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Nah, that's not the "proper" way to think about it, that's just your opinion.

As it stands today, AI video generation tools like Sora suck up useful energy and produce things that are useless at best (throwaway short form videos), and harmful at worst (propaganda, deepfakes).

Rich people were always going to do what they wanted anyway, "democratizing" that doesn't make the situation better.

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>Rich people were always going to do what they wanted anyway, "democratizing" that doesn't make the situation better.

total disagree.

if you put vid gen in the hands of regular people then regular people get super-powered in that they begin to recognize the frame pacing, frame counts, and typical lengths and features of an AI video.

Do you know how many people have cited AI videos in this war? We'd all be better off if all of us were betting at spotting fakes rather than allowing the fakes to illicit hardcore emotional responses from every peon on the street.

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I think you're overestimating the average person. We can give people direct, scientifically-backed evidence of something, and there will still be significant groups of people fervently denying it.

The resources (money, energy, opportunity cost of engineering time) put into AI video generation are better spent elsewhere. Not pouring resources into it would hopefully stunt its progress, making AI generated propaganda lower quality and easier to spot.

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Even if that were true, the little quirks of private large scale video models would be different than the public cheap ones. If anything, it would just give the public a false sense of being able to detect AI videos and overlook the more subtle flaws of privately made ones.
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So only rich people can propagandize? How is that better?
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There are a lot of things it seems only rich people can do and get away with. It doesn't mean I support it or want them to do it, but that seems to be the reality.

If I may make an analogy, it would be like looking at rich corporations dumping toxic chemicals into our waterways, and saying "wow I wish I could dump toxic chemicals in the water too, not fair!"

The point is that if a rich person wants to do it, my only hope is that they have to spend a significant amount of their resources to do it, and that there would be immense negative social pressure against them when they do.

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OpenAI never gave the community the weights. They always intended to monopolize it for corporate extortion, they didn't "democratize" shit.
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There are open-source alternatives:

https://mochi1ai.com/

https://wan.video/

and others. There are free to use tools also.

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> democratized

I really don't think that using that term is appropriate when there's a multi-billion American macro corporation involved in the activity in question.

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HN loves to abuse the term to pretend it's somehow a good thing when one human being is in control of something.
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> with Sora some of that ability democratized

No it didn't; OpenAI had control.

Saying Sora democratised video generation is like saying that landlords democratised home ownership.

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Video production is already wildly democratized. AI did not lower the barrier to entry. Digital tools already did most of the legwork.
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