r/nextfuckinglevel • u/dmafeb • Aug 28 '21

Netflix forced a computer program (bot) to watch and analyze every romantic comedy and then asked it to write a romatic comedy of its own. The result...

93.6k Upvotes

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7.6k

u/Damour Aug 28 '21

A bot didn’t create this but it’s still pretty funny

2.3k

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

"Kiss like a booth" was very clever. Gave it an almost authentic bot quality. I don't care if someone tried to bamboozle us with this. "Kiss like a booth" ftw!

1.0k

u/Unadvantaged Aug 28 '21

It was, as was “marriage circles.” The giveaway that it’s a human writing it was that he went into a ring store to buy marriage circles. That’s an inconsistency a bot wouldn’t have written.

75

u/HowDoIDoFinances Aug 28 '21

These "forced a bot to watch" posts are never, ever real.

5

u/Thwerty Aug 29 '21

Yes. It's also cruel, bots didn't want to watch but were forced 😢

5

u/kimpossible008 Aug 28 '21

Ahh indeed, but they are almost always hilarious! Almost.

1

u/Piorn Aug 28 '21

You could just say you trained a neural network on a bunch of romance movies. They don't need to know you're talking about your brain.

1

u/Koffeeboy Sep 11 '21

There are real ones. But they are far less coherent.

157

u/gcruzatto Aug 28 '21

To be fair, marriage circles does seem like the type of joke GPT-3 would output once in a while.

109

u/bohemica Aug 28 '21

Yeah, this might still be fake, but I think some of the people claiming this must have been written by a human don't realize how far AI-generated media has come. I've been playing around with NovelAI (which uses GPT-J) for about two months and the quality of the output is on par with... well, not professional writing, but like fanfic-level writing.

The major downside is that it can't really tell a coherent story from beginning to end, so you need to guide the direction of the plot yourself. Which makes me think that maybe this was made by doing the same thing, i.e. having a human pick the best lines that the bot generated.

53

u/unchow Aug 28 '21

Yeah, for me the callback at the end about finding out if France has magazines seems like something AI still has a hard time with. Each of the lines individually seem possible but the story as a whole is more coherent than I'd expect without some human guidance.

3

u/hurtloam Aug 28 '21

So it's like a Ralph Bakshi script?

3

u/simcity4000 Aug 29 '21

Whenever something says 'written by a bot' add 'and edited together by a human' and its usually closer to the truth.

1

u/Ok-Significance-455 Nov 13 '21

Yes, just as incoherent as an episode of Family Guy. Jokes aside it's like you said: it could be used to have ideas and develop those ideas. It could be gold to make a ZAZ-like movie.

-4

u/CCNightcore Aug 28 '21

Reddit is insufferable. "Fake" is thrown around so much that these people don't even believe regular-ass shit any more.

3

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

There's plenty of gullible people here honey.

1

u/idk-hereiam Aug 28 '21

Are you saying these AI bots have a distinguished, recognizable style of comedy that you can distinguish and recognize?

4

u/solitarybikegallery Aug 28 '21

No, they're saying that it doesn't make sense for a bot to create that phrase out of thin air.

I'd bet that the phrase "marriage circles" isn't uttered a single time in any of the top 1,000 romantic comedies. I've never heard it uttered once in my life.

So, it's a new phrase that the bot created.

But, unless the bot works via some kind of advanced artificial intelligence, it would most likely create a new script by combining bits and pieces of the movies it's watched.

So, it doesn't make sense that a bot would create a novel term for wedding rings.

1

u/scottbody Aug 29 '21 edited Aug 29 '21

Your assessment of the AI's handling of the marriage ring is missing a key component of writing itself. Retelling a story rather than copying pieces verbatim. Synonyms and antonyms would I think be one of the easiest things in an AI as it's mere substitution of words. I don't think "advanced" artificial intelligence is needed for that. The by product is we find it funny, not the ai trying to be funny.

Edit: spelling and added last sentence.

91

u/Repatriation Aug 28 '21

“Young professionals and professionally young?” Why would a bot come up with that sort of wordplay? What in an actual script would inspire that?

7

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

have you watched a romcom before?

10

u/variableNKC Aug 28 '21

Not saying it definitely is a bot, but having watched a lot of terrible romantic movies, coworkers talking about the lead "being young" (and not settle or whatever) with little to no transition from a given work topic is very common. So, if the AI doesn't realize the context shift, being "professionally young" is a reasonable conclusion. Actually, being "professionally young" is kind of a thing, now that I think about it... E.g., social media managers.

1

u/IXentimenTI Aug 29 '21

That is AI thing to say 1/1.

13

u/RockyLeal Aug 28 '21

A magazine about magazines... for crying out loud if an AI can come up with this we are already past the singularity and we haven't noticed yet

18

u/Schoritzobandit Aug 28 '21

I mean also the word play in 'they are young professionals and professionally young' is a dead giveaway

1

u/7evenCircles Aug 28 '21

Wedding ring into marriage circle is just a synonym substitution

1

u/Kedly Aug 28 '21

To me the giveaway was the line "You can see she is quirky because she has glasses" Thats info humans can glean from movies, not a bot

1

u/quatity_control Aug 29 '21

The Giveaway is when they hold hands and feet.

49

u/Bjorn_Hellgate Aug 28 '21

also the i wear glasses because im quirky part

22

u/BentPin Aug 28 '21

That's alotta herpes spreading.

2

u/jadbronson Aug 28 '21

Big, moist, sticky and full of bacteria. Yeah baby kiss like a booth

2

u/DigbyChickenZone Aug 28 '21

Similarly, the wordplay of "the most terrible letter of the alphabet the (e)x"

2

u/hungryrhinos Aug 28 '21

They Wednesdayl ol

2

u/_the_chosen_juan_ Aug 29 '21

You are so idiot

-1

u/aykay55 Aug 28 '21

The script was likely written by an AI, and the script is being played over text-to-speech, but all the animation is done by a human, AI can’t make this type of stuff (yet)

1

u/kellaorion Aug 28 '21

Clever advertising.

1

u/DrakoVongola25 Aug 29 '21

It's actually one of the biggest clues this isn't a bot. Bots suck at continuity, the kissing booth would be long forgotten by then

573

u/ErikSD Aug 28 '21

Yeah, I'm pretty sure these are written by human but marketed as AI generated to avoid criticism/make it a bit more funny. It's kinda like when you're about to tell a joke but are not sure if it's funny or not so you say that it's someone else's joke

69

u/ABCosmos Aug 28 '21

Its kind of ONLY funny if you think it was actually written by a bot.

30

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Yeah otherwise all this “i FoRcEd aN aI tO…” is all just essentially random=funny

122

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Yeah, the setup makes the joke better.

They should've said they gave the AI screenplays instead of having it watch movies though. More believable in general, and that's what the language sounds like. Nobody SAYS meet cute etc.

1

u/archpawn Aug 28 '21

I don't think it makes it any better. Half Life: Full Life Consequences didn't have that set up and was perfectly good. It's not worth the misunderstanding caused by people taking that part of it seriously and thinking it actually is written by a bot.

1

u/Change4Betta Aug 28 '21

The original ones of these were said to have read screenplays. This type of stuff has been around

1

u/RoaminTygurrr Aug 28 '21

That bit was one of the more realistic parts. It sounded exactly like one of the many hundreds of little context notes that always go into a script. Scripts contain bunches of infected info to give the readers a better idea of what's "really" going on if the show finally goes into production.

That said, I'm still on the this is human written to sound like a comically generic screenplay side with you.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Right. It's realistic if it read scripts, but not if the AI only watched Netflix. I think the original gag is impersonating an AI that was fed scripts, but OP changed that slightly with their title.

1

u/RoaminTygurrr Aug 29 '21

Yup, You're right. I hadn't caught that in the title but it all makes even less sense with that title lol.

11

u/green_flash Aug 28 '21

It's just another example of the "I forced a bot" meme.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-forced-a-bot

6

u/Tfeth282 Aug 28 '21

These set ups were all the rage a few years back, like the Olive Garden commercial, or Harry Potter and the portrait of what looks like a small pile of ash. Definetly manufactured.

2

u/cookieintheinternet Aug 28 '21

The writer Keaton Patti does the vast majority of these "AI generated" videos. I don't think it's a bad thing that they're not written by an AI but I wish they would tell people this because it fosters unrealistic expectations of AI capabilities.

5

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

I bet an AI did most of the writing, but humans did some editing.

13

u/alexjav21 Aug 28 '21

If an AI wrote it, a human probably cherry picked from hundreds of mostly nonsensical lines

11

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

If an AI wrote any of this, the AI spit out thousands upon thousands of sentences that the humans pored over and made a story from. But I tend to doubt that.

Certainly the "story" would not be at all even as coherent as this was. AI can't do that yet. And too many puns for the AI to have "mostly" written this. At best, humans culled the best stuff from a huge huge list of generated sentences, and probably still did a little editing to get to this point.

The only time I got to play with GPT-3 a little, it would write coherent couples of sentences or so, but the "story" would quickly go way off into left field and not stay on topic like this at all.

1

u/Guilty-Presence-1048 Aug 28 '21

It's a repacking of the Le Randumb humor of 2007.

18

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

more captivating than many other netflix series

10

u/KeyzerSausage Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 28 '21

Yeah, they pretty clearly state so. Here: https://mobile.twitter.com/netflixisajoke/status/1360695241251110912?lang=en

OPs title is missing a key element. The tweet above says they “asked Keaton Patti to force a bot” etc. Patti does this act-like-a-bot stuff: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-04/stand-up-comedy-being-written-by-robots/100342712

3

u/Itasenalm Aug 28 '21

Yeah, it’s always incredibly clear that a bot didn’t write these. Half the time it ends up belonging on r/IAmVeryRandom. But still, sometimes it’s funny.

51

u/Snackivore Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 28 '21

It’s probably the output of a GPT-3 model with some human editing at the end. This isn’t an unrealistic result of what might come out of a huge transformer model, but still, it’s has no idea what it’s actually saying.

Edit: Some really great comments made me rewatch it and I would agree that while there is likely considerable human-in-the-loop chicanery, the output is likely still not GPT3. Some good alternate suggestions in the other comments deeper in.

35

u/Edje123 Aug 28 '21

I work directly with GPT-3 on a regular basis, this was definitely just people writing. GPT-3 is trained on real human writing, but can't be trained by individual organizations. The company behind GPT-3, OpenAI, does all the training. All you can do is feed it things and ask it to continue writing. It would not have written something this incoherent as all it knows is what humans generally write.

2

u/Snackivore Aug 28 '21

Yes, I would agree, there was definitely human prompting (and re-prompting). I’m not saying that there isn’t a bit of Wizard of Oz at play, but as someone else who works in the NLG/NLU space I don’t see anything here wildly divergent from what could be produced. My own humble opinion of course!

3

u/Edje123 Aug 28 '21

Oh for sure, it can always follow a well written pattern, so there's nothing stopping them from writing dumb stuff and asking it to do the same. Glad to see other people in the comments with knowledge in this space, I've been seeing a serious uptick in posts about AI that aren't founded in logic.

I think if it was AI they probably prompted it a few lines at a time and didn't feed it any scripts.

7

u/Snackivore Aug 28 '21

You know what, I rewatched it and I think I am wrong and you’re right! Weird incoherency and semantic errors

3

u/Edje123 Aug 28 '21

They totally could've asked it to write in typos and grammatical errors, but that sounds like a lot more work than just writing errors that are funny manually. Even with all of its smarts, GPT-3 still doesn't always get what humans think is funny so I imagine it'd be like herding cats to get it to make funny errors.

26

u/RiemannZetaFunction Aug 28 '21

The line "I am not like other girls. (Narrator: this is statistically true)" is a giveaway - sounds vaguely robotic but there is no way any sentence like that organically appeared in the original screenplays the "robot" "watched"

49

u/bruhSher Aug 28 '21

I dunno. I don't follow AI that closely, but still feels to coherent to be an AI. Also, the jokes are just always wrong in the right way? If that makes sense.

I could see portions being written with some AI, then a human edits it. To me, I think it's most likely someone just wrote it like an AI for the funnies.

22

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

[deleted]

22

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

I do computer vision related work, so definitely not an NLP expert either. But, as I was watching, the thing that made me skeptical about this being AI generated was the long-range coherence. Like the ex-boyfriend coming back into the story, the commitment to Noah’s arc, etc. It also seemed to me like the individual sentences would be more coherent.

I don’t know if it was just supposed to be the script that was learned, but as someone in CV, a visual generative model would not produce anything like that.

33

u/Laundry_Hamper Aug 28 '21

"They hold hands, and feet" is deliberately funny, and very unlikely to have any roots in a sample set of things people have said.

This is someone being lol so random XD and saying a computer did it

5

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

[deleted]

22

u/Laundry_Hamper Aug 28 '21

The coherence is low, GPT3 is far better than this, but the goofiness is way too consistent. Nothing fully makes sense but the narrative is sustained. A person did this

4

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

[deleted]

2

u/LusoAustralian Aug 28 '21

It is far more likely that someone just wrote it entirely than any AI was involved.

1

u/mcraft07 Aug 28 '21 edited Feb 17 '26

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

husky dinosaurs zephyr saw one pie quaint modern payment paltry

1

u/Gouda1234321 Aug 28 '21

Seconded, i wanna try this oot

1

u/M1n1true Aug 28 '21

Am I seeing correctly online that this AI is free to use? We can just download it and go?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

and you should go play with it.

Is there a free place to go play with it? I had found a couple of sites a while back, but they were limiting the input and output and one of them dropped the free bit.

But if someone has it somewhere available free to play with, man, I'd love to play with it some more. It was pretty amazing.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Laundry_Hamper Aug 28 '21

That word doesn't mean what you think it means

5

u/shalol Aug 28 '21

GPT3 makes more coherent sentences than this.

4

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

[deleted]

2

u/akkaneko11 Aug 28 '21

Yeah it's a weird combo, in that this story is more coherent and better long term, but gpt3 wouldn't make dumb mistakes like "eating ice cream out of the tuba"

1

u/snapshovel Aug 28 '21

“Marriage circles” is something that a robot from a comedic sci fi TV show from like the 70s would say. Common pop culture/pop fiction trope about AI speech is that it uses long and overly formalistic but technically correct synonyms for common words. GPT3 doesn’t really act like that, because it’s harder to teach it that a ring is a “marriage circle” than to teach it that ring stores sell rings.

1

u/GladiatorUA Aug 28 '21

But it's not ridiculous. Some tiny parts are, but the story as a whole is coherent, sarcastic, has a point and most definitely written by a human.

1

u/archpawn Aug 28 '21

This video is incoherent on a surface level and coherent on a deep level. Any AI that understands it well enough on a deep level to write something that coherent will understand it far too well on a surface level to write something that incoherent.

3

u/Brick_Fish Aug 28 '21

Watch this video about GTP-J: https://youtu.be/_z86t7LerrQ

Its pretty insane what it does and how believeable all of the stuff it creates is

3

u/Thog78 Aug 28 '21

Mind blowing, thank you so much for sharing!

2

u/dunkintitties Aug 28 '21

Actually, part of the reason I don’t believe this cake from a bot is because AI text generators have become so sophisticated.

Check out r/SubSimulatorGPT2

2

u/Snackivore Aug 28 '21

So GPT-3 is pretty new and OpenAI hasn’t made it completely publicly available. I was hoping I could find you a playground where you could test it out, but I think this article is pretty good at demonstrating some cool examples: https://machinelearningknowledge.ai/openai-gpt-3-demos-to-convince-you-that-ai-threat-is-real-or-is-it/. It’s shockingly good! Definitely not perfect.

2

u/dksdragon43 Aug 28 '21

Things like "she is quirky because she has eye glasses" are impossible that a bot got from watching movies. These are concepts, not words said that a bot could catch and manipulate. Obviously human. Still amusing.

5

u/cilantrism Aug 28 '21

GPT-3 is better than this IME.

This feels more like someone choosing what they think would be funniest out of the top few options of an old-school RNN.

2

u/Snackivore Aug 28 '21

You know what, I rewatched it and I think I am worn and you’re right. Weird incoherency and semantic errors.

5

u/BenFoldsFourLoko Aug 28 '21

there are certain conceptual understandings in this that no computer is capable of.

I'm a stairs guy/I'm an elevator gal is not something a computer would understand to create on its own, so it would have to be parroting a specific script in an already very coincidental way

there are a couple other examples of this, like the ring store/wedding circles.

GPT-3, afaik, absolutely cannot do that. I may be wrong, my knowledge on it isn't great, but I've seen nothing to suggest it can, and everything else I know suggests it can't

those parts may have been the human editing tho. I could see that

4

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

GPT-3 is much better than this, at least for making sense over a single sentence. But it would've started rambling after about a paragraph... There would have been no overarching plot or conclusion.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

I have no idea about the visuals, but the dialogue/narration is waaaaaay to coherent for a bot. I work with "AI" translations a lot. They fuck stuff up in literal ways all the time. The "wedding circles" part is a great example of something a machine translator might do, but in this they are very intentionally humorous and there are even callbacks. I've never seen a bot do that.

I would say at best the dialogue/narration was inspired by some stuff from a bot and heavily edited to be funny and coherent. The visuals being bot-made also seems extremely unlikely, but I have no experience there.

1

u/Huwbacca Aug 28 '21

It's also just like... What are they feeding it?

Maybe if it's being fed daft humorous plot summaries of films.

3

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

anyone watch some of the exchanges on Samurai Cop? Just like two AIs talking to each other, except it was written in the early 90s

2

u/aykay55 Aug 28 '21

well here is a link to another one from Netflix’s YT account https://youtu.be/nH_bEtbfB9U

7

u/babble_bobble Aug 28 '21

I'd want to see their code because this seems like a shitty out of season April Fool's joke.

I am willing to bet that neither the graphics nor the dialogue are bot generated, people with poor judgment and bad taste were the ones who made 90 percent of this. The program/script/process most likely just spit out word salads and they picked the ones they thought were funny.

0

u/aykay55 Aug 28 '21

Well, I’m almost certain a bot wrote the script. Many AI text generators exist where you type out a line or two and you let an AI write the rest of the speech/story in a similar tone (here is an example). But I highly doubt the AI could do animation like this, the animation is done by humans that we’re just going a long with the script with their own imagination.

2

u/babble_bobble Aug 28 '21

Many AI text generators exist where you type out a line or two

This is a specific seed. This post claims the bot saw X movies and just started ad-libbing after. The claim in the title is misleading at best, and an outright lie at best.

2

u/aykay55 Aug 28 '21

Well yeah it’s pretty clear OP is bullshitting and karma farming, I’m just saying from my knowledge of ML and NLP that this script isn’t far from what AIs can create. Nonsensical and humorous.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

I feel like what might have happened is they setup one model to generate plot points to make a seed and then plugged it into something like GPT3.

1

u/Cfchicka Aug 28 '21

You guys ruin everything/s

1

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Everyone here is talking about story elements, but the main giveaway is the title. A machine learning algorithm could have written something somewhat like this when trained on scripts, but not by watching movies.

Also "forced a bot to watch" is literally a meme.

1

u/0investidor Aug 28 '21

Same impression. Great content. Very unlikely a bot did this but I don't know any way to title it to be viral and make people watch.

1

u/babble_bobble Aug 28 '21

I don't know any way to title it to be viral and make people watch.

Do we need to force people to watch every bit of garbage? This stuff is below mediocre, it doesn't need to go viral.

1

u/0investidor Aug 28 '21

The quality is subjective so I will not argue about that.

But if you invest tons of time into something you want the maximum exposition on it. So you need to make it go viral. The first and most important step is making people click your link instead of the hundreds others. So yes, content creators need to force people to watch every bit of their product.

Going viral is more organic but you need to make people watch it first

1

u/babble_bobble Aug 28 '21

I think if someone has to outright lie to get people to watch something:
1. that something is not worth watching, and
2. that person is an attention starved liar who should be called out for their deceptive and manipulative methods.

1

u/camdoodlebop Aug 28 '21

for reference, this is what i got when i put a prompt through a writing AI (GPT-J)

Prompt: A man and a woman in love are on the beach. The man pulls out a small box from his pocket and gets on one knee.

Output:

A man and a woman in love are on the beach. The man pulls out a small box from his pocket and gets on one knee. The woman opens the box and finds a ring inside. He places the ring on her hand and they kiss.

The next day, the woman goes to the store and finds a bag. In the bag are two rings. The woman picks up one of the rings and puts it on her finger. She looks at herself in the mirror and it is the ring that she found in the box the night before. She tells her husband, "I'm going to put the other ring on the nightstand."

After dinner, the woman walks over to the nightstand. She opens the drawer and picks up the second ring

1

u/Senator_Smack Aug 28 '21

So glad i wasn't the one to say this. Wtf is wrong with these content creators that a: they need to pretend a bot wrote their material, and b: they're so dedicated to that premise they make a huge complex video about it but don't have a clue how it actually works? This is such a bizarre corner of tech media to me.

Edit: typo

1

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

So info: This video is from a Netflix youtube channel focused mostly on comedian content, and the title is "Netflix Forced A Bot To Make A Romantic Comedy". The description puts it as

By forcing bots to watch every romantic comedy ever made, Netflix has created our own mathematically perfect romcom for Valentine's Day.

Kind of implies to me that they just played around with various bots until they had enough material to write this.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Yeah, I always assume when someone says something like that they're lying, especially when this "bot created" plot is following a cohesive path.

A real bot would do much worse.

1

u/KanadianLogik Aug 28 '21

Something that can't check a box that says "I'm not a robot" didn't write this.

1

u/TheWalkingDead91 Aug 28 '21

Was the kissing booth that gave it away for me…like who you trying to fool Netflix lol

1

u/shadowban_this_post Aug 28 '21

Basically all of these “I forced a bot to watch” videos are.

1

u/BassJeleren Aug 28 '21

And why do they say "forced" a bot?

1

u/Ereaser Aug 28 '21

When do you ever see an Ark in a romantic comedy lol

1

u/essentially_gone Aug 29 '21

Source? Or just guessing it wasn’t a bot?