There is a huge audience for AI-generated content on YouTube, though admittedly many of them are oblivious to the fact that they are watching AI-generated content.
Here are several examples of videos with 1 million views that people don't seem to realize are AI-generated:
These videos do have some editing which I believe was done by human editors, but the scripts are written by GPT, the assets are all AI-generated illustrations, and the voice is AI-generated. (The fact that the Sleepless Historian channel is 100% AI generated becomes even more obvious if you look at the channel's early uploads, where you have a stiff 3D avatar sitting in a chair and delivering a 1-hour lecture in a single take while maintaining the same rigid posture.)
If you look at Reddit comment sections on large default subs, many of the top-voted posts are obviously composed by GPT. People post LLM-generated stories to the /r/fantasywriters subreddit and get praised for their "beautiful metaphors.
The revealed preference of many people is that they love AI-generated content, they are content to watch it on YouTube, upvote it on Reddit, or "like" it on Facebook. These people are not part of "the Midjourney community," they just see AI-generated content out in the wild and enjoy it.
This brings to mind one of my favorite TV shows, One Outs. It's about the strategies that a clever and "unsportsmanlike" player brings to a baseball team, exploiting the rules while violating the spirit of the game.
As one example: in order for a baseball game to be considered valid, both teams must play 5 innings. If the weather is bad and teams are unable to continue due to rain, a <5 inning game is considered invalid and scheduled for a later date. If one team is behind and knows there's a high chance of rain later in the day, the pitcher can begin drawing out the length of innings by intentionally giving up hits. (After all, it doesn't matter how many runs he gives up if the game is canceled.) This, in turn, gives the opposite incentive to the opposing team's offense, who wants their runners to be declared "out" so that the inning can end faster. There's a real-time rules-gaming arms race as both teams test the bounds of what's legally permissible, driven by incentives that lead to a very unusual game of baseball.
This actually sounds like the opposite of what Michael Crichton described. The Gell-Mann Amnesia occurs when, due to your domain expertise, you are able to see when a publication display a complete lack of understanding on the topic they are covering, yet despite this continue to assume that the publication is qualified to cover topics outside your narrow area of domain expertise. (It is, in a certain sense, a refusal to believe the evidence of your own eyes: you see that a publication has no credibility, yet continue to assume that it has credibility for some reason.)
The effect described by the poster you're responding to is the opposite of that, and actually how credibility is presumed to normally work: you see that a publication get things right in a narrow domain that you have a lot of expertise in (and thus are qualified to identify which publications are purveyors of truth), and extrapolate that and assume, "if this one story is of impressive quality, then there's a good chance the rest of the publication is held to a similar standard." This is how a publication earns a badge of trustworthiness.
Unclear. We know how authors get paid for Kindle Unlimited because KDP is a self-publishing platform that anyone can use and Amazon has pages that explain everything when you go through the KDP signup process (plus reports from literally hundreds of authors who are enrolled in the program and post on forums/facebook groups about it). We have significantly less insight into the closed-door negotiations that happen between Netflix and Paramount Pictures to allow Indiana Jones movies to appear on Netflix; there are strategic reasons for both sides of the deal to want the details to be kept secret.
Note: this thread is about Kindle Unlimited, which has a different monetization/payment model than regular Kindle ebooks. KU readers do not "buy" KU ebooks, any more than Netflix users "buy" the TV shows that they are streaming.
If someone pays $10/mo for access to a library of tens of thousands of books but doesn't actually read any of them, then Amazon gets income without having to pay royalties, in the same way that Netflix still gets your money if you subscribe but don't watch anything. This is true even if you decided to subscribe to KU/Netflix because "Oh, I should get around to reading Harry Potter/watching Stranger Things" and then don't get around to actually reading Harry Potter or watching Stranger Things. This is very much legal.
Authors get paid monthly, approximately two months after the royalties are earned. So if you have a KU subscription and you read 20% of a KU book in January, the author will get paid for those pages in March, and then if you continue reading book and read the remaining 80% in February, the payment for the pages that you read in February will be included in their April statement.
It used to be that if Blockbuster wanted to rent out Raiders of the Lost Ark to six different customers simultaneously, they needed to own 6 VHS copies of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now, with streaming, Netflix doesn't have a finite number of "copies" that they can lend out at a time; if every single Netflix subscriber in the country decides that they want to start watching Indiana Jones right now, the only thing preventing Netflix from providing that is their bandwidth, because Netflix has worked out an arrangement with Paramount Pictures that allows them to do this.
Likewise, Amazon has an arrangement with KDP authors that says, "We lend your ebook out to as many KU subscribers as want it. At the end of the month we pay you based on how much people read your books." If an author doesn't like the terms of the KU program for any other reason, they are free to decline the subscription model and sell their ebooks through the regular "customer pays fixed price for ebook, I get money from sale" model. In fact, most authors don't opt into KU; there are a millions of Kindle books, and only tens of thousands of books in the KU program.
Because you pay a fixed subscription fee and the money gets divided between all the authors you've read, it's effectively zero sum: if Amazon wants to give more money to authors who wrote books that people dropped after the 1st chapter, that means less money for the authors who wrote books that people actually liked enough to read past the first chapter. Amazon has structured their program to reward authors for writing books that people consume more of, which seems like a good way of rewarding creators based on the value that they contribute to the platform. If you don't like it, don't opt in and instead sell your books the "normal" way.
The post you are responding to is about Kindle Unlimited, and not regular Kindle ebooks. Kindle Unlimited, as stated in the post, is Amazon's subscription service where people pay a $10 monthly fee for access to all ebooks in the Kindle Unlimited library. (Or, as I explained it, "Netflix for ebooks.")
The "authors get paid per page read" model is only for Kindle Unlimited, not for regular Kindle ebook sales. When you buy a Kindle book for $6.99 or whatever, Amazon sends the money directly along to the author (or their publisher) after taking their cut, just like you'd expect.
But if you pay $10 a month for a Kindle Unlimited subscription, and read a dozen books by different authors, Amazon has to figure out how to split that fixed monthly subscription fee between all the authors that you read; paying authors based on page reads seems like the best way for your KU money to go to the authors/books that you actually read.
Your intuitions are correct; romance novels and thriller novels tend to be the most successful genres on Kindle Unlimited. Different pricing/distribution models attract different kinds of customers. (On the other end of things, I have seen engineers pay $30+ for PDFs about technical subjects without hesitation; I don't often see people spending that kind of money for romance ebooks.)
For similar reasons, the quality and genre of made-for-TV movies currently airing on the Hallmark channel is probably different from what you could experience for the cost of a ticket at your local movie theater: one of these distribution channels caters to people who want to consume several hours of content every day at no marginal cost beyond the monthly subscription that is already part of their budget, while the other caters to people who are willing to pay $15 to spend 2 hours watching a film that a studio spent millions of dollars marketing to them.
My understanding is that Netflix just pays a fixed, pre-agreed amount up front (either paying a licensing fee for existing content, or funding the production of their own Netflix originals). If lots of people view a show, Netflix takes that data into account when deciding whether or not to renew the the licensing contract (in the case of existing shows) or order a new season (in the case of Netflix's original productions).
Because Netflix pays for their content up front, they have to take a bit of a gamble. (Maybe they spend a bunch of money for a new Coen Brothers film, but nobody watches it, so they take a loss on that project. Or, as was the case in 2008, maybe TV networks grossly under-estimate the value of their catalog of old shows, so Netflix gets to pay peanuts for the content that serves as the bread and butter.)
Since you seem to have missed the point of my "Netflix for ebooks" analogy (which you quoted): Kindle Unlimited is a subscription service where users can pay $10/month for unlimited access to a catalog of books that authors have chosen to list under the KU program. (This is how subscription services like Netflix work from a consumer standpoint. The difference from the creator side is that authors get paid based on how much people read their books, whereas Netflix funds productions up front, and then uses viewer data to make decisions about which shows to renew.)
The money that people spend on $10/month KU subscriptions is used to pay authors based on which authors people spent the most time reading (or, more accurately, which books you read the most pages of). If I read 400 pages of book A, and 5 pages of book B, then author A gets paid more than author B. I think the reasoning behind this should be pretty intuitive and obvious. Since every KU subscriber only spends $10/mo regardless of how much they read, there is a fixed "pie" to distribute to authors, and it makes sense to divide the pie based on which authors contributed the most to the readers' use of the KU platform.
Readers don't get a "refund" for dropping a KU book 5% of the way through, because even if you quit reading one book, the fact that you stopped reading a book does not change the fact that you still have access to tens of thousands of other ebooks in the KU library for the remainder of that month, which is the thing that you are ostensibly paying for. (I don't phone Netflix to request a partial refund if I start watching the first episode of Bojack Horseman and quit halfway through the first episode, I just start watching Stranger Things or Narcos instead.)
If authors don't like this arrangement, they are free to not participate in Kindle Unlimited, and sell their books under a more traditional model (where the author sets a price, and people can buy the book for that price irrespective of any participation in any sort of subscription program).
This is apparently how older Kindle models worked, which has made them an attack vector for fraud on Kindle Unlimited:
>KDP [Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon's self-publishing platform] pays authors for both paid downloads as well as for pages read and it doesn’t sense reading speed, just the highest number of pages reached. ...
>The way that the book-stuffing con works is that scammers stuff lots of extra content into an ebook before uploading it to Kindle Unlimited, and then trick readers into jumping to the end of the book.
>Thanks to a flaw in the Kindle platform, namely that the platform knows your location in a book but not how many pages you have actually read, the scammers can get paid for a user having “read” a book in Kindle Unlimited by getting the user to jump to the last page. ...
>Interestingly, the flip-to-end scam doesn’t quite work on newer Kindles but still works on older, non-updated Kindles which makes it still a lucrative scam.
One of the selling points for Kindle is that if you switch devices partway through (e.g. switch from reading on your tablet to reading on your phone, or switch from reading the ebook to listening to the audiobook in your car), it remembers what page you're on, so you can resume exactly where you left off.
Amazon actively touts this "Whispersync" feature in their marketing. (From the Kindle product page: "With Whispersync, switch from Kindle to the Kindle app without losing your place (requires Wi-Fi).") One would presume that Amazon achieves this by tracking whenever readers tap the screen to advance to the next page. (And having a timestamp for that tap matters for resolving merge conflicts.)
Also worth noting that in the case of Kindle Unlimited (Amazon's "Netflix for ebooks" program), authors get paid per page read. (If a person reads the first 5 pages of your book and drops it, the author gets paid less than if they read the whole thing.) One of the things that Amazon has to deal with is fraud prevention, to detect when authors are finding ways to game metrics: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/notorious-kindle-unlimited...
I'm not sure I relate to Paul Graham's experience of finding being a "noob" unpleasant -- if anything, I find it's the opposite, because any time you're a "noob," there's so much low-hanging fruit to pick.
New city? There's a bunch of cool/fun things to do that you haven't tried yet. New hobby? Hop onto Youtube and there's hundreds of hours of "explainer" videos made by passionate hobbyists looking to share their favorite parts of that hobby with you. New to a particular field? Other people have probably already done the work of curating the 1% most interesting, important, and fascinating things to learn about. It's easy to feel like you're making progress when you're starting from zero.
I recently bought a guitar and started playing Rocksmith -- think Guitar Hero, but with a real guitar hooked up to your computer, with learning tools designed to help you learn how to play songs of your choosing, along with lessons covering everything from how to play power chords to the very basics of how to hold your guitar when sitting vs standing. I'm a total noob when it comes to playing guitar, but I've enjoyed every part of my time with Rocksmith, from the very first moment I plugged in my guitar and let the software step me through the process of tuning it.
I've found it incredibly edifying largely because the experience of picking up an instrument and learning how to play it has reminded me of what it's like to learn a completely new skill from scratch -- I think spending a week with Rocksmith has not only taught me guitar basics, but also given me a refresher course on how to learn a new skill.
In fact, I wonder if this can lead to its own problem -- someone who gets too much pleasure from the experience of being a noob and may turn into a dilettante, moving from hobby to hobby without ever taking the time to spend years cultivating a deep expertise. Which, I suppose, is fine on a certain level, but there are definitely times when I've procrastinated and hidden from the intimidating prospect of achieving mastery in a field where I already have a lot of experience, and instead spent that time venturing into new fields where there's still low-hanging fruit for me to pick.
>>while this meeting can be gotten out of, it requires some sort of excuse, and an individual's consistent absence is considered a mild crisis for the group.
>any religious group that considers your occasional absence as a crisis is a group i'd stay away from.
Indeed, which is probably why the poster you're responding to specifically made the point about consistent absence (not occasional absence) and it being a mild crisis.
Most religious communities I've observed are also quite lax about what qualifies as an excuse. For example, any sort of travel (be it vacation, visiting family, going on a business trip, or traveling with the team for little Jimmy's soccer tournament), seems to be accepted as valid excuse. So are other institutional commitments, provided that they don't become regular/recurring reasons for missing religious attendance. "I overslept" or "I was tired after staying up late Saturday night" or "I decided that there were other activities I'd prefer to spend my Sunday doing" are not.
Furthermore, having your absence declared to be a "mild crisis" for the group is not necessarily a bad thing: certain excuses like being sick (or caring for a sick family member) are likely to draw the support of the group; if you're in a small religious community where people hold each other accountable for religious attendance, there's a decent chance that if members of your church know that you missed Sunday service due to being ill or pregnant or recovering from surgery (or caring for a family member who is any of the above), some of them will stop by later in the afternoon (or later in the week) to drop off a home-cooked meal or some other sort of care package.
(I understand that some people might prefer to deal with their health situation in private without having a community of people who take it upon themselves to offer support, and I've always been one to appreciate the benefits of solitude and privacy, but in contemporary society I feel like we may have veered too far in the direction of isolation and atomization.)
>if anything, for things like scouting and sports groups, or any kind of group where you learn something together it is more important that members attend regularly.
Many religious practices involve a service that involves teaching (for example, a "sermon" that is delivered to a congregation by a preacher), so for many people, religious attendance falls into the category of "group where you learn something together." Indeed, I've observed it's common for many churches to have weekly sermons that are part of a "series," offering a sort of week-to-week continuity as they provide a deep exploration of a single topic over the course of a month, so if you miss a single service you might perhaps be inclined to ask a friend what was covered in the sermon later in the week when you meet them at something like a Wednesday Bible study or a Tuesday morning prayer group.
Japanese 21st century light novel titles have a long way to go if they want to catch up with 18th century book titles, like 12 Years a Slave Narrative of Solomon Northup, citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington city in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana (now shortened to 12 Years a Slave), and The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates (commonly abbreviated to Robinson Crusoe)
While search engines didn't exist back then, books of that era had these kinds of titles for similar reasons: they were a way of turning the book's cover into a piece of marketing. Books with long titles could explain their appeal to shoppers without requiring them to pick up the book and open it.
Interestingly, one of the things that may have led to titles getting shorter in the 19th century may be the advent of serialized fiction: as printing technology became more widely available, many famous stories like The Count of Monte Cristo and the early works of Charles Dickens were published chapter-by-chapter in weekly publications (quite similar to how manga are published in weekly magazines like Shounen Jump), and if you had an extra-long title that took up half a page every week, it would add to the printing cost in a non-trivial way.
The only real issue RSS has is that ads have to be baked in. Sadly I don't know if we could have an open system with personalized ads.
They've already figured out how to do this. I download the Waypoint podcast (which is part of the Vice Media family) via old-school RSS feed, and the most recent episode I downloaded had a pre-roll ad which specifically called out the city that I live in.
There's not a lot of "discipline" that goes into paying off your credit card each month (in the sense of practice); my credit card auto-debits from my checking account at the end of the month to pay off the full balance for that billing period, so I passively pay for my purchases shortly after making them. The only way I lose money to interest is if I actively decide to log into my account and tell the system to stop paying my balance, which is something which would be bad on a variety of levels and doesn't appeal to me tremendously, so I guess it requires discipline for me to stay out of credit card debt in the same sense that it requires discipline for me to refrain from shoving a chunk of lard into my mouth.
At a minimum, you could benefit from having a credit card that you just use to pay for a monthly subscription (e.g. Netflix, Github, Patreon) and just not use it for any other expenses; stuff it in a drawer and forget about it, or physically destroy the plastic if you don't want the temptation. (Heck, you could probably even request that your credit card have a $15 limit if you want to ensure it never gets used for anything other than your Netflix subscription.)
>(btw I'm in the EU, so I don't get the obsession with CC in the USA)
I wouldn't say that Americans are "obsessed" with credit cards any more than they're "obsessed" with shampoo. Which is to say, yes, there are some people who care a great deal about hair care products and have five different bottles in their shower, but for a lot of people it's just a basic fixture of living that you're kind of expected to deal with and isn't really in people's minds. Yes, I use it every day, but I'm not a credit card enthusiast any more than I'm a shower enthusiast.
I'm a full-time freelancer/remote worker. In late 2016, I made the decision to move to Pittsburgh, partly persuaded Paul Graham's talk about how Pittsburgh could become a startup hub. (PG grew up in Monroeville, 10 miles east of Pittsburgh.)
I feel really good about the decision, CMU feels like a peer of Stanford and MIT but living here is substantially cheaper than living in Cambridge or Palo Alto. (I pay ~$750 for a 1-bedroom apartment that's ~1.5 mile from CMU campus.) The legacy of Randy Pausch's Building Virtual Worlds was also a draw for me personally, as I work in game development and was coming of age when Randy Pausch's delivered his famous Last Lecture (if you had asked me in 2008 who my personal heroes were, Randy Pausch would be the first name out of my mouth). Going to gamedev meetups has kind of allowed me to insert myself into the CMU alumni network post hoc. Very green (lots of beautiful neighborhoods), hip enough for my tastes, and the intellectual climate is everything I had hoped it would be.
If you want to live in a city where companies like Google, Uber, Amazon, and Apple have offices, Pittsburgh may be your cheapest option.
I recommend reading the submission you're commenting on, as this is actually answered in the article:
“Sometimes we’ll start on a trailer before they’ve even started filming,” Gritton says. “We just break down the script. Then we’ll get dailies—literally everything they’ve shot, hours and hours.” The dailies are covered in ghostly watermarks and stamped with the producer’s and house’s name for security’s sake, making them nearly unwatchable and of no real use to pirates. Theoretically.
Given the extraordinary and time-consuming process of CGI, sometimes green screens, motion capture dots on actor’s faces, maybe a cardboard cutout where a dragon will eventually go are still visible in these early cuts. “We’ll pick what we think are the best takes,” Gritton says. “The majority of the time it’s not what ends up in the film, which is why you see stuff in the trailer that you may not recognize later.”
As a recent example of this, there are several trailers for Baby Driver where we hear Doc describe Baby as "Young Mozart in a go-kart," [1] but this line is never heard spoken in the film (though we do see it written on one of Baby's cassette tapes).
Here are several examples of videos with 1 million views that people don't seem to realize are AI-generated:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxvTjrsNtxA
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfDnMpuSYic
These videos do have some editing which I believe was done by human editors, but the scripts are written by GPT, the assets are all AI-generated illustrations, and the voice is AI-generated. (The fact that the Sleepless Historian channel is 100% AI generated becomes even more obvious if you look at the channel's early uploads, where you have a stiff 3D avatar sitting in a chair and delivering a 1-hour lecture in a single take while maintaining the same rigid posture.)
If you look at Reddit comment sections on large default subs, many of the top-voted posts are obviously composed by GPT. People post LLM-generated stories to the /r/fantasywriters subreddit and get praised for their "beautiful metaphors.
The revealed preference of many people is that they love AI-generated content, they are content to watch it on YouTube, upvote it on Reddit, or "like" it on Facebook. These people are not part of "the Midjourney community," they just see AI-generated content out in the wild and enjoy it.