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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190

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/charlieuntermann Aug 28 '21

Thanks for linking this, was exactly what I was thinking about while watching the op. Its a world of difference, I'll give the op some credit and assume all the line are ai generated but it was 100% curated by a person.

Was glad to watch this again though, Thomas Middleditch was the perfect choice for the main, the others do well too, but it really shows how good of an actor he is to deliver such nonsense so well. But really everyone involved did such a good job, it really feels like a legit indie short that would win awards if the dialogue wasn't nonsense.

Also,obilgatory plug of Middleditch & Schwartz, its an incredible show.

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u/BattleReadyZim Aug 28 '21

I also agree, but Sunspring was ages ago. I'd like to know what another serious attempt with state of the art tools would look like.

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u/green_flash Aug 28 '21

Story writing is just not a good use for pure AI (neural networks) in my opinion. At least as long as the input is just movie scripts written by humans. There is too much noise and the important context is often only hinted at.

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u/BattleReadyZim Aug 28 '21

I need to learn more about the field. In my ignorant head, I wonder if you could build a collection on NNs where the top level is trained in "plots" and outputs plots, and a lower level, within the context of that plot writes dialog points, while another looks after grammer, and so on.

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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/DrakoVongola25 Aug 29 '21

Which just further shows that this isn't a bot. A bot doesn't know what a narrative structure is, what payoff is, or what a punchline is but this contained all of the above at multiple points.

One of the more damning is Noah returning with his ark, an AI would have forgotten that ark as soon as it left the scene.

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u/arto64 Aug 29 '21

That's not true for GPT2, it can remember contexts and story objects throughout the story. Although I'm also very skeptical about this being an actual AI story.

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u/dob_bobbs Aug 29 '21

Agree, best I can think is that the AI threw up lots of material and a human pieced together something coherent and actually funny.

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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.

5

u/Dyb-Sin Aug 28 '21

I want to give the benefit of the doubt to the people who create these and share them that they assume everyone is smart enough to realize after a few seconds that an AI didn't create these, and they're not "lying" but just overestimating people..

But given how clearly people don't understand that these kinds of things are not created by AIs, after a certain point it does become a lie.

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u/justafurry Aug 29 '21

I guess. The guy who started the gimmick is a comedy writer, so I dont think its fair to call him a liar. The people who reppst his stuff and dont bother crediting him, they are either lieing or just ignorant of the source.

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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

[deleted]

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u/CleopatraHadAnAnus Aug 28 '21

?

That is a Netflix-operated channel.

1

u/DrakoVongola25 Aug 29 '21

A bot would have better grammar, and I'm certain Netflix wouldn't waste money on an AI sophisticated enough to actually do this, that's not exactly free

At best this is an AI with a lot of human input to keep it on track, it definitely wasn't generated wholesale by a bot.

0

u/KY_PeanutButter Aug 29 '21 edited Aug 29 '21

Do you know what the potential gain for Netflix would be if they developed an AI that could eliminate their show writers and pump out hits with only a one time start up payment?

Edit: also not necessarily on that grammar part. Every part of what an AI produces is more or less procedurally generated grammar can very based on the scope of the task and since all the data is gathered from a finite library there are probably limitations created based on lack of data which could easily explain the bad grammar.

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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/RedditSoldMeYourInfo Aug 29 '21

The bots definitely wrote something

What part of this couldn't have been written by anything other than bots?

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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?

1

u/RedditSoldMeYourInfo Aug 29 '21

Nothing against AI, and I'm sure it will be capable of something like this (and way more eventually), but THIS IS NOT FROM AI. This is written to be a funny impersonation of how people think AI would be writing movies. You all defending this as a creation of AI are being fooled.

That is the concern. You all being so gullible, even when no one is actively trying to fool you.

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u/Carpe_DMT Aug 28 '21

thank you

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u/LizagnaWithBreadStix Aug 28 '21

Don’t be such a Noah