The younger generation loves short-form, to-the-point stuff. Which is the exact opposite of what the current crop of GenAI makes. In a tiktok video, every sentence, every word counts because there's a time limit. If people don't engage with your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. The video linked in another post starts off with 15 seconds of complete fluff. You'd have better engagement if you have a guy opening with BIIIG NEWS!! LABOR DAY BREAKFAST GOES HAYWIRE!!! and hook people.

GenAI is great at generating "stuff", but what makes good content isn't the quantity. What makes good content is when there's nothing left to take away.

The idea that "TikTok is for Gen Z" seems like a very stale meme, although I only have anecdata to back that up.

Microtransactions are way older than 15 years. Wizards of the Coast was selling randomized MtG booster packs in 1993. I'm guessing that the earliest loot boxes for kids were baseball card packs, with very similar psychological purpose to today's game cosmetic collectibles.

"If they'll keep consuming AI-driven media, they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years."

There is a sense in which that is true.

However, we all develop taste, and in a hypothetical world where current AI ends up being the limit for another 10 or 20 years, eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much "there" there as they supposed.

The wild card is that we probably don't live in that world, and it's difficult to guess how good AI is going to get.

Even now, the voice of AI that people are complaining about is just the current default voice, which will probably eventually be looked on about as favorably as bell-bottomed jeans or beehive hairdos. It is driven less by the technology itself than a complicated set of desires around not wanting to give the media nifty soundbites about how mean (or politically incorrect) AI can be, and not wanting to be sued. It's minimal prompt engineering even now to change it a lot. "Make a snappy TikTok video about whatever" is not something the tech is going to struggle with. In fact given the general poverty of the state space I would guess it'll outcompete humans pretty quickly.

Personally I don’t think it has anything to do with normalcy.

I don’t consume AI media because it’s not very good.

I watched a lot a bad movies and read a lot of bad books as a kid that I can’t stomach now because I’ve read better books and watched better movies. My guess is that kids today would do the same, assuming AI doesn’t improve.

  >  they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years.

The result of this is that I watch more and read garbage and have less joy. Maybe I'm just addicted to the routine, but I definitely consume less. I just think it is the problem when you try to make something for everyone; you just end up making things with no substance, no soul. As they say, diversity is the spice of life, and good god, could I go for some actual flavor.

Slightly tangential but TikTok isn't just short-form stuff. It also has normal length content, which is where most current-affairs/analyses would fall, outside of clips.

Similarly (somehow?) for Fortnite, 100% of their microtransactions are cosmetic. It's also free, so it's be akin to telling people you could get AAA quality games for free. The $60+++ group of games make up a vanishingly small chunk of the total market, and are more a relic of 'our' generation. Roblox is a platform, more than a game, so it's its own beast. In general though I think younger gamers have become more demanding, in a good way.

I regularly watch 10 minute or longer TikToks and I'm sure you've turned off a YouTube video in the first 10 seconds.

Blipverts are probably the future and not just for ads but for content as well

On the other hand, I'm getting some of my news from shorter (5 - 10 min these days, though they used to be shorter) videos with talking maps and war machines...and I'm very much not young.

Buff/Franklin for 2028!

Fortnite and roblox are f2p though.

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> anyone who bought games would laugh at you if you said every game that you paid $80 for would also have endless amount of small items that you can buy for real money.

> kids that grew up with Fortnite and Roblox just think that's the norm.

How so? Fortnite and Roblox don’t cost $80, they are free to play with in game purchases.

Bad TV is a lot older than that. It probably seems weird nowadays to watch “I Dream of Jeanie” and “Gilligan’s Island” reruns because that’s what was on TV. Or how about game shows and soap operas? Daytime TV was the worst. But people watched.

I'm pretty sure humans have been finding ways to unproductively waste time for millenium...

I'm not sure how watching lightweight videos on subjects you're curious about is any worse than how people wasted time in the past?

Personally I waste time watching videos on outdoor gear, coffee making equipment and PC hardware. I certainy don't regret it because I had no plans to do anything productive with that time either.

videos of other people talking about how they do their make up and pick their outfits.

Doesn't seem that much different from a fashion magazine interview about what X celebrity likes to wear. Those have been around for quite a long time.

Ahh, you e touched on a big problem with our society rn - nothing is worth doing.

I've been really thinking about lawns lately and how much time men and women spend maintaining them, how much pride many of them have in such activity... lawns aren't real tho, it's just a personal park nobody ever uses that we all thought we wanted bc rich ppl had them. Front lawns especially, just for looks, nobody normal ever sits on them even.

Case in point is all the people that live in an apartment - they don't do lawns. They might think they want to and some might even enjoy up keeping a lawn but it's not an activity that's "worth it" in fact there are many reasons not have a lawn, it isn't an activity that justifies itself as so many pretend.

Everything is like that. Almost nothing any of us do adds to humanities' general progress or improves our own situations even.

Mowing a lawn and watching TV are incredibly similar activities if you have a nice lawnmower.

I'm not disputing that people waste inordinate amounts of time running out the clock before they shuffle off this mortal coil. (cough every X demograph reacts to Y video cough).

Agreement to eat said head apparel is predicated upon "infectious energy" (i.e. quality) - NOT success. I'll draft up a more officious document later.

Note: I am the sole arbiter of what constitutes quality.

> It's been a long time since "quality" and "success" have been decoupled.

I think so, too.

I guess quality was a property of interest in the old days, because the path e.g. for commercial music was: Maximize profit -> Maximize sales -> Maximize what the target audience likes -> Maximize quality.

For TikTok etc. they bypass the market sales stuff and replace it by an 'algorithm', that optimizes for retention, which is tightly coupled to ad revenue. I imagine the algorithm as a function of many arguments.

Just relying on quality is an inefficient approximation in contrast to that.

We used to have some "radio station" in shoutcast during the 90s. It was very local and geeky, but had a couple of listeners. It was kind of a podcast

Good point. I absolutely abhorred reaction videos until I found a channel that works for me. A guy who reacts to videos about ultra luxury mansions. I find it interesting hearing an expert in the field point out things that most of us wouldn't think of. Plus he's got a great sense of humor.

What blew my mind was that there would be a market to watch other people play video games. You never know what catches on.

> Go back to the 1990s (even probably the 2000s?) and ask literally anyone what they think of the idea of people spending huge quantities of their time on this mortal plane watching videos of other people talking about how they do their make up and pick their outfits.

So like supermarket magazines in video form? I think people would get it.

To me, unboxing videos are documentation, not entertainment. When I need to know exactly what's in a box and how it's packaged, an unboxing video is the only source of that information.

I used to listen to podcasts during my commute, when they took the place of listening to NPR or talk radio. Now that I work from home full time, I listen to them when I'm doing dishes or similar chores, going on walks around the city, and when I'm doing any significant amount of driving. I listen to a combination of comedy/history (love The Dollop), politics, and sci-fi commentary.

For the most part, I'm listening pretty actively, but if I'm just sitting there listening without a fairly mindless activity going on, I'll get distracted pretty quickly and find myself looking at my phone...

I don't get them either since the hosts are typically "regular people" talking about often complicated subjects that they are by no means domain experts in.

I find the format of "Dumdum Host A read some articles about something last night and Dumdum Host B asks questions about it" especially grating, unless it's purely opinion-driven and then I still probably won't care unless I read about the hosts and find out they are probably people with opinions worth listening to.

I'd rather read a book or be with my own thoughts without having them be even more crowded by some randos telling me stuff they think they know

> Don't get me wrong, I like podcasts, Fall of Civilizations being a personal favorite of mine, it's just that my desire to try and actively listen to them requires that I carve out an hour (or much longer in the case of FoC, worth it) of my free-time to eliminate any distractions and focus.

I don't see why that should be true. Podcasts are great when coupled with mindless work like mowing the lawn, weeding the garden, stacking firewood, walking to the shop, driving etc. You can get virtually 100% out of a podcast while performing tasks like this.

I figured people listened to them while commuting. It seemed the best fit: lots of time, mostly little attention needed (except when you alight or are driving in adverse conditions).

I don't understand enjoying podcasts while just using them for background noise. Maybe because I actually listen, and most podcasts I listen to seemed to have an engaged audience. But then I like listening to people talk about philosophy, politics, sports, true crime, science, history.

I agree. I think I listen to podcasts just for a bit of "social noise" when I'm doing something by myself and for occasionally picking up on something new I hadn't heard of before. For pure information content, I think they're actually very poor. It's not unlike listening to an old AM radio talk show. Hosts repeat themselves, engage in banter, and often oversimplify topics for the sake of a narrative.

I also think AI podcasts could become popular one day for people who just want some background noise and bits of trivia every once in a while. I would argue that a lot of YouTube channels I sometimes have in the background just summarize Wikipedia articles and don't have much of a personal touch anyway, so an AI could do the same thing.

I switched to improvised pods for this reason. Podcasts are for doing the dishes and mowing the lawn and playing factorio. I don't turn on anything with 'meat' unless I have a long car trip ahead of me. I just am not able to sit still and only listen without feeling like I could be doing something else, and when I'm doing something else I'm gonna start tuning out eventually.

Hey Riddle Riddle, Hello from the magic tavern, Artists on artists on artists on artists are my picks for now.

There is nothing you are supposed to be doing with free time, hence free time.

Tbh tho, there is nothing that we are supposed to be doing in this world rn anyways, nobody was born to work any of these jobs, we didn't evolve to flip burgers.

This is the old world, don't place too much stake in it, everything will change and then what?

If you want to listen to a podcast, do it. If you want to do something else, do that.

Don't do what you don't want to do, that's all there is too worry about.

This is partially true for me, but when I listen to podcasts it’s generally in what would otherwise be dead time for me such as when grocery shopping or exercising.

Having this strong of an opinion on something you admittedly don't understand (the appeal of podcasts) is not a great choice. Maybe ask people instead of making up stuff.

> I'm convinced that most people who enjoy podcasts don't really actively listen to them,

Or you know not everyone is the same. Just because you struggle with something doesn’t mean that it is not easy and effortless for others.

I can’t dribble a basketball and walk at the same time, still I won’t make the claim that everyone who claims to enjoy playing basketball is somehow fudging it.

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> The future of human content is being as human as possible. AI isn't going to replace that in our lifetimes, if ever.

I have been working on machine learning algorithms for a long time. Since the time when telling someone I worked on AI was a conversation killer, even with technical people.

AI's are going to understand people better than people understand people. That could be in five years, maybe - many things are happening faster than expected. Or in 15 years. But that might be the outside range.

There is something about human psychology where the faster something changes, the less we are aware of the rate of change. We don't review the steps and their increasing rate that happened before we cared about that tech. We just accept the new thing that finally gets our attention like it was a one off event, instead of an accelerating compounding flood, and imagine it isn't really going to change much soon.

--

I know this isn't a popular view.

But what is happening is on the order of the transition to the first multi-cellular creatures, or the first bodies with specialized cells, the first nervous systems, the first brains, the first creatures to use language. Far bigger than advances such as writing or even the Internet. This is a transition to a completely new mode for the substrate of life and intelligence. The lack of dependency on any particular substrate.

"We", the new generation of things we are building, will have none of the limits and inefficiencies of our ancient slow DNA-style life. Or our stark physical bottlenecks on action, communication, or scaling, and our inability to understand or directly edit our own internal traits.

We will have to face many challenges in the coming years. It can't hurt to mindfully face them earlier than later.

I just took a poll about art that had 50 examples and you had to choose which were human and which were not - I did very well, bc I'm awesome but apparently it shook the art world to its core, many of the professionals have no idea how to tell the difference/can't tell the difference.

The elements that identified a painting as human to me had nothing to do with appearance but everything to do with feeling.

Be passionate about what you present - if you can't be, don't bother. Passion is what will distinguish us from the AI - stuff like personality is almost immediately replicated, vocal inflections, funny comments, unusual spoken delivery - that's all within the realm of AI capability. Talking about micro blogging like it's God's gift to the world, not so much an AI thing, it won't feel right with AI.

I tried it with something fairly abstract about a decision I was working on making. Fed it a bunch of information, details about me, my background, the factors I'm considering in the decision and the impact of getting it right/wrong.

It was interesting. I certainly wouldn't say it was useless, I think the contrived dialogue actually touched on some angles I hadn't considered and I think it was useful. Not in a 'oh shit it's clear to me now' kind of way but it definitely advanced my thinking.

I find it as listenable as the podcasts the people I'm around play in their cars during roadtrips

To me that's absolutely unlistenable, but to them its interesting and engaging. I find NotebookLM replicates that perfectly. Its not at all the issue that the OP encountered with the Hawaii news service, as those lacked tone and pronounciation, which NotebookLM would not.

Regarding the outcome being a long winded summary, yeah thats what I see about the aforementioned 2 hour podcasts as well. They take the intro paragraph of a wikipedia article, pretend that the topic is a novel mystery they just discovered through hours of scouring microfilm at a municipal library, and then interject each other every other word with nonsense, before getting back to the point for just one sentence.

> For some reason the LLM seemed to latch on to the idea that one host should say something, and the other host should just repeat a key phrase in the sentence for emphasis -- and say nothing else, and they'd do it like multiple times in a sentence, over and over again throughout the entire thing.

cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

Hmm, does Google not use the Claude or ChatGPT API for it? I still don't hear of people chatting with Gemini nearly as often as with the other two.

Edit: looks like the subreddit is still called Bard. Well played, Internets. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1g0egad/gemini_vs_not...

There are a lot of "uh huh", "yeah", "agree" types of statements in odd places as well.

You're not wrong, but your argument seems to boil down to "something is better than nothing" and I suppose I disagree. If there's not a podcast about a particular topic that I'm interested in, I would rather go find a curated expose of that topic via a different medium, such as longform journalism.

I think you make a good connection with the long tail. That will definitely be one of AI's triumphs. People who don't understand this, don't understand what's been happening to media production and consumption over the last 40 years.

I probably should've clarified that by infectious energy I wasn't so much referring to the vocal aspect as I was the overall quality, interaction between the hosts, and pithiness / wit.

Having experimented with many LLMs (mixtral, sonnet, ChatGPT, Llama, etc.), the coherence is for the most part on point, but their capacity for novelty has been found wanting irrespective of how I tuned the top_k, temperature, or prompts.

That being said, I've seen some very impressive examples of style transference even conveying emotional range in some of the SOTA TTS systems.

Ha that’s not what IANAL means but perhaps should be

> Give it time. Progress is fast.

Why pick 2020 as your starting point? That is simply around the time the current set of techniques came about.

We had generative art back in the late 90's - my screensaver has been generative art for over 20 years now.

Obviously generative art has come a long way but people have been working on various approaches to it for at least 30 years.

“Generate” does not have the same connotation that “create” does. Are they really that interchangeable?

I personally would not bother with AI generated podcasts, they're such low bar, why waste time where there's so much other great content to catch up on? But I think you may be right, I wouldn't be surprised if people take them in with no fuss. But then what do I care? What I care most is that they'll pollute the search space. I'd filter out all GenAI content if I had the option and Im guessing that will become an option soon.

We had this recently, yes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693087

It's kind of horrible.

Everybody trots out this argument.

GPT styled LLMs were introduced back in 2018 so SIX years ago.

Have they gotten more COHERENT? Absolutely. Is coherence the same thing as NOVELTY? NOT EVEN REMOTELY. I've played with markov chains in the 90s that were capable of producing surprising content.

Unless there is a radical advancement in the underlying tech, I don't see any indication that they'll be capable of genuine novelty any time in the near future.

Take satire for example. I have yet to see anything come out of an LLM that felt particularly funny. I suppose if the height of humor for you is Dad jokes, reddit level word punnery, and the backs of snapple lids though that might be different.

Two years ago we had ChatGPT and Midjourney. Now... we also have those?

The accelerationism argument made a little bit of sense two years ago, but now, after two years of marginal improvements at best? Really?

Do you not use autocorrect?

Many don't even care if they make it in the long run. Making it is cashing in in the short term, screwing the investors.

Thank you for focusing on the real point of my post. :)

I was thinking I'd just unhinge my jaw in the style of 90s Reach Toothbrush commercials or like a human pez dispenser.

Cook it like stovetop stuffing, I'd imagine....

Isn't it a stovePIPE hat?