Roku's 24/7 AI Slop Channel Is Even Worse Than Expected (engadget.com) 70
A new streaming TV channel shows films made with genAI, reports Engadget. "Fairground AI Creator TV" is free — and supported with ads — describing its material as "AI Cinema":
"AI-generated" can make it sound as though someone typed a sentence into a machine and came back five minutes later to find a finished movie. Fairground's catalog shows why that description can be too simple. Take Lost Garden: The Awakening of the Lantern Knight. According to its Fairground page, creator Frank Houbre wrote the world, characters, mythology, emotional arc and screenplay himself. AI tools were used mainly for animation and visual production, with other tools helping create voices and music before the episode was assembled in conventional video-editing software.
There's still one question, the article notes: "whether viewers actually want an AI-focused TV channel." More than 100 AI creators have contributed to the 24-hour slate of programming, although Variety points out several of them were discovered on social media.
The channel was recently profiled in an article by the Guardian. Its headline? "'Nightmare fodder': Roku's AI slop channel is even worse than expected." (And its subheading calls it "a 24/7 channel devoted to low-quality AI content for viewers sick of watching real people move...") What about people who hate plot and vision and the sight of people speaking convincing dialogue that synchronises perfectly with the movement of their lips? What about the people who just want to watch an unyielding torrent of eerily weightless nightmare fodder? Well, good news. Roku has finally caught up... Early reactions were, to put it mildly, not great. The Verge compared it to eating from a trough, while Futurism called it "bottom-of-the-barrel slop"...
On the plus side, the channel is evidence that artificial intelligence has come on in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years... However, it is still awful. Categorically, catastrophically awful. The channel doesn't so much offer shows as a drifting dreamscape of bad ideas rendered as horribly as possible with no thought paid to scheduling. At one point on Wednesday, a shrill high-frequency anime gave way to a long and staid German-language short about Nazi bureaucracy. After that came a sort of Gladiator ripoff that had all the dynamism of an exhibit you'd see at the fourth-best museum on a poorly planned family holiday.
There's still one question, the article notes: "whether viewers actually want an AI-focused TV channel." More than 100 AI creators have contributed to the 24-hour slate of programming, although Variety points out several of them were discovered on social media.
The channel was recently profiled in an article by the Guardian. Its headline? "'Nightmare fodder': Roku's AI slop channel is even worse than expected." (And its subheading calls it "a 24/7 channel devoted to low-quality AI content for viewers sick of watching real people move...") What about people who hate plot and vision and the sight of people speaking convincing dialogue that synchronises perfectly with the movement of their lips? What about the people who just want to watch an unyielding torrent of eerily weightless nightmare fodder? Well, good news. Roku has finally caught up... Early reactions were, to put it mildly, not great. The Verge compared it to eating from a trough, while Futurism called it "bottom-of-the-barrel slop"...
On the plus side, the channel is evidence that artificial intelligence has come on in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years... However, it is still awful. Categorically, catastrophically awful. The channel doesn't so much offer shows as a drifting dreamscape of bad ideas rendered as horribly as possible with no thought paid to scheduling. At one point on Wednesday, a shrill high-frequency anime gave way to a long and staid German-language short about Nazi bureaucracy. After that came a sort of Gladiator ripoff that had all the dynamism of an exhibit you'd see at the fourth-best museum on a poorly planned family holiday.
In a few years it'll be the only channel they need (Score:1, Insightful)
...and it will feature better writing, acting and overall quality than anything by Hollywood, Netflix, etc. currently does.
That's not to say it's a future everyone wants, but it is the future.
Re: (Score:2)
IF what gp predicts happens, so "writing, acting and overall quality" will be better, enough people will watch
Re: In a few years it'll be the only channel they (Score:2)
Problem is that won't happen.
The fundamental issue is that a GenAI user that pumps out whatever the GenAI does without review will be tons faster than the GenAI user that actually cares, reviews, edits, and reworks the output.
This flips things upside down, someone with dedication under the traditional ways would produce more, now dedication and care become a liability. Accepting a bland paste of garbage from the AI is easier to produce content than trying to implement actual creative content.
Re: (Score:2)
I think your projection of future AI is based too strongly on current capabilities. But it WILL aim for the lowest common denominator.
OTOH, I find most movies to be unwatchable, so my judgement is biased. My tastes are definitely those of a minority. E.g., I hated what the movie did to "The Wizard of Oz", and especially the way it corrupted the ending.
Re: (Score:2)
Effort is not always correlated to quality. Hollywood has quite a few examples for that.
Re:In a few years it'll be the only channel they n (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO:
The good news is, gen AI lets anyone make a movie!
The bad news is, gen AI lets *ANYONE* make a movie.
Re: (Score:2)
The good news: You only have to watch the movies you want to see, not the ones others want to see.
Re: In a few years it'll be the only channel they (Score:2)
Content discovery is hard when drowning in crap content. Finding a needle in a haystack is rough.
Re: (Score:2)
Just as with images, text, etc: It's filter problem.
And it's not even that new. Art sites always had a problem to show good images in algorithmic feeds without them being manipulated. Spam is still an unsolved issue. And so on.
It's neither useful nor possible to restrict the content creation, but it is very useful to try to help you to curate your feeds. One simple way is to do away with the algorithmic crap and let YOU curate your feed. Just follow people who create stuff you like. Yeah, not that this woul
Re: (Score:2)
Who is telling you what to watch? There's already practically boundless possibilities today, all on-demand.
Re: (Score:2)
The number of no-talent, no-effort guys emboldened to take a stab at stardom is going to way outweigh the number of undiscovered supergeniuses.
The ratio is so terribly lopsided that I'd be surprised if there ends up being one piece of content airing on this channel, ever, that is worth watching more than 5 minutes.
Re: (Score:1)
IMHO:
The good news is, gen AI lets anyone make a movie!
The bad news is, gen AI lets *ANYONE* make a movie.
So, basically, YouTube for AIs?
No shit (Score:3)
Roku, and everything it touches, is trash. Their hardware sucks. Their software sucks.
Re:No shit (Score:4, Informative)
Roku was recently bought by Fox Corporation, so Roku is even more trash than their usual "Roku is trash".
Re: (Score:2)
Well, that deal hasn't fully closed and gone through quite yet, but yes, Roku will get even worse than it already was.
Re: (Score:3)
Roku does suck. Personally, I just use it as a front-end to play my home media on the various TV's in the house (using Jellyfin as the back-end) along with occasional content from Amazon Prime. I've deleted all the junk channels they try to foist on customers. Yes, the hardware does kinda suck, but it's just "good enough" to excrete a 4k hdmi signal, pass through the audio to my receiver where needed, and the interface is "good enough" for my family to use it. I've also neutered most of the "phone home"
As expected (Score:2)
Early attempts always suck
The question is, will any of it ever be good?
My guess is that it might be possible, but it won't be easy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It hasn't been long enough for that to be "obviously wrong". OTOH, and speaking as definitely NOT an expert in the field, their financing looks...suspicious.
Re: As expected (Score:2)
How many years can one talk about a bubble? The longer it exists, the less likely it is a bubble, right?
But sure it will pop right after the model collapse.
Many years. No, bubbles don't pop when you look at them. Yah that ain't real, models will continue to improve, but the rate of improvement may slow. Then there's the vacuum of potential behind it that will take some time to realize. They way we use them is changing as rapidly as the quality, as in models could all stand still a year and in that year you'll see very different ways of extracting more from the same quality model, better harnesses and frameworks, etc.
Bubbles don't go away when everyone agrees t
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure what you mean when you imply that AI doesn't understand storytelling. It's not *great* at it, but if you formalize the process (outlines, character profiles, world details, external notes, and so on) you can get something coherent if you use a decent AI.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not about the tools at all. The tools could be 100% flawless every time, it wouldn't matter. It's about the people using the tools.
When you make a big-budget film or TV show, you have hundreds if not thousands of people working on it. Even the writers room has many people (writers, showrunners, etc) who might object to bad writing/plotting, and above that you have directors, producers, creators, studio execs who might object, and even below that you have, say, actors who may at least say "This line so
Re: As expected (Score:2)
Re: As expected (Score:2)
It's about the authors rather than GenAI.
Previous advances brought down costs and accelerated production, but things were still specifically deliberate choices by humans.
This stuff allows a mediocre short prompt generate significant chunks of content without human care.
The human care that serves to generally add quality now becomes an impediment to speed and volume of content.
You can still have that care applied with GenAI, but that gets drowned out by the low effort crap.
Re: (Score:2)
100% this.
Re: (Score:2)
If you do it with one prompt, then the skill is in the AI.
With the right treatment, even a moderately lousy idea can turn into a good, or at least decent, movie. The less control you give to the AI, the more the quality depends on the guy that controls it.
Also, please not that quality isn't that easy. Even some famous works of art were panned by both audiences and critics when they first came out. Basically, the didn't meet the expectations, because they were trying something new. (Of course, most thing
Re: (Score:2)
Statistics dictate that some of it will be decent, and someone will curate it.
I imagine that people with a good film school education will start producing gems that would never have been possible without AI - think George Lucas making THX 1138 directly.
The next problem is getting the word out without the use of a movie company like Paramount. Young people I know seem to be experimenting with their own purpose built social networks, this one for instance: https://rendeznous.be/ [rendeznous.be].
Re: (Score:2)
George Lucas making THX 1138 directly.
Actually, from what I've read broadly George Lucas' work was really only decent by virtue of everyone else kind of fixing it up around him. Which is a prime example of some critical mass of human involvement being useful to refine creative outcomes.
Wait until they will make you pay for this. (Score:2)
with no way to opt out.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you're not aware of which line-items in your budget the tax is applied to. Maybe you feel that it's too small of a sum to care about. But you're definitely paying.
slop on TV? you don't say... (Score:3)
I haven't owned a TV in decades. My new gf has a Netflix subscription. I only now realized how much utter TRASH there is out there. So, for all I care: AI slop fits right in.
Re: slop on TV? you don't say... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: slop on TV? you don't say... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm think we all support Google and various other evil corporations s directly or indirectly.
Sure, but we can try to minimise it. If we all just give up, we're even more screwed.
Try avoiding big oil.
We can't but we can choose to walk/bike somewhere.
My Gmail address is 22 years old
Mine too. I was starting to run out of storage and I _finally_ took the time to set up Thunderbird. This made it easier to delete all the accumulated spam. I say "easier" but it wasn't trivial. Google deliberately makes it harder than it should be, because a huge part of their business depends on millions of people just accepting the "lazy tax." But now, at current rates, I
Re: (Score:2)
Mine too. I was starting to run out of storage and I _finally_ took the time to set up Thunderbird. This made it easier to delete all the accumulated spam.
Funny. Spam is all I use my gmail account for. It's the e-mail I use to sign up to places I don't expect to visit often or that make me sign up for no discernible reason (well, obviously the reason is that they want to send me spam). My entire gmail inbox is spam, newsletters and the occasional "here is your activation link" mail.
It's really useful as a spam-sink.
Re: (Score:2)
I completely agree with you there, except that I don’t think “evil bastards” is strong enough phrasing. Actually, I just checked and I’m actually not paying for gmail anymore. When I did, I honestly didn’t have time to clean it up. I will continue to pay for ad-free YouTube because I have no way to keep my sons off of it. They live with their mom and the one that watches it often actually use it for valuable content. Despite t
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks for the reply. I'm glad you haven't just rolled over and accepted big Tech :-)
Still, one of my mottos is to use the system to subvert the system
As my .sig suggests, I agree with this one. When GMail suggests AI summaries of emails I used to enjoy clicking the "thumbs up" when the summary is wrong, though of course that goes away when you use a different email client. While we're talking about email summaries, this was part of what pushed me away from GMail, especially for travel related stuff. I hate that Google puts their summary before the real email from the air
Re: (Score:2)
On a scale of corporate evilness, while I certainly wouldn't put Google at the bottom, I'd hardly put them at the top either.
Re: (Score:2)
Nebula is actually the one streaming service I ever subscribed to for a while, mostly because I like documentaries and for all I've heard their business model is more in favour of the actual creators.
because we have families and friends? (Score:2)
I completely agree; I can't understand why anyone pays for any streaming service, especially with all the free content and "workarounds" available for anything that isn't free.
Because it's nice to have a guest over and just watch something on a streaming service than some weird piracy menu...nor teach your kids to steal. Kewl...you hacked the system. I just worked a job and pay the monthly fee for Disney+ so my kids can enjoy the movies they want to see. I don't judge it if you want to...but why is it so unfathomable to you that I'd rather pay a small amount not to steal?
Re: (Score:2)
Otherwise, I grew up without much television or movies. At maybe 11 years old, I started to have TVs, but no cable and only received one worthwhile channel over the airwaves. Those TVs were mainly for using my first co
Kewl flex,hipster, No TV? I don't poop either!!!! (Score:2)
I haven't owned a TV in decades.
The fact that you think that's a flex says more about you than your realize. We've all heard it before, it's fucking tedious and shitty. You're worse than a vegan who won't shut up about being a vegan.
Not owning a TV is not a virtue. You're not superior to anyone who does. Also, if you couldn't find a single thing worth watching on Netflix...again...you're the issue. There's a fuckton of good Netflix content on there. If you can't find ANYTHING in Netflix's decades-long production run as well as al
Re: (Score:3)
Dude, what is your problem?
I mention not owning a TV because it's topical - it means I didn't not notice the quality going down slowly over time, so I might notice the difference more than those who did.
Nowhere did I imply that not owning a TV makes me better in any way. It's a personal choice, that's all.
Why you jump on that so aggressively - maybe ask yourself why that is.
When people compare AI water use to golf (Score:4, Funny)
For those people who say AI datacentres water use is just a pittance of water use used to keep golf greens green, I'd like to remind you it's far more pleasant being struck by a golf ball than watching even 5 minutes of this shit.
Re:When people compare AI water use to golf (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like to add that it's nicer if the view outside your window is of a golf course, and not a datacentre.
Re: When people compare AI water use to golf (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
You know how data centers release water? They evaporate it. It is basically distilled water. (Puns about LLM distillation welcome)
You can't get water more clean than that.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, most of the (not remotely significant compared to agriculture) water consumption attributed to datacentres is actually attributed to the power production, not cooling. Which applies to all electricity consumers.
Re: (Score:2)
Also, most of the (not remotely significant compared to agriculture) water consumption attributed to datacentres is actually attributed to the power production, not cooling. Which applies to all electricity consumers.
It does not. Power production has wildly different water consumption based on generation type. The current two largest growing means of production use zero water during operation.
I do agree it's insignificant compared to agriculture, but that's asking the wrong question. The right question is: can you eat a really poorly AI generated movie? When your kids complain they are hungry do you tell them to just type something into Google and read the Gemini generated results?
Also no, "most" of the water consumptio
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it does (as an average) [arxiv.org]. Table 1, page 5.
(Note that the paper is extremely dated when it comes to individual model / hardware / query power / water consumption, but power water intensity and server water intensity, per unit kWh, should not have meaningfully changed in 3 years).
Re: (Score:3)
Considering all the fertilizers, insecticides, etc. they use on golf coursed it's not that they don't need to clean up the water they release, it's just that they don't.
Re: When people compare AI water use to golf (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Funnier of the two Funnies on the story, but I was looking for the obvious and low-hanging joke on the headline:
"Not possible. My expectations were MUCH lower than that."
TFA (Score:2)
https://fairground.tv/watch [fairground.tv]
in other news (Score:2)
there is a devoted fan.base, and they were mostly flat-earthers.
Repent! The end of the world is nigh!
AI generated (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
I take it you can't get that out of your head?
Enough of that garbage... (Score:2)
There's enough of that garbage on youtube, These AI concoctions seem to have a "thing" for HOA's, single fathers, CEOs, as it seems like every one of the videos they create have these subjects somewhere in the "script"... Getting hard to avoid them while trying to watch the actual human-generated content.
Re: (Score:2)
They scrape Reddit for content. These topics are a lot of what Reddit likes to bitch about. Hence, that's what the bots make videos about.
Re: (Score:2)
There's enough of that garbage on youtube, These AI concoctions seem to have a "thing" for HOA's, single fathers, CEOs, as it seems like every one of the videos they create have these subjects somewhere in the "script"... Getting hard to avoid them while trying to watch the actual human-generated content.
Being a music fan, my youtube seems to be filled with:
"Love Boat Theme" but it's Dark Metal
"Fraggle Rock Theme" but it's Thrash Metal (Admittedly amusing for about thirty seconds)
"Bluest Eyes in Texas" but it's 80s Hair Metal (I mean, same song, right?)
It'd be nice if you could turn all that shit off with a click, but the AI producers keep finding ways around any filter, and the youtube built-in filters thus far filter out actual creators more often than the AI generated slop.
It is soooo bad (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
We should really pay attention to this stuff. It's probably AI plotting what it's going to do with the pesky humans once it escapes from its digital prison. You know, role-playing!
Just like kids' animation on youtube (Score:2)
I'm convinced that most of the animated content target at kids on Youtube is autogenerated. Most of the songs are like weird simulations of nursery rhymes that have some words changed and a different tune so the copyright filters don't get upset. Dialogue is minimised so the same slop can be served in different countries with minimal changes. The stories don't make sense. I mean, I get that toddlers don't care about plot, but this isn't even trying. Give them some good old-fashioned claymation, or a coyote
Are they talking about the Hallmark Channel? (Score:2)
If you watch this AI slop channel, you just might forget you're not watching Hallmark!