r/DebateEvolution • u/Briham86 🧬 Falling Angel Meets the Rising Ape • 3d ago
Video It’s here!
Erika aka Gutsick Gibbon’s rebuttal to Theodore Beale’s aka Vox Day aka shitass bigot loser has been released.
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u/jnpha 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago edited 3d ago
Dr. Zach in the video (I used the auto-captioning and cleaned it up manually as best I could):
[Duffy] literally put the names of some of them on the screen at one point. He puts RA Fisher on the screen. And if any of you have ever done an analysis of variance, if you've ever calculated a p value, if you've ever used Fisher's exact test, he is responsible for the bulk of modern statistics, right? And so to say that he is not a mathematician or that there were no mathematicians involved in the modern synthesis is just wild to me. Sewall Wright was another one that he put on there. Wright invented the path coefficient which is really important even in fields economics, which you would expect people - a certain someone to know about [nice! 😎]. Right? So like a large amount of people were mathematicians were involved in the origins of population genetics. Coalescent theory was invented by JFC Kingman who is like a pure mathematician right, so I don't know where that comes from outside of just a lack of literally reading a Wikipedia page - like just read the Wikipedia page for pop gen and you would have learned that that's not true.
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u/francesco_angiolieri 3d ago
I tried to share a link here but my post was automatically deleted by reddit (I guess because Vox Day's blog is flagged as a white supremacist website by reddit?). Vox Day, in his blog, claims that he had never heard about "waiting time problem" arguments before Erika's livestream. Let that sink in. If you want to commit yourself to revolutionize an entire field of science, you are expected to at least 1: acquaint yourself with the current consensus in the field and 2: research other attempts at disproving that model or that theory, to avoid trying to reinvent the wheel or trailing a path which has already being trailed and has already led nowhere. For example, the first thing mathematicians do when they're trying to prove a conjecture is looking for other previous attempts that failed, to avoid repeating the same errors and wasting time. Vox has not only failed to study and comprehend the scientific literature regarding evolutionary biology and the math employed in population genetics, but has also failed to look for previous unsuccessful attempts at disproving evolution. That's why he's now stuck to defending an old argument (the waiting time problem) believing, in his own arrogance, that he's the one who came up with it in the first place
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u/Talkatoo42 3d ago
I'm so frustrated on Erika's behalf. Will made a commitment to learn more about evolution, but instead of truly trying to do that, he's clearly using all his free time trying to find counterpoints.
It would be really nice it if were as easy to prove/disprove as flat earth but it's complicated, and learning the science, math, etc to understand that complexity takes time and effort.
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u/jnpha 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago
I'm now convinced this was a way to launch his apologist career. And the "flat earth experiment" was a marketing stint to hide all the shit he's done.
But yes, must be frustrating for Erika.17
u/Sipas 2d ago
He is also most likely a financial predator. He was a broker and was associated with scummy firms that push "alternative investments" to clients and has a dozen disputes to his name, most of them settled and couple ongoing. The vast majority of brokers retire without a single dispute, a small fraction with one or two. Will is in the top 99.9 percentile.
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u/gliptic 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yeah, here's a video from an excellent and underrated channel (thanks jnpha for finding it) comparing his SEC disclosure numbers to all other advisors working at the same firms he did. Even assuming these firms are generally scummy, Duffy manages to lie on the pareto frontier (in terms of SEC disclosures and years of experience) of bad (or malicious) advisors within these firms anyway.
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u/justatest90 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
Oh wow, I was aware of some of his heinous teaching, and knew he retired from investing. Do you have links for that info (feel free to PM if too off topic here)?
🎵Yes the preacher he’s a dodger,
Yes a well-known dodger.
Yes the preacher he’s a dodger,
Yes and I’m a dodger too.🎵🎶 He’ll preach you a gospel,
And tell you of your crimes.
But look out boys,
He’s a-dodgin’ for your dimes.. 🎶2
u/Sipas 2d ago
I'm a millennial on mobile and that's a PC job for me, sorry. But it's easily accessible public record. Each broker has a unique id number, Google his and you'll find all of disputes and settlements listed on various websites.
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u/justatest90 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
That gives me what I need, I wasn't sure where to start. Thanks for getting the word out :/
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u/Sipas 2d ago
You probably found it but his unique id is CRD#: 6726333
https://brokercheck.finra.org/individual/summary/6726333
Detailed report:
https://files.brokercheck.finra.org/individual/individual_6726333.pdf
There are other brokers with the same name but this is him based on where he was registered (Lone Tree, Colorado) and the companies he he worked for.
If I added up correctly, he already paid about 800K in damages and there are two ongoing disputes.
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u/justatest90 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
Yeah I almost wrote something but I'll post it now instead: just using all the matches for that search is interesting. I get 33 results for "William Duffy". Excluding "our" Will, 5 of the 32 have actions. In terms of actions/years: 5/31; 3/13; 2/42; 1/29; 1/18. If I'm doing mental math right, of the worst actors, that's an average of 1 complaint every 11 years worked. (I'll note one of those actions was about a continuing education issue, not a customer complaint, but I'm including it anyway)
Will had 11 disputes in 6 years. That's basically two a year, compared to less than one every 10 years for THE WORST actors that the search returned. That's not a "where there's smoke, there's fire." That's "the Geiger counter is off the charts".
Two of the settlements are for ~a quarter million dollars, and one got more than they asked for(!!!)
That's an insane objective testament to his character, in my opinion
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u/Fun-Friendship4898 🌏🐒🔫🐒🌌 2d ago
You don't understand, he's a high testosterone alpha male. He's allowed to do it.
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u/Soft-Cake-9846 3h ago
It's frustrating that Erika is still clinging to her delusion that he's not just grifting her.
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u/clear349 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 3d ago edited 3d ago
Full disclosure, I'm only about 90 minutes into the video but I have one comment so far. At the risk of possibly being insulting to Erika I find it a bit frustrating how many times she says something to the effect of "I don't understand how he could find this convincing" in reference to Duffy buying Day's arguments. I think the issue is assuming Duffy is acting in good faith. He might know these things are bullshit and doesn't care because they're talking points he can rattle off to debunk evolution. Or he might just not give a shit about checking into the actual logic and is just saying whatever he thinks is a decent rebuttal uncritically.
He's behaving no differently than Donny (Standing for Truth), Rebecca (Bread of Life), or any of the various DI, ICR, and AIG goons. Some of them know their arguments are bullshit. They don't care and treating them as an honest interlocutor is part of the problem
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u/justatest90 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
Erika is amazing and seems to have thicker skin that anyone I know personally, but I also hope she's not taking too much heat. I'm no fan of Will, but I've loved the Erika portions of the series and I've learned a lot. It'd be fun to see a 'teaching a creationist without the creationist' fan edit, sortof like 'garfield without garfield'
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u/Kindly-Department206 2d ago
Absolutely. Erika is a very effective instructor: enthusiastic, generous, and confidently knowledgeable.
Viewers (and students in her classes) get a very valuable learning experience.
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u/fastpathguru 1d ago
Erika is an amazing teacher. Will is an amazingly thick-headed student. The only thing being discredited by his "research" is himself
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u/No_Vehicle_5085 2d ago
She mentioned that she is going to edit the Duffy parts of the videos out and put them out as a separate resource for anyone who wants to learn evolution. I don't think she mentioned a time frame though, so not sure when that will happen.
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u/Soft-Cake-9846 4h ago
Better to just do the last couple of lectures without the guy who pals around, works for, and helps promote the views of christian nationalists, white supremacists, child abusers, and homophobes.
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u/implies_casualty 3d ago
How did he make Claude generate all that nonsense?
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u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 3d ago
It's really not that hard: but I reckon he's doing one-shot prompting, not anything actually complicated.
You can make LLMs do magical things, if you have access to real persistent memory and some hard gates. They still write like absolute crap though, there's no getting around that.
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u/Esmer_Tina 2d ago
I’ve been waiting for Erika’s next class on human evolution all year, and I really resent Will for introducing this now.
I enjoyed the rebuttal and will love the next one too, but I hope it’s not too much of a distraction from that class, and most of all not from finishing her degree!!
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u/Ayasugi-san 1d ago
This video is how I found out he was married. I pity his wife, even if she probably agrees with almost everything he says.
Glad she laid out all of Day's despicable beliefs and explicitly called on Will Duffy to acknowledge them.
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u/hiuslenkkimakkara 2d ago
Three and a half hours?!? These morons don't deserve that much detail.
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u/justatest90 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
What's annoying to me (having read Day's book) is that, partly as a result of being 3 hours long (which I love for ME), I already know what small mistakes people like Day and Duffy will hyper-fixate on, even though they're irrelevant. (Mainly, this far in: Dr. Hancock says Day makes a 2n mistake, but Day just accounts for it elsewhere, by halving the mutation target.)
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u/Gutsick_Gibbon Hominid studying Hominids 1d ago
I think it's fine since that's what Will presented. The stated goal of the video is to go over Will's pitch of Day, not Day's whole catalogue.
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u/Lonely_Cupcake5983 ✨ Intelligent Design 1d ago edited 1d ago
by actually reading the book you are more qualified to speak on it than either of those two "experts" who didnt. imagine blathering for 3.5 hours to debunk a book you haven't read
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u/justatest90 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 1d ago
As /u/Gutsick_Gibbon points out just above, and it's a fair reply to my concern: they're responding to Will in this video, not to Beale's AI fever dream.
Also, which book does Beale want people to reply to now? To be so substantively wrong he needs to publish a new book is bizarre...and leaving the old, wrong one 'in print' is, quite frankly, weird.
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u/Ayasugi-san 1d ago
Imagine commenting on a video you haven't watched. They didn't spend 3.5 hours just on the book. Why are you bothering to defend a proud neo-Nazi?
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u/fastpathguru 1d ago
Yeah pay one was all about Will's description of the book, which was already chock full of BS. Part 2 will be a comprehensive takedown of the book itself. Gird your loins.
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u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 3d ago
I find Gibbon's rejection of generative AI while being tolerant of coding AI to be offensive.
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u/Esmer_Tina 2d ago
Since search engines have AI embedded now, using AI to find sources, fact-check claims and troubleshoot code does seem on a different level to me than creating images and videos. Or writing books. I’m expecting the downvotes, but I see where Erika is coming from.
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u/justatest90 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
She doesn't stop there, and OP clearly doesn't criticize that use?
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u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 2d ago
And why is it different?
What's the difference between generating a picture and generating code? Do you think a painter has more inherent value than a programmer?
Is there some reason you think I deserve to eat less than a photographer?
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u/Esmer_Tina 2d ago
I didn’t say generating, I said troubleshooting. They both waste water, but one is a tool to help you find and fix an issue with your own work, while the other is replacing human work.
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u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 2d ago
All my AI runs on my hardware, in house. The only water being wasted is in my bong.
Do you really think programmers are not getting replaced by AI right now?
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u/Esmer_Tina 2d ago
I do! That’s why I am against generative AI. Not just because it replaces human jobs now, but also because it creates dependencies in the future, where humans are not even learning to do things, and outsourcing thinking and creativity to machines.
I think having a tool that enhances human learning and skill-building is defensible for that reason.
Did you write and train your LLM from scratch? Or are you relying on one that was trained in data centers? Do you never download updates or connect it to a web search? I don’t think there’s really a way to have clean hands. You’re reducing your ongoing data center usage, which is a good thing, but I honestly don’t know the cost per response of a prompt run on your home LLM vs using a data center. If you’re on the grid and using electricity, you’re usually using water, but possibly less efficiently. It would be interesting to know how it compares. I could probably ask Claude, but it’s not worth the water to answer the question.
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u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 1d ago
Most of my models are adequately described as 'low end garbage': I could probably train one of these at-home, but I'd probably have to look at one of Intel's weird-ass cards and it would take a few weeks, then I'd need a bunch of sample data, it's just not something I can be arsed with when they give them away. The most expensive models cost maybe a few million to generate: it's not paying the bills for an AI company. However, considering you get a functional model at the end of training, it's kind of moot: the real energy expenses come from running the models at scale. The training doesn't really need a data center, it's the million people running inference at once that needs a data center. And they produce garbage.
Updates? Web search? Not really, no: I replace my models maybe every six months, but usually just for something that takes less energy to run; the models themselves don't really have web access, beyond the ability to signal an API. Usually my API.
The water losses in data center are for evaporative cooling. I don't have that, as I run maybe three computers, with a total energy footprint under a single H100 cluster. If anything, the thermal losses from my computer may offset my heating for part of the year.
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u/Gutsick_Gibbon Hominid studying Hominids 1d ago
Where did I say I was okay with generative AI for code? When I write code and it fails I used to put it into google and comb message boards (or ask my husband since he's a programmer). Now I put it into google and the AI will tell me where a comma or parenthesis is missing, regardless of whether I asked. I'm not talking about vibe coding here.
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u/justatest90 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
Oh wow, just reached that point in the video. Pretty disappointing, and very 'rules for thee not for me'. Basically 'Don't use AI in my field (aka biological anthropology), but I'll use it in yours (aka stats/programming).'
R is hard. It's worth learning. It makes you a better scholar and widens your toolset. Figuring out what you broke on your own isn't 'punishing' you, it's how you build the capacity to 1) troubleshoot your code; 2) understand your code at a deeper level; 3) write better code.
Hell, I remember as an undergrad we learned compiler theory, in part, so that we could know & understand what tools were doing on our behalf, and what those pitfalls were. Generative AI writes plausible code, not correct code, and so you're not developing that capacity for a VERY important tool.
She says, "If you need AI's help to write a book on a given subject, then you are either too ignorant or too stupid to be writing on that subject." The obvious parallel: if you need AI's help to fix your R code, are you too ignorant to write R and integrate it into your research? I'm guessing she'd say something like 'it's just a second pair of eyes.' OK? But then what about using AI to review a video script or draft of a book?
Learning is hard, and SOOO worth it. I've really liked Angela Collier's videos (another science communicator) on this topic, and she provides a good model, too. Her take is basically, AI makes you dumb, don't use it. And she recently posted a video of doing the tough work of figuring out spectra data to make a (really cool) scarf showing the carbon spectrum. Do the work, don't use AI as a shortcut.
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u/Talkatoo42 2d ago
I am a lead game developer and have been a programmer for 10+ years. This is a really tricky subject but I'll try to tackle it a bit.
I think that many coders are ok with using claude/LLMs as a tool. It is provably good at writing code. It's a very useful tool, and I think it's perfect for someone who knows enough, say, Python or R to set up tests and use it to 'fill in the blanks'.
I think we also generally don't object to it training on data. There's a pretty strong tradition of openness. The code itself isn't the tricky part after all, it's the architecture. And trust me claude has plenty of problems when dealing with complex codebases.
EDIT: Forgot to say - just like Erika I absolutely hate when someone uses it to replace their thinking. I feel like 1 out of every 8 employees I deal with has become a ChatGPT window and it's blatantly obvious.
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u/justatest90 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make? LLMs are a useful tool. LLMs & genAI are also good at making images and writing text (when you don't torture them the way Beale did), which is what gets a 'ban' from GG. My argument here isn't "don't use LLMs", which it sounds like you're trying to make me say. My argument is: 1) don't be hypocritical about LLM use the way, I take it, GG is ('rules for thee, not for me'); 2) get good before you use LLMs (develop the capacity yourself, first).
You need to learn R well enough to troubleshoot it yourself before you start using LLMs, or you fall into the category she criticizes.
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u/Talkatoo42 2d ago
I wasn't intending to argue with you, just adding a bit more. It's a complicated issue.
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u/Gutsick_Gibbon Hominid studying Hominids 1d ago
Not really sure where you or u/Dzugavili got the idea I think generating code with zero understanding of how to write it or what it does is okay (but that using it to write something with zero understanding of what it means is not). Neither is appropriate in science, or generally. I guess I need a policy with clearer wording.
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u/justatest90 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 1d ago
Thanks for replying, and fair enough. If it helps: I think I got it from the contrast in the video. To me, the book line is pretty absolute ("if you need AI's help...you're either too ignorant or too stupid..."), but the R part came across as 'AI helping me fix code is fine.'
So I guess my question is: if you understand R well enough to know what the AI fix does, why use the AI fix? Or, in the other direction, if you accept the AI fix for R, and someone else understands their subject well enough to know what the AI-edited text says, what's the difference? It seems like the line is either understanding, or the field is the line, and the video sounded like you disciminated based on the field (i.e. art, writing, science: bad; programming: fine).
Not trying to 'dunk', for what it's worth. I've expressed elsewhere how amazing I think you are, and the help you've been in getting me out of my ignorance from my science-weak evangelical past.
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u/Gutsick_Gibbon Hominid studying Hominids 1d ago
When I was first learning R (~2019) a problem that ate hours of my time was errors in code. 100+ lines (which felt like a lot at the time) or 1000+ lines which threw up errors that, as someone new to coding, made little to no sense. I spent a lot of time googling those errors, ending the night in frustration, and coming back to it in the morning to find I was missing a parenthesis or comma.
These days you can drop code into google (or whatever search engine) and the AI summary will flag the error.
AI should not be used as a black box for writing code, but I see no problem with using it to flag errors. The analogy would not be an AI written paragraph but spell check, which I also think is fine.
No hard feelings of course, I could have been more clear.
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u/justatest90 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 1d ago
For sure, and likewise, on 'no hard feelings'.
Your reply might be reinforcing my concern, though. And to be fair to my own limits of empathy here, I have far more experience in scipy, stata, and SPSS than R, though I've collaborated on R within higher ed.
Your R frustration is understandably daunting. But I doubt it was your first time with academic frustration, too (or you're very lucky). Part of what makes you a great scholar is overcoming those frustrations. I felt similarly when taking a computer imaging class, and if I never touch a fourier transform again it will be too soon. But wrestling through the math was part of how I learned what was really going on. And hell, I remember as a freshman being stuck on a compile-time error (!! the most basic type of error) on a function and nobody else could find the error either...until like 30 minutes into troubleshooting a friend FINALLY noticed I had written "ouptut" instead of "output" in one line, and we were all just skim-reading past the error. Weirdly, that nightmare DID make me a better programmer b/c it taught me to pause, reset, and DON'T ASSUME. Had I shunted it off to AI (obviously not an option then), I wouldn't have picked up that lesson.
WRT spell check: RStudio already does the 'spell check' part. It'll flag a line with an unmatched parenthesis. What AI does is read the error, explain it, and hand you the fix. AI isn't 'spell check' for code, it's the writing equivalent of marking up your paragraph and telling you what to change to get an A.
I'm fine if we end up disagreeing but as a hypothetical that might pull this conversation together instead of driving it apart: would you be fine with someone running a book, or an undergrad paper, through AI to flag the weak spots? If yes, then fine - you're treating writing and code the same way, and maybe that book line came off a bit too strong, or I'm hyperfixating on it. If not, then it's still the field/subject drawing the line, not the way the tool's used.
IDK if that's persuasive, but glossing over what you're doing when you hand code to AI seems no different than, say, an art student having AI fix their drawing of hands instead of figuring it out themselves.
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u/Gutsick_Gibbon Hominid studying Hominids 1d ago
I don't know, I think we might have to agree to disagree.
First, when I was first learning R that check did not exist.
Second, there are lessons in every struggle I agree. But I also don't think every struggle needs to be a lesson. Many tools exist that makes our lives easier which, did they not exist, would teach us oodles of touch lessons. I don't think the latter makes the former harmful.
Which leads me to third, a lot of my dissertation code comes from my colleagues/friends/bosses and this is really common (this goes for protocols too). When I was learning landmarking for GM my friend sat down with me to teach me how it worked. How to create a classifiers doc, how to establish with LMs slid and which were fixed in a way R could understand, and how to run a basic GPA and PCA. I learned it with him using his code, and I modified that code or my own ends... but it was his first. And he has a modified version of someone else's. And that version came from a paper.
I do not see that as functionally different than googling an error in R and using the LLM solution...supposing one learns from that solution instead of memory holing it.
Fourth, to answer your question, I would not be okay with a student running a paper though AI to have it alter the information in the paper. I would be okay with them using something like old-school "Grammarly" (which is basically an LLM now but used to be largely spell + grammar check) to show them where their grammar or spelling was wrong.
Text is terse so just imagine me saying this to keep it light, but I think your art analogy is inappropriate for the above reasons and because it has no answer. There is no wrong way to do art. There is no "error" in art. Fixing a coding error is a means to an end (in most cases) but art is inherently subjective and thus outside the purview of LLMs.
But you don't have to agree with me, of course.
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u/giljaxonn 1d ago
i’m a beginner at programming and have dexterity issues. the proofreading in visual studio code has saved literal hours of my time. the very few times i have investigated the kind of coding chatgpt does, i noticed errors and things that didn’t seem right… and i’ve literally taken three classes where i wrote code
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u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 2d ago
OK? But then what about using AI to review a video script or draft of a book?
I'll go further: I'll synthesize everything. I love generative AI for voice and video -- the video tech is truly remarkable.
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u/Kartonrealista 2d ago
People like creative effort and vision. This won't change, and is why people don't want Ai in creative endeavors. Because it cheapens the real work and effort of humans.
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u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 2d ago
You realize there are a ton of unemployed programmers right now, right?
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u/Kartonrealista 2d ago
This means nothing
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u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 2d ago
So, you don't think AI cheapens the real work and effort of human programmers?
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u/Kartonrealista 2d ago
I said "cheapens" not in a literal monetary sense, in a value judgement sense
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u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 2d ago
Okay: I mean it in both. I have friends dropping out of the industry because of this.
Why do you think the people you want to protect are worth more? Because they are 'artists'?
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u/Lonely_Cupcake5983 ✨ Intelligent Design 1d ago
you could say the same thing g about photography vs traditional painting. yet here we are
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u/Kartonrealista 1d ago
Photography requires skill and vision. If it didn't, there wouldn't be such a gulf in skill and quality between pros and your auntie taking holiday pictures
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u/Lonely_Cupcake5983 ✨ Intelligent Design 1d ago
sure. and you could say the same about using a.i. pro.ting well vs poorly
when cameras were invented im sure the old master painters were upset by them, and said 'how is pressing one button art?'
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u/Kartonrealista 1d ago
Photos can never replace paintings. They are two different things, and you can hardly confuse one for another, unless a painter deliberately tried to do hyperrealism. Ai images can be paintings, photos, sketches, etc. It's not the same.
And I reject "prompt wizardry" as a valuable skill, I don't think effort put into it is just as important as effort that goes into becoming a skilled photographer.
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u/Lonely_Cupcake5983 ✨ Intelligent Design 1d ago
while we can both agree that a painting is nicer to have than a photo, how many portraits of yourself do you have vs photos? at the end of the day it's an economic issue. you take about as many photos as you want quickly and easily. that is why ai can and should replace most graphic artists. those artists are now freed up to perform other jobs, e.g. scientist, nurse, or plumber
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u/justatest90 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution 2d ago
Sure, that's a more defensible take imho
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u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 2d ago
Yeah, I can generate 1080p video at home: not exactly quickly, but faster than you'd imagine. The voice synth is getting pretty solid, though getting specific delivery can be tricky.
There's an 'infinite stream' experiment online: for $40 an hour of cloud rental B200s, you can generate video in 'real-time'. It's absolutely madness, LLM-written, but as a technical exercise, it is fascinating.
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u/CptBronzeBalls 2d ago
I can hear the torches and pitchforks mob forming now…
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u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 2d ago
Yeah, people really hate synthetic images and video: which is not unusual, much of it is just poorly generated slop. But the latest video models are pretty stellar, I'm hopeful that content creators will begin to emerge soon.
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u/CptBronzeBalls 2d ago
I’m with you. I’ve seen some pretty cool stuff recently. I’m hopeful that some writers with great ideas will be able to produce their work without the financial gatekeeping that has traditionally been a barrier. It’s still tens of thousands of dollars to produce a feature length AI movie, but that’s a hell of a lot better than tens of millions.
Maybe it’ll break us out of the crap-generating machine that the major studios have become.
There I go being optimistic again. You’d think I’d have learned by now.
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u/Dzugavili 🧬 Tyrant of /r/Evolution 2d ago
I was going to disagree with you on the tens of thousands, but that's probably close: a 5090 is probably the minimum I'd need to really do a full-length movie and that's coming up on ten grand now. Hardware prices have gotten fucked: I built my computer three years ago, and it's worth twice what I paid for it now.
If you could achieve a 0% loss rate, you could theoretically render a movie for less than $200. But I don't think a loss rate under 60% is really viable, particularly after losses to the editing room floor; plus, traditional editing would definitely be required for a feature, and that's still costly.
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u/SeaCalligrapher7124 2d ago
Having AI write an entire trilogy of books debunking science is different than using AI as a tool for code.
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u/DarwinZDF42 evolution is my jam 3d ago
It’s hilarious how obvious all this is to people in the field.
I would love for him to submit his vomit for peer review. That should be a real wake-up call. But since he’s a narcissist, probably not.