SXSW Audiences Loudly Boo Festival Videos Touting the Virtues of AI (variety.com) 65
At this year's SXSW festival, discussions on artificial intelligence's future sparked controversy during screenings of premiers like "The Fall Guy" and "Immaculate." Variety reports: The quick-turnaround video editors at SXSW cut a daily sizzle reel highlighting previous panels, premieres and other events, which then runs before festival screenings. On Tuesday, the fourth edition of that daily video focused on the wide variety of keynotes and panelists in town to discuss AI. Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount -- many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI -- decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently.
Those boos grew the loudest toward the end of the sizzle, when OpenAI's VP of consumer product and head of ChatGPT Peter Deng declares on camera, "I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human." That is not a popular opinion. Deng participated in the session "AI and Humanity's Co-evolution with Open AI's Head of Chat GPT" on Monday, moderated by Signal Fire's consumer VC and former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine. Constine is at the start of the video with another soundbite that drew jeers: "SXSW has always been the digital culture makers, and I think if you look out into this room, you can see that AI is a culture." [...] The groans also grew loud for Magic Leap's founder Rony Abovitz, who gave this advice during the "Storyworlds, Hour Blue & Amplifying Humanity Ethically with AI" panel: "Be one of those people who leverages AI, don't be run over by it." You can hear some of the reactions from festival attendees here, here, and here.
Those boos grew the loudest toward the end of the sizzle, when OpenAI's VP of consumer product and head of ChatGPT Peter Deng declares on camera, "I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human." That is not a popular opinion. Deng participated in the session "AI and Humanity's Co-evolution with Open AI's Head of Chat GPT" on Monday, moderated by Signal Fire's consumer VC and former TechCrunch editor Josh Constine. Constine is at the start of the video with another soundbite that drew jeers: "SXSW has always been the digital culture makers, and I think if you look out into this room, you can see that AI is a culture." [...] The groans also grew loud for Magic Leap's founder Rony Abovitz, who gave this advice during the "Storyworlds, Hour Blue & Amplifying Humanity Ethically with AI" panel: "Be one of those people who leverages AI, don't be run over by it." You can hear some of the reactions from festival attendees here, here, and here.
You can boo all you like (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:You can boo all you like (Score:5, Insightful)
I know how this is going to be modded because uncomfortable truth is uncomfortable, but I got karma to burn so do your worst.
I can say about AI only what I had to say about unqualified offshore work: If you are threatened by something that does a shoddy job at what you do, there's something wrong on a different level.
Because either quality just doesn't matter whatsoever, or you're doing a shoddy job yourself so nothing of value is lost by handing it to someone doing a crappy job cheaper.
And considering how the writing in some of the more recent movies was, I cannot say that I'll expect a lot of quality loss if the task is taken over by some half-baked AI doing a mediocre, derivative job, probably just rehashing some of the hits of the past and mashing it together with other crap, adding a dash of contemporary "must have" (at least according to studios, because you have to cram in some ethnicities for that all important foreign market, because I would clearly only watch a movie if someone like me is in it...)...
And I fail to see the difference to the crap that is already produced by human writers.
So bluntly, if your job is threatened by something that does a crappy job at what it does, I think the problem is that you're not really doing a better job, or that nobody wants a better job done.
So blame the person currently holding that job for not doing a better job, or blame the customer for not demanding a better job. Your pick.
Re: You can boo all you like (Score:5, Insightful)
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Unfortunately, your comment is all but worthless, since it focused on the sector that isn't being seriously threatened. AI can't really create original writing very well.
The cynic in me would point out that neither can the people who currently write scripts in Hollywood.
At all. It, as you pointed out, ends up as remashed, unoriginal garbage.
Yes and yes. The argument stands.
Re: You can boo all you like (Score:5, Funny)
Read the summary again "the audiences at the Paramount -- many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI -- decided to boo the video" - it was precisely about original writing.
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We must remember that SXSW attendees are by and large douchebags by nature.
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Unfortunately, your comment is all but worthless, since it focused on the sector that isn't being seriously threatened. AI can't really create original writing very well. At all. It, as you pointed out, ends up as remashed, unoriginal garbage.
Remashed and unoriginal garbage is what we're being given by live actors and writers already. Endless reboots and swiss cheese bad writing.
The exceptions prove the rule. The Barbenhimer phenomenon then Godzilla minus one capping it off were a punch in the gut to the Disney Empire that managed to lose a billion dollars in 2023.
Barbie - a bit of silly fluff. But a lot of women went to see it after the same demographic had no interest in the modern female superhero movies. Its main feature I liked was it
Re: You can boo all you like (Score:2)
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Yeah, and I wonder WHO would produce better animations with it - the monkey behind the keyboard, or the artist behind the keyboard who can be nitpicky and re-render frames, especially with all of the artistic based guidance tools out there.... The sheer amount of stuff you can do as an artist to guide Stable Diffusion for example is staggering.
Too bad, for the most part, the artists are either just sitting there drooling with their fingers shoved in their ears hoping it goes away, or autistically screechin
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I know how this is going to be modded because uncomfortable truth is uncomfortable, but I got karma to burn so do your worst.
I can say about AI only what I had to say about unqualified offshore work: If you are threatened by something that does a shoddy job at what you do, there's something wrong on a different level.
Because either quality just doesn't matter whatsoever, or you're doing a shoddy job yourself so nothing of value is lost by handing it to someone doing a crappy job cheaper.
And considering how the writing in some of the more recent movies was, I cannot say that I'll expect a lot of quality loss if the task is taken over by some half-baked AI doing a mediocre, derivative job, probably just rehashing some of the hits of the past and mashing it together with other crap, adding a dash of contemporary "must have" (at least according to studios, because you have to cram in some ethnicities for that all important foreign market, because I would clearly only watch a movie if someone like me is in it...)...
And I fail to see the difference to the crap that is already produced by human writers.
So bluntly, if your job is threatened by something that does a crappy job at what it does, I think the problem is that you're not really doing a better job, or that nobody wants a better job done.
So blame the person currently holding that job for not doing a better job, or blame the customer for not demanding a better job. Your pick.
There is a lot of truth to this point. A number of years of my career were funded by companies fixing poorly off shored software projects. I bet a fair number of jobs will be provided to find and fix mistakes made by AI created products. Time and money that could be significantly reduced by doing things properly in the first place.
Re:You can boo all you like (Score:5, Insightful)
Time and money that could be significantly reduced by doing things properly in the first place.
I've heard many people say this as if it's a proven fact. It isn't.
In many situations, a crappy first pass saves time.
For instance, machine translations save time for human translators. They use an LLM to do a first pass and then go through and correct the mistakes, saving 40-60% of the time it would take to translate the entire text directly.
The same is true for LLM coding. Tools like Copilot make blunders, but they often produce a good framework, and many sections are correct, saving about half the time a competent coder would need to write from scratch. LLMs can also help with writing unit tests.
The same will likely be true in show business. LLMs will write scripts and lyrics requiring touchups but less human effort. Generative AI is already having a big effect on CGI.
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Time and money that could be significantly reduced by doing things properly in the first place.
I've heard many people say this as if it's a proven fact. It isn't.
In many situations, a crappy first pass saves time.
For instance, machine translations save time for human translators. They use an LLM to do a first pass and then go through and correct the mistakes, saving 40-60% of the time it would take to translate the entire text directly.
The same is true for LLM coding. Tools like Copilot make blunders, but they often produce a good framework, and many sections are correct, saving about half the time a competent coder would need to write from scratch. LLMs can also help with writing unit tests.
The same will likely be true in show business. LLMs will write scripts and lyrics requiring touchups but less human effort. Generative AI is already having a big effect on CGI.
It was in the case I worked through (anecdotal I know). The outsourcing was for safety critical software testing. The result was a massive amount of manual testing that took hundreds of hours to run, failed to produce the proper software coverage, and in some cases failed to run properly. I heard from people dealing with the results that they asked the outsourcing company about the tests that failed to run, the response was along the lines of "we didn't think you would look at that".
In order to fix the t
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Re:You can boo all you like (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm in IT security. If AI really takes over writing code, my job security is solid until retirement. If you think cargo-cult programmers that copy/paste off Stackexchange produce insecure, crappy code, you haven't seen nothing yet when it comes to the crap AI barfs out.
Re:You can boo all you like (Score:4, Informative)
As an experiment we used AI to convert code from one language to another. At first I was impressed. Looking through the code it did some very appropriate and clever things. Wait. It doesn't even compile. It's missing major portions. It is a mess.
So, yes, AI generates lots of bad code and doesn't warn you.
Re:You can boo all you like (Score:4, Interesting)
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You were WAY premature. Asking an LLM to do something that detailed, specific, and unforgiving of errors was silly. It's like demanding a toddler explain the nuances of the Oxford Comma because they've successfully used a conjunction for the first time.
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Even the simple stuff doesn't work properly. While not quite "AI", I had fun with Visual Studio's code analyser the other day.
object.Property = new List<string> { value };
The code analyser cheerily suggested that I replace this with:
object.Property = [value];
This immediately produced red squiggles and refused to compile.
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I'm in web development. I haven't seen that AI can produce code that is much better than Microsoft FrontPage from 1996.
Frontpage did not kill web development as much as the fearmongering said it would.
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If anything, Frontpage created a lot of security jobs, along with web designer jobs that fixed the worst blunders.
Re:You can boo all you like (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You can boo all you like (Score:4, Insightful)
Our jobs are threatened by people in charge
Nope. When you're talking about necessities, that's true. When you're talking about luxuries like movies, the consumer is entirely at fault for being willing to go see a stinking pile of shit.
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Art will never really be a luxury. There's always people who want to create art and who are happy if you hand them whatever you can spare so they can continue creating it.
Yes, that's not a Hollywood blockbuster and a AAA game. But let's face it, they have stopped being art a long, long time ago.
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Commercial art is still art, although it may also be crap. However, that doesn't differentiate it from other art.
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Commercial art is still art, although it may also be crap. However, that doesn't differentiate it from other art.
You are correct. Some people want to differentiate between so called "high art" and illustration AKA commercial art. I tend to put them in the same class. Probably my education and experience (I minored in art with an emphasis on photography and graphic arts)
A person still has to have the talent, the eye, and the skillset. As well, there is a real crossover effect. The illustrators in my department mostly created "high art" on the side. Each side influenced the other.
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My mother was a graphic artist. She was also generally artistic, and created art recreationally. She was also a pretty good photographer.
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'if you hand them whatever you can spare"
And that, right there, is why it's a luxury. Luxuries take whatever you can spare. Needs don't care if you can spare it or not.
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Entertainment and the arts should not be a luxury. Unless you think life should be all work and no play.
Commercial art is art, but it's not the only kind of art.
Going to see a movie is a kind of play, but it's not the only kind of play.
Entertainment existed before the corporation.
Re:You can boo all you like (Score:4, Informative)
Our jobs are threatened by people who think crappy is "good enough". If you stop buying the crappy AI slurry, they have to stop producing it. As long as you got "eh, whatever, I'll just adapt and play along", they get away with it.
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You alone sure are not the deciding factor. But people are not dumb. They want to get their money's worth out of something. Some are satisfied with less than others, but nobody is going to hand over money for nothing.
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Our jobs are threatened by people in charge that decide that a cheap machine that does a crappier job should be replace us, so that they get more rich. We could also blame them, no? Why do they not feature in your comment? All these CEOs and talking heads are happy clappy with AI because there's nobody that will choose to replace them, even if their job is most certainly replaceable, especially the TED talk handwaivy fluff.
Oh, relax. This is movies. Your thesis falls apart when considering that today's movies in general are worse than AI.
The writing is bad. clumsy, unbelievable, with poorly injected politics. Unlikeable characters with lame character arcs that usually are some version if "I am a perfect person who has been suppressed by some monolithic evil group, and my perfection will do it. That's it.
If AI takes over that swill, it will because it deserves to. And my experience so far is that aside from the occasional
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Re: You can boo all you like (Score:2)
And when the AI does a better job than any human ever could, who do we complain to?
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I know how this is going to be modded because uncomfortable truth is uncomfortable, but I got karma to burn so do your worst.
I can say about AI only what I had to say about unqualified offshore work: If you are threatened by something that does a shoddy job at what you do, there's something wrong on a different level.
Because either quality just doesn't matter whatsoever, or you're doing a shoddy job yourself so nothing of value is lost by handing it to someone doing a crappy job cheaper.
And considering how the writing in some of the more recent movies was, I cannot say that I'll expect a lot of quality loss if the task is taken over by some half-baked AI doing a mediocre, derivative job.....
O gawd - a thousand times this!
The present state of moviemaking makes AI generated scripting several levels better than the lame stuff put out now. Badly written, with clumsy politics and weird and non-credible gender reversals that are unintentionally amusing. Characters that are not able to be empathized with because they aren't even likeable - with character arcs that don't allow for much growth.
And the weirdest thing is in the case of the superhero movies, telling the fanbase to eat shit and die,
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AI / ML / AGI / Whatever it's called next still has a long way to go before it can hit alot of those in the "knowledge sectors". It may get there eventually - with eventually being anything from a year to a few decades, I guess.
Currently it's mostly a crap shoot with things which may or may not work properly.
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We have arrived at pablum a long, long time ago. Ever turned on the TV in the afternoon? Where "scripted reality TV" took over?
I don't know about the US, over here it's the staple of afternoon TV. What happens is that they get a few unemployed people, put 50 bucks in their hands and tell them to act like they're some sort of insane idiot. Like being addicted to cheese [youtube.com], which got even a sequel where that cheese-addict got lactose-intolerant and had to find an outlet [youtube.com].
I needn't go on, do I? That's already insa
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Yeah, I'm not exactly feeling threatened by AI at this point. If you ask Bard or ChatGPT to write code for you, it's usually at the quality level of a college intern. Sure, it's (mostly) syntactically correct, but it's often not the most elegant, efficient, or secure solution.
If someone was dumb enough to put this code into production as written, they're probably going to need to hire a consultant later on to fix it.
If I was a first level IT help desk person who basically tells people to turn their devices
I agree, and I've mostly given up the argument. (Score:2)
"Because either quality just doesn't matter whatsoever, or you're doing a shoddy job yourself so nothing of value is lost by handing it to someone doing a crappy job cheaper."
As a lifelong musician (personally, not professionally), I've been saying for a few years that people don't understand what gap AI will fill first. To date, there's no question that AI-produced music is not as good as even what a mediocre professional musician/composer will produce. The gap is large.
The real question is what is requir
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Never underestimate the power of cheaper work. Never. Even if it means the quality is awful, short-sighted and/or desperate managers will go for cheaper 9 out of 10 times.
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Not only managers, consumers, too. If confronted with cheaper crap, they will buy it, even if they know that it's junk that falls apart in a few weeks. Because it's so much cheaper.
Re: You can boo all you like (Score:2)
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Within 10 years it will be a big problem, as you can't force companies to use humans for work that AI and general purpose robots are much better, and MUCH cheaper, at.
Not going to happen. It hasn't happen yet and nothing indicates that AI is going this way.
All it is a friend for the idiots and a crutch for the incompetent.
AI will do nothing but race us even faster to the bottom line.
Re: You can boo all you like (Score:2)
Not sure what they expected... (Score:5, Insightful)
Are they just high on their own supply and didn't realize how it would go over? Is forcing the soon-to-be-replaced labor units to watch videos with you rambling about how brilliant their obsolescence is part of the fun?
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> Is forcing the soon-to-be-replaced labor units to watch videos with you rambling about how brilliant their obsolescence is part of the fun?
Probably true but also if they feel the need to engage in propaganda two things must be true:
- they know their audience is not (yet?) persuaded
- their audience has power they must contend with.
Failing either no propaganda is necessary.
Not a popular sentiment (Score:4, Insightful)
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What kind of cucks attend these conferences?
I think you forget the meaning of words. They don't want to sit by and watch someone else take their job.
A tech C-Suiter, talking about being more human? (Score:3)
I don't know, man. At this point, a tech CxO wanting to speak with anybody about how anything is going to make us better humans just screams that somebody's thinking outside their comfort zone. It'd be like asking a marketing person how to become more attached to your soul. Or a sales person how to be more ethical in business dealings. It's a subject they are completely unfamiliar with, so of course they think their machines are conduits to humanity. The levels of WTF reach beyond epic when attempting to contemplate the disassociation between speaker and audience in such a case.
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I don't know, man. At this point, a tech CxO wanting to speak with anybody about how anything is going to make us better humans just screams that somebody's thinking outside their comfort zone. It'd be like asking a marketing person how to become more attached to your soul. Or a sales person how to be more ethical in business dealings. It's a subject they are completely unfamiliar with, so of course they think their machines are conduits to humanity. The levels of WTF reach beyond epic when attempting to contemplate the disassociation between speaker and audience in such a case.
You aren't going to want to hear this, but they are humans too, and are subject to the nice person/bad person business just like the rest of humanity.
I've worked with CEO's who are the nicest people you'd ever want to meet, and general workers who are clinical psychopaths who amazingly are not in prison.
As well, I've worked with a lot of people who use the meme of CEO = evil, lower person = good as a personal crutch to lay claim to their status as a good person, by virtue of their lower status.
I do
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I don't know, man. At this point, a tech CxO wanting to speak with anybody about how anything is going to make us better humans just screams that somebody's thinking outside their comfort zone. It'd be like asking a marketing person how to become more attached to your soul. Or a sales person how to be more ethical in business dealings. It's a subject they are completely unfamiliar with, so of course they think their machines are conduits to humanity. The levels of WTF reach beyond epic when attempting to contemplate the disassociation between speaker and audience in such a case.
You aren't going to want to hear this, but they are humans too, and are subject to the nice person/bad person business just like the rest of humanity.
I've worked with CEO's who are the nicest people you'd ever want to meet, and general workers who are clinical psychopaths who amazingly are not in prison.
As well, I've worked with a lot of people who use the meme of CEO = evil, lower person = good as a personal crutch to lay claim to their status as a good person, by virtue of their lower status.
I don't know if that shoe fits, but if it helps you to sleep at night, have at it.
Oh, I've met plenty of low-rungers that are pure evil incarnate. And while I've met many C-suiters that can behave like nice, personable folks in person. But, deep down, they still support some truly evil bullshit. Every one of them I've ever met, even the really nice ones, love shitting down the necks of their workers.
And I sure as hell won't claim to be a good person. I'm a broken, listless nothing. Good and evil don't touch my rung on the ladder of human consciousness.
Magic Leap? (Score:2)
The rest of the speakers I understand but the Magic Leap guy? I mean, that company is 100% hype and all let down.
"Be one of those people who leverages AI, don't be run over by it."
Translation: we want to run you over with AI.
The booing will turn into blades sharpening sounds (Score:3)
At the moment, a few people directly impacted by AI are voicing their discontent.
But when AI is truly deployed on a massive scale and creates mass unemployment and destroy society - which will happen, and sooner rather than later, make no doubt about it - the booing will turn into rioting, and those OpenAI exec had better hide because their lives will be in danger.
As for "Be one of those people who leverages AI, don't be run over by it", that's beyond insulting and patronizing: how many truck drivers, accountants or primary school teachers will be able transition and master the fine art of getting an AI to produce anything other than mediocre garbage, assuming they're even needed at all for that task?
It's blindingly obvious that for every job AI creates, AI will destroy 100. It's always been like that when technology displaces jobs that become redundant. The difference with previous game-changing technologies is that this one will not impact just one industry: it will impact the whole of society at once. And society will not accept it idly and peacefully.
I wouldn't want to be in Sam Altmann's shoes when the shit hits the fan. That man will have to hide harder than Salman Rushdie for the rest of his life.
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next 1% question to ChatGPT: How can I get millions of people to put these bomb collars on?
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I tried to heal that boy over there and failed.... then this woman came and did it like it was nothing.
Either I am obsolete or she must me a witch...
Burn the witch!
People never had the humanity they always claimed.
Boooo (Score:2)
Art is one of the most beautiful, pure and uncorrupted methods of communication that humans have. AI is a giant turd smeared on that canvas.
OpenAI is not your friend (Score:2)
LMAO (Score:3)