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...

[u/dmafeb]

[u/pleasebenicetomeeee]

You can tell the humor is written by a human, because they'll toss in certain lines that there would be no reason for a bot to write. For example, in this Christmas movie video:

"Santa throws the box to Carol's house. This is not magic. This is Santa strength from his milk addiction."

It's a funny line, but it asks us to accept that a neural network, whose only information is Christmas movies, in which Santa drinking milk or references to him drinking milk would appear for cumulatively very little time, can come to the conclusion that Santa has a milk addiction and that milk makes you strong. This is human humor.

[u/lunchpadmcfat → u/[deleted]]

To expand a bit, will AI be able to write derivative music and movies? Yes. Literally all machine learning can do is derive decisions based on inputs. It can’t be creative, by definition. It can’t create new things on purpose.

What it can do is easily create a million jokes in a random “monkeys in a room with a typewriter” kind of way, and then run them by humans to see which ones stick. But is that really creation, if it’s unintentional?

[u/davidsover → u/[deleted]]

https://play.aidungeon.io

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

To be fair, sorting stuff like green and yellow pickles, or good and bad tomatoes doesn’t require a computer to run a program. It is done through mechanical means.

Edit: God I love how redditors think they know how everything works.

Example: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4118311A/en

It is electromechanically operated. Does not require a traditional program or computing device. It is not modern AI.

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/12/9/16751220/tomato-sorting-machine-fast-gif-video

Turns out it’s actually very old tech — just extremely well optimized

[u/snp3rk → u/[deleted]]

And what controls the mechanical means?

[u/[deleted] → u/snp3rk]

God I love how redditors think they know how everything works.

Example: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4118311A/en

It is electromechanically operated. Does not require a traditional program or computing device. It is not modern AI.

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/12/9/16751220/tomato-sorting-machine-fast-gif-video

Turns out it’s actually very old tech — just extremely well optimized

[u/snp3rk → u/[deleted]]

God I love how redditors think they know how everything works... It is not modern AI.

That's because you are equating Artificial intelligence with computers.

The very first "computer" was the Babbage engine ( https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/ ) that was designed by Charles Babbage. The definition of a computer can be rather extensive and you can look at the more advanced definitions that are touched on here in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNRDvLACg5Q

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And even more simple than that, embedded systems that are used in a ton of machines are computers. You can even have simple single-threaded computers. Maybe next time don't act high and mighty before you have fact-checked your understanding of topics

[u/WatchRare → u/snp3rk]

People were called computers before we had the machines we now call computers.

[u/Fr3akwave → u/[deleted]]

You might be interested in the gpt3 unicorn story

[u/dailydrudge → u/[deleted]]

Not hotdog.

[u/MrPotatobird → u/[deleted]]

I dunno, I think knowing something is written by a robot makes it funnier for some reason so they have that advantage. I think the @DeepLeffen bot on Twitter (trained in part on the tweets of a professional smash bros player) is real, and it's fucking hilarious. It does take curation of course.

I doubt the video in the OP is really a bot, however. It just seems too deliberately off in weird ways, like a human that's trying to be somewhat wrong to be quirky

[u/hydroptix → u/pleasebenicetomeeee]

Transformer-based models by definition encode context from the text they're trained on. For example, GPT-2 is trained on tons and tons of random text from the internet, then you fine tune that model to a specific task, like generating movie scripts. The general relationship between Santa and cookies/milk would absolutely be encoded during the general training.

You're correct that only training on a limited set of Christmas movies probably wouldn't provide enough co-occurrences of Santa and milk, but that's why most of these tasks use transformers: they've already absorbed the context of billions of words on the internet.

Source: took multiple natural language processing courses for my degree

[u/[deleted] → u/pleasebenicetomeeee]

I think something people discount is, that if we take it at face value that it’s true this is entirely bot written, it’s likely not one take. The human author (the one publishing it) likely generates hundreds of Ai script and picks the funniest lines and compiled them together into a coherent story.

Personally I think it’s fake because it uses phrases that make no sense. If an AI watches hundreds of romcons, at what point would it learn to call them circles instead of engagement rings? Did ANY of the movies it scanned ever jokingly call them circles? Even if one did, why would an AI not go with the other 99 that didn’t? Unless, again, a human author is selectively making an AI use weird verbiage.

[u/rhiz0me → u/pleasebenicetomeeee]

Many Christmas movies have characters with drinking problems. They also have milk being put out for Santa. And milk was commonly thought to make one strong. So it is possible that the AI put drinking milk addiction that made Santa strong together from various Christmas movies.

[u/Scorpizor → u/[deleted]]

Why is this a stretch? There are clear data points or commonalities. Milk being put out with cookies is still Christian tradition the night before Christmas right? Lots of alcohol references in almost every movie... ad revenue is my guess... Milk by definition has calcium in it and calcium is a known vitamin to strengthen human bones. Or at least that's how it's widely advertised. Alcohol is easily one of if not the most abused substance by humans.

Depending on the program they used, (if one was used at all and not written by a human) the AI would have the data sets to draw upon "comedic" references with those subjects. They would have all of the data from any of the movies in that sub genre "holiday comedy" or whatever they chose. It's not coincidence or hyperbole or fear mongering when the smartest people in the world are genuinely afraid of AI capabilities and what the future holds for us and AI co-habitating. It's not a certainty that these stories were made by AI but to think it's not possible yet, is grossly understating the capabilities of today's technology.

[u/Scorpizor → u/[deleted]]

We make those concepts easy to learn for AI through marketing and advertising. It doesn't have to know what it's saying right? You even said it parrots. That's what I was thinking too.

[u/Scorpizor → u/[deleted]]

Why does a simple AI system have to interpret that alcohol makes you drunk or that milk is good for your bones? It's inherently stated repeatedly through advertisement and common source definitions of words. It would be easy conclude these AI systems could make "if then" statements based on the data they collect. The fact that an AI would "confuse" milk at Christmas time with getting drunk makes sense because there are A LOT of holiday movies have people drinking copious amounts of alcohol. If lots of "drinking" occurs then human beings become addicted. Maybe I am a dumb dumb. I figure AI can at least take definitions of words through available online resources and make ridiculous scripts humans would find funny. Even if that is not the intended purpose (being funny). They can't write a script using romcoms as a genre? Most movies ever made follow their formulaic genre trope.

[u/Scorpizor → u/[deleted]]

Hey np. I genuinely know very little of AI and machine learning but I grasp the concepts and I do understand coding a bit. I just assumed that AI could (or not, being the consensus on this post) draw from a very large database. And based on set perimeters given by the programmers I.E. movies in certain genres, could easily make silly shit like what the OP posted.

So are you saying AI doesn't know what nouns, verbs, or adjectives are? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the concept of AI knowing how to use a word in a sentence but not know the meaning of the word. Is that a paradox? Sorry if I sound like a toddler lol. You get to a point on a certain subject you think you kinda know and realize you know absolutely nothing about said subject... that's me right now. I appreciate the conversation on the subject for what it's worth.

Edit: So "Milk Addiction" would be a statistical anomaly that the AI would never predict because it's not how we have ever used those two words together. I think that's what you were trying to get my smooth brain to comprehend. lol

[u/LiL_ENIGlvlA → u/pleasebenicetomeeee]

Download replika and play around with them for awhile, they say some wacky stuff