There are two completely distinct differences that jump out to me initially that I think may help justify your feelings:

1: Reading a long book demands focus on a longer timespan than scrolling TikTok, and with focusing on a single thing for a long time, we get a sense of accomplishment. I don’t know how to justify this as valuable, but for some reason I feel that it is.

2: The Song of Ice and Fire (and GoT) were consumed by a huge proportion of people, and you now have this in common with them. This act of consuming entertainment also grants you a way to connect with other humans - you have so much to talk about. Contrast that with an algorithmic feed, which is unique just for you - no one else sees your exact feed. Of course, there are tons of people that see some of the same snippets of content, if their interests overlap with yours, but it’s not nearly as universal as having read the same series of books (and there’s much less to talk about when you’ve seen the same 17-second short form video than when you’ve both invested dozens of hours in reading the same series of books).

I don’t think these thoughts fully justify your belief, but hopefully they provide some support to it.

> Can one form of entertainment really be more well-regarded than another? Is fine art fundamentally different from pop art?

It depends on what you want to get out of art.

Do you want human connection and shared cultural context so you can talk to real friends about things? Do you want virtual friends and connections? Do you want ideas to inspire you to create your own things, or change how you think?

Do you just want to distract yourself from how hungry you are, how much inequality is in the world, and how depressed you are, letting death draw closer?

All of those are valid things, and different art is more meaningful for different goals.

Scrolling tiktok fits into the last one, it's burning time to avoid thinking about things, moving you closer to death. Song of Ice and Fire builds a large coherent world, has bits of morality and human relation, and all of those can spark ideas and be related to your own human suffering, so it indeed feels more valid to me as a way to reflect and change how you think.

I think reading does force more long term focus, even if it's marginal for certain books. Certainly moreso than scrolling TikTok.

My personal process of grappling with this led to a focus on agency and intentionality when defining the difference.

Scrolling TikTok, much as scrolling Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or YouTube's recommendations would be, is an entirely passive activity. You sit back and you allow the Content to be fed to you.

Reading a book requires at least a bare minimum of selecting a book to read, choosing to finish that book, and intentionally choosing at any given time to spend your time reading that particular book. Similar things can be said for selecting movies. The important part in my mind is that you chose it, rather than letting someone or something else pick what they think you'll like.

The process of picking things yourself allows you to develop taste and understand what you like and dislike, mentally offloading that to someone or something else removes the opportunity to develop that capability.

I think there's arguments to be made against this view: how can you decide what to read or watch without getting recommendations or opinions? If you only engage with popular media isn't it just a slower process of the same issue?

But I do believe there is a fundamental difference between passivity and active evaluation of engagement as mental processes, and it's the exact reason why it is harder to do than scrolling is.

The TikTok feed is an amalgamation of posts from lots of people who aren't collaborating. The Song of Ice and Fire is a single work by a single author (or so I assume). So it's more like you're reading a single humongous post that has been “liked” (bought, positively reviewed, critically appraised) by a shitton of people, compared to a firehose of morsels that barely anyone cares about.

I’ve been in an existential crisis after reading Postman and I’ve since reframed the whole dilemma thusly: one of the highest aspirations for a person is the act of creation, and the result one can often call art.

What is wrong is instead the routine consumption of art created by others in a stupor to rest from the drudgery of daily work.

Create art, don’t waste your life consuming.

Could it be the incentives? With regard to books, paintings, theater, etc. you have an incentive to produce something that is meaningful or at least entertaining. Generally the artist is attempting to turn abstract thoughts or ideas into something real or quantifiable.

But TV and Social Media have their incentives twisted. It's just about ads. They don't really care what you are seeing as long as you are seeing as many ads as possible. The joke about TV was that a valid description of it was advertisements with a little bit of entertainment sprinkled in throughout.

I'm not saying that people haven't been able to use these platforms to build anything meaningful, but that the incentives and the purpose of these platforms are not to entertain, but to keep you glued to the feed for as long as possible to see as many ads as possible (which is why I think "rage bait" is so common).

I think some forms of entertainment can have also redeeming qualities. A novel can be seen (also) as a form of entertainment but it can also be a vehicle for a message. The difference with social media sized alternatives is that with the latter the "consumer" is much more passive, at most it's expected to react emotionally without thinking. On the other hand with the former there is an interaction between the work and the reader/viewer. Some books have the ability to make you re-evaluate your beliefs and your values, without being manipulative. Art is not necessarily entertaining.

One analogy is to liken tiktok (and shortform content) as exploring the shallows. Walking around, close to the shoreline, you explore pieces of flotsam that the sea washes your way. You might spend a lifetime on this shore, walking up and down, but most would argue that you've actually never gone anywhere.

On the other hand, reading a book is like getting on a boat. You've made certain preparations for acquiring the vessel and set course through unknown territory. A journey away from the shore and away from what's immediately at hand, which can also turn out to be a journey towards self-discovery.

> The crisis part is that I can't justify this belief with words.

Here's one attempt; it's art versus content. Tiktok is content; it's people recording a video, sometimes in one take and publishing, sometimes in multiple takes with some editing etc, sometimes fully professional ones. But overall, it's cheap, rapidly produced content for cheap, rapid consumption. ASoIaF was a labor of years to produce not just a series of books, but a world, a rich history, and later on a multi-media enterprise that involved and employed millions of people, then entertained and excited hundreds of millions of people over the years.

AI is lowering the barrier to entry even more, with anyone able to just punch in some words - less even than this comment - and produce something. For someone to consume. Maybe one in a billion will be remembered or still popular in a decade (like how some of these cheap videos are still popular / remembered / quoted, think vines / memes). But the ratio just keeps getting worse.

ASoIaF to a TikTok video is like... ASoIaF to a tweet.

A good fiction novel has multiple aspects: of course entertainment/escapism, but also a larger point the author wants to explore. With Asoiaf George Martin wanted to break/subvert classic fantasy tropes. For example that the good guy wins (Rob Stark is marrying for love and punished for that in the red wedding) or the romantic knightly quest, here done by Brianne of Tarth, an ugly/strong woman instead of a male fighter.

I am not sure how important fiction novels are (compared to reading non-fiction books or biographies who tell true facts about the real world), but I would say they broaden the horizon of the reader? And there is a selection effect in that “literature” was done by pretty smart people.

Scrolling TikTok is often described as mindless and with people not describing later what videos they watched. In general short form content (TikTok, Instagram, X/Tweets) seem to be much more superficial than long form content (eg this hn discussion board).

There's a fitting quote from 2017's Columbus:

> "[...] in its place, he identifies a different kind of crisis. Not the crisis of attention, but the crisis of interest."

Our attention in fact, has never been as fully absorbed as is today's. In place of books and architecture (as in the film), our attention has shifted towards more rapid forms. Yet in terms of hours spent, our 'attention' towards them has massively increased.

Is the crisis we're feeling then one of purported inattention, or a general loss of interest and satisfaction from our surrounds? What has spurred this crisis? Gabriel and Casey's conversation ends:

> "What about everyday life? Are we losing interest in everyday life?"

The film offers an hopeful answer.

I prescribe Plato - Republic, book X, specifically. How can one set of shadows on the wall be better than another, as they’re just shadows, degraded representations of the real?

Or perhaps Aristotle’s Poetics - pop culture has value because it is mimetic, and AI generated pop culture is no less a mirror, just one which produces reflections of every moment, all the time - but rather than the grand catharsis we might experience in a work of literature with well wrought characters with whom we empathise, we find the void staring into us as we do into it. Hollow art for hollow men.

Like it or not, the void is culture, and has value because it reflects us, albeit through a glass, darkly.

One path that might help you work out your own personal justifications is to find two forms of entertainment you enjoy at near equal levels, but where one you view as valuable and another as a waste. Then look at how both impact your life and see if you can identify what makes one valuable and the other a waste. This not only gives you a good inside view of what is happening with both forms of entertainment, but removes any bias to see your own version as superior because both forms of entertainment belong to you.

I did this, found two things I did for fun, both consuming significant blocks of time. The one that felt useless left not real impact. I want to do more of it, but after spending hours on it, I'm no different than I was before (other than perhaps a bit more skilled at the form of entertainment).

The other form, which was the same thing from an outside perspective (for example, my parents would see them as the same) left me different. It led to me building new goals, reevaluating things happening around me, spend more time thinking about where I'll be in 10/20 years. It led to me walking an hour a day and to start jogging some to build my endurance, despite the form of entertainment being unrelated to physical activity. I don't think this is innately a property of one entertainment form over another, but more about my personal relationship to entertainment.

Using this, how do 'poorly regarded' entertainment impact those engaging in it, compared to 'well regarded' entertainment? Are their lives better for it?

An old welder once told me: "It is not so important what you do. A bit more important is how you do it. And most important is why you do it."

Your comment makes me think that we have criminalized and squashed entertaining but obviously political writing out of existence :-) .

Say that somebody writes to make certain ideas more visible. For example, somebody wants people to buy the idea that amusing oneself to death is what we do (the book you mentioned). Somebody else perhaps has found that we are chronically depressed and cynic, when instead we should be thinking that a dead death itself is a fine trophy to hang on the wall during the march of progress[^1].

You can a) decide that you are set on your ways, thus entertainment should be pure and removed enough from reality so it doesn't mess with your deeply held beliefs and not read any of those books. or b) run the risk and read the thing with an open mind.

A lot of people are in the a) camp. Those who are in the b) camp would still like to be entertained a little.

[^1] Yours truly. I do that in fiction. https://www.ouzu.im/

I read AOtD and I had a different takeaway: TV is great entertainment (watch all the trash you want!) but it's terrible for news and learning about the world. I found it pretty convincing--it's so clear to me that our societal discourse divebombed when TV news became dominant.

There are probably ways you could explore this quantitatively by trying to measure the amount of novel latent information in the data you are ingesting, or by trying to quantify its effects on cognition.

Most short form content would probably score low. It’s short, for one, and it tends to be repetitive and lack anything like plot complexity or nuance.

Of course it’s not like trite pop is new. Way back in the dime store novel days it was called pulp. TikTok is just one of the latest iterations. People have always consumed dumb filler.

>The crisis part is that I can't justify this belief with words

Reading thousand page novels requires actively engaging with the material as you grow your vocabulary, and explore new ideas.

Scrolling TikTok on the other hand is a passive process. Could you recall even a quarter of all the videos you see on your TikTok feed in a single day? I would doubt it.

If society only consisted of the people in a given sector/industry, could it continue and flourish? If we only had engineers, how would society fare versus if we only had influencers? In this paradigm, there's no difference between fine art and pop art.

> The Song of Ice and Fire

is a trash derivative "we have Lords of the Rings at home" wannabe, completely void of joy and feels like it's written by an angsty edgy teenager who hates the world and has learned about medieval history for the first time and wanted to add zombies and dragons, the most original fantasy tropes.

I would honestly and unsarcastically take a day of scrolling through TikTok over sitting through 1 chapter of ASoIaF.

And apparently lately the author feels so too.

that's a really great question.

I think that it reduces down to "reward without effort is bad for you" - in so many different contexts in life, especially entertainment.

> Can one form of entertainment really be more well-regarded than another?

This is a no-brainer question. For an extreme example: CSAM is a form of entertainment for some people.

well, one destroys your attention span and brain

You might enjoy some of my writings on formalizing meaning (see here[1] and follow the links). In some way, although not always reliable, you can say that if you feel A is more meaningful than B, that is already some kind of evidence for this assertion even if perhaps unreliable in some ways.

So there isn't necessarily some huge crisis that you need to justify: in some ways reality just is (and this includes subjective reality;).

Say if you ask why do the laws of physics conserve energy locally, you can actually argue that if it were otherwise actually life would be extremely more unlikely, as that tends to increase instability in various systems (both energy divergence and going to 0 makes life unlikely); but still I'm almost certain you could conceive of forms of life in non-energy-conservative systems (something like Conway's Game of Life, but maybe with more advance rules if you prefer). So while it makes sense that the physics in our universe is approximately locally conservative (maybe not exactly in GR?), in totality it's just kind of a brute fact, an experimental observation. Our theories help us devise say better experiments to test e. conservation, and in a way map out the landscape of consistent physical laws. But they don't tell you which realization of consistent or admissible laws you'll find yourself in.

Other way to phrase it, what you feel is in a way real. So if you feel in some fundamental way better reading A than B, then that simply reflects a property of reality and needs no further explanation. The only problem is that in some cases our judgement can be distorted, like by substances or maybe overwhelming blinding desires (that fail to reflect fundamental experiences) or by limitations of our memory, etc.. But if we assume this isn't the case (i.e. some pathological reason for your preference), then your feeling is valid irrespective of a wordy justification. I think some things really are subjective, but also believe in a fundamental and very complex way subjectivity is actually as objective as anything else. I think the fact that one experience is actually (with some important caveats and necessary context) better than another in what might be called essentially an objective sense, is one of the most counterintuitive things we will come to accept about the human mind. We tend to mistaken complexity (it's very complex to compare experiences) to impossibility (it's impossible to judge experiences objectively).

I believe in principle there might be the equivalent Laws of Physics (say Newtonian mechanics) for the human mind, but I suspect we're still very far from it, because it might require analyzing the network of n=100 trillion synapses in our brain. I think one day we might get there, but that would probably require something like a computational effort maybe at least several times n, or even on the order of n², or some other poly(n), and also poly(n) memory. If we think of one of the major objectives of physical law is to make predictions, and explain behavior, and say to aid in engineering and designing structures, I think one of the main objective of the laws of the mind would be say to predict whether say an experience or mental state is good or not, and explain why it is so; and then perhaps allow improving a little the design of things so that we have better experiences, that is, a better life. I guess this is already what say psychology, various spiritual traditions, philosophy and arts try to achieve (and I think gets already in many cases pretty close, maybe increasingly closer, to the still inaccessible extremely complicated reality of the human mind and brain).

Regardless, we often have to do our best with what we have today, which is our best-effort subjective judgement, aided by language various human disciplines :)

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1n6j1jg/pur...

[dead]

Social media is also a wonderful tool for influencing participants and controlling them in the long term. In other words, behind the economic purposes there is a darker, more profound effect that is dangerous in the hands of a few powerful players. In the case of TikTok, that would be the Chinese state. Why shouldn't US Big Tech also be interested in this kind of power, in addition to the extra revenue?

This is your steelmanning? God it sounds awful.

Can you explain a bit more? I'm intrigued by your comment, but not seeing the connection

And users paying to generate longer videos.

Not only it has the slot-machine like addiction factor, it's going to make lots of money and it will take off very quickly.

All OpenAI has to do is to make the video generation much much faster.

Certainly, and that is the more pessimistic view that I have, that this is being developed with a view to introduce product sponsorships and advertisements.

I mainly am curious if anyone has the view that there is broader benefit to the development of this, after all, wasn't that the entire mission statement of OpenAI?

Quoting from their announcement on their site:

> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.

This feels like something constrained by the need to generate a financial return, and not something primarily focused on understanding physics and world models, to be blunt.

source: https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/

> I would have never guessed a social media app whose biggest feature is “it disappears within 24h!” (even though you can easily screenshot everything) would become as big as it became.

Or 'everything has to fit into 120 characters' (= Twitter). Or 'replies are designed to be maximally rage bait-y' (= Tumblr).

>Books, comic strips, movies, they're all just telling a story with a different amount of it left up to the viewer's imagination. Lowering the barrier to entry for this type of stuff is so cool.

This response just never feels true to me. Many of the most successful web comics are crude drawings of just stick figures and text[1] with potentially a little color thrown in[2] and like half of the videos I see on TikTok are just a person talking into the forward facing camera of their phone. The barrier to entry in the pre-AI world isn't actually that high if you have something interesting to say. So when I see this argument about lowering the barrier to entry, I can't stop myself from thinking that maybe the problem is that these people have nothing interesting to say, but no one can admit that to themselves so they must blame it on the production values of their content which surely will be improved by AI.

[1] - https://xkcd.com/

[2] - https://explosm.net/

It's undeniably cool. But look at Cocomelon on YouTube, it's hard to see how this won't converge to something similar, only infinitely more scalable.

This "barrier of entry" rhetoric reads like a pure buzzword dreamed up by AI pushers with no actual meaning to it. The barrier has NEVER been lower to produce books or comic strips or anything else like that. Hell, look at xkcd, there's nothing technically challenging about it, it's quite literally just stick figures, yet it's massively popular because it's clever and well thought out.

What exactly is this enabling, other than the mass generation of low quality, throwaway crap that exists solely to fatten up Altman's wallet some more?

> People always like telling stories. Books, comic strips, movies, they're all just telling a story with a different amount of it left up to the viewer's imagination.

It's not just different amounts, but different kinds. A (good) comic strip isn't just the full text of a book plus some pictures..

I think it’s really cool… and I’m still concerned about the long term implications of it. We’ve already seen a lot of TV get worse and worse (e.g. more reality tv) in a quest to reduce costs. It’s not difficult to imagine a reality where talented people can’t make great content because it’s cheaper to thump out bargain basement AI slop.

The democratization of storytelling is probably the best argument in favor, I'd agree. Thank you for the response!

I do find the actual generation of video very cool as a technical process. I would also say that I can find a lot of things cool or interesting that I think are also probably deleterious to society on the whole, and I worry about the possibility of slop feeds that are optimized to be as addictive as possible, and this seems like another step in that direction. Hopefully it won't be, but definitely something that worries me.

Half of TikTok is blurry videos wtere you can’t tell what’s happening overlaid with meaningless text and random noises, so this wouldn’t be much different.

I think a dedicated "TikTok but AI" is infinitely better than AI videos polluting other platforms.

They'll just cross-post. That's been going on since back when Facebook was The Face Book.

I don't think this is going to reduce the slop on other sites at all though.

You're right that the societal cost is very different. I hadn't thought about people doing the stupid things on video, I think personally I focus on the effects of the consumption moreso.

Personally I think the problem with TikTok is largely based in hyperoptimized content specialized to your interest shaping your worldview and isolating your perspective of the world from others, as well as probably being pretty bad for the ability to maintain attention and engage with long form narratives and ideas. I don't really think TikTok is unique here, other than that it's the best in the game at doing it and keeping people's attention.

But overall I suppose I just see something like this as potentially worse in those regards, but maybe I'm overly pessimistic.

> It seems not unlikely that the amount of energy it takes to produce, edit, and process a TikTok video exceeds half a kilowatt-hour.

That would be really remarkable, considering the total power capacity of a phone battery is in the neighborhood of 0.015 kWh

> Let's say one video pegs a top of the line Blackwell chip at 100% utilization for 10 minutes.

Where do you get this from?

You didn't include the amortized cost of a Blackwell GPU, which is an order of magnitude larger expense than electricity.

We are not getting better at producing cheaper power as the cost has increased per hour a lot over the last 50 years. But we are generating more power from different sources that are cleaner.

Power needs to be given away or people paid to take it is more of a function of limited storage abilities and limited ability to scale down rather then generating unlimited power. The free power is an issue with how the system is built (and the type of power source) rather than a sign of success. The same area has to import power at higher costs when the sun or wind isn't as powerful.

Free access to openAI tools?

They don't have ads, it's paid members only. You can see other people's images, including the prompts, so it's an interesting way to learn what works, and to mutate prompts and images. There are many ways of recombining or breeding images.

They have an onboarding flow where you rate images and it tunes into your aesthetic preferences. You can create mood boards for specific projects.

So I would say it's more community than social media.

Packing meth into tiny baggies pays someone's bills, too.

I'm an adult. I personally found some of it funny and entertaining.

I like appointment television too. Sometimes A24 isn't pretentious enough for me. But I'm not beyond saying that there's absolutely a time and place for saccharine.

This content will grab eyeballs. I'll bet money on that.

It doesn't really matter what you or I think anyway. OpenAI is delivering a stream of hits and will continue growing while we debate on the sidelines.

It's wax fruit.

You might not want to. It's definitely not appealing to me in any way shape or form.

The younger generations however will likely gobble it right up. I try not to judge because folks said the same thing about Nintendo when I was young.

Some of it can produce a chuckle, like Newsom posting a video about an inflated JD Vance talking about couches. https://x.com/GovPressOffice/status/1973167665075335449

Just like how the hype on Ghibli art styles via ChatGPT died, same will probably happen here

I found some of it funny and entertaining.

STOP_HAVING_FUN.gif

Kids are going to absolutely love this.

[dead]