Pika Labs new generative AI video tool unveiled

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? 🤷
  
  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.
  
  I don't understand your argument.
  
  I'm in no way convinced that this will lead to new cool jobs, and I have never heard anyone suggest how that could happen. In all honesty, I'd hate to lose my job as a dev and suddenly the only option in my industry is now "debugging AI mistakes."
  
  If you want to create cool new jobs, how about doing it without disregard for the people you're hurting? That's entirely possible, but the current system doesn't care about people, it cares about money.
  
  If we saw the potential in these tools, and decided as a society to just let the machines do all the stuff we don't want to do, and we all got to do whatever meaningful beautiful things our hearts wanted, then sure. But that isn't happening. The system isn't broken so it won't fix itself.
  
  "Maybe something good will come of all this pain" is a bad philosophy, imo.
  
  But like, it will happen anyways. You can't stop Musk from shoving Grok down everyone's throats and firing 80% of his work force to replace them with AI drones.
  
  If we saw the potential in these tools, and decided as a society to just let the machines do all the stuff we don't want to do, and we all got to do whatever meaningful beautiful things our hearts wanted, then sure.
  
  Yes, literally this, my argument is literally we use all our efforts to fight for this, as making something beautiful out of a shit situation is literally all life has and I feel always will be.
  
  Yep, then we have nothing to argue about. I'm an idealist, I'm just angry about the way these things are going instead of accepting them.
  
  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…
  
  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 ~~reddit~~ lemmy 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 starve
  
  I'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.
  
  There is some technical skill involved in making it output something in the direction you want, but nothing exists until you hit enter, only a vague concept. The process is so detached from the artistic decision making that it is a complete outstrech to call it art. You can never have a personal style doing AI stuff. No vision, no nuances.
  
  There is some technical skill involved in pointing the camera in the direction you want, but nothing exists until you hit the shutter, only a vague concept. The process is so detached from the artistic decision making that it is a complete outstrech to call it art. You can never have a personal style doing photography. No vision, no nuances.
  
  Yes. Photography captures an instant of the real world. The photographer still has to choose the moment, perspective, composition, filters and so on, but they are very constrained (not as much as AI prompters).
  
  The debate about the artistic involvement of photography has existed sonce the invention of the camera, it's not something new.
  
  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.
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.
  
  Tell that to Disney, for example. It wouldn't replace artists in a world that cared about artistic quality... we don't live in that world.
  
  For capitalists, easily generated shit is good enough.
  
  That's down to the audience. If people won't accept it then it won't be done. If people do then why wouldn't they.
  
  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.
  
  My guy, they stop being an artist because someone stole all their work and fired them for it
  
  My dude, my grandfather got fired after the collapse of the soviet economy because "artist" wasn't a productive enough job to be kept around, but he still made art for 20 years after without getting paid because his purpose in life was to create art, not to sell it.
  
  And sure the theft argument would be valid, but that's a strawman, because Adobe have already trained their own image gen model on fully licensed images and real life artists are already paying money to use it, so they must see the value in it.
  
  You just described the problem back to me, artists should get paid for creating, I don't think being paid for something you love takes away from it, but that's an opinion and I understand people have their own. I think that's just an extension of the beauty of art (having our own opinions about it). Profit motives are the exact problem here, not a justification to make it worse.
  
  If Adobe is doing that, then that's awesome. If they're making tools to replace artists, instead of tools to help them, significantly less awesome.
  
  My problem is that lots of tools do exist that replace artists, and most do steal their training data. I would love for these things to change, maybe we'll make it out okay, but we need to make noise.
  
  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.
  
  Is it our responsibility to help people? I think it is if we're helping to hurt them. While we can technically throw the blame up the corporate chain, I think we need to have personal responsibility for our actions, I understand that you, as I do, likely rely on your job to exist, but we can still push for the least harm possible.
  
  If you advocate up said chain on behalf of others, then that is good too.
  
  I'm aware of what this technology can do, I actively use some to help with my work. But I make sure it's as ethical as it can be.
  
  And AI art is not really all that useful. Just because you can automate art doesn't mean it's a waste. I think that's a dreadfully bleak view.
  
  Helping funding research is great and all, but maybe they should pay all the people they're stealing from? Or at the very least get consent.
  
  I was talking about automating jobs in general there. AI will never replace art completely. Only really digital artists if it does.
  
  It depends how you view it. You could chose to view it as saving someone from a pointless job. If I can write an application to do it then they are literally wasting their lives doing that task.
  
  Is keeping someone in a bullshit job helping them?
  
  It not up to me to create jobs. I'd start a business if I wanted to do that. The task of keeping people in employment as technology progresses is way above my paygrade and not something I know anything about.
  
  Ah I understand.
  
  I'm not talking about that either, and I'm not against automating jobs. I'm more talking about preventing unecessary harm, I don't really want to say who I work for but our company will shutdown entire storefronts and just lie about why. The union works to ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen unfairly, and that people have access to the legal support they need when it does, among other things.
  
  The reality is that they aren't working bullshit jobs, and we don't automate everything they do. Even the things we do automate require their constant help to support, but the business doesn't care and will just fire them because they see some vague report suggesting they can.
  
  Creating jobs is much harder, of course, but there are things we can and should do to make sure transitioning people out of those jobs is as painless as possible. I'm honestly of the opinion that we shouldn't have to have jobs to survive, and that pushing for good social support is a necessary part of increasing automation.
  
  As a loosely related aside, even though my job doesn't qualify for being bullshit, I definitely feel like I'm wasting my life doing it, but I have no other choice except dying.

Pika Labs new generative AI video tool unveiled — and it looks like a big deal