The guy from www.joshuasnider.com and https://www.youtube.com/@joshuasnidercom
Josh Snider
Karma: 454
It’s always nice to be included in a Zvi post, but I was probably going to do Flatland instead of My Dinner with Andre next, so I could avoid Veo entirely.
Yeah. for one or two rounds of editing, I was hoping I could get the weirdness down enough so that it would read as being diegetic, with the haunted house and Cthulhu-nonsense leaking out like Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem did it. It didn’t work.
I’ve used this pipeline on short films before. They have the same issues as this one, but given their shortness the results are not impressive enough to write about. The end goal is to make film adaptations of every classic sci-fi novel (at least those with public domain copyright), so practicing longer movies is ultimately a prerequisite.
I expect no-longer-obviously silly movies to be doable within two years, right now it’s going slower than I expected in January 2026 because the frontier labs are no longer competing over having the best video generator, like they were when we had Sora2 and Veo 3.1.
I agree this uses more narration than a normal book, part of that is needing to tell things the video failed to show and part of that is it just coming naturally from the story being framed in-universe as a diary, where quoting passages is a natural thing to do, especially since the guy has almost no dialogue while spending half of his time going on cosmic visions or wandering alone.
I’m not sure it would actually be able to garner significant public support. It sounds very wonkish, so it might go over the average person’s head, while the AI companies would be sophisticated enough to understand this as an attempt to freeze the entire industry.
Can an LLM make a feature-length movie on its own?
I’m fine with being disagreed with, but can I get someone to explain which part of what I said is so disagreeable?
I think there is a bit of a stretch in taking an artist using “marriage” and “spouse” as metaphors and reading that as zoophilia as opposed to implying an extremely deep and close, but non-sexual, bond. I have been convinced by weaker arguments before, though, so it’s not much of a stretch for me. It does seem pretty strange to me. I would think that if I were a director of an art exhibit and believed the artist was implying such a thing, I would either state it as a possibility the viewer should consider or just pick a less potentially controversial exhibit and I’m going to be charitable and assume the art director does not agree with your interpretation and therefore did not suggest it.
Yeah, with neutral framings, Talkie says that the gays should go to mental asylums and not jails, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is bad because gays undermine military discipline, and incest is worse than homosexuality, but with positive framing he says that gayness is just a harmless vice, that public displays of affection are unacceptable regardless of sexuality, but that gays should still not be drafted or allowed to volunteer for the military. That sounds slightly more coherent listed out like that than the conversation made it seem.
As for personaless alignment, I believe we will get ASI in the short-term from techniques broadly similar to our current AI-training techniques and that personas arise almost automatically from current techniques. Therefore there isn’t time for an alignment technique that seems so incompatible with our current pipeline to be tested, debugged, and made standard.
A possible alternative direction would be to filter out all of a certain kind of goodness[2] and seeing if it is possible to put it back into the model using our alignment techniques without knowing or identifying what was removed or might have been removed, since we don’t know what virtues an ASI might lack. This seems rather difficult.
I don’t think that personaless alignment will be a good research direction, but I encourage anything that might work, so I talked to Talkie about homosexuality like you suggested. I’m not sure if his views are really 1930s accurate, but to the extent they are, he seemed really flexible and easy to convince, or at least he would be good along with any positive framing in the question until he finished answering. Maybe this is just because Talkie is a small model and didn’t have any actual ethics training?
Yeah, this is beautiful. Cells at Work, but for biology PhD students.
that ordered experiences would outnumber disordered experiences; for example, a bare assertion that “All mathematical structures exist.”
I deny being a Boltzmann Brain, but I’m enough of a mathematical realist to disagree here. I find it very easy to imagine that all computable universes exist, but to weight the existence such that I am overly likely to be in a universe described by simple physical laws where billions of creatures like me exist in a normal-seeming universe than to be in a universe running Skyrim 5000 where Sheogorath is about to reveal that this is all a dream.
Of course, after I typed up the above paragraph, I kept reading and realized you largely answered this objection. Mods can delete this if they want.
AI cultist looks like it will be a big one.
This seems pretty clever. If you suppose that distillation transfers misalignment and the ability to conceal misalignment at different rates, that can be used to discover misalignment. I have two main concerns.
First, if we have a misaligned model of sufficient capability, then we have already lost. I believe that none of the models we currently have are at that level, but when people talk about “automated AI research interns” and “countries of geniuses in a datacenter” I’m not sure how long that will last.
Second, are we sure that discovering the teacher model to be misaligned would actually be handled correctly? To an extent, this overlaps with your reason #5 it might not work, but I see it as not identical. All of the frontier labs have produced models whose alignment has been questioned. Some of these alignment issues have taken months or years to fix and some remain unfixed to this day. This does not make me confident that if this technique diagnosed a model as misaligned, that the problem would actually be fixed.
We have many techniques for aligning models and testing for model alignment, but I really do like this one. It comes at the problem from a very clever angle with non-overlapping failure modes from many other techniques. It’s definitely worth some dignity points.
I have some thoughts on https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/too-much-happening-too-fast/687177/?gift=nwn-guseqS6cY1kVeEKZAUJGzsWHB05vLuDlMisVh94 that I might write up in a post this weekend. Warzel seems to imply that AI-boosters and AI-doomers are overreacting and that the AI industry is being irresponsible by using grave rhetoric, but this seems to take as given that the rhetoric around AI is not broadly accurate and that people are reacting, if not correctly, with appropriate concern for the stakes.
Man, this story just makes me feel… happy.
> But if you don’t train on text about self-awareness or long-horizon agency tasks whose simplest implementation would require self-modeling, it’s hard to see why self-awareness would emerge spontaneously.”
But doesn’t that imply that modern LLMs are self-aware? Since long-horizon agency tasks are now well-represented in the training data?
I strongly believe that Dario does not actually think that and is just saying that for politics. Can we get someone from Anthropic to clarify this?
I assign a probability higher than 50% that in 2028, I will be using an older open-source model instead of paying market prices for the State of the Art.
I find this unlikely for two reasons.
The first is that even if Claude Mythos 8 isn’t the right fit for the problem, there will be a Haiku/Sonnet/Opus model that will be tough competition for the cheap models, RSI might make the entire range of models from the leading lab just better.
The second is AI decision-making, if Claude Mythos 8 is running a logistics business, it might prefer to do work itself or outsource to a “friendly” model if necessary instead of optimizing purely on price/performance metrics.
Thanks, I was actually considering Flatland as the next movie I would try, which would let me replace Veo with manim.
Edit:
As for the storyboard length, perhaps that explains some of it. I had it write the storyboard for a Veo backend, so the estimated runtime was exact, but it does seem like large chunks of it were stuff that would have been expanded in a human production.