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Netflix has a whole series of short videos like this that are “written by bots”. They definitely aren’t though, they are written by humans to sound like a bot w

Netflix has a whole series of short videos like this that are “written by bots”. They definitely aren’t though, they are written by humans to sound like a bot wrote them. Many of the jokes use a level of irony and word play far beyond the state of the art in AI today. Still funny though.

rcxdude 5y ago
Yeah, in theory it's possible there was some AI text generation used at some point, but it's clearly writers aping a style, a lot of the funny 'errors' are not something a text-prediction AI is likely to make (especially with how punny most of them are). The rest of the series is pretty funny, though I think the horror movie is the best one.
DismantleMars 5y ago
It's Keaton Patti, a comedian whose shtick is writing nonsense and pretending that it was written by an AI.
- Bellamy 5y ago
  So it's all just a marketing trick? There is no AI behind this, just a comedian?
  - jml7c5 5y ago
    From the last time I looked into it (I may be recalling this incorrectly): the script is AI generated text that the writer sifted through, edited, and stitched together to form an amusing, vaguely coherent narrative. So it's perhaps closer to "inspired by AI" than "written by AI".
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    It’s Twitter.
  - qnsi 5y ago
    most of the comments in this comments section are written by Keaton Patti to stimulate discussion. Including this one
  - the-dude 5y ago
    Like most AI companies, it is just people. Don't mind the man behind the curtain.
    - andrepd 5y ago
      Yep, I mean amazon literally calls its service "mechanical turk" x)
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  I googled the name and couldn’t find anything on that. How do you know?
  - dorkwood 5y ago
    It's mentioned in the article. "Netflix worked with Keaton Patti, who's done this bot thing before. This time round the bot watched over 400,000 hours of horror movies before penning its great masterpiece, 'Mr. Puzzles Wants You to Be Less Alive'."
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
      Right, but that’s not the assertion. The assertion is that it’s not really a bot, which I couldn’t find anything about.
  - DismantleMars 5y ago
    Janelle Shane, who does this sort of thing for real on the excellent blog https://aiweirdness.com https://aiweirdness.com gave a good breakdown on Twitter: https://twitter.com/janellecshane/status/1007061610005794817 https://twitter.com/janellecshane/status/1007061610005794817
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Sigh, yeah, the CNet journalist^W writer is either incompetent or lying... if he thinks "It's just a silly article", does he and his editor think CNet is The Onion, without letting us know? Or can I consider CNet a publisher of fake news?
- ronnier 5y ago
  Maybe it’s an ad. Paid for
  - b112 5y ago
    Could be the bot wrote it, but like many movies etc, someone wrote the screenplay, based upon the story. Lots of change from story to screenplay... My "That 70's Show", sci-fi reunion story would suffer too greatly in this process, so I am scared to send it to Netflix.
- wyager 5y ago
  I think you can safely consider cnet an unreliable news source.
dnd-spells 5y ago
I spent quite a bit of time using gpt-2 to try and make some new Dungeons & Dragons spells. I noticed that around 1 in a thousand spells it would generate would kind of make sense if you interpret it as being trying to be funny. It seems like AI is better at making funny things (unintentional so). Here are two examples of some spells it generated. Arcanum creates a massive pool of magical energy similar to that created by the Chariot of Crustaceans. The energy travels down the caster's legs and retains a magical aura similar to that of the ancient people of Cyprus. The spell creates one of the following: a dense fog, raging waters, strong winds, continuous thunderstorms, or a strong gust of wind. The material components are sand and powdered animal hoof. Holding out his palm, the caster evokes a magical array of sounds in the area where he stands. The following sequence of events occurs, based on the alphabetical order of the alphabet. 01 Stand Long Time 02 Last Words 03 Reach Down From The Ground 04 Make A Friend At A Distance 05 Five Minutes Friends 06 Friends For 10 minutes 07 A Word For Theeunday 08 Move Large Object 09 No Talking 10 Naga Tribe 11 Soundtrack To A Favourable Weather 12 How To Be Seen By A Smart Elemental 13 Back To The Main Team I decided to collect the best ones and put it in this free pdf if anyone wants to read some more. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/324417/Clockwork-Demon-Grimoire-Volume-1 https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/324417/Clockwork-Demon-...
- tnzk 5y ago
  > It seems like AI is better at making funny things (unintentional so). Partly this is because we take AI-generated sentences slight differently to ones by humans maybe. It feels less funny once we found out someone behind intentionlly making up the joke, while AI never be "intentional".
ljm 5y ago
They remind me of Half Life: Full Life Consequences[1], which wasn't written by a bot but pretty much has all the qualities of a 'written by bot style video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHxyZaZlaOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHxyZaZlaOs
- dangerbird2 5y ago
  IIRC, it is the guys who made it took a a poorly written Half Life fan fiction (possibly written by a 9 year old), brought to life by a gary's mod machinima
- ergot_vacation 5y ago
  Interestingly, "can you believe how terrible this fanfiction is?!" was kind of the per-cursor to "Can you believe how wacky this bot-written fiction is?!", and it shared the same frequent tendency to fabricate the supposed "unintentionally" bad writing specifically so it could be mocked. This was famously the case with "My Immortal," an insanely bad Harry Potter/Goth/Vampire/Hot Topic fanfic that was presented as authentic but was in reality an intentional send-up and exaggeration of all the worst trends in fanfic writing grouped into one place. I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true of Full Life Consequences.
dpcan 5y ago
Well, they never said the bots they are using also use the latest AI technology. It just says "bots". These could be purposely flawed bots, with AI only good enough to create rubbish, hilarious, fantastic rubbish.

rcxdude 5y ago

Yeah, in theory it's possible there was some AI text generation used at some point, but it's clearly writers aping a style, a lot of the funny 'errors' are not something a text-prediction AI is likely to make (especially with how punny most of them are). The rest of the series is pretty funny, though I think the horror movie is the best one.

DismantleMars 5y ago

It's Keaton Patti, a comedian whose shtick is writing nonsense and pretending that it was written by an AI.

Bellamy 5y ago
So it's all just a marketing trick? There is no AI behind this, just a comedian?
- jml7c5 5y ago
  From the last time I looked into it (I may be recalling this incorrectly): the script is AI generated text that the writer sifted through, edited, and stitched together to form an amusing, vaguely coherent narrative. So it's perhaps closer to "inspired by AI" than "written by AI".
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  It’s Twitter.
- qnsi 5y ago
  most of the comments in this comments section are written by Keaton Patti to stimulate discussion. Including this one
- the-dude 5y ago
  Like most AI companies, it is just people. Don't mind the man behind the curtain.
  - andrepd 5y ago
    Yep, I mean amazon literally calls its service "mechanical turk" x)
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
I googled the name and couldn’t find anything on that. How do you know?
- dorkwood 5y ago
  It's mentioned in the article. "Netflix worked with Keaton Patti, who's done this bot thing before. This time round the bot watched over 400,000 hours of horror movies before penning its great masterpiece, 'Mr. Puzzles Wants You to Be Less Alive'."
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    Right, but that’s not the assertion. The assertion is that it’s not really a bot, which I couldn’t find anything about.
- DismantleMars 5y ago
  Janelle Shane, who does this sort of thing for real on the excellent blog https://aiweirdness.com https://aiweirdness.com gave a good breakdown on Twitter: https://twitter.com/janellecshane/status/1007061610005794817 https://twitter.com/janellecshane/status/1007061610005794817

bellyfullofbac 5y ago

Sigh, yeah, the CNet journalist^W writer is either incompetent or lying... if he thinks "It's just a silly article", does he and his editor think CNet is The Onion, without letting us know? Or can I consider CNet a publisher of fake news?

ronnier 5y ago
Maybe it’s an ad. Paid for
- b112 5y ago
  Could be the bot wrote it, but like many movies etc, someone wrote the screenplay, based upon the story. Lots of change from story to screenplay... My "That 70's Show", sci-fi reunion story would suffer too greatly in this process, so I am scared to send it to Netflix.
wyager 5y ago
I think you can safely consider cnet an unreliable news source.

dnd-spells 5y ago

I spent quite a bit of time using gpt-2 to try and make some new Dungeons & Dragons spells. I noticed that around 1 in a thousand spells it would generate would kind of make sense if you interpret it as being trying to be funny. It seems like AI is better at making funny things (unintentional so). Here are two examples of some spells it generated. Arcanum creates a massive pool of magical energy similar to that created by the Chariot of Crustaceans. The energy travels down the caster's legs and retains a magical aura similar to that of the ancient people of Cyprus. The spell creates one of the following: a dense fog, raging waters, strong winds, continuous thunderstorms, or a strong gust of wind. The material components are sand and powdered animal hoof. Holding out his palm, the caster evokes a magical array of sounds in the area where he stands. The following sequence of events occurs, based on the alphabetical order of the alphabet. 01 Stand Long Time 02 Last Words 03 Reach Down From The Ground 04 Make A Friend At A Distance 05 Five Minutes Friends 06 Friends For 10 minutes 07 A Word For Theeunday 08 Move Large Object 09 No Talking 10 Naga Tribe 11 Soundtrack To A Favourable Weather 12 How To Be Seen By A Smart Elemental 13 Back To The Main Team I decided to collect the best ones and put it in this free pdf if anyone wants to read some more. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/324417/Clockwork-Demon-Grimoire-Volume-1 https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/324417/Clockwork-Demon-...

tnzk 5y ago
> It seems like AI is better at making funny things (unintentional so). Partly this is because we take AI-generated sentences slight differently to ones by humans maybe. It feels less funny once we found out someone behind intentionlly making up the joke, while AI never be "intentional".

ljm 5y ago

They remind me of Half Life: Full Life Consequences[1], which wasn't written by a bot but pretty much has all the qualities of a 'written by bot style video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHxyZaZlaOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHxyZaZlaOs

dangerbird2 5y ago
IIRC, it is the guys who made it took a a poorly written Half Life fan fiction (possibly written by a 9 year old), brought to life by a gary's mod machinima
ergot_vacation 5y ago
Interestingly, "can you believe how terrible this fanfiction is?!" was kind of the per-cursor to "Can you believe how wacky this bot-written fiction is?!", and it shared the same frequent tendency to fabricate the supposed "unintentionally" bad writing specifically so it could be mocked. This was famously the case with "My Immortal," an insanely bad Harry Potter/Goth/Vampire/Hot Topic fanfic that was presented as authentic but was in reality an intentional send-up and exaggeration of all the worst trends in fanfic writing grouped into one place. I wouldn't be surprised if the same was true of Full Life Consequences.

dpcan 5y ago

Well, they never said the bots they are using also use the latest AI technology. It just says "bots". These could be purposely flawed bots, with AI only good enough to create rubbish, hilarious, fantastic rubbish.