Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Previous week
Not a sneer, but I recently saw Ari K's AI generated video of Trump in his golden ballroom. It's quite good, here is the channel: https://m.youtube.com/@AriKuschnir
Looking at his other videos, he is a talented story teller. Most videos are about two minutes, has numerous short shots of a few seconds and a voice over or music connecting the shots. So presumably he generates the shots, splice them together and puts the soundtrack over the it. Most of the short stories are dreamlike. To the extent it has characters it's famous people (getting their comeuppance), so even though they look a bit different in each shot, it's easy to keep track.
I think it's interesting because by doing what can be done with the tools, it illustrates the limitations. In the hands of a good story teller you essentially get an illustration for a short radio play (and the radio play needs to be recorded separately, and you can't show actors talking). Because of the bubble and investor bux, it can right now be done on a shoe string budget.
But that's all! Are illustrated radio plays replacing feature films? No, so this remains a niche use case. And once the investor bux dries up, potentially an expensive one. Not something to build a billion dollar industry on.
I'm sorry, I believe that there are legitimate artistic uses of neural networks (and they're never about cutting budget), but this is just fascist aesthetics repurposed to serve anti-Trump messaging. Do not like.
Where are you getting "talented storyteller" from? The whole thing is some heavy-handed ham-fisted fever dream that I would expect from some liberal engagement farm. And "illustrated radio play?" What are you even on about.
The video looks like garbage and the rapid cuts are severely grating. The construction is lackluster and the content is garbage. It appears you have brought us a piece of the internet to throw into the garbage bin.
What I'm on about? I think the english term is "damning with faint praise". If this is the best that can be done, which I am arguing, there isn't much use to it.
The latest one is an outlier, in that it doesn't have a voice over, so it isn't a radio play. Most of the other ones I have seen has a voice track that tells the story. They are also more dreamlike which matches the prediction of what kind of story can be told from one of the comment threads here (from one of the pivot videos about VEO).
The latest one (and the only one to gone viral) is actually interesting in that he is trying to tell a visual story, but with the medium he has chosen he can't have a novel character as protagonist really, or dialogue, which is why it is limited to a very simple story.
I'm interested in why it is so limited, because I think that tells a lot of the limitations of the technology as such.
Yeah. I think there's definitely something interesting here, but it's mostly in how badly compromised the final pproduct ends up being in order to support the AI tools.
How much energy was used to produce that video?