alt.hn

7/16/2026 at 8:03:23 PM

$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol

 https://www.tryai.dev/blog/ai-music-video-arena-claude-vs-gpt-5.6

by hershyb_

7/17/2026 at 5:44:51 AM

Like most of this stuff, it's obviously impressive technology compared to what existed a few years ago. But the end product has zero artistic value. It's a grey goo of the average of every concept picked up from the concept of the song.

A talented creative with a vision could make something more interesting and enjoyable in an afternoon with a $0 budget.

by hbn

7/17/2026 at 7:21:22 AM

As much as I don't want jobs taken away by AI, a creative person with a vision that would usually required $1 million budget, could create such a video using AI by being very specific in what they require which would not be a " grey goo of the average of every concept "

eg. "scene 32, same 2 characters from the previous scene, now dressed in the garb of Egyption middle kingdom high priests, though with cat faces, dancing on the back of an elephant that is running fast with blurred feet on the surface of a river with licks of water that burst from the water in time with the music that I gave you before, length of song for this clip 2:21 to 2:31"

Your mind is your limit. AI is a tool. If you tell it "create me a music video for this song set in egypt" then it may turn out AI sloppy.

by scrollop

7/17/2026 at 7:45:06 AM

Art isn't just the screenplay, or a prompt; it's the clash between reality and the intent (whether a location or practical set constraints), the individual skill of everyone involved, costume and prop department. And it may change during production. And effort. If it's easy, it's easily reproducible and not worth that much. And novelty, that's something current models aren't capable of. That's why Jarimoquai's Virtual Insanity video became popular. That's why practical effects are more impressive than CGI, even if they're jankier and hide behind clever camerawork.

by spaqin

7/17/2026 at 3:09:38 PM

If you've ever tried to get around Gemini or ChatGPT's guardrails, stock footage poisoning, and just general tendency to produce the most frustratingly banal version of your prompt possible, then you would understand that prompting AI images and video absolutely already involves a clash between reality and intent (in the sense that this is Google and OpenAI's world, we're just living in it).

I would love to get around the "individual skill" part, but all of my artist friends would excommunicate me if they knew the AI projects I've been working on, let alone if I asked them to collaborate.

by 59percentmore

7/17/2026 at 4:07:35 PM

> If you've ever tried to get around Gemini or ChatGPT's guardrails, stock footage poisoning

Art is (often) provocative, uncomfortable, taboo, explicit, subversive, or challenging of norms. You're never going to get that out of increasingly locked-down and Disney-fied BigTech hosted LLMs obsessed with "AI safety."

by ryandrake

7/17/2026 at 9:51:26 PM

So, would you agree that working creatively around the Disney-fied locking-down of those tools in order to produce something "provocative, uncomfortable, taboo, explicit, subversive, or challenging of norms" would at least begin to approach being a process that involved at least a semblance of artistic merit?

Because I can assure you that much of what I've gen'd checks those boxes (unless Sorry To Bother You's third-act twist no longer unsettles).

by 59percentmore

7/19/2026 at 1:34:41 PM

Note that he simply downvoted me. I refuse to believe that it's because equisapiens no longer shock.

by 59percentmore

7/17/2026 at 12:33:48 PM

A notable chunk of criticism GenAI receives has to do with output irreproducibility and semantic instability relative to the input, so this is a bit entertaining to read.

If there's a way to do something better and worse, then one can absolutely talk about added and absent value. I browse AI generated images a ton, and the difference between beginner / low effort submissions and high effort / advanced submissions is very stark.

by perching_aix

7/17/2026 at 5:39:26 PM

Yeah one thing people aren’t really grasping with a generative AI is that it fundamentally can’t produce the same thing twice. You can’t really create top notch art with all kinds of inconsistencies

by timacles

7/18/2026 at 8:29:08 AM

Not fundamentally, no. It is entirely possible to keep putting in the same thing, and then getting out the same thing. To be honest, it's outright frustrating that this feature is so often neglected.

by perching_aix

7/17/2026 at 8:37:43 AM

I think you are making the same mistake as everyone else with respect to art.

Art has nothing to do with _mechanical_ difficulty. I see this misconception all the time. Examples

- Kumail Nanjiani roided up for his next movie. This has mechanical difficulty, sure. But what does it add to the artistic element?

- Dream Theatre guitarists play olympics with their guitar and play solo's that are mechanically impossible for normal people. Yet we still find Beatles have more artistic value, why?

I hope this popular misconception will die down. I don't want mechanical difficulty in art being praised. I feel these are things people hold on to because mechanical difficulty has some moat and people don't want to give it up.

by simianwords

7/17/2026 at 12:05:16 PM

I don't think that was fair comparison, earlier comment was that creative person can make million dollar art without having million dollar budget, then again creative person can splash paint on canvas while being dead drunk and make most valuable painting.

Most people find it more impressive if you learn to play Dream theater song on guitar than if you program it in daw.

by therouwboat

7/17/2026 at 9:06:51 AM

I partly agree with you - I used to think of mechanical difficulty as a kind of 'proof of work' for art. Nowadays I am less interested in the idea of what counts as art or not.

However, consider works like photorealistic drawings of eyes (usually at a very large scale). A lot of people like these, and consider them to be fine art, while others (art critics?) consider them bland. Contrast that with a Picasso flamingo drawn with a single line.

There is artistic value in high-effort, low concept works as well as low-'effort', high-concept works and other combinations. Perhaps what we are all looking for is effort of some kind (I prefer human effort) whether that is conceptual effort or practice in drawing lines on paper.

by gilleain

7/17/2026 at 9:16:22 AM

I’m curious to understand why you think drawing photorealistic eyes is different from a person beating a Guitar Hero time record.

Both are pushing boundaries in mechanical dexterity. Yet one is considered art and another is not.

by simianwords

7/17/2026 at 9:38:55 AM

If I was feeling unfair I would say there is no difference! However, if a friend drew me an eye on A3 paper would I frame it? Probably yes...

Others have said this better, but art is an qualitative/emotional thing, not a simply measurable quantity of an object. We tend to use the effort put in as a proxy measure for quality, but when photocopiers and 3D printers and - yes - genAI get involved, that becomes harder or impossible.

Beating Guitar Hero is emotional, but not artistic. Photorealistic drawings could be emotional, and may or may not be artistic. Putting a text prompt into a generative model to make a (frankly terrible) music video for $100 is ... something else.

by gilleain

7/17/2026 at 11:49:25 AM

Anything can be artistic, but some things are very hard to make artistic.

Beating Guitar Hero could artistic. I don't even know how, but I'm sure some artist could beat Guitar Hero in a way that was somehow artistic.

This terrible $100 music video which I'm not even going to watch, is surely not art. Also I'm totally sure some person is going to spend $100 with an AI and make art. It's very hard, but they day will come. The slop-to-art ratio will be astronomical.

by actionfromafar

7/17/2026 at 9:16:00 AM

[dead]

by toivo

7/17/2026 at 2:12:46 PM

> it's the clash between reality and the intent (whether a location or practical set constraints), the individual skill of everyone involved, costume and prop department

That's not art, that's the limitations that everyone working in this industry have been working night and day to overcome for hundreds of years

by jcelerier

7/17/2026 at 7:47:51 AM

[flagged]

by f6v

7/17/2026 at 8:37:40 AM

The problem with this discussion is we are conflating artistic value with economic value. A music video can be valuable as art, but it can also be valuable as a tool for promotion or for generating revenue. If the goal is pure economic efficiency then an AI has the potential to create a music video more efficiently than a human. If the goal is to produce something that makes people feel some kind of emotion then AI will work against you. The same goes for code. I use AI to write code that I'm not precious about but if I want to feel proud of my work, you can be sure I'll write it by hand.

by spuz

7/17/2026 at 8:51:56 AM

[flagged]

by simianwords

7/17/2026 at 9:26:46 AM

The physical limitations work with you, not against you. Have you ever read a book? The physical limitations is the blank paper, you need to be creative enough with the words you need to express for your vision to come to life.

by filipn

7/17/2026 at 9:19:23 AM

Given that all serious artists seem to be extremely anti-AI, I strongly suspect that you may be wrong.

I've been trying Fable for coding in the past week and while it's incrementally better than Opus sometimes, what it's churning out is still far from art - and I do think it's possible for code to be art.

by sanitycheck

7/17/2026 at 9:33:16 AM

If you're defining "serious artists" as some approximation of "people who have made money with their art" then it's clear that there's a conflict of interest here.

Now I happen to be in the camp that believes that AI on its own isn't really capable of producing art (but like a human creating a collage, there can be art created by humans using AI... there is artistic merit in the arrangement).

I still despise that AI is going to be used to strip creators of their labour value, but that's more related to my objection to capitalism than it is to AI.

by pcthrowaway

7/17/2026 at 12:02:24 PM

I'm simply defining serious artists as people who are serious about their art, whether they're award winning filmmakers or amateur photographers. Roughly nobody out of all those people wants to use AI.

(If you want to define it as professional artists instead, then I don't even see much of a conflict of interest. Professional programmers tend to be cautiously optimistic about the new tool and are finding uses for it, why wouldn't professional artists? But, they largely do not see it that way.)

by sanitycheck

7/18/2026 at 12:30:36 AM

I think it's more that serious artists who don't want to burn their bridges are keeping their AI experimentation/production a secret. It's difficult to openly talk about that work when your friends and acquaintances are saying things like, "People who use gen-ai should die," or, "If you use gen-ai, I never want to talk to you again, instant block."

That side is quite vocal, and has been effective at resulting their fanbases into a witch hunt for anyone who's ever even touched ChatGPT. So anyone who disagrees just stays quiet, for the most part.

by 59percentmore

7/18/2026 at 1:04:47 AM

This leans much too hard on the drama of victimization and tribalism ("people in the 'other camp' want me to die", they're "vocal").

by happytoexplain

7/18/2026 at 2:40:27 PM

I don't know what you're implying, but that's an incorrect read anyhow. "The people in 'MY camp' want me to die, they just don't know that they're talking about me, and it's bad and consistent enough that I've had to mute mutuals to avoid constant anxiety and demoralization," is better.

by 59percentmore

7/17/2026 at 12:19:04 PM

https://variety.com/2026/film/news/martin-scorsese-supports-...

by simianwords

7/17/2026 at 6:42:02 PM

This is simply cherry-picking (though of course the parent asked for it, by using the word "all" in their original comment - but that doesn't absolve you of resorting to a "gotcha").

by happytoexplain

7/18/2026 at 10:46:08 AM

nah i'm not cherry picking. its a serious artist and director betting on AI. expect more to come - just like we did with photography.

by simianwords

7/17/2026 at 3:36:24 PM

If you consider microdramas as art (who knows what art means to people these days) then the Chinese duanju already has not just full shows using AI but also already have big hits using it.

Yes the people making these are frustrated by how much stress it puts on them (directors managing multiple shows at a time daily must be stressful af) but nobody (neither artists nor audience) are complaining about AI usage. As always they don't hate AI, they hate capitalism.

by newswasboring

7/17/2026 at 9:21:54 AM

Interesting, so the 'pure vision' of the director can remain unsullied by the inept crew, huh? :)

More seriously, it reminds me of a video I was watching yesterday about a tabletop roleplay DM who was great at _telling_ stories but the players felt they were not included in the story. That is, the 'art' (if it is) of roleplay is collaborative between the storyteller and the players.

Are movies not usually a collaboration among a group of people (director, crew, etc) to produce a single work? Rather than liberating the vision, this process forces the visionary to engage with the constraints and limitations of the real world. Mabe why movies made on massive budgets by directors who have a string of recent successes can sometimes turn out terrible, as their ego outgrows the project?

by gilleain

7/17/2026 at 9:33:12 AM

Multiple issues with this argument.

First you use crew and directors as holding dual use - one is collaborating on the idea itself. One is a necessary thing in the process. Crew is important primarily because they literally appear on screen. That they help collaborate is a good side effect.

AI still allows you to get collaborators for ideas and eliminates need that is usually a waste of time.

I get your point on using constraints in reality to make something sublime. Ironically it adds to my point rather than yours. Indie movies are generally considered more artistic than blockbusters. We realise that we shouldn’t don’t go out maxing things like scale and power. This doesn’t make a movie more artistic. So what remains? It’s the idea. The vision. AI lets you directly address this. What you suggest is adding fake physical constraints that we should surpass. Idk how that is artistic.

by simianwords

7/17/2026 at 11:19:16 AM

Constraint breeds creativity. If you get to the point where AI can put anything you want on the screen with complete freedom, you’re going to get complete horse shit.

>fake constraints

People add fake constraints all the time. Artists using AI will have to learn to artificially constrain themselves to produce anything good. My guess is it takes about 50 years.

At the same time there will always be people who want to see real actors on a real set.

by sarchertech

7/17/2026 at 12:08:20 PM

[dead]

by simianwords

7/17/2026 at 11:20:43 AM

No one ever said anything remotely like that about software development 10 years ago.

by sarchertech

7/17/2026 at 11:07:24 AM

Do you feel your coding skills atrophying as you write less code?

Do you plan to mitigate that or just let them slide?

by brador

7/17/2026 at 6:23:49 PM

I feel like I've been doing less and less programming as I've become more senior. And that's been a good thing for me, I wouldn't want to go back to doing all the code myself. The perfect amount of hands-on programming is probably zero for me at this point.

by f6v

7/17/2026 at 11:24:33 AM

They have the same sentiment also now. I expect when you not write code at all you aren't more productive than before or producing unmaintainable shit. Sorry bro, most of the time it needs more text to explain the AI which small fault she has done compared with just fixing it self. So when you don't code at all, you either lose time by explaining this issues a guy that never learns or you just ignore them.

by krater23

7/17/2026 at 6:25:33 PM

> you aren't more productive than before or producing unmaintainable shit.

That's a very strong statement with virtually zero argumentation.

by f6v

7/17/2026 at 9:59:21 AM

I don't rememeber that sentiment being expressed much in the past about programming.

I do notice a lot more bugs these days, a lot more slop code and a lot more complaints about slop code.

by pydry

7/17/2026 at 11:24:00 AM

[dead]

by fatata123

7/17/2026 at 10:02:20 AM

Your code is slop. Probably was before as well. At least now it's consistent slop.

by doitright99

7/17/2026 at 7:19:28 PM

I don’t think I care about that all that much as long as the code does what I need.

by f6v

7/17/2026 at 8:38:19 AM

> Art isn't just the screenplay, or a prompt; it's the clash between reality and the intent

Okay, clanker

by neonstatic

7/17/2026 at 6:58:10 PM

I find video models very hard to steer. They can output amazing "shiny" things quickly, but if you want something very specific, you may need to spend days on it. It is not like sitting down with an artist and seeing how they make the exact changes you need in real time while also ensuring artistic cohesion.

AI is obviously very useful, but perhaps not in the way people think. Two aspects I would like to see improved are instruction following and providing relevant feedback.

by dr_kiszonka

7/17/2026 at 8:44:32 AM

This is not about jobs taken away by AI. There are not that many jobs for artists to begin with. And OP was not talking about a job.

> Your mind is your limit. AI is a tool.

Then the companies should start talking about them the same way as they talk about tools. Because when they are pushing for artists replacement by AI, they are not talking about tools. They are trying to make AI into a person while very intentionally devaluing things people actually like.

> a creative person with a vision that would usually required $1 million budget, could create such a video using AI by being very specific in what they require which would not be a " grey goo of the average of every concept "

How many $1 million budget music videos you look at? The sold vision of AI is to not be the tool you are talking about here. Yes, there is an alternative reality where these companies tried to make tools for artists, but it is not a reality we live in.

by watwut

7/17/2026 at 7:36:06 PM

Most of the discussions I've read about AI is as a tool. There is a narrative being created that its all about replacing humans. I've not seen that outside of a view influencers.

by doug_durham

7/17/2026 at 4:35:02 PM

The prompts would more be like: "The dancing and lip movement is still wildly out of time with the music"... "Ok now the dancing is even more out of sync with the beat"

by ericmcer

7/17/2026 at 5:07:58 PM

Sure, but it appears as if the LLM just doesn't understand dancing and rhythm. I don't know why, but an old music video by the band Jungle came to mind -- just a kid dancing, and while it definitely cost more than $100 I'm sure, it couldn't have been all that expensive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JkDzNOgO3U

Edit: oh I remembered another, The Blaze said their first music video cost them $100 to make: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UivZrL2znh0 and their follow up didn't cost a whole lot more they've also been on record saying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fea7wuV6s

by throwforfeds

7/17/2026 at 9:35:14 AM

Have you ever experienced real artistic process? Because each and every comment from -presumedly- tech people that follow along these lines above is inevitably proof that the author does not grok creative processes at all, and they assume it’s just another algorithmic endeavor, or a collation of serial inputs. This mentality is awful.

by camillomiller

7/20/2026 at 12:36:24 AM

well said.

by geraldmcboing

7/17/2026 at 8:01:36 AM

I would really love to see examples of creatives using modern AI/LLMs to make quality art, and it feels like this should be happening, but I can't think of any examples yet. Maybe there's so much low-effort slop that the good works are lost in the noise. Or maybe most artists don't use AI on principle.

I would love to see examples if anyone has any. I saw a few things on r/AIVideos that I sort of liked, but I wouldn't go as far as to call them quality art.

by qnleigh

7/17/2026 at 8:22:41 AM

When it happens they won’t tell you about it

by ChrisGreenHeur

7/17/2026 at 9:10:30 AM

Look up a Kenneth Anger or Maya Deren film.

You probably won't be impressed and these are legendary figures in experimental film making either.

There is no audience or market for what these tools would be good for.

These videos in the examples are laughable uncreative trash to me but so are big budget super hero human slop.

The main constraint with AI art is that I think the models have been overfit to a very narrow range of visual expression. Midjourney in 2023 could produce the absolute most fucked up images I have ever seen and I have seen a lot of fucked up visual art. That has all been washed out of the model at this point towards a statistical average of what people think is "beautiful".

Also no nudity allowed. What we have is nothing like a model trained to output the sensibility of Hieronymus Bosch or Francis Bacon with nudity. We have literally the opposite of that.

It is the difference between an artist and a "creative". These models are for "creatives", the conformist corporate bullshit version of the artist.

Instead of Hieronymus Bosch we have the statistical average infinite pretty portraits of the virgin mary because we are good people and good corporate citizens.

by neuralhawke

7/17/2026 at 7:33:41 PM

I don't think you can make the absolute statement that there is no audience or market for these tools. I enjoyed watching all of these videos. They are far from banal crap. They are deranged. They are not intentionally deranged, it is limitation of the tool. If a video artist were to employ these tools not to save effort, but instead to create an aesthetic it would be proper and good use. Just like non-AI video editors or color grading tools.

by doug_durham

7/17/2026 at 1:31:23 PM

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PlfOoKTFcAE seems pretty good to me?

by ndriscoll

7/17/2026 at 3:07:35 PM

I don't agree, but this is exactly why AI is the technology of this century. We will never be able to agree, because we have no common ground.

I think it's pointless dribble. There's no punchline that it's working towards other than "pigeon dumb"

by delusional

7/17/2026 at 12:57:44 PM

> I would really love to see examples of creatives using modern AI/LLMs to make quality art

Look up "The Chronicles of Bone". It's pretty good.

by Marha01

7/17/2026 at 3:48:48 PM

I've seen a few that have been shared - I'll link them here if I can find them.

I think right now most people here and on twitter have no taste, and post slop that were just sort of one shotted.

But there are people using these tools in a sort of hybrid way, which I think has incredible potential. You can use it to do CGI on existing footage, in a way that's orders of magnitudes faster and cheaper than current CGI methods.

I also think that the most viable models will be video-to-video, and audio-to-audio.

If you've read A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, I think you might get what I'm saying. But essentially, you can capture a lot of emotion, expression, etc, using a cheap camera and a single actor, and then use AI to "stylize" it in a really cheap effective way, while keeping the emotion/expression. Adding lighting for example, upscaling the quality, changing the voice timbre while keeping the pacing, etc.

by peab

7/17/2026 at 8:25:08 AM

The suno produced AI world cup country songs were far more exciting and viral than any of the “real” slop produced by the event

https://youtube.com/shorts/xWziEfQxkyo?si=UEzIzVeUUFXEZvCS

by chhxdjsj

7/17/2026 at 9:25:09 AM

They really slap for Social Media, but not real life.

by marysol5

7/17/2026 at 9:01:15 AM

Take a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/@Gossip.Goblin

He (they?) have a vision, and are trying to get it on the screen via AI tools. I don't think the tools are quite there yet, so I wouldn't call it "quality art", but I think it shows the direction of travel, and it shows somebody trying to use those tools to say something (ironically, the message is that the tools are kinda bad news).

I'm reminded of the tipping point when a generation of bedroom producers got tools "good enough" that they didn't need studio time any more. We got some creative music and a lot of slop out of that change. But hey, 80% of everything is crap, so it shouldn't be a surprise.

by flir

7/17/2026 at 9:36:54 AM

It just does not feel original, or novel, or actually weird. I dunno it’s impressive but… so empty?

by camillomiller

7/17/2026 at 3:19:25 PM

I think its feet stand more in written SF than filmed SF - I haven't seen anything quite like it in film, but I can point to books that seem to have influenced it. In that respect, I think it's novel. I agree with the emptiness comment. Maybe it's empty because it's so relentlessly shiny - there's not much "tonal variation".

But I do think it's a harbinger of things to come: bedroom auteurs with new tools (although they'll be surfing an absolute tidal wave of slop). The tools are going to get better; early synthesizers were pretty primitive.

by flir

7/17/2026 at 9:12:06 AM

It won't happen for the intrisc nature of (current-gen, at least) AI of being forced within the limits of their training, which deprives the artist of intent - that is, specifically the ability of questioning in some way what came before him.

The point of art isn't "I made it pretty so it has value now", it's "This is how I see the world, am I the only one who feels this way?".

And yes, this is valid even for absolute jerks who couldn't care less about that the other people were thinking at the time, Like Lou Reed for example. The questions in his music were rhetorical and directed at himself in that case. Unfortunately, as Pablo Picasso said, for this computers (or AIs, in this case) are useless. They can only give you answers.

by easyThrowaway

7/17/2026 at 3:00:00 PM

> AI of being forced within the limits of their training

AI doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's the sum of training, inputs and outputs. If I give it novel inputs, the outputs won't be solely within the limits of their training. If I use it as part of a pipeline, the end result of the pipeline too won't be forced within the limits of AI training.

by danielbln

7/17/2026 at 3:07:03 PM

You're kinda right but it's exactly the ease of generation and the lack of time and money spent which makes people value AI output less.

A fake Gauguin painting and a real one can be almost indistinguishable to the human eye. But only one is worth the big bucks. Everyone scoffs at the other (once told which is real and which is fake). Something similar might happen to AI where the requirement to disclose it becomes a signal that the creator has cheapened out

by aprilthird2021

7/17/2026 at 4:07:47 PM

There was an interesting recent 99% invisible episode about the creation of videos for Karaoke in the 90s, which talked about videos created on very low budgets for songs with tight constraints. Even adjusting for inflation, their budgets would be well below a million dollars by today’s standards (and some costs would likely be lower thanks to digital video removing the cost of purchasing and processing film stock and making editing cheaper).

by dhosek

7/17/2026 at 11:08:53 AM

A lot of iconic scenes were at the discretion of the actors in those scenes. One wonders how much personality and complexity you can really get without the skills and idiosyncrasies of everybody in front of and behind the cameras on a real movie set.

My point being there's a lot more complexity in not producing slop than it seems.

by wvh

7/17/2026 at 9:04:57 AM

It's much simpler than that.

If you can't afford a video then don't make one. A slop video for $100 will devalue your entire brand. People will question your music.

There's a lot more value in just cutting some live performance videos together cheaply.

by cryo32

7/17/2026 at 9:30:13 AM

> eg. "scene 32, same 2 characters from the previous scene, now dressed in the garb of Egyption middle kingdom high priests, though with cat faces, dancing on the back of an elephant that is running fast with blurred feet on the surface of a river with licks of water that burst from the water in time with the music that I gave you before, length of song for this clip 2:21 to 2:31"

No need to even be so detailed: "Make this an ancient egypt theme" would probably work.

by lelanthran

7/17/2026 at 11:01:50 AM

Interestingly, I enjoyed early GenAI videos much more. All those bizarre, fever dream like experiences from the lack of consistency between frames, where things would morph or pop in and out of existence. They had a certain flair and something truly distinct to the medium. Now it is mostly just this uncanny valley of bringing stock photography to life.

Obviously, there will be some who use AI to great artistic effect, but I'm really worried about the discoverability of actually interesting stuff, whether it uses AI or not. Everything will be swamped by the automated goo of mediocrity that will vastly dominate in volume.

My perhaps naive hope is that this pushes people back toward offline and local communities, as well as toward more physical art instead of even more consumerism.

by smoe

7/17/2026 at 11:59:14 AM

Have you been following Gossip Goblin?

by mapt

7/17/2026 at 12:35:08 PM

Gossip Goblin, I think, is a great example of what artists with actual working experience can do with AI.

That said, for my taste, his works, while visually beautiful and interesting, feel a bit collage-y and lacking in emotion. The over the top visuals distract from a lack of depth. Sound design is very meh.

As I said, I think there are and will be many artists using AI in great and novel ways. It’s just that so far I have seen many more grifters than artists.

I’m not yet convinced that AI will bring us the next Masamune Shirow, Katsuhiro Otomo, Moebius, H.R. Giger, or Syd Mead in terms of lasting stylistic impact on the genre without them having to learn some actual skills, rather than just being an “idea person"

by smoe

7/17/2026 at 8:30:52 AM

I'm amazed how easily people dismiss this. They used less that an hour of wall clock time and max $50 to do this.

How much would it take for me to create videos like this? I'm guessing 1-4 years calendar time practicing half an hour every day just to break my lack of talent. Immeasurable cost given how there's no way in hell I'm going to invest that kind of time for a skill I don't actually want to acquire.

Somebody who's actually competent and talented is going to make some pretty amazing stuff cheaply with something like this, and the technology is nowhere near its peak yet.

by abc42

7/17/2026 at 8:39:50 AM

That depends on your own standards to be honest. Here's a video from Meshuggah which is a camcorder recording of them emoting in a camper van - that's half an hour of work, a few hours of editing tops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A_tSyJBsRQ

My point is, anyone can make a music video on any budget or level of talent. And camcorder silliness is more artistic and entertaining than AI generated stuff any day of the week.

by Cthulhu_

7/17/2026 at 1:20:00 PM

I found the OP AI videos much more entertaining than this camcorder silliness. It was interesting to see how literal the AI interpreted the lyrics, but then sometimes took the liberty to add clips of synchronized dance moves which actually seemed like a good match for the tempo. And each shot was different and engaging in some way. I tired of watching a bunch of grown men thrash around like idiots in a cramped van after about 5 seconds. How you consider that artistic is beyond me.

by tejohnso

7/17/2026 at 2:31:14 PM

Interesting. One of my biggest surprises from all this was that the timing of the dancing seemed significantly wrong. I would have thought that would be one of the easiest things.

by recursive

7/17/2026 at 9:24:18 AM

I'm fine with AI music having AI videos.

https://www.youtube.com/@DementedVinyl

But I have never cared about a video when it comes to music.

by ThatMedicIsASpy

7/17/2026 at 10:57:53 AM

A good music track does not _need_ a video, but some videos definitely can enhance the music or are just amazing by themselves.

'Sabotage' by the Beastie Boys (Spike Jones), 'Hunter' by Bjork (Paul White), 'Praise You' by Fatboy Slim (also Spike Jones), ... er Billie Eilish 'When The Party's Over', Apex Twin's Windowlicker (Chris Cunningam). There are so many great music videos that are more than just the song.

Of course, some are just the artist singing in front of a greenscreen, and that's fine I suppose. Still, they are fundamentally different to an excellent music video.

by gilleain

7/17/2026 at 10:54:31 AM

Didn't expect to see a MESHUGGAH reference in HN today. Not bad.

by santiagobasulto

7/17/2026 at 11:26:38 AM

This. I generally much rather watch a live video of the band performing the song interspersed with some behind the scene footage than some random badly acted (non-AI) slop video on top of the song.

If you like the music, you probably want to feel some connection to the people making that music.

by wvh

7/17/2026 at 1:38:10 PM

It's like using an excavator to arrange a bunch of big stones in a circle and saying it's a new Stonehenge. The excavator is obviously a powerful tool, it took you an hour to do what took the ancients a huge amount of time and effort. But why should anybody care? The stones aren't the actual point of Stonehenge, despite the name. It's the history and meaning.

If the input was a few sentences, an hour of waiting, and $50, why should I value the result any more highly than Excavatorhenge?

by wat10000

7/17/2026 at 11:45:44 AM

> I'm amazed how easily people dismiss this.

Why? What's its value? I personally wouldn't watch a video/movie/show that's entirely clanker generated, I see no point in it.

All AI fanatics can talk about is cost, productivity, money, efficiency, ... no wonder they can't understand art or even basic human emotions

by toasty228

7/17/2026 at 10:57:45 PM

>All AI fanatics can talk about is cost, productivity, money, efficiency, ... no wonder they can't understand art or even basic human emotions

That's an incredibly myopic way of thinking about other people. Sort of ironic when you imply that you're better at "basic human emotions".

by abc42

7/17/2026 at 8:41:54 AM

Why would you want to make a video like that though, it’s soulless slop

by simmerup

7/17/2026 at 10:50:23 AM

Why would you think that soulless slop is the only thing this technology can make?

by abc42

7/17/2026 at 12:19:54 PM

... because of the evidence all around us?

But really, nobody said "only" it's just that the gems are drowning alongside us in a sea of bullshit and the tide is still on the way up I'm afraid.

by natebc

7/17/2026 at 10:59:09 PM

Where exactly do you think this evidence is? Don't tell me you're basing this on demos like the one in the article?

by abc42

7/20/2026 at 12:34:00 PM

No. Not the demos in this article.

by natebc

7/17/2026 at 11:47:23 AM

> can make

It doesn't matter what it "can" make when what it does make is 99.999% boomer certified slop

by toasty228

7/17/2026 at 11:36:21 AM

I've seen similaer videos in the pre AI time where someone stiches stock fotos together that fit to the lyrics. Absolute shit, and this is the advanced way to do that. It's a costly gimmic for illegal youtube uploads. The videos have no more value than that. So yes, you could do that in half an hour with your current knowledge and 0$, but it would be meaningless still images instead of meaningless video snippets. I see not much difference.

by krater23

7/17/2026 at 7:12:52 AM

A talented creative with a vision can now direct AI to build things that would have otherwise cost millions or been entirely impossible. I don’t understand the myopic view people have when it comes to this technology. Just three or four years ago, we saw the exact same skepticism with programming. People insisted it can't do this and it can't do that, but many of those things are possible today.

by xbmcuser

7/17/2026 at 7:22:21 AM

This tech isn’t steerable enough when it comes to creative output.

Maybe there are some nooks and crannies where this tech can be employed and actually save time/budget. Maybe. But what does not work is to just take the output and use it. There is nowhere near enough precision there.

by arrrg

7/17/2026 at 7:44:50 AM

This is exactly my vision. I can barely get AI to output my code how I want it to after hours of planning and refining.

If you think you can be "specific" enough for AI to match your "creative vision", then maybe you're not really creative.

by isqueiros

7/17/2026 at 9:35:24 AM

Yes today but the statements coming out of people are like as if the tech is static and not changing everyday. It was the same for programming it can't do this it can't do that till it is able to now.

by xbmcuser

7/20/2026 at 12:48:36 AM

You are describing false equivalency. There is a fundamental flaw to LLMs. The data is not weighted. Thats why it cant be reliably directed.

by geraldmcboing

7/20/2026 at 12:47:05 AM

But there is no evidence of this - its is your hypothetical reckons. If a "talented creative" wanted realism, they can already access it and in a reliable, repeatable, direct-able way using all of their lived experience. Your idea of 'directing AI' just shows you haver never directed a human actor, or collaborated with a talented DOP etc. All you describe is an unreliable shortcut to shiny blandness and call anyone who points out your massive blindspot 'myopic'. It would appear it is you who is profoundly myopic about the reality of producing creative work of worth.

by geraldmcboing

7/17/2026 at 7:29:11 AM

"can" but generally doesn't .. and the rare gold is buried in a mountain of bland crap and outright propaganda, state level and crank level.

I have no objection to the potential vision you espouse, I have zero love for the actual ground level reality of the tsunami of AI slop videos being pumped out ATM - many are skewed toward trust building in a probable long con game of deceit or nation swaying, others are just ick.

by defrost

7/17/2026 at 7:18:44 AM

It remains godawful slop in every instance I've seen, no matter how expensive it would be to produce without AI.

by zeofig

7/17/2026 at 7:24:41 AM

I think this new one made with Seedance 2.5 is actually not too bad.

https://x.com/BytePlusGlobal/status/2077321849806234080

by starshadowx2

7/17/2026 at 7:58:57 AM

Needs more cuts.

by lotsofpulp

7/17/2026 at 3:05:08 PM

I saw nothing wrong with the number of cuts, seems very in line with other commercials like this. I would not have been able to tell this was made by ai had I not known it going into it.

by marknutter

7/17/2026 at 3:12:40 PM

I don’t watch commercials to know what is typical, but I just have experience that video media with lots of cuts is generally low quality and a sign to turn it off.

by lotsofpulp

7/20/2026 at 12:50:08 AM

its out of sync such that it would fail a basic QC by any reputable post house. And it looks like digital slop.

by geraldmcboing

7/17/2026 at 8:14:26 AM

Art is kind of unique though, because it inherits a lot of it's value from scarcity, both of the art itself and of the rare talent that can make quality art. If an artistic style or product becomes too common, it tends to lose its luster.

An app is still useful even when it's cheap for anyone to make it. But art that anyone can make for cheap becomes, by definition, slop.

by qnleigh

7/17/2026 at 1:34:29 PM

> A talented creative with a vision could make something more interesting and enjoyable in an afternoon

I should hope that a "talented" creative "with a vision" could, do better, yes. But now a talentless hack devoid of vision can do something half decent too. And if you don't think this is half decent, just replace "now" with "soon".

by tejohnso

7/17/2026 at 1:57:00 PM

We all know that tasteless junk media would never be successful, this is why you only find high quality media on the internet and only high quality media gets popular in the mainstream. That sounds right, right?

Seriously, the nudge for artistic value can be made, although I would very much doubt a creative human making a video for an established song with a clear theme would do better in creativity. Perhaps the one advantage a human would have is to reject the expectations for such a tasks, which the AI is trained to fulfil.

The problem isn't that such content lacks artistic value. It is that it is enough for the broadest audience. The average consumer is basically a vacuum cleaner.

by raxxorraxor

7/17/2026 at 2:11:38 PM

> The average consumer is basically a vacuum cleaner.

Yeah, this has been the hardest pill to swallow, as a creative and person that enjoys art. They know it's all least-common-denominator bullshit and they like it anyway. A lot of people truly just don't care about the meaning or any message in the art, they just like explosions and pretty people.

And that's fine, I guess. There's nothing wrong with it. It just... makes me feel a little empty inside.

by intrikate

7/17/2026 at 3:09:59 PM

We’re all tasteless and unrefined morons for something. You enjoy art and have developed a sense of taste, and that’s valuable and valid, and I would assume brings a lot of depth and meaning to your life. Could you differentiate mass-market vs lovingly handmade beef jerky? Or do you want to spend the time researching the precise-to-certainty best vacuum cleaner (ha, did that subconsciously) for your specific apartment, average particulate size and volume and texture?

I’m really trying not to make a value judgment here—tbh I also care a lot more about artistic integrity (in the arts I’m in a place to understand and judge, anyway) than beef jerky. Just landing on: the mass market is there to satisfy the majority of people that don’t deeply care about the particular slice that the mass market serves, because we’re all mortal and can’t be arsed to refine our tastes and decisions on everything.

by Arubis

7/17/2026 at 1:42:20 PM

And do you think that makes the world a better place?

by contagiousflow

7/17/2026 at 1:56:34 PM

the moment debate becomes philosophical it's over

by armanj

7/17/2026 at 1:52:56 PM

What does making the world a better place mean?

How do you define “a better place”?

by achalxyz

7/17/2026 at 2:39:31 PM

> And if you don't think this is half decent, just replace "now" with "soon".

see, you keep saying that, but it never comes true. First of all, you suggest that just because progress has been fast up to now, it will continue being fast. I think that's something like Gambler's fallacy. Secondly, the progress we're seeing is not like linear progress to 100%. It continues to get certain things extremely wrong. This might be half decent today for fooling the elderly, but it's not a good look for artistic expression or even marketing for that matter.

by functionmouse

7/17/2026 at 1:37:35 PM

Yes, and it has me genuinely concerned.

by DaiPlusPlus

7/17/2026 at 7:53:40 AM

> It's a grey goo of the average of every concept picked up from the concept of the song.

All right, but that's what an average entertainment product looks like. All these new TV shows have exactly the same look and feel about them. The same actors playing the same roles over and over again.

People keep comparing AI to some kind of once in a lifetime genius instead of an average person in the field.

by f6v

7/17/2026 at 8:11:45 AM

This seems overly pessimistic to me. Of the recent shows I have watched, Andor contradicts it in my opinion. Might even be one of the best shows I have watched. Granted I rarely watch movies/TV shows these days so my random sample might just be lucky.

by kriro

7/17/2026 at 4:17:37 PM

andor is without doubt, the exception that proves the rule and you know, was not renewed because it was so expensive to make

andor is exceptional

by 8note

7/17/2026 at 1:39:04 PM

Guess what, I don't like or watch those either.

by wat10000

7/17/2026 at 8:24:26 AM

No one is denying that AI can generate worthless slop, just how most of what humans generate is worthless slop.

by Jtarii

7/17/2026 at 6:32:16 AM

We don't yet know the "load bearing" or "delve" or "not X. Not Y. Just..." Clichés of video AI - at least I don't know. But given it's instruction tuned, we can be confident they will be there, and that the breadth of what it can generate for a given prompt will have extremely low diversity compared to its training data.

by vintermann

7/17/2026 at 6:57:54 AM

One of the big dead giveaways for AI videos is the sequence of slow pan shots without any sort of real action or focus. Once you start seeing it in a few of them, you'll start seeing it in _all_ of them. Just shot after shot of a slow pan of a scene with minimal action happening in only a few areas.

by DanHulton

7/17/2026 at 4:37:27 PM

People keep referring to the output of neural nets as the "average of the training data" but imho the deep value in neural nets and the interesting philosophical part is they are massive conditional probability engines whose results can change based on the variables you feed in.

by sporkland

7/17/2026 at 9:45:48 AM

> A talented creative with a vision could make something more interesting and enjoyable in an afternoon with a $0 budget.

Only if you are really sloppy with your book keeping.

by jstummbillig

7/17/2026 at 8:17:28 AM

I think these videos are a great visual representation of what happens to your codebase of you let the agent vibe code the entire thing by itself without review and guidance!

It works... but once you actually start looking at the details there are so many small cases that need fixing.

Now, if you had someone with experience in editing, and they worked as a team, human + agent, then most of the small issues would be picked up and fixed during development.

by calgoo

7/17/2026 at 8:30:14 AM

>I think these videos are a great visual representation of what happens to your codebase of you let the agent vibe code the entire thing by itself without review and guidance!

I think you are right if the codebase has no tests.

Thats the thing about producing art. Its subjectively consumed. Is it good or bad? You can’t really verify that during generation.

You largely can with code.

by nonethewiser

7/17/2026 at 1:35:06 PM

Completely agree. Impressive as a tech demo, but that is pretty much where it ends. Give a talented kid an iPhone and they could create something significantly better and more interesting.

And this is the bear case on AI. Sure, if the quality of the output is largely meaningless or binary, e.g. it works or it doesn’t, then AI is useful, but as soon as subjective judgement or taste is involved it is useless.

by etempleton

7/17/2026 at 6:43:37 AM

"It's a grey goo of the average of every concept picked up from the concept of the song."

You just described 90% of todays music videos made by humans.

by karlkloss

7/17/2026 at 7:24:22 AM

Even the worst music videos I have seen aren’t as incoherent as this mess.

This is actually mostly down to constraints: even if you suck you will suck in some coherent consistent way that will give your music videos more structure than this mess.

Those videos are just nihilistic despair.

by arrrg

7/17/2026 at 3:33:19 PM

I remember an Apple ad from a while back where a hydraulic press crushes a bunch of musical instruments. Your "grey goo of the average" analogy resonates for me because these videos feel like what would ooze out if we take all relevant videos that were produced by humans and then crush them under a generative press.

by hliyan

7/17/2026 at 3:54:36 PM

It was made with zero artistic intent, so it has zero value. If you sat down a talented art student that cared, they could prompt AI to make something artistically interesting to watch.

by throwawaytea

7/17/2026 at 8:11:15 PM

remembering that line from the Portlandia sketch where the PTA is discussing the music their kids are listening to with the subtext that it's not indie enough :

"It is pap. It is pabulum." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdEPgB2yizw

by nekooooo

7/17/2026 at 9:08:02 AM

You can find someone on Fiverr that’ll do a better job than this for $100. The concept will be completely different but it’ll be much better.

by basisword

7/17/2026 at 2:01:52 PM

$100 for a video on Fiverr?

by lostmsu

7/17/2026 at 2:10:58 PM

It's basically a freelancer website at this point. The original concept is long dead.

by basisword

7/18/2026 at 2:42:07 AM

I was questioning price range really

by lostmsu

7/17/2026 at 7:17:23 AM

Yes but they would have had to spend years training/practicing which apparently is not a thing we value anymore.

by mirsadm

7/17/2026 at 12:30:45 PM

I wonder how much of the sloppy feeling is created by the knowledge that its AI generated.

by Spacecosmonaut

7/17/2026 at 6:19:34 PM

I wish I could see it with fresh eyes without the accumulated knowledge I have of how AI looks. What does this video look like to a person clueless about AI?

What do they think of the constant repetition of slow panning shows where barely anything is happening, or a guy spinning on the floor but his head morphs into his feet and his feet morph into his head, or a person kissing a mirror that isn't quite mirroring the person and it slowly becomes a person kissing what appears to be their identical twin standing on the other side a floating empty mirror frame?

by DrammBA

7/17/2026 at 1:32:07 PM

Same. I think there's a lot of AI prejudice influencing people's opinions on AI output.

I wonder what would happen in a study where some art is critiqued by one group that is informed that the art was created by AI and another group that is uninformed.

by tejohnso

7/17/2026 at 2:56:21 PM

Yeah, a $100 AI music video is materially worse than not having a music video.

by MPSimmons

7/17/2026 at 2:39:44 PM

The scary thing is that this is the worst this technology will ever be.

The media industry is cooked.

Get ready for $100 movie theater tickets, because the cost actual creative work is going to go sky high in the next few years

by websap

7/17/2026 at 2:47:27 PM

Movie tickets won't skyrocket. The price to make content will only go down. Best case, creators will be able to make better movies w/ a fraction of the $$ (faster iteration on concepts, cheaper CGI, no need to hire extras, etc). Worst case, movie makers don't find AI useful and ticket prices stay the same.

by jvorick

7/18/2026 at 8:18:15 AM

cheaper CGI

Worth noting that the weird artifacts and morphing transitions that seem to be "free" and perhaps too abundant in AI videos would've probably been impossible or extremely difficult to create otherwise.

by userbinator

7/17/2026 at 2:41:14 PM

Wouldn't it track that AI creative work would plummet ticket costs rather than increase them?

by bmau5

7/17/2026 at 5:32:36 PM

The industry may be cooked, but the economic effect you predict is entirely illogical. Things don't get more expensive simply because other things get cheaper.

by zahlman

7/17/2026 at 2:41:41 PM

> Get ready for $100 movie theater tickets, because the cost actual creative work is going to go sky high in the next few years

I suspect movie theaters will just die. Even nowadays, on the occasion I go to see a movie, I damn near gave the entire theater to myself. Given the output from Hollywood is already abysmal, I can’t imagine paying $100 for it even if the alternative is AI slop.

by sigsop7

7/17/2026 at 2:20:23 PM

The hooks are more important than the quality. The whole short video stuff is designed to be filled by AI slop.

Even the long video format (I.e movies) are in big trouble due AI because the cheap/junk stuff they produce (I.e Netflix style ) will be easily produced with AI.

Not to mention that people will have the option to no longer subject themselves to the lecturing of various political crap that is being delivered through the big media producers(I.e Netflix)

by theplumber

7/17/2026 at 8:30:00 AM

A lot of the replies to this are, predicably, disappointing. For what its worth, I entirely agree.

AI is good at a lot of things, but it genuinely sucks at anything that requires real creativity. The human at the heart of a creative endeavor can't be replaced, and I hope that never changes.

by maxehmookau

7/17/2026 at 8:02:31 AM

"90% of everything is crap".

Although I guess we should probably update it to "99% of everything is slop.

by gpderetta

7/17/2026 at 8:28:08 AM

>But the end product has zero artistic value

It has more artistic value than most modern art.

by nonethewiser

7/17/2026 at 6:17:21 AM

We dont need music videos though. Music videos are absurd and meaningless.

by onesandofgrain

7/17/2026 at 6:41:49 AM

I don't know if there is a hidden /s but I disagree with your general statement. Music Videos often enough expand the story the song tells.

While "The Blaze - TERRITORY" is already a beautiful song to me, its music video[1] Always brings a tear to my eye.

That said, music Videos, like many songs themselves, are not rarely meaningless and bland. I guess that is just the result of commercial music.

[1] https://youtu.be/54fea7wuV6s

by jakemm

7/17/2026 at 6:44:35 AM

They do not, they add nothing. And if they do then the song is bad.

by onesandofgrain

7/17/2026 at 6:27:00 AM

Ah man I love the music videos of the 90s

Spike Jonze had so many creative ones

by AIorNot

7/17/2026 at 8:01:13 AM

That was Morrissey's stance when he was in the Smiths.

I really wish he hadn't been such a luddite, it would have been great if we had some Smiths music videos that were actually made in the 80s. (OK, we did get one, "Stop Me if You Think That You've Heard This One Before.")

by johnvanommen

7/17/2026 at 6:31:20 AM

Why are they absurd and meaningless?

Can be art and creative, just like the music.

by Mashimo

7/17/2026 at 6:41:08 AM

Music videos take attention away from the actual art. It's purely a gimmick to make bad music sound better. ... and no, music videos are not art.

by onesandofgrain

7/17/2026 at 6:51:16 AM

Your definition of art is not in agreement with any artist’s interpretation I’ve ever heard. It’s like saying a movie based on a book is not art , it just distracts from the book.

by brabel

7/17/2026 at 7:00:58 AM

I don't care about being in agreement with "any artist's interpretation". And stop appealing to the masses argument, it's cringe.

No, a movie based upon a book is the same art just told in a different way, but I'm not buying that rappers driving luxury cars while rapping and having women in stripper heels tells the same musical artistic story in a different way. Or some random story.

by onesandofgrain

7/17/2026 at 8:36:06 AM

> but I'm not buying that rappers driving luxury cars while rapping and having women in stripper heels tells the same musical artistic story in a different way

Lol ok that's where you're coming from. Reducing music videos to gangster rap shite is basically the equivalent of "all movies suck because I've ever only seen Hollywood superhero movies".

by flohofwoe

7/17/2026 at 9:55:04 AM

you really love the distraction economy huh

by onesandofgrain

7/17/2026 at 7:24:07 AM

> music videos are not art.

Yes, they definitely are. I mean not all, but they can be. Just like cover photos on an LP or the music itself.

It might not do anything to you, but it's definitely art that can compliment the video. Might make it worse, might make it better. Might change the feeling.

by Mashimo

7/17/2026 at 6:51:53 AM

I think it's the same situation and direction with human dancers on every pop-music stage. They add nothing to the music so why are they there? It used to be that musicians focused on great playing and singers on great singing, but now every pop-star and also rap-star must have their dancers on stage. I personally don't get it but seems like many people like it more if there are more dancers.

by galaxyLogic

7/17/2026 at 6:58:09 AM

Exactly, they add nothing. It's a cringey gimmick. The music is the art.

by onesandofgrain

7/17/2026 at 7:03:34 AM

I'm sure some people said the same about ballet.

by __alexs

7/17/2026 at 9:55:21 AM

Ballet isn't art, it's wasted potential.

by onesandofgrain

7/17/2026 at 8:12:37 AM

Music videos aren't absurd and meaningless, as in many instances they are of fantastic artistic merit on their own accord and are simply scored in reverse

by bloqs

7/17/2026 at 9:04:48 AM

They're often a collection of meaningless visual cliches spliced together in an attempt to look meaningful, and always have been.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsgWUq0fdKk

by TheOtherHobbes

7/17/2026 at 9:54:38 AM

Agreed

by onesandofgrain

7/17/2026 at 6:43:30 AM

[dead]

by flohofwoe

7/17/2026 at 8:05:39 AM

[dead]

by theshowforbirds

7/16/2026 at 8:51:51 PM

Unsure if it's just the way they prompted it / coded it, but the output is far too much a literal direct copy of the lyrics. The best music videos have a story arc on the theme of but often not litearlly the lyrics, and start with obscurity and reveal something (following all the literary/story mechanisms)

Consider Amber Run - Found lyrics versus the video, and the story arc of the video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj6V_a1-EUA

by maerF0x0

7/16/2026 at 9:03:47 PM

Literal music videos are still fun and a valid creative direction, e.g., Vance Joy's "Riptide": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ_1HMAGb4k

by anonova

7/16/2026 at 9:25:35 PM

The thing about art is that literally everything is a "valid creative direction." But that doesnt make everything immune from derision.

by Waterluvian

7/17/2026 at 1:47:32 AM

I don’t understand what your point is.

by NuclearPM

7/17/2026 at 2:04:33 AM

The point is that, at least presently, an algorithm lacks the creativity to meaningfully stimulate an intellectual person, and whatever excuse you give for the decisions that algorithm makes, you should never expect a human being to be more impressed with the algorithm than they are with their human peers.

by RIMR

7/17/2026 at 6:17:53 AM

[dead]

by little-victory

7/16/2026 at 9:29:42 PM

Coincidence that both songs reference Michelle Pfeiffer or was that free connotation at work?

by therein

7/16/2026 at 11:02:22 PM 

  ...
  This hit, that ice cold
  Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold
  This one for them hood girls
  ...
- https://genius.com/Mark-ronson-uptown-funk-lyrics

by m463

7/17/2026 at 4:29:02 AM

...

I just wanna, I just wanna know

If you're gonna, if you're gonna stay

I just gotta, I just gotta know

I can't have it, I can't have it any other way

I swear she's destined for the screen

Closest thing to Michelle Pfeiffer that you've ever seen, oh

...

- https://genius.com/Vance-joy-riptide-lyrics

by therein

7/16/2026 at 10:13:26 PM

Free association?

by titanomachy

7/17/2026 at 4:29:40 AM

Yeah.

by therein

7/17/2026 at 1:01:30 AM

That’s neat. It especially works because the words are a little bit nonsensical, so interpreting them literally becomes unexpected.

by bee_rider

7/17/2026 at 3:48:41 AM

Come on, that video is on another level. "All my friends are turning green" (shot of $1 bills), "she's been living on the highest shelf" (woman standing on Juliet balcony), "they come unstuck" (someone pulling twin pole popsicle apart)

For contrast these have "ice cold" (shot of ice cubes), "got chucks on" (shot of shoes), "livin' it up in the city" (shot of city).

by wzdd

7/17/2026 at 4:21:02 AM

Those shots all matched the banality of Uptown Funk's lyrics.

by dolebirchwood

7/17/2026 at 1:52:11 PM

The retired dragon(s) were honestly my favorite part simply because of how absurd they were.

by threetonesun

7/16/2026 at 9:16:41 PM

That’s not really the same thing.

by Forgeties79

7/16/2026 at 9:07:41 PM

In an interview, an adult actress was asked about the things she says during scenes. She said she describes what is happening literally at any moment.

This is what LLM models do.

by dataviz1000

7/17/2026 at 1:15:36 AM

That was sort of like what The Mandalorian dialogue devolved into, with some explaining what's happening right now, and then some explaining what they're about to do.

Once you notice this, it's impossible to not notice it.

by BLKNSLVR

7/17/2026 at 8:27:32 AM

Also what all of Nolan's dialogue is.

by Jtarii

7/18/2026 at 1:35:09 PM

I'm yet to watch The Odyssey, I'll let you know how much your pointing it out ruined it for me ;)

by BLKNSLVR

7/16/2026 at 9:42:24 PM

Weird Al videos are often totally literal and extremely fun as a result.

https://youtu.be/N9qYF9DZPdw?is=tU_8p-hDZv9gjAJ6

by nsxwolf

7/16/2026 at 9:51:28 PM

Wierd Al videos are a parody of an existing property. "White and Nerdy" is a parody of "Riding Dirty" by Chamillionaire, but the lyrics are about nerd stereotypes (as an intentional contrast with black culture as presented in the original,) and a great deal of creative effort is put into making those lyrics humorous while also fitting to the original theme. Nothing about Wierd Al's videos are "totally literal," certainly not in the sense of these AI videos, which are "literal" in the sense of "literally showing what the lyrics are describing."

by krapp

7/17/2026 at 6:03:14 AM

Lots of the shots in white and nerdy are literally showing what the lyrics are describing, is there another level to them with references I’ve missed?

by IanCal

7/17/2026 at 12:31:21 PM

It's Riding Dirty but it it's about a guy who does anything but.

It's a song about how white people find black culture cool but are themselves stereotypically uncool.

It's a song about nerd culture and celebrating that, wherein a white nerd makes the same kinds of boasts that black rappers do in their music, but about nerd stuff.

It's layered, as any good parody has to be, with cultural references. When Al mows the lawn, he isn't just mowing the lawn because the lyrics say he's mowing the lawn, he's mowing the lawn because that's a sterotype of white people, and the intent is to show how uncool Al is and how unlikely he is to fit into the culture he aspires to. Note that when Key and Peele show up they lock the door on their convertible. This is a joke because their convertible is down and locking it while literally useless is an expression of their frustration with Al's nerdiness, it's also something white people stereotypically do around black people. The candles behind him are arranged like a Pac-Man. Al mentions that his rims don't spin not because the rims of the car in the frame aren't spinning but because he's a nerd and why would a nerd have spinning rims?

In "Amish Paradise" there's a part where Al sweats profusely. This is both a reference to the hard physical labor employed by the Amish and to the original Gangster's Paradise video.

The levels you're missing are irony, cultural awareness and genre awareness. The context is what makes the humor work.

by krapp

7/17/2026 at 6:49:57 PM

There’s two sides to what you’ve said - I’d forgotten lots of the things like trying to lock the car doors, which is an additional point although the scene is still pretty direct.

The other things you’re saying are about the song and storytelling there which is not relevant here. We’re talking about the translation from the song and lyrics to a video. The things I’d remembered about the video were very direct translations from the lyrics, because the lyrics are very clear and to the point.

> Al mentions that his rims don't spin not because the rims of the car in the frame aren't spinning but because he's a nerd and why would a nerd have spinning rims?

Right, a thing in the lyrics.

by IanCal

7/17/2026 at 7:17:14 PM

I feel like people are being purposely obtuse here. OK. If you want to believe that satire and parody only consist of blindly showing things mentioned in the lyrics in order to imply that these AI generated videos are equivalent in art and skill to what Wierd Al does, I won't even try to stop you.

But most people are going to understand the difference between the two and see that argument for the reach that it is.

by krapp

7/18/2026 at 3:38:42 AM

> I won't even try to stop you

You don't need to, because I've not done that. This may be why you're reading my comments as obtuse because you think I'm saying something that I am not.

I initially thought you were mixing up a discussion about the lyrics vs creating a music video for a song. However now I'm not sure if you think that Weird Al wrote the lyrics after the video was created?

> If you want to believe that satire and parody only consist of blindly showing things mentioned in the lyrics

The songs are excellent parody, and then things like the music video for white and nerdy is pretty much a series of scenes showing exactly what the lyrics are saying. Almost every shot is explicitly the thing being said.

> Al mentions that his rims don't spin not because the rims of the car in the frame aren't spinning but because he's a nerd and why would a nerd have spinning rims?

The lyrics were written first, explaining that his rims don't spin. This is because he's a nerd. The music video was then created, and at the point this is sung he points to his stationary rims.

by IanCal

7/17/2026 at 8:57:22 AM

That's because White and Nerdy isn't a standalone song (if it was, it would be rubbish). It only has value as referential humour and self deprecating parody. So by being literal, it's using juxtaposition to emphasise the humour: It's funny when the nerd is pointing at the old JS logo and star trek's klingon icon because one would typically expect there to be something related to black culture, as in the start of the music video.

If it wasn't a parody of an existing song, and the popular genre, it would be complete garbage. Nothing about the song would work.

by automatic6131

7/18/2026 at 3:49:09 AM

I think you're mixing up the lyrics and the video.

> It's funny when the nerd is pointing at the old JS logo and star trek's klingon icon

The lyrics are funny. The video is almost entirely converting each near standalone statement into a very direct scene. "I'm fluent in javascript as well as klingon" is the funny line about his nerdiness, and the video is literally just him pointing to those logos.

Key and Peele locking the car doors is one of the few things that happens that's in the video and not explicitly said in the lyrics.

by IanCal

7/17/2026 at 1:14:32 AM

I wonder what would happen if you gave the AI video generation tools a widely ranging prompt to generate a video from Weird Al's "Amish Paradise", and then compared it to the actual video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg

by walrus01

7/17/2026 at 6:20:24 AM

It seems no one has called themselves "Weird AI" and started making AI parodies of Weird Al's videos yet...

by userbinator

7/17/2026 at 12:34:13 AM

I definitely read that as weird ai and was confused when I saw a normal, but dope, video

by maerF0x0

7/17/2026 at 6:47:42 AM

They are funny, which is the point of Weird Al. The overwhelming majority of music and music videos are not comedic.

by latexr

7/16/2026 at 9:58:40 PM

Fun fact (if you care): Back in the '90s, pretty much every music video produced in Azerbaijan literally matched the lyrics.

by nalekberov

7/16/2026 at 10:14:24 PM

The entire thing was cringeworthy to the core. I kind of enjoyed it though because it perfectly epitomized "AI slop" in the first 30 seconds so wonderfully. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" - show a blonde woman in a gold sequined top! "Livin' it up in the city" - show a shot of a big city!

If anything, the absurd literalism of the video contrasted so perfectly with the (IMO) brilliant clever originality of the lyrics. E.g. "Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold" is actually a not-so-subtle reference to cocaine. Imagine if the lyrics were as stupidly unoriginal as the video ("Now we're all snorting cocaine!!").

by hn_throwaway_99

7/17/2026 at 12:58:09 AM

> The best music videos have a story arc on the theme of but often not litearlly the lyrics

If the music is crazy popular, you can still do it. See Land Down Under

by postsantum

7/17/2026 at 1:50:40 AM

Sometimes you can fix this by swapping one tracks music video with another, and letting the syncopation happen naturally.

by deadbabe

7/17/2026 at 8:04:54 AM

Yes, LLMs are way to literal - it is a problem.

Claude can right great code, but it’ll throw comments into the code about why we chose this approach instead of the random one I discussed with it - when the comment is of no use to a future developer.

It points at some sort of theory of mind problem in LLMs imo.

by FailMore

7/17/2026 at 8:23:18 AM

I think these videos are actually a good representation of vibe coding... If you let the agent do its own thing, it works... but once you start looking at the details (just like in the video) you can see where the issues are.

by calgoo

7/17/2026 at 6:32:38 AM

AI is destroying the economics which allowed for a sizable middle class of artists. The issue is that many are paid for their art mostly for its aesthetic rather than artistic value. This isn’t the most creatively fulfilling, but it previously allowed many artists to make a living while refining their skills, often enabling them to pursue their real creative ambitions on the side.

by qbit42

7/17/2026 at 7:23:35 AM

AI enthusiasts actively want a world dominated by a few massive tech corps that'll steer our thoughts and kill creativity. The envy towards people who have skills that they polished is always very, very palpable when reading comments they make or hearing them talk in real life. But beyond just AI, the world is increasingly full of people who are proudly self-declared "accelerationists": accelerationism being the idea that we should make everything as shitty as possible because it'll make the world worse and bring everything down to their level. It's crabs in a bucket as a political, economic, and work philosophy.

by kdheiwns

7/17/2026 at 9:58:06 AM

I understand what you mean but speakers and recording equipment destroyed the economics of paying people to play music a long time ago.

It's another way of looking at the problem.

Smartphone cameras and easy-to-use professional equipment were thought to destroy the photography profession, yet photographers still exist, although we have to admit not as many as in the past.

If I had a company with a budget, I wouldn't waste my time using Claude to create art, even if it meant I could do all myself.

Certainly people who earned top dollar for doing something that AI can easily do now are going to be displaced, however the world of top dollar business has never been that big for the middle class of artists to begin with.

by lp4v4n

7/17/2026 at 11:06:08 AM

Sure, this mirrors history, technology is always transforming economics.

I guess my point is that there is a decent sized middle class of creative professionals right now, and I expect that the number of them will go down significantly due to AI. Seems like art will become more and more restricted to hobbyists and the lucky few who achieve mainstream success.

This is kind of what happened with photography. But I think the scale is much bigger, affecting all creative industries.

by qbit42

7/17/2026 at 5:36:53 PM

If you take the analogy of smartphones & photographers- then why don't you take both sides? We're much better off with now than then.

by halJordan

7/17/2026 at 6:23:34 PM

So this is a bit of a hot take for HN, but while my life is dramatically more convenient due to smartphones, “better” is actually not obvious to me. Some things are better, some are worse.

Anyway, I don’t think anything I said was even framed morally (although of course I have my personal opinions). My prediction is just that the amount and average quality of paid creative work is going to massively decline. To me, the scale difference matters a lot (compared to impact of previous tech). I hope I’m wrong.

by qbit42

7/17/2026 at 9:34:16 PM

FWIW smartphones did massively change the economics of being a photographer. The family photographer used to be a reliable profession and now it's just a side thing that event and wedding photographers do.

by Karrot_Kream

7/17/2026 at 8:06:55 AM

> AI is destroying the economics which allowed for a sizable middle class of artists.

I was an art major and switched to CompSci purely for the money.

AI "art" is often slop, but the ability to create something in seconds that used to take months shouldn't be taken lightly. There will undoubtedly be truly creative people who will use AI art as a force multiplier instead of a shortcut, and that is when things will get interesting.

We're already seeing this in software; plenty of people can attest to the fact that LLMs give them the opportunity to write software that they couldn't have written without AI, because their ability to write code wasn't up to snuff.

Some use that opportunity to get their existing work done faster.

But some use that opportunity to create things which were beyond their capabilities, just a few years ago. And when that same mindset eventually becomes prevalent among artists, we will undoubtedly see AI "art" that is truly art.

by johnvanommen

7/17/2026 at 9:39:29 AM

> There will undoubtedly be truly creative people who will use AI art as a force multiplier instead of a shortcut, and that is when things will get interesting.

No it won't :-/

What someone carefully prompted and refined over and over over a matter of months can be, the minute it is released, cloned in minutes.

Even being good with AI prompting still results in the product having no value to someone looking for the specific aesthetics.

by lelanthran

7/17/2026 at 9:43:36 AM

Not only is AI art often slop, it's also often theft. Or maybe even always theft. And it's both of these things that account for this newfound ability to create something normally time-intensive in seconds. Imagine I want to have a world-class painting on my wall: the fastest and cheapest way is to steal one from a museum, especially if I found a way to obscure the act. In the case of LLMs, its obscured by the fact that the model draws from many sources, blending them together in a way that's hard or even impossible to separate. Is stealing a small amount from many more excusable than a lot from just one? I don't see why that would be so. It's the total amount that measures the gravity of the transgression.

by pegasus

7/17/2026 at 1:28:22 PM

"I was an art major and switched to CompSci purely for the money." Translation: Not an artist.

I worked for 30 years as a pianist. The number of programmers who have told me they too are a musician... No- you aren't. And you never were. That's the thing, if you were a musician, you would be playing music. That would be your job.

I mean as a hobbyist, yes, sure, enjoy splashing paint and calling it art, but spending the tens of thousands of hours to learn what music actually is, no, no, no. You aren't. Would you call yourself an architect if you can draw a picture of a building? No, you aren't.

No artist wants to "create things which were beyond their capabilities" with an AI, they want to develop their capabilities to create things beyond who they are now. Art is about discovering the world, yourself, the strange magic of an ethereal plane, some how reached through vibrations.

I don't know. Reading programmers talk about art, as if they are not dilettantes, is always depressing for me.

by bubblegumcrisis

7/17/2026 at 1:57:36 PM

I agree with some of your characterizations here, but I don’t think it is fair to say that if you are not currently a professional artist, you were never a true artist. People get unlucky, have families to support, etc

by qbit42

7/17/2026 at 2:35:41 PM

Sure, if you devote yourself to art, you commit, and I'm not talking some insulated school environment, to improve and struggle, and then you burn out. Yes, this is a well known path for an artist. They failed, but they are still an artist. They are a failed artist, and this is actually a proud title to wear.

Someone who decides, "I'll be a programmer for money," was never an artist. Someone who studies music in college and does admin for some company is not a "musician" and never was. It is the journey in art that makes the artist, not playing a piece.

Unfortunately art is just like that. The amount of time required in devotion to the skill is truly staggering and humbling. And then, it's never enough.

I don't know.

It is possible to make this commitment while working in some unrelated field, but it takes tremendous will-power. Charles Ives is an example I suppose.

by bubblegumcrisis

7/19/2026 at 4:54:41 PM

This is borderline satirical. Being an artist doesn't require dedicating your entire life to it, that is not real, reasonable, or widely held

by xgulfie

7/17/2026 at 3:55:49 PM

This might be the most pretentious waffle I have ever read lmfao.

You write like the critic from Ratatouille.

by Jtarii

7/17/2026 at 5:42:59 PM

So Vivian Meier was not a photographer? The local bands that work day jobs aren't musicians?

Nonsense, frankly. Being an artist is not dependent on monetizing your talent.

There are artists and musicians and photographers, and there are professional musicians and artists and photographers.

What is someone who writes and performs music every day their whole life but bartends to pay their rent, to you? They're not a musician but someone that makes ukulele tracks for corporate training videos is, because the latter does it professionally?

by queenkjuul

7/17/2026 at 6:15:09 PM

If you are a computer programmer who meets up with your buddies to play every once in a while, no you aren't an artist.

If you are in a band, and you are playing all the time, obviously you are an artist. The job is facilitating you playing. The playing is the focus.

Someone who decides in college, or directly after college, "you know what, I'm just gonna be a programmer." Then touches the piano every once in a while, or plays with his friends every once in a while. I don't call that an artist.

There are so many of these people. They aren't artists. Sorry. Are the smart, probably, are they talented, probably, are they committed, yes to programming.

by bubblegumcrisis

7/17/2026 at 6:31:55 PM

>you are in a band, and you are playing all the time, obviously you are an artist.

Well, no, it's very much not obvious, you literally just said "you're not a musician, if you were, it'd be your job" but now it doesn't have to be your job, as long as your job isn't programming?

by queenkjuul

7/17/2026 at 7:11:56 AM

I'm not sure if AI slop will make a bad situation much worse tbh. The pop stars of the 60's to 90's always depended on a distribution platform/network (record labels, radio stations, MTV, ...). Those distribution platforms either don't exist anymore, or changed their 'business model' to f*ck the artists at least two decades ago. To find the really good stuff you already have to look elsewhere, and popular music was already 90% mass produced "slop" before AI entered the scene.

E.g. this ancient Frank Zappa interview about the decline of the music industry is still as relevant as ever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZazEM8cgt0

by flohofwoe

7/17/2026 at 8:54:17 AM

I think it will make a bad situation much worse, because CEOs of OpenAI and Antromorphic along with investors actively want to make it so. If they get more power, they will you that power to make the artists bad situation worst.

They don't have that power yet, but are consistently actively trying to worsen the situation for the last 4 years. They proudly bragged about achieving the bad situation like 2 years ago already.

by watwut

7/17/2026 at 9:51:41 AM

It was already bad, but I think there is still room for it to get a lot worse unfortunately.

by qbit42

7/17/2026 at 9:43:29 PM

AI appears to be doing this Software Engineering too, so seems it applies to other industries too.

Maybe the net effect so far has been more extractive and a transfer of wealth to a select few people? Is this how past technological revolutions were, or is this the first so far?

I think the elephant is the room is we hope things will change later - will they really?

by mannanj

7/17/2026 at 7:43:23 AM

I'm not sure it's the same people being paid for aesthetics as for the art. In streaming, for instance, background music is extremely profitable, and a good example of "just aesthetics". But you rarely see artistic artists crank out a few tracks for the "music for studying" playlists just to pay the bills.

by vintermann

7/17/2026 at 9:49:45 AM

They are not always the same but there is more overlap than you would think. One place that I know is being hit hard is Nashville (no comment on what this implies about the state of US country music). There are a lot of local musicians with their own (small) bands whose primary income came from (relatively low quality, compared to their own music) song-writing, playing back-up instrumentals/vocals for studios, stuff like that. This income stream is shrinking rapidly.

by qbit42

7/17/2026 at 9:17:56 AM

They're not going to put their name on it if they do.

Until fairly recently "jingles" - ad music - were a huge source of income for many musicians with full time careers. Likewise library music, which was prerecorded with a specific mood so music editors could drop into their projects without having to commission it, and then the composers would be paid for performance royalties/residuals.

Writers - not such a thing now, but in the 60s and 70s a surprising number of "serious" writers in the UK began their careers writing ad copy.

Famous movie directors - many started in the ad slop trenches.

Music videos are literally ads, and it's not a surprise they use many of the same techniques and are directed by ad industry people.

And then in tech there's ad tech...

AI is just the newest arrival to the party.

by TheOtherHobbes

7/17/2026 at 6:52:03 AM

[dead]

by marsven_422

7/16/2026 at 9:48:08 PM

These are awful. It’s like Suno music. Seems convincing if you half listen. As soon as you pay attention you notice all the cracks.

by saaaaaam

7/16/2026 at 10:18:41 PM

Unless I'm misunderstanding the article, or your comment, the models were responsible for generating the music _videos_.

The music itself is Uptown Funk... which was a very successful song in 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPf0YbXqDm0)

The videos are indeed awful though.

by sd9

7/16/2026 at 11:31:52 PM

Yes, I know what the music is. The videos are awful. I meant that watching them is an equivalent experience to listening to music generated by Suno.

by saaaaaam

7/17/2026 at 1:38:47 AM

They are awful because there is no effort put into it. You're missing the point entirely with generative art. Generative art with care and intent is indiscernible from "real" art at this point. You just don't realize it.

by esikich

7/17/2026 at 8:30:52 AM

I would love to see an example of this! Can you link anything?

by qnleigh

7/17/2026 at 1:47:15 AM

Generative art with care and intent is art.

The intent and care is the whole point. It is the difference between slop and art whether generative or not.

by 4chandaily

7/17/2026 at 2:03:00 AM

I completely agree and this is a very unpopular opinion outside of people who actually are artists.

by esikich

7/17/2026 at 3:24:58 AM

I think because pretty much all AI generated art is slop. When artists use AI with care and intention in their works, people don’t even realize it’s AI and they don’t care. And that’s fine.

by slopinthebag

7/17/2026 at 4:04:44 AM

It's a new medium and I think that is really exciting to watch it develop.

by esikich

7/17/2026 at 11:29:24 AM

Agreed. As with any new tool, there will be an adjustment period before the Overton Window catches up.

This is the current era's version of these hit classics:

   - "If you use autotune,you aren't a real singer!"
   - "Programming a drum machine isn't really writing percussion!"
   - "If you use Photoshop, you can't be a real artist."
   - "No real artist would use duct tape as a medium."
   - "Video games can't be art."
   - "Sampling is just ripping off other people's music."
Etc. The general public believed each of those things for a few years before accepting, each time, the simple truth.

Art is simply a conversation between the artist and the audience.

The medium, tools, subject, content, or even size of the audience are all just metadata which accompany the art. It will happen with these tools also.

by 4chandaily

7/17/2026 at 4:52:27 PM

But at the same time, we've had people commissioning art for centuries and we still don't consider the commissioner to be an artist.

Using AI as part of your workflow? Possibly art. Using it as your entire workflow? Slop, not art.

by slopinthebag

7/17/2026 at 7:49:51 PM

I think that is generally fair. My thought is if you are using AI like a metaphorical slot machine to generate things whole cloth...there is a very good chance what you are creating will be seen as slop by most. I think I would carve an exception here for those that are incredibly elaborate and detailed with their prompting to the point that the AI is essentially deterministic.

It really all comes down to the effort and intent of the artist. I use AI tools in the creation of my art, but it would never occur to me to pass off something entirely generated as "my art". The AI tool is just another brush, instrument, or typeface in an assortment of tools I reach for when creating. The AI by itself has no intent. You need a human for that (at least currently). without the human? Yeah, slop like the videos in the OP.

by 4chandaily

7/17/2026 at 4:05:42 AM

To each their own I suppose.

by slopinthebag

7/16/2026 at 10:31:20 PM

They're just saying that like Suno Music, if you look closely the cracks show. They're not saying the music is AI generated.

by Philip-J-Fry

7/17/2026 at 2:38:22 PM

I've had some real success with Suno. There's one song I made as a joke which is a house track with lyrics about me and my friends which I've genuinely downloaded and listen to regularly.

by __alias

7/17/2026 at 1:09:10 AM

The more concerning part is that a much less discerning audience will happily engage with and watch endless hours of AI slop videos. For example what happens if you give a 3 year old a tablet and youtube access to keep clicking on things.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ai-baby-slop-9.7166873

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/us/ai-videos-children-you...

Or for an "Adult" audience, I'm sure you could get an AI to create videos of "OW, My balls!" from Idiocracy.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Dh4l!,f_auto,q_auto:...

https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/D4E22AQEqLntg_DW7vg/fee...

by walrus01

7/16/2026 at 10:03:27 PM

Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured. What took this industry decades to advance it taking months in AI. Think the spaghetti Will Smith and now this. Another one people don't mention here but is specific to video is higgsfield ai.

by thewanderer1983

7/17/2026 at 12:01:04 AM

>Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured

The industry haven't matured except until a certain point. Then it declined. Modern visual effects are worse than practical effects in their heyday. They are also worse done than 3D effects in their tasteful early days (like Jurassic Park).

by coldtea

7/17/2026 at 5:23:25 PM

I think this has more to do with the cutthroat business than the technology involved. It seems the tech has improved, but the quality has suffered due to pressure to just fling shit out the door using the least amount of money to generate the most amount of profit. They are squeezing every penny dry. It seems to me the person you're responding to still has a valid point.

by y-c-o-m-b

7/17/2026 at 6:41:08 AM

Are you sure this is not just a case of good VX has hard to spot? And you only notice the bad/cheap examples.

by Mashimo

7/17/2026 at 7:35:34 AM

It's a case of the biggest blockbusters, with the biggest budgets, like the MCU movies or Fast and Furious and such, looking like crap vfx wise. Same for movies at every level.

VFX can be more subtle (e.g. how Fincher uses it), but it's rare. The industry (which is separate from the technology) didn't mature, it enabled crappy effects to dominate.

by coldtea

7/17/2026 at 7:47:47 AM

> with the biggest budgets, like the MCU movies or Fast and Furious

Oh, I hundred percent believe it. But did they spend the money on the vfx?

For example 1917 or Nolan movies I think have great VFX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bRZbsk_wuA (last part)

by Mashimo

7/17/2026 at 8:31:08 AM

CGI animals are still universally awful.

by Jtarii

7/16/2026 at 10:08:19 PM

Those old movies with old visual effects are watchable and still enjoyable. This is never good, interesting or enjoyable.

by claaams

7/16/2026 at 10:46:42 PM

> Those old movies with old visual effects are watchable and still enjoyable.

Id say it’s definitely possible to get spoiled by high production quality - if I went back to the old Star Trek or even the first seasons of the Doctor Who reboot, I’d mostly have to try to enjoy it for the story (then again, Doctor Who has never been overly concerned with presentation, the most fearsome aliens in the galaxy being metal boxes with plungers sticking out of them is quite silly). Same with most CGI in the older movies or even the style of older anime, it can all be a bit hard to watch.

I guess I also experience the same with video games, though to a lesser degree - some like Hidden & Dangerous 2 can still be enjoyed whereas something like Operation Flashpoint would be quite frustrating, though more often due to controls rather than graphics.

Ehh, they did what they could at the time.

by KronisLV

7/17/2026 at 8:57:46 AM

Also, just to be clear, the AI generated videos are quite trash.

However, you could imagine that maybe with a decade of refinement they'll get better - the existing prompting and composition were okay, it's just that they were plain bad technically. Then again, so was Will Smith eating spaghetti.

by KronisLV

7/16/2026 at 11:09:50 PM

Survivorship bias.

Not disagreeing with you that these are unwatchable, but it’s a little rose-tinted to think that (non-AI) slop didn’t exist a long time ago.

by pennomi

7/17/2026 at 12:02:03 AM

It's logical for slop to exist. It's bad when slop production is automated.

by coldtea

7/16/2026 at 11:47:16 PM

At least non-AI slop had a human behind it.

by galleywest200

7/17/2026 at 1:36:27 AM

The AI slop isn't making itself either.

by userbinator

7/17/2026 at 8:32:00 AM

Yes it is.

by Jtarii

7/19/2026 at 7:26:50 PM

Care to elaborate? Or are you just parroting some ideological belief with no basis in fact?

All AI-generated content is the result of one or more humans who decided to use AI to create it.

by userbinator

7/16/2026 at 10:21:20 PM

It is remixing what the industry created, not advancing past it. OpenAI even ended Sora in under a year. Anthropic doesn't even bother.

by 10xDev

7/16/2026 at 10:10:58 PM

Spaghetti Will Smith was 3 years ago, so it’s taking a little longer than months.

by clickety_clack

7/16/2026 at 11:12:30 PM

Any day now LLMs will develop taste

by sph

7/17/2026 at 2:29:51 AM

Don't many people have poor taste?

by skinfaxi

7/17/2026 at 5:37:45 AM

Like any other instance of this tired cliché, people can develop taste.

by sph

7/17/2026 at 7:16:50 PM

What does a developed taste look like to you when expressed in words?

by skinfaxi

7/17/2026 at 3:14:26 AM

guess that's what AI trained itself on

by byzantinegene

7/17/2026 at 6:57:05 AM

CGI effects actually got worse once they were used en-masse to make movie production cheaper. Good CGI still takes care, skill and taste.

by flohofwoe

7/16/2026 at 11:34:33 PM

Yes, I imagine in six months or so this will be far better.

by saaaaaam

7/16/2026 at 10:39:43 PM

Nonsense. Ray Harryhausen's work today is still incredible, by any standard.

by squidsoup

7/16/2026 at 10:47:30 PM

Spaghetti Will Smith was funny, this only inspires disgust in me: a clear downgrade. We're just getting deeper in the uncanny valley, with no end in sight.

> Visual effects went through this same development issues as the industry matured.

The difference is intent. Watching an old movie, the effects are obviously janky and far from seamless, but the authors had intent and the imperfections are understandable. When an AI jumbles a basic walk animation, it's just weird and soulless. The prompter just didn't want to spend any time doing actual work, so used this slop as a stand-in, when better techniques exists.

by thrance

7/17/2026 at 12:59:31 AM

Lmao yeah I’d rather give $100 to a college kid to film a bunch of shit and then splice it together. Would be significantly more interesting.

by datsci_est_2015

7/17/2026 at 1:02:26 AM

What college kid would do that for $100? Seems like a lot of work.

They might do it for free if they enjoy it or for a class, but purely for the money, not even close to being worth their time.

by bko

7/17/2026 at 7:03:15 AM

Seems pretty clear that the argument isn’t “approach a random kid in college studying philosophy or economics and ask them to make a music video for $100”. You ask this of someone studying cinema or something related, which has both the know-how and access to equipment but is lacking in experience.

by latexr

7/17/2026 at 5:55:50 AM

It depends on how long it takes to make the video. Most employed college kids are paid minimum wage or thereabouts. $100 is a day’s work.

by ashdksnndck

7/17/2026 at 8:05:45 AM

Interesting how bad this is when you don't use video models and your own direction.

The first two clips are made with Kling (not affiliated, but I use it myself): https://xcancel.com/PJaccetturo/status/2076312902685085815#m

Obviously not one-shot, and finalised in a video editor. It's quite doable to get this kind of fidelity.

by michelb

7/18/2026 at 7:43:49 PM

Thanks for sharing this, I'm not sure I would've come across it otherwise.

Ironically, watching the two shorts had me second-guessing whether what I was watching was actually AI-generated and not created by a professional. It's like peeking at what lies beyond the Overton horizon... only to see it wrap around until we're right back where we started.

by ctippett

7/16/2026 at 8:54:59 PM

> None of the music videos were great

Glad they acknowledge this.

Curious how much time in addition to tokens this costs. If you have to spend $25 and wait 45 minutes to get a basically unwatchable video, I'm not worried about indie film makers being replaced just yet...

by nzoschke

7/16/2026 at 10:03:56 PM

"not great" is a huge understatement

by mohamedkoubaa

7/17/2026 at 2:44:56 AM

It's sickening we're running out of compute for this shit lol. I don't blame the author though, it is what it is.

by hackmack10

7/17/2026 at 3:09:11 AM

If it wasn't this it'd be for mining shitcoins.

by mohamedkoubaa

7/16/2026 at 9:57:23 PM

This wasn’t possible even a year ago, with the speed of things changing and how much money is spent on movies is there really a doubt that someone will be able to make $100 million movie for less than $1 million in token spend?

by mensetmanusman

7/17/2026 at 2:28:43 AM

> This wasn’t possible even a year ago

Just because it’s possible now, doesn’t mean it’s worth doing.

by mcphage

7/16/2026 at 10:14:09 PM

Do you... Have a lot of professional experience with making $100 million-budget movies?

by vkou

7/16/2026 at 11:35:27 PM

Even small budget indie flicks, when filmed in LA, have a ridiculous amount of paperwork and dealing with unions. Which isn't surprising, since it's an established industry there. Spending $1 million for each day of filming is totally achievable. I don't have personal experience with this but I know some people in the industry and have had conversations with them. Was background/extra in a movie. An AI director/producer doesn't have to deal with the human aspect, actor and other people's egos and clashing behavior. There are moments of film gold that are the result of human actor's human personalities, so we'd lose out on that though.

by fragmede

7/16/2026 at 9:07:18 PM

I'm classically trained and I honestly can't really tell how these are worse than the human produced ones. They all look kinda the same to me.

by qurren

7/16/2026 at 10:36:10 PM

Classically trained in music videos??

by beepbooptheory

7/17/2026 at 1:41:34 AM

No, as in classical music. The analog kind.

by qurren

7/17/2026 at 3:08:01 AM

So, how is that relevant to the part that is generated by AI?

by altcognito

7/17/2026 at 3:42:34 AM

I honestly can't tell a good music video from a bad one. I don't know what makes a music video "good". These AI generated ones seemed pretty good to me, of the same caliber as those Michael Jackson or "Beez in the trap" things. It's all just butt shaking and sunglasses in Philips Hue lights chanting some meaningless words.

by qurren

7/17/2026 at 7:31:58 AM

Imagine the blogpost was on AI generated classical music. Everyone, including the authors, agrees the result is shit. You, being classically trained, can understand more than most why the results are bad.

Then someone comes along and says “I honestly can't really tell how these are worse than the human produced ones. They all sound kinda the same to me” and “I honestly can’t tell a good piece of music from a bad one. I don’t know what makes a piece of music “good”. These AI generated ones seemed pretty good to me, on the same caliber as those Mozart or Beethoven things”.

That’s what you’re doing, and that’s why you’re being downvoted. It’s fine that you can’t tell, but it’s supremely obvious to everyone else.

by latexr

7/17/2026 at 5:48:09 PM

I think takes like GP's are perfectly reasonable to express and it aggravates me that HN seems not to like that. The competition for the AI work here is explicitly not aiming at a niche audience. If that human work is nevertheless higher quality, readily distinguishable by the general audience of people who like music videos (?), then that audience really ought to be able to articulate why and how.

Like:

> Everyone, including the authors, agrees the result is shit.

> I honestly can't really tell how these are worse than the human produced ones. They all [seem] kinda the same to me

There is not actually a contradiction here.

by zahlman

7/17/2026 at 7:52:12 PM

If you really really like the $100 AI video, no one can take that away from you, but its just weird to be so principled about this in the negative: like no one actually wants to say they're good, its just some people don't want to admit they're worse than anything else.

Acting like some Roman legionary, saying "This slop is good enough for the piggies. not that I, classically trained, could discriminate between the slops either way" is certainly not contradictory, but if it needs to be the kind of discourse defended on here, then please, go right ahead!

by beepbooptheory

7/17/2026 at 11:58:53 AM

As opposed to the non-analog kind??

by beepbooptheory

7/17/2026 at 3:07:14 AM

I'm seeing these type of comments a lot more. A type of comment where it seems like the "user" (commentor) makes a categorically wrong comment about the linked article that would be sort of right if it were a different medium. Clearly whatever was used here triggered on the "music" part, but didn't understand what the article was really about. Typically it goes beyond just not reading the article (as in this case)

I'd assume that it was a bad LLM take, but it looks like the rest of the comments are normal.

by altcognito

7/17/2026 at 3:57:28 AM

“Classically trained” in the musical context usually means “I took a year of piano lessons.”

by senderista

7/17/2026 at 1:04:07 PM

It's just categorically a wrong statement. Just because someone knows how to play a musical instrument, I'm not sure why it would make any sense that they would understand what makes a good music video - they are a completely different medium.

You might be able to discuss asthetics from a music theory standpoint because you are "classically trained", again, it is just a weird mismatch that stood out for me recently, but I think everyone is a little more paranoid lately.

by altcognito

7/17/2026 at 1:29:21 PM

Its like misunderstanding the concept of "music video" as one form music can take, presumably alongside "music audio," and the being "classically trained" is meant to speak to a strength in "music" in general.

by beepbooptheory

7/17/2026 at 8:33:35 AM

Your dislike of music videos in general has meant that you haven’t had the interest to discern the good from the bad. There are plenty of high quality music videos. It’s like someone saying “I’m not really into classical music, it sounds all the same to me”. If they had an interest they’d know that it doesn’t sound all the same. So what’s the point in saying so?

by dwb

7/16/2026 at 9:31:24 PM

Directors and editors using Seedance can fire the film studio.

This is a fundamental shift in how storytelling is funded and made, not in who does the driving.

Same as is happening with code.

by echelon

7/16/2026 at 9:38:48 PM

>funded and made

I’m curious (admittedly skeptical) what you mean by this. Are you talking about a world where director’s just like…don’t actually make movies and create AI media?

by Forgeties79

7/17/2026 at 1:53:34 AM

Same thing.

by NuclearPM

7/17/2026 at 8:16:51 AM

[flagged]

by KaiserPro

7/16/2026 at 11:14:44 PM

Dude you have been salivating at the thought of seeing developers fired, now film studios, for months now. Give it a rest, this is unhealthy.

by sph

7/17/2026 at 4:48:29 AM

> Dude you have been salivating at the thought of seeing developers fired,

I don't think you understand my arguments at all.

I don't want people to lose jobs. I don't want the advantages to accrue to a few hyperscalers.

I want there to be more work, more money, more societal progress. For everyone.

AI currently enables experts in their domains (code, film, game design, music) to get the work of small teams done. It is now possible for dedicated, hard-working ICs in several domains to produce extremely good products in a short amount of time without external capital and without studio meddling. This is a good thing.

by echelon

7/17/2026 at 12:43:57 PM

Like your other comment this is so general I’m not entirely sure what you’re describing.

AI in production has allowed us to salvage bad audio and fix mistakes/not go back for re-shoots or ADR when it’s acceptable. It’s currently a repair/salvage and corner cutting tool. As for video, generative AI is not creating particularly usable stuff and it’s at best useful for short bursts.

If you’re in the commercial game it’s a little more useful - a few seconds of a generic looking kitchen sink and faucet running isn’t a big ask. But also getting quality B-roll isn’t particularly laborious as it is.

It’s great for transcriptions/captioning first passes but we already had great tools for that prior to the ChatGPT era.

It’s not cutting for us, it’s not generating useful shots most of the time and only for a few seconds, it’s not cutting out middlemen. I don’t see what you’re seeing.

by Forgeties79

7/17/2026 at 1:50:38 PM

> I don't want people to lose jobs. I don't want the advantages to accrue to a few hyperscalers.

Versus:

> It is now possible for dedicated, hard-working ICs in several domains to produce extremely good products in a short amount of time without external capital and without studio meddling

A contradiction exists: lower-capital requirements means less employment all-around and more profit to fewer people.

by DaiPlusPlus

7/16/2026 at 9:31:59 PM

When the line was "don't believe me just watch"

And then the clip was literally just an arm wearing a watch!

That's freaking hilarious!

It's like someone playing charades

by adverbly

7/16/2026 at 9:45:07 PM

the giant cartoon dragon with a sign that says "retired" made me guffaw

by evan_

7/17/2026 at 1:14:17 AM

It's an interesting experiment and the results are surprising. I will say that if you're a musician I'd bet anything you can make a way cooler and better music video for $25 and 45 minutes with your friends.

by willmeyers

7/17/2026 at 6:12:51 AM

$25 is an exaggeration, because that wouldn't even cover lunch for your friends to say thanks for the favour.

OK Go blew up early youtube with Here It Goes again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTAAsCNK7RA .

But these are exceptions to the rule, most people don't have the ability to do much creatively with a shoestring budget.

( Which isn't to say this slop is better. This slop is far worse, it's utterly dreadful. )

by eterm

7/17/2026 at 4:06:12 PM

>most people don't have the ability to do much creatively with a shoestring budget.

I'm sure in a room full of musicians they could come up with more creativity for a video than literally 0, which is what LLMs are currently capable of.

by Jtarii

7/17/2026 at 3:22:42 AM

Tangent: philosophically to me, art is inherently human. What makes art meaningful and impactful isn’t whether it looks good or cool. It’s the story of the artist, the context of the art itself, the hard work and struggle involved, the meaning represented by a human creating something very specific to their own personal context and taste. Or a mix of any of that.

Can AI be used as a tool to help create art? Absolutely. But as a rule, I do not give any shits about AI generated content like this. It’s not art. It’s not human. And the line is really how much meaning and effort _a human_ is putting into it.

If a human spends a minute or two prompting AI and then tweaking The result, and peddling it as their own art… get outta here. You made some content. That’s easy, and no one should cares. Content can already be shoveled out faster than we can watch it with or without AI.

Meaningful art is not mass-produced, generated content.

I realize art is completely subjective, so some person may find meaning in AI generated art. That’s fine, and that’s part of what could make that art. (Like an original way of presenting something that really resonates with someone.)

But this garbage ain’t that.

And I realize this is just a capability test, but plenty of places will see this as cheap and good enough. But it ain’t art, and we should push back against another cost-cutting measure that does nothing to make the world better.

by anon7000

7/17/2026 at 3:39:40 AM

> Meaningful art is not mass-produced, generated content.

Andy Warhol might disagree [1] (:

(I realize that's not exactly apples-to-apples, but y'know.)

Or there's "art is anything you can get away with," which I just mention to point out that this kind of issue ("what is art?") is not new. In some ways it seems like a good thing to get people, like you, riled up about these topics, arguing the merits of their point of view. That's how culture happens.

It's an interesting question you tangle with: is it art because of what the artist did, or is it art because of how the viewer/listener/etc receives it? Some of both? How much of each? If you encountered some art but you didn't know its provenance, and it had some emotional impact on you, would it still be art if you found out later it was 100% AI generated?

Like you say, it's all subjective, but it's nice to see random people on the internet talking about the nature of art, since it's something I care about too.

So in other words, thank you for being angry (:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans "... what Time magazine called the 'Slice of Cake School'—artists who treated the banal artifacts of contemporary civilization as legitimate subjects for high art"

by interroboink

7/17/2026 at 4:27:27 AM

That one took me back to high school art history. Agree, as much as I dislike AI generated art, it still is art. An Andy Warhol of today would could be making his screenprints using AI.

You really can't say, 'art should be this', 'art isn't that'. It's just art, it is what it is, people have a lot of emotions wrapped up in the art they like but it simply is what it is.

by smfjaw

7/17/2026 at 3:56:12 AM

I don't think that example applies at all here. The quote you quoted itself said it - "subjects for high art". Theres a difference between treating the banalities of life as SUBJECTS for your art and making human, non-mass produced art from that ( like the paining you linked) vs just treating the soup cans themselves as art.

At least that's my interpretation of it

by Systemerror7A69

7/17/2026 at 4:40:18 AM

I agree it's not a perfect parallel. But it was very much part of a movement that challenged traditional notions of what art was, and spurned similar debates and outrage as here.

Perhaps a more apt example would be Duchamp's "Fountain" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp))

by interroboink

7/17/2026 at 4:58:53 AM

> Andy Warhol might disagree

He might not actually. He could have just printed the cans, yet they’re all hand painted. The fact that he could mass produce them, but didn’t is part of story.

by exitb

7/17/2026 at 4:13:00 AM

In these discussions, the concept of perceiving content gets intertwined with how content was made, because artists and creatives are usually more interested in how something was made.

So unless these two concepts are separated, people will endlessly talk past each other assuming both sides hold the same fundamental beliefs.

Claiming you made something by yourself, when in reality someone else made it (AI) is easy to frown upon.

I think if you can have a positive experience from looking at a sunset, hearing birds sing, etc, it should technically be possible to have a positive experience from the outputs of an AI without human input. This assumes art is clearly defined as needing to be made by a human with some effort, which neither a sunset or AI outputs are.

In practice, people who use AI to make content give it some direction. The amount of guidance varies wildly, and in practice the majority of what we see is minimal involvement.

by CapsAdmin

7/17/2026 at 8:23:33 AM

But would you have an equally good experience listening to random beeps and chirps which aren't actually birds? Or from relaxing in the light of a big orange lamp?

It's not really about the artist. It's about the thing that's there. Which you experience, always imperfectly, through your senses. Other people are a wonderful thing that's there, but they aren't the only thing that's enjoyable. Usually the thing that's there which the artist wants you to experience, isn't merely the artist themselves.

Can you wonder at the miracles arising from matrix multiplication? Sure. Especially if it's a good artist trying to show you that miracle. I've enjoyed AI art from the start, but then it's the AI which is the point.

by vintermann

7/17/2026 at 4:37:53 AM

> the concept of perceiving content gets intertwined with how content was made

It reminds me also of the eternal "can we separate the art from the artist" debate, too. For instance, some people (myself included) find that their experience of some art that they previously enjoyed is soured when they learn that whoever made it is a Bad Person in some way. Neil Gaiman comes to mind as a recent example.

I think it goes beyond just creative people being more interested in the process behind the art. Even people who are more purely consumers care about where this thing that touches them came from. I think a person's experience of the art makes them feel closer to or entwined with that artist, even if they might be long-deceased. Or non-human?

by interroboink

7/17/2026 at 4:49:36 AM

Maybe we care about where something comes from, but we don't have the will to care about everything? (also, never meet your heroes comes to mind regarding the endless debate)

For example, I had never thought or cared where the trash can in my office came from. I forgot where I bought it from. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm a little curious, but is it worth knowing? If I knew the designer of the trash can was a bad person, should I get get a new one and make sure the designer of that trash can is a good person?

I think logically and ethically yes, but I'm not willing to spend my time on this.

It's an extreme example, but I think the same applies to music, art, movies, etc, just to a lesser degree for people who claim they care more about the outcome than the human author.

by CapsAdmin

7/17/2026 at 5:01:26 AM

>Andy Warhol

Given that the man made his living doing stunts on top of the corpse of modernity, I'm not surprised he would love anti-human stuff like AI music. He famously said he wished he could be a machine. I don't think appealing to his nihilistic embrace of the spectacle is persuasive.

by viccis

7/17/2026 at 4:52:58 AM

it was 100% AI generated?

Depending on what you mean, this is currently not possible, and probably not ever possible, because as much as people like to call things "autonomous", these AIs are still ultimately being directed by humans to do things. Prompting an AI is on a different level of abstraction, like writing software in a HLL and using a compiler instead of keying in machine instructions on a hexpad, but IMHO it is still the work of a human.

...and then you look at what people who are professional artists do and call art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork)

by userbinator

7/17/2026 at 4:04:58 AM

> What makes art meaningful and impactful isn’t whether it looks good or cool.

I fall on the other side of that coin: I care about the final output way more than the story & struggle of the artist.

Also: Nature is probably the most epic artist in my book - a sunset, leaf, coral or rock can outshine virtually any human creation.

by beambot

7/17/2026 at 4:42:09 AM

I think most people care about the final output, especially the market. This is why many artists complain about mainstream art, because it genuinely isn't interesting from an artist's perspective.

I'm not too familiar with visual arts, but I know most jazz musicians make a living off of teaching music and doing concerts where the attendees are just other musicians. It's very much centered around technique and human performance. (the term musician's musician is also used here)

Meanwhile, the average person think jazz is noise.

So my point is, saying "What makes music meaningful..." sounds more like an elitist jazz musician take. (I'd say jazz musicians tend to be more self deprecating than elitist, and often make light of the genre and how people perceive it!)

by CapsAdmin

7/17/2026 at 5:09:07 AM

That's the saving grace of it for me tbh

AI art shows the philistines for who they are. It's a giant decoy to lure them away from spaces where people are making art of more substance.

I feel the same way about things like the absolutely miserable quality of Marvel, Star Wars, etc. stuff leading to films being increasingly polarized between 60 IQ blockbusters and more interesting small projects. It's what kicked off the 70s arthouse cinema in the US, and I'm hoping we get a similar renaissance soon with the success of all of the small and difference projects lately.

>doing concerts where the attendees are just other musicians

If this is how jazz musicians actually made money, they'd have all died of starvation at this point. Every jazz musician that's not a top 20 or so act makes most of their money playing whatever kind of music people pay them to make, whether it's church music, session musician gigs, etc. The entire reason they started doing (and still do!) straightahead jams is that they were tired of playing schlock all day and wanted to spice it up with and for other people tired of playing schlock.

by viccis

7/17/2026 at 4:56:55 AM

Art mediates human values and broadcasts judgments about the good life, how to live, what is worthy, what is looked up to or down on. Yes, even uptown funk does that, it communicates a lifestyle ideal, whether the audience thinks about it in those terms or not.

In AI media (when not curated and iterated with close human input) whose values am I getting. Who is communicating their values to me? Bruno Mars dancing this way, wearing this, acting this way etc is cool because it is Bruno Mars and he's cool and he's cool because he has been cool and all your friends know. So by watching him you get enculturated into this culture. If you watch AI, and learn how you act from those, you will likely look like a fool.

Similarly with stories. The morale may be entirely opposite to what a human would say. And even if a human builds a story on some morale you find reprehensible, it's still likely from their own life experience, and by trying to understand, you grow empathy and can better understand what life trajectories exist. Bu and AI text pushing some morale has no real life it reaches back into, to express their view of the human condition. There is no gain from reading it.

by bonoboTP

7/17/2026 at 4:16:07 AM

I'm in the middle. Sometimes the artist story is so compelling it almost makes the body of work make sense on a new dimension. However, having said that, I also am highly skeptical of authenticity and almost always believe the art is created and the story gets written after the fact as some artistic song and dance because no story/why/reason is never an option.

by conductr

7/17/2026 at 4:51:01 AM

It's also somewhat considered lame and cliche to ask an artist where their idea came from, and what their intention was.

However people will claim that the artist had an intention, it was just not obvious to the artist at the time. The art was also shaped by their experiences, etc. So in contrast, AI does not have this intention.

by CapsAdmin

7/17/2026 at 5:09:48 AM

Maybe people will find deep meaning in “AI is us, any intention was shaped by the written down intentions of every human that ever put pen to paper”.

maybe masters of art will train their own tortured models in digital dungeons and a rich man’s home won’t be complete without a cyber collective of pathological artist models actively that you guests CAN interrogate about why they chose what on the basement homelab.

by floam

7/17/2026 at 1:29:13 PM

I'm of the opinion that AI represents the average creativity, which can be interesting (especially base models) but on the other hand, too many cooks can ruin a dish.

by CapsAdmin

7/17/2026 at 3:35:35 AM

All of this can be said about photography, too.

And, yes, most photography ain't art, or at least not meaningful art. Just like most of my attempts at drawing ain't meaningful art either.

Btw, by your high standards most human produced music videos ain't art either. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potboiler

by eru

7/17/2026 at 3:43:27 AM

> most human produced music videos ain't art either

Sounds accurate to me

by BLKNSLVR

7/17/2026 at 4:16:41 AM

This is a demo. It's like taking the first shitty picture or making the first shit sounding "analog electronic instrument" played by the guy who doesn't know how to play music but is an electronic savant. It's the concept that matters, not this specific execution of it.

by esikich

7/17/2026 at 5:01:16 AM

> What makes art meaningful and impactful isn’t whether it looks good or cool. It’s the story of the artist, the context of the art itself, the hard work and struggle involved, the meaning represented by a human creating something very specific to their own personal context and taste. Or a mix of any of that.

I beg to disagree: meaningful art is where something speaks of its own. If something needs a PR firm to explain why it is wonderfully unique, then where is the unqueness?

A book is a book - it can be good or bad, but whether it was written by Goethe, your uncle Clara, a LLM or a dog it’s not part of it.

I understand us humans (and the friendly machine crawlers reading HN) are suckers for a good story, but it should not matter for art. Of course, YMMV.

by kamma4434

7/17/2026 at 4:03:24 AM

GPTs were inherently trained on human text. It would not surprise me if mixing all this together by AI touches the people of today with the feelings of today more than a biased singular person.

by rileymat2

7/17/2026 at 8:01:01 AM

> philosophically to me, art is inherently human

The other side of it is that most humans can't produce art. I can't draw, rhyme, dance, act, etc.

> I realize art is completely subjective, so some person may find meaning in AI generated art. > But this garbage ain’t that.

These two statements are very conflicting. I'm sure you can find someone who thinks that The Centre Pompidou is full of genius pieces. I didn't enjoy it that much. So, it's exactly the same with AI.

by f6v

7/17/2026 at 6:34:29 AM

> philosophically to me, art is inherently human.

When I was younger, still trying to figure out who I was and what I'd be doing for a career, I was very interested in science. Sadly, my home life as it was prevented me from pursuing it as a student and survival as an adult meant catching up was an uphill battle. I just didn't have the discipline. So instead I just read books, mostly cosmology related, but also computer science. That was my way of making up for lost time to become the software developer and eventually engineer that I am today. But something was sorely missing.

I believed science would solve everything, that we could use technology to lift humans out of regressive traditionalism, force out ignorant politicians, but more obviously, build things that would solve climate change, hunger, disease, whatever. Growing up and realizing this was not the case has left me cynical. Social media is a blight that poisons everything and truly has not been studied enough on how it has raped society from increased vanity, parasocial relationships, addiction, the ability to be targeted by bad actors, I could go on. This technology in particular is probably at fault for the rise of fascism and far right politics. American tax payer funded and researched space innovation has been plundered and now controlled by a fucking weirdo psychopath trillionaire with a taste for culture wars. It is just absurd. Now, AI, and that is a whole topic of its own.

Good science still happens, of course, but now it's being buried by noise from the newest tech hype, AI. What chaps my ass about AI is that it has amazing uses but because of capital at all costs, we advance it in the most blind and irresponsible ways possible at the expense of our humanity and planet. So much so, now it is blasting out "art" for the cost of fucking up people's lives wherever there is a datacenter.

My main point is, that with all these topics, I've found that people are generally "philosophically empty". It is easy to say people are dumb, but I don't think that is the case (or, well, it is but that is too simple). That younger self scoffed at philosophy, seeing it as a fun thought experiment and little more, science was king. Now? Oh man. I feel so foolish. I think we all should have been challenged to think more philosophically at a much younger age. We have a generation of young people who dream of being influencers. Have you ever seen a more talentless, uninspired, cynical group of people worse than influencers? I sure haven't. But it is my more philosophical side that sees so clearly how vapid it is, and how it cheapens what we are as human in the name of attention seeking capitalism, to sell yourself at all costs and one more medium to be a walking advertisment. It feels like we're at the end game. I'm sure most generations have felt this way, and some had good reason (looking at you generation of the atomic bomb). But somehow, this feels less tangible, more philosophically bad, and already endemic. We're all so ill equipped to address it or even acknowledge it societally.

Sorry for the rant, thanks for reading if you got this far.

by dannersy

7/16/2026 at 9:30:44 PM

It is jarring to me that most of the dancing seems slightly out of sync with the music. It is like a music video uncanny valley - images look good, but the lack of sync to the sound shatters the illusion entirely.

by Scubabear68

7/17/2026 at 7:22:08 AM

Well yeah, because music is not a modality of the models involved at all. It's literally just an LLM with the timestamps of each line injected into its context, and then making an API request to image / video generators. I don't really understand what the point of this project even was; stitching together dumber models with bespoke glue logic like this takes us further away from general intelligence and confuses the public.

by jackb4040

7/17/2026 at 4:32:16 PM

While it's made huge improvement in just the past few years, AI still hasn't quite solved motion, especially human motion. The humans in these videos are rendered really well, but move unnaturally. Like someone did a motion capture of a real human, and then played it back with a very high quality 3d model--something hard to describe is lost in the processing. Everything seems to move just too smoothly, at too exactly constant a speed. Same for camera movement. A real life camera doesn't precisely follow some exact 3D Bézier curve at an exactly constant speed. AI doesn't get this yet.

by ryandrake

7/16/2026 at 10:15:29 PM

To me nearly all of the real world dancing looks like that. The dancers could literally be olympic level and I still don't see the connection between their movements and the sounds of the music. Music videos sometimes do sync for me but only on very simple motions, and for whatever reason shuffle dance on video almost always looks great.

by scotty79

7/17/2026 at 1:05:38 AM

How many hours of your life would you say you’ve danced? Have you ever trained at a sport beyond the recreational level, especially highly rhythmic ones like basketball or soccer?

Genuinely curious, because I have friends without any sense of rhythm and it’s interesting how it manifests

by datsci_est_2015

7/17/2026 at 8:15:59 AM

> How many hours of your life would you say you’ve danced?

I'd say less than 20? Maybe even less than that. Even counting short bursts, to especially compelling music, that did't last more than few seconds.

The closest I ever felt, to what I imagine people might feel while dancing, was playing Beat Saber in VR. You could have your friends try, they might enjoy it. I did. I spent way more hours on Beat Saber than I ever spent dancing. But I don't see any improvement from that.

> Have you ever trained at a sport beyond the recreational level, especially highly rhythmic ones like basketball or soccer?

I don't think I ever did anything in my life beyond recreational level. Even coding feels recreational level regardless of how much I get paid.

Basketball is completely incomprehensible for me. The rule that you can't do more than one step while holding the ball is impossible and unreadable when somebody else does it. Dribbling is pretty hard too.

I played some soccer as a kid and at school but I wasn't good at this because of multiple factors. I mostly played defense when sometimes I could interrupt the attacking player mostly with a single action, not a sequence. I wouldn't even think about soccer as rhythmic sport, but I imagine it can be, if you are leading the ball which I pretty much never did successfully.

I hate repeatable movements done during exercises. Never participated in any exercise groups (beyond what was enforced at school). I like biking but I vary my pedaling style a lot while riding and I don't ride for too long, few hours at most. I like walking but I zone out completely during walks. I can't run due to rapidly diminishing lung capacity when I try but I imagine if I could it would resemble walking.

I don't play instruments and never had any success in that area. I can't do and don't enjoy trying souls like games. I'm not a fan of platformers with all the repeated jumping and timing their repeats to what happens in the level. From games that require skill I prefer (quake-like) FPPs.

On the plus side, I have decent full body reflexes and rarely ever fall. In falls reliably instincitvely shield myself with arms to prevent damage to the head and mostly body. I can't imagine getting hurt by stepping on lego brick because my feet react to what I'm stepping on quickly shifting the load around any sharp or uneven objects. The brain itself is decent as well. I'm in top <1% according to Mensa iq test results.

It feels like cyclical engine of my brain is very weak while the reactive one is fairly good.

by scotty79

7/17/2026 at 1:21:00 AM

This is how you do AI music videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njk2YAgNMnE

Lean into the not-quite-but-almost uncanny-valley-ness. Make it a feature, not a bug.

by BLKNSLVR

7/17/2026 at 1:43:27 AM

They also trained the AI for that video on the band members' own artwork, so the video is focused despite the trippy visuals and avoids copyright issues.

by DoktorDelta

7/17/2026 at 3:51:57 AM

Released October 2022? That’s a very human piece of art even if the images may have been generated by an algorithm

by aardvarkr

7/17/2026 at 4:05:19 AM

I think that's also why it's good, and an example of the need for relatively heavy human fingerprints applied to AI to do 'art' (which feels like I'm just repeating what @anon7000 says in top comment).

Three and a half years at the rate of AI progress has gotten to the point of reality-level picture quality, but there's a lot AI gets wrong without nudges here and there. That may be slightly unfair, however, given that this film clip took a couple of months and the ones in TFA cost $100 max and took less than an hour.

Now it feels obvious that I'm comparing apples and oranges. I mean, nice to know that we all seem to like 'proper art' better than an hour worth of an AI generated version of 'one art please'.

by BLKNSLVR

7/17/2026 at 3:29:30 AM

That is how you do A video but if everyone does this it becomes like those blurred photos that make cities look like a small model and everyone is doing it. I guess this is the issue. Me buying a Toyota and pointing at it is not art, there are too many of them.

by hahahaa

7/17/2026 at 3:51:24 AM

I'm possibly retro-fitting my answer here, but that film clip feels like the band, feels like it fits well with the music, I think that's why that clip came to my mind in relation to the produce-generica of the original article.

The clip incorporates images of the band and, as @DoktorDelta pointed out (which I didn't know before), it was trained on art created by some of the band members. It also totally fits the psychedelic rock vibe, not just for this song, but also into the canon of psychedelic rock film clips and general psychedelia media.

by BLKNSLVR

7/17/2026 at 4:59:56 AM

Yes absolutely. A good analogy would be Gibhli. If you saw a Gibhli styled ad for say your local restaurant would you consider it art.

Now rewind, uninvent AI and then would you consider that same ad art?

by hahahaa

7/17/2026 at 5:03:03 AM

>it becomes like those blurred photos that make cities look like a small model

Tilt-shift photography for those wondering.

by derektank

7/17/2026 at 3:10:36 AM

Along the same lines this one leans into it and makes something absolutely unique and wild: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dHAP3E5e2jc

Behind the scenes here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UhOc0VXo7II

I agree though, you can combine art with AI and make something really unique but the majority of art people are pushing with AI is in my opinion being rightfully branded as AI slop.

by VohuMana

7/17/2026 at 7:24:36 AM

That is pretty amazing, with more intricacies and a coherence of shapes / objects through the whole thing.

AI as artists tool, not AI as artist.

by BLKNSLVR

7/17/2026 at 5:03:59 AM

Interesting example to choose considering King Gizzard and Lizard Wizard’s latest single is an anti-ai piece called Level 5, referring to level 5 self driving.

by onionisafruit

7/17/2026 at 3:33:14 AM

Reminds me of when autotune came out and everyone and their dog had autotune songs

by foobarian

7/17/2026 at 1:33:27 AM

[flagged]

by tsunamifury

7/17/2026 at 1:49:08 AM

I personally do not, but I strongly appreciate some of the output of those who do.

by BLKNSLVR

7/17/2026 at 1:36:10 AM

Nah, us fiends watch things like https://youtu.be/TuGg0aMO1NI?is=zFRpAeel1keKFbsb

by nullstyle

7/17/2026 at 1:47:36 AM

Now _that_ is freaking amazing. I couldn't look away for the whole thing.

by BLKNSLVR

7/17/2026 at 3:57:04 AM

Glad you like it! Doopdidoo is the artist that taught me AI generated art can hit me as hard as the human greats. The hair on my arms stand on end — like it does when the french horns come in on hollst’s jupiter — when jesus descends from the ufo in arc hive.

by nullstyle

7/17/2026 at 1:46:46 AM

French surealism is a very differnet thing that random LSD imagery.

by tsunamifury

7/17/2026 at 4:38:46 AM

You must be tons of fun at a dinner party

by nullstyle

7/17/2026 at 3:25:07 PM

Tired and low effort.

by tsunamifury

7/17/2026 at 3:50:11 PM

Takes one to know one, “we get it you do drugs”-boy.

by nullstyle

7/16/2026 at 10:16:03 PM

These videos are far from good, but it's possible to create a decent AI music video if you use a human-in-the-loop workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Km88uAZ4M

by victor9000

7/17/2026 at 1:49:05 AM

If we're talking AI music videos that are amazing with a human in the loop, I really enjoy Snoop Dogg's music video for "Last dance with Mary Jane".

https://youtube.com/watch?v=rseqmSGH7xk&t=59s

> From the start, the production team knew they didn’t want a music video that relied solely on any single technique. With this goal in mind, they worked to blend live action, AI, and a wide range of handcrafted animation styles – 2D, 3D, collage and motion design.

https://lbbonline.com/news/psyop-and-temple-cache-get-surrea...

by tim--

7/17/2026 at 1:18:21 AM

Unexpected appearance of the NCC-1701 Enterprise at about 0:40 into the video, but no appearance of star wars star destroyers?

by walrus01

7/17/2026 at 1:06:22 AM

Robot characters keep you away from uncanny valley of creepy slightly off AI humans. Still fun though.

by s0rce

7/17/2026 at 8:50:35 AM

These are funny the first time you see them, but I guarantee if you watch a few you will start picking up how similar they all are and it will all start to feel like slop.

by qnleigh

7/17/2026 at 11:20:35 AM

One thing all models aced was the costume design. I don’t know why this was the case. Maybe they trained exclusively on lots of fashion data to use models in fashion industry.

Filmmaking is inherently an iterative process. You don’t normally one shot music videos in the real world. Agents should review and iterate at every step of the process. Lots of room for improvement here.

Also for comparison, budget of the original Uptown Funk music video was probably around $100,000. Even “indie” is pretty expensive in traditional filmmaking due to high cost of equipment, people and places. 100x cost reduction is huge for any industry.

by ozgung

7/16/2026 at 10:38:16 PM

Interesting article, but those videos aren’t. Not even pre-MTV quality.

While checking out the gallery, came across this image:

https://www.tryai.dev/gallery/d3725e9b-1df9-4c10-8a23-2fc705...

There’s something wrong with it, but I just can’t put my paw on the problem.

by xoxxala

7/16/2026 at 11:37:31 PM

For fun, I took that image and put it into a few models and asked it "what is wrong with this genAI image?"

Grok fast came up with a lot of minor quibbles and missed the issue.

Grok expert touched on it with a "Limbs/anatomy ambiguity / This creates a slight "how many legs does this cat actually have?" moment." but then moved on to complain about texturing . Later it summarized the issue as "classic "animal + held object" anatomy problem".

Chatgpt 5.6 instant didn't notice it

Chatgpt 5.6 medium didn't notice it and mainly complained about the background being blurry

Chatgpt 5.6 high (46s) "The biggest error is the cat appears to have six paws"

Google AI mode complained about whiskers and feet placement

Only chatgpt high and marginally grok expert had acceptable answers.

by qwerpy

7/17/2026 at 2:52:58 AM

I don't have a problem with AI and can't stand the anti-AI brigade, but... this is the worst thing I have ever seen in my life.

This specific type of garbage is exactly what arms the anti-AI critics with valid arguments. We should really wait a few years for the technology to mature before releasing these kinds of projects into the cultural sphere.

by boca_honey

7/17/2026 at 3:12:55 AM

The article is not about video quality.

by sneak

7/17/2026 at 4:42:02 AM

My first thought was "we'll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing, we're so fucked" but then found myself being quite amused by the AI-glitching mistakes in the GPT 5.6 $25 effort: lean into the strange glitching and I won't be too upset.

by fallinditch

7/17/2026 at 3:34:25 AM

Not everything is a war between those in favor and those against…

by d--b

7/17/2026 at 3:14:35 AM

If you benchmark is to be better than a human familiar with the task at hand, then you will be disappointed.

If you are not expecting them to be as good as people then their failures seem wholly unremarkable. The specific nature of tbe failures can be quite interesting in fact. They can expose deficiencies in the architecrure, training data, or presumptiona of those controlling the models.

In my experience very few people are claiming the capabulities that would be required for me to expect them to produce better than they currenrly are.

I'm not bothered by a fish's inability to quote Shakespeare.

by Lerc

7/17/2026 at 3:19:11 AM

> I'm not bothered by a fish's inability to quote Shakespeare.

But I am bothered when they put a pencil in the mouth of a fish and tell us that this is the future of literature, that this qualifies as playwright, and that theaters will soon begin putting on plays written by a fish with a pencil in its mouth.

by runarberg

7/17/2026 at 7:17:54 AM

"Fish are going to make your job, and most jobs, obsolete within the year" I say for the fourth year in a row. I'm pretending to talk to workers, but am actually indirectly addressing my fish investors trying to scare them into thinking fish are too world-changing of an opportunity to pass up.

Every talk show then has to have me on. It would be one thing if I was boasting about the fish, but scared of it? Well then surely there must be something important going on there. I begin:

"Don't worry. Be happy"

by jackb4040

7/17/2026 at 3:53:52 AM

But they are not claiming that current models are better than humans but later developments might.

Do you think that a descendant of a fish could be a playwright or put on a play?

by Lerc

7/17/2026 at 3:58:33 AM

Objectively no. Fish form animals have been around far longer than mammals and we've touched the moon.

by TehCorwiz

7/17/2026 at 5:30:44 AM

Well I would expect them to have been around for longer if they were to be ancestors of mammals.

by Lerc

7/17/2026 at 5:38:17 AM

Taking your logic to its conclusion fishes (or descendants of fish) regularly recite Shakespeare.

However there is a major flaw in your logic. Fishes (or their descendants) reciting Shakespeare is part of natural history. AI making quality music videos is just a prediction (or maybe even just wishful thinking). The former has occurred and has been observed, the later has not. So you are comparing nature with science fiction.

by runarberg

7/17/2026 at 6:22:06 AM

> Taking your logic to its conclusion fishes (or descendants of fish) regularly recite Shakespeare.

I believe that was the point.

by IanCal

7/17/2026 at 2:59:49 AM

Eh, I'd like to see YOU make a better music video for $100 or less!

by bjourne

7/17/2026 at 3:12:57 AM

This is such a bad argument:

a) You are allowed to dislike cheap stuff, in fact it is common in western culture to dislike art where it is obvious that the artist cheaped out.

b) Never in the history of western art critique has there been a requirement that the critic is able to do better then the artist (let alone for cheaper). As the saying goes, “I may not be able to pilot a 100000 ton cargo ship, but I can tell when one is stuck in a canal.”

by runarberg

7/17/2026 at 5:38:06 AM

I remember when my friends in middle school were making DBZ fight scene music videos with iMovie and Movie Maker. They were way better than this and did not cost $100.

by jayd16

7/17/2026 at 4:25:29 PM

I'm not claiming that no one can make a better music video for $100. I'm claiming that a random member of the HN peanut gallery can't make a better music video for $100. :)

by bjourne

7/17/2026 at 3:22:10 AM

If you don’t count the cost of the phone I think many people could. See, it would look like it cost $100, but that’s still better than using AI to generate something that looks like the temu version of a $500,000 video.

by slopinthebag

7/17/2026 at 8:04:36 AM

I have done a few - even if very amateurish, still learning, on the side, for saxophone covers. Budget was basically just transportation to the location. I don't count the price of my equipment in the budget because I'm also not counting the price of a datacenter here.

by spaqin

7/17/2026 at 12:43:53 PM

You are also discounting your time which is not fair

by Turneyboy

7/17/2026 at 3:11:13 AM

or i can just not do it? this absolute garbage of a music video is not worth a single cent, let alone a $100.

by byzantinegene

7/17/2026 at 3:15:51 AM

What do you mean, I thought it was fun.

Feel free to not make your own music videos, but I am not sure why you would be so upset about other people having fun.

by stale2002

7/17/2026 at 3:51:03 AM

People say this a lot, and I usually think it's said by folks who haven't thought about it much.

As a person who makes a lot of music, I don't care if folks have fun. In fact I am having such a hard time caring hat folks do or how they do it I can't get motivated to book any shows this season.

But the part you're missing is when folks make these things and then say "yeah, you see this thing we're doing? That's what we think -you- are doing." LIke when someone sets up an LLM to shit out some song lyrics, I don't care if they are having fun doing it, but I think it displays a lot of contempt for [insert an songwriting artist youlike here] to claim that the LLM is doing the same thing.

Which is fine and all- I've got plenty of unmitigated contempt for my fellow humans.

And you don't even need a computer to do that- I've released a certain amount of music that is facile and boring and in retrospect understand why folks were dismissive.

But if you want to understand why folks who consider themselves invested in their craft (or even invested in other artists' craft) are dismissive of these things, then you might consider how radically dismissive of craft these kinds of cultural products might seem to artists.

by scarecrowbob

7/17/2026 at 3:49:31 AM

"or i can just not do it", because you can't! To much pride to admit that the bot beats your ass every day of the week ten times over when it comes to making music videos so the cop out is "nah, man, I just don't wanna."

by bjourne

7/17/2026 at 3:50:00 AM

I don't think its that bad, you are just hater

by tonyhart7

7/17/2026 at 1:31:36 AM

This absolutely is the opposite of what I want to see in a music video

by beezlewax

7/17/2026 at 8:50:10 AM

Woah that sucks. Closed the tab when I saw the cartoonishly stupid, completely out of place smoking thermometer.

A music video is not (necessarily) a depiction of what the lyrics say at any moment. Soulless for sure.

by Zopieux

7/17/2026 at 1:42:04 PM

Watching the videos and reading the methodology, it feels like "scientist one-shot music video with LLMs" which is... useful but in no way represents how one would use the models.

If nothing else, it serves as a great reminder that you can't offload taste and creative decisions to AI. AI is also not a mind reader. It _may_ do a useful thing sometimes - but it's much better to codify that thing in your requirements if it's something you want to occur consistently.

by dudeinhawaii

7/17/2026 at 6:21:34 AM

The interesting irony of using Bruno Mars, who, for my taste, really is something like Human AI.

Uptown Funk is a very enjoyable track -- but if you're familiar with his influences, it can make his music generally stale and unenjoyable. Like Silk Sonic has the technical sound of that era, but it feels like they're treating it like a joke.

by jrm4

7/17/2026 at 3:02:11 AM

Not a fan really. There are certainly uses for AI, but this is lacking something. Personally I think it works best as a filter or applying a style or effect that is difficult otherwise, or generating fancy ambient or abstract textures etc.

People constantly think the music video I created for Zingara's Unlock Your Keys [1] is AI, but it really is just real footage all around, except for a handful of lines / pulse textures that were created in TouchDesigner.

I am really excited for the possibilities that AI can give us in the future but often I find trying to use it generatively I run into the paradox of choice and end up paralyzed!

1: https://xfeeefeee.net/unlock-your-keys/ tribal dance fusion music video, sfw but does show some skin. Uses lots of slow motion ink in water footage for texture as well.

by xfeeefeee

7/17/2026 at 3:56:11 AM

It's a strange experiment. Claude and GPT aren't generating the video. They're directing and editing it, and they request video from a generative video model using mainly text-to-video. Neither Claude nor GPT can actually watch video content, and the video model generates shoddy quality clips with artifacts, lack of consistency, and where actions aren't synced to the music.

It would be very hard for anyone to make a good music video with the tools Fable and Sol had available to them. They don't have precise control over the clips that get generated, and they can't see or hear the result, other than screenshots. So I'm not sure what the experimenters expected.

by nearbuy

7/17/2026 at 7:58:43 AM

Agree. It's pretty clear the purpose was not to take even a small step in the direction of musicality for llms or video models. More of a typical "agentic engineering setup" blog geared to a different type of professional

by jackb4040

7/17/2026 at 9:26:13 AM

The result depends mostly on two things: The first is the LLMs ability to come up with a good story, choose and prompt the video model, evaluate and editing. The other is the quality of the video models themselves.

The LLMs mostly used older video models from a year ago that are capped at 10 second single shot clips. Newer video models like Seedance 2 go up to 15 seconds (Seedance 2.5 even up to 30 seconds) and they support multimodal references.

As a tool, I think those video models can be pretty amazing for artists as you can create things not possible before. Here is a music video made by an artist using Seedance 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYfDJQxyHFg

by yanexr

7/17/2026 at 1:34:21 AM

The results are pretty bad for a top stars music video. But it's pretty impressive for not very important short clips like insert shorts of cheap Ads.

I'm scared because that's the most labor intensive area. Top talents will survive but all the volume industry will collapse.

by dialogbox

7/16/2026 at 10:12:34 PM

I did let Claude Code Opus + OpenRouter API Key (limited to 25EUR) create an an Arthouse Video about "Is AI art or can it go?"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E6XofKqFYeQ

I like the scene with the hands.

by franze

7/17/2026 at 2:07:29 AM

OP really figured out the secret to getting on the frontpage. Three frontpages in a row lol

by prodigycorp

7/17/2026 at 7:57:55 AM

Probably a good example why you shouldn't outsource creative work to AI.

by ben8bit

7/16/2026 at 10:11:32 PM

Please repeat this with models from MiniMax:

https://www.minimax.io/news/minimax-hailuo-23

(No affiliation, I just want to see how well they work).

by throwa356262

7/16/2026 at 10:17:20 PM

Even their demo clips are soundly in the uncanny valley, and I assume normal folks using it and having to pay for each clip will have generally worse results.

by SwellJoe

7/17/2026 at 4:54:29 AM

I think these videos are a great way to visualize what is wrong with the "personality" of LLMs: they are shallow, unoriginal, overconfindent.

The videos convey this in a more vivid and direct way than any text answer could. I often have the thought that if Claude were a human colleague, I'd avoid having to work with them.

by antfarm

7/17/2026 at 2:27:08 AM

Good creator of AI music videos (with human editing etc) is "ALFfx Visual DJ"

Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lWArXcsxYo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn-4lIFhybA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kjUEan_fgM

Most of their videos have a similar retro-futurism look

by slyall

7/17/2026 at 2:56:01 AM

These still seem awful to me. There are weird events in them that take me out of the moment like the record needle suddenly jumping of the record for no apparent reason. But more so I just hate the AI glaze look of all the characters.

by VladVladikoff

7/17/2026 at 1:13:06 AM

I wonder how much worse this would be if instead of starting with a human-created song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uptown_Funk

Start from an entirely AI generated song, and have an AI generated video. We apparently already have an example of such:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWLLIjOTqkE

by walrus01

7/17/2026 at 1:15:54 AM

I always found the Severus Snape - ALWAYS (Live at Hogwarts) video to be really good for AI. The video was probably created by prompting for each scene, instead of letting the model generate the whole thing. It's a cool of example of what's possible nonetheless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlsEDkavoso

by f3408fh

7/17/2026 at 2:11:18 AM

That's definitely not "let the AI do everything unsupervised", but many short scenes generated with probably much filtering, and then manually edited together.

It's interesting how the Harry Potter fanbase was one of the first to get on the AI video trend, but not too surprising as there was already plenty of HP fanfiction, and no doubt many who wanted to have them visualised.

Here's another channel with a ton of AI parody videos: https://www.youtube.com/@NeuralDerpMusic

by userbinator

7/17/2026 at 1:52:36 AM

Looks like some auteur-level work on the prompting to keep all of that so tight. That really is great.

Trent Reznor would make a decent Snape...

by BLKNSLVR

7/16/2026 at 10:08:38 PM

There's definitely still room for innovation in custom use cases with AI. I like to write and draw comics, but it's very time consuming to make a finished product. Working with tools in default and you'll have a bad time. You have to really guide it and if you're using a longer story to adapt, it'll compress things and lose context during Thinking. Luma labs was the most interesting tool I've seen so far, but there's still a lot of room for growth

by dayvid

7/16/2026 at 9:27:20 PM

AI videos as in remotion based videos look much better imo since it can code much better than it can prompt for videos with a coherent narrative

https://youtu.be/uDAeAuYyl0E (parody of Claude announcements) https://youtu.be/cSsVNtGPOIg (recreating a fireship video)

by siwakotisaurav

7/16/2026 at 9:30:18 PM

This is incredible! Did you make these yourself? I am familiar with remotion but this is a lot more than just splicing images, etc.

Did you use a skill library to make this?

by sushid

7/17/2026 at 6:49:39 AM

Yea this one specifically is mostly fable, remotion skills and allowing it to use Gemini 3.1 pro to understand the video

The Claude one was a 3-prompt to get it to recreate the original “Agent view” announcement video. But wanted to challenge it, hence the bankruptcy mode. But it’s really bad at coming up with jokes and a coherent narrative so had to guide it wit prompts like 5 times or so

Fireship video that was just a single prompt, with allowing it to use my basement gpu which has Higgs installed for the voice clone

by siwakotisaurav

7/16/2026 at 9:53:15 PM

So AI could generate a great lyrics video.

by lwkl

7/16/2026 at 8:14:14 PM

Seems like if you build some more scaffolding around it, it wouldn't be bad. I think AI video isn't quite there yet so you probably would want to lean into that. For example you could ask for an animated or cartoon music video so the real shots don't look weird. Also if you gave it some guidance on what a good music video is like it would probably help as well. But yeah idk may be that's not the goal here.

by zhinit

7/16/2026 at 9:36:47 PM

The GPT ones are strange. The $25 fable one to me is subjectively better than the others. The $100 fable one is too literal and robotic.

The jevons paradox is you need auteurs to curate vignettes or effects and cut or mask them in etc. That's not really different philosophically when software entered art in other ways. I could see errors/glitches lowering in time but I doubt there will be much acceleration.

by kev009

7/16/2026 at 9:45:13 PM

As someone who has marketed music, shot music videos, directed music videos, cut music videos together from stock footage: you don’t need auteurs.

You did back when MTV made songs big.

No one actually pays attention to the details of music videos any more. It’s visual chewing gum at best. The reality is that now, if you have something half decent, nice colours, nice lighting and a wee bit of a story, no one is going to care.

The only other route is a huge budget spectacular - but you only get the huge budgets if you label lends you the money to make a huge budget video because they think it will increase the amount of money they make - while extending the amount of time it takes you to recoup.

Ultimately, now, it is just another social media asset, so promo videos are built with that in mind.

None of these would cut it.

by saaaaaam

7/16/2026 at 9:51:21 PM

> No one actually pays attention to the details of music videos any more. It’s visual chewing gum at best.

Hilarious to hear someone in industry blame their audience for the commodification of the medium. Is every industry like this? Surely nobody goes into creative fields thinking “I can’t wait to feed the masses slop!” Who’s killing our spirit?

by namuol

7/16/2026 at 10:02:03 PM

He's not wrong though. In the 80s I'd watch video shows and over the course of a week I'd probably see some videos 10 times. And it wasn't background filler - I'd actually be sitting in a chair/couch and watching the videos. Kids don't do this anymore. First many/most songs are made popular through TikTok memes, not videos. And videos really are mostly just played in the background as they do other stuff. No one is just tuning into Yo MTV Raps or Headbangers Ball anymore.

by kenjackson

7/16/2026 at 10:09:04 PM

Video killed the radio star. Streaming killed the video. Sure, lots of people use youtube for consuming music, but how many of them truly are watching the videos or just have them on while they do something else without seeing the images? With that in mind, putting anything on screen is just checking the boxes

by dylan604

7/16/2026 at 11:07:25 PM

I think short-form video has killed many things. There's just too much dopamine stimulation.

Although arguably music videos have always been a sort of short-form-video - takes strung together enough to keep you engaged through the song.

by m463

7/16/2026 at 11:32:43 PM

No, that’s not the fault of the audience.

by saaaaaam

7/16/2026 at 9:44:25 PM

> need auteurs to curate vignettes or effects and cut or mask them in etc

The problem is that reliable, repeatable professional-grade commercial art and design sensibilities happen in full-time careers. It’s entirely different than fine art, where intense self-exploration and experimentation are a very viable option.

These tools are exacerbating an already difficult creative job market so there’s no reasonable path to get those skills. Our creative professional pipeline is fundamentally broken.

by DrewADesign

7/16/2026 at 10:00:30 PM

The same thing is happening in software, I see the ladder pulled up and don't feel vulnerable as senior staff. If anything, we face a massive and increasing competency crisis in computing because there is a cult dumb enough to believe acceleration and doomer cases for LLMs.

by kev009

7/17/2026 at 8:58:12 PM

I got out of the software business after a couple decades and the market for newly graduated designers in my field collapsed in my senior year of 2024 so now I work in machining.

The last of the core industrial skilled trade workforce that came up in the 70s and 80s, before offshoring, is retiring. Offshoring left the industry with all the skilled workers they needed for decades, so a vanishingly small number of apprentices were trained. Since the seniors transferred very little knowledge, very few people still have that knowledge, and they’re scrambling to transfer all of that knowledge into a new batch of apprentices.

I think the software business is closer to a trade than an engineering profession than people care to admit, and is looking at something like that down the road a few years. In the interim, we can look to the rust belt to see how the America industry treats workers that are no longer needed. I don’t even think we need autonomous, agentic virtual developers to make that happen — a double-digit productivity boost will likely result in a double-digit job market contraction.

by DrewADesign

7/17/2026 at 6:47:01 PM

I found these hilarious!

I was ROFL over some of the mistakes the AI made. Parts of it was amazing, other parts were amazingly off.

by BatFastard

7/16/2026 at 9:04:17 PM

Regular music videos (including the writing/recording) can easily go into 6 figures. I wonder what the $200,000 AI music videos looks like.

by LPisGood

7/16/2026 at 9:12:23 PM

You don't need to spend $200k, because results can be bad for cheap.

https://youtu.be/HDdsKJl92H4

Though we're finding the studios contracted to do this can bill $50k. I know several studios that previously billed clients six figures for ad campaigns (P&G, HBO, pharma, etc.) are now charging five figures and winning a lion share of the bids now.

Not sure why Wan is the focus of this article and Seedance is a footnote. Wan/LTX/open models are significantly behind Chinese closed source models. (And the Chinese have left the Western models in the dust.)

I wouldn't do anything production grade in Wan.

by echelon

7/16/2026 at 9:46:13 PM

3 of the 4 agents used Wan, the other one used Seedance.

by janalsncm

7/16/2026 at 9:26:59 PM

But why spend the same amount of money on AI instead of humans? My guess is that shooting a music video is probably fun for a lot of artists. And with AI the result is not predictable and might be inconsistent in the dumbest ways.

My guess is that an AI music video would have to be a lot cheaper for artists to consider it outside of making one just because you want to make an AI music video.

by lwkl

7/16/2026 at 10:16:14 PM

Okay, then a $50,000 music video.

The idea is to reduce production cost and therefore more plentiful/accessible.

by paulddraper

7/16/2026 at 10:54:28 PM

Exactly the same

by jrflowers

7/17/2026 at 3:09:55 PM

All these AI discussions seem to lack the nuance that the real utility of these tools will come in the finer points.

GPT? Sure, you can write a book with it, but in writing its use as a tool by a real human is perhaps best when it is providing a jumpstart to creativity. If I'm writing a script I might have a chatbot give me a rough outline which will usually be complete garbage that I throw away 90% of but it got me over the decision paralysis of getting started.

Image generation? Sure, you can create varying degrees of body horror wrong-hand imagery and ugly-as-sin event flyers. But it's also indispensable for, as an example, object deletion and cleanup workflows within Photoshop. Or intelligently letting me change the paint color of a car while preserving the reflection's tones and realistic shadows.

Video generation? Sure, you can make ugly nonsensical slop but I imagine it will be hugely useful for AI driven rotoscoping, quickly creating placeholder or background resources.

Of course, the ethics of how this training data was all gained creates an entirely different aspect of discussion. Supposedly Adobe's image generation, by far some of the worst on the market, is so bad because it is ONLY trained on imagery that they already have reproduction and usage rights to. Which tracks, because it does an admirable job of erasing an ugly building and revealing trees and a field behind it, but anything that results in it having to generate stuff more complex than the landscape photography that makes up the glut of its training data has... hilarious results.

by 100percentjake

7/16/2026 at 9:36:15 PM

The fable $25 version was the best.

by blueshoe

7/16/2026 at 11:42:59 PM

I don't know how much WickedAI is putting into creating their videos, but if you want examples that aren't terrible, https://youtube.com/@wickedai

by fragmede

7/16/2026 at 10:36:55 PM

Spice 1 released an AI video for Jealous Got Me Strapped. Got a young AI Spice 1 and Tupac. I see on his channel he put out another AI video in 2024.

https://youtu.be/j36hjNuAIWQ

by NDlurker

7/17/2026 at 1:56:40 AM

Recurring characters drift between shots, and none of the videos hold a coherent storyline from start to finish.

Stuff like veo 3 can't always hold a coherent storyline for 8s. It's asking too much to expect a whole, coherent music video.

by dfxm12

7/17/2026 at 6:28:56 AM

For what it’s worth I tried an experiment where I had a similar harness (where LLMs competed head to head playing snake) and made them aware of their budget and it had very little impact. This was cheaper open weight models

by sails

7/17/2026 at 2:55:40 AM

The cutting edge technology is being tested with pelican drawings and video creation. You may argue that this is just testing, but actual mainstream use of this tech won't be far off from these tests.

by zkmon

7/17/2026 at 1:49:44 PM

I am shocked at the good quality of the output. Might not be great from an art standpoint (according to the other comments), but that's just a question of time (not a lot)

by roni3

7/17/2026 at 7:58:42 AM

All videos are so full of stereotypes and clichés, often borderline (or just plainly) racist. But of course, that's not the main worry for people making these things, right...

by seu

7/17/2026 at 7:18:38 PM

Well if AI destroys bad music videos by making them cost $25, I say it's a win. What will be left will be seriously scripted productions.

by dsign

7/17/2026 at 2:33:48 PM

We still need a different approach to create this. Consistency is the problem in video, a model should create from start to end instead of different shots.

by tolga-inkpilots

7/17/2026 at 10:34:09 PM

I'm not really a music video watching person but the output of these videos seem almost like non serious memes mocking music videos.

by duxup

7/17/2026 at 9:23:18 AM

Always nice to see that it still really struggles with the nuances of human movement and self-interaction. Especially when it comes to clothing overlapping.

by marysol5

7/17/2026 at 1:22:40 AM

No need to take any pot shots at this trash in terms of aesthetic efficacy in earnest, if y'all know what I mean. But as an experiment, it's interesting. There seems to be an odd consistency to all of them, which reveals a kind of internal logic & coherence of sorts that courses throughout any iteration.

Aesthetically, where can you place these? I feel like the late David Lynch could have used some tropes in his unnerving, unsettling dream sequences (a la the intro dream in "Mulholland Drive" where people are so cheery and upbeat that it feels viscerally disturbing).

That's the consistent feeling that I'm left with watching each one, is just a deep, deep unsettled and uneasy feeling. A scowl on my face the whole time trying to make through each one.

I did crack up seeing a martini glass presented to the camera, then float in place on it's own and the presenter resumes holding it with his other hand.

Everything else made me nauseous.

by deebosong

7/17/2026 at 1:58:53 PM

How about the full 360 head turn in the first video. Nightmare fuel.

by marknutter

7/17/2026 at 1:31:55 AM

> I did crack up seeing a martini glass presented to the camera, then float in place on it's own

It's just a cheap video-generation model doing its thing. I wonder if the orchestrator model noticed this and tried "Create a scene with a martini glass. Make no mistakes".

by red75prime

7/16/2026 at 10:26:17 PM

Did it misunderstand "don't believe me just watch" and put a bunch of washing machines in on the Fable 5 $100 at about 1:20?

by stusmall

7/16/2026 at 8:52:37 PM

Wow. These are horrible. Sort of refreshing. I thought video was better than this now, but I guess not.

by bubblegumcrisis

7/16/2026 at 9:17:00 PM

Video can be good if you stick to a garden path of simple scenes with tons of examples in the training material and not a ton of motion between overlapping objects in a scene, and don't really care too much about specifics.

As soon as you want something very specific, or something novel, or anything with a lot of moving objects/people, it falls apart.

by Sohcahtoa82

7/16/2026 at 9:42:08 PM

Video is better. The models just chose older video models which are not SOTA

by meric_

7/16/2026 at 9:00:40 PM

Exact same impression

by fittestme

7/17/2026 at 7:26:13 PM

Slightly different impression

by bgroins

7/17/2026 at 3:54:20 AM

The visuals are good enough to be interesting. I just don't like the shot selection / story writing

by pianopatrick

7/17/2026 at 4:41:37 AM

The creative in me would rather take the cursed parts of of the cheap models and edit them together.

by tim-projects

7/17/2026 at 11:55:53 AM

token cost for the $100 video was $3.25 for Sol 5.6 and $25.05 (!) for Fable 5

for the $25 video it was $4.27 (Sol) vs $16.99 (Fable)

this seems like an interesting benchmark of a complex task, even if the output has little artistic merit. the efficiency of Sol is impressive

by spongebobstoes

7/17/2026 at 2:16:20 AM

Can I just say that they look awful?

by dwa3592

7/16/2026 at 10:13:22 PM

Embarrassing!

You can still delete this, there is time.

by tantalor

7/16/2026 at 10:16:36 PM

What's embarrassing?

by adenta

7/16/2026 at 11:56:44 PM

The post itself was technically useful, I found, and they posted their entire project to GitHub https://github.com/hershalb/music-video-arena which I think makes it worthy of a HN post and discussion since it is technical and at least IMHO a very interesting post.

by samspenc

7/16/2026 at 10:19:27 PM

The outputs

by tantalor

7/17/2026 at 3:03:38 PM

Some tells, the face, reflections on faces, multiple legs, no sense of gravity

by ge96

7/17/2026 at 8:05:11 AM

It's amazing that someone used those awful videos as a showcase for anything. :)

by cyclopeanutopia

7/16/2026 at 9:20:30 PM

Skip the Claude Fable 5 $25 video to 1:42. The disembodied Adams' Family hand is on the job.

by gausswho

7/16/2026 at 9:29:54 PM

It's Wan video, which is a shitty video model.

The OP would exclusively be using Seedance 4k if they were serious about this.

by echelon

7/16/2026 at 10:25:20 PM

It was the agents job to pick the model.

by redox99

7/16/2026 at 10:35:07 PM

Pretty neat that the gallery of videos plays from where the previous one was paused. Nice UX.

by arjie

7/16/2026 at 10:32:57 PM

How well do these models do producing a proof-of-life video? Asking for a friend.

by hasbot

7/17/2026 at 2:34:19 AM

…is your friend… er, was your friend, a US Senator, by any chance?

by mcphage

7/17/2026 at 3:50:00 AM

Slightly off topic, but earlier today I was bored, having a kibitz with Claude, and I asked if it played chess. I was surprised when it confirmed, with a humble yes and disclaimer of its mediocre strength. I then asked if it happened to also play Go, which has been my preference for many years now. I was surprised when it again confirmed yes, but admitted it was even weaker here.

Where I began to feel delightfully uncomfortable was when it asked me if it should build a Go board and start a game. Surely you jest, Mr Claude... I thought.

No. The crazy bastard built a beautiful HTML/SVG board, and before I knew what was going on, there it was. I thought for a moment that fraud rhymes with something. Then before I knew it, I was black (that's courtesy!) and I made my first move expecting nothing, kind of astonished by what was happening. Mind you, I was on a phone. Then it made a move in response, and lo and bloody behold, I was playing a game of Go with Claude, on a 19x19 board made in a few seconds, with formidable aesthetics.

I was enamored enough to overlook that Claude does need some practice. But wow. I guess everyone is impressed by something, but that got me.

by eth0up

7/17/2026 at 8:37:26 AM

Wow, I hate all of it

by neonstatic

7/17/2026 at 11:01:07 AM

These videos have the "karaoke" vibe to them

by tarosnow

7/17/2026 at 3:34:31 AM

Awesome! Other commenters are negative but I'm very excited to welcome AI into the artistic community. The more the merrier. Can't wait to see what they come up with!

by sandspar

7/17/2026 at 4:53:19 AM

Truly impressive that we're burning trillions of dollars for this abject garbage. I'm so glad people can't buy RAM anymore so that we can shit out some more soulless slop - and this really is the definition of slop - like this

by sensanaty

7/17/2026 at 11:10:56 AM

You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension. -Nikola Tesla

by andai

7/17/2026 at 4:53:29 AM

TIL that Fable and Sol generate video...

by ElijahLynn

7/17/2026 at 6:52:35 AM

Can't tell if this was a joke, but they don't. They had access to video generating models and a budget for it.

by Mashimo

7/16/2026 at 10:08:31 PM

claude’s is bad and chatgpt’s is horrific

by yapyap

7/16/2026 at 11:13:21 PM

Passable as an episode of Robot Chicken.

by opengrass

7/16/2026 at 10:24:07 PM

They are terrible. Perhaps if one on purposely prompts for a weird imaginary, the result could be less awful even acceptable, like that famous Gucci ad. These videos instead are common scenes with the super cringey AI artifacts.

by tedggh

7/17/2026 at 4:13:01 AM

The future is pretty obvious. People spending thousands of hours honing the skills of being able to create visual art will dwindle. The same will be true for many creative endeavors. Artists will still exist and some will be able to make a living from it but it will rare. Slop will prevail. Most people will lose the ability or care to try and tell the difference. The attention wars have a lot of time to go. The addicted are kids and teens and young adults at this point and I see little to make me think they break out of it any time soon.

by blightful

7/16/2026 at 9:59:23 PM

As a clanker-apologist I gotta say this is the strawman of AI slop brought to life. Letting the machine do literally everything without even supervision and see how it turns out? No surprise at all the results are so bad.

My fav AI video is still Post-Scarcity Blues from a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_t3h2AZ0KY There have been others I've enjoyed since then. But, that one stands out in memory. Work warning: it is occasionally just a bit spicy.

by aenvoker

7/17/2026 at 12:09:06 AM

Pretty amazing stuff and evocative. Thanks for sharing to put things in perspective.

by s1artibartfast

7/16/2026 at 11:59:25 PM

I mediocrity was a visual style.

by coldtea

7/17/2026 at 2:07:32 AM

I don't care that the results are technologically impressive, the automation of creativity is dystopian. As I watched these videos and tried to compare what different AIs can do with similar budgets, is struck me to how utterly soulless and unenjoyable this whole thing is.

AI has plenty of utility, but this isn't one of them. If anything, I want to see AI automate all of the tedious stuff so that human beings can focus more deeply on art and culture. Automating art and culture is anti-human.

by RIMR

7/17/2026 at 2:43:27 AM

These videos are awful.

by hackmack10

7/17/2026 at 4:45:41 AM

id like to see AI dance & sweat and sing on stage...

by sourcecodeplz

7/17/2026 at 2:16:22 AM

GPT is missing a beat

by erickhill

7/17/2026 at 6:08:53 AM

Feel like a lot of comments are missing the point here - the authors weren't trying to make a great music video, they were trying to test independent tool use.

Despite how awful the end result may be, the models did successfully plan and execute a moderately complicated generation and editing process.

by swiftcoder

7/17/2026 at 1:36:29 AM

I think that a lot of posters here are missing the point - this is just the tip of the iceberg, and even simple improvements in prompting (infer the meaning of the lyrics, then generate footage related to that) would create a better result.

There is no going back from this, only forwards, for better or worse.

by RealStupidity

7/17/2026 at 2:29:31 PM

Impressed by what utter shit this is. Music video creators are safe for a while yet

by circlefavshape

7/17/2026 at 1:53:23 PM

I hate AI slop as much as the next Hacker News reader, but I thought these were just fine. Any one of these would have thoroughly entertained me during the 80s MTV era.

by fortran77

7/17/2026 at 2:03:51 AM

No effort went into that. No talent went into that. The creator doesn't care about the outcome. Nobody wants to watch it. Fucken A, brilliant. The intelligence is artificial.

by Fricken

7/17/2026 at 11:00:54 AM

The videos are lame as fuck. This is what they’re spending trillions of dollars on, absolute madness.

by paganel

7/16/2026 at 10:06:22 PM

These are pretty terrible, but for me there were at least a few moments where they genuinely became "so bad they're awesome". They actually re-enforced an idea I keep coming back to: sometime soon a real artist is going to use AI to make something amazing, not by aiming for flawless "realism" or some kind of pastiche slop, but by leaning into the weirdness that often comes out of AI.

by abstractbill

7/17/2026 at 8:51:34 AM

The AI slop humans always look they are amazing by the fact they can move around, in slow motion.

by rrr_oh_man

7/16/2026 at 11:00:42 PM

Welcome to the Age of the Plateau. Enjoy your stay, everything is very mid, but it’s oh so cheap to make.

by Mistletoe

7/16/2026 at 9:45:07 PM

Wow. These are all terrible. Music video producers can breathe a sigh of relief.

by angrydev

7/17/2026 at 9:12:15 AM

Absolutely horrendous and devoid of any value whatsoever.

by mvdtnz

7/17/2026 at 4:06:10 PM

happy to see this is still ugly unwatchable dogshit

by ashivkum

7/17/2026 at 3:48:32 AM

They're all pretty bad lol

by curvaturearth

7/16/2026 at 10:35:41 PM

Please stop using AI for creative work. This is utterly abysmal.

by squidsoup

7/19/2026 at 3:11:28 AM

[flagged]

by cortexosmain

7/16/2026 at 10:19:39 PM

[flagged]

by MaximTsyg

7/17/2026 at 1:42:15 PM

[dead]

by teampmladv

7/17/2026 at 3:24:53 AM

[dead]

by ele11

7/17/2026 at 5:41:25 PM

[dead]

by syed_qutub3

7/16/2026 at 9:33:04 PM

[dead]

by kerriy

7/16/2026 at 8:53:05 PM

These are getting really good. Much more interesting than the average music video already.

by apt-apt-apt-apt

7/16/2026 at 8:54:23 PM

can't tell if sarcasm or just zero taste...

by gary_b

7/16/2026 at 9:00:35 PM

I only glanced at the video thumbnails and was repulsed. But then again, I'm not the target audience for this garbage.

by pstuart

7/17/2026 at 12:31:26 AM

I'm fascinated by some of the comments in here, that the videos are "awful," "far from good," "embarrassing," etc.

This is technology that was unthinkable before just a couple of years ago. Photorealistic video generated by typing out a description of what you want to see is something from a sci-fi movie. I must be dreaming, this can't be real.

I took a screenshot in the middle of a video, and it's indistinguishable from a photograph: https://imgur.com/a/TyNbd7E

I don't know, maybe I'm just old. I remember hacking the hidden iframe trick to make ajax-style file uploads work in IE7. The advancements I've watched unfold in the past couple of years are still hard to wrap my head around.

by valar_m

7/17/2026 at 12:50:31 AM

No one is criticizing the photorealistic video generation. Yes, AI has gotten very good at that, I don't think anyone is disputing that.

At some point you have to move past your astonishment at the technical achievement alone and judge the result for what it is, on its own merits, as if a human had made it. Especially when the goal of using generative AI is to remove as many human creators and as much human effort from the creative process as possible, and to have as much "art" be as fully AI generated as possible.

People are criticizing these videos because they aren't good. As "art." Which is a problem if this is what all art is supposed to be become.

by krapp

7/17/2026 at 8:20:17 AM

> judge the result for what it is, on its own merits, as if a human had made it.

I don't think anyone was proposing this as an actual professional music video, right? It's a tech demo that used all of $25 of budget. So why are you judging it "on its own merits, as if a human had made it"?

by throw310822

7/17/2026 at 12:06:10 PM

Most of the "professional" AI generated content I've seen isn't much better than this. It all lacks in the same dimensions, it's all the same sort of mediocre and uncanny. Claiming "it's a tech demo, actually quality doesn't matter" isn't going to cut it when this technology is already replacing actual human professional work.

Besides, several people in this thread have already decided that these tech demos are better than human created music videos. In fact, many AI "artists" already claim generative AI has surpassed humans in every relevant metric and they judge it on the same merits as I do just coming to the opposite conclusion. They certainly aren't waiting until it's "good" to call it art.

So it's entirely valid to point out that this technology is actually bad at doing the thing it's supposed to do.

by krapp

7/17/2026 at 3:48:36 AM

Louis CK:

>I was on an airplane and there was high speed internet on the airplane… it’s fast, I’m watching YouTube clips, I’m on an airplane. It breaks down, they apologize, and the guy next to me is like “This is bullshit..."

>Like how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago?

>Flying is the worst one, people come back from flights, they tell you their story and it’s a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 40s in Germany.

>"It was the worst day of my life! First of all we didn’t board for 20 minutes. And then we got on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes. We had to sit there."

>Oh really, what happened next, did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero?

>You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should be constantly going ‘oh my God, wow!’

>You’re sitting in a chair in the sky

>….Here’s the thing, people say there are delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in 5 hours. That used to take 30 years. And a bunch of you would die on the way there. And have a baby. You’d be a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and you take a shit and you’re home.

https://youtu.be/nUBtKNzoKZ4?si=yaCJhTLiXkPyksbg - his delivery starts at around 2:00 but he starts with additional jokes.

by sandspar