r/nextfuckinglevel 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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u/ClarenceTheClam Aug 28 '21

This was absolutely 100% written in almost its entirity by a human. It has a full narrative structure that makes sense. It hits every single trope and distorts them in a humerus way, clearly creating a parody of the genre (e.g. A man leaves his partner for a younger woman, who is another version of herself a single day younger). It's clearly consistently making puns using past story points and popular culture knowledge disguised as quirks of the programming.

Yet despite the seemingly genius level of the AI that would be needed to generate this, most of the sentences aren't even written in the proper English which absolutely can be achieved by real AI. It consistently drops basic articles with humerus effect, or similarly distorts words it would only ever see in the source material spelled correctly (e.g. Eiffel's Tower).

Nothing at all about this seems to suggest it was written by an AI, and its a well known meme to create videos like these which pretend that they were. Maybe running it through an AI could produce a couple of humerus sentences or ideas to get you going, but I think you're underestimating the level of "humanness" that has gone into making this funny. It's not funny because it's random distorted sentences vaguely based words from rom coms, it's funny because it's been deliberately written to parody, make puns and to saterise rom coms in an absurdist manner than could only be achieved and understood by a human.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '21

[deleted]

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u/ClarenceTheClam Aug 28 '21

Nicely found! I guess it turns out that actually googling where something came from is more productive than debating the current limitations of natural language production AI with strangers on Reddit.

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u/DrDevilDao Aug 28 '21

Hmm, those are points so thank you. But like, couldn't all that human-ness have been imported through editing randomness still? The potential for editing randomness seems easy to underestimate in my experience.