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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2767 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 10, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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People here like to sneer at litrpg as slop - that's way out of date:

https://x.com/JerusalemDemsas/status/1976740387344814365

A new type of entertainment called 'vertical drama' has emerged: shows filmed in vertical format to suit smartphone users. Each episode lasts between two and five minutes, and after a few teaser episodes you have to pay to watch the rest. The dramas are usually taken from popular web novels. A title can be produced in less than a week, and the requirements for the actors are basic: they just have to look good on camera. Nuance and subtlety are the preserve of artistic films; verticals need as many flips and twists as possible. Production is often sloppy. If a line is deemed problematic by viewers, the voice is simply muffled, without any attempt to cut or reshoot. The stories are sensational. One that has got lots of viewers excited is the supposedly forthcoming Trump Falls in Love with Me, a White House Janitor. According to an industry report, vertical drama viewers now number 696 million, including almost 70 per cent of all internet users in China. Last year the vertical market worth 50.5 billion yuan (€5 billion), surpassing movie box office revenue for the first time. It is projected to reach 85.65 billion yuan by 2027.

See this is where AI is going to make insane profits, disrupting/expanding the immensely lucrative but radically unprestigious media formats you never knew existed. Just a few minutes, no need for fancy acting or cinematography, just stimulus in your face. I bet this will come to the West too and make Netflix look like a joke. Maybe it already has.

Sturgeon's law really does apply to every genre of media in existence. AI generated videos are probably 99.9% slop, because of ease of generation compared to the old way of filming and recording, and because the average user has negative taste. It'll only get better, those lambasting it because of a lack of consistency, weird physics, poor audio etc will be in for a bad time when it's all fixed. Who am I kidding? They'll probably retreat to every more nebulous concerns such as "effort" or "artistic intention".

AI-generated media is, I think, necessarily generic. Generating proper art is antithetical to how AIs function. People seek novelty, and LLMs learn through repetition, so novelty is precisely what they fail to learn. AIs are also downstream of human experience, and they cannot ever be otherwise, so attempting to solve this problem is like trying to turn hyper-processed foods back into healthy ingredients. An experience is more real than the memory of said experience, and for the same reason, AI generated content is necessarily lacking to anyone with taste (those who can taste the difference between home-made food and microwaved supermarket food)

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