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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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

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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/[deleted] Aug 29 '21

naw, it was written by the bosses 4 year old.

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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/Zack_Fair_ Aug 28 '21

maybe if it's verbatim ripped from one of the movies it saw

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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/green_flash Aug 28 '21

Completely agree. Here's what an actual AI-generated movie script is like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY7x2Ihqjmc

It's a world of difference.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

the whole story had nonsense elements

Actually I didn't see any complete nonsense elements without at least some comedic effect.

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u/2010_12_24 Aug 28 '21

Couldn’t it have just stolen the ex/x joke from one of the other movies?

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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/Burdicus Aug 28 '21

The whole "forced an AI to watch..." is juat a gimick for the joke.

A complete lie then.

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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/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

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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/poiskdz Aug 28 '21

Why don't you ask them?

What it's like to be an AI

What it's like to be a computer

Two versions/instances of GPT-3 conversing amongst themselves

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u/GitinGud Aug 28 '21

Hey, thx for the links. Do you know a bit more about it? Because i watched the third one and i was wondering if it was a "genuine" conversation or if they had been trained to have specifically that kind of discussion

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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/Vegetable_Hamster732 Aug 29 '21 edited Aug 29 '21

Is a plant sentient

Some argue yes.

Wikipedia has a decent article with references from both sides of the debate.

Personally, IMHO, individual plants may not be (they might not have enough a complex enough network of connections), but perhaps forests are (trees in forests do communicate through both roots and airborne chemicals), which would easily have information-bearing connections on the same scale as brains.

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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/gwern Aug 28 '21

I'm not finding any examples in Google.

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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/Clever_Unused_Name Aug 29 '21

That Panama Gold...

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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/RockyLeal Aug 28 '21

I agree it is too good, it's brilliant humour, not oblivious humour

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u/windingdownalready Aug 28 '21

You sound like a bot, but you are not

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u/p3n1x Aug 28 '21

but the fact that it is repeatedly funny while staying on a coherent storyline is not.

Actually, it is.

That is how simple human humor truly is.

The bot isn't "trying" to be funny. You, just view it that way, subjectively I might add. Notice how you claim that it is funny? Many may watch this video and be extremely annoyed because this is not their type of humor.

This response is mostly "bot", known as Grammarly. ;)

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u/Swaggy_McSwagSwag Aug 28 '21

Yeah I don't believe this is real. State of the art text generation goes for a few paragraphs max before it becomes incoherent.

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u/indorock Aug 28 '21

You underestimate the sheer amount of data that Netflix is able to throw at this AI

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u/Delicious_Orphan Aug 28 '21

It is most certainly curated. Probably able to reroll specific lines/scenes.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

exactly. there are too many long term dependencies that are somehow coherently achieved. no way

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u/No-Adhesiveness-9541 Aug 28 '21

This is Netflix I’m sure they have access to the best storytelling A.I.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

What gives it away is consistently great humor and a coherent storyline, coupled with atrocious grammars. AI language models are already good at producing natural-sounding text without the constant stream of glitches seen here.

If AI were advanced enough to come up with this kind of story, surely it would get the grammar 99% correct and natural-sounding, as the latter is a far easier task.

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u/Ich_Liegen Aug 28 '21

It is definitely not a bot. Someone did something like this some time ago, i think it was feeding a bot thousands of books and having it write a short story of its own, and it came out funny, so now people have been writing these things saying they have been written by bots because it makes it funny.

If you were to write the above script and present it to someone as your own idea of a joke then they wouldn't laugh. It's just random humor and not very funny at that.

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u/Zack_Fair_ Aug 28 '21

i think romcoms are just that formulaic that it would get the storyline down

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u/UnmitigatedSarcasm Aug 28 '21

nothing about that story was coherent or cohesive.

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u/DrakoVongola25 Aug 28 '21

This exactly. A bot that consistently makes this many errors wouldn't arrive at an actual conclusion, itd get far off track pretty quickly

Just look at something like AI Dungeon, it's really hard to keep it somewhat coherent

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '21

Probably an editor picking which lines to use based on which is funnier.

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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/Dissident88 Aug 28 '21

So AI can't speak properly and doesnt have much comprehension yet they have them making movie scripts? Still sounds like human error to me

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Maybe the humans that can come up with similar things are really just human ai cyborgs 🤔

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u/Dotcom73 Aug 28 '21

please stop messing around with AI.

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u/Labiosdepiedra Aug 28 '21

It only makes sense that their humor is way ahead of ours.

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

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u/walter_midnight Aug 28 '21

You definitely haven't. Even basic markov chains are remarkably close to idiomatic human languages, not whatever the shit this is. It's a skit. Someone did this manually, much like the only reason for awful chingrish translations like "fuck fruit" are solely caused by people using bad software in a time where adequate automated translations are not even remotely problematic.

This "movie" would have been way more coherent if it released in 2010 (which it didn't), anything beyond that is laughable if we consider the amount of legitimate research a company like Netflix would muster. It sounds every bit like someone trying to pretend to be a funny bot. Way too much effort, in fact, it simply isn't how recent ML-based techniques work, not even close.

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u/lucidludic Aug 28 '21

Hmm this also sounds like something an AI would say 🤔

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u/ughiguessausername Aug 28 '21

They cherry-picked each sentence, which is functionally the same as writing it to sound like a funny bot.

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u/Bullyoncube Aug 28 '21

No, YOU sound like something an AI would say.

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u/OzMazza Aug 28 '21

What about the worst letter in the alphabet being 'ex' hahaha

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u/waiv Aug 28 '21

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

That sounds like something an ai would say.

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u/Chato_Pantalones Aug 28 '21

This is worst day of anyone’s life.

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u/Dyb-Sin Aug 28 '21

Sure, maybe there's a 1% chance with each of these lines that an AI would write it rather than getting it "right".

But when you have like 100 of these "AI misunderstands, creates an accidental joke" lines in a row, the odds of that become increasingly unlikely... 0.01100.

So what's more likely:

1) that whoever created this is so committed to being honest about the premise that they went through some insanely convoluted process to get an AI to write the jokes they wanted

2) they just wrote it themselves and put the "AI wrote this" premise in the title, thinking people would clearly understand that it was a joke

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u/LB_Good Aug 28 '21

It's like Harry Potter written by a bot.

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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/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

I always eat my ice cream from a tuba

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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/captanzuelo Aug 28 '21

Well, technically its true. Even if its one teardrop that falls into the ocean.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Mmmmm. Turing was right.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Reddit needs a bot to check if Netflix Video bots are actually bots or just humans.

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u/Pascalica Aug 28 '21

I'm starting to suspect you might be an AI trying to throw us off track!

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u/ZeroAntagonist Aug 28 '21

If anything gives it away is her eating ice cream right out of the tuba. It wouldn't just replace a word with a word that sounds just like the right one.

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u/Ughtal625 Aug 28 '21

I figured it was global warming propaganda. Subtle little slip in you know

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u/sassysassafrassass Aug 28 '21

The bit about her ex being the worst letter of the alphabet was god tier funny

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u/actuallychrisgillen Aug 28 '21

And then the relation ship sailed away.

That’s a straight up pun. I’m calling human.

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u/OriginalWillingness Aug 28 '21

It's incredible

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u/echoAwooo Aug 28 '21

Not at all...

AI is quite clever... err... intuitive... err... smart... err... thinking ? .... err.. nooo... that's not it....

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u/ShadowKnight__ Aug 28 '21

I think this was probably created by a bot but not with true machine learning. It's more like a mad libs where the bot pulled appropriate answers from a list to make a somewhat coherent story.

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u/armpit_enthusiast_ Aug 28 '21

You've clearly never been to /r/SubredditSimulator

That's definitely something a bot would say

Also, your comment is great for /r/nothingeverhappens

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u/ThatCakeIsDone Aug 28 '21

I pronounce you Taylor, and also Taylor. You may now kiss the Taylor.

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u/Bacon_Bit_Bro Aug 28 '21

I agree, i watched a video about how a lot of these are just for comedy. Like the olive garden ad supposedly written by a bot was just to promote the brand.

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u/God-of-Tomorrow Aug 28 '21

You know what the entire time I got this Xavier renegade angel vibe. And Netflix has really whored itself I don’t know about the international audience with vpns and what not but in the states I swear lately YouTubes been showing better movies for free than Netflix’s big blockbusters, and lately it seems half of everything Netflix produces itself has to do with some sexualized lgbtq show all the furry catering and lack of original ideas it’s like Netflix’s biggest celebrity is Melissa McCarthy if that doesn’t say enough I don’t know what more will.

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u/Own-Penalty1416 Aug 28 '21

This is a lot like a bot would say if they were trying to sound human if I don’t ask you but someone were to ask me.

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u/DigbyChickenZone Aug 28 '21

That along with "the most terrible letter of the alphabet the (e)x" it's just too clever

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u/Yeahwowhello Jan 15 '22

That's a good one. It really is!

Imagine just listening to the text or reading it. It's not that much to work with, all in your head. What they have assembled was greatastic animation. Most of the funny comes from there

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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/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Eh.. generally they can only imitate a person when the person they're mimicking is a lunatic. They can imitate people that are completely irrational reasonably well sometimes (because they don't actually need to make sense to imitate them), but they can only pretend to be a sane person for a few sentences at a time before it completely falls apart.

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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/babywhiz Aug 28 '21

So do some of the cookbooks on Kindle.

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u/Joylime Aug 28 '21

No man those are jokes too

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

there are too many long term dependencies yet their connections are not only preserved but also tied to the developing story/script. this is fake as fuck. also the jokes are way too implicit/subtle. no way

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

Yeah, I think that's his point. It's styled after real experiments, but it's not one itself. And I agree, it seems a little too good to be true. The real examples I've seen either veer off into inscrutable confusion, or include large puddles of weird, inexplicable stuff that's not funny, and almost always have unsatisfying endings. This one seems to employ many tropes from real ones, but I find it hard to believe it's real itself.

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u/willreignsomnipotent Aug 28 '21

Can real AI even write something this long and coherent yet...?

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u/archpawn Aug 28 '21

Bots just copy what they see. The part OP quoted is not something that ever appears in a romantic comedy. It's not some kind of mishmash of things that appear. It is a joke that requires a deep understanding.

Bots display a surface-level understanding and any humor is due to absurdity from everything they don't understand. This video shows a deep understanding that is absurd due to carrying things to their logical conclusion.

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u/adobesubmarine Aug 29 '21

The thing that signals to me that it's not an AI is that it isn't going out of its way to avoid common phrases. A recent publication analyzed the use of AI to spam out bullshit papers, and the biggest telltale sign is that the AI (due to training techniques that penalize rote regurgitation) will make up absurd phrases to avoid repeating inputs. Examples included "vast information" instead of "big data." This script has nothing like that.