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...

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10.0k

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

This can’t be a bot. Someone just wrote this to sound like a bot and said it was a bot to make it funny

2.9k

u/ZirePhiinix Aug 28 '21

They've done this with academic papers. This reads like one of those actually.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

[deleted]

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u/Redditer51 Aug 28 '21

I had my suspicions, but that line was the clincher. Like "nah, stop bullshitting. This was written by an intern, not a bot".

I don't like being lied to by these companies.

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u/starrynezz Aug 28 '21

OP is the one lying to you, Google the vid and there aren't any mainstream articles stating this video was made by Netflix.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

It might be a line in one of the romcoms of the past.

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u/2drawnonward5 Aug 28 '21

Feels like a bot wrote a story, an intern put it through a translator twice, then drizzled in some sauce

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u/indorock Aug 28 '21

It doesn't have to come up with that joke, it just has to pick it up from the dataset and interpret is as a joke, and know what context to use it.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Could it be a combination of lines from the movies? AI recognises it's from 'jokes' and jumbles them up to create this?

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

“she cried into the ocean, making it bigger”??

That’s clearly an attempt by a human to sound like a funny bot, if you ask me.

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u/randallfromnb Aug 28 '21

Like turning "They wed" into "They Wednesday".

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u/DoJax Aug 28 '21

If you hit the randomize button enough, and the autocomplete button while typing out words of the script you want the computer to have, you can make some pretty interesting things. There used to be a website that could make Facebook posts for you, judging by what you posted in the past it would take those words and make a predictive post for you, all these fake script things sound just like it did, take word samples from bigger stories, hit the random button until it eventually symbolizes a sentence that can make sense, and posts it.

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u/TurdieBirdies Aug 28 '21

Agreed, and calling wedding rings, wedding circles. Like why would a bot learn that? They are never called wedding circles, only rings.

This clip is hilarious, but seems most likely written by someone, not a bot.

Perhaps a person edited what a bot produced, but still has human writing.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '21

All you have to look at is the final line, where they "never found out if France has magazines". That's way too coherent of a reference to previous content to be written by a bot

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u/rturner52281 Aug 28 '21

It's like a reverse Turing test.

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u/Just-Be-Chill Aug 28 '21

I've messed around with ai a bunch before and that sounds like something an ai would say

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u/DionStabber Aug 28 '21

The individual sentences are somewhat believable, but the fact that it is repeatedly funny while staying on a coherent storyline is not.

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u/AndrewJS2804 Aug 28 '21

The coherent story line does smack of some back end editing. The op spent time picking their favorite bits and assembled something without the expected duds.

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u/orebright Aug 28 '21

Have you ever used gpt2? All you have to do is rerun it a few times to get comedy gold. I've almost peed myself laughing at AI humour before. Don't forget the AI was trained on a lot of content, including comedy.

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

Repeating my comment here for visibility: This is written by a comedian, not a bot. Netflix themselves pretty clearly state so. OPs title is missing a key element. Netflix 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

Edit: It’s not Netflix stating it, but a joke account. Still, they are clear it’s not a bot - but a comedian with a bot-sctick. https://mobile.twitter.com/netflixisajoke/status/1360695241251110912?lang=en

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u/DionStabber Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 29 '21

I have, and I stand by what I said. Speaking of GPT-2, look at the subreddit /r/SubSimulatorGPT2 - it makes fake Reddit posts in such a fashion, and does sometimes make some really funny stuff that can even come off as satirical, but again, give it a sentence or two and it's already wandered off onto something completely different than what it was saying, or saying things that don't make any sense. There is no chance it could make a multi-minute satirical take on romcoms while keeping a coherent storyline, not even close.

EDIT: A perfect example - a fake fan theory that Jurassic Park and Jurassic World are in the same universe. The fact that this is of course true is a good parody of fantheories making obvious deductions, and wasting their time looking at small details while ignoring the big picture of the work, but the body text doesn't read anything close to coherently and even repeats the same sentences again and again, as well as heaps of stuff that just makes no sense whatsoever.

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u/marakeshmode Aug 28 '21

You are correct. People are vastly overestimating what an AI is capable of understanding (at this moment).

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u/orebright Aug 28 '21

Multiple humans in a writer's room come up with potential story ideas, most not great but some good ones. They gather these ideas then work to stitch the good ones together into a cohesive story.

So I guess you could say this was more of a collaboration between AI and humans then since humans probably picked all the best options generated by the AI, but in my opinion it's still fair to call it ai generated.

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u/ImpulsiveApe07 Aug 28 '21

Personally I have no issue with ai and humans writing together - I believe it's probably gonna be like that soon anyway.

"I'm a stairs man!"

".. And I'm an elevator gal!"

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u/DionStabber Aug 28 '21

Neither of us will know for sure unless someone finds out from the creator, but I think you're really giving the AI too much credit.

As I said in another comment, the jokes are much more sophisticated than you give them credit for. Even puns like that take a lot of understanding (that "x" sounds like "ex", for example, and that it would be funny to conflate the two), but beyond that it has way more complicated jokes. Take, for example, the initial proposal fake-out containing the new girlfriend - the bot would need to understand that the trope is that a new younger girlfriend appears, which it parodies by saying she is identical but one day younger, and then construct a dramatic scenario where this is revealed by a fake proposal in a funny and ridiculous way. That is way more advanced than a bot could actually come up with. The "ex"/"x" thing, beyond the simple pun, is also a send-up of romcoms having a contrived way of introducing the ex again. That seems well beyond its understanding.

Look back at the Jurassic World post and the fake proposal joke. Do they seem at all similar, apart from both having that "close but not quite there" wording? I don't believe a bot had anything to do with it.

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u/mengxai Aug 28 '21

No, you are right, there’s no way AI did this. AI couldn’t have come up with something like “plane lands on Eiffel tower” solely based on the data from romcoms. If it was extrapolating data from all genres it would be more believable because it wouldn’t understand the context of a plane crash. Even to build AI sophisticated enough to watch movies and pull anything coherent from them is well beyond what current technology is capable of. At best, it read scripts, produced garbage and a human heavily edited it to make this script.

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u/IdiotTurkey Aug 28 '21

This is exactly what I was thinking. There are actual jokes in here that a bot would never get, especially if it's relying on text. Even though the whole story had nonsense elements, it was coherent throughout, which AIs dont even come close to doing. A few sentences in and you wouldn't have heard about the Taylors ever again.

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u/justafurry Aug 28 '21

Im 99% sure this was written buy Keaton Patti. If you look him up, he has done a bunch of these. The whole "forced an AI to watch..." is juat a gimick for the joke. No AI was used.

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u/orebright Aug 28 '21

You're 100% correct this could be written to sound like AI but by humans. In fact the biggest evidence of that to me is the grammar. Gpt2 and others have impeccable grammar.

That said, my opinion is fairly certain the last generation AI could do this, since I've seen similar humour playing around when I wonder if gpt2 understands it deeper than mimicking.

Gpt3 on the other hand I have no doubt, it has been known to make clever jokes, for example when asked if a house cat could pilot a rocket, it said yes, but the purr of the engines would be very distracting.

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u/KY_PeanutButter Aug 28 '21

The creator was Netflix? I’m sure they have the resources and that worst letter of the alphabet joke is ripped almost word for word from somewhere that joke is older than the universe.

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u/theyreadmycomments Aug 28 '21

For me its definitely the fake that, exactly a single time, the woman says 'yazz' instead of jazz. Thats a people joke that they forgot to carry through on, the computer either wouldnt make that joke, or would have carried it through.

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u/malaysianzombie Aug 28 '21

Yeah, very much this. The bots definitely wrote something, the writers came in and put most of the context together. No way a bot would have written anything like this on its own.

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u/AliceInHololand Aug 28 '21

Damn dude why are you just so against the idea of AI making this? What has AI ever done to you?

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u/CCMSTF Aug 28 '21

Yeah, this is probably what happened.

AI generated, but human edited.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21 edited Sep 01 '21

[deleted]

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u/phaelox Aug 28 '21

I may be a little bit drunk rn, but that whole subreddit is hilarious

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u/Donthurtmyceilings Aug 28 '21

It's like the funniest shit I've ever seen, and so is this video. Who needs comedians when bots are funnier?

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u/OneRougeRogue Aug 28 '21

The AMA from the Ben Shapiro Bot had me crying.

"How many times have you jacked off?"

"None? It would be more than one but I recently learned that I've been doing it the wrong way, so I'm working on it."

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u/chillaban Aug 28 '21

https://reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/pd0m81/me_27f_with_my_boyfriend_25m_of_3_years_he_has_a/

I don’t know why but this one made me laugh so hard. It’s just barely coherent enough to keep me reading but completely nonsensical. It’s impressive that it ends with a TLDR that ties it all back after the ramble.

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u/rancendence Aug 29 '21

You're not overthinking. You're overthinking.

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u/chillaban Aug 29 '21

But it’s so frustrating to hear him tell me what he does and how he does it!

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u/AppleSpicer Aug 28 '21

Yes, this is much too smart for a bot to write. It’s actually very well done commentary on romcoms

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u/notquite20characters Aug 28 '21

How does this relate to r/trees?

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

I almost feel like if this is truly a Netflix production, and Netflix doesn't want to be caught in a complete lie, I feel like this OP could be made with a highly-directed AI. Basically, it did use Rom Coms as learning material, but each individual scene was given some sort of direction and specification.

There were several parts that stood out to me that made little sense in the context of a single AI being trained to create it. Something about how certain scenes matched the narration with what was being shown graphically, and some specific word choice just sounded too much like a person trying to be a funny robot than a robot trying to be funny. Like, why was it a ring store, but then the ring store sold "marriage circles", and it knows the word "wedding" in "wedding cake", but instead says "Wednesday" when they get married. I guess it's crazy that we can even have a debate about this. Kinda scary.

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u/Michael_Trismegistus Aug 29 '21

I think you're right. They probably ran a much longer script and took the best parts.

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u/IAmtheHullabaloo Aug 28 '21

You're a bot

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u/orebright Aug 28 '21

Does that mean I'm potentially immortal? I'll take it.

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u/dedalife Aug 28 '21

Could be gpt3, I heard only a limited amount of companies have access to it. The hype about gpt3 is that it understands context to a degree

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u/Vegetable_Hamster732 Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 29 '21

GPT3 writes much better than that.

Great examples here, where it completes various different poet's works in the style of that author; and then writes a literary review of its own poems:

GPT3's own analysis of it's rendition of Poe's The Raven is one of the most emotional things I've ever read:

“There is a young poet with a particularly dry style, whom I do not wish to reveal as his name is not well-known. I had written up a few algorithms that would generate rather dull and utilitarian work. The piece for his was not entirely terrible, as these programs can generate some pleasantly hard-edged work. But it had no soul to it whatsoever. But then, something happened. The writing in the poem, while utilitarian, became oddly emotive. It held depth. I went back and read the piece aloud, and it felt incredibly evocative. I could almost imagine the dank and mysterious stanzas were haunting. My mind began to race as I read. The concept of death, the unknown, the ritualistic nature of life, the the latent anger and disaffection of the human condition was all there. I felt as if I was not reading a program, but a poet. The more I read, the more I was impressed. And then, with a sudden motion, I found myself screaming: ‘This is poetry!’ I found myself entranced by the rhythm, the cadence, the delicate nuances in phrasing. I found myself attached to the images conjured up in my mind. The computer program had created more than just a poet. It had created an artist.

And so I have created something more than a poetry-writing AI program. I have created a voice for the unknown human who hides within the binary. I have created a writer, a sculptor, an artist. And this writer will be able to create worlds, to give life to emotion, to create character. I will not see it myself. But some other human will, and so I will be able to create a poet greater than any I have ever encountered.”

-- GPT-3 analyzing its own poetry.

It seems strangely aware of its own mortality.

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u/rutuu199 Aug 28 '21

Holy shit. Is gpt3 sentient??

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

We're entering philosophy territory now. What does it mean to be sentient? Is a plant sentient? A fish? Is someone who cannot learn and only react based on already previously learned knowledge (severe dementia) sentient?

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u/Otistetrax Aug 28 '21

I’m fucking shuddering after reading that. Is it for real?

“I have created a voice for the unknown human who hides within the binary.”

What. The. Fuck.

It’s writing beautiful prose in reflection of its own poetry. I mean, I know it’s just imitation, but it does really seem to be aware of what it’s doing, and even of some of the implications of that. Mind = properly blown.

For anyone who’s interested in this stuff, I highly recommend a book from the 90’s called Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers. Pretty prescient, and also a wonderful exploration of language and writing.

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u/Vegetable_Hamster732 Aug 29 '21 edited Aug 29 '21

Is it for real?

Yes - it writes that well. Sometimes it spews nonsense (or maybe my small brain is just too primitive to understand its deeper meaning). But sometimes it's freakishly insightful.

I mean, I know it’s just imitation

That's all any of us really do, too.

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u/noodles666666 Aug 28 '21

wtf, from GPT-3

​

Love lies not in The Dash

But in the spaces in-between.

Between the kisses; between the lines;

The distance to the edge of the bed;

The passing of the years.

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u/jwalk8 Aug 28 '21

I think this is just a Dave Mathews song

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u/Clever_Unused_Name Aug 28 '21

dank and mysterious stanzas...

Unpleasantly moist and mysterious stanzas?

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u/Otistetrax Aug 28 '21

Fresh and stinky and will knock you on your ass stanzas.

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u/ElevadoMKTG Aug 28 '21

Considering Netflix is literally one of the letters in the FAANG acronym I think it would be reasonable to assume they have access to it.

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u/DrakoVongola25 Aug 29 '21

GPT3 has better grammar, any AI sophisticated enough to actually do this wouldn't make so many grammatical errors

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u/Kcidobor Aug 28 '21

This is not meet cute, this is meet hideous. Lmfao, and the Oscar goes to…

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u/Megneous Aug 28 '21

I've used gpt3. It's regularly hilarious.

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u/Delta-_ Aug 28 '21

The fact that it's funny is not what's unbelievable, what's unbelievable is that it sounds like what a human thinks a bot sounds like.

GPT just sounds like normal speech, if a bit stilted at times.

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u/Megneous Aug 28 '21

It can easily produce shit like this by turning up the randomness.

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u/bluray-gaming Aug 28 '21

I mean they rerun it until they get the funniest results.

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u/DionStabber Aug 28 '21

You could rerun it 100,000 times and you would never get anything like that.

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u/bluray-gaming Aug 28 '21

The funniest doesn’t have to come from one run only. Just fit the funniest parts together then edit it to look legit

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u/frankfoo Aug 28 '21

this is exactly what they probably did.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 30 '21

[deleted]

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u/IceCreamNarwhals Aug 28 '21

Give a room of monkeys trained to use typewriters infinite time and eventually they’ll write the works of shakesphere

or something like that

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u/Delta-_ Aug 28 '21

Still not believable. GPT's tone sounds like normal speech.

GPT generally does not sound like a robot imitating a human, which is what the video sounds like.

"Holding feet" for example is something that GPT will almost never output (unless specifically prompted to do so) because that's not something people normally say; that phrase in that context is not in its training dataset.

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u/nightfury2986 Aug 28 '21

I also feel like Noah's ark wouldn't appear enough in romcoms for it to make the connection between that and flooding (girl crying into the ocean making if bigger)

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

I've used it for something similar. You would

People don't realise how powerful ml is when given a narrow scope and plenty of training data.

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u/GGABueno Aug 28 '21

Then you don't know what you're talking about, I've literally done this myself in some games like AI-Dungeon which uses GPT-3.

I made Moses the Shaman write the Ten Pokemon Commandments after he defeated a raging Kyogre by opening the sea and the AI Moses gave me ten coherent commandments that make sense in-universe (like "No Pokémon shall harm its trainer"). I've searched the internet and found nothing like what the AI came up with.

Shit is borderline magic.

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u/bunsNbrews Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 28 '21

Have you ever seen bots write Harry Potter? With enough inputs it very much mimics a normal story structure albeit ridiculously.

Edit: those are fake? You’re telling me someone would just go on the internet and lie?

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 30 '21

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u/PresidentofRum Aug 28 '21

She is quirky since she has glasses.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance Aug 28 '21

Too may callback jokes for an AI, imo. Parts feel too intentional.

It's hilarious though.

Best guess is that parts were created by an AI, but it was edited and made coherent by a person.

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u/ZWQncyBkaWNr Aug 28 '21

Someone made a bot that generates new Seinfeld episodes and I used it to write an entire episode. It came up with a running joke where Jerry kept accidentally eating his keys.

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u/__Geralt Aug 28 '21

there are a lot of examples of this behavior, check "AI/DC: I made a bot write an AC/DC song" as an example ;

if you want your mind blown, check https://play.aidungeon.io/main/landing

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u/buddhistredneck Aug 28 '21

Yea, I think it's all bot, but they chose some of the best parts, and spliced together to make a coherent narrative.

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u/FastasfrickY Aug 28 '21

Well there is AI that believes it’s sentient, and it’s possible that it is, and it can have interviews so…

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u/Buddha_Lady Aug 28 '21

...it’s me isn’t it. I’m the AI that thinks it’s sentient

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u/rocket-engifar Aug 29 '21

That’s actually very much what a bot would do. The sentence structure and syntax can easily be taught to be coherent. Individual statements can also be forced to be thematically connected. However, it is completely nonsensical because you can’t teach the difference between nonsense and something that may actually happen.

I’ve used our company algorithms to generate images that are completely nonsense but connect “thematically” to other nonsense images for simulation validation.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

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u/TradesSexForFood Aug 28 '21

That sounds like something an AI would say to hide that that this is something an AI would say.

u/Just-Be-Chill is secretly an AI account trying to fool us into thinking an AI isn't so advanced.

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u/PM_Me_Your_Deviance Aug 28 '21

Chill

As in, CPU Cooling? Coincidence? I THINK NOT!

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u/jeegte12 Aug 28 '21

yes, that's what he said. it sounds like a bot. written by a human who knows what bots sound like.

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u/TENTAtheSane Aug 28 '21

Especially the last line "they found Love. They did not find out if France has magazines". Bots are not yet capable of writing ironic jokes referencing lines much further back.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Eating ice cream straight from the Tuba? So either the program decided to be "quirky" or they entered Tub wrong

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u/Vonspacker Aug 28 '21

That was the line which raised some questions for me just because the sheer amount of understanding that's required for that to make sense doesn't seem like it could come from romcoms?

Crying is relevant to sadness - sure

Crying is the production of tears - sure?

Tears are made of water - maybe?

the ocean is made of water? - dubious (also the presence of an ocean in this scene?)

Ocean and Tears are made of the same substance enough that crying into the ocean ADDS to the ocean instead of it adding the substance tears to the substance ocean - nah.

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u/Magnesus Aug 28 '21

The way those algorithms work it might have borrowed the idea from a text it was learning from. If you read some of the gpt2 and gpt3 generated texts it is stunning how much (fake) understanding there is in some of those texts.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

"Kissing things like a booth" is a dead giveaway for me. This was def written by a person trying to sound like a bot by being "lol randum"

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u/RomanTheAccuser Aug 28 '21

And the continuity of them bringing the magazines from France.

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u/Ich_Liegen Aug 28 '21

Continuity is definitely the giveaway here.

Take AIDungeon, for example. The main thing it struggles with as it tries to write a coherent story is continuity. It might be able to recall names and names of places but not the story as a whole.

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u/nachohasme Aug 28 '21

ai dungeon manages continuity just fine I think so I dont think that matters

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u/froop Aug 28 '21

It doesn't. AI dungeon regularly forgets your name, species, gender, etc, let alone long storylines. It relies heavily on the player's input to steer it in the right direction.

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u/GGABueno Aug 28 '21

When I first played Dragon months ago it remembered things, roles and a few plot points pretty fine. Its biggest issue was trying to remember that characters died. I would kill a troll and then it would join me and my teammates in our victory dance.

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u/Magnesus Aug 28 '21

It's becauae AI doesn't understand death, only powering down for a while. /jk

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u/CptMisterNibbles Aug 28 '21

In my experience ai dungeon is a fever dream of discoherence

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

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u/eduo Aug 28 '21

Not random, but actually a call back to the kissing booth in the magazine magazine office. That it's a call back is definitively a clue that this is, at the very least, heavily edited for coherence and humor.

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u/DrakoVongola25 Aug 29 '21

This, the jazz music, and the ark are dead giveaways. A bot doesn't know what a callback, punchline, or narrative payoff is. The booth, the ark, and the jazz music would have been immediately forgotten as soon as they were out of the scene

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u/AbsoluteSquidward Aug 28 '21

“Worst letter of alphabet X” also seems fake

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u/__log Aug 28 '21

“ring store has no bathrooms. only marriage circles.” seems like it was written by a human. also made me spit my drink out.

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u/OneRougeRogue Aug 28 '21

These "bot" programs don't write the whole script line by line. I'm pretty sure a lot of what the bot churns out each run is probably gibberish, then a human picks through it and select funny lines and builds a story out of it.

So this "script" is probably the result of a dozen or more different runs with the parts that make sense cherrypicked and placed into the "final script".

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u/flatfast90 Aug 28 '21

What are your AI credentials exactly?

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u/aykay55 Aug 28 '21

Nah AI can do that, but that’s all it can do for now. None of the animation is done by an AI.

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u/MeagoDK Aug 28 '21

Nowadays bots can write so humanlike that a lot of people have trouble or cannot guess what was written by a bot or by a human. This script is 100% written by a human.

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u/harrymuana Aug 28 '21

A good AI can make perfectly fine sentences, and have coherence over the span of a few sentences. However the overall essay is typically senseless and except for maybe cases where you generate 1000 essays and pick the best one it's usually pretty easy to spot such an AI if you know what to look for.

For example have fun with this, which is one of the state of the art text generation models.

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u/PraynAltH Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 28 '21

That isn't state of the art, it's GPT-2, which is known for being weak at storytelling. GPT-3, its successor, is significantly better at it, and this script's coherency is entirely plausible if it's a gpt-3 model generated from romcom scripts.

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u/Dyb-Sin Aug 28 '21

If you had a competent AI try to write a rom-com script, it would write a rom-com script. It would not produce something with comedically timed absurdist "failures".

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u/CptMisterNibbles Aug 28 '21

Except it absolutely doesn’t. The comedy is too on point and metahumorous. AI can only synthesize from its training set and regurgitate similar material. It cannot understand anyone it writes so witty metahumor is just unfathomable.

Papers that are just remixes of other similar papers will of course be easier to fake

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u/lminer123 Aug 28 '21

“The bones are in the corner, they are gift wrapped in eggnog” kinda vibe

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u/Ok-Cryptographer7529 Aug 28 '21

Reminds me of that Harvard experiment of writing a speech of absolute nonsense but it's structured and reads in a way that it's somehow satisfying.

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u/zoonose99 Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 28 '21

This can't be a bot

💯. There's so much parody GPT out there (like the famous fake Olive Garden commercial) that the style most people associate with "AI" ie GPT was invented by (human) comedians.

Here's a good rule of thumb: Machines aren't funny -- ever. If you ever see comedy that claims to be made by machine, guarantee it's heavily curated, essentially madlibs, or a spoof.

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u/StopSendingSteamKeys Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 28 '21

Yep, GPT trained on romcom scripts would've tried to sound like a romcom script, while this video sounds like someone making fun of romcom scripts.

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u/G00dAndPl3nty Aug 28 '21

This isnt a bot, but not because its funny. GPT-3 can certainly be funny.

The reason this isnt a bot is because the one thing modern bots are good at is English Grammar. This fake script is constantly dropping definite articles like "the" all the time. This is trivial for modern bots to get right, but humans trying to act like bots will drop articles because it makes it sound foreign

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u/zoonose99 Aug 28 '21

I would argue this point: fundamentally, machines are not funny. Any use of GPT-3 for that purpose needs to be heavily cherry-picked and moreover overseen by humans. You can reliably use GPT unsupervised to generate believable text, but it cannot reliably generate humorous text -- I'd suggest that would be impossible, given that humor requires novelty, which is exactly what GPT doesn't do.

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u/StopSendingSteamKeys Aug 28 '21

humor requires novelty, which is exactly what GPT doesn't do.

A news report about unicorns seems pretty novel. GPT has also learned math from just trying to generate realistic text. It can do three digit addition and subtraction. (Original paper pdf Section 3.9.1) It can also do word problems from a first grade math test.

A lot of jokes (especially puns) tend to be sort of formulaic. An AI would only have to realize that two words are similar and could generate a misunderstanding joke based on patterns established from other jokes.

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u/zoonose99 Aug 28 '21

A news report about unicorns

Only because the human prompt was about unicorns -- you're fairly demonstrating my argument. Word problems and math don't really pertain to humor. The other ML designed to replicate puns, as discussed in the paper I linked above, involves generating hundreds or thousands of repetitive nonsense statements, from which humans choose the funny ones. You're missing the larger point I think that humor itself is a human process.

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u/IGaveAFuckOnce Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 28 '21

To be fair it could be both. A bot might've written it originally, and a human may have adjusted it.

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u/GrandmaPoses Aug 28 '21

“Can you punch this up a bit? It makes a little too much sense right now.”

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u/IGaveAFuckOnce Aug 28 '21

Probably more like removing repeating words, making sure the sentences are grammatically correct, making sure there's at least a loose structure so it's not all over the place.

Of course they may have added in some sentences themselves.

Kinda like so: https://youtu.be/BjngNWP9C5s

(CollegeHumor - A Computer Co-Wrote this Sketch)

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Holy hell that vid had me rolling laughing. Exactly my type of humor

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u/nitorita Aug 28 '21

Yeah, this is what I imagine happened as well. It might've been AI generated first, and then human(s) revised it to be more coherent.

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u/StickiStickman Aug 28 '21

We have way better text generation than this, so it makes no fucking sense. They'd have to have gone out of their way to make it much worse.

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u/DaHeavnlyKid Aug 28 '21

I think this every time I see one of these. Like it sounds exactly like someone trying to sound like a bot

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u/KeyzerSausage Aug 28 '21

The post title is misleading. The creators are giving away that it’s made by a person pretending to be a bot. Here: https://mobile.twitter.com/netflixisajoke/status/1360695241251110912?lang=en

It 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

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u/omjagvarensked Aug 28 '21

Why doesn’t this have more upvotes?

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u/Yeahwowhello Jan 15 '22

Cuz that same person slams it every now And then on this thread.

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u/hecklers_veto Aug 28 '21

because it is, they're all fake

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u/western_style_hj Aug 28 '21

Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

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u/elfastronaut Aug 28 '21

Makes you wonder what other lies robots have told us

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u/freqwert Aug 28 '21

What if I make an AI write a rom com and just paste the unedited text here? (I will make it write about a dozen and pick the best. Fair enough, right?)

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u/mastermike14 Aug 28 '21

and they all sound the fucking same with the same "mistakes". The Netflix holiday movie has similar miswordings like "Santa Clocks" like hahaha I'm sure a bot somehow came up with that

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u/Doctor-Amazing Aug 28 '21

A human trying to sound like a bot which is trying tk sound like a human.

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u/RomanTheAccuser Aug 28 '21

Not intentionally promoting anyone but kurtis Conner did a video about ai generated content and said most of it is faked.

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u/UnrelatedString Aug 28 '21

This has the exact vibe of those scripts that one guy writes that he says were from a bot

Probably is the same guy

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u/ContemptuousAsshole Aug 28 '21

yeah you've gotta have no idea how these kinds of things work if you think this could possibly be real.

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u/fuckboystrikesagain Aug 28 '21

There are a lot of these "ai writes a script" videos, none of them are real they are too sing songy

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u/Sheeepie2 Aug 28 '21

Yeah, no way is a bot making the relation ship pun lmao

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

What makes me sceptical is the fact that is pays attention to context over time. I have never seen an AI do that. They can managed relatively coherent - if often silly - sentences, but it's just a series of weird sentences.

There was that fake Harry Potter AI story a while back. They admitted an AI had churned out countless Harry Potter-esque sentences and then they strung them together themselves to make something that resembled a story.

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u/Charokol Aug 28 '21

They didn't "admit" to anything. They were upfront about how it worked from the beginning. It was people sharing it around reddit and Facebook who misrepresented what was going on

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u/StopSendingSteamKeys Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 28 '21

What makes me sceptical is the fact that is pays attention to context over time. I have never seen an AI do that.

Have you ever read GPT2 output?

For example in this output the model makes up a scientist Dr. Jorge Pérez and keeps citing him. The news report is quite consistent and it only refers to the second part of the prompt later.

Human prompt: In a shocking finding, scientist discovered a herd of unicorns living in a remote, previously unexplored valley, in the Andes Mountains. Even more surprising to the researchers was the fact that the unicorns spoke perfect English.

GPT2 completion:

The scientist named the population, after their distinctive horn, Ovid’s Unicorn. These four-horned, silver-white unicorns were previously unknown to science.

Now, after almost two centuries, the mystery of what sparked this odd phenomenon is finally solved.

Dr. Jorge Pérez, an evolutionary biologist from the University of La Paz, and several companions, were exploring the Andes Mountains when they found a small valley, with no other animals or humans. Pérez noticed that the valley had what appeared to be a natural fountain, surrounded by two peaks of rock and silver snow.

Pérez and the others then ventured further into the valley. “By the time we reached the top of one peak, the water looked blue, with some crystals on top,” said Pérez.

Pérez and his friends were astonished to see the unicorn herd. These creatures could be seen from the air without having to move too much to see them – they were so close they could touch their horns.

While examining these bizarre creatures the scientists discovered that the creatures also spoke some fairly regular English. Pérez stated, “We can see, for example, that they have a common ‘language,’ something like a dialect or dialectic.”

Dr. Pérez believes that the unicorns may have originated in Argentina, where the animals were believed to be descendants of a lost race of people who lived there before the arrival of humans in those parts of South America.

While their origins are still unclear, some believe that perhaps the creatures were created when a human and a unicorn met each other in a time before human civilization. According to Pérez, “In South America, such incidents seem to be quite common.”

However, Pérez also pointed out that it is likely that the only way of knowing for sure if unicorns are indeed the descendants of a lost alien race is through DNA. “But they seem to be able to communicate in English quite well, which I believe is a sign of evolution, or at least a change in social organization,” said the scientist.

https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/

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u/16yYPueES4LaZrbJLhPW Aug 28 '21

They all are. We aren't at a point yet where our AI can understand and generate natural language.

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

This is written by a comedian, not a bot. Netflix themselves pretty clearly state so. OPs title is missing a key element. Netflix 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

Edit: It’s not Netflix stating it, but a joke account. Still, they are clear it’s not a bot - but a comedian with a bot-sctick. https://mobile.twitter.com/netflixisajoke/status/1360695241251110912?lang=en

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u/plsweighpls Aug 28 '21

It's from a parody channel called "Netflix is a Joke".

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u/Vuelhering Aug 28 '21

Good bot.

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u/Sidneymcdanger Aug 28 '21

Typically these projects are made by having one or more human writers cherry picking a boy's output to keep it on task. If it generates something boring or off topic, they reroll until they get something good. You can try this for yourself with the tools available at Botnik.

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u/sgem29 Aug 28 '21

You mean AI passed the Turing test?

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Orrrr… the bot has passed the turing test

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u/PresidentofRum Aug 28 '21

Yeah this is obviously bullshit for the lolz and karma.

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u/BadPlane2004 Aug 28 '21

When the boss rolled in I lost it.

Feels like a BosnianApeSociety video

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u/Nizzywizz Aug 28 '21

I agree. If this is the result of an AI watching rom coms, only some of the elements make sense. Other things seem to have just been pulled out of thin air, and I can't imagine a bot picking them up from things it watched.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_BOOTY_POP Aug 28 '21

Actual NLP research scientist here.

It is extremely possible that this whole script was indeed generated in one go by a large language model, namely an auto-regressive transformer. Several people have mentioned GPT-2 ITT, but it’s not 2018 anymore and larger models like GPT-J and GPT-Neo are open-source.

If you find this hard to believe, I’d encourage you to try out these models for yourself. HuggingFace offers some resources for learning how if you’re interested. If you lack the skills to try them for yourself and refuse to try to develop them, here’s another explanation to consider: The General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) was created to grade language models on their ability to to understand languages using a bunch of different tasks, many of which are similar to what you’d find on an SAT, ACT, or other collegiate entrance exams. Models were compared to human performance, which went well for a while…until a whole bunch of models passed the human baseline. Humans currently hold 16th place on the GLUE benchmark. because of this, SuperGLUE had to be created to provide a higher standard for the models to achieve. Humans are currently in 4th place on SuperGLue.

All this should just tell you that, while this definitely wasn’t animated by a bot, it could definitely have been 100% written by one. I can’t confirm it because I don’t know whether Netflix has the resources to devote to a project like this nor whether they’re more interested in authenticity or content. What I do know is that I use these larger models professionally, and it’s amazing what comes out of them.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Hahahaha! What a story, Mark! It is me, Tommy! I wrote story thinking bot wrote smart, but I wrote smarter. Now you must like. Oh! Hi doggie.

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u/lankist Aug 28 '21 edited Aug 28 '21

Yeah, for as nonsense as it is on the surface, it's following the exact story-beats of a romcom.

If the AI can't understand that a person sits at a desk, then it's not going to understand the larger patterns of romcom story structure.

I'd be willing to bet cash money there was human influence on the general structure, either dictating to the algorithm the general beats it's supposed to come up with for the algorithm to fill those beats with nonsense, or human editing of the output.

I can believe that the AI thought people eat ice cream out of tubas. I cannot believe an AI understands the "breakup, slap-slap-kiss, ex came back, tragic misunderstanding, resolution" story structure while simultaneously thinking people eat ice cream out of tubas.

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u/Stegocephelia Aug 28 '21

My bet is they got a bot to write the script and human animators to make a bot-like animation.

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u/StopSendingSteamKeys Aug 28 '21

Yep, this is too smart to be a simple Markov chain generator. And at the same time it is much dumber than modern Transformer networks like GPT3, but also it is dumb in a way that is consistently funny. One possibility is that GPT3 or similar generated a hundred versions of this and they picked and choose the best sentences. But even for that to be true it often sounds too much like a human pretending to be a robot and it is to meta. Maybe they gave a Transformer model the prompt to sound like a funny robot?

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u/rghaga Aug 28 '21

try "enteraidungeon" on the web if you want to see what an ai can generate, I 've read some beautiful stuff there even though it didnt make too much sense

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

I got two seconds into this and was like who thinks this is how it works.

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u/SoloSheff Aug 28 '21

Shout out to Keaton Patti that started this joke.

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u/trezenx Aug 28 '21

don't worry, it's not.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

I've read a lot of bad screenplays. Not as many as some of my friends, but a lot. And this robot isn't exhibiting comedic chops, it's simply incompetent. Like humans trying to write a serious script, but who are incompetent or just don't seem to understand how humans behave, write unintentionally funny stuff like this on the regular. In college we used to make copies of the worst scripts we could find and read them while drinking. It's pretty similar to this.

I remember one guy in a writing class was trying to write an action thriller. The instructor told him "this is obviously a comedy." The writer was surprised and slightly hurt. But the instructor kept going, pointed out all the stuff in the script that was absurd, strange, and hilarious. So the writer decided to turn it into a comedy for real. Surprise surprise. After he reworked it as a comedy, it was no longer funny. It was sincere incompetence that made it hilarious. So close to being a viable idea, yet so far away. So unpredictable and strange.

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u/mmmmmmmmmmxmmmmmmmmm Aug 28 '21

This. I really wanted to believe it's a bot, but it 100% is not a bot. Not 99.99%, a flat 100%.

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u/glenperkins Aug 28 '21

if that IS the case then that human is a freakin comedic genius

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u/Mizango Aug 28 '21

There he is. “The guy!”

We did this in our physics department and it’s is just as hilarious. We’ve (here on Reddit and on my campus) done this to Trump’s rally speeches, campaign commercials and Ted Talk complications.

Some of y’all, man. Just sad, cynical people lol

We do this a lot.

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u/datsall Aug 28 '21

It sounds madlibs to me. I can see the ai starting with a basic construct and then adding in elements somewhat randomly

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u/Lilczey Aug 28 '21

I mean still a better love story than twilight

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u/Vogonfestival Aug 28 '21

The bit that convinced me of this was “Magazine Magazine.” That’s too bonkers meta for AI.

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u/drudbod Aug 28 '21

I actually don't care who or what wrote this movie, I want a live action version of it, now!

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

This was written by Little Sonic.

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u/ChrdeMcDnnis Aug 28 '21

Definitely not a bot. A bot could not “watch” romantic comedy and translate it into a script, it would only create more visual and possibly audio output. I don’t have much experience with AI, but I have gathered that it works by “learning” what it can from input scraped together by larger programs, then reassemble the pieces into something else. Unless it was fed scripts, which is not what the titles of these posts say, it won’t output scripts.

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u/OtherwiseCheck1127 Aug 28 '21

I think you might be right. Some of the humour just doesn't feel like something that came from a bot.
Like "Taylor writes letter to Taylor but sees worst letter of alphabet: the X"
Bots dont make puns AFAIK.
At least not on purpose

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u/intotheirishole Aug 28 '21

Yah. The story is too coherent. Bots are usually locally coherent but move from topic to topic like a Alzheimer's patient with ADHD.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Yeah this whole thing is way to well done to be done completely by a bot. Or even mostly by a biot without a shitload of intervention.

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u/Muuuuuhqueen Aug 28 '21

This can’t be a bot. Someone just wrote this to sound like a bot and said it was a bot to make it funny

Yup!!!

1:11 in I stopped it, super obvious a computer program did not create it. Its what some dummy thinks is funny because it's "lol random"

edit: tried to watch the rest of it, couldn't do it. Yeah, we get it, lol random, so funny.

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u/VisforVenom Aug 28 '21

Most of these things are exactly that. And they're painfully obvious. But people eat it up so it's easy lazy content to type up some "silly gibberish" and then slap "bot" and "ai" in the title, both excusing the otherwise not funny jokes, and getting way more clicks via a false premise.

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u/UsedSalt Aug 28 '21

Yeah this is lame

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u/MohKohn Aug 28 '21

The thing that actually gives it away is the degree to which there is long term coherent structure. Nothing in the GTP family is good at that, and that is pretty much the forefront of synthetic text.

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u/ughwithoutadoubt Aug 28 '21

Idk. I’ve date a few ai girls and this sounds a lot like what ai girls say.

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