Pika Labs new generative AI video tool unveiled — and it looks like a big deal::The new Pika 1.0 tool comes after a $55 million funding round for the generative AI company and is a big step up in AI video production.
There’s a lot of “AI is theft” comments in this thread, and I’d just like to take a moment to bring up the Luddite movement at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution: the point isn’t that ‘machines are theft’, or ‘machines are just a fad’, or even ‘machines are bad’ - the point was that machines were the new and highly efficient way capital owners were undermining the security and material conditions of the working class.
Let’s not confuse problems that are created by capitalistic systems for problems created by new technologies - and maybe we can learn something about radical political action from the Luddites.
I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF if you haven’t already. The EFF is a digital rights group who most recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
AI training isn’t only for mega-corporations. We can already train open source models, and Mozilla and LAION have already commited to training AI anyone can use. We shouldn’t put up barriers that only benefit the ultra-wealthy and hand corporations a monopoly of a public technology by making it prohibitively expensive to for regular people to keep up. Mega corporations already own datasets, and have the money to buy more. And that’s before they make users sign predatory ToS allowing them exclusive access to user data, effectively selling our own data back to us. Regular people, who could have had access to a competitive, corporate-independent tool for creativity, education, entertainment, and social mobility, would instead be left worse off and with less than where they started.
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Did you get it right this time, or can expect another revision?
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Hardly, but I’m not against people refining their craft so have at it.
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I don’t get your meaning actually - are you saying: ‘you are in favor of theft in the name of AI’, or ‘you are agreeing that AI is theft’?
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Christ, you’re so worked up on rhetoric. Maybe, try using your own opinions, rather than those funneled into your meaty language model for you to grind up and spit out the buzzwords in some semblance of coherent thought, hmm? 🤪
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I’ve been saying for a year now, generative AI is going to foster a resurgence in stage theater. When movies are all 100% AI with no humans in them, we’ll want to see humans act. That and “organic” movie labels.
Cool, another step in the ruining art with AI saga
These are all short clips because they look like ass if you get enough time to actually look at them. But even still, can people just stop with this shit?
Let people do the one truely human thing ffs.
Edit: Let me be clear, AI has good uses. My only argument here is that generating art is not one, especially when the training data is stolen and used for profit.
No one is stopping people from making art, lazy people will use this to do things they want, but artists will make art because that’s what they do.
I’m more concerned about the fact that shitty companies will use this sort of thing to put graphic designers out of a job.
This isn’t good progress. Even soulless corporate bullshit puts food on the table for someone, soon it’ll just make another company a bit richer.
Look I’m not supporting mega rich assholes extracting even more from working people, but would you use the same argument for textile weavers and the Jacquard loom? Sure a lot of people lost their jobs at the time, but most, if not all, respecialized and we got computers in the end so would you say it wasn’t good progress? 🤷
Textile weavers still exist, they just get paid even less and live in third world countries. “AI” is the same - a lot of the training is done by underpaid folks living in Kenya and Tanzania. They have to label the gore and CP so that the “AI” won’t use it. Post traumatic stress disorder is pretty common…
Except that this is entirely unecessary, and doesn’t create a product we need, and it’s certainly not one I want.
I want to support people, I want people to do beautiful incredible things. I don’t want a higher production rate of souless art statistically generated by taking the work of thousands of people without their consent, for no good reason.
Replace CEOs with AI, that would be good progress.
I also mentioned in another comment that this technology has some very very good uses, I am convinced creating art is an evil use. I’m a big fan of projects like Talon Voice, you can donate voice samples to help improve their language model to help people who struggle to use a computer with their hands. It’s amazing stuff and I love it.
See, that’s the crux of the argument I feel. You can’t have one without the other, you can’t have voice generation for the mute without that technology also displacing voice actors in the process.
That’s why I think the Luddite approach doesn’t work, we can’t forcefully break the machines that are capable of so much good because they’re also capable of so much bad.
Instead we should focus on helping those that are most negatively impacted by their existence, while supporting everyone that is already being positively affected by them. (like the UBI mentioned in my other comment)
PS. Totes down for replacing CEOs with AI and distributing their salary among the workers
I can kinda get behind that, but only if it’s done right (which I’m absolutely convinced it won’t be, thanks to history).
Even just paying the people who lose their jobs, and helping them transition to other work is bad because voice acting is probably a dream job for a lot of people. We also have to ethically source training data, and I don’t really see that happening. After all, who would want to contribute to losing their own job?
If we could do all that, I think we can agree as a society to protect those jobs instead. I legimately think we can have only the good, but I understand that doing so requires a fight. I’d much rather fight for that than lay down and accept the worst possible option.
Edit: I’ll add further, that this is probably already happening, just for the CEOs. They have the power to create tools capable of replacing them, and to prevent them from replacing them.
That’s a good attitude to have and I’m not advocating for putting down our arms and waiting for big tech to steamroll us all.
But as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the people making the AI models are fully aware they are contributing to a technology that will take away their own jobs, because they think that it will create other, even more interesting jobs in the process. (see trad artists swearing off photography in it’s early days because it was “mechanical and soulless”, only to realize it’s creative potential years later)
My advice would be to continue being aware of the negative history of things, but don’t let it blind you to the positive aspects either.
Like… That was bad too. What we need to do is ditch capitalism before we automate everything.
It doesn’t function if nobody has jobs.
Advancements like the loom usually just affect one industry (yes, there are ripples in the whole economy) and it’s not like we got that, the printing press, the internal combustion engine, the computer, and the telephone all at once. AI, if properly trained, can do nearly any task so it’s not just artists that are in danger of becoming obsolete.
They’ve already been doing that
Capitalism optimizes for lazy over good. Who’s going to be able to pay rent as an artist in your dystopia
What artists do you know that make money off their art? The starving artist not being able to make money to survive has been a thing since before Van Gogh’s time.
We’ve automated the food making process, but people still make money off of preparation of food, there’s always going to be a market for artists, but that market will be different.
These AI things are great tools to assist artists, but the fear mongering gets in the way.
What artists do you know that make money off their art?
this is such a bad take, I present to you, society. and the hundreds of thousands if not millions, tens or hundreds of millions of employed (either self or through businesses) artists.
and using the “starving artist” as a goal we should transition to just really sucks in concept. I’m not sure you would say the same if it was your profession.
I know
redditlemmy is full of techbros but geez have some compassion for other people. Oh wooweey i can type words and not have to have someone else do an art, I’m an artist now, everyone else can starveI’m not sure you would say the same if it was your profession.
I am an artist, who uses AI to assist me…
I know reddit lemmy is full of techbros but geez have some compassion for other people.
So because I don’t see AI as a big scary monster coming to devour our souls I’m a Tech Bro and don’t have compassion?
But yeah, fear AI all you want, but artists will always be needed even if the bleep Boop machine can do it faster.
Writing prompts for an image generator doesn’t make you an artist, lol
Well not in the sense of the word you’re using, but there is an art to getting them to do what you want if your doing more than just dumb shit like I post on this account.
Do you mean that you were an artist who made art before AI image generation existed and you’ve incorporated it into your art, or do you mean you’re an artist because you type out what you want for the AI? Because people just paying artists to make something for them are also artists if that’s what you mean.
I am also an artist, and I frankly think you are a shite artist if you need to steal other peoples work.
No, this is a tool that does all of the work of an artist. It is absolutely not an assistant.
That’s a bad faith argument, and it’s actively harmful. Artists are struggling yes, and this just makes that worse, it won’t be a separate market that somehow doesn’t impact them.
If you think we should actually work to make it harder for artists to do things, that it’s actually good that they struggle, then you have some messed up priorities, friend.
It doesn’t really do all the work of an artist though. It generates pictures, but consider that a camera also generates pictures of things, and yet photography is considered an art form these days, and one’s results from doing that can vary quite a bit between someone who understands both artistic principles and how their tools function, versus someone who does not. Having an image generator does not also entail knowing what to ask the generator for, or how to make any adjustments to it’s output if it gives you something that is close to what you envision but not quite there. If anything, I personally suspect a more mature version of the technology will get integrated into art tools in some way rather than looking like it currently does, because a text prompt is a somewhat vague and inexact way to describe an image. If you ask it for a spaceship, for example, it’ll give you some sort of spaceship, and if you ask it for a specific spaceship from pop culture it may likely give you that, but if you’re imagining a specific design for a spaceship, with specific details, that does not already exist in existing art, it would be very hard to completely describe that just through text, versus if you could start sketching out and have it sort of act as a kind of graphical autocomplete that you can steer in given directions.
Ok so it’s absolutely not an assistant right? So say I’m working on a business logo and I’m having a hard time coming up with an idea to branch off of, I use an ai image gen to create a bunch of logos in a bunch of styles, I then use a couple as starting points for a design. How is that not a tool to assist an artist?
Just because you don’t see it as a tool to assist an artist’s doesn’t mean it isn’t, people will use any tool for good or evil.
It’s not assisting you in anything. It’s doing all the work for you
All it means is that at art as a career is dead.
Guess we want everyone working in retail or something
That’s already the system outside of creating what rich people want. An entire team of artists creating boardroom directed art is much less art to me than a single creative using AI to bring their personal vision to life.
Hopefully individual artists can do more with these tools, and we can all hope for a world where artists can be supported to have the ability and freedom to create apart from the whims of the wealthy.
Starving artist is a term for a reason. Technology has never been the real problem.
An entire team of artists creating boardroom directed art is much less art to me than a single creative using AI to bring their personal vision to life
This is honestly repulsive to me. Needing to pay rent doesn’t mean artists stop putting effort and creativity into what they’re doing. If you’ve ever enjoyed a movie, game, or music that isn’t indie produced then you’ve seen the value in what you’re shitting on here, because regardless of how it’s marketed none of that is the vision of a single creative, either. If anything larger projects are often able to catch lightning in a bottle, as many people contribute ideas and spin things in directions that a single person wouldn’t have seen.
And at least they all started from a basic level of artistic vision and competency, and had the integrity to do their own work. If the only reason someone can call themselves an artist is because of AI, they’re not an artist, they’re a plagiarist.
They aren’t making their own art though, they are making the boardrooms art.
They have about as much say in the creative process as retail workers have a say what gets sold in the store.
They don’t own the rights to it, that doesn’t mean they’re not using the same creative processes to make it. There’s not some switch artists flip to make “fake” art when they get paid.
By this metric the Sistine Chapel isn’t Real Art compared to a 15 year old typing “woman big breasts oily in a bikini on the beach” into the plagiarism machine, because Michelangelo was paid for his work and the Catholic Church came up with the idea for it.
You also seem to have a lot of misconceptions about how media is made. Boards have very little to do with it beyond making sure whatever rules they think make it most profitable are followed, and even that is mostly on project directors to enforce. They aren’t standing over people 40 hours a week, and project directors and individual artists often have a decent amount of leeway. Successful media companies’ boards keep a light touch, both because of unions and because they aren’t artists. There’s no point in hiring artists if you don’t let them work.
Doesn’t everyone want to be a creative? Turns out you gotta be able to afford it. I work for a living. If everyone worked for a living, I could afford some time and space to myself to do what I like with it. Unfortunately work supports art and people are trying to pass off their fun time as a contribution so I’m supporting them regardless. I’d rather everyone supported themselves so I can art without anyone else’s input.
I don’t like this, because one of the most used arguments in favor of capitalism is supposedly the free market and how you are allowed to make money doing what you like. If now it turns out that only a few things are classified as jobs then… where are the benefits of capitalism?
You don’t make money doing what you like. You make money doing what your customers like. If you also like it, then all the better.
Art is just fine. Credit for it is in jeopardy.
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Dey took arrr jeeerbs!
DEEY DOOK DUR DOORBS
This is not the way to look at this. Stop thinking this stuff will replace human art. Until we can simulate a human in the machine (not there yet), art will always be by humans because it is a human endeavor recognized and appreciated only by humans.
These things are tools for a human to use. And like any tool that is used in the hands of the casual or the lazy, it will become very banal indeed once the shininess wears off. With your same outlook you could tell Adobe to stop improving the digital brushes in Photoshop, because art is only for humans.
I think a good analogy is clipart, or those horrible corporate memphis/algeria graphics. They look awful, but they are just good enough at illustrating an idea that many companies will use them rather than hiring an artist. The thing is, corporations almost never want art. They want illustrations.
AI doesn’t generate art. Art is about using media in order to convey a perspective on the world and to illicit emotions from the audience. What AI generates is simply the media itself. It isn’t capable of having the point of view or life experiences needed to create actual art.
People forget art isn’t just a product it’s an activity people do.
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We were only meant to be wage slaves /s
I quite like AI art.
It’s capable of generating things that we’ve not seen before because as hard as we try what we create always has a human filter on it.
If people don’t like it it won’t catch on anyway.
Have you ASKED artists to draw these things they’re supposedly incapable of?
Ah yes, because the favorite part of the process for every artist is the hours spent going back and forth with their client touching up the most minor details instead of creating art they actually want to make…
Idk, I feel AI art only affects commercial artists who first and foremost care about making money off their art form. The ones that actually make art for the love of the craft (without expectation of getting anything in return) aren’t really affected in any way.
TL;DR Let UBI free artists from the capitalistic yoke and let the oligarchs use AI to automate the soulless part of art creation that nobody enjoys anyways.
In what world is it a bad thing for someone to get paid for their skills? That’s a bizarre spin to put on it.
And yes, UBI should definitely happen, but we shouldn’t start painting the world with crap to do it.
It’s fine to get paid for your skills, but from experience I can say that developing skills just to get paid is also rather soulless.
Since, sure, I can bet there’re furry artists that love drawing sexy tigers to bits, but I can guarantee there’s a not-so-small percentage that would much rather draw something else, but the yiffing money is too good to pass up on.
Being paid for your skills is service, not art. It can be art when your audience’s money isn’t the director.
Yeah, service isn’t art. If you’re making “art” for someone else’s money, you’re performing a service. You’re not an artist. Remember when YouTube was mostly just people getting their ideas out and going viral was because something was awesome instead of being designed to spread? Now it’s every kid and their grandma trying to be an influencer so they can have fun with other people’s money for a living.
When what you’re doing isn’t for the clients’ money, it can be art. There’s no constraint this way.
Exactly, personalised art should only be for those who can afford to pay for it. Expanding that privilege to more people is very bad.
It’s literally a luxury, and trying to yank the rug out from under the artists who actually made the art the plagiarism machine runs on isn’t going to change that. You don’t need personalized art, and if you REALLY REALLY want personalized art super bad then that just underlines the value that artists give to society.
It’s literally a luxury to have your own copy of a book, and trying to yank the rug out from under the scribes who actually made the books the plagiarism press runs on isn’t going to change that. You don’t need your own book and if you REALLY REALLY want one super bad then that just underlines the value that scribes give to society.
Modern society was partly possible due to the printing press. Yep, it sucks that people had their jobs replaced and if it were happening now I’d be fighting for them to be looked after, as they should.
Generating art is not some amazing world changing technology, it’s trash. We do not need to replace artists, and frankly we just fucking shouldn’t.
If it’s so trash it won’t replace them right? So there’s no issue.
Plus these neural networks could be the stepping stones to a truly transformative technology and in 100 years someone will be saying exactly what you said about the printing press.
Hate for AI is a meme at this point.
Any artist who stops being an artist because someone else can put words into a computer and get a big tiddy goth gf pic out, wasn’t really that interested in making art in the first place.
If I can’t have the plagiarism machine spit out 100 pics of my big tiddy anime gf kissing me that’s just like children not having access to books. Won’t someone think of how every generation before this lived under the oppression of artists who wouldn’t work for free? 😭
It’s also a crime to reprint anything without the original author or artist’s permission so you might not like where your analogy leads lmao.
As a human I can’t imagine them so how would I.
Also money
I do not like theft laundering machines.
I like people.
AI actually has good uses when embedded within technology, a great example being natural language processing, it’s capable of so much good especially for the disabled. But so much effort is being focused on creating junk, using stolen data. People are not being paid for their work which is then being used to replace their jobs.
You should read this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF. The EFF is a digital rights group that recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
Do you think the software engineers who are developing the AI models (which have been trained on freely given away code) are just stupid and are willingly creating a machine that will take away their jobs because they don’t understand the impacts? Or could it be that they do understand the stakes, but continue on despite that because of (as you mention) the unfathomable good the technology can bring? I would hope most people would be willing to sacrifice their wellbeing now for the betterment of everyone else in the future.
If you’re still understandably worried tho - just start a garden and begin building tightly knit communities now, since you never know when a solar flare will wipe all our technological progress away…
Do you understand that there’s a choice about what purpose to make these for?
That yeah, you can just ignore all the harm you’ll do? That people do just ignore all the harm they are doing?
No, I’m not one to call people stupid. I’m calling people and corporations greedy, there’s an insanely long history of that and I’m sick of it ruining this world.
People do choose to make good AI, ones that will and currently are benefiting people. This is not one of them, I’m not calling all AI bad, I’m calling theft and soulless art generation bad.
What if a solar flare hits? What if the world was made of pudding?
You can say that about all software.
As a programmer my job is to automate tasks and make people obsolete.
You have to make your peace with it.
Should we ban excel and calculators and make everyone do calculations by hand? It would create a lot jobs Hehe
Also the solar flare thing is a very real thing that could happen. Not a random hypothetical like the pudding.
Hello, we have the same job.
It is not something to be proud of, but it is a part of progress and it is vaguely justifiable if it actually has a worthwhile purpose. We should also be helping the people whose jobs we replace, but we don’t. I joined a union to try and help those people, to secure their jobs and to get them the pay they deserve.
AI art is not a worthwhile thing to create. Stealing from people is bad. These are my points.
A solar flare is entirely unrelated to anything I’m talking about, hence the pudding.
It’s really not up to us to help people. That’s why we have governments. Of course we should if we can.
If your job can be easily automated then you are wasting your life anyway.
The technology behind it is incredibly powerful and these tools are funding research.
This is not the death of artists but of studios. When creating movies will become cheap, movie studios will be the ones becoming unnecessary. But artists are the creatives who feed these tools and who now can create content on their own.
This is from over a month ago.
Seeing people go gaga over all this AI trash kind of makes me convinced that most people just… do not see? Not that something is physically wrong with their vision but it’s like most of it doesn’t even register, even more so than what I thought was the normal baseline of inattention to details.
Are people just constantly distracted and not really engaging with media? Only watching or looking at things on small screens? The result of decades of cuts and devaluation of art education? Literally just being happy with whatever garbage is in front of them? It’s a mystery to me.
The ooohs is mostly about how fucking far it has come so quickly. You must see how this technology is a pretty fucking big deal
They don’t see and don’t really want to see. Typical technophobe responses rooted in fear and insecurities.
I’d rather be a technophobe than a Philistine. 🤷♂️
You wouldn’t have to be a fool at all if you don’t want to?
A bigger fool is the one who thinks they’re making art when they type “big titty goth gf” into the plagiarism machine, lol.
They aren’t making the art.
The AI is drawing the big titty goth gfs.
No, the bigger fool is the aggressor
Both you fuck yourself and try to fuck others
People that exist and use new tools
Even if the tool is bad to you
Are not the fools here
I am sure you see that
I see how far it’s come and I fucking hate it. It creates nothing, it wholly brings down the quality of art in the world and destroys countless people’s lives. There are no benefits
A very childish take
Yeah, if you reread what I wrote you might notice I said absolutely nothing about the technical side of it.
No
What a condescending view point while bringing nothing to the table but insults.
I see a technology that will break the barriers necessary to get into animation and movie production, finally paving way for indie companies in the domain. It will elevate art in all domains, bringing us more interesting products and features.
God I want some large projects by independent teams. It’s impossible to do anything without a sponsor, but this might be what we need for smaller groups to create wonderful complex works of art, instead of cookiecutter boardroom content machines that currently flood almost all available commercial artistic spaces.
Can’t wait to see how the tech develops. It’s be curious to do VR experience recreations of my dreams through AI dictation.
Modelling, rigging, animation and the like are all coming. Imagine walking around a world being crafted and changed as you describe each element to be exactly what you are looking for.
I think it would capture more artist intent than the unnecessary interface of archaic tools that create an artificial interface and challenge between you and your vision.
Especially if you’ve damaged your digits, or otherwise lack digital dexterity.
But change scares people. Especially ones who have put in effort to conform to the current economic system corporate art creators.
If I’m happy with something, it’s not garbage.
Is this going to be available for free? And if so, to what extent? I’m not paying for AI, but would be cool to try it out.
I’ve also been burnt a few times by registering for some “free” AI service only to realise after putting in some actual effort into trying to create something that literally any actual value you might extract from it is gated behind a payment plan. This was the case when I tried generating voices, for example: spend an hour crafting something I like; generating any actual audio with it? Pay up. It’s like trying out a free MMO where you spend a long time creating your character just the way you want it only to be greeted by “trial over - subscribe now!”
Definitely not but there are already free models available from other companies.
There’s is stable video diffusion which is image to video. There is also anim diff, which is built of stable diffusion 1.5 and lets you do quite a lot. Both need a quality graphics card but you can run them using a service like runpod for a dollar an hour or so. Runpod lets you rent GPUs, so it’s not like those scammy AI sites. All of this takes a bit of know how though, it isn’t as easy as using a paid service like pika.
So artists need paid but not code developers who host massive servers? How often do you pay an artist?
Yeah got to stick to FOSS models that ideally can be self hosted (I count distributed systems here too though like petals.dev)
