i think it was one of the Gawker writers who described it as "a magazine for the wives of New Jersey orthodontists" and that seems about right.

every time i open New York magazine, i regret it.

@Pappy exactly. and that takes a lot of time too, so it's not clearly offering savings there either.

@Pappy I'm sure it will pretty much take over the low-effort content channels. I see people on the metro watch slop all the time.

@Pappy they paid voice actors. and we don't actually know what generating video like this costs. might be cheaper. might not be!

@Pappy like, I think there's lots of ways generated video can be used to capture attention (have you seen the vids of people slicing glass fruit?? captivating) but for **narrative** this is a shitshow.

@Pappy I genuinely think unboxing videos are more compelling than this. and regular old cartoons are probably cheaper to produce.

I think there's a chance people figure out how to use this kind of video generation for... something. but it seems extremely poorly-suited to narrative. like, it's genuinely slop. I'm not necessarily gonna discard the whole thing (I've seen compelling stuff from the Chinese) but at the very least, I would say Google's AI stuff is in deep, deep fucking trouble. **deep** trouble.

people make jokes about the little stuff AI gets wrong or inconsistent in video content like this, and I used to kind of think of that as "gotcha" criticism, but for real, I think the human subconscious picks up on **tons** of little things about a room or clothing, and when those little things are inconsistent, you completely lose the thread of the narrative or place. it's an exceptionally weird experience.

I just watched this (for science!) and how should I put this. it is... useless? incoherent? extremely disorienting? they were very careful to select a narrow task with the best possible conditions (very short, no conversations between characters, human voice actors, 3-second cuts, award-winning filmmaker, full support from Google) and it's completely incoherent. like, you spend the whole time waiting for it to start because the whole thing feels like an introduction/trailer.

omg sounds amazing

lmao let's check the top comment, see how it's going.

lol i didn't realize that Darren Aronofsky AI-generated series they announced a few weeks ago, "On This Day... 1776" is actually 1) on YouTube, and 2) each "episode" is like five minutes long lmao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZDnL_a0YfQ