on the frontpage. Three frontpages in a row lol
Interesting article, but those videos aren’t. Not even pre-MTV quality.
While checking out the gallery, came across this image:
https://www.tryai.dev/gallery/d3725e9b-1df9-4c10-8a23-2fc705...
There’s something wrong with it, but I just can’t put my paw on the problem.
For fun, I took that image and put it into a few models and asked it "what is wrong with this genAI image?"
Grok fast came up with a lot of minor quibbles and missed the issue.
Grok expert touched on it with a "Limbs/anatomy ambiguity / This creates a slight "how many legs does this cat actually have?" moment." but then moved on to complain about texturing . Later it summarized the issue as "classic "animal + held object" anatomy problem".
Chatgpt 5.6 instant didn't notice it
Chatgpt 5.6 medium didn't notice it and mainly complained about the background being blurry
Chatgpt 5.6 high (46s) "The biggest error is the cat appears to have six paws"
Google AI mode complained about whiskers and feet placement
Only chatgpt high and marginally grok expert had acceptable answers.
They're all pretty bad lol
These videos are far from good, but it's possible to create a decent AI music video if you use a human-in-the-loop workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Km88uAZ4M
If we're talking AI music videos that are amazing with a human in the loop, I really enjoy Snoop Dogg's music video for "Last dance with Mary Jane".
https://youtube.com/watch?v=rseqmSGH7xk&t=59s
> From the start, the production team knew they didn’t want a music video that relied solely on any single technique. With this goal in mind, they worked to blend live action, AI, and a wide range of handcrafted animation styles – 2D, 3D, collage and motion design.
https://lbbonline.com/news/psyop-and-temple-cache-get-surrea...
Unexpected appearance of the NCC-1701 Enterprise at about 0:40 into the video, but no appearance of star wars star destroyers?
Robot characters keep you away from uncanny valley of creepy slightly off AI humans. Still fun though.
Slightly off topic, but earlier today I was bored, having a kibitz with Claude, and I asked if it played chess. I was surprised when it confirmed, with a humble yes and disclaimer of its mediocre strength. I then asked if happened to also play Go, which has been my preference for many years now. I was surprised when it again confirmed yes, but admitted it was even weaker here.
Where I began to feel delightfully uncomfortable was when it asked me if it should build a Go board and start a game. Surely you jest, Mr Claude... I thought.
No. The crazy bastard built a beautiful HTML/SVG board, and before I knew what was going on, there it was. I thought for a moment that fraud rhymes with something. Then before I knew it, I was black (that's courtesy!) and I made my first move expecting nothing, kind of astonished by what was happening. Mind you, I was on a phone. Then it made a move in response, and lo and bloody behold, I was playing a game of Go with Claude, on a 19x19 board made in a few seconds, with formidable aesthetics.
I was enamored enough to overlook that Claude does need some practice. But wow. I guess everyone is impressed by something, but that got me.
No need to take any pot shots at this trash in terms of aesthetic efficacy in earnest, if y'all know what I mean. But as an experiment, it's interesting. There seems to be an odd consistency to all of them, which reveals a kind of internal logic & coherence of sorts that courses throughout any iteration.
Aesthetically, where can you place these? I feel like the late David Lynch could have used some tropes in his unnerving, unsettling dream sequences (a la the intro dream in "Mulholland Drive" where people are so cheery and upbeat that it feels viscerally disturbing).
That's the consistent feeling that I'm left with watching each one, is just a deep, deep unsettled and uneasy feeling. A scowl on my face the whole time trying to make through each one.
I did crack up seeing a martini glass presented to the camera, then float in place on it's own and the presenter resumes holding it with his other hand.
Everything else made me nauseous.
> I did crack up seeing a martini glass presented to the camera, then float in place on it's own
It's just a cheap video-generation model doing its thing. I wonder if the orchestrator model noticed this and tried "Create a scene with a martini glass. Make no mistakes".
There's definitely still room for innovation in custom use cases with AI. I like to write and draw comics, but it's very time consuming to make a finished product. Working with tools in default and you'll have a bad time. You have to really guide it and if you're using a longer story to adapt, it'll compress things and lose context during Thinking. Luma labs was the most interesting tool I've seen so far, but there's still a lot of room for growth
I wonder how much worse this would be if instead of starting with a human-created song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptown_Funk
Start from an entirely AI generated song, and have an AI generated video. We apparently already have an example of such:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWLLIjOTqkE
I always found the Severus Snape - ALWAYS (Live at Hogwarts) video to be really good for AI. The video was probably created by prompting for each scene, instead of letting the model generate the whole thing. It's a cool of example of what's possible nonetheless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlsEDkavoso
That's definitely not "let the AI do everything unsupervised", but many short scenes generated with probably much filtering, and then manually edited together.
It's interesting how the Harry Potter fanbase was one of the first to get on the AI video trend, but not too surprising as there was already plenty of HP fanfiction, and no doubt many who wanted to have them visualised.
Here's another channel with a ton of AI parody videos: https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralDerpMusic
Looks like some auteur-level work on the prompting to keep all of that so tight. That really is great.
Trent Reznor would make a decent Snape...
AI videos as in remotion based videos look much better imo since it can code much better than it can prompt for videos with a coherent narrative
https://youtu.be/uDAeAuYyl0E (parody of Claude announcements) https://youtu.be/cSsVNtGPOIg (recreating a fireship video)
This is incredible! Did you make these yourself? I am familiar with remotion but this is a lot more than just splicing images, etc.
Did you use a skill library to make this?
So AI could generate a great lyrics video.
The GPT ones are strange. The $25 fable one to me is subjectively better than the others. The $100 fable one is too literal and robotic.
The jevons paradox is you need auteurs to curate vignettes or effects and cut or mask them in etc. That's not really different philosophically when software entered art in other ways. I could see errors/glitches lowering in time but I doubt there will be much acceleration.
As someone who has marketed music, shot music videos, directed music videos, cut music videos together from stock footage: you don’t need auteurs.
You did back when MTV made songs big.
No one actually pays attention to the details of music videos any more. It’s visual chewing gum at best. The reality is that now, if you have something half decent, nice colours, nice lighting and a wee bit of a story, no one is going to care.
The only other route is a huge budget spectacular - but you only get the huge budgets if you label lends you the money to make a huge budget video because they think it will increase the amount of money they make - while extending the amount of time it takes you to recoup.
Ultimately, now, it is just another social media asset, so promo videos are built with that in mind.
None of these would cut it.
> No one actually pays attention to the details of music videos any more. It’s visual chewing gum at best.
Hilarious to hear someone in industry blame their audience for the commodification of the medium. Is every industry like this? Surely nobody goes into creative fields thinking “I can’t wait to feed the masses slop!” Who’s killing our spirit?
He's not wrong though. In the 80s I'd watch video shows and over the course of a week I'd probably see some videos 10 times. And it wasn't background filler - I'd actually be sitting in a chair/couch and watching the videos. Kids don't do this anymore. First many/most songs are made popular through TikTok memes, not videos. And videos really are mostly just played in the background as they do other stuff. No one is just tuning into Yo MTV Raps or Headbangers Ball anymore.
Video killed the radio star. Streaming killed the video. Sure, lots of people use youtube for consuming music, but how many of them truly are watching the videos or just have them on while they do something else without seeing the images? With that in mind, putting anything on screen is just checking the boxes
I think short-form video has killed many things. There's just too much dopamine stimulation.
Although arguably music videos have always been a sort of short-form-video - takes strung together enough to keep you engaged through the song.
No, that’s not the fault of the audience.
> need auteurs to curate vignettes or effects and cut or mask them in etc
The problem is that reliable, repeatable professional-grade commercial art and design sensibilities happen in full-time careers. It’s entirely different than fine art, where intense self-exploration and experimentation are a very viable option.
These tools are exacerbating an already difficult creative job market so there’s no reasonable path to get those skills. Our creative professional pipeline is fundamentally broken.
The same thing is happening in software, I see the ladder pulled up and don't feel vulnerable as senior staff. If anything, we face a massive and increasing competency crisis in computing because there is a cult dumb enough to believe acceleration and doomer cases for LLMs.
Regular music videos (including the writing/recording) can easily go into 6 figures. I wonder what the $200,000 AI music videos looks like.
You don't need to spend $200k, because results can be bad for cheap.
https://youtu.be/HDdsKJl92H4
Though we're finding the studios contracted to do this can bill $50k. I know several studios that previously billed clients six figures for ad campaigns (P&G, HBO, pharma, etc.) are now charging five figures and winning a lion share of the bids now.
Not sure why Wan is the focus of this article and Seedance is a footnote. Wan/LTX/open models are significantly behind Chinese closed source models. (And the Chinese have left the Western models in the dust.)
I wouldn't do anything production grade in Wan.
3 of the 4 agents used Wan, the other one used Seedance.
But why spend the same amount of money on AI instead of humans? My guess is that shooting a music video is probably fun for a lot of artists. And with AI the result is not predictable and might be inconsistent in the dumbest ways.
My guess is that an AI music video would have to be a lot cheaper for artists to consider it outside of making one just because you want to make an AI music video.
Okay, then a $50,000 music video.
The idea is to reduce production cost and therefore more plentiful/accessible.
Exactly the same
Seems like if you build some more scaffolding around it, it wouldn't be bad. I think AI video isn't quite there yet so you probably would want to lean into that. For example you could ask for an animated or cartoon music video so the real shots don't look weird. Also if you gave it some guidance on what a good music video is like it would probably help as well. But yeah idk may be that's not the goal here.
I did let Claude Code Opus + OpenRouter API Key (limited to 25EUR) create an an Arthouse Video about "Is AI art or can it go?"
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E6XofKqFYeQ
I like the scene with the hands.
Spice 1 released an AI video for Jealous Got Me Strapped. Got a young AI Spice 1 and Tupac. I see on his channel he put out another AI video in 2024.
https://youtu.be/j36hjNuAIWQ
Embarrassing!
You can still delete this, there is time.
What's embarrassing?
The post itself was technically useful, I found, and they posted their entire project to GitHub https://github.com/hershalb/music-video-arena which I think makes it worthy of a HN post and discussion since it is technical and at least IMHO a very interesting post.
The outputs
Please repeat this with models from MiniMax:
https://www.minimax.io/news/minimax-hailuo-23
(No affiliation, I just want to see how well they work).
Even their demo clips are soundly in the uncanny valley, and I assume normal folks using it and having to pay for each clip will have generally worse results.
These videos are awful.
Can I just say that they look awful?
Awesome! Other commenters are negative but I'm very excited to welcome AI into the artistic community. The more the merrier. Can't wait to see what they come up with!
Did it misunderstand "don't believe me just watch" and put a bunch of washing machines in on the Fable 5 $100 at about 1:20?
GPT is missing a beat
Pretty neat that the gallery of videos plays from where the previous one was paused. Nice UX.
Wow. These are horrible. Sort of refreshing. I thought video was better than this now, but I guess not.
Video can be good if you stick to a garden path of simple scenes with tons of examples in the training material and not a ton of motion between overlapping objects in a scene, and don't really care too much about specifics.
As soon as you want something very specific, or something novel, or anything with a lot of moving objects/people, it falls apart.
Video is better. The models just chose older video models which are not SOTA
Exact same impression
How well do these models do producing a proof-of-life video? Asking for a friend.
…is your friend… er, was your friend, a US Senator, by any chance?
The fable $25 version was the best.
Skip the Claude Fable 5 $25 video to 1:42. The disembodied Adams' Family hand is on the job.
It's Wan video, which is a shitty video model.
The OP would exclusively be using Seedance 4k if they were serious about this.
It was the agents job to pick the model.
I think that a lot of posters here are missing the point - this is just the tip of the iceberg, and even simple improvements in prompting (infer the meaning of the lyrics, then generate footage related to that) would create a better result.
There is no going back from this, only forwards, for better or worse.
I mediocrity was a visual style.
This is my favorite AI generated (or assisted?) music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctBpVI6lRyo
Passable as an episode of Robot Chicken.
Recurring characters drift between shots, and none of the videos hold a coherent storyline from start to finish.
Stuff like veo 3 can't always hold a coherent storyline for 8s. It's asking too much to expect a whole, coherent music video.
They are terrible. Perhaps if one on purposely prompts for a weird imaginary, the result could be less awful even acceptable, like that famous Gucci ad. These videos instead are common scenes with the super cringey AI artifacts.
I'm fascinated by some of the comments in here, that the videos are "awful," "far from good," "embarrassing," etc.
This is technology that was unthinkable before just a couple of years ago. Photorealistic video generated by typing out a description of what you want to see is something from a sci-fi movie. I must be dreaming, this can't be real.
I took a screenshot in the middle of a video, and it's indistinguishable from a photograph: https://imgur.com/a/TyNbd7E
I don't know, maybe I'm just old. I remember hacking the hidden iframe trick to make ajax-style file uploads work in IE7. The advancements I've watched unfold in the past couple of years are still hard to wrap my head around.
Louis CK:
>I was on an airplane and there was high speed internet on the airplane… it’s fast, I’m watching YouTube clips, I’m on an airplane. It breaks down, they apologize, and the guy next to me is like “This is bullshit..."
>Like how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago?
>Flying is the worst one, people come back from flights, they tell you their story and it’s a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany.
>"It was the worst day of my life! First of all we didn’t board for 20 minutes. And then we got on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there."
>Oh really, what happened next, did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero?
>You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should be constantly going ‘oh my God, wow!’
>You’re sitting in a chair in the sky
>….Here’s the thing, people say there are delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in 5 hours. That used to take 30 years. And a bunch of you would die on the way there. And have a baby. You’d be a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and you take a shit and you’re home.
https://youtu.be/nUBtKNzoKZ4?si=yaCJhTLiXkPyksbg - his delivery starts at around 2:00 but he starts with additional jokes.
No one is criticizing the photorealistic video generation. Yes, AI has gotten very good at that, I don't think anyone is disputing that.
At some point you have to move past your astonishment at the technical achievement alone and judge the result for what it is, on its own merits, as if a human had made it. Especially when the goal of using generative AI is to remove as many human creators and as much human effort from the creative process as possible, and to have as much "art" be as fully AI generated as possible.
People are criticizing these videos because they aren't good. As "art." Which is a problem if this is what all art is supposed to be become.
I don't know how much WickedAI is putting into creating their videos, but if you want examples that aren't terrible, https://youtube.com/@wickedai
As a clanker-apologist I gotta say this is the strawman of AI slop brought to life. Letting the machine do literally everything without even supervision and see how it turns out? No surprise at all the results are so bad.
My fav AI video is still Post-Scarcity Blues from a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_t3h2AZ0KY There have been others I've enjoyed since then. But, that one stands out in memory. Work warning: it is occasionally just a bit spicy.
Pretty amazing stuff and evocative. Thanks for sharing to put things in perspective.
These are pretty terrible, but for me there were at least a few moments where they genuinely became "so bad they're awesome". They actually re-enforced an idea I keep coming back to: sometime soon a real artist is going to use AI to make something amazing, not by aiming for flawless "realism" or some kind of pastiche slop, but by leaning into the weirdness that often comes out of AI.
Wow. These are all terrible. Music video producers can breathe a sigh of relief.
claude’s is bad and chatgpt’s is horrific
I don't care that the results are technologically impressive, the automation of creativity is dystopian. As I watched these videos and tried to compare what different AIs can do with similar budgets, is struck me to how utterly soulless and unenjoyable this whole thing is.
AI has plenty of utility, but this isn't one of them. If anything, I want to see AI automate all of the tedious stuff so that human beings can focus more deeply on art and culture. Automating art and culture is anti-human.
No effort went into that. No talent went into that. The creator doesn't care about the outcome. Nobody wants to watch it. Fucken A, brilliant. The intelligence is artificial.
Please stop using AI for creative work. This is utterly abysmal.
Welcome to the Age of the Plateau. Enjoy your stay, everything is very mid, but it’s oh so cheap to make.
These are getting really good. Much more interesting than the average music video already.
can't tell if sarcasm or just zero taste...
I only glanced at the video thumbnails and was repulsed. But then again, I'm not the target audience for this garbage.