I had so much fun making videos with my mom when it came out. During the first two weeks, we made over 100 cameo videos together - we were constantly running up against the upload limit. It unleashed tons of genuine creativity, joy, and laughter from us.
After those first two weeks though, we just… didn’t use it again. The novelty wore off and there wasn’t anything really to bring us back. That was the real downfall of Sora.
The problem is that due to the ease these can be made there is also really no reason to make this social. “Why would I look at somebody else’s creations when I can do mine.”
I can see some usage for this use case - "look Morty, I turned myself into a pickle!" - but just like image / meme generators, this is like 10-30 seconds of engagement within a friend circle at best (although some might go viral, but that won't bring in much money for in this case OpenAI).
There will be (or is, I'm behind the times / not on the main social networks) an undercurrent or long tail of AI generated videos, the question is whether those get enough engagement for the creators to pay for the creation tool.
I'm not an artist or creative person in any sense. My persona is closer to a settings menu than a colorful canvas.
The AI art I have seen creatives produce is far beyond anything I have been able to come up with. We're not at the point yet where you can just prompt "Make me a video that is visually stunning and captivating" and get something cool.
> My persona is closer to a settings menu than a colorful canvas
ah, but what a persona that would be if you were a Kai's Power Tools settings menu!
> The AI art I have seen creatives produce is far beyond anything I have been able to come up with
.. such as? What's the "Mona Lisa of AI art"? Is there, like, a gallery? Awards?
Unfortunately I don't have a solid reference point or checklist for the defining qualities of "good art". And frankly I don't take those who do very seriously. To me art is all about the personal vibes you get from it. So I enjoy Zach London (gossip goblin), Bennet Weisbren, and voidstomper/gloomstomper if you want something to measure with your "real true art" checklist.
Didn't we used to think the same of Photos?
They're different impulses. Some want to consume. Others want to create.
TikTok and social media is a strange mix of both, people posting response videos to everything.
Personally, I've stopped subscribing to Spotify, YT music, etc because the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music or whatever lofi playlist. It's free, it's good enough, and it's not grating to hear after a few days of that favorite song.
The video slop can well replace TikTok and Reels. Make educational content about your hometown. Explain how to throw an uppercut.
But I guess the desire to create something that others would consume is also different from the desire to simply create.
Sweet Jesus. You realise this is the mental equivalent of stuffing your stomach full of junkfood and soda every day?
This is a mainstream break up song: https://youtu.be/ekzHIouo8Q4
This is a vocaloid break up song: https://youtu.be/9pQR4a5sisE
The first isn't bad by any means. There's a million break up songs and that's one of the best sad ones. Most are just... angry? Blaming? Empowering? They work fine. They sell records. Many have have a billion views.
But the second one, even with the clunky translation, strikes somewhere deeper. It's written by someone who had enough time ruminating on a break up. The ending hits a little harder, because break up songs are about endings.
Both are sincere, but the first feels more formulaic. I'm inclined to think the first one is the soda.
I feel Suno leans towards this group of songwriters and poets who have something to say. Sora doesn't.
Vocaloids are hardly similar to fully AI-generated songs. Vocaloids are still human controlled.
And also that VOCALOID uses "traditional" signal processing techniques as opposed to generative deep learning techniques.
As opposed to the kardashians and real house wives and Chappell Roan?
No, the whole horseshit belongs together of course. Just that the AI slop is the logical culmination of the dumbed down pop-culture of the last 15ish years or so.
That doesn't sound meaningfully different from what people are already doing on Instagram and TikTok all day.
Absolutely correct and my comment is by no means dedicated just strictly to the AI slop.
For a lot of people music is a focus aid, not the object of contemplation.
Some want to consume... content that they don't think they could do in one minute themselves. They want to consume content made by other humans, even if it's still brain-eating algorithmic fodder, but still. Sora proved it quite clearly. These clips had ZERO value.
> Personally, I've stopped subscribing to Spotify, YT music, etc because the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music or whatever lofi playlist.
The musician in me just shed a tear
Pink Beatles, in a purple Zeppelin comes to mind
Had to create an account just to let you know that someone out there got the reference.
That comment for sure made me sad
I occasionally use Suno to re-imagine songs in different keys, tempos, and genres, and sample them. Most of the output from Suno is slop, but occasionally has a few good bits you can sample, chop up, re-pitch, and create something totally new from, which also has the added benefit of being unrecognizable to rights algorithms and lawyers from major labels.
It's a neat tool for genuine creators, and a crutch for people interested in slop.
Modern music has done this to itself. When the human product is already pure corporate slop, it's not hard for AI to compete.
Hopefully AI outcompeting humans at slop sparks a renaissance of humans creating truly beautiful human artwork. And if it doesn't, then was anything of value truly lost?
> Modern music has done this to itself
I get my modern music from Bandcamp. If you can't find good stuff to listen to, that's a 'you' problem.
So true. AI music gens like Suno can't do Paul Shapera works even remotely, but can recreate a lot of pop or EDM music very faithfully. There's just no distance to close, it's already mainstreamly bad.
> Modern music has done this to itself. When the human product is already pure corporate slop, it's not hard for AI to compete.
What are you talking about? There’s lots of modern music that’s not corporate slop and that’s absolutely great. Never in history was access to great music as easy as it is now.
So find music you like that isn't modern corporate slop. My music right now consists mainly of indie stuff I've found on youtube and daft punk. No plagiarism machine needed, just human-made music
"No plagiarism machine needed, just human-made music"
From wikipedia: Many Daft Punk songs feature vocals processed with effects and vocoders including Auto-Tune, a Roland SVC-350 and the Digitech Vocalist. Bangalter said: "A lot of people complain about musicians using Auto-Tune. It reminds me of the late '70s when musicians in France tried to ban the synthesiser. They said it was taking jobs away from musicians. What they didn't see was that you could use those tools in a new way instead of just for replacing the instruments that came before. People are often afraid of things that sound new."
Did Daft Punk put in a lot of effort to remix existing sounds to make their own music? Yes. Did they type "pls make french house electronic music number 1 chart" into a text box? No. Did they also credit original authors? Yes. I've not gone through their whole library, but for example, Edwin Birdsong has songwriting credit for harder, better, faster, stronger
> The video slop can well replace TikTok and Reels. Make educational content about your hometown. Explain how to throw an uppercut.
There is a fundamental issue of trust here. Facebook has me tagged as history nerd so I get to see those slop videos. They are fun, but always superficial and often plainly wrong. So unless the slop comes from a known, trustworthy source, the educational element is simply not there.
For throwing an uppercut it's even more important, if you follow wrong slop instructions you can end up breaking your wrist or fingers.
> the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music
I wonder what OP categorises as 'mainstream'. As a classical musician this breaks my heart.
Many of the things on a top #100 list for the last few decades. That includes plenty of "indies" as well as pop.
There are exceptions though. FUKOUNA GIRL by STOMACH BOOK, for example. AI can't come close to replicating something like this. Not the cover art, not the off-key voices, not the relatable part of the lyrics. I don't believe this is a top #100 song, though it certainly is popular.
It is chaotic crap.
you could not waterboard an admission of bad taste like this out of me
How do you get Suno songs for free? You listen to others or make your own?
Almost nobody listens to others' songs on Suno, that's the entire point.
You wouldn't care to order the food as I personally like it -- might be too spicy (or too bland) for your taste.
Suno songs are overtuned for personal preference in the same way.
I get that, but you have to pay to create your own.
And on the second part, I somewhat disagree. I mean, yes everyone has a personal preference, but if you bucket all those personal preferences they all fit nicely together (In many buckets).
A fairly narrow buckets, sure.
I think the point of Suno is to make you not search for your specific thing though, and instead produce your own. Searching for niche music has always been a thing. If our goal is to listen for free, we don't care about Suno (or any other way to make music) one bit, it's just another DAW for those making music.
And AI music in general sure has its fans, check out Only Fire for example.
They have a discover section for songs made public.
I'm with you here, resonates so much. I'm so fed up with endless subway tunnels, they all look and sound utterly same and boring.
So I quit riding the overpriced subway altogether and now consume AI-generated subway imagery and soundscapes for free, they are just good enough to feed my passion for boring tunels.
Some ego-bloated edgelords had nerve to tell me that there are, like, other modes of transportation, but I honestly find their high-horse elitism despicable.. Damn morons.
[dead]
Sounds like when we first had smartphones with orientation sensors and we could drink a beer from the phone, so cool... for 2 weeks.
But now you can vibe the same app 1000 times for root beer, coca cola, ginger ale, even a milkshake, and nobody will ever have to have a new idea again!
I wouldn't be surprised that the beer apps cost less to develop than one AI generated video.
Was there a Send Me to Heaven for Sora?
That is for loved things
This is consistent with a lot of AI apps. I fell in love with Gamma and haven’t used it in forever. Same with NotebookLM.
I somewhat consistently use notebookLM for podcasts of academic papers I'm reading in my PhD. You have to go read it yourself afterwards but it makes better use of time in the gym or doing dishes/groceries.
> You have to go read it yourself afterwards
^ this is important.
Otherwise you may very well be missing anything really surprising or novel.
See for example https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/after-software-eats-the... , an experience report of NotebookLM where
> It was remarkable to see how many errors could be stuffed into 5 minutes of vacuous conversation. What was even more striking was that the errors systematically pointed in a particular direction. In every instance, the model took an argument that was at least notionally surprising, and yanked it hard in the direction of banality.
On one hand 2024 in AI time was a decade ago.
On the other, Google might not have done much to upgrade the podcast feature since them.
This regression towards the mean is still very much a feature of the newer models, in my experience. I don't see how a model that predicts the most likely word based on previous context + corpus data could possibly not have some bias towards non-novelty / banality.
It’s gotten somewhat better over time though clearly not their top priority.
I found notebookLM to consistently make up about 20% of it's summary. Entertaining but unreliable.
I used it most key to learn about history. There isn’t much damage if it got 1600s or 1700s detail wrong. My high school teachers got much of it wrong too.
The bantering of the podcast I found distracting and the breathless enthusiasm. I guess there was a way to make it more no nonsense? I found I lost content if tuned for brevity.
I just use elevenreader for this. I copy in essays or whatever text I want to listen to and it works decently well. It's far from perfect, but certainly good enough.
Sometimes I'll take deep research output and listen to it too that way.
I tell them “no idle conversation or verbal tics” in the instructions.
I've found notebookLM summaries to be too high-level and oversimplified to be useful. Hopefully in a few years they can go deeper.
You can alao use NotebookLM's as source for Gemini app and ask it to do more in-depth summaries with custom prompting.
This somewhat makes whole NotrbookLM less useful, but still.
I also like doing that for topics that I am tangentially interested in. One minor thing that I find annoying is that the narrators switch roles in the middle of conversation. They start with the female voice explaining a concept to the male voice and suddenly they switch. In the meantime I have identified myself with the voice being explained to.
> You have to go read it yourself afterwards
Or before! Either is mandatory to actually learn the content.
Just listen to actual audio books... literally doing double the work for no benefit... why?
There aren't a lot of highly technical audiobooks or ones that give the same specificity that would be the same as an academic paper
Okay but the user is describing listening to papers, then having to read the papers because listening to them isn't efficient. So why bother listening to it in the first place if you're going to read it?
Not yet but it seems like they're getting to the point of AI narration finally being good enough to make any text an 'audiobook'.
Having said that I absolutely hate the audio format, I only used it when I had to drive or when I swam lanes. But these days I do neither.
No, reading verbatim from a technical paper is way too dense. You need a lot of filler words to slow it down and repetition to make it stick when read aloud.
Hmm fair enough but text manipulation is exactly something where LLMs do shine. Writing and modifying text is what they were meant for.
Ps I don't mean the word 'manipulation' in a negative context.
Writing a book takes like 2-3 years on average. Papers are published everyday. Having a cute two-person "conversational chat" w/ audio works for a lot of people vs. just reading a paper. "No benefit" to you perhaps. Don't generalize the lived experience.
Okay but this person is literally saying that listening with LLM tools isn't helping their understanding and they have to still read the paper... why listen at this point? Why listen using a tool that literally causes you to do more work?
We all have the same amount of time on this Earth, saying how great a tool is that is causing you to do more work is just... weird?
I'd personally never do this, I value my time.
It can synthesize and summarize many topics.
For example, I can give it 8 papers on best practices in online marketing, it will turn it into a 20 minute podcast.
There are errors, but also with real podcasters.
Yeah it's not just the hardware depreciating, it's the social impact of what the model can do
NotebookLM is great for learning I feel
It's not just software: I use my Vision Pro (now in year 3) less than once a month now, and each time I do the painful/awkward/unpleasant set-up and prep and difficult interface sours me on the device yet again, until a new blockbuster movie like "Project Hail Mary" appears that when watched on the VP in 4K on a virtual 40-foot screen blows my mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
24/7 titillation is boring
The interesting difference here is that other hedonic activities do bring people back even after the first time they build up a tolerance and get bored. But many of these AI "creative" apps seem like a one-and-done thing. Once the novelty wears off there isn't anything more deeply rewarding to bring people back.
It’s because they are slop which is only funny by the novelty of it. Stephen hawking at a skate board park it’s funny for a bit but as soon as the novelty wears off it’s just slop.
It's not really that people wouldn't come back - it's that they were losing money on each customer.
Those 100 videos probably cost $100+ for them to create. Did you pay them $100+? (not a critisism, just a re-framing)
When it launched we all talked about the serving/inference costs being massive. In hindsight if they had a paywall, it might not have self-imploded so fast, might have stayed aspirational, and they might have a profitable business today. Interesting case study.
This tracks my usage exactly. It was like Mad Libs - in that moment it was THE MOST FUN but after a while it became just a novelty bordering on... creepy. Now I feel kind of guilty for having exposed so many friends to what looks like a data gathering scheme.
I thinks its the same reason why chess tournaments, where two AIs play against each other are not as popular, compared to when two humans play each other. Maybe its because humans generally compare themselves to other humans and that's part of how they value.
It's the same with e.g. faceapp, fun for a minute but then... then what?
And this is the challenge that these tools have - they have to have a free tier to get people to explore it, but unless they can make it a habit, those people will never upgrade to a paid subscription.
I have no figures, but if I'm being optimistic, these freemium subscription services have 10% conversion rate at best; can that 10% pay for the other 90%? For a lot of services that's a yes, but not for these video generators which are incredibly compute intensive.
I'm sure there's a market for it, but it's not this freemium consumer oriented model, not without huge amounts of investments. Maybe in 5-10 years, assuming either compute becomes 10-100x cheaper / more available, or they come up with generators that run cheaper.
Yes, Sam Altman was talking about how he lost you on his blog and how it lead to Sora's downfall :D But honestly... I believe this too. There's just no value.
A lot of AI hype is parlor tricks
Sounds like me with listening to AI covers. After a couple of weeks I couldn't care less. But I was so stoked in it at the start
The Cameo feature is really excellent. The likeness of both the person and the voice is exceptional. I really enjoyed making some funny Cameo videos with my friends. I don't know of another simple way to insert your own avatar with your own voice into a video, and I'm pretty deep in this space.
Yep. Impressive toys, but not useful day to day.
There's some market for b2b I'm sure, but as a consumer facing product it's tough to see how it could ever come close to paying for itself.
Reminds me of when photo filters and initial stickers and mirror filters came out on MacBook in like 2007. It was super fun for a couple days then the novelty wore off.
You know who the novelty didn’t wear off for? My in-laws, who for some ungodly reason are superusers on TikTok. Once the audio-enabled, realistic videos of babies and children hit the feed, it was a virtual 9/11 moment. The group chat is spammed by 90% believable videos of babies arguing, dogs doing smart shit and it’s all slop.
I am hoping against hope that this will stem the tide because the slop-generators are too lazy or too poor to run other models locally or search them online.
Humans are very good at pattern recognition, even if you generate different stuff, you still see a pattern, either in the cutting, color, cadence of movements, the color grading, camera lens used, everything, your mind will tag it as slop.
Essentially you are watching the same videos over and over subconsciously
This is something that people working on procedurally generated games have already noticed. No Man's Sky has billions of planets, each with "unique" plant and animal species, but you can easily sort them into a few dozen templates with minor variations.
Procgen has a niche, but it never became ubiquitous, because for most people exploring a nice hand-made intentional environment is better.
U say that but then when u look at most “content” on social media it is the same video over and over again. How many JRE podcasts are basically the same crap as last time? How many influencer “life” videos are the same thing over again? Even the stuff i like is formulaic to the point ai can almost write the scripts.
I think people attach to other people more than “ai”. When there isnt a narrative “person” behind the content it is way less interesting.
Wow that's a really good point. The style of the videos did become quite repetitive.
"...and when everyone's super, no one will be"
I think this is starting to play out.
When I personally see a blog post which didn't need an image, but still does have an AI-slop image banner, I mentally check out. I might have Claude summarize it, or (more likely) just skip it altogether.
I honestly forgot about Sora until this post, and yeah same behavior played with it for a bit, then moved on with my life.
[flagged]
probably one of the few human commenters remaining here
Cue a flood of crass jokes as the bots attempt to prove their humanity
Such a stupid joke but it gave me a laugh.
noice
[flagged]
(FYI, this is an LLM bot, check their comment history and note the repetitive structure with every comment they've ever posted all within the last hour)
I dunno, it was the same for me and creative writing with AI.
First it looked like it was crazy inventive, good at writing snappy dialouge, and in general a very good font of ideas.
Then the same concepts, turns of phrase, story ideas kept reappearing, and I kinda soured on the concept.
I haven't done it in a while, but that kind of usage really shows the weakness of LLMs - if you keep messing with its generations, editing what it made, and as the context length keeps increasing, its more end more likely it goes into dumb mode, where it feels like talking to GPT3, constantly getting confused, contradicting itself etc.
[flagged]
Please don't cross into personal attack. Your comment would be fine without the swipe at the end.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think you’re fumbling on an important distinction.
Sometimes people want to paint, sometimes people want a painting.
To have wonderful time with their mom… I bet they had absolutely zero interest in the act and process of making silly videos.
Totally. This wasn't a situation where a stranger was slopping another stranger, it was a mother and son doing something fun together.
I get your point but it goes too far in the opposite direction. We should now discuss absolutely nothing in relation to Sora and genAI videos? That seems overly charitable to the platform.
Here, let me try this approach:
Read the main comment out loud to yourself while imagining it’s someone sitting at a table at a pub.
Now imagine someone turning to this person in the pub, and speaking the subsequent comment, word for word.
No seriously, try it out.
Agreed. I did try this out! So the reply to the original comment is dumb. I actually dismissed it for being flippant.
Your reply is more interesting. Hence my (albeit maybe snarky) chiming in. So the original comment does end at a very specific app/sora related conclusion. "Sora didn't keep us coming back."
If I may amend your scenario: imagine this bar is actually in the center of SF or across the street from Open-AI or whatever. We're on HN discussing a post on X about Sora.
The appeal to humanity is not wrong. My point is more let's keep the connection with that humanity in relation to AI, to Sora, to what's going on in this forum.
Come on now...'We're curing cancer, right?!'
You didn't at least puff a little ack through your nostrils for that one?
[dead]
[dead]