Comment by kkoncevicius

Comment by kkoncevicius a day ago

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For me posts like these go in the right direction but stop mid-way.

Sure, at first you will want an AI agent to draft emails that you review and approve before sending. But later you will get bored of approving AI drafts and want another agent to review them automatically. And then - you are no longer replying to your own emails.

Or to take another example where I've seen people excited about video-generation and thinking they will be using that for creating their own movies and video games. But if AI is advanced enough - why would someone go see a movie that you generated instead of generating a movie for himself. Just go with "AI - create an hour-long action movie that is set in ancient japan, has a love triangle between the main characters, contains some light horror elements, and a few unexpected twists in the story". And then watch that yourself.

Seems like many, if not all, AI applications, when taken to the limit, reduce the need of interaction between humans to 0.

petekoomen a day ago

Do you want an LLM writing and sending important messages for you? I don't, and I don't know anyone who does. I want to reduce time I spend managing my inbox, archiving stuff I don't need to read, endless scheduling back-and-forths, etc. etc.

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gameman144 a day ago

> Sure, at first you will want an AI agent to draft emails that you review and approve before sending. But later you will get bored of approving AI drafts and want another agent to review them automatically.

This doesn't seem to me like an obvious next step. I would definitely want my reviewing step to be as simple as possible, but removing yourself from the loop entirely is a qualitatively different thing.

As an analogue, I like to cook dinner but I am only an okay cook -- I like my recipes to be as simple as possible, and I'm fine with using premade spice mixes and such. Now the simplest recipe is zero steps: I order food from a restaurant, but I don't enjoy that as much because it is (similar to having AI approve and send your emails without you) a qualitatively different experience.

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  • hiatus a day ago

    > I order food from a restaurant, but I don't enjoy that as much because it is (similar to having AI approve and send your emails without you) a qualitatively different experience.

    What do you like less about it? Is it the smells of cooking, the family checking on the food as it cooks, the joy of realizing your own handiwork?

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    • gameman144 a day ago

      For me, I think it's the act of control and creation -- I can put the things I like together and try new thing and experiment with techniques or ingredients, whereas ordering from a restaurant I'll only be seeing the end results from someone else's experimentation or experience.

      I don't dislike restaurants, to be clear -- I love a dinner out. It just scratches a different itch than cooking a meal at home.

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  • bambax a day ago

    The cooking analogy is good. I too love to cook, and what I make is often not as good as what I could order, but that's not the point. The point is to cook.

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saalweachter a day ago

So here's where this all feels a bit "build me a better horse" to me.

You're telling an AI agent to communicate specific information on your behalf to specific people. "Tell my boss I can't come in today", "Talk to comcast about the double billing".

That's not abstracted away enough.

"My daughter's sick, rearrange my schedule." Let the agent handle rebooking appointments and figuring out who to notify and how. Let their agent figure out how to convey that information to them. "Comcast double-billed me." Resolve the situation. Communicate with Comcast, get it fixed, if they don't get it fixed, communicate with the bank or the lawyer.

If we're going to have AI agents, they should be AI agents, not AI chatbots playing a game of telephone over email with other people and AI chatbots.

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  • aaronbaugher a day ago

    Exactly. To be a useful assistant, it has to be more proactive than they're currently able to be.

    Someone posted here about an AI assistant he wrote that sounded really cool. But when I looked at it, he had written a bunch of scripts that fetched things like his daily calendar appointments and the weather forecast, fed them to an AI to be worded in a particular way, and then emailed the results to him. So his scripts were doing all the work except wording the messages differently. That's a neat toy, but it's not really an assistant.

    An assistant could be told, "Here's a calendar. Track my appointments, enter new ones I tell you about, and remind me of upcoming ones." I can script all that, but then I don't need the AI. I'm trying to figure out how to leverage AI to do something actually new in that area, and not having much luck yet.

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a4isms a day ago

Short reply:

I agree, it only goes half-way.

Elaboration:

I like the "horseless carriage" metaphor for the transitionary or hybrid periods between the extinction of one way of doing things and the full embrace of the new way of doing things. I use a similar metaphor: "Faster horses," which is exactly what this essay shows: You're still reading and writing emails, but the selling feature isn't "less email," it's "Get through your email faster."

Rewinding to the 90s, Desktop Publishing was a massive market that completely disrupted the way newspapers, magazines, and just about every other kind of paper was produced. I used to write software for managing classified ads in that era.

Of course, Desktop Publishing was horseless carriages/faster horses. Getting rid of paper was the revolution, in the form of email over letters, memos, and facsimiles. And this thing we call the web.

Same thing here. The better interface is a more capable faster horse. But it isn't an automobile.

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  • programd a day ago

    > You're still reading and writing emails, but the selling feature isn't "less email," it's "Get through your email faster."

    The next logical step is not using email (the old horse and carriage) at all.

    You tell your AI what you want to communicate with whom. Your AI connects to their AI and their AI writes/speaks a summary in the format they prefer. Both AIs can take action on the contents. You skip the Gmail/Outlook middleman entirely at the cost of putting an AI model in the middle. Ideally the AI model is running locally not in the cloud, but we all know how that will turn out in practice.

    Contact me if you want to invest some tens of millions in this idea! :)

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    • mNovak a day ago

      Taking this a step farther; both AIs also deeply understand and advocate for their respective 'owner', so rather than simply exchanging a formatted message, they're evaluating the purpose and potential fit of the relationship writ large (for review by the 'owner' of course..). Sort of a preliminary discussion between executive assistants or sales reps -- all non-binding, but skipping ahead to the heart of the communication, not just a single message.

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  • echelon a day ago

    > > Seems like many, if not all, AI applications, when taken to the limit, reduce the need of interaction between humans to 0.

    > Same thing here. The better interface is a more capable faster horse. But it isn't an automobile.

    I'm over here in "diffusion / generative video" corner scratching my head at all the LLM people making weird things that don't quite have use cases.

    We're making movies. Already the AI does things that used to cost too much or take too much time. We can make one minute videos of scale, scope, and consistency in just a few hours. We're in pretty much the sweet spot of the application of this tech. This essay doesn't even apply to us. In fact, it feels otherworldly alien to our experience.

    Some stuff we've been making with gen AI to show you that I'm not bullshitting:

    - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4

    - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x7IZkHiGD8

    - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FkKf7sECk4

    Diffusion world is magical and the AI over here feels like we've been catapulted 100 years into the future. It's literally earth shattering and none of the industry will remain the same. We're going to have mocap and lipsync, where anybody can act as a fantasy warrior, a space alien, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Literally whatever you can dream up. It's as if improv theater became real and super high definition.

    But maybe the reason for the stark contrast with LLMs in B2B applications is that we're taking the outputs and integrating them into things we'd be doing ordinarily. The outputs are extremely suitable as a drop-in to what we already do. I hope there's something from what we do that can be learned from the LLM side, but perhaps the problems we have are just so wholly different that the office domain needs entirely reinvented tools.

    Naively, I'd imagine an AI powerpoint generator or an AI "design doc with figures" generator would be so much more useful than an email draft tool. And those are incremental adds that save a tremendous amount of time.

    But anyway, sorry about the "horseless carriages". It feels like we're on a rocket ship on our end and I don't understand the public "AI fatigue" because every week something new or revolutionary happens. Hope the LLM side gets something soon to mimic what we've got going. I don't see the advancements to the visual arts stopping anytime soon. We're really only just getting started.

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    • namaria a day ago

      You make some very strong claims and presented material. I hope I am not out of line if I give you my sincere opinion. I am not doing this to be mean, to put you down or to be snarky. But the argument you're making warrants this response, in my opinion.

      The examples you gave as "magical", "100 years into the future", "literally earth shattering" are very transparently low effort. The writing is pedestrian, the timing is amateurish and the jokes just don't land. The inflating tea cup with magically floating plate and the cardboard teabag are... bad. These are bad man. At best recycled material. I am sorry but as examples of why using automatically generated art they are making the opposite argument from what you think you're making.

      I categorically do not want more of this. I want to see crafted content where talent shines through. Not low effort, automatically generated stuff like the videos in these links.

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      • echelon a day ago

        I appreciate your feedback.

        If I understand correctly, you're an external observer who isn't from the film or media industry? So I'll reframe the topic a little.

        We've been on this ride for four years, since the first diffusion models and "Will Smith eating spaghetti" videos. We've developed workflows such as sampling diffusion generations, putting them into rotational video generation, and creating LoRAs out of synthetic data to scale up points in latent space. We've used hundreds of ControlNet modules and Comfy workflows. We've hooked this up to blender and depth maps and optical flow algorithms. We've trained models, Frankensteined schedulers, frozen layers, lobotomized weights, and read paper after paper. I say all of this because I think it's easy to under appreciate the pace at which this is moving unless you're waist deep in the stuff.

        We're currently using and demonstrating workflows that a larger studio like Disney is absolutely using with a larger budget. Their new live action Moana film uses a lot of the techniques we're using, just with a larger army of people at their disposal.

        So then if your notion of quality is simply how large the budget or team making the film is, then I think you might need to adjust your lenses. I do agree that superficial artifacts in the output can be fixed with more effort, but we're just trying to move fast in response to new techniques and models and build tools to harness them.

        Regardless of your feelings, the tech in this field will soon enable teams of one to ten to punch at the weight of Pixar. And that's a good thing. So many ideas wither on the vine. Most film students never get the nepotism card or get "right time, right place, right preparation" to get to make the films of their dreams. There was never enough room at the top. And that's changing.

        You might not like what you see, but please don't advocate to keep the written word as a tool reserved only for the Latin-speaking clergy. We deserve the printing press. There are too many people who can do good things with it.

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hiatus a day ago

> Seems like many, if not all, AI applications, when taken to the limit, reduce the need of interaction between humans to 0.

This seems to be the case for most technology. Technology increasingly mediates human interactions until it becomes the middleman between humans. We have let our desire for instant gratification drive the wedge of technology between human interactions. We don't want to make small talk about the weather, we want our cup of coffee a few moments after we input our order (we don't want to relay our orders via voice because those can be lost in translation!). We don't want to talk to a cab driver we want a car to pick us up and drop us off and we want to mindlessly scroll in the backseat rather than acknowledge the other human a foot away from us.

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  • igouy 12 hours ago

        "You can't always get what you want
    But if you try sometime you'll find
    You get what you need"
    We are social animals. We need social interaction.
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braza a day ago

> AI applications, when taken to the limit, reduce the need of interaction between humans to 0. > But if AI is advanced enough - why would someone go see a movie that you generated instead of generating a movie for himself.

I would be the first to pay if we have a GenAI that does that.

For a long time I had a issue with a thing that I found out that was normal for other people that is the concept of dreaming.

For years I did not know what was about, or how looks like during the night have dreams about anything due to a light CWS and I really would love to have something in that regard that I could visualise some kind of hyper personalized move that I could watch in some virtual reality setting to help me to know how looks like to dream, even in some kind of awake mode.

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scrozier a day ago

Are you saying this is what you'd like to happen? That you would like to remove the element of human creation?

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  • bluGill a day ago

    I'm not sure? Are humans - at least sometimes - more creative?

    Many sci-fi novels feature non-humans, but their cultures are all either very shallow (all orcs are violent - there is no variation at all in what any orc wants), or they are just humans with a different name and some slight body variation. (even the intelligent birds are just humans that fly). Can AI do better, or will it be even worse because AI won't even explore what orcs love for violent means for the rest of their cultures and nations.

    The one movie set in Japan might be good, but I want some other settings once in a while. Will AI do that?

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    • achierius a day ago

      Why is "creativity" the end-all be-all? It's easy to get high-entropy white noise -- what we care about is how grounded these things are in our own experience and life, commonalities between what we see in the film and what we live day-to-day.

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    • scrozier a day ago

      Do you limit your reading to sci-fi? There is a world of amazing literature out there with much better ideas, characters, and plots.

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    • alganet a day ago

      Nothing will ever do that again, probably ever. Stories ran out a long time ago. Whatever made them in the past, it's gone.

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      • bluGill 16 hours ago

        There are only a few story archetypes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots). However there are an infinite number of ways to put words together to tell those stories. (most of those infinite are bad, but that still leaves a lot of room for interesting stories that are enough different as to be enjoyable)

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        • alganet 16 hours ago

          That is precisely the sadness of it. How barren stories have become, how limited humans have turned out to be in the way they see themselves.

          Whatever it was before all that, it's probably lost forever. Whatever is new gets instantly absorbed and recategorized, it can't be avoided.

          There's only so much recombinations of those basic grand themes you can do before noticing it.

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    • otabdeveloper4 a day ago

      > Will AI do that?

      No, never. AI is built on maximum likelihood under the hood, and "maximum likelihood" is another name for "stereotypes and cliches".

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DrillShopper a day ago

> Or to take another example where I've seen people excited about video-generation and thinking they will be using that for creating their own movies and video games. But if AI is advanced enough - why would someone go see a movie that you generated instead of generating a movie for himself

This seems like the real agenda/end game of where this kind of AI is meant to go. The people pushing it and making the most money from it disdain the artistic process and artistic expression because it is not, by default, everywhere, corporate friendly. An artist might get an idea that society is not fair to everyone - we can't have THAT!

The people pushing this / making the most money off of it feel that by making art and creation a commodity and owning the tools that permit such expression that they can exert force on making sure it stays within the bounds of what they (either personally or as a corporation) feel is acceptable to both the bottom line and their future business interests.

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  • ipaddr a day ago

    There are different agenda. Some want to make money or power upending the existing process. Making production cheaper.

    There are people who want this want to make things currently unavailable to them. Taboo topics like casting your sister's best friend in your own x-rated movie.

    There are groups who want to restrict this technology to match their worldview. All ai-movies must have a diverse cast or must be Christian friendly.

    Not sure how this will play out.

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  • stevenAthompson a day ago

    I'm sure the oil paint crowd thought that photography was anti-artist cheating too.

    This is just another tool, and it will be used by good artists to make good art, and bad artists to make bad art. The primary difference being that even the bad art will be better than before this tool existed.

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    • DrillShopper a day ago

      > I'm sure the oil paint crowd thought that photography was anti-artist cheating too.

      The difference is that the camera company didn't have editorial control over what you could take pictures of, unlike with AI which gives all of that power to the creator of the model.

      > The primary difference being that even the bad art will be better than before this tool existed.

      [citation needed]

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fennecbutt a day ago

Lmao re modern media: every script that human 'writers' produce is now the same old copy paste slop with the exact same tropes.

It's very rare to see something that isn't completely derivative. Even though I enjoyed Flow immensely, it's just homeward bound with no dialogue. Why do we pretend like humans are magical creativity machines when we're clearly machines ourselves.

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  • namaria a day ago

    Sure. Let's create a statistical model of our mediocrity and consume that instead.

    Why is the fact that average stuff is average an argument for automatically generating some degraded version of our average stuff?

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