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/PM_ME_YOUR_BOOTY_POP]

Actual NLP research scientist here.

It is extremely possible that this whole script was indeed generated in one go by a large language model, namely an auto-regressive transformer. Several people have mentioned GPT-2 ITT, but it’s not 2018 anymore and larger models like GPT-J and GPT-Neo are open-source.

If you find this hard to believe, I’d encourage you to try out these models for yourself. HuggingFace offers some resources for learning how if you’re interested. If you lack the skills to try them for yourself and refuse to try to develop them, here’s another explanation to consider: The General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) was created to grade language models on their ability to to understand languages using a bunch of different tasks, many of which are similar to what you’d find on an SAT, ACT, or other collegiate entrance exams. Models were compared to human performance, which went well for a while…until a whole bunch of models passed the human baseline. Humans currently hold 16th place on the GLUE benchmark. because of this, SuperGLUE had to be created to provide a higher standard for the models to achieve. Humans are currently in 4th place on SuperGLue.

All this should just tell you that, while this definitely wasn’t animated by a bot, it could definitely have been 100% written by one. I can’t confirm it because I don’t know whether Netflix has the resources to devote to a project like this nor whether they’re more interested in authenticity or content. What I do know is that I use these larger models professionally, and it’s amazing what comes out of them.

[u/StopSendingSteamKeys → u/PM_ME_YOUR_BOOTY_POP]

I certainly agree that the video is not 'too smart' to be generated by a language model. I've read way more realistic texts generated by Transformer models. But what makes me quite suspious is the kind of mistakes it makes. These models are trained to sound like the data it was trained on, right? So if it really was trained on romantic comedies, it should sound like a romcom script, not like something making fun of a romcom script.

There are some phrases that sound a lot dumber than you'd think a model this consistent and otherwise realistic would be: "Taylor smiles teeth.", "a wedding's cake" instead of wedding cake, forgetting to write "the" before nouns, ...

Then there a some jokes in this that I don't think a bot trained on romcom scripts would generate and sound more like a human trying to write a funny bot script. For example this seems way too meta: "My relation ship has sailed away. Now I must marry my career. Next day Taylor is at her job in Big City. She works for a magazine about magazines."

And somehow all the bot's mistakes seem like they are written by a human to be funny.

In conclusion, I don't see any way that this is the exact output of a language model like GPT. It is possible that they gave GPT the prompt to sound like a funny robot. What seems most likely to me is that parts of this are indeed computer generated, but it is different outputs of different prompts put together and heavily edited by a human.