Jonathan del Strother
Antony JohnstonImagine if every tech bro is converted into an animated dancing raccoon and made 10x less dumb. AI will do this. Huge opportunity here to disrupt Y Combinator.
Ernie Smith@antonyjohnston this guy just straight-faced described the general concept of a movie
Matilda@ernie @antonyjohnston I know, I was trying to figure out if he was trying to be funny.
Ben Rattigan š³ļøāš@antonyjohnston christ his tweet is a prime example of why you read it back to yourself before posting.
naught101@BenRattigan @antonyjohnston do you think it would have helped in this case?
Patrick Mayo@antonyjohnston This might literally be the dumbest thing I have ever read. Just remarkable.
phy@patro85 @antonyjohnston I hope you mean the original post about āanimated AI booksā and not the dancing raccoonsā¦
@phy @antonyjohnston oh of course! I would actually love to see the tech bros made into dancing raccoons!
apetresc@antonyjohnston Can someone explain to me why this is dumb? Like, I get that weāre all supposed to be dunking on this guy, but can someone explain why so I can join in too?
@apetresc Because he's basically invented movies.
@antonyjohnston What? Heās talking about having the AI generate animations based on the text of the book, automatically, and use them to create slightly-more-interactive books. This is something that is easily imaginable in a few years given the current state of the art.
You donāt see the difference between that and spending a few tens of millions of dollars to engage a few hundred people in creating a movie?
FediThing has moved!AI doesn't "generate" animations, it takes work other people have done and mashes it together automatically.
More important problem though: reading written words or hearing spoken words are totally different experiences to seeing one particular interpretation of those words. The original author seems to be ignorant of why people read (or listen to) books.
@FediThing @antonyjohnston Okay, your first point may or may not be true, depending on your definition of āgenerateāvs āmashing togetherā, but either way itās orthogonal to whether the result is feasible or disruptive.
Thereās a big difference between āhaha tech bro so dumb, his big idea is nonsensicalā and ātech broās idea is dangerous because it completely upends the existing structure with no regard for everyone it disruptsā
In fact, theyāre nearly opposite.
@FediThing @antonyjohnston And then your second point goes back to the most uncharitable possible interpretation of his idea.
It at least makes more sense than pretending to think he means movies, since at least he uses the word āAudibleā in there. But obviously itās understood that he doesnāt just mean a drop-in replacement for every audiobook use case.
Heās referring to generating ārichā, āimmersiveā, etc., ebook experiences. Like that iPad version of The Waste Land
Adam Davis@apetresc @antonyjohnston
He also wants to "disrupt" a media that is often listened to in the car and make it a distracting audio/visual mess.
He also wants to "disrupt" a media that is often listened to in the car and make it a distracting audio/visual mess.
Chris [list of emoji]Is it possible to injure your eyes by rolling them too hard? I need to know whether I should be heading to the emergency room right now.
Bioteach@antonyjohnston what happened to using our imaginations?
Oh, right. That would be too hard .
* forehead slap*
Oh, right. That would be too hard .
* forehead slap*
bigiain@Bioteach @antonyjohnston How the hell are we supposed to monetise that??? What possible exit strategy is there for āLetting people use their imaginationsā?
Domage@antonyjohnston @jsnell that is some kind of different level of cringe..
mhoye@antonyjohnston "What if every book was a saturday morning cartoon" is just the galaxy brain meme in reverse.
Armando@antonyjohnston Donāt see the big deal with this
Why not AI as another creative tool ?
Ideas get shared in different mediums: words, music, pictures, movies, games, etc
Generative AI can freely move between all of them
Peat Bog@antonyjohnston
I know "disrupt" is one of those MBA buzzwords with a cool gotta-have-vibe. But for some reason lately I just wanna punch its smug little Theranos face.
I know "disrupt" is one of those MBA buzzwords with a cool gotta-have-vibe. But for some reason lately I just wanna punch its smug little Theranos face.
sunglasses@antonyjohnston honestly not a terrible idea but he put it in a really obnoxious way, why does he want to compete with kindle and audible??? How is that supposed to replace an audiobook???? What is stopping kindle from implementing the same thing????? Hell, how is that to be a replacement for books???????
That said, just having an image generated from a text extract of a book that describes the ambience sounds neat. But that's about it.
Mike MC@antonyjohnston not sure if this is what john lennon had in mind but let me ask chatgpt to be sure
Cameron Talley@antonyjohnston every book is already an animated book. Itās just drawn inside my head.
Lazarou Monkey Terror ššš@antonyjohnston look at 'Mr Disruptor' there, strutting around like #GlassOnion never happened...
Alyssa Willson@antonyjohnston real life rocket raccoon
Sapphic Hazard@antonyjohnston He knows books tend to be copyrighted, right? They could start on the public domain to concept this already, though (and it won't upset kindle at all).
Leon Cowle@antonyjohnston Your post makes for an interesting engagement exercise, seeing as you posted this at the same time on Twitter and Mastodon.
8 hrs later:
229 boosts and 438 likes on your instance (mastodon.social)
137 boosts and 19 likes on my instance (hachyderm.io)
7 RTs and 26 likes on Twitter
Like many have commented (e.g. @gruber), there is something REALLY wrong with Twitter's engagement recently...
@leoncowle @gruber Youāre not wrong, but also worth noting that @jsnell boosted this post to his many Masto followers several hours ago, while on twitter he only just RTād it. I rarely get big reach in anything unless itās boosted by famous friends, tbh š
tmtrains@antonyjohnston Jason also included it in the screenshot for the Six Colors story on Ivory. He has good taste š
John Gruber
Glenn Fleishman@gruber @antonyjohnston @leoncowle @jsnell Jason *just* RTād it (at that time); but he boosted it hours earlier. (Time, not terminology.)
@glennf @gruber @leoncowle @jsnell Yeah, Glenn has the right of it. Although hours later it still hasnāt performed on twitter anything like it has here, which reinforces Leonās point
Jeremy Keens@antonyjohnston I thought you were MY famous friend
Scott@glennf heās my famous friend - but he doesnāt even follow me. Snif.
Gurtbeef Robe@antonyjohnston I just want all the books to be converted into movies. And not just any movies. They have to be as good as the book so I donāt have to listen to people say how the book was better. Can AI do that?
Wayne's Account@antonyjohnston What a horrible idea.
Casey Tourangeau@antonyjohnston wait long enough and the tech bros will loop back to bringing the written word āback to its rootsā, freed from the clutter from all the animation. Maybe then they can invent paper, too!
Huge opportunity.
Marc Jacobs@antonyjohnston It is weird to work in the literal silicon side of Silicon Valley.
For my whole career, I have worked at startups or recently public companies that had been founded on real innovation: high speed CMOS memories, MPEG decoders for DVD players, Gigabit Ethernet, Read Channel chips for hard disks.
Reading this guy, itās like Iām back in the dorms, doing bong hits and bsāing.
MikeNM@antonyjohnston Imagine if every VC pitch deck was transformed into a long series of liquidy farts, it was so uncannily similar no one could tell the difference.
Steve Torrente@antonyjohnston Have none of them heard of NetLibrary?
Coffee Pinewood@antonyjohnston A year ago the same type of guy would've produced the same sentence just using the word "blockchain" instead of "AI".
liroso@antonyjohnston
DeSantis is going to lose his sh!t!
DeSantis is going to lose his sh!t!
Starstorm (to migrate...)@antonyjohnston The whole "animated book" thing was done in the 90s. No AI needed! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Books
William Robison@antonyjohnston imagine if every book is animated. That would be the death of reading.