There's a similar problem with AI-generated video, but it's in the time dimension. There's a huge genre of Asian vertical dramas, and now about 17,000 a day are being cranked out by AI systems. But there are maybe ten major plots. "Lost daughter of rich family comes home" appears over and over. There are longer videos where the plot gets lost. I was watching one where it seemed like the "save the world" goal scrolled off the history buffer and the hero was off on side quest after side quest with the main goal forgotten.
This probably comes from a lack of intermediate level structure. To make a good dramatic story, you usually start from a plot summary, add character sheets, develop a plot, then a storyboard, then detail the storyboard. That way, you end up at the desired end. If you just let LLM-based systems free run, they go on forever, which is real life but bad entertainment. Unless the goal is a soap opera.
There's good stuff out there, from people who can plot.
"I was watching one where it seemed like the "save the world" goal scrolled off the history buffer and the hero was off on side quest after side quest with the main goal forgotten."
That's hardly a problem unique to AI-generated low budget dramas. That's a problem that literally derailed the latter seasons of Game of Thrones, a show with a huge budget, massive human writer's room, drawing from award winning source material.
People ascribe every problem to AI, instead of just recognizing that people can make crap with any tool you put in their hands, be it Seedance, Houdini, or a typewriter.
The goal for most of these vertical shorts is soap opera so this is a feature and not a bug. Also, in order to maintain engagement, they often need to have continuously escalating plots which makes for bad writing (typically in good plots you have dips in action before the next climax). The problem isn't what AI can generate and rather what people are asking for (both the audience and the producers).
> it seemed like the "save the world" goal scrolled off the history buffer and the hero was off on side quest after side quest with the main goal forgotten.
This is pretty standard for a JRPG.
I wonder how these videos have ‘asian’ cultural values encoded in them. What models do they use? Trained on what? Etc.
Putting aside the question of "why consume any media," and even admitting that I myself have seen hundreds of hours of General Hospital (don't ask), why consume this media specifically? Are people seeking this out or is it just TikTok algorithms?
Is it reductive to ask what the point is? Do fans get together and discuss plot developments? "I can't believe X did Y!" Maybe it's the future of media but to me it just rings hollow.
Social media algorithms have increasingly promised to replace self-curation, an effort consuming higher thinking activity, with an automatic optimization of limbic responses. AI just proved to be an effective tool for stretching the base motif into an infinite series of stimulus, fulfilling that same function and winning over by volume.
I think that lack of variety is a strong signal of how much slop we already had. There's no other way for this to happen in a statistical model.