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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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The thing is, when the ElsaGate videos first came to light, my first thought was: "Clearly a proto-AI is optimizing children's videos for views and is varying all possible parameters to find maxima". I still think this is very possible. So I'm not sure

beautiful only insofar as they were created by humans

necessarily applies. And even if it's not an AI doing this, isn't this pretty clearly what the mystery third-world video producers are doing? Many of these videos show up in variant forms with small deviations, suggesting multivariate testing. I guess you could be optimistic and choose to see this as the human artistic spirit, but it seems a lot more like Molochian profit maximization to me.

Once GPT can make credible videos I expect to see far more ElsaGate styled content, and not just targeted at kids.

The first ElsaGate videos started appearing circa 2017, prior to even the very first version of GPT. I wasn't following AI closely in 2017 and I don't know exactly what models were publicly available then, but whatever was out there was a far cry from what we have now. I doubt AI helped with the production of the videos in any meaningful way. I doubt they're helping even now in April 2023, given the current state of text2video, but it would at least be plausible now to have GPT generate scripts for you.

I remember back when they started popping up and yeah, there was no gpt. Instead it was always described as 'algorithmic', with no further explanation.