It’s probably a mistake to read too much into it but I can’t help but notice the McDonald’s ad is kind of a mirror held up to all the things that American culture has been progressing into: cynical, mean, isolated, artificial... whatever the opposite of “wholesome” is. Totally off-key for what Christmas is supposed to stand for. Christmas (at least the secular holiday) is supposed to be about kindness, putting differences aside, enjoying people and family, and the commercial was pretty much the opposite of that.
PSA: if you have family meltdowns playing Monopoly, try following the rules and allowing auctions of un-bought property. At least the game may eventually end then. Or just don't play games intended to be teachable "well isn't this shit" moments.
There is no agreed on meaning of secular Christmas. It might converge on one some day, but secular culture is literally dying so it has only about 100 years to come up with one.
> It’s probably a mistake to read too much into it
I disagree; art both reflects and influences culture. If we don't discuss and explore the subtext of things, we're impacted without understanding, and that's never a good position to be in.
> “However, we notice – based on the social comments and international media coverage – that for many guests this period is ‘the most wonderful time of the year’.”
How to make your corporate response sound even more AI than the actual AI...
> "And here’s the part people don’t see: the hours that went into this job far exceeded a traditional shoot. Ten people, five weeks, full-time.”
If it didn't even save time, then what was the point?
Looking at it I see familiar elements, which are used by an artist going by the name Gossip Goblin to draw apocalyptic visions of a humanity far in the future that, for the N-th time, almost wiped itself out via increasingly invasive body modifications.
I liked the McDonald's ad quite a bit because it encapsulated how I feel about this time of year - although I've never in my life eaten in a McDonald's and don't intend to start.
I thought the McDonalds one was good and what does it matter it was AI ; mcdonalds makes artificial food and everything about the place is artificial so why not artificial ads?
I'm pro-AI but I thought the Coca-Cola and McDonald's ads were shit. The Coke one was especially egregious because if the creators hadn't been lazy they could have made it look half-decent. Instead it's janky and inconsistent and ugly.
The worst part about the Coke ad is the fake "making of" video they released to show how much manual work went into their ads. The "pencil sketches" ostensibly made by humans in the making of were also AI-generated.
You probably do, but you don't count the calories, and instead of everything being in the salad, you have a few ingredients outside (bread, nuts, cheese, whatever).
Salads being a healthy, low-calorie thing is an idiocy; it's only possible if you don't use any dressing, and at this point you are only eating crunchy water.
Otherwise, the oil in the dressing is over 800 kcal per 100g. Most people will put the equivalent of 50-70g of bread just as dressing in their salad. It's mostly fat and not filing.
In other words, it's extremely dumb to think salads are healthy; only fat women believe that shit and this is exactly why they end up like this.
I'm not American; I'm French.
We invented the vinaigrette, and I have worked at quite premium restaurants.
You are just clueless, and it's not even worth explaining.
Salad is a stupid meal for rich people to feel superior. It's wasteful and plain stupid. And if you are actually a worker (or someone who needs to be physical), you are ingesting the wrong type of calories.
But that's the whole point. It's not sustainable for a worker; thus it is a class signifier.
I have premium French dressing in my fridge. It's 483 kcal/100g.
The recommended serving size is 2 tablespoons, but most people actually put in at least 3.
That's about 20-30 g of vinaigrette.
In other words, it's about 150 kcal just for the vinaigrette, or about 50g of bread.
You are an idiot, I'm not your buddy, go fuck yourself.
Very cute story. It's a shame my cynic brain is telling me "but wolves can't survive off of berries and nuts". Also, I guess fish are fair game in the forest hierarchy. Should have user an omnivore.
Wolves (and all dogs) could be vegetarians as they aren't obligate omnivores - and in certain conditions where pray is sparse they do eat berries to surviven. Cats on the other hand are obligate carnivores and can't produce taurine amino acids, so they have to eat meat to survive.
I don't think it's only from a cynic point of view - the question "if meat is murder, am I a bad person if I literally can't survive without it?" is a fair and interesting one.
Of course that's not the point of the ad and I don't blame them for not making it a philosophical discussion, but it's the same approach that Madagascar uses (spoiler for a 20yo movie) to resolve their main conflict and both feel like cheating - if the penguins can think, I always thought, then so should the fishes.
> I don't think it's only from a cynic point of view - the question "if meat is murder, am I a bad person if I literally can't survive without it?" is a fair and interesting one.
I think the argument is “meat is murder because you can survive without it”. Maybe that doesn’t work for the wolf, but I mean, it’s literally a story being made up for a child, and animals in those are allegories for humans.
I can choose to not eat meat and live healthily, but I’m not going to feed only vegetables to a pet cat, who needs something different. To each what they need, as ethically as possible. When you can minimise harm, do.
Extremely debatable and seems very dependent on your personal genetics/ethnicity.
Just because you don't drop dead doesn't mean it's ideal; people can live underground too…
You can survive without a lot of things. Some people survived eating dead bodies on a mountain in the Andes. When people reference life quality they generally don't talk in terms of "survival."
Cats doesn't need more beef kibbles than vegan kebbles! It's a common fallacy but cats do thrive with vegetables if selected and cooked right! Sure they're meat eater in the wild but if we accept modern (ultra processed) meat keebles as suitable for a cat, the vegan options definitely also check the healthy and nutricious points.
Now we can debate if it's "natural" but that would open the horizon to other aspects of cat's modern live.
What parts of my message you think is misinformation? Beside multiple anecdotal evidence, heres a paper on the subject:
> No differences in reported lifespan were detected between diet types. Fewer cats fed plant-based diets reported to have gastrointestinal and hepatic disorders. Cats fed plant-based diets were reported to have more ideal body condition scores than cats fed a meat-based diet.
> Cat owner perception of the health and wellness of cats does not appear to be adversely affected by being fed a plant-based diet. Contrary to expectations, owners perceived no body system or disorder to be at particular risk when feeding a plant-based diet to cats.
He is eating fish because Intermarché has a fishing business.
Yes, I watched it, and I'm not reading into things. This is just the popular ideology at the moment. For now, fish is ok, but for how long?
> Also, I guess fish are fair game in the forest hierarchy
Fish don't appear to have the ability to speak or engage in social relationship with other animals in the story, so it makes sense to eat them. Like vegan find it OK eating mushrooms even though they are closer to us than they are to plants.
So, although it's difficult to generalize because exactly where the line is drawn varies from one vegan to another, it's generally not enough that the animal wasn't directly harmed.
For example the honey bees make honey for a reason, just as apple trees make apples for a reason and maple trees make a sugary sap for a reason. "So that humans can eat it" isn't the reason in either case. The apples and maple syrup are categorised differently by vegans because the trees aren't animals. That's still an arbitrary line, but so are most things.
For themselves. To eat. So it’s easy to understand the argument that you’re harming them directly by stealing their honey, which is the result of their labour.
But surely there’s nuance there. I don’t doubt there are ethical growers who provide bees with an extra nice and controlled environment, plus care for them and help them fight pests, and thus feel like taking a share of the produced honey is a fair trade. The bees might agree.
> "So that humans can eat it" isn't the reason in either case.
But it is. In the case of many fruits, the goal is for an animal (humans included) to eat them, seeds and all, then poop them out (bonus fertiliser) somewhere else.
> That's still an arbitrary line, but so are most things.
No disagreement there, but I don’t see how any of that is relevant to my comment. I was correcting a misconception about mushrooms, not debating the nuances of vegan opinions. I don’t care for the label and don’t think it’s helpful to fight about what it means. It’s much more important to strive to be progressively better than to aim for perfection and fail.
Essentially all modern honey farming is what you're calling "ethical". It's too expensive to replace the colony each year now that we have an alternative, and a winter - even a relatively mild winter in most parts of the world - will kill the bees if you've stolen all their food.
Unlike the maple tree, we do know how to substitute the valuable honey for nutritionally similar but cheaper alternatives - you can buy suitable food commercially because this is a whole industry, nevertheless, vegans object to our intervention, the bees didn't make nutritionally equivalent bee food, they made honey. Even farmers who choose to calibrate and remove only some honey, judging what will be enough for their colony to survive, are considered not to meet vegan requirements for the same reason.
To the extent there's a shared definition it really is as simple as originally explained, animal: not OK, non-animal: fine.
One of my professors (who is now vegan) had an ethical rule prohibiting eating things which, like him, had backbones. Same idea, it's more similar to me, therefore don't eat it. All such lines in the sand are somewhat arbitrary.
Many might, but many don’t. This is a prime example of why fighting over the label is counterproductive. You’re putting a bunch of different people in the same sack and criticising them for something which the group is not consensual on.
Again, I have no desire to nitpick over what makes one a vegan or not. That’s a waste of everyone’s time and only generates unnecessary conflict. It is not only detrimental but unbearably boring.
> For themselves. To eat. So it’s easy to understand the argument that you’re harming them directly by stealing their honey, which is the result of their labour.
On the other hand the bee social structure (not sure what the right word to use here) is so brutal that taking their honey seems to be just keeping pace. :)
> it’s easy to understand the argument that you’re harming them directly by stealing their honey
Do you think no physical arm is done to an Apple tree for it to give fruits? You should read about fruit tree pruning then…
> But it is. In the case of many fruits, the goal is for an animal (humans included) to eat them, seeds and all, then poop them out (bonus fertiliser) somewhere else.
Which we don't. So we're doing exactly the same thing to tree as we are doing to cow: abusing a natural process that's designed to help their babies.
> I was correcting a misconception about mushrooms, not debating the nuances of vegan opinions.
There's no misconception about mushrooms.
> It’s much more important to strive to be progressively better than to aim for perfection and fail.
The problem is that there isn't an objective definition of “better”. As heterotrophs we can only survive by destroying other living thing. This is a curse we must live with.
Which living thing is fair game is fundamentally an arbitrary position driven by our subjective moral values. You have to draw a line, but there's no valid reason to say that the line must be drawn at the Animalia border rather than at the Tetrapod (which means fish are OK to eat). Most of the arguments that apply to the whole order of animals also apply to most multicellular beings anyway (including the existence of a pain-like mechanism).
You are free to have stronger emotional bonds with a fish or a bee than with a mushroom or a plant, but it's in no way more rational or objectively better than when most people refuse to eat dogs and horses but are fine with cows.
Well the reason apple trees make apples is actually that someone can eat them, and then ideally poop out the seeds so that a new tree can grow. But that is literally their purpose.
> Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungus. Complaining about eating those is akin to complaining about eating apples; you’re not harming the tree.
Why are eggs a problem for vegans then? They are quite literally the “fruit body” of birds. Milk and honey should be even less problematic, as it's not even made of parts of cow or bees.
Each have his own reason, but I refer you to the definition of veganism by the Vegan Society (whose founder "invented" the world vegan):
> [...] exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, [..]
While ecology and health are cited by some vegans, many (if not most) of them are interested in avoiding unnecessary cruelty. That's why there's a discussion where some people define themselves as vegan but do eat musles and other "nerveless" animals they don't considered sentient. On the other hand bees, cows and chicken are sentient and most of they don't have a lot of fun at the farm.
Intermarche have done some other great Christmas ads on a simialr theme of eating better. Their 2019 ad had a kid realizing that Santa was too rotund to fit down their chimney, so the kid spent the season visiting him at the store and handing him lettuce, homemade vegetable preserves etc. https://youtu.be/DeSG2-FuQhE?si=YvCMY4fR-7K5R8Ke
Is this newsworthy entirely because it was made without AI? It seems like a perfectly fine ad. I just don't understand why this is significant. If people just like this ad enough to vote for it, fine. But I feel like I'm missing something.
It seems like an excellent advert because it got everybody talking about McDonalds. Even this thread talks more about McDonalds than the “French supermarket’s” ad. The “French supermarket” isn’t even named in the title. The people who came up with the McDonalds ad were wildly successful in what they set out to do; they even have all the people who hate AI talking about their new ad, even when attempting to showcase somebody else’s ad.
> Even this thread talks more about McDonalds than the “French supermarket’s” ad. The “French supermarket” isn’t even named in the title.
The name of the supermarket is mentioned in the title when the audience is likely to know it, e.g. on French websites. I don’t blame any American who does not know Intermarché, as they are very unlikely to come across one. I am not going to link them because that’s a bit pointless and the URLs are terrible, but a quick googling of "publicité Intermarché" should give plenty of examples.
I think it's debatable whether the principle that "any press is good press" is actually true. Especially for a brand that is already a household name. People will talk about you, yes. But is it a good thing that they're gonna be talking, and reinforcing the association in the minds of your customers, that you're putting out lazy, soulless slop? Of course, that's de facto what McDonald's is, but it's not like they don't benefit from at the very least an illusion that this isn't the case.
We're at that point, where we are literally celebrating something made by humans, not machines. Wild timeline. It will get rarer and rarer as AI becomes quicker, easier, higher-quality and cheaper than it is today.
I disagree, people are just happy to see coca cola fail, which's fair enough.
The ad company that made this supermarket's piece capitalised on that, and now we have ... an ad on the front page, with people commenting on its storytelling.
Celebrating an advertisement video is absolutely bizarre.
I don't know about the AI thing or newsworthiness. The reason I upvoted the submission is this (not my comment, but someone else put it into words better than I could think of): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231908
> Very cute, and full of humorous touches. Worth sharing, for a change (when compared to the vast majority of ads).
It's not strictly within HN's scope of "what hackers find interesting" though. This'll have to be December's exception upvote
I lived through the end of the beginning of computer becoming a primary tool for art, both in building DeviantART and also I was in the second cohort of the first ever digital imaging and technology program in Canada. It was super interesting, during college was the release of the Canon 300D, things moved really quickly after, my graduating year the pro film makers associations introduced a ban on digital work within the associations "club activities" (that lasted about 16 months) - it was funny tho you would see people judging professional salons (contests) zooming in to 30000% looking for signs of digital editing - I was ~20 and it was all very amusing to me, like why did all these old people hate digital art do much? We persisted, bunch of us graduated and started a studio, one day Canon called us, I was one of the first people in the world to use a Canon 5D Mk2 months before it was released, my ads ended up on TV, we won three technical emmy awards, made lots of money, had a great time etc. All the people I know who rode the wave had fantastic careers and worked on interesting stuff, made money etc.(and btw, the last ones standing after all was said and done in the "fuck digital camp"? curmudgeons!)
fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists, I am a business/technology person who happens to be decent at story telling and naturally not awful at picture making - I would have gotten crushed by what the technologies enabled as the abstractions and programatic features opened up film making to people who didn't want to or couldn't naturally grasp the physics/controls. I'm grateful past me was able to think about this clearly because it lead me to meeting Ben and Moisey and joining them to go on and build DigitalOcean, one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
>fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists
I'm not sure if that bet really paid off. I feel like the number or both "skilled artist" and "skilled storyteller" didn't really move. It just feels higher because the barrier to entry and validation is "how well can I market myself on social media?" Not "can I get into/create my own studio?" or any other metric a craftsman would use. I don't necessarily callel this a bad thing, and I'd even argue that it only magnified existing issues instead of creating new new ones. but it has obvious down sides.
Deviant art played a part in that, so kudos. Or perhaps, you've doomed us all? Hard to say, I always had a strange relationship with DeviantArt.
I think people are setting themselves up for failure if they index their happiness or sense of self satisfaction to their ability to discern what AI-generated content is or not.
Soon, we’ll have no idea what’s AI-generated or not. I care about good, tight story telling.
Part of watching films and animations was that seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself. When all they did was enter a prompt that takes some of the magic away.
If all you care about is just the story then maybe you personally will be satisfied but a lot of people cared about the animations, cinematography, etc, and all of the work that went into that.
I think digital effects still rarely look as good as the peak of Hollywood practical effects (call it… idk, Alien in 1979 through Independence Day in ‘96 or so, roughly, and yes I know ID4 also had computer fx in addition to lots of miniatures and models)
Having to do things for-real also kept things grounded. Modern action movies are often cartoon-like with supposedly human characters stringing together super-human moves that’d leave a real person with dislocated shoulders, broken bones, and brain damage, because they’re actually just CG, no human involved.
[EDIT] OMG, or take Bullitt (1968) versus, say, the later Fast and the Furious sequels (everything past Tokyo Drift). The latter are basically Pixar's Cars with more-realistic textures. They're cartoons with live-action talking segments. Very little actual driving is depicted. Bullitt may have used the movie-magic of editing, but someone did have to actually drive a car, for every shot of a car driving. Or at least they had to set up a car with a dummy to convincingly crash. What you're seeing is heightened, but basically within the realm of reality.
Or take A Bridge Too Far. It's a bit of a mess! Make it CG and it'd be outright bad. But ho-lee-shit do they blow up a lot of stuff, like, you cannot even believe how much. And look at all those tanks and armored vehicles they got! And planes! And extras! Those are all 100% real! AND ALL THE KABOOMS! And it all looks better than CG, to boot. The spectacle of it (plus some solid performances) saves the movie. Make all the FX CG and it'd be crap.
Imagine a Jackie Chan movie with CG stunts. What is even the point. It'd be trash.
This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real) vs Furiosa (a lot of CGI.)
But only bad CGI is visible. I guarantee you have watched CGI footage and not noticed. At all.
The problem over the last decade or so hasn't been the technical limits of CGI, but studio unwillingness to spend enough on it to make it good.
And directors have also become less creative. You can find UK newsreels from the 50s on YouTube, and some of the direction and editing are superb - a beautiful mix of abstraction, framing, and narrative.
Most modern directors don't have that kind of visual literacy. The emphasis is more on spectacle and trying to bludgeon audiences into submission, not on tastefulness and visual craft.
This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real)
Fury Road is pure wall to wall CGI. People keep pointing to it as some example of doing things with live action when the entire movie is soaked with CG and compositing.
It's a lot of CGI, but done in realistic ways. A lot of the examples from the article (which is a very good article, thank you for linking it) were mostly about paint-outs, color grading, or background elements.
There's a good chunk of modern blockbusters that will CGI everything in a scene except the lead actor's face - and sometimes that too.
Predates computers, they used to paint out wires and whatnot by hand and it usually looked just as good.
> Compositing
Predates computers. They've been doing it since forever with miniature overlays, matte paintings, chromakey, double exposures, and cutting up film negatives with exacto blades.
> color grading
Literal cancer which ruins movies every goddamn time. The fact that they shoot movies with this kind of manipulation in mind changes how they use lighting and makes everything flat with no shadows, no depth, everything now gets shot like a soap opera. This also applies to heavy use of compositing too. To make it cheaper to abuse compositing, mostly so the producers can "design by committee" the movie after all the filming is done, they've destroyed how they light and shoot scenes. Everything is close up on actors, blurred backgrounds, flat lighting, fast cuts to hide the lazy work. Cancer.
I'm talking about Fury Road too BTW. It's crap. Watch the original Mad Max, not Road Warrior, then watch Fury Road. The first is a real movie with heart and soul, the world it depicts feels real. The latter feels like a video game, except it somehow comes out looking even less inspired and creative than the actual mad max video game that came out at the same time.
But yeah, they made some real weird cars for the movie. That's fine I guess. The first movie didn't need weird cars, it had this thing called characters. Characters who felt like real people, not freaks from a comic book.
Exactly - they've been doing paint outs and composite shots forever! It doesn't feel fundamentally different to do it "on a computer," to me. They aren't using it to show off, just to make the scene look how you'd expect it to.
They've also been doing color grading forever - digital just makes it way cheaper and easier. Before, you'd have to do photochemical tricks to the film, and you would use different film for different vibes.
I'd argue that the ease of digital manipulation has led some studios to do what you say - postpone creativity until after the movie is mostly shot, which leads to that design-by-committee feeling. That sense of 'don't worry, we'll fix the lighting it the editing room' is the same sloppiness as 'and then the big gorilla will use his magic attack and it will look really cool,' without any thought given to it's actually going to look like. But that's not really a failure of CGI itself - that's a failure of vision, right? If you procrastinate making artistic decisioms for long enough, there's not actually going to be any art in the movie once it's done.
I have watched the original Mad Max, and it was pretty alright. If I had watched it at the right age, I probably would have imprinted on it.
It used to be the case that movies had to be made carefully, with the intended look in mind when they were shooting it. Compositing, etc aren't new, as we both know, but the way they're used has changed; they're used far more than ever before, with important design decisions about the look of the movie deferred to the very last minute ans everything up to that point done in such a way to facilitate making late last minute changes. This is absolute poison for cinematography as an art. Very few big budget movies made in recent years has any artistic merit for this reason. Producers now feel like they have the technology to make all the decisions that, by technical and logistic necessity, the directors/cinematographers would have to make themselves years ago. And the producers are just assholes with money, they cannot make art.
With respect to Mad Max, I think it aged like a fine wine. I didn't first see it when I was young, I saw Road Warrior first. But Road Warrior and everything after it is very camp. Mad Max is more grounded and feels like a commentary on our times, not pure fantasy spectacle. I think the best time to watch Mad Max was the 70s, and the second best time is probably today. In the 90s or 00s it wouldn't have hit right.
I'd argue that the ease of digital manipulation has led some studios to do what you say - postpone creativity until after the movie is mostly shot,
None of this is true. You can't shoot plates and do whatever you want later. Even basic effects shots take intricate planning. They were talking about cleaning up mistakes and small details.
which leads to that design-by-committee feeling
I'm not sure what this means in the context of a movie but it isn't how movies are made.
There are art directors, production designers and vfx supervisors and they answer to the director. Movies are the opposite of design by committee. It isn't a bunch of people compromising, it is the director making decisions and approving every step.
that sense of 'don't worry, we'll fix the lighting it the editing room'
This doesn't happen because it isn't how anything works. You can fix lighting in editing.
the same sloppiness as 'and then the big gorilla will use his magic attack and it will look really cool,' without any thought given to it's actually going to look like.
Enormous thought and planning is given to every stage. This idea of not liking lots of effects in fantasy or comic book movies and then attributing that to sloppiness or apathy simply does not happen in big budget movies. There are multiple stages of gathering reference, art direction and early tests, many times before any photography is shot.
If you procrastinate making artistic decisioms for long enough, there's not actually going to be any art in the movie once it's done.
Not only does this not happen, it doesn't make sense. Just because you don't like something that doesn't mean huge amounts of work and planning didn't go into it.
The person I replied to said it was "mostly real". Lots of CG is done in realistic ways but people pick and choose what they decide is good based on the movies they already like. Fury Road has somehow become an example of "doing things for real" when the whole movie is non stop CG shots.
A lot of the examples from the article (which is a very good article, thank you for linking it) were mostly about paint-outs, color grading, or background elements.
No they weren't, there are CG landscapes, CG mountains, CG canyons, CG crowds, CG storms, CG cars, CG arm replacements and many entirely CG shots. It's the whole movie.
Are you suggesting it's not noticeable in those movies? I found it distracting several times in I think every one of those (maybe the least in 1917? And I haven't seen Ford vs. Ferrari, but I have all the rest). A few entire scenes or sequences in TG:M look awful, and it's usually the mundane ones that wouldn't even have been effects in a pre-CG movie, not the aircraft action stuff. Alien: Romulus looks fake practically the whole movie (that one didn't ruin it for me or anything, but it had an effect like the Riddick movies, of being obviously mostly a cartoon, though of course not as awful about it as those were).
Well, I guess it wasn't exactly distracting in Barbie because that's practically a marionette movie a la Thunderbirds, so it's not really trying not to look off.
> Are you suggesting it's not noticeable in those movies
You can check the youtube link I posted. You'd be hard pressed to notice the good CGI in those movies.
> I found it distracting several times in I think every one of those
Honestly, I really doubt you noticed that much CGI. Well, unless you go in already primed to discount everything as CGI (whether or not it's actually CGI).
Current-era CGI is insanely good. The problem is that it's used and abused everywhere, often with very little consideration for whether it's needed, or if there's time to do all the VFX shots etc.
I think eliminating the need to think and work around reality is part of the trouble. Not that it ruins everything (people take HN posts as so maximalist even when they factually are not; see: the rest of this comment tree) but I think the lack of the odd limitation or need to think about how to solve a problem without resorting to “render it in a computer” causes significant harm to cinema overall. I’m not (see above parenthetical) claiming it’s net-negative, but there’s a kind of film-making skill and genius that was once on display pretty widely, and now is not.
I mean for fuck’s sake, they’d probably CG the paint buckets in Home Alone if they made it today. And we’d get some tasteless can-cam shot, because you don’t have to figure it out, you can just do it. And they’d look fake because they’d move too perfectly, lacking the kinds of little off-seeming movements that a real paint can in a real take might do. Never might the can obscure a few frames of face when the directors might choose otherwise, and the result will be obviously CG through its convenience if not due to outright flaws.
Excessive perfection and too many things moving the optimal way for the shot or exactly the way the viewer expects are under-appreciated tells of CG, and they’re deadly ones, present even in a lot of “perfect” CG (give it a few years, we thought the CG in Lord of the Rings was convincing and now it looks like trash). They need to start CGing their fake environments sometimes doing something slightly less than ideal to an actor’s jacket, or something, and not to call attention to it as a comedy relief moment, but because “that’s just what happened” (not really, but it’d make the effects more convincing)
> CG through its convenience if not due to outright flaws.
It's also over-reliance on this convenience. Bad shot? We'll fix it in post. Objects missing, or in wrong places, or too many of them? We'll fix it in post. Bad sound, camera position, actor unavailable? Believe it or not, post.
And many don't even think whether you should prepare the shot for post-production, or even give vfx teams more time to complete the work
This is just rose tinted nostalgia. You are remembering the things you loved which are much simpler and forgetting all the lemon shots and limitations of the day.
The movies and TV that can be made now without the limitations of the past are significantly different, from period movies to super hero movies and everything in between. Watch the 1970s superman or logan's run and see how they hold up.
The vast majority of CG is replicating stuff like set design or replacing a location shoot. We don’t usually call that an “effect” when it’s not done with a computer. And even then… it continues to deliver “bad matte painting” often enough that spotting such failures in the wild isn’t hard (nor was it hard with bad matte paintings!)
[edit] my point, anyway, isn’t that any given effect is better. It’s not even necessarily that the movies are better (The Passion of Joan of Arc barely had effects at all, and didn’t have synced sound, for god’s sake, an it’s incredible—of course CG-having movies can be great) but that I tend to find the overall effect of those movies better. Those “seamless” mundane CG effects shots of things like composited computer-generated rooms or streets rarely get the kind of attention a real set does, and the movies suffer for it. Nobody had to move around the space with their real body and think about it, and it usually (usually! Not every single time) shows, if not in anything wrong, exactly, then in the degree to which it’s perfectly forgettable and fails to contribute anything but filling screen space.
[edit edit] more to the point, peak practical wins at convincing effects in the Big Damn Action Moment. But only peak, and that was a tragically brief span. Point me to a CG sci-fantasy space fight that looks better and/or more like a real thing that’s happening than the battle above Endor in return of the Jedi (you’ll notice I didn’t pick the earlier two movies, as Jedi is where they really perfected it all—though even the first has some shots that are quite convincing!). Like truly if you know of one I’d love to see it. I never have. They all look plainly computer generated. I’m not saying every frame of those SFX shots in Jedi is perfect, but it looks overall more real than anything similar I’ve seen done in a computer. Like you’d think in about 40 years it’d have been surpassed multiple times, but no. They all look CG.
Or, like… put the best 50% of practical shots in Jurassic Park against the best 50% of CG-heavy dino action shots in any Jurassic Park from 3 on. They’re more convincing than any of the CG shots. (Some, from the field of all practical effects shots in the film, are not convincing! But a hell of a lot are, and not just better than the median CG effect in later JPs or something, but better than all). We struggle to touch the tippy-top peak of that craft with computer effects, still today.
The vast majority of CG is replicating stuff like set design or replacing a location shoot.
Says who?
We don’t usually call that an “effect”
Who is "we" ?
This is basically going from "CG is bad" to "not all CG" to "that's not an 'effect'". These arguments never hold up because any explanation ends up full of holes and inconsistencies.
Usually it just ends up being a variation of "I liked the movies I saw when I was a kid". Most of what you're saying here is just that you liked an old movie.
People have been making the argument of 'models look more real' since the 90s, but when it comes down to it, they don't know what is CG and what isn't and can't tell the difference. It's a combination of nostalgia and thinking they know better when they aren't actually being tested.
Then there is the fact that shots in modern movies can't be made without CG. You can't do the same things with models and have the camera freedom, long shots, wide shots etc, and that's just hard surfaces.
Saying "I love this black and white movie, therefore CG is over used" is an opinion that most people would never hold and a connection that doesn't make a lot of sense, but the a cold hard fact is that the same movies can't be made. Eventually seeing a half second jump scare of an alien is going to get old even if the man in the suit looks good.
> > The vast majority of CG is replicating stuff like set design or replacing a location shoot.
> Says who?
The people who are like "actually there's a ton of CG you don't notice!". They mean simple compositing, CG backdrops, painting in props, and stuff like that. (as if I'm not already aware of that stuff, LOL) That's where most of the CG is in movies for the last decade or so—they're right about that. It's replacing prop construction, set design & construction, and location shooting.
> This is basically going from "CG is bad" to "not all CG" to "that's not an 'effect'". These arguments never hold up because any explanation ends up full of holes and inconsistencies.
No, I'm just not impressed when CG successfully (I disagree it's successful as often as proponents say, and to them I say "give it ten years and a lot of this 'good' stuff will look awful to you", as it's the same ride we've been on with CG the entire time so far, the "look, CG's finally entirely convincing!" movie seems about as convincing as Jason and the Argonauts' stop motion a few years later) does something mundane that wouldn't even have been an effect before.
I mean, if we're counting that, and trying to compare the two, then just about every single time a location shoot was used where CG might have been today, classic "effects" win. That part's silly to compare.
> People have been making the argument of 'models look more real' since the 90s, but when it comes down to it, they don't know what is CG and what isn't and can't tell the difference. It's a combination of nostalgia and thinking they know better when they aren't actually being tested.
The best of the best just really do hold up better. It's a shame we didn't get more time with that style before CG took over, it was a pretty brief window between "you can always tell the model is a model" and "now it's all computers".
(This should irk you too: CG blood spatter harms every single action movie where it replaces squibs, the movie may survive the harm but that part is terrible every time)
The people who are like "actually there's a ton of CG you don't notice!". They mean simple compositing, CG backdrops, painting in props,
No, it's everything. Modern big budget movies could have 800-1200 vfx shots. You aren't able to guess at what is photography in every shot in a few seconds 800 times during a movie. You can make that claim, but even people who have been doing vfx for decades can't do it. People say these things because they want to believe it and they know they won't be tested to prove it.
I mean, if we're counting that, and trying to compare the two, then just about every single time a location shoot was used where CG might have been today, classic "effects" win. That part's silly to compare.
The best of the best just really do hold up better. It's a shame we didn't get more time with that style before CG took over
You say this but again, you don't know how every shot was done and every shot is different. This mostly comes from people wanting to think they are never 'fooled' and 'old ways are better'. This has been going on and repeated since the 90s.
The truth is that you aren't in a position to judge what is 'best' because you don't know how every shot was done in the first place.
I think this might be your nostalgia. The thing looks different in different scenes, and there's a scene that feels like it's a guy inside from the way it moves. So I disagree that Alien is peak special effects. (still peak over things. Peak ambience for sure)
I didn't pick perfect examples, I picked useful ones for bounding the rough time period. Both examples are transitional.
Alien nails it like 80% of the time (I've watched it twice in the last year, in 4k on a wall-size screen, so it's fresh for me). It's an early, major example of getting it damn near perfect pretty often. Not every shot's great—like, about two-thirds of the shots of the exterior of the landing craft look like a miniature, not as glaring as a Showa-era Godzilla or anything, but you can tell—but it's still a better average than modern computer-heavy movies. It's one of the earliest that's exhibiting the potential of peak pre-CG special effects, if not nailing it all the time. But, very few movies nail it all the time, including modern ones doing the computer graphics thing.
There’s an argument to be made that by watching higher image quality versions, you’re losing on the experience. I.e. the blurriness helped the effect. Their nostalgia and your (presumably) more recent viewing are then two different watching experiences.
That's very romantic. The golden age of both cinema and animation was an assembly line, often an exploitative one. Most frames were the by product of industrial labor, done by people with little autonomy, low wages, no creative input... the human element was already highly concentrated among a very small elite, and, the majority of the labor pool was treated as mechanical/replaceable input. "seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself." Sure, but, it's not reeeaaally “a human did it.” It is more “a small number of visible artists did it.”
But nevertheless, a human did still do it. How gruelling and exploitative the process was, or how many humans it took, is beside the point. The fact that the image existed meant that there was an attainable skill that a person could learn in order to do that same thing, and that was inspiring.
Since the days of cave paintings, that experience has been available to all humans. In the year 2025, it died, and I will never experience it again.
I get it, but it also doesn't matter. I liked anime when it was drawn by hand because I liked looking at all the things people could draw. But it doesn't matter what I like; virtually all anime is now rendered from 3d computer models, particularly any sort of machinery or whenever the camera rotates or transforms in space showing off the 3d structure of things. That stuff used to be drawn by hand but now nobody does that. It's not coming back.
Good film making is good film making. I am a creative. I incorporate AI into videos that I make subtly and with a huge amount of care. I know I put more time and care into my craft than most others.
Nobody knows what involved AI and what didn’t. At the end of the day, if you care about your work, it shows.
I can almost see your point, but there are two big problems:
1) To date, there has been no example of AI that is good. It's not even close.
And 2) Why should I be interested in a story nobody was interested in telling? If you don't want to make a video, or tell a story, or write a song, then...just don't. Why even have an AI do it?
It's wild that you would make this claim without taking a few seconds to drop a link. It's such a substantial, controversial claim, it really needs some kind of evidence.
What does a visualization being to the table over a book, if it's executed in the most generic way possible? The decisions made when adapting one medium to another are what does or doesn't make it worthwhile.
Unless your goal is purely to capture people who don't and won't read, as cheaply and cynically as possible.
there is a big difference between sending the story to the AI and saying "visualize this" vs carefully describing exactly how the visualization should look like and effectively only using the AI to render your vision.
well the question is rather, what is the difference of AI use vs say a 3D modelling application?
assuming you have the 3D assets already designed. you then take a model, and instruct the application that this model is to move from point A to point B, using a pathfinding algorithm while avoiding obstacles. once done, render the result in a video.
now do the same with AI. is the human contribution really that much different?
I think the objections with AI will change based on the quality of the AI generated work. What people don't want is to wade through a million gallons of poorly generated slop to see one good movie. They also don't want to have to deal with thousands of zero effort AI videos just to find one good video generated by a human being.
If the actual result of AI is an unlimited supply of adequate media personalized to our tastes, I don't foresee there being any objection. Right now, it's honestly just shovelware on a scale that hasn't been seen before. No one likes shovelware except maybe toddlers.
If we ever get to that point...im still ambivalent. I also get exposed to media to form community. And Ai very explicly wants to tear down communities and create a factory of slop. Even if we can get some good Ai storytelling, I'm not sure if a tree fighting the flood is enough. It's going to topple eventually as the roots get washed out
>In the case of this ad.. it’s okay?
I thought it was cute. I can nitpick, but it gave a feeling of family and community, and how you can't form that by devouring your peers.
The McDonald's ad meanwhile : "the world's going to shit, use McDonald's as your apocalypse bunker! (no loitering tho)". Heck, it feels like the kind of ad Fallout or Outer Worlds would make on an in-game TV.
You are framing it as "this technological advancement is being thought of as bad because we always think of new technological advancements as bad". AI is bad because of all the ways in which it is objectively bad.
You cold find plenty of people complaining about CGI up to earlier this year.
Computers are bad, unless used by exactly the necessary measure to add to the story. Then they are great. But most movies don't do that, and you can see the actors not reacting to the scenes they are in because they have no idea what's actually happening.
The same will probably happen to AI, with also most people overdoing it and making bad stuff. Forever.
It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out.
I may be wrong, but I get the sense that computer art was welcomed by people actually working in the field (did professionals criticize the computer graphics in Star Wars or Wrath of Khan?) and it was mostly the lay public that saw it as somehow not real. The opposite seems to be true for AI "art."
> It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out.
People at the time also said using a computer was fundamentally different from putting in a ton of work into building physical models.
A lot of tech adoption is motivated by economics, so the argument that "before it was more work, now it's less work" will almost always apply regardless of the specifics. I don't think it's a useful thing to focus on. It's almost a moral argument: I deserve it because I suffered for it, but he did it easy so he doesn't deserve it.
In fact, I would even go further. I would say it's part of the definition of technology. What is technology? Technology is a thing or an idea, created or discovered, that makes work easier and/or cheaper.
I agree that it's not useful if we're looking at practical stuff. It doesn't matter to me if my table was built with ten hours of human work, or ten seconds.
But for creative work? I think it matters a lot. You used the phrase "creating art." I don't think it counts as "creating" if there's no work going into it. Typing some words into a prompt box and getting a video out is not "creating," any more than doing an image search and printing out an image of a painting is creating a painting.
Printers are extremely useful devices, but they don't create art.
but there are subtle signs that the old ways made art different
people do more practical effects, they also miss the era of physical set filming[0], i personally am bored seeing the latest gpu able to create gazillions of whatever because i got the memo, gpu can do everything.. i get more magic seeing what people did with very few
don't get fooled by the "people reject evolution every time"
[0] technology can distort the focus onto the tool out of the art, films before had to arbitrate between various tricks to get a scene to work, now apparently people don't. they film bits and postprocess everything later, the tech allows infinite changes, but the cake has no taste
The core difference is in the amount of intentional decisions being made by the artist. A prompt, no matter how specific, still delegates a lot of work to what is essentially chance. Something like Blender does make it easier to do certain things, but you still have to actively choose to do them. This is why AI-slop, no matter how detailed, will always feel off. It lacks the deliberateness of a human artist who knows exactly what they're doing and why at every level.
Did the Wrath of Khan have any CGI? The only scenes I remember are the jarringly bad computer displays at various points on the Enterprise. If I recall correctly, the rest of the movie used traditional VFX: models, compositing, etc. I personally find the battle scenes in that movie-- particularly the nebula scene-- to be beautiful and one of the space battle scenes ever. Despite what others think, I also think that the first Star Trek movie is both a technical and narrative masterpiece, so YMMV.
Thanks, somehow I forgot about that scene. Pretty great by 1982 standards… a little lame by modern standards, although I could imagine that this is exactly the kind of snazzy but low-res simulation a scientist of the future might generate.
AI is threatening to remove humans from the whole equation except the very top. AI is an existential threat (not in the Terminator sense).
Especially for art, I'm an AI researcher myself (in bio for health), but I think that ppl are completely understandable for wanting to help artists make a living and want to consume something that someone cared about
Lisberger recounts. "We did all those effects in about seven months, which included inventing the techniques." "Tron," however, wasn't nominated for a special-effects Oscar. "The Academy thought we cheated by using computers," he scoffs.
Writer and director Steven Lisberger made that claim in interviews, so I wouldn't quite call it an urban myth.
As far as I know, any film can be submitted for Academy Award consideration in any category, then an executive committee determines the eligibility of each submission and chooses up to 20 films to move onto the nomination process.
I don't think this committee publishes anything about its decision-making process, so presumably Lisberger is just guessing based on his impression of industry sentiment at the time.
366k views in 4 days hardly qualifies as a worldwide hit. It's decent, but other ads saw more views faster this year, like that American Eagle ad with Sweeney.
It's hard to measure on Youtube due to the weight of paid views but still.
It's a cute ad all but as a French kid I used to see similar things often, we have a good culture of animation. Is "they didn't use AI" really a criteria now?
Advertising that you didn't use AI is definitely a thing now. But this is more likely a jab at the recent McDonalds ad, which did use AI, and which the agency who made the ad vigorously defended the use of AI (hilariously, by bragging about how many hours it took to make that ad).
> vigorously defended the use of AI (hilariously, by bragging about how many hours it took to make that ad).
Likewise with the Coca Cola ad, the agency said in their defense that they had to sift through 70,000 video generations to assemble the few dozen shots in the final ad. And after all that sifting they still couldn't get the one element of continuity (the Coke truck) to look consistent from shot to shot, and had to manually composite over all of the Coke logos since the model kept mangling them.
I feel like there are subcultures that value "long hours and hard work" over "result".
If you can produce great things easily, then it is lazy. But if worked hours and hours including through Christmans, then it is great even if result is crap.
The only mention of AI is the editorialized title in the HN submission, I don't see any mention at all in the ad or the video description. This ad does not appear to be a reaction to anything.
That’s hilarious. I had cursory familiarity with the McDonald’s situation but did not know thread agency aspect. I’d be very curious how many “hours” were spent minus the inference time.
I don't watch TV and use ad-blockers on my devices so I don't have a clue of what ads look like nowadays.
And given how people are praising this one (that looks exactly like the ones I was used to growing up) I can only guess that the situation must be awful.
> that looks exactly like the ones I was used to growing up
Unless you’re so young you just finished growing up, I find that unlikely. Sure, this ad isn’t visually revolutionary by today’s standards (nor does it need to be; it’s an ad, it’s not being played in theatres before the next Disney movie), but it’s still competent and has a ton of detail which surpasses earlier Pixar pictures.
Becoming vegetarian caused my French-Canadian grandmother some dismay. She asked me what I wanted for dinner. I said "no meat" and she replied "ok, we'll eat chicken." I was like, "oh, uh, no animals" and she said "fine, we'll have fish." I finally had to say "ONLY VEGETABLES." Her response was "don't you feel weak all the time?"
Once I brought my favorite tofu to my grandmother so she can try it. She reacted with "I'm against tofu". She's agains basically anything culturally imported after here birth, no problems with potatoes, tomatoes and corn indeed.
Most people who do not have the ideological inclination are against tofu. Not because it is imported or anything, but because it doesn't taste good and has a terrible texture.
Even the people who originally ate it in Asia are switching up to more meat as they become richer.
I have vegan/vegetarian friends, one of whom is a chef and worked at a pretty good vegan restaurant, and not once have I eaten tofu that I would like to eat again.
It's just bad, but it's one of the cheapest and most convenient ways to get your proteins on a vegan diet, so that's that.
I have had silken tofu that was pretty decent. But I would only eat it if there was no other option.
The vegan restaurant I talked about had an excellent bean/chickpea-based burger that was actually wonderful. That I would like to eat, no question about it. But it was insanely expensive because it took so much effort and so many ingredients/processes (they showed me the recipe; it's crazy how long that took).
In the end, my pleasure from eating that isn't superior to a regular, much cheaper burger. Which is why it always ends up in a precarious moral argument.
As far as I'm concerned, veganism is an ideology for the affluent that allows them to express their perceived superiority, moral or otherwise.
This is weird, most vegan I know spend less than with meat : beans, peas and lentils are bargain and tofu as well. Even local-organic quinoa is the about the same price as the cheapest chicken once watered. Of course there’s fancy expensive restaurants with a different price/taste ratio but that’s not specific to plant based food.
Yes, if you cook everything yourself, it can definitely be less expensive. But not really if you use tofu or any other ready-made meat protein replacement.
In my region, tofu is actually pricier than many animal meats.
For example, it costs more than chicken thighs and around the price of cheap canned tuna (those are often less expensive when bought in bulk and with deals as well).
And if you compute for cost per protein, it is absolutely much pricier. For example, at my local drive, tofu is about 24g of protein per euro, and chicken thighs are 40g of protein per euro. More premium parts of meat are pricier, but then they are not really comparable in terms of protein/nutrition (you need to add tons of stuff to the tofu to be an equivalent).
I'm sure one can find some better deals on tofu and meat replacements somewhere, but the point is that they are not generally available and not very cost competitive. My vegan friend, who was very stingy, had the strategy of only buying the vegan meat replacement stuff when it was on clearance because it was at the expiry date (for some vegans, there is definitely a cheapskate aspect).
But this is not surprising when you learn about how those things are made and how many resources they require. They actually require a lot of processing, a lot of water, and a lot of energy to get made. Add to that the laws of supply and demand, and the economics are pretty bad.
When it comes to restaurants, all the vegetarian/vegan ones are of the fancy/expensive kind; there is just no other way to make the economics work considering the high amount of manual labor involved. This is why you can get a decent “classic” burger for 10-15€, while a vegan one will run you at least 20 €.
However, as you said, it can be cheaper if you cook everything yourself and only buy stuff like beans, chickpeas, lentils, quinoa, etc.
But you pay in another way: with your time, manual labor, and energy for cooking/processing. All those things take forever to cook (and often need to be pre-soaked), require combining to get a full protein panel, and also necessitate the addition of expensive fats to be any good (nuts, olive oil, and the like).
And after all that, you'll get something that still doesn't taste as good as any random meat that you prepared in 5 min in a pan, simply accompanied with pasta/bread/rice, whatever carbs you like.
If you wonder how I know all of that, it's because I did the work. I actually make a mean hummus for my vegetarian friends that I managed to sell at a very typical meat-eating restaurant (it was popular as a starter on grilled bread with pickles). And I have many other vegetarian-friendly recipes. But most people have to deal with pretty bad flatulence/bloating and all kinds of digestive problems like that. I could never make it work for myself, even after following the diet for months at a time.
And if you actually compute the cost and value your time above zero, it makes absolutely no sense, before even talking about any of the pleasure aspect of food.
The reality is, as we moved up the value chain, we delegated the complex and time-consuming aspects of protein production to animals. We have built a very efficient system around it, and it saves time as well as provides pleasure to humans. If the vegan alternative were competitive, they would have come up with something as convenient and economical by now. But it is not the case, and the same thing can be applied to lab-grown meat. I will add that animals do not provide only meat; we use basically every part of them for different things, so the typical vegan argument of animal farming being wasteful is completely bonkers (if the economics were not enough in the first place).
Which is why they systematically focus on morals and have a very annoying proselytizing behavior. But you can't really shame most people into a behavior; they first and foremost protect their interests. Naturally, most people are not convinced, and even if they can't make the argument for a lack of knowledge/skill, they “know”.
I associate veganism with highly religious behavior, and it is clear to me that there is a lot of self-loathing in those I know. It is similar to the self-flagellation of Catholics in a way. I consider it to be a dangerous ideology because it only leads to lower living standards: time-poor and pleasureless. I think that those people want everyone to suffer as badly as them and thus put the “well-being” of animals above those of their fellow humans. That's pretty dumb to begin with, because I can readily observe in my countryside that you can produce meat in a respectful manner.
The alternative to industrial factory farming is not going for the other extreme of veganism.
Please excuse the rant, but I have suffered the moralization and scolding of one too many vegans, and this is actually what sent me on the research path.
The funny thing is that I would be vegan if it made any sense, but alas, it is not the case, and having fled the church, I would rather not have another form of zealotry become popular. The hilarious part is that technically meat-eaters could be considered nasty to animals, but the vegans are often nastier to their fellow humans, short of killing them outright. Anyone who knows the behavior of your typical church lady can probably relate to some extent.
"Everyone" can reasonably be understood to only apply to "people/animals like those present here"
If we're pedantic on the phrasing, the wolf could have already satisfied the demand by keeping a meat-based diet that simply excluded hedgehogs. Then he wouldn't eat everyone, just those who aren't a hedgehog. But the spirit of the complaint was clearly "everyone here is running away because they are personally afraid of being eaten". Which only included mammals and maybe some birds
Theres a fascinating recent (free) movie that develop the theory of Jesus avoiding eating other animals. Theology is a very special discipline that embrace all at once history, human psychology and strong lobbies. Not easy to propose alternative lectures of the bible but I think this one have a great point.
Everywhere there are talking animals fish are never considered to be sentient :) Think of all the cartoons and movies (except those specifically about fish).
Everyone keeps making religious connections, but it’s worth pointing out linguistically most countries in Europe (and the world) refer to red meat, poultry, and seafood as entirely separate. Meat often just refers to red meat. English is in the minority to bucket them all under “meat”
Not to mention that loads of people detour through pescetarianism on their way to vegetarianism. But even if you stop at pescetarianism that's still a wild improvement on plenty of metrics over eating other meats.
There seems to be this pressure to either go fully vegetarian or it doesn't count, which is obviously total nonsense.
> There seems to be this pressure to either go fully vegetarian or it doesn't count, which is obviously total nonsense.
Hard agree. It’s counterproductive to have that view, even, and it’s why many people give up on vegetarianism (“I wasn’t able to go all in cold turkey, so it isn’t for me and I’ll revert completely”).
Right? I think it’s a christian thing. There’s gotta be something about eating fish being okay in their bible because the amount of times I heard “fish aren’t meat”
Christians are allowed to eat all food. Only Christ is what saves. (Mark 7:19)
But the fish / meat / etc is a tradition thing, so it comes from the culture surrounding the Christian, and probably more relating to Jewish history more than anything
I was told by my teacher as a kid that traditional Catholics used to believe that if you didn't eat fish on Fridays, you'd go to Hell. I wonder if that was true?
You don't have to eat fish, you just have to avoid poultry and red meat. The intent was sacrifice as penance for sins. And in the US and some other countries, it's really only mentioned during Lent (Ash Wednesday to the day before Easter); the rest of the year, it's encouraged to do that or some other form of penance, but everyone ignores it.
"The term [meat] is sometimes used in a more restrictive sense to mean the flesh of mammalian species (pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, etc.) raised and prepared for human consumption, to the exclusion of fish, other seafood, insects, poultry, or other animals."
I think it's just a general apathy in the general population about knowing the difference. "Meat" is pig, cow, horse, rabbit, elephant or whatever, "fish" is fish meat. At a restaurant you could ask if a salad has any meat, they say no, and when it arrives, it has tiny pieces of bacon because "oh but that's almost nothing, certainly not \"meat\"".
During lent, you weren't supposed to eat meat as part of your fast. However, not eating meat is... not as enjoyable as eating meat, so they basically declared that fish doesn't count as meat so they could eat it without breaking the fast.
For similar reasons, they also declared beavers to be fish later on.
Except that's not how it happened. Lent was someting that took several centuries to occur in any form, and what was allowed and what was prohibited varied greatly for long after. Fish and shellfish from the start were allowed more often than things like butter, oil, or wine.
I just got a pair of AirPods Pro 3 and have been looking for a way to use for Live Translation of a language other than Spanish.
I don't feel like I 100% needed to hear the English translation, because the animation tells the story almost without words. But it was a bit more interesting to have my AirPods tell me bits of the words exchanged between the adults and the boy, leading into and out of the video.
There are usually 10 aisles of meat/meat-related products, and 1/2 aisle of "not meat" products (exaggerated to make my point.) Meat and dairy lobbies are very strong in France, and it's obvious from ads/store aisles.
So I'm pleasantly surprised to see an ad from a French supermarket that is not trying to sell you more turkey, sausage, and beef for Christmas but rather focuses on vegetables.
What do you mean? The will be an aisle with ham, sausage etc, and a butchery. There will be one for canned food, which will include some tuna, cassoulet and raviolis.
There is way more surface dedicated to meat and dairy than to their alternatives. Typically it’s rows of freezers and fridges for meat and dairy, and a third of an alley for alternatives.
Hehe. People have "AI" fatigue (I'll include myself there, too), not only because AI content "feels" soulless, but also because the looming job displacement narrative, exacerbated by CEOs, VCs, etc. There'll be a big consumer pushback against companies using AI to lay off employees, etc
It drives me mad to see that companies use AI to make garbage for 1/10th of the cost instead of just leveraging it to halve the cost while not losing quality…
>There'll be a big consumer pushback against companies using AI to lay off employees, etc
No there won't. Same how there was no consumer pushback when everything from your Nikes to Apple computers moved to be made in China by slave labor and gutted your manufacturing industry at the same time while consumers and shareholders cheered.
Consumers only care about value for money not where or how a product is made. People's morals go out the window when their hard earned paycheque is on the line. Capitalist competition is dehumanizing by nature. The only thing that can help maintain humanity is government regulation because expecting consumers to prioritize morality over price has always failed.
If AI companies give consumers the same product but cheaper, they'll win.
Interesting. I agree with you that consumers prioritize price over morality, but not when their livelihood is directly or indirectly negatively affected by AI, and the people are starting to notice it.
>but not when their livelihood is directly or indirectly negatively affected by AI, and the people are starting to notice it.
And do what about it? People don't give a shit AI is replacing creators jobs same how people didn't give a shit automation or offshoring replaced blue collar jobs. Literally nobody cared when the actors and writers went on strike so nobody will care when they'll be replaced by AI.
Especially when the quality of human made entertainment has been on a steep decline over the last 10 years consumers will even cheer to see them replaced same how they cheered when they could buy higher quality Japanese made cars at lower prices.
> I agree with you that consumers prioritize price over morality, but not when their livelihood is directly or indirectly negatively affected by AI...
No consumer complained 15 years ago when the VFX industry in LA was outsourced to Vancouver and London due to subsidizes [0], and no consumer complained when VFX in Vancouver or London was outsourced to India and China over the last 5 years. No one will complain when VFX studios leverage AI to create content and then maybe have around 20-30% of the remaining humans edit videos to be humanlike.
Ironically, the Trump admin proposed a tariff that would help bring VFX back to the US [1] but the same consumers who on here are complaining about AI and Offshoring are the same ones who opposed such a tariff. Of course, if the Biden or a hypothetical Harris admin did something similar, they would also be flamed severely.
And thus the cycle continues. You all will keep complaining, but will keep purchasing from Costco, Trader Joe's, Patagonia, etc, will keep consuming content from one of the handful of companies that have consolidated media, and will remain employed by tech companies that in some shape or form continue to help maintain this cycle.
Statistically speaking, the demographic on HN told blue collar workers in 2009-17 to "learn to code". Why should they have sympathy for you? And thus the cycle continues.
>Ironically, the Trump admin proposed a tariff that would help bring VFX back to the US [1]
Why ironically? Tarifs to protect some US Industries were part of his campaign promises. We're people living under a rock till now?
With the rest of your comment I agree 100%. Replacement of expensive US jobs will continue tarifs or not.
It's the downside of being the world reserve currency. Labor is too expensive to be globally competitive outside mega specialized and highly profitable niches like big tech and AI or protected industries like defense.
Because it's an industry with an avaowed opposition to Trump and it's members are not in his voting bloc. A major reason the policy has been pushed was because of the Teamsters (which the Motion Pictures Union is a part of) lobbied the Trump admin due to Sean O'Brien's close ties to Trump.
Honestly I think the reason the ad is so popular is because at the end, the look that the wife gives to the husband is precisely what every man wants in his life.
I remember a french comic called Le loup en slip (literally the wolf in underwear), was it by any chance made by the same artists? Both the style and story have a lot in common.
We have the "5 fruit and vegs per day" ingrained since birth (for au least 25 years now). People buy these and if you have z supermarket you want to show that you have good vegs.
No matter how the ad is made, it is still an ad. What's probably more important is the message. And this one was dumb as a message and as a real bad advice contributing to the increasingly brainless population who nowadays believes they can go into woods and everything there is friendly if you smile enough.
It's so blatantly obvious there is no AI involved here as you can feel the animation. The sentiment behind everything hits so different to AI. I feel that's what AI sycophants seem to always miss.
I really believe AI will never match the real feeling from created art, but I also don't know why we NEED/WANT it to. It's not a race to the bottom. But AI usage will increase until shareholder value increases.
People who make and enjoy AI art obviously engage with art in a completely different way. To me and many others, it's so instantly offputting and repulsive.
The family were sitting around the table eating dinner while the kids was getting a story read to him about the present he just received. Nothing Christmasy about that at all.
The ad illustrates the Christmas spirit and fish is a Christian religious symbol and actually traditional at Christmas in some countries and areas. I don't know if they did it on purpose in this ad or just because it would obviously not have worked for the wolf to bring a meat dish.
I was confused because one of the characters tells the wolf he might have more friends if he didn't go around killing animals all the time. Then the wolf starts making vegetarian dishes, and I thought, okay, they're promoting vegetarianism. Great.
But then later the wolf is killing fish, and that's ...okay I guess because they don't talk or walk like the other animals? The speciesism hit hard.
The video itself might not be generated, but who knows about the script (quite generic Christmas Carol, Shrek, Wolf trope), the character design, the models, the animations, etc?
edit: getting downvoted to hell, but I think my question is valid. What does it mean "no AI"? Are we just limiting ourselves to the render?
It means no AI. If I say you used no AI but had an LLM write or refine the script, I would have lied.
You may be getting downvoted because your comment's tone can read as accusatively presumptive. "Who knows" isn't a useful contribution to almost any discussion. Which is a shame, because you raise an interesting point–I would personally feel fine saying no AI was used to do work even if I used AI to help me with research. (Provided I read all the primary sources.)
I think he's right. We have no idea if AI contributed to the ad in any way, so "no AI" in this context only means "not AI-rendered". The entire script might have been written by an LLM (which is perfectly fine by me).
On the other hand, the McDonald's ad is obviously AI-rendered, but all the concepts and prompts and choices might have been made by humans? Which doesn't make it any better (although it's not that bad, it's just average).
As a wolf, I find this advertisement very offensive to carnitarians. Prey animals were clearly made for our use and enjoyment, and the idea of some sort of multi-special gathering, finding a least common denominator in the predation of pescids (simply absurd for a canid), is insulting to our way of life and frankly racist.
Whoa! 7.5 miles is a long swim. Thanks for the interesting article. Just so you know, that article says “During the salmon and herring spawning seasons, nearly one-quarter of this coastal wolf’s diet is fish” so I don’t think it supports your claim, exactly.
Major pet peeve of mine is when people unironically spread literal advertisements, whether it's because they're "cute" or people are outraged at them or whatever it may be.
The ad is doing it on purpose. It is literally manipulating you and you are spreading the malicious influence to other people. It's not AI but it sure is 'slop'. Propaganda, even.
It's an ad by a grocery store advocating healthy eating and inclusion.
I think people will make reasonable decisions about whether or not to purchase food this winter with or without the "malicious influence" of these ads.
The irony is that Christmas is the time for unhealthy eating but is it still allowed to show in ads?
Personally I interpreted the fish as either a timely Christian symbol (and fish at Christmas is traditional in some places) or simply because a meat dish would not have worked in context.
True the vast majority of the time. This ad though doesn’t promote anything malicious. It’s a cute story with the message “eat healthy stuff like vegetables and fish”, with a brand name/ logo at the very end.
And as a (very occasional) customer, I like that this company is signalling that it does not oppose inclusion and doesn't mind questioning "traditional values" (the wolf eating animals).
Many actors these days (both companies and political figures) are very much signalling the contrary, so some kind of signalling is absolutely useful.
"You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss."
It is possible to have art and artist be separate things; to acknowledge that that reason a thing was created and/or who it was created by can be looked at separately from the thing itself. This commercial was fun to watch. The Budweiser horse commercials are also fun to watch. But enjoying them has very little to do with a choice to support the creator.
I'm ok with people caring about whatever they want. What I dislike is people trying to create artificial groups. Like "pro AI" and "anti AI" then try to sell them shit because now this is part of their tribe.
You can also just skip advertising to whole world about what you dislike, and your projected dislikes of whatever else you need to comment on, unrelated to original topic of a simple ad for enjoying Christmas with others regardless of your origins while eating well. Nobody here is doing anything you complain about.
People really don't care that much, especially when for something positive, original and funny somebody grumpy comes along and tries to drag discussion down their misery pit.
As someone who wrote two paragraphs about why they dislike my comment, I don't think you see the irony here.
Also speaking about enjoying Christmas then doing an ad hominem in the next sentence, very nice mental gymnastics.
I don't think so. Not the ones that will matter at least. Anything that looks or feels even a little bit like AI goes on the dung heap now, even if it was just made by a human that spends so much of their time working with LLMs that they have completely regressed to the mean
OP is the original upload, but the agency reposted it with English subs after it got popular outside of France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLERt5ZkpQ4
You can tell it's great visual storytelling because you don't even need to know the words.
I guess the McDonald's ad didn't need words either, but it was just depressing and awful.
It’s probably a mistake to read too much into it but I can’t help but notice the McDonald’s ad is kind of a mirror held up to all the things that American culture has been progressing into: cynical, mean, isolated, artificial... whatever the opposite of “wholesome” is. Totally off-key for what Christmas is supposed to stand for. Christmas (at least the secular holiday) is supposed to be about kindness, putting differences aside, enjoying people and family, and the commercial was pretty much the opposite of that.
Here in the UK, Tesco is running a pretty similar campaign to the McDonald's one (without the AI): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=711Cq8_E0oI
I think Brits tend to be more cynical than Americans, though, so it kinda tracks.
That ad is brutal. I feel sorry for people who experience Christmas like this.
That montage version is actually quite uplifting compared to the longer version of each individual segment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMUWrBKHoKc
I mean, that's just depressing to watch :(
I'd like to know what Monopoly knock-off is partly in the shot here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebA8X4HChJM
PSA: if you have family meltdowns playing Monopoly, try following the rules and allowing auctions of un-bought property. At least the game may eventually end then. Or just don't play games intended to be teachable "well isn't this shit" moments.
Misery loves company. Some people just want other people to be as unhappy as they are.
Seemed pretty realistic to me!
One exception: with the stamp cost rise, I think this might be the year even the staunchest card senders may be reconsidering!
I remember my mum sending out 20 or 30 cards all with first class stamps. I don't see many millennials and down doing it. "Not in this economy"!
It was generated by McDonald’s Netherlands who said the ad was about Christmas mishaps in the Netherlands.
There is no agreed on meaning of secular Christmas. It might converge on one some day, but secular culture is literally dying so it has only about 100 years to come up with one.
Merry Christmas!
> secular culture is literally dying
Can you elaborate on this? It doesn't match my experience at all.
> It’s probably a mistake to read too much into it
I disagree; art both reflects and influences culture. If we don't discuss and explore the subtext of things, we're impacted without understanding, and that's never a good position to be in.
I don't think a commercial for a fast food joint can reflect an entire nation let alone the other 174 it has restaurants in.
What was the McDonald's ad? Could you drop a link, perhaps?
Here's a guardian link that tells the story and includes the ad: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/11/mcdonalds-r...
> “However, we notice – based on the social comments and international media coverage – that for many guests this period is ‘the most wonderful time of the year’.”
How to make your corporate response sound even more AI than the actual AI...
> "And here’s the part people don’t see: the hours that went into this job far exceeded a traditional shoot. Ten people, five weeks, full-time.”
If it didn't even save time, then what was the point?
Ah the famous AI efficiency and productivity boost.
Thank you! Goodness, that ad made me want to barf
Both because of the content, and because of the odd perspective shifts in the AI-generated footage. It made me feel like I was drunk.
That ad looks like a concatenation of Tiktok shorts.
That's what happens when you just concatenate the output of an AI trained in Tiktok shorts …
(Which is a shame, as IA video generation can do much better if the author cares a bit about what they're doing).
Looking at it I see familiar elements, which are used by an artist going by the name Gossip Goblin to draw apocalyptic visions of a humanity far in the future that, for the N-th time, almost wiped itself out via increasingly invasive body modifications.
Sometimes telling the truth is unwelcome I guess.
Cheers bro!
I liked the McDonald's ad quite a bit because it encapsulated how I feel about this time of year - although I've never in my life eaten in a McDonald's and don't intend to start.
I thought the McD add was hilarious - I would have preferred it not be AI.
The ad felt like a family guy skit. And animated about as well as modern FG animation.
I guess that will speak to if you will find the ad funny or just depressing. I don't think the Ai helped either way.
Yes, it was brilliant! As for AI, who cares? It's a commercial. Laugh, and move on.
It looks like shit.
I thought the McDonalds one was good and what does it matter it was AI ; mcdonalds makes artificial food and everything about the place is artificial so why not artificial ads?
I'm pro-AI but I thought the Coca-Cola and McDonald's ads were shit. The Coke one was especially egregious because if the creators hadn't been lazy they could have made it look half-decent. Instead it's janky and inconsistent and ugly.
The worst part about the Coke ad is the fake "making of" video they released to show how much manual work went into their ads. The "pencil sketches" ostensibly made by humans in the making of were also AI-generated.
>artificial food
As if people are not "cooking" the exact same food bought from these supermarkets.
I don't usually make salads with 750 calories and an entire day's worth of sodium when I cook.
You probably do, but you don't count the calories, and instead of everything being in the salad, you have a few ingredients outside (bread, nuts, cheese, whatever).
Salads being a healthy, low-calorie thing is an idiocy; it's only possible if you don't use any dressing, and at this point you are only eating crunchy water. Otherwise, the oil in the dressing is over 800 kcal per 100g. Most people will put the equivalent of 50-70g of bread just as dressing in their salad. It's mostly fat and not filing.
In other words, it's extremely dumb to think salads are healthy; only fat women believe that shit and this is exactly why they end up like this.
First Americans invented how to ruin salads with dressings, now they are complaining that dressings make salads less healthy. Whew, how ironic.
I'm not American; I'm French. We invented the vinaigrette, and I have worked at quite premium restaurants. You are just clueless, and it's not even worth explaining.
Salad is a stupid meal for rich people to feel superior. It's wasteful and plain stupid. And if you are actually a worker (or someone who needs to be physical), you are ingesting the wrong type of calories. But that's the whole point. It's not sustainable for a worker; thus it is a class signifier.
Buddy, 100g of olive oil is like 7 tablespoons. Not even Americans put that much on one salad.
I have premium French dressing in my fridge. It's 483 kcal/100g. The recommended serving size is 2 tablespoons, but most people actually put in at least 3. That's about 20-30 g of vinaigrette. In other words, it's about 150 kcal just for the vinaigrette, or about 50g of bread.
You are an idiot, I'm not your buddy, go fuck yourself.
Very cute story. It's a shame my cynic brain is telling me "but wolves can't survive off of berries and nuts". Also, I guess fish are fair game in the forest hierarchy. Should have user an omnivore.
Wolves (and all dogs) could be vegetarians as they aren't obligate omnivores - and in certain conditions where pray is sparse they do eat berries to surviven. Cats on the other hand are obligate carnivores and can't produce taurine amino acids, so they have to eat meat to survive.
We can chemically synthesize taurine just fine.
Are you a wolf (or a dog)?
I think the implications is that cats could eat veggies laced with synthetic taurine...?
I thought the implication is that people should feed themselves to cats?
Consent removes a bunch of ethical issues.
What's eating you, Earthman: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5HLy27bK-wU
I don't think it's only from a cynic point of view - the question "if meat is murder, am I a bad person if I literally can't survive without it?" is a fair and interesting one.
Of course that's not the point of the ad and I don't blame them for not making it a philosophical discussion, but it's the same approach that Madagascar uses (spoiler for a 20yo movie) to resolve their main conflict and both feel like cheating - if the penguins can think, I always thought, then so should the fishes.
> I don't think it's only from a cynic point of view - the question "if meat is murder, am I a bad person if I literally can't survive without it?" is a fair and interesting one.
I think the argument is “meat is murder because you can survive without it”. Maybe that doesn’t work for the wolf, but I mean, it’s literally a story being made up for a child, and animals in those are allegories for humans.
I can choose to not eat meat and live healthily, but I’m not going to feed only vegetables to a pet cat, who needs something different. To each what they need, as ethically as possible. When you can minimise harm, do.
> not eat meat and live healthily
Extremely debatable and seems very dependent on your personal genetics/ethnicity. Just because you don't drop dead doesn't mean it's ideal; people can live underground too…
You can survive without a lot of things. Some people survived eating dead bodies on a mountain in the Andes. When people reference life quality they generally don't talk in terms of "survival."
Cats doesn't need more beef kibbles than vegan kebbles! It's a common fallacy but cats do thrive with vegetables if selected and cooked right! Sure they're meat eater in the wild but if we accept modern (ultra processed) meat keebles as suitable for a cat, the vegan options definitely also check the healthy and nutricious points.
Now we can debate if it's "natural" but that would open the horizon to other aspects of cat's modern live.
no, they can't. please stop spreading this misinformation.
What parts of my message you think is misinformation? Beside multiple anecdotal evidence, heres a paper on the subject:
> No differences in reported lifespan were detected between diet types. Fewer cats fed plant-based diets reported to have gastrointestinal and hepatic disorders. Cats fed plant-based diets were reported to have more ideal body condition scores than cats fed a meat-based diet.
> Cat owner perception of the health and wellness of cats does not appear to be adversely affected by being fed a plant-based diet. Contrary to expectations, owners perceived no body system or disorder to be at particular risk when feeding a plant-based diet to cats.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12917-021-02754-8
That is not a study about cats. That was a study about cat owners.
That's interesting but it's questionaire based so I would not trust it much. There are many levels of bias here.
It's obviously vegan propaganda, but of course it corresponds perfectly to the type of people working those fields.
It's absurd to make kids believe a wolf can stop eating animals and become nice and friendly.
Stop reading into things what isn't there. The wolf is still eating fish, did you even watch it?
He is eating fish because Intermarché has a fishing business. Yes, I watched it, and I'm not reading into things. This is just the popular ideology at the moment. For now, fish is ok, but for how long?
Suspension of disbelief.
May be this one inspired the video :)
https://www.nbcnews.com/video/video-shows-wolf-appearing-to-...
> Also, I guess fish are fair game in the forest hierarchy
Fish don't appear to have the ability to speak or engage in social relationship with other animals in the story, so it makes sense to eat them. Like vegan find it OK eating mushrooms even though they are closer to us than they are to plants.
> Like vegan find it OK eating mushrooms even though they are closer to us than they are to plants.
Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungus. Complaining about eating those is akin to complaining about eating apples; you’re not harming the tree.
So, although it's difficult to generalize because exactly where the line is drawn varies from one vegan to another, it's generally not enough that the animal wasn't directly harmed.
For example the honey bees make honey for a reason, just as apple trees make apples for a reason and maple trees make a sugary sap for a reason. "So that humans can eat it" isn't the reason in either case. The apples and maple syrup are categorised differently by vegans because the trees aren't animals. That's still an arbitrary line, but so are most things.
> bees make honey for a reason
For themselves. To eat. So it’s easy to understand the argument that you’re harming them directly by stealing their honey, which is the result of their labour.
But surely there’s nuance there. I don’t doubt there are ethical growers who provide bees with an extra nice and controlled environment, plus care for them and help them fight pests, and thus feel like taking a share of the produced honey is a fair trade. The bees might agree.
> "So that humans can eat it" isn't the reason in either case.
But it is. In the case of many fruits, the goal is for an animal (humans included) to eat them, seeds and all, then poop them out (bonus fertiliser) somewhere else.
> That's still an arbitrary line, but so are most things.
No disagreement there, but I don’t see how any of that is relevant to my comment. I was correcting a misconception about mushrooms, not debating the nuances of vegan opinions. I don’t care for the label and don’t think it’s helpful to fight about what it means. It’s much more important to strive to be progressively better than to aim for perfection and fail.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231187#46242623
Essentially all modern honey farming is what you're calling "ethical". It's too expensive to replace the colony each year now that we have an alternative, and a winter - even a relatively mild winter in most parts of the world - will kill the bees if you've stolen all their food.
Unlike the maple tree, we do know how to substitute the valuable honey for nutritionally similar but cheaper alternatives - you can buy suitable food commercially because this is a whole industry, nevertheless, vegans object to our intervention, the bees didn't make nutritionally equivalent bee food, they made honey. Even farmers who choose to calibrate and remove only some honey, judging what will be enough for their colony to survive, are considered not to meet vegan requirements for the same reason.
To the extent there's a shared definition it really is as simple as originally explained, animal: not OK, non-animal: fine.
One of my professors (who is now vegan) had an ethical rule prohibiting eating things which, like him, had backbones. Same idea, it's more similar to me, therefore don't eat it. All such lines in the sand are somewhat arbitrary.
> vegans object to our intervention
Many might, but many don’t. This is a prime example of why fighting over the label is counterproductive. You’re putting a bunch of different people in the same sack and criticising them for something which the group is not consensual on.
Again, I have no desire to nitpick over what makes one a vegan or not. That’s a waste of everyone’s time and only generates unnecessary conflict. It is not only detrimental but unbearably boring.
> For themselves. To eat. So it’s easy to understand the argument that you’re harming them directly by stealing their honey, which is the result of their labour.
On the other hand the bee social structure (not sure what the right word to use here) is so brutal that taking their honey seems to be just keeping pace. :)
> it’s easy to understand the argument that you’re harming them directly by stealing their honey
Do you think no physical arm is done to an Apple tree for it to give fruits? You should read about fruit tree pruning then…
> But it is. In the case of many fruits, the goal is for an animal (humans included) to eat them, seeds and all, then poop them out (bonus fertiliser) somewhere else.
Which we don't. So we're doing exactly the same thing to tree as we are doing to cow: abusing a natural process that's designed to help their babies.
> I was correcting a misconception about mushrooms, not debating the nuances of vegan opinions.
There's no misconception about mushrooms.
> It’s much more important to strive to be progressively better than to aim for perfection and fail.
The problem is that there isn't an objective definition of “better”. As heterotrophs we can only survive by destroying other living thing. This is a curse we must live with.
Which living thing is fair game is fundamentally an arbitrary position driven by our subjective moral values. You have to draw a line, but there's no valid reason to say that the line must be drawn at the Animalia border rather than at the Tetrapod (which means fish are OK to eat). Most of the arguments that apply to the whole order of animals also apply to most multicellular beings anyway (including the existence of a pain-like mechanism).
You are free to have stronger emotional bonds with a fish or a bee than with a mushroom or a plant, but it's in no way more rational or objectively better than when most people refuse to eat dogs and horses but are fine with cows.
Well the reason apple trees make apples is actually that someone can eat them, and then ideally poop out the seeds so that a new tree can grow. But that is literally their purpose.
> Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungus. Complaining about eating those is akin to complaining about eating apples; you’re not harming the tree.
Why are eggs a problem for vegans then? They are quite literally the “fruit body” of birds. Milk and honey should be even less problematic, as it's not even made of parts of cow or bees.
Each have his own reason, but I refer you to the definition of veganism by the Vegan Society (whose founder "invented" the world vegan):
> [...] exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, [..]
While ecology and health are cited by some vegans, many (if not most) of them are interested in avoiding unnecessary cruelty. That's why there's a discussion where some people define themselves as vegan but do eat musles and other "nerveless" animals they don't considered sentient. On the other hand bees, cows and chicken are sentient and most of they don't have a lot of fun at the farm.
[1] https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism
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Intermarche have done some other great Christmas ads on a simialr theme of eating better. Their 2019 ad had a kid realizing that Santa was too rotund to fit down their chimney, so the kid spent the season visiting him at the store and handing him lettuce, homemade vegetable preserves etc. https://youtu.be/DeSG2-FuQhE?si=YvCMY4fR-7K5R8Ke
Is this newsworthy entirely because it was made without AI? It seems like a perfectly fine ad. I just don't understand why this is significant. If people just like this ad enough to vote for it, fine. But I feel like I'm missing something.
McDonalds were recently criticised for an AI-generated Christmas advert:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/11/mcdonalds-r...
It seems like an excellent advert because it got everybody talking about McDonalds. Even this thread talks more about McDonalds than the “French supermarket’s” ad. The “French supermarket” isn’t even named in the title. The people who came up with the McDonalds ad were wildly successful in what they set out to do; they even have all the people who hate AI talking about their new ad, even when attempting to showcase somebody else’s ad.
> Even this thread talks more about McDonalds than the “French supermarket’s” ad. The “French supermarket” isn’t even named in the title.
The name of the supermarket is mentioned in the title when the audience is likely to know it, e.g. on French websites. I don’t blame any American who does not know Intermarché, as they are very unlikely to come across one. I am not going to link them because that’s a bit pointless and the URLs are terrible, but a quick googling of "publicité Intermarché" should give plenty of examples.
We have come a long way down from ads like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VM2eLhvsSM
It isn’t named in the title because it doesn’t have the same brand recognition as mcdonalds.
That seems self fulfilling
I think it's debatable whether the principle that "any press is good press" is actually true. Especially for a brand that is already a household name. People will talk about you, yes. But is it a good thing that they're gonna be talking, and reinforcing the association in the minds of your customers, that you're putting out lazy, soulless slop? Of course, that's de facto what McDonald's is, but it's not like they don't benefit from at the very least an illusion that this isn't the case.
We're at that point, where we are literally celebrating something made by humans, not machines. Wild timeline. It will get rarer and rarer as AI becomes quicker, easier, higher-quality and cheaper than it is today.
(Also I think the ad is really nice)
I disagree, people are just happy to see coca cola fail, which's fair enough.
The ad company that made this supermarket's piece capitalised on that, and now we have ... an ad on the front page, with people commenting on its storytelling.
Celebrating an advertisement video is absolutely bizarre.
The AI ad required orders of magnitude more humans to make. Those that know, know.
I don't know about the AI thing or newsworthiness. The reason I upvoted the submission is this (not my comment, but someone else put it into words better than I could think of): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46231908
> Very cute, and full of humorous touches. Worth sharing, for a change (when compared to the vast majority of ads).
It's not strictly within HN's scope of "what hackers find interesting" though. This'll have to be December's exception upvote
It's remarkable that an animated video of this high quality for a French tv commercial is immediately disregarded. Animation has come so far!
I remember a time when using computer was not well seen when creating art.
Wasn't it even Tron who didn't qualify for the special effects oscar because they "used computers"?
It's interesting that it's no longer "computer bad", now it's "AI bad".
I lived through the end of the beginning of computer becoming a primary tool for art, both in building DeviantART and also I was in the second cohort of the first ever digital imaging and technology program in Canada. It was super interesting, during college was the release of the Canon 300D, things moved really quickly after, my graduating year the pro film makers associations introduced a ban on digital work within the associations "club activities" (that lasted about 16 months) - it was funny tho you would see people judging professional salons (contests) zooming in to 30000% looking for signs of digital editing - I was ~20 and it was all very amusing to me, like why did all these old people hate digital art do much? We persisted, bunch of us graduated and started a studio, one day Canon called us, I was one of the first people in the world to use a Canon 5D Mk2 months before it was released, my ads ended up on TV, we won three technical emmy awards, made lots of money, had a great time etc. All the people I know who rode the wave had fantastic careers and worked on interesting stuff, made money etc.(and btw, the last ones standing after all was said and done in the "fuck digital camp"? curmudgeons!)
fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists, I am a business/technology person who happens to be decent at story telling and naturally not awful at picture making - I would have gotten crushed by what the technologies enabled as the abstractions and programatic features opened up film making to people who didn't want to or couldn't naturally grasp the physics/controls. I'm grateful past me was able to think about this clearly because it lead me to meeting Ben and Moisey and joining them to go on and build DigitalOcean, one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
>fwiw: I got out of that industry because it became clear quickly that the technology was going to enable a lot of skilled story tellers to become talented artists
I'm not sure if that bet really paid off. I feel like the number or both "skilled artist" and "skilled storyteller" didn't really move. It just feels higher because the barrier to entry and validation is "how well can I market myself on social media?" Not "can I get into/create my own studio?" or any other metric a craftsman would use. I don't necessarily callel this a bad thing, and I'd even argue that it only magnified existing issues instead of creating new new ones. but it has obvious down sides.
Deviant art played a part in that, so kudos. Or perhaps, you've doomed us all? Hard to say, I always had a strange relationship with DeviantArt.
Thanks for sharing this!
I think people are setting themselves up for failure if they index their happiness or sense of self satisfaction to their ability to discern what AI-generated content is or not.
Soon, we’ll have no idea what’s AI-generated or not. I care about good, tight story telling.
In the case of this ad.. it’s okay?
Part of watching films and animations was that seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself. When all they did was enter a prompt that takes some of the magic away.
If all you care about is just the story then maybe you personally will be satisfied but a lot of people cared about the animations, cinematography, etc, and all of the work that went into that.
I think digital effects still rarely look as good as the peak of Hollywood practical effects (call it… idk, Alien in 1979 through Independence Day in ‘96 or so, roughly, and yes I know ID4 also had computer fx in addition to lots of miniatures and models)
Having to do things for-real also kept things grounded. Modern action movies are often cartoon-like with supposedly human characters stringing together super-human moves that’d leave a real person with dislocated shoulders, broken bones, and brain damage, because they’re actually just CG, no human involved.
[EDIT] OMG, or take Bullitt (1968) versus, say, the later Fast and the Furious sequels (everything past Tokyo Drift). The latter are basically Pixar's Cars with more-realistic textures. They're cartoons with live-action talking segments. Very little actual driving is depicted. Bullitt may have used the movie-magic of editing, but someone did have to actually drive a car, for every shot of a car driving. Or at least they had to set up a car with a dummy to convincingly crash. What you're seeing is heightened, but basically within the realm of reality.
Or take A Bridge Too Far. It's a bit of a mess! Make it CG and it'd be outright bad. But ho-lee-shit do they blow up a lot of stuff, like, you cannot even believe how much. And look at all those tanks and armored vehicles they got! And planes! And extras! Those are all 100% real! AND ALL THE KABOOMS! And it all looks better than CG, to boot. The spectacle of it (plus some solid performances) saves the movie. Make all the FX CG and it'd be crap.
Imagine a Jackie Chan movie with CG stunts. What is even the point. It'd be trash.
This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real) vs Furiosa (a lot of CGI.)
But only bad CGI is visible. I guarantee you have watched CGI footage and not noticed. At all.
The problem over the last decade or so hasn't been the technical limits of CGI, but studio unwillingness to spend enough on it to make it good.
And directors have also become less creative. You can find UK newsreels from the 50s on YouTube, and some of the direction and editing are superb - a beautiful mix of abstraction, framing, and narrative.
Most modern directors don't have that kind of visual literacy. The emphasis is more on spectacle and trying to bludgeon audiences into submission, not on tastefulness and visual craft.
This was the argument about Fury Road (mostly real)
Fury Road is pure wall to wall CGI. People keep pointing to it as some example of doing things with live action when the entire movie is soaked with CG and compositing.
https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/a-graphic-tale-the-visual...
It's a lot of CGI, but done in realistic ways. A lot of the examples from the article (which is a very good article, thank you for linking it) were mostly about paint-outs, color grading, or background elements.
There's a good chunk of modern blockbusters that will CGI everything in a scene except the lead actor's face - and sometimes that too.
> paint-outs
Predates computers, they used to paint out wires and whatnot by hand and it usually looked just as good.
> Compositing
Predates computers. They've been doing it since forever with miniature overlays, matte paintings, chromakey, double exposures, and cutting up film negatives with exacto blades.
> color grading
Literal cancer which ruins movies every goddamn time. The fact that they shoot movies with this kind of manipulation in mind changes how they use lighting and makes everything flat with no shadows, no depth, everything now gets shot like a soap opera. This also applies to heavy use of compositing too. To make it cheaper to abuse compositing, mostly so the producers can "design by committee" the movie after all the filming is done, they've destroyed how they light and shoot scenes. Everything is close up on actors, blurred backgrounds, flat lighting, fast cuts to hide the lazy work. Cancer.
I'm talking about Fury Road too BTW. It's crap. Watch the original Mad Max, not Road Warrior, then watch Fury Road. The first is a real movie with heart and soul, the world it depicts feels real. The latter feels like a video game, except it somehow comes out looking even less inspired and creative than the actual mad max video game that came out at the same time.
But yeah, they made some real weird cars for the movie. That's fine I guess. The first movie didn't need weird cars, it had this thing called characters. Characters who felt like real people, not freaks from a comic book.
Exactly - they've been doing paint outs and composite shots forever! It doesn't feel fundamentally different to do it "on a computer," to me. They aren't using it to show off, just to make the scene look how you'd expect it to.
They've also been doing color grading forever - digital just makes it way cheaper and easier. Before, you'd have to do photochemical tricks to the film, and you would use different film for different vibes.
I'd argue that the ease of digital manipulation has led some studios to do what you say - postpone creativity until after the movie is mostly shot, which leads to that design-by-committee feeling. That sense of 'don't worry, we'll fix the lighting it the editing room' is the same sloppiness as 'and then the big gorilla will use his magic attack and it will look really cool,' without any thought given to it's actually going to look like. But that's not really a failure of CGI itself - that's a failure of vision, right? If you procrastinate making artistic decisioms for long enough, there's not actually going to be any art in the movie once it's done.
I have watched the original Mad Max, and it was pretty alright. If I had watched it at the right age, I probably would have imprinted on it.
It used to be the case that movies had to be made carefully, with the intended look in mind when they were shooting it. Compositing, etc aren't new, as we both know, but the way they're used has changed; they're used far more than ever before, with important design decisions about the look of the movie deferred to the very last minute ans everything up to that point done in such a way to facilitate making late last minute changes. This is absolute poison for cinematography as an art. Very few big budget movies made in recent years has any artistic merit for this reason. Producers now feel like they have the technology to make all the decisions that, by technical and logistic necessity, the directors/cinematographers would have to make themselves years ago. And the producers are just assholes with money, they cannot make art.
With respect to Mad Max, I think it aged like a fine wine. I didn't first see it when I was young, I saw Road Warrior first. But Road Warrior and everything after it is very camp. Mad Max is more grounded and feels like a commentary on our times, not pure fantasy spectacle. I think the best time to watch Mad Max was the 70s, and the second best time is probably today. In the 90s or 00s it wouldn't have hit right.
I'd argue that the ease of digital manipulation has led some studios to do what you say - postpone creativity until after the movie is mostly shot,
None of this is true. You can't shoot plates and do whatever you want later. Even basic effects shots take intricate planning. They were talking about cleaning up mistakes and small details.
which leads to that design-by-committee feeling
I'm not sure what this means in the context of a movie but it isn't how movies are made.
There are art directors, production designers and vfx supervisors and they answer to the director. Movies are the opposite of design by committee. It isn't a bunch of people compromising, it is the director making decisions and approving every step.
that sense of 'don't worry, we'll fix the lighting it the editing room'
This doesn't happen because it isn't how anything works. You can fix lighting in editing.
the same sloppiness as 'and then the big gorilla will use his magic attack and it will look really cool,' without any thought given to it's actually going to look like.
Enormous thought and planning is given to every stage. This idea of not liking lots of effects in fantasy or comic book movies and then attributing that to sloppiness or apathy simply does not happen in big budget movies. There are multiple stages of gathering reference, art direction and early tests, many times before any photography is shot.
If you procrastinate making artistic decisioms for long enough, there's not actually going to be any art in the movie once it's done.
Not only does this not happen, it doesn't make sense. Just because you don't like something that doesn't mean huge amounts of work and planning didn't go into it.
It's a lot of CGI, but done in realistic ways.
The person I replied to said it was "mostly real". Lots of CG is done in realistic ways but people pick and choose what they decide is good based on the movies they already like. Fury Road has somehow become an example of "doing things for real" when the whole movie is non stop CG shots.
A lot of the examples from the article (which is a very good article, thank you for linking it) were mostly about paint-outs, color grading, or background elements.
No they weren't, there are CG landscapes, CG mountains, CG canyons, CG crowds, CG storms, CG cars, CG arm replacements and many entirely CG shots. It's the whole movie.
> There's a good chunk of modern blockbusters that will CGI everything in a scene except the lead actor's face - and sometimes that too.
Like Top Gun: Maverick, Ford vs. Ferrari, Napoleon, The Martian, 1917, Barbie, Alien: Romulus... to name just a few: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46238167
Are you suggesting it's not noticeable in those movies? I found it distracting several times in I think every one of those (maybe the least in 1917? And I haven't seen Ford vs. Ferrari, but I have all the rest). A few entire scenes or sequences in TG:M look awful, and it's usually the mundane ones that wouldn't even have been effects in a pre-CG movie, not the aircraft action stuff. Alien: Romulus looks fake practically the whole movie (that one didn't ruin it for me or anything, but it had an effect like the Riddick movies, of being obviously mostly a cartoon, though of course not as awful about it as those were).
Well, I guess it wasn't exactly distracting in Barbie because that's practically a marionette movie a la Thunderbirds, so it's not really trying not to look off.
> Are you suggesting it's not noticeable in those movies
You can check the youtube link I posted. You'd be hard pressed to notice the good CGI in those movies.
> I found it distracting several times in I think every one of those
Honestly, I really doubt you noticed that much CGI. Well, unless you go in already primed to discount everything as CGI (whether or not it's actually CGI).
I highly recommend this 5-part essay series "NO CGI" is really just INVISIBLE CGI" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo (it starts with "Top Gun: Maverick").
Current-era CGI is insanely good. The problem is that it's used and abused everywhere, often with very little consideration for whether it's needed, or if there's time to do all the VFX shots etc.
Good points about how practical effects improve cgi, by forcing them to be believable, and providing a realistic reference.
It's like Golum (lotr) vs Jar Jar Binks.
One was a real actor, interacting with other actors, and they just gave him a digital costume. The other was a tennis ball.
I think eliminating the need to think and work around reality is part of the trouble. Not that it ruins everything (people take HN posts as so maximalist even when they factually are not; see: the rest of this comment tree) but I think the lack of the odd limitation or need to think about how to solve a problem without resorting to “render it in a computer” causes significant harm to cinema overall. I’m not (see above parenthetical) claiming it’s net-negative, but there’s a kind of film-making skill and genius that was once on display pretty widely, and now is not.
I mean for fuck’s sake, they’d probably CG the paint buckets in Home Alone if they made it today. And we’d get some tasteless can-cam shot, because you don’t have to figure it out, you can just do it. And they’d look fake because they’d move too perfectly, lacking the kinds of little off-seeming movements that a real paint can in a real take might do. Never might the can obscure a few frames of face when the directors might choose otherwise, and the result will be obviously CG through its convenience if not due to outright flaws.
Excessive perfection and too many things moving the optimal way for the shot or exactly the way the viewer expects are under-appreciated tells of CG, and they’re deadly ones, present even in a lot of “perfect” CG (give it a few years, we thought the CG in Lord of the Rings was convincing and now it looks like trash). They need to start CGing their fake environments sometimes doing something slightly less than ideal to an actor’s jacket, or something, and not to call attention to it as a comedy relief moment, but because “that’s just what happened” (not really, but it’d make the effects more convincing)
> CG through its convenience if not due to outright flaws.
It's also over-reliance on this convenience. Bad shot? We'll fix it in post. Objects missing, or in wrong places, or too many of them? We'll fix it in post. Bad sound, camera position, actor unavailable? Believe it or not, post.
And many don't even think whether you should prepare the shot for post-production, or even give vfx teams more time to complete the work
This is just rose tinted nostalgia. You are remembering the things you loved which are much simpler and forgetting all the lemon shots and limitations of the day.
The movies and TV that can be made now without the limitations of the past are significantly different, from period movies to super hero movies and everything in between. Watch the 1970s superman or logan's run and see how they hold up.
The vast majority of CG you don't notice.
The vast majority of CG is replicating stuff like set design or replacing a location shoot. We don’t usually call that an “effect” when it’s not done with a computer. And even then… it continues to deliver “bad matte painting” often enough that spotting such failures in the wild isn’t hard (nor was it hard with bad matte paintings!)
[edit] my point, anyway, isn’t that any given effect is better. It’s not even necessarily that the movies are better (The Passion of Joan of Arc barely had effects at all, and didn’t have synced sound, for god’s sake, an it’s incredible—of course CG-having movies can be great) but that I tend to find the overall effect of those movies better. Those “seamless” mundane CG effects shots of things like composited computer-generated rooms or streets rarely get the kind of attention a real set does, and the movies suffer for it. Nobody had to move around the space with their real body and think about it, and it usually (usually! Not every single time) shows, if not in anything wrong, exactly, then in the degree to which it’s perfectly forgettable and fails to contribute anything but filling screen space.
[edit edit] more to the point, peak practical wins at convincing effects in the Big Damn Action Moment. But only peak, and that was a tragically brief span. Point me to a CG sci-fantasy space fight that looks better and/or more like a real thing that’s happening than the battle above Endor in return of the Jedi (you’ll notice I didn’t pick the earlier two movies, as Jedi is where they really perfected it all—though even the first has some shots that are quite convincing!). Like truly if you know of one I’d love to see it. I never have. They all look plainly computer generated. I’m not saying every frame of those SFX shots in Jedi is perfect, but it looks overall more real than anything similar I’ve seen done in a computer. Like you’d think in about 40 years it’d have been surpassed multiple times, but no. They all look CG.
Or, like… put the best 50% of practical shots in Jurassic Park against the best 50% of CG-heavy dino action shots in any Jurassic Park from 3 on. They’re more convincing than any of the CG shots. (Some, from the field of all practical effects shots in the film, are not convincing! But a hell of a lot are, and not just better than the median CG effect in later JPs or something, but better than all). We struggle to touch the tippy-top peak of that craft with computer effects, still today.
The vast majority of CG is replicating stuff like set design or replacing a location shoot.
Says who?
We don’t usually call that an “effect”
Who is "we" ?
This is basically going from "CG is bad" to "not all CG" to "that's not an 'effect'". These arguments never hold up because any explanation ends up full of holes and inconsistencies.
Usually it just ends up being a variation of "I liked the movies I saw when I was a kid". Most of what you're saying here is just that you liked an old movie.
People have been making the argument of 'models look more real' since the 90s, but when it comes down to it, they don't know what is CG and what isn't and can't tell the difference. It's a combination of nostalgia and thinking they know better when they aren't actually being tested.
Then there is the fact that shots in modern movies can't be made without CG. You can't do the same things with models and have the camera freedom, long shots, wide shots etc, and that's just hard surfaces.
Saying "I love this black and white movie, therefore CG is over used" is an opinion that most people would never hold and a connection that doesn't make a lot of sense, but the a cold hard fact is that the same movies can't be made. Eventually seeing a half second jump scare of an alien is going to get old even if the man in the suit looks good.
> > The vast majority of CG is replicating stuff like set design or replacing a location shoot.
> Says who?
The people who are like "actually there's a ton of CG you don't notice!". They mean simple compositing, CG backdrops, painting in props, and stuff like that. (as if I'm not already aware of that stuff, LOL) That's where most of the CG is in movies for the last decade or so—they're right about that. It's replacing prop construction, set design & construction, and location shooting.
> This is basically going from "CG is bad" to "not all CG" to "that's not an 'effect'". These arguments never hold up because any explanation ends up full of holes and inconsistencies.
No, I'm just not impressed when CG successfully (I disagree it's successful as often as proponents say, and to them I say "give it ten years and a lot of this 'good' stuff will look awful to you", as it's the same ride we've been on with CG the entire time so far, the "look, CG's finally entirely convincing!" movie seems about as convincing as Jason and the Argonauts' stop motion a few years later) does something mundane that wouldn't even have been an effect before.
I mean, if we're counting that, and trying to compare the two, then just about every single time a location shoot was used where CG might have been today, classic "effects" win. That part's silly to compare.
> People have been making the argument of 'models look more real' since the 90s, but when it comes down to it, they don't know what is CG and what isn't and can't tell the difference. It's a combination of nostalgia and thinking they know better when they aren't actually being tested.
The best of the best just really do hold up better. It's a shame we didn't get more time with that style before CG took over, it was a pretty brief window between "you can always tell the model is a model" and "now it's all computers".
(This should irk you too: CG blood spatter harms every single action movie where it replaces squibs, the movie may survive the harm but that part is terrible every time)
The people who are like "actually there's a ton of CG you don't notice!". They mean simple compositing, CG backdrops, painting in props,
No, it's everything. Modern big budget movies could have 800-1200 vfx shots. You aren't able to guess at what is photography in every shot in a few seconds 800 times during a movie. You can make that claim, but even people who have been doing vfx for decades can't do it. People say these things because they want to believe it and they know they won't be tested to prove it.
I mean, if we're counting that, and trying to compare the two, then just about every single time a location shoot was used where CG might have been today, classic "effects" win. That part's silly to compare.
The best of the best just really do hold up better. It's a shame we didn't get more time with that style before CG took over
You say this but again, you don't know how every shot was done and every shot is different. This mostly comes from people wanting to think they are never 'fooled' and 'old ways are better'. This has been going on and repeated since the 90s.
The truth is that you aren't in a position to judge what is 'best' because you don't know how every shot was done in the first place.
> Alien in 1979
I think this might be your nostalgia. The thing looks different in different scenes, and there's a scene that feels like it's a guy inside from the way it moves. So I disagree that Alien is peak special effects. (still peak over things. Peak ambience for sure)
I didn't pick perfect examples, I picked useful ones for bounding the rough time period. Both examples are transitional.
Alien nails it like 80% of the time (I've watched it twice in the last year, in 4k on a wall-size screen, so it's fresh for me). It's an early, major example of getting it damn near perfect pretty often. Not every shot's great—like, about two-thirds of the shots of the exterior of the landing craft look like a miniature, not as glaring as a Showa-era Godzilla or anything, but you can tell—but it's still a better average than modern computer-heavy movies. It's one of the earliest that's exhibiting the potential of peak pre-CG special effects, if not nailing it all the time. But, very few movies nail it all the time, including modern ones doing the computer graphics thing.
There’s an argument to be made that by watching higher image quality versions, you’re losing on the experience. I.e. the blurriness helped the effect. Their nostalgia and your (presumably) more recent viewing are then two different watching experiences.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xbZMqS-fW-8&t=11m15s
That's very romantic. The golden age of both cinema and animation was an assembly line, often an exploitative one. Most frames were the by product of industrial labor, done by people with little autonomy, low wages, no creative input... the human element was already highly concentrated among a very small elite, and, the majority of the labor pool was treated as mechanical/replaceable input. "seeing that a human created this inspired the wish to create in yourself." Sure, but, it's not reeeaaally “a human did it.” It is more “a small number of visible artists did it.”
But nevertheless, a human did still do it. How gruelling and exploitative the process was, or how many humans it took, is beside the point. The fact that the image existed meant that there was an attainable skill that a person could learn in order to do that same thing, and that was inspiring.
Since the days of cave paintings, that experience has been available to all humans. In the year 2025, it died, and I will never experience it again.
I would be interested in a book telling the history of cinema and animation that you describe
https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Line-Untold-Animation-Simpson... and https://archive.org/details/hollywoodcartoon00barr
I get it, but it also doesn't matter. I liked anime when it was drawn by hand because I liked looking at all the things people could draw. But it doesn't matter what I like; virtually all anime is now rendered from 3d computer models, particularly any sort of machinery or whenever the camera rotates or transforms in space showing off the 3d structure of things. That stuff used to be drawn by hand but now nobody does that. It's not coming back.
Good film making is good film making. I am a creative. I incorporate AI into videos that I make subtly and with a huge amount of care. I know I put more time and care into my craft than most others.
Nobody knows what involved AI and what didn’t. At the end of the day, if you care about your work, it shows.
I can almost see your point, but there are two big problems:
1) To date, there has been no example of AI that is good. It's not even close.
And 2) Why should I be interested in a story nobody was interested in telling? If you don't want to make a video, or tell a story, or write a song, then...just don't. Why even have an AI do it?
"1) To date, there has been no example of AI that is good. It's not even close."
It's because you haven't noticed. It's an observability bias.
Don't you think some AI company that's able to make good content would want to show that off?
It's wild that you would make this claim without taking a few seconds to drop a link. It's such a substantial, controversial claim, it really needs some kind of evidence.
what if you write the story yourself, and use AI only to visualize it?
If that interests you, fine. I have no interest in doing that.
What does a visualization being to the table over a book, if it's executed in the most generic way possible? The decisions made when adapting one medium to another are what does or doesn't make it worthwhile.
Unless your goal is purely to capture people who don't and won't read, as cheaply and cynically as possible.
there is a big difference between sending the story to the AI and saying "visualize this" vs carefully describing exactly how the visualization should look like and effectively only using the AI to render your vision.
Is there a big difference? There might be in process, but I've yet to be impressed by one in results.
well the question is rather, what is the difference of AI use vs say a 3D modelling application?
assuming you have the 3D assets already designed. you then take a model, and instruct the application that this model is to move from point A to point B, using a pathfinding algorithm while avoiding obstacles. once done, render the result in a video.
now do the same with AI. is the human contribution really that much different?
I think the objections with AI will change based on the quality of the AI generated work. What people don't want is to wade through a million gallons of poorly generated slop to see one good movie. They also don't want to have to deal with thousands of zero effort AI videos just to find one good video generated by a human being.
If the actual result of AI is an unlimited supply of adequate media personalized to our tastes, I don't foresee there being any objection. Right now, it's honestly just shovelware on a scale that hasn't been seen before. No one likes shovelware except maybe toddlers.
>I care about good, tight story telling.
Agreed, wake me when that happens.
If we ever get to that point...im still ambivalent. I also get exposed to media to form community. And Ai very explicly wants to tear down communities and create a factory of slop. Even if we can get some good Ai storytelling, I'm not sure if a tree fighting the flood is enough. It's going to topple eventually as the roots get washed out
>In the case of this ad.. it’s okay?
I thought it was cute. I can nitpick, but it gave a feeling of family and community, and how you can't form that by devouring your peers.
The McDonald's ad meanwhile : "the world's going to shit, use McDonald's as your apocalypse bunker! (no loitering tho)". Heck, it feels like the kind of ad Fallout or Outer Worlds would make on an in-game TV.
CGI is still bad tbh. Look at all the boring stuff produced for Marvel.
You are framing it as "this technological advancement is being thought of as bad because we always think of new technological advancements as bad". AI is bad because of all the ways in which it is objectively bad.
You cold find plenty of people complaining about CGI up to earlier this year.
Computers are bad, unless used by exactly the necessary measure to add to the story. Then they are great. But most movies don't do that, and you can see the actors not reacting to the scenes they are in because they have no idea what's actually happening.
The same will probably happen to AI, with also most people overdoing it and making bad stuff. Forever.
It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out.
I may be wrong, but I get the sense that computer art was welcomed by people actually working in the field (did professionals criticize the computer graphics in Star Wars or Wrath of Khan?) and it was mostly the lay public that saw it as somehow not real. The opposite seems to be true for AI "art."
> It seems fundamentally different to put in a ton of work building 3D models, putting together scenes, etc., versus typing a description into a text box and seeing what pops out.
People at the time also said using a computer was fundamentally different from putting in a ton of work into building physical models.
A lot of tech adoption is motivated by economics, so the argument that "before it was more work, now it's less work" will almost always apply regardless of the specifics. I don't think it's a useful thing to focus on. It's almost a moral argument: I deserve it because I suffered for it, but he did it easy so he doesn't deserve it.
In fact, I would even go further. I would say it's part of the definition of technology. What is technology? Technology is a thing or an idea, created or discovered, that makes work easier and/or cheaper.
I agree that it's not useful if we're looking at practical stuff. It doesn't matter to me if my table was built with ten hours of human work, or ten seconds.
But for creative work? I think it matters a lot. You used the phrase "creating art." I don't think it counts as "creating" if there's no work going into it. Typing some words into a prompt box and getting a video out is not "creating," any more than doing an image search and printing out an image of a painting is creating a painting.
Printers are extremely useful devices, but they don't create art.
but there are subtle signs that the old ways made art different
people do more practical effects, they also miss the era of physical set filming[0], i personally am bored seeing the latest gpu able to create gazillions of whatever because i got the memo, gpu can do everything.. i get more magic seeing what people did with very few
don't get fooled by the "people reject evolution every time"
[0] technology can distort the focus onto the tool out of the art, films before had to arbitrate between various tricks to get a scene to work, now apparently people don't. they film bits and postprocess everything later, the tech allows infinite changes, but the cake has no taste
The core difference is in the amount of intentional decisions being made by the artist. A prompt, no matter how specific, still delegates a lot of work to what is essentially chance. Something like Blender does make it easier to do certain things, but you still have to actively choose to do them. This is why AI-slop, no matter how detailed, will always feel off. It lacks the deliberateness of a human artist who knows exactly what they're doing and why at every level.
Did the Wrath of Khan have any CGI? The only scenes I remember are the jarringly bad computer displays at various points on the Enterprise. If I recall correctly, the rest of the movie used traditional VFX: models, compositing, etc. I personally find the battle scenes in that movie-- particularly the nebula scene-- to be beautiful and one of the space battle scenes ever. Despite what others think, I also think that the first Star Trek movie is both a technical and narrative masterpiece, so YMMV.
The Genesis effect sequence was completely CGI.
Thanks, somehow I forgot about that scene. Pretty great by 1982 standards… a little lame by modern standards, although I could imagine that this is exactly the kind of snazzy but low-res simulation a scientist of the future might generate.
AI is threatening to remove humans from the whole equation except the very top. AI is an existential threat (not in the Terminator sense).
Especially for art, I'm an AI researcher myself (in bio for health), but I think that ppl are completely understandable for wanting to help artists make a living and want to consume something that someone cared about
It's urban myth. Tron was not disqualified because they used computers, it wasn't nominated because it looked terrible.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190105145419/https://www.sfgat...
has the director saying it though.
Lisberger recounts. "We did all those effects in about seven months, which included inventing the techniques." "Tron," however, wasn't nominated for a special-effects Oscar. "The Academy thought we cheated by using computers," he scoffs.
Writer and director Steven Lisberger made that claim in interviews, so I wouldn't quite call it an urban myth.
As far as I know, any film can be submitted for Academy Award consideration in any category, then an executive committee determines the eligibility of each submission and chooses up to 20 films to move onto the nomination process.
I don't think this committee publishes anything about its decision-making process, so presumably Lisberger is just guessing based on his impression of industry sentiment at the time.
366k views in 4 days hardly qualifies as a worldwide hit. It's decent, but other ads saw more views faster this year, like that American Eagle ad with Sweeney.
It's hard to measure on Youtube due to the weight of paid views but still.
Anyway, it's a cute ad.
I think it mostly blew up via unofficial reposts, since that original version was in French without subtitles.
This one copy on X has 27 million views after 2 days: https://x.com/pawcord/status/1998361498713038874
Ok thanks, this changes things! X exagerates how it counts views but overall I do believe millions saw it.
It's a cute ad all but as a French kid I used to see similar things often, we have a good culture of animation. Is "they didn't use AI" really a criteria now?
Advertising that you didn't use AI is definitely a thing now. But this is more likely a jab at the recent McDonalds ad, which did use AI, and which the agency who made the ad vigorously defended the use of AI (hilariously, by bragging about how many hours it took to make that ad).
> vigorously defended the use of AI (hilariously, by bragging about how many hours it took to make that ad).
Likewise with the Coca Cola ad, the agency said in their defense that they had to sift through 70,000 video generations to assemble the few dozen shots in the final ad. And after all that sifting they still couldn't get the one element of continuity (the Coke truck) to look consistent from shot to shot, and had to manually composite over all of the Coke logos since the model kept mangling them.
I feel like there are subcultures that value "long hours and hard work" over "result".
If you can produce great things easily, then it is lazy. But if worked hours and hours including through Christmans, then it is great even if result is crap.
The only mention of AI is the editorialized title in the HN submission, I don't see any mention at all in the ad or the video description. This ad does not appear to be a reaction to anything.
It's reactions to reactions. Low quality type of engagement, similar to why people complain about AI.
That’s hilarious. I had cursory familiarity with the McDonald’s situation but did not know thread agency aspect. I’d be very curious how many “hours” were spent minus the inference time.
> Is "they didn't use AI" really a criteria now?
Absolutely. Have you been living under a rock? /jk ;-)
I don't watch TV and use ad-blockers on my devices so I don't have a clue of what ads look like nowadays.
And given how people are praising this one (that looks exactly like the ones I was used to growing up) I can only guess that the situation must be awful.
> that looks exactly like the ones I was used to growing up
Unless you’re so young you just finished growing up, I find that unlikely. Sure, this ad isn’t visually revolutionary by today’s standards (nor does it need to be; it’s an ad, it’s not being played in theatres before the next Disney movie), but it’s still competent and has a ton of detail which surpasses earlier Pixar pictures.
I think that comment is in response to McDonalds recent AI-slop-ad.
And Coca Cola
Source: Montpellier company: https://www.illogicstudios.com/
Interesting, especially as the city is also host to some of the best gaming developers.
Great ad, but is it a confirmation that fishes have no soul?
In France, fish isn't usually considered "meat" (viande).
In my child's school, there are only three dietary choices for the kids who eat at the canteen:
* No pork / sans porc (for the muslim or jewish children)
* No meat / sans viande (but there's still fish!)
* Everything
Becoming vegetarian caused my French-Canadian grandmother some dismay. She asked me what I wanted for dinner. I said "no meat" and she replied "ok, we'll eat chicken." I was like, "oh, uh, no animals" and she said "fine, we'll have fish." I finally had to say "ONLY VEGETABLES." Her response was "don't you feel weak all the time?"
Once I brought my favorite tofu to my grandmother so she can try it. She reacted with "I'm against tofu". She's agains basically anything culturally imported after here birth, no problems with potatoes, tomatoes and corn indeed.
Most people who do not have the ideological inclination are against tofu. Not because it is imported or anything, but because it doesn't taste good and has a terrible texture. Even the people who originally ate it in Asia are switching up to more meat as they become richer.
I have vegan/vegetarian friends, one of whom is a chef and worked at a pretty good vegan restaurant, and not once have I eaten tofu that I would like to eat again. It's just bad, but it's one of the cheapest and most convenient ways to get your proteins on a vegan diet, so that's that.
As a non-vegetarian, I have eaten very bland tofu, and I have eaten really excellent tofu.
I think the big thing about tofu is that it takes a lot of effort to make it of the excellent kind, so very often you end up with the bland one.
I have had silken tofu that was pretty decent. But I would only eat it if there was no other option. The vegan restaurant I talked about had an excellent bean/chickpea-based burger that was actually wonderful. That I would like to eat, no question about it. But it was insanely expensive because it took so much effort and so many ingredients/processes (they showed me the recipe; it's crazy how long that took). In the end, my pleasure from eating that isn't superior to a regular, much cheaper burger. Which is why it always ends up in a precarious moral argument.
As far as I'm concerned, veganism is an ideology for the affluent that allows them to express their perceived superiority, moral or otherwise.
This is weird, most vegan I know spend less than with meat : beans, peas and lentils are bargain and tofu as well. Even local-organic quinoa is the about the same price as the cheapest chicken once watered. Of course there’s fancy expensive restaurants with a different price/taste ratio but that’s not specific to plant based food.
Yes, if you cook everything yourself, it can definitely be less expensive. But not really if you use tofu or any other ready-made meat protein replacement. In my region, tofu is actually pricier than many animal meats. For example, it costs more than chicken thighs and around the price of cheap canned tuna (those are often less expensive when bought in bulk and with deals as well).
And if you compute for cost per protein, it is absolutely much pricier. For example, at my local drive, tofu is about 24g of protein per euro, and chicken thighs are 40g of protein per euro. More premium parts of meat are pricier, but then they are not really comparable in terms of protein/nutrition (you need to add tons of stuff to the tofu to be an equivalent).
I'm sure one can find some better deals on tofu and meat replacements somewhere, but the point is that they are not generally available and not very cost competitive. My vegan friend, who was very stingy, had the strategy of only buying the vegan meat replacement stuff when it was on clearance because it was at the expiry date (for some vegans, there is definitely a cheapskate aspect).
But this is not surprising when you learn about how those things are made and how many resources they require. They actually require a lot of processing, a lot of water, and a lot of energy to get made. Add to that the laws of supply and demand, and the economics are pretty bad.
When it comes to restaurants, all the vegetarian/vegan ones are of the fancy/expensive kind; there is just no other way to make the economics work considering the high amount of manual labor involved. This is why you can get a decent “classic” burger for 10-15€, while a vegan one will run you at least 20 €.
However, as you said, it can be cheaper if you cook everything yourself and only buy stuff like beans, chickpeas, lentils, quinoa, etc. But you pay in another way: with your time, manual labor, and energy for cooking/processing. All those things take forever to cook (and often need to be pre-soaked), require combining to get a full protein panel, and also necessitate the addition of expensive fats to be any good (nuts, olive oil, and the like). And after all that, you'll get something that still doesn't taste as good as any random meat that you prepared in 5 min in a pan, simply accompanied with pasta/bread/rice, whatever carbs you like.
If you wonder how I know all of that, it's because I did the work. I actually make a mean hummus for my vegetarian friends that I managed to sell at a very typical meat-eating restaurant (it was popular as a starter on grilled bread with pickles). And I have many other vegetarian-friendly recipes. But most people have to deal with pretty bad flatulence/bloating and all kinds of digestive problems like that. I could never make it work for myself, even after following the diet for months at a time. And if you actually compute the cost and value your time above zero, it makes absolutely no sense, before even talking about any of the pleasure aspect of food.
The reality is, as we moved up the value chain, we delegated the complex and time-consuming aspects of protein production to animals. We have built a very efficient system around it, and it saves time as well as provides pleasure to humans. If the vegan alternative were competitive, they would have come up with something as convenient and economical by now. But it is not the case, and the same thing can be applied to lab-grown meat. I will add that animals do not provide only meat; we use basically every part of them for different things, so the typical vegan argument of animal farming being wasteful is completely bonkers (if the economics were not enough in the first place).
Which is why they systematically focus on morals and have a very annoying proselytizing behavior. But you can't really shame most people into a behavior; they first and foremost protect their interests. Naturally, most people are not convinced, and even if they can't make the argument for a lack of knowledge/skill, they “know”.
I associate veganism with highly religious behavior, and it is clear to me that there is a lot of self-loathing in those I know. It is similar to the self-flagellation of Catholics in a way. I consider it to be a dangerous ideology because it only leads to lower living standards: time-poor and pleasureless. I think that those people want everyone to suffer as badly as them and thus put the “well-being” of animals above those of their fellow humans. That's pretty dumb to begin with, because I can readily observe in my countryside that you can produce meat in a respectful manner. The alternative to industrial factory farming is not going for the other extreme of veganism.
Please excuse the rant, but I have suffered the moralization and scolding of one too many vegans, and this is actually what sent me on the research path. The funny thing is that I would be vegan if it made any sense, but alas, it is not the case, and having fled the church, I would rather not have another form of zealotry become popular. The hilarious part is that technically meat-eaters could be considered nasty to animals, but the vegans are often nastier to their fellow humans, short of killing them outright. Anyone who knows the behavior of your typical church lady can probably relate to some extent.
If you eat only vegetables then you are vegan, not vegetarian.
In the Venn diagram of eating, vegans are a subset of vegetarians.
But the film mentioned "if you didn't you eat everyone", it wasn't talking about meat.
"Everyone" can reasonably be understood to only apply to "people/animals like those present here"
If we're pedantic on the phrasing, the wolf could have already satisfied the demand by keeping a meat-based diet that simply excluded hedgehogs. Then he wouldn't eat everyone, just those who aren't a hedgehog. But the spirit of the complaint was clearly "everyone here is running away because they are personally afraid of being eaten". Which only included mammals and maybe some birds
Well, France is just incorrect on that one.
Jezus also ate fish
Theres a fascinating recent (free) movie that develop the theory of Jesus avoiding eating other animals. Theology is a very special discipline that embrace all at once history, human psychology and strong lobbies. Not easy to propose alternative lectures of the bible but I think this one have a great point.
https://christspiracy.com/
I don’t know her
Jesus also ate lamb as part of observing Passover
And?
Frutti di mare is fruit of the sea. Fish is flora. QED.
Intermarché owns the biggest fishing org in Franche (Scapêche), so they can't tell their customers to stop eating fish!
I think they were the one with the worst record in responsible fishing (the one where you drag nets on the sea floor)
It’s okay to eat fish because they don’t have any feelings.
My mind also immediately went to this lyric.
That's the point that made me laugh out loud yeah
Everywhere there are talking animals fish are never considered to be sentient :) Think of all the cartoons and movies (except those specifically about fish).
Apparently fish aren't animals. :)
Everyone keeps making religious connections, but it’s worth pointing out linguistically most countries in Europe (and the world) refer to red meat, poultry, and seafood as entirely separate. Meat often just refers to red meat. English is in the minority to bucket them all under “meat”
Not to mention that loads of people detour through pescetarianism on their way to vegetarianism. But even if you stop at pescetarianism that's still a wild improvement on plenty of metrics over eating other meats.
There seems to be this pressure to either go fully vegetarian or it doesn't count, which is obviously total nonsense.
> There seems to be this pressure to either go fully vegetarian or it doesn't count, which is obviously total nonsense.
Hard agree. It’s counterproductive to have that view, even, and it’s why many people give up on vegetarianism (“I wasn’t able to go all in cold turkey, so it isn’t for me and I’ll revert completely”).
Yup, a friend's wife used to be a vegetarian. The occasional chicken for dinner never put a dent in that self-assessment.
Probably because flesh fell out of fashion?
From a story point or view it makes sense. Why try to please those not present at Christmas table.
If the table was filled with carrots as guests, do you think the rabbits would be invited? The original wolf would.
I know, I know, it is about bettering yourself.
The wolf wasn't trying to be vegetarian, he was trying to not have the forest creatures run away from him. He achieved his goal by not eating them.
Maybe they did that because the Intermarche makes more on fish than on meat.
Intermarché owns a massive fleet of fishing boats. That could explain this.
Right? I think it’s a christian thing. There’s gotta be something about eating fish being okay in their bible because the amount of times I heard “fish aren’t meat”
Christians are allowed to eat all food. Only Christ is what saves. (Mark 7:19)
But the fish / meat / etc is a tradition thing, so it comes from the culture surrounding the Christian, and probably more relating to Jewish history more than anything
I was told by my teacher as a kid that traditional Catholics used to believe that if you didn't eat fish on Fridays, you'd go to Hell. I wonder if that was true?
You don't have to eat fish, you just have to avoid poultry and red meat. The intent was sacrifice as penance for sins. And in the US and some other countries, it's really only mentioned during Lent (Ash Wednesday to the day before Easter); the rest of the year, it's encouraged to do that or some other form of penance, but everyone ignores it.
"The term [meat] is sometimes used in a more restrictive sense to mean the flesh of mammalian species (pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, etc.) raised and prepared for human consumption, to the exclusion of fish, other seafood, insects, poultry, or other animals."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat#Etymology
Fun fact: in various contexts and languages, rabbits are sometimes considered poultry despite being mammals.
ah of course, everybody knows the reptile chicken is not meat
I think it's just a general apathy in the general population about knowing the difference. "Meat" is pig, cow, horse, rabbit, elephant or whatever, "fish" is fish meat. At a restaurant you could ask if a salad has any meat, they say no, and when it arrives, it has tiny pieces of bacon because "oh but that's almost nothing, certainly not \"meat\"".
Whaaaat! definitely not in the US haha, at last not the the major cities I guess.
It's some good ol' catholic rules bending.
During lent, you weren't supposed to eat meat as part of your fast. However, not eating meat is... not as enjoyable as eating meat, so they basically declared that fish doesn't count as meat so they could eat it without breaking the fast.
For similar reasons, they also declared beavers to be fish later on.
Where I'm from, they just hide the meat in dumplings to eat on Fridays. No way God could ever see through that ruse!
Except that's not how it happened. Lent was someting that took several centuries to occur in any form, and what was allowed and what was prohibited varied greatly for long after. Fish and shellfish from the start were allowed more often than things like butter, oil, or wine.
France is waaaaay less religious than the US.
But it is getting on track. Just not with the previous religion.
Even with 5 “a” it's still an understatement.
I just got a pair of AirPods Pro 3 and have been looking for a way to use for Live Translation of a language other than Spanish.
I don't feel like I 100% needed to hear the English translation, because the animation tells the story almost without words. But it was a bit more interesting to have my AirPods tell me bits of the words exchanged between the adults and the boy, leading into and out of the video.
Very cute, and full of humorous touches. Worth sharing, for a change (when compared to the vast majority of ads).
The best, imo, is the Corona one
https://youtu.be/AhTM4SA1cCY?si=DVczeTNpaomkB1y0
(That's the extended version for some extra calm).
I do not like the beer, but they nailed what I want for Christmas
Ehm, so I clicked on 4 random timestamps throughout the hour. Is anything supposed to happen? How is this relayed to the OP?
The little tail wag as he brought his bounty to the table was a nice touch (my fav in fact), and something that AI might have missed.
I have strong Tawney Scrawny Lion and Un loup dans le potager vibes from this commercial. Delightful.
Exactly what I thought of. I used to love the Tawny Scrawny Lion when I was a kid.
I am amazed that a French supermarket selling food is advertising switching to vegetables rather than meat and milk! What a time to be alive
Well all supermarkets here sell vegatables and many of them also sell fish ... And I see nothing about stopping milk consumption in this ad ?
There are usually 10 aisles of meat/meat-related products, and 1/2 aisle of "not meat" products (exaggerated to make my point.) Meat and dairy lobbies are very strong in France, and it's obvious from ads/store aisles.
So I'm pleasantly surprised to see an ad from a French supermarket that is not trying to sell you more turkey, sausage, and beef for Christmas but rather focuses on vegetables.
What do you mean? The will be an aisle with ham, sausage etc, and a butchery. There will be one for canned food, which will include some tuna, cassoulet and raviolis.
In my SuperU meat is not overly present.
The supermarkets I use aren’t like yours then.
There is way more surface dedicated to meat and dairy than to their alternatives. Typically it’s rows of freezers and fridges for meat and dairy, and a third of an alley for alternatives.
Ah, I misunderstood your comment, sorry. I thought you were comparing meat & dairy to anything else (vegs, canned, ...).
Yes, there are not many alternatives, half an alley in my case.
Hehe. People have "AI" fatigue (I'll include myself there, too), not only because AI content "feels" soulless, but also because the looming job displacement narrative, exacerbated by CEOs, VCs, etc. There'll be a big consumer pushback against companies using AI to lay off employees, etc
It's not just soulless, it's plain ugly. You'd think with their budget these companies would try harder.
It drives me mad to see that companies use AI to make garbage for 1/10th of the cost instead of just leveraging it to halve the cost while not losing quality…
>There'll be a big consumer pushback against companies using AI to lay off employees, etc
No there won't. Same how there was no consumer pushback when everything from your Nikes to Apple computers moved to be made in China by slave labor and gutted your manufacturing industry at the same time while consumers and shareholders cheered.
Consumers only care about value for money not where or how a product is made. People's morals go out the window when their hard earned paycheque is on the line. Capitalist competition is dehumanizing by nature. The only thing that can help maintain humanity is government regulation because expecting consumers to prioritize morality over price has always failed.
If AI companies give consumers the same product but cheaper, they'll win.
Interesting. I agree with you that consumers prioritize price over morality, but not when their livelihood is directly or indirectly negatively affected by AI, and the people are starting to notice it.
>but not when their livelihood is directly or indirectly negatively affected by AI, and the people are starting to notice it.
And do what about it? People don't give a shit AI is replacing creators jobs same how people didn't give a shit automation or offshoring replaced blue collar jobs. Literally nobody cared when the actors and writers went on strike so nobody will care when they'll be replaced by AI.
Especially when the quality of human made entertainment has been on a steep decline over the last 10 years consumers will even cheer to see them replaced same how they cheered when they could buy higher quality Japanese made cars at lower prices.
> I agree with you that consumers prioritize price over morality, but not when their livelihood is directly or indirectly negatively affected by AI...
No consumer complained 15 years ago when the VFX industry in LA was outsourced to Vancouver and London due to subsidizes [0], and no consumer complained when VFX in Vancouver or London was outsourced to India and China over the last 5 years. No one will complain when VFX studios leverage AI to create content and then maybe have around 20-30% of the remaining humans edit videos to be humanlike.
Ironically, the Trump admin proposed a tariff that would help bring VFX back to the US [1] but the same consumers who on here are complaining about AI and Offshoring are the same ones who opposed such a tariff. Of course, if the Biden or a hypothetical Harris admin did something similar, they would also be flamed severely.
And thus the cycle continues. You all will keep complaining, but will keep purchasing from Costco, Trader Joe's, Patagonia, etc, will keep consuming content from one of the handful of companies that have consolidated media, and will remain employed by tech companies that in some shape or form continue to help maintain this cycle.
Statistically speaking, the demographic on HN told blue collar workers in 2009-17 to "learn to code". Why should they have sympathy for you? And thus the cycle continues.
[0] - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-feb-01-la-fi-ct...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-impose-100...
>Ironically, the Trump admin proposed a tariff that would help bring VFX back to the US [1]
Why ironically? Tarifs to protect some US Industries were part of his campaign promises. We're people living under a rock till now?
With the rest of your comment I agree 100%. Replacement of expensive US jobs will continue tarifs or not.
It's the downside of being the world reserve currency. Labor is too expensive to be globally competitive outside mega specialized and highly profitable niches like big tech and AI or protected industries like defense.
> Why ironically
Because it's an industry with an avaowed opposition to Trump and it's members are not in his voting bloc. A major reason the policy has been pushed was because of the Teamsters (which the Motion Pictures Union is a part of) lobbied the Trump admin due to Sean O'Brien's close ties to Trump.
Very cute and charming ad, the tail wagging at the end was great
The fish are realistic, and not cutsey cartoon animals, and so the wolf can eat those.
Where did the wolf get all the dairy products needed for all that rich French cuisine? This ad raises more questions than it answers.
The advertised grocery store, perhaps?
Then where did he get the money!
Are they suggesting fish are vegetables or are these just mammal exclusionaries?
Honestly I think the reason the ad is so popular is because at the end, the look that the wife gives to the husband is precisely what every man wants in his life.
I remember a french comic called Le loup en slip (literally the wolf in underwear), was it by any chance made by the same artists? Both the style and story have a lot in common.
Interesting to me is the fact the supermarkets in France encourage you to buy more veggies.
We have the "5 fruit and vegs per day" ingrained since birth (for au least 25 years now). People buy these and if you have z supermarket you want to show that you have good vegs.
En même temps, si tu mangeais pas tout le fichier ...
Je suis un lex, q'est ce que tu veux que je mange?
and by worldwide hit, do they mean europe and few americans?
its not a bad ad, but nothing about it is worldwide
C'est bon! Charming video.
No matter how the ad is made, it is still an ad. What's probably more important is the message. And this one was dumb as a message and as a real bad advice contributing to the increasingly brainless population who nowadays believes they can go into woods and everything there is friendly if you smile enough.
> No matter how the ad is made, it is still an ad
I disagree. An ad is always an ad. But it can also be art. This ad has artistic merit, and I think people are reacting to that.
Damn, those forest animals really hate their fellow fish!
Did I just watch Zootopia? En Francais?
So anything animated with animals is Zootopia for you ?
No, but a fox not eating other animals does not remind you of Zootopia?
cute ad. Too bad wolves are hypercarnivores. They won't survive without a heavy-meat diet
They are not https://wolf.org/wolf-info/basic-wolf-info/biology-and-behav...
It's so blatantly obvious there is no AI involved here as you can feel the animation. The sentiment behind everything hits so different to AI. I feel that's what AI sycophants seem to always miss.
I really believe AI will never match the real feeling from created art, but I also don't know why we NEED/WANT it to. It's not a race to the bottom. But AI usage will increase until shareholder value increases.
People who make and enjoy AI art obviously engage with art in a completely different way. To me and many others, it's so instantly offputting and repulsive.
[dead]
Ah yes. The christmas ad that has nothing to do with christmas. There's also a fish dish the wolf makes... great attention to detail there.
The family were sitting around the table eating dinner while the kids was getting a story read to him about the present he just received. Nothing Christmasy about that at all.
It is all about Christmas and New Year: cooking good healthy food for the extended family, and new year's resolutions.
The ad illustrates the Christmas spirit and fish is a Christian religious symbol and actually traditional at Christmas in some countries and areas. I don't know if they did it on purpose in this ad or just because it would obviously not have worked for the wolf to bring a meat dish.
I was confused because one of the characters tells the wolf he might have more friends if he didn't go around killing animals all the time. Then the wolf starts making vegetarian dishes, and I thought, okay, they're promoting vegetarianism. Great. But then later the wolf is killing fish, and that's ...okay I guess because they don't talk or walk like the other animals? The speciesism hit hard.
"Fish meat is practically a vegetable" --Ron Swanson
The video itself might not be generated, but who knows about the script (quite generic Christmas Carol, Shrek, Wolf trope), the character design, the models, the animations, etc?
edit: getting downvoted to hell, but I think my question is valid. What does it mean "no AI"? Are we just limiting ourselves to the render?
> What does it mean "no AI"?
It means no AI. If I say you used no AI but had an LLM write or refine the script, I would have lied.
You may be getting downvoted because your comment's tone can read as accusatively presumptive. "Who knows" isn't a useful contribution to almost any discussion. Which is a shame, because you raise an interesting point–I would personally feel fine saying no AI was used to do work even if I used AI to help me with research. (Provided I read all the primary sources.)
I think he's right. We have no idea if AI contributed to the ad in any way, so "no AI" in this context only means "not AI-rendered". The entire script might have been written by an LLM (which is perfectly fine by me).
On the other hand, the McDonald's ad is obviously AI-rendered, but all the concepts and prompts and choices might have been made by humans? Which doesn't make it any better (although it's not that bad, it's just average).
As a wolf, I find this advertisement very offensive to carnitarians. Prey animals were clearly made for our use and enjoyment, and the idea of some sort of multi-special gathering, finding a least common denominator in the predation of pescids (simply absurd for a canid), is insulting to our way of life and frankly racist.
Actually, some wolves are mostly pescetarian https://www.dangerrangerbear.com/the-sea-wolf/ ;)
Whoa! 7.5 miles is a long swim. Thanks for the interesting article. Just so you know, that article says “During the salmon and herring spawning seasons, nearly one-quarter of this coastal wolf’s diet is fish” so I don’t think it supports your claim, exactly.
Major pet peeve of mine is when people unironically spread literal advertisements, whether it's because they're "cute" or people are outraged at them or whatever it may be.
The ad is doing it on purpose. It is literally manipulating you and you are spreading the malicious influence to other people. It's not AI but it sure is 'slop'. Propaganda, even.
...slopagada
It's an ad by a grocery store advocating healthy eating and inclusion.
I think people will make reasonable decisions about whether or not to purchase food this winter with or without the "malicious influence" of these ads.
The irony is that Christmas is the time for unhealthy eating but is it still allowed to show in ads?
Personally I interpreted the fish as either a timely Christian symbol (and fish at Christmas is traditional in some places) or simply because a meat dish would not have worked in context.
I want my grocery store to sell me the things I want to eat. The grocery store trying to manipulate me into a different lifestyle is highly dystopian.
True the vast majority of the time. This ad though doesn’t promote anything malicious. It’s a cute story with the message “eat healthy stuff like vegetables and fish”, with a brand name/ logo at the very end.
You think the company went "ah forget about profit, we'll spend our money for the good of the people"?
The company is virtue signaling, pandering, and you're falling for it. Jesus Christ.
> The company is virtue signaling
It is true!
And as a (very occasional) customer, I like that this company is signalling that it does not oppose inclusion and doesn't mind questioning "traditional values" (the wolf eating animals).
Many actors these days (both companies and political figures) are very much signalling the contrary, so some kind of signalling is absolutely useful.
> The company is virtue signaling
Is that the way people say "advertising" these days?
Bah! Humbug!
"You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss."
Enjoy your simulated steak.
The supermarket does sell actual food here. That is a thing that they do.
This time of year, cinemas show Christmas commercials, such as this one, but two or three in a row.
It becomes funny how hard they try to move us. And in the end it's just for a supermarket.
It is possible to have art and artist be separate things; to acknowledge that that reason a thing was created and/or who it was created by can be looked at separately from the thing itself. This commercial was fun to watch. The Budweiser horse commercials are also fun to watch. But enjoying them has very little to do with a choice to support the creator.
The "malicious influence" being (checks notes) spreading propaganda in favor of pescatarianism and healthy natural eating?
The best ad for diversity and inclusion I've seen so far.
It is a wholesome ad, but as I don't care that my shoes are handmade, I also don't care if the supermarket ad is without AI.
There are people who do care about both. Does that bother you?
I'm ok with people caring about whatever they want. What I dislike is people trying to create artificial groups. Like "pro AI" and "anti AI" then try to sell them shit because now this is part of their tribe.
You can also just skip advertising to whole world about what you dislike, and your projected dislikes of whatever else you need to comment on, unrelated to original topic of a simple ad for enjoying Christmas with others regardless of your origins while eating well. Nobody here is doing anything you complain about.
People really don't care that much, especially when for something positive, original and funny somebody grumpy comes along and tries to drag discussion down their misery pit.
As someone who wrote two paragraphs about why they dislike my comment, I don't think you see the irony here. Also speaking about enjoying Christmas then doing an ad hominem in the next sentence, very nice mental gymnastics.
Snarky comments won't get you far in life... ever thought about directing that negativity into something simply better, ie creative?
ad hominem -> ok
snarky comments -> not ok
got it, ever thought about going into politics?
There was controversy because of a Mcdonald's AI ad recently so I think they say that as a little wink.
You will when all the artists starve.
The artists will use AI. Artists have always used new media when it became available, AI will not change that.
I don't think so. Not the ones that will matter at least. Anything that looks or feels even a little bit like AI goes on the dung heap now, even if it was just made by a human that spends so much of their time working with LLMs that they have completely regressed to the mean
700,000 thousand views in 5 days.
"worldwide hit"
Please make white peoples'* astroturfing great again.
* I include Ashkenazi Jews in this category, in case anyone cares.
23Million on twitter. Link in one of the parent comments.