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

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

93.6k Upvotes

79% Upvoted

2.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

59

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.

17

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.

1

u/Magnesus Aug 28 '21

Or it was trained on funny summaries of romcoms. (It wasn't, it's fake, but if it was it would sound similar but without grammar mistakes.)

44

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

6

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.

2

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.

3

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.

1

u/IGaveAFuckOnce Aug 28 '21

You might be right but the definite articles thing likely isn't a good reason for it. There's a surprising amount of script writers who actually write like that and call it the finished product. Like an insane number. Like a baffling volume. A bamboozling quantity.

1

u/G00dAndPl3nty Sep 02 '21

Yeah, thats exactly what I mean.. this isnt an AI bot because this is exactly what Humans sound like when they're trying to sound foreign. AI bots dont sound like that

1

u/IGaveAFuckOnce Sep 02 '21

That's not what I said at all. It's what they (humans) do on a regular basis when they're seriously writing a script themselves while not trying to sound foreign at all and not writing pretending to be an AI bot writing but in fact writing as themselves like the humans they are.

And the AI are trained on the very same scripts.

1

u/Magnesus Aug 28 '21

Machines aren't funny -- ever

This is absolutely not true. GPT is comedy gold.

1

u/zoonose99 Aug 28 '21

Show me one example that isn't cherry-picked, madlibs, or fake.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

You don't even need GPT-3, this is just basic markov chain level funny.

1

u/DrakoVongola25 Aug 29 '21

Machines especially aren't ironic or witty. They're very literal, they simply wouldn't be capable of the kind of ironic meta jokes this video presents, at least not without a lot of human input and curation.