14 ms·

I made an AI write a story about AI then I made another AI illustrate it

365 points by ttuttle 4y ago

nautilus12 4y ago
Isn't humor and irony the one thing (unless it's just repeating a joke) that GTP-3 isn't good at? I feel like this will be the tell, we should modify the Turing test.
Linda703 4y ago
[dead]
tikkun 4y ago
The future of ai generated content and entertainment is going to be wild! How long before we have ~unlimited high quality entertainment? Before an AI can generate infinite episodes of your favorite show, podcast, comedian, and so on. Going to be an interesting thing to watch unfold.
- annoyingnoob 4y ago
  There is truth to the saying 'keep your audience wanting more'.
- eismcc 4y ago
  Reminds me of when cable tv became a thing and the “57 channels and nothing on” song https://youtu.be/YAlDbP4tdqc https://youtu.be/YAlDbP4tdqc
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    IIRC, it only became unbearable once HOme Shopping Network and extended infomercials became a thing. Before that, there was more scripted content even if it was just reruns.
  - snek_case 4y ago
    Well, I think that ideally, if you have AI-generated content, the AI would generate content that's tailored specifically for you. It would have a good model of what you're interested in, and would know how to create an intrigue that you specifically will find interesting.
    - sitkack 4y ago
      It will be AI generated shopping channel dynamically generating products for you to buy on subscription. This one of the solutions to the Drake equation
      - dotnet00 4y ago
        This reminds me of Google's 'The Selfish Ledger' thought experiment video from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDVVo14A_fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDVVo14A_fo
        sitkack 4y ago
        Wow
      - Melting_Harps 4y ago
        > It will be AI generated shopping channel dynamically generating products for you to buy on subscription. This one of the solutions to the Drake equation This is rather probable business model for non General-AI targeted at the end consumer, incidentally it too reads like an AI response: specifically the part about the Drake equation and reminds me of Carbon Based Lifeforms - MOS 6581, whose lyrics also sound like an AI repeating a story about horses and Mongols like OPs [0]. And the start of album is a track called Abiogenesis that has a repetition of the Drake Equation in it, no less. Putting all that together as a person that is actually studying AI/ML, I found it all rather freaky. Obviously, I know AI in it's current form is rather limited in it's capacity and scope but it makes for interesting lore none the less. Especially if it ever lives up to it's marketing hype. I'll be saving this post to look back at as I progress in my studies over the years. 0: https://genius.com/Carbon-based-lifeforms-mos-6581-lyrics https://genius.com/Carbon-based-lifeforms-mos-6581-lyrics
- woleium 4y ago
  ~unlimited twitter bot content!
  - mdale 4y ago
    I think we already have that ;)
- snek_case 4y ago
  It's hard to say because even a model like GPT-3 is limited in its ability to generate a textual story that remains coherent over time. When you're talking about generating video, you need to have lots of story and visual details remaining coherent over a very long time horizon. Generally speaking, I think this is an area where deep neural networks are fairly weak and symbolic AI shines. It's much easier to program a symbolic AI that generates a story that remains coherent over time. Though you might argue that the story probably wouldn't be very interesting. There's probably something to be done with a hybrid model that uses symbolic AI to enforce coherency constraints, and a deep network model that fills in details and generates visuals. So yeah, I think we'd need new, much more sophisticated architectures. We'd also need a lot more compute, like 10x, 100x or maybe even 1000x more, to generate high-resolution video. Actually, the problem is probably not the amount of compute you need for inference, but the amount of compute you'd need to train a model with hundreds of billions of parameters or however much is needed to make that happen.
  - labster 4y ago
    Having a story remain coherent over time is not a prerequisite of Hollywood blockbusters.
    - str34m 4y ago
    - taftster 4y ago
      Right. The Transformers comes to mind.
    - avereveard 4y ago
      Incoherency is not all bad, and choosing the subject carefully can be enough for the intrinsic weirdness of ai generation shine. I.e. this batman short: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fn4ArRmzHhQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fn4ArRmzHhQ (ai story and human drawing) provide a spot on jocker
      - 4y ago
- kromem 4y ago
  If AI's compounding effects continue to play out as they have, my answer to "when" is "sooner than most people think." At very least I can confidently say the next 20 years will have more disruption to society as a result of technology than the past 40.
- lmm 4y ago
  We've had practically unlimited entertainment for most purposes for at least the last couple of decades. There's far more e.g. TV being produced than anyone could watch in one lifetime.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    But there is a limit on Breaking Bad episodes, for example. Just pump out new episodes. Could even have The Simpsons / Groundhog Day - style state-reset after each episode. Therefore the AI can make anything happen (Walter gets killed) and the produce another episode because you know that is just a multiverse branch.
    - nonstickcoating 4y ago
      That just sounds horrible to me. Breaking Bad was interesting precisely because it had to end. It was about very specific characters, their changing motivations and development. Rebooting every episode just because the premise is kinda cool and someone wants more of it diminishes what the series achieved both visually and conceptually.
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        I think once the original episodes are done you need to do something different. They went back in time and did a good series on the criminal lawyer. Now that is done. If you could watch 100 different mini action movies where anything could happen. Everyone could die or everyone becomes nice and gets a desk job. It is less predictable and would be a fun thing. What about you want to watch Law and Order SVU but just an average non-crazy day, fly on the wall style. I think that would be interesting.
        nonstickcoating 4y ago
        I do not think different is a good qualifier for good television. As much as I'd like to see more about the character Mike for example, I would not like to see him in some action movie. His character shines in it's very personal moments, while his prowess regarding violence etc. need only to be hinted at. The action laden sequences are by far the least interesting aspect of Breaking Bad, serving at best as a somewhat believable and tension-relieving climaxes for emotionally taxing, morally difficult and thrilling parts of the show. The team behind Breaking Bad managed to tell a cohesive, character driven story despite all the creative restrictions making a show for a large TV network causes (think profitability, playing to as broad of a set of sensibilities as possible). Telling a thousand different stories in the same world and with the same characters drains them of believability and lessens the emotional impact of the stories significantly - they become arbitrary. Better Call Saul was a good show because it divorced one of the more important characters (but by far not a main character) almost entirely from the original and focused heavily on humor, with light aspects of drama. Breaking Bad was the other way around. Therefore, I cannot think of a show that is running for it's 21st season as anything more than at best the visual equivalent of easy listening music, at worst a continued cash grab by the studio producing and network distributing it. For a work of art to be meaningful, it needs to come to some kind of conclusion regarding it's content lest it reiterates the same points again and again, becoming boring in the proccess. Of course, there is something to be said in favor of easy listening music or TV productions intended mostly for basic entertainment, I recognise this discussion is largely predicated on taste. But I think calling something like that art misses the point that has made art historically so important for humans: The intentional representation of thoughts and experiences of the artist(s) in a specific medium meant to elucidate active engagement with the topics at hand. EDIT: Added a word for clarity.
- userbinator 4y ago
  Especially adult entertainment... which I suspect will be both wild and immensely creepy.
- stevesearer 4y ago
  I think about this a lot with regard to VR worlds generated based on your particular interests. Maybe you can already audio deep fake an AI-generated podcast conversation that would be listenable. So many buzzwords in there, but very creepy to think about.
- narrator 4y ago
  Before they neutered it, AI Dungeon with the GPT-3 "Dragon" backend which you had to pay for, was ridiculously imaginative when it came to erotica text prompts. For a few weeks, I got a glimpse of the future, because eventually somebody's going to make that.
- bitwize 4y ago
  > The future of ai generated content and entertainment is going to be wild! Someone at Netflix is looking at this, rubbing their hands together with dollar signs in their eyes.
- nathancahill 4y ago
  We've got color TV, but it still isn't satisfying.
  - tines 4y ago
    Holy shit another Cake fan. Greetings!
- bamboozled 4y ago
  You’ll get this when you have access to unlimited energy ?
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > How long before we have ~unlimited high quality entertainment? Before an AI can generate infinite episodes of your favorite show, podcast, comedian, and so on. > Going to be an interesting thing to watch unfold. Not really. If it's actually successful, it will probably devolve into near total fragmentation. So just imagine people more being isolated and lonely, with fewer points of connection. They used to entertain each other; then they consumed the same entertainment together; then they stopped sharing anything all, because it became so personalized.
- yreg 4y ago
  An obvious application would be creation of rich (MMO) worlds where each player goes on unique quests. IIRC NovelAI (one of the AIDungeon clones) is working on this. Also: Open-ended NPC dialogues.
- termy 4y ago
  You're joking
- pelorat 4y ago
  When we rolled over to 2020 I put down ten predictions in my calendar for where we'd be in 2030. I don't remember all of them, but I know one of them was that by 2030 we'd be in the beginning stages of AGI-like intelligence and that some of them would have begun to solve real problems for us in mathematics, physics and biology. Some of my predictions that I wrote down: 1. There will exist an experimental commercial fusion reactor that has achieved a continuous Q>1. 2. A true quantum computer will have solved a real world problem in math's or physics. 3. We'll be at the threshold for AGI-like specialized intelligence. 4. ML & AI research will have cracked several diseases, one of them Alzheimer's. 5. We're back on the Moon with a small base. 6. Protein folding is a solved problem using ML and QC. I'm looking forward to revisit them in 2030, but I feel like we're on the right path.
minimaxir 4y ago
A minor note is that OpenAI does specifically forbid generation of images of human faces from DALL-E 2: I wonder why that last image didn't hit the content filter.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  Too cartoonish?
- sen 4y ago
  Why is that?
  - zzzzzzzza 4y ago
    probably porn and politics
    - taftster 4y ago
      And accidentally generating the likeness of someone in those situations?
- anon_123g987 4y ago
  What if someone specifically asked for faces that can bypass the filter? Is this AI its own adversary that filters its own output? Or is that another, better AI?
- raverbashing 4y ago
  I'd say it's probably forbidden to generate a specific person's face. Or maybe a generic "a boy" description goes through.
- willy_k 4y ago
  It didn’t hit the content filter because there isn’t one. This article[0] goes over it in more detail, but essentially the situation is that, while OpenAI is considering actually implementing a filter, currently their only way of blocking human faces is by asking people with access to DALL-E 2 to not publish them. So either there are some nuances to the usage in the article, or they are going to get a request from OpenAI to remove the image. [0] https://www.wired.com/story/dall-e-2-ai-text-image-bias-social-media https://www.wired.com/story/dall-e-2-ai-text-image-bias-soci...
jhartr 4y ago
I hope future iterations can dodge these painful cliches.
jedberg 4y ago
So who owns the copyright on this story and its illustrations. :)
- LegitShady 4y ago
  I don't think the copyright issue has been decided yet. The AI can't own it, but that doesn't mean anyone owns it, or that its copyrightable.
- zhte415 4y ago
  This is like asking someone to write an AI that would be able to read a picture of a cube farm without a licence.
iaw 4y ago
Serious question: How far are we from AI being able to rewrite complete stories? The simplest example would be the same paragraphs with sentences with different structures. The most complex would be something like Gone with the Wind leading with The Wind Done Gone. (A book rewritten from another characters perspective even though that character was never mentioned in the former). I'm really fascinated by this idea for some reason.
- minimaxir 4y ago
  Not a full story, but you can tell GPT-3 Instruct to "Rewrite the following the text in the style of X" and it does an interesting job.
jcims 4y ago
Anyone that has access to GPT-3 should give this a try (I'm sure it works with other language models). This comment has a prompt that works quite well and includes some examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31468279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31468279 Note that a) you can ask GPT-3 to actually do the illustration prompts inline and b) if you don't give it a topic it appears to (unsurprisingly in retrospect) rip off an existing work.
mathgladiator 4y ago
Here is the dream... I plug my brain into a fully immersive wolrd within an AI driven Marvel movie that lasts my entire life. The matrix may actually be awesome, so sign me up as a coppertop.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  What would you eat in this nightmare world?
  - programmarchy 4y ago
    Soylent, obviously.
- tomatowurst 4y ago
  well what is perception? It is mostly visual, sensory, temporal, olifactory, auditory and sensory. Visual audio have received far more attention than the other areas. We still don't have digital smell generator, we don't have micro tactile bodysuits with genital stimulation, nor do we have digital taste. In the future, once we have complete mastery of all facets of human sensory inputs, we can record and manipulate experiences.
  - methodin 4y ago
    I imagine the ultimate goal is to stimulate the responses in the brain not to physically use the senses. It would most likely feel as real as a dream which feels real during it.
- dqpb 4y ago
  This sounds far-fetched, until you count the hours per day that people currently spend in front of one screen or another, and then it doesn’t sound far-fetched at all.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- zhte415 4y ago
erichmond 4y ago
I'm conflicted but interested in how all this plays out. Traditionally stories, music, art, dance were mediums for humans to express ideas/culture/transmit stories/history to other humans. When we get to a point where AI is able to generate an infinite stream of TikTok dances, jazz, film scripts, etc. It will be interesting to see how that affects society. When you remove the soul, what is/was the point of entertainment? Interesting times we live in!
- ravi-delia 4y ago
  I think it'll either turn out the soul was latent in the training data, or AI generated art will always be distinguishable. My money is on the first, but we're a little ways away yet.
- rrsmtz 4y ago
  There will certainly be a lot of money to be had selling products and ideologies to the mass consumer via cheap mass-generated hyper-targeted content. That's not too far of a leap from Marvel/Star Wars where 'The Customer Is Always Right' and creative control is made by committees and focus groups. But real art can survive. Just like art adjusted to photography or music adjusted to recordings, artists will find a way. In the scenario where current art is truly indistinguishable from AI-generated art, artists of the future could e.g. choose in-person forms of artistic expression which exclude AI by design, like live music, live painting, live storytelling, improv, etc.
woeirua 4y ago
Maybe a machine will finally be able to finish Winds of Winter.
- herodoturtle 4y ago
  And then shut itself down after killing off all the characters.
js8 4y ago
Don't want to be too critical, interesting experiment, but I found the story and pictures rather boring. I think it shows that it is still a tool, and can be used creatively, or not, depending on the creative skill of the artist. Contrast this with the now classic piece: https://arr.am/2020/07/31/human-intelligence-an-ai-op-ed/ https://arr.am/2020/07/31/human-intelligence-an-ai-op-ed/
kingkawn 4y ago
no feelings
turtledove 4y ago
How many attempts and how much human curation was involved. Every "I made AI do..." story seems to necessarily omit the "and I filtered out a LOT of rubbish before picking this one good example."
- pkdpic 4y ago
  Sounds like the future of humanity maybe. Or the present.
- qgin 4y ago
  That could be the job description of the editor of the New Yorker
  - noisy_boy 4y ago
    New job title: Chief Editor, AI Content Bonus points for outsourcing that to AI.
    - taftster 4y ago
      Upvote, because of the "bonus" sentence.
    - zhte415 4y ago
      AI is too complicated, it is too complex in order to build an algorithm that could be the machine for its own purposes. Comment generated by hncynic.leod.org
    - drusepth 4y ago
      Running novelgens.com basically gives me that job title. I occasionally build new features, but really all I do all day is review generated text/images and flag the good ones as "ready to release". :)
- goodside 4y ago
  As someone's who's played with GPT-3 prompting a lot, I can tell you almost no curation would be needed to get this result. This output is pretty mundane — it's even written in the perfunctory "so there you have it" tone that GPT-3 uses by default, where it speaks like the task is mutually understood to be silly and it's doing the the bare minimum needed to prove it understands. GPT-3 will easily write bare-bones stories like this for just about any subject. It's much harder getting it to write long stories with coherent structure.
Barrin92 4y ago
the story itself feels, no pun intended, very robotic but the illustrations I think would be perfectly useable in a lot of contexts. I can see web fiction and say comic writers benefitting from this quite a lot given that commissioning art is fairly expensive.
pkdpic 4y ago
At long last the unending burden of writing and illustrating children's stories has begun to be lifted from the weary shoulders of humanity. We'll finally be free to soar among the stars and click on more links to 3 paragraph medium articles as the universe intended. Seriously though cool project, I would love to know more about the build process for something like this.
jasmes 4y ago
Back in my day cherry pickers were used to fix power lines. Now cherry pickers are ppl who will never tell you how much fine tuning it took to get their Medium click bait dreams come true.
almostdigital 4y ago
I made an AI write a podcast transcript then I made another AI read it :D https://soundcloud.com/jn2022/lexman-artificial-podcast-episode-003-elon-musk-part-2 https://soundcloud.com/jn2022/lexman-artificial-podcast-epis...
- mccorrinall 4y ago
  This is amazing. “We use robot dogs to plant the fruits”
  - Melting_Harps 4y ago
    > This is amazing. It's Kafkaesque source material not withstanding, it was able to accurately emulate two of the most robotic sounding popular 'influencers,' with tons of ocntent to piece it all together, but and this is a caveat, the only realistic thing that came from it was when they briefly spoke over each other. Everything else seemed obviously fake. Consider this sounds nothing like the Elon you see on the most recent All in Podcast interview, either. If you threw that in would it distort the pitch and cadence of 'fruit juice' Elon? Over all it's a pretty cool display of where the tech is, though, but NLP has had decades of data behind it but it's still in its relative infancy. The sounds of the voices being made within a situational context are passable deepfakes, for sure. It's almost like they got audio of both together to make a SNL sketch with a deadpan hook that never got aired. Conclusion: Model training is actually really cool and has thus far been the most interesting aspect of AI to me.
    - simsla 4y ago
      "It's like a dog that taught itself to speak to humans, but people are complaining that its English isn't perfect." - someone, on the state of ML (Can't find the source, because Google hates me.)
    - mccorrinall 4y ago
      I found it amazing in the sense that I wouldn’t even come up with sentences like this under influence :D I just think it’s funny.
lsalvatore 4y ago
samtimalsina 4y ago
But can it does it without the prompts? I'd be really impressed if you could have an AI spit out original story complete with plot.
snickmy 4y ago
This exemplify one of the biggest challenges with those type of models. Consistency over multiple outputs (look at the robot... it's the same character but looks different in every image)
mola 4y ago
Funny, It reads like propoganda made by AI overlords in a posthuman world. The leap between being scared to being friends to conclude that all AI is nice without any real compelling narrative tying it up is what I would expect from an automatic well-being machine taking over us for our own good.
- krastanov 4y ago
  Funny indeed, but that leap was part of the prompt selected by the human author according to the post script.
remoquete 4y ago
I'm under the impression that "Made by OpenAI" is replacing "I've asked my cousin to do it" as the lowest quality grade in artistic endeavours. Hopefully it'll get better over time.
rhacker 4y ago
I can't tell if any comments here, and replies, were written by people or entirely just people with access to GPT3 and other similar generators.
- lllr_finger 4y ago
  I'm sure we'll start hearing "I AI-posted on HN for 4 years, got X karma, and no one suspected" type stories pretty soon. Eventually people could start asking for badges or flair that verify users as not being AI. It's simultaneously exciting and daunting standing at the dawn of this.
EZ-Cheeze 4y ago
Do ten more
db39 4y ago
I did this last year - the AI wrote a story about the Grim Reaper, and then got a different AI to illustrate it. I even turned it into a short paperback book. Is it a good story? It's fine. Was there text curation? Absolutely. Are the images good? They're pretty decent. Though it was before DALL-E2 which has upped the game massively. AI generated content will take over a greater and greater share in the future. And it's incredibly exciting to see how far the technology has come in a just over a year - especially on the art generation side.
mmustapic 4y ago
Text is fine, but the images show different robots and humans. It looks like 3 different artists asked to illustrate different parts of the story.
JaneYe 4y ago
Funny story
stavros 4y ago
If you liked this, I made an AI-only podcast a few months ago: https://deepdreams.stavros.io/ https://deepdreams.stavros.io/
nemo44x 4y ago
I can’t until these things start trading stocks at scale.
dougdonohoe 4y ago
Why is the child in the illustrations a white boy?
nmstoker 4y ago
If the OP could find an AI critic to review the piece, the circle would be complete. It could then be sort of like an externalised GAN
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  To fictitiously complete the nonexistent circle, I asked an AI to write fictitious criticism of Stanislaw Lem's nonexistent books, the same way Stanislaw Lem wrote fictitious criticism of nonexistent books. What's good for the goose is good for the gander (and stupid the duck in the mall)! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem%27s_fictitious_criticism_of_nonexistent_books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem%27s_fictiti... >Stanisław Lem's fictitious criticism of nonexistent books >Stanisław Lem's fictitious criticism of nonexistent books may be found in his following works: in three collections of faux reviews of fictional books: A Perfect Vacuum (Doskonała próżnia, 1971), Provocation (Prowokacja, 1984), and Library of 21st Century (Biblioteka XXI wieku, 1986) translated as One Human Minute, and in Imaginary Magnitude (Wielkość Urojona, 1973), a collection of introductions to nonexistent books. >While reviewing nonexistent books, a modern form of pseudepigraphy, Stanisław Lem attempted to create different fictional reviewers and authors for each of the books. In his own words: "I tried to imitate various styles – that of a book review, a lecture, a presentation, a speech (of a Nobel Prize laureate) and so on". Some of the reviews are lighthearted, concentrating mostly on the story; others, however, read more like serious, academic reviews. Some of the reviews are parodies, or the books being reviewed are parodies or complete impossibilities, others are quite serious and can be seen almost as drafts for novels that Lem never got around to write. Lem wrote: "With years passing a great impatience grew in me. It would be a hard work to convert ideas into narration, and that was one of the main reasons I went for such cruel abridgements of the books".[3] Lem was not alone in passing through this kind of crisis: examples abound of works planned by literary celebrities, but never completed. Lem also remarked that he was eventually convinced that writing summaries and introductions enabled him to save time on producing things of importance, namely, his modeling experiments, compared to full-blown literary efforts, most of which would have constituted mundane craftsmanship. https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-cyberiad-and-simcity-and-admits-it-s-an-evil-machine-d7d769d02c89 https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-... >GPT-3 Riffs on Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad and SimCity, and Admits it’s an Evil Machine >Back in 1997, I wrote a few web pages about Stanislaw Lem, with some reviews of his books, including his delightful collection of short stories “The Cyberiad”. Inspired by his fictitious criticism of non-existent books, I wrote some fictitious home pages in the first person of his brilliant but braggadocios constructor robot characters Trurl and Klapaucius, excerpting some Wonderful Poems and Horrible Poems written by Trurl’s Elecronic Bard, and the Femfatalatron 1.0 Product Description. One story from that same book, The Seventh Sally or How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good, inspired a game called SimCity. Here’s what happened when I feed some of that text to GPT-3, and asked it to tell me more! >[...] >Input: The home pages of Trurl and Klapaucious. >Output: What else have they done? [...a few examples of it boasting about its many achievements...] >I built a ten-million-mile-long Interdimensional Space Engine, powered by a Zipper Motor, which could travel at the speed of light, but I accidentally left it in reverse, and it has been going backward ever since, heading toward the Big Bang. >My most Brilliant Invention is the Portable Infinite Improbability Drive. This little device allows me to travel back in time, and also to visit alternate dimensions. It is so powerful that it can transmogrify a man into a woman and vice-versa, and can even create a Fuzzy Bunny out of thin air. >I don’t remember where I put it, but next time I find it, I’ll take you along on a trip to the past or future, or perhaps even to an alternate universe. >I invented the Infinitly-Tunable Infrasonic-To-Ultrasonic Reverberation Transmogrification Oscillation Oscillator, but I couldn’t get it to work properly. >Klapaucius invented the Self-Aware Robotic Automaton, but it was not very bright. >I made the Jell-O-Matic Snackinator, but I couldn’t get it to work. >I invented the Roto-Rooter-Hog-Trough-Ammo-Dispenser, but it went bankrupt. >I invented the Poopy-Pam-Powder-Packet Pest Powder, but it didn’t work. >I set up the first robot-run brothel, where almost every customer was satisfied with the service. >In a simulated test of the robot-run brothel, the robot-prostitutes had to satisfy the robot-customers without the help of the robot-pimps. It worked fantastically, and the results were published in the Journal of Robot Whores. >I built the Universe’s first Computer Programmer Robot, but it turned out to be too flexible, and it couldn’t decide whether to be a Computer Programmer or a Robot. >Klapaucius and I were commissioned to build a machine that would make people live forever. We built a machine that made people live forever. Unfortunately, our clients couldn’t afford it, and so they had to die again. >Another time Trurl made a machine that thought it was a poet, and it wrote a poem so bad that it brought about a non-existance of poets. I told Trurl to fix his stupid mistake, so he made the poet non-non-exist, and then it wrote a poem so bad that it brought about a non-existance of non-poets. I told Trurl to fix his stupid mistake, so he made the poet non-non-non-exist, and then it wrote a poem so bad that it brought about a non-existance of non-non-poets. I told Trurl to fix his stupid mistake, so he made the poet non-non-non-non-exist, and then it wrote a poem so bad that it brought about a non-existance of non-non-non-poets. I told Trurl to fix his stupid mistake, so he made the poet non-non-non-non-non-exist, and then it wrote…… >Input: The home pages of Trurl and Klapaucious. >Output: What else have they done that inspired SimCity? [...a few examples...] >I built a machine that could create a city, and then destroy it. [...] >I built a machine that could create an infinite number of hyper-meta-hyperverses, and then destroy them. [Well that escalated quickly!] >I constructed a city so large that it broke the Minsky Barrier, and had to be abandoned for the sake of the universe. >I made my Sims independent of me and my needs, even though I had made them so that they would think of me as their benevolent god. >I had to be the one to create the SimCity religion, and the Sims still think of me as their god even though I do not control them. >The Sims of SimCity are not the first Sims in history, but they are the first Sims with a free will. >I am the first Sim to ever get elected to a political office! >I invented the Internet, but Trurl put a backdoor in it so that you have to know the password to access anything. >Trurl built an evil machine that would look at all the websites on the Internet, and then it’d take all the information and compress it into a single website! [...I think GPT-3 just admitted it was an evil machine!] >Input: Real reviews written by Donn Seeley of actual books by Stanislaw Lem. >Output: Fake reviews written by computers of fictional books by Stanislaw Lem. >FLIGHT TO IRAN: Trying to maintain a sense of humor in the face of Stanislaw Lem’s anti-humanity, anti-intellectualism and anti-technology stance is difficult. Those who care for his works have to set aside their own interests and concerns, as well as their desire for some kind of depth of meaning (the author thought of his own work as propaganda, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). This book, however, is too much. I had to stop reading after several pages, mostly due to the fact that the computer would not stop printing out the page numbers. >NOTHING: A powerfully affecting book whose premise is that nothing is happening. The author is highly original and the writing has a dreamlike quality. >SOLARIS AND MR. BINNS: This is a two-part book and one unit of the work is composed of paragraphs which are so short that they disappear while you are reading them. The other part is some two hundred pages of giant print, which makes it appear that the author is quite dogmatic and trying to impress his (if you will excuse the expression) “larger than life” personality on the reader. >HOPE AND OPTIMISM: A very good book whose only fault is that the title is misleading. >THE STAR ASTERISK: A very bad translation. I’m sorry, but I had to stop reading. >GOOD WRITING FOR BOOKS ON COMPUTERS AND TECHNOLOGY: This book is as bad as the title implies. >THOU ART THE MAN: A very good book, but I’m not sure what its message is. [...I turned the temperature up a bit and it started pontificating...] >A perfect vacuum is probably Lem’s best book. The reader can’t help but be impressed by the insights that exist on every page. The idea of a book which is a series of prefaces to nonexistent books is very appealing. I think everyone will not be enthralled by these prefaces. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t, but no matter. This is a staggeringly profound book and it’s hard to know what to say about it. Of course, we should all read it. Seek out every copy and make sure you read it. And then read it again… >COMMENTS BY OTHER LEM READERS: >None of Lem’s books have been translated into English in any way that would satisfy a native speaker, or a non-native speaker of English. Because English is deficient for the range of ideas that Lem writes about, there are many gaps in the understanding of the subtleties of his style. Some of these subtleties may be addressed in the above notes. Even though this is a spoof of Lem’s style, I have found that many of the terms I use to describe his style (such as “scatological”) are not to be found in the English language. >A perfect vacuum is probably Lem’s best book. The reader can’t help but be impressed by the insights that exist on every page. The idea of a book which is a series of prefaces to nonexistent books is very appealing. I think everyone will not be enthralled by these prefaces. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t, but no matter. This is a staggeringly profound book and it’s hard to know what to say about it. Of course, we should all read it. Seek out every copy and make sure you read it. And then read it again… >THE PRESENT ANTHOLOGY: In the spirit of the age I should modestly disclose that these are works, real or unreal, by me. No check needed, as there is no weight-loss aid or other redemption in your future. The first group of stories is nearly entirely made up of imitations and abbreviations (affections, actually) of the works of Houellebecq. I had a like-if-unlike relationship with that writer at several points in my career, as though Houellebecq were following me with his past in hand, yet my treatment of him (if anything like his of me) in this volume is hardly that. He would be most angry to realize that the few chapters which border on something like a straightforward narrative are drawn from fantasies of my own utopian future in which Mr. Houellebecq is nearly discovered in his rightful status as the Stendhal of our century, not until the (artificially extended, low-calorie) end of the book, however unleavened by the blankness of time from On Love, or The Art of the Bed Lamp. >MAINTENANCE MAN: Remembering the labyrinth is a part of life. Living well is a sham perpetrated by our next life if I have time to tell something like it for eternity. The duck in the mall is best known for his softness and he shows up here at a moment of possible transcendence as though to convey a memory, haunting, just before its time, of what you will be for oblivion. Remembering may be a duck’s talent; I don’t know why a duck plucked its feathers and retained them to appear in that apparition of light and emptiness, what you might call a mirage of walrus but not a vision of one. Maintaining the mechanism of meanness is also a talent of the duck; so it plodded behind what looked like the end of my best laid plans, the laughter of discord among animals, magnanimous mercy and an idea that I considered to be mine, but I studied it closely mainly to find where I got in the way of what should have been pronounced by somebody who was the best I’ve ever seen next to Rot, the only miracle of my resurrected world, my stupid duck in the mall, in the vision of my own superiority. [The above were but a few of the choice excerpts from GPT-3's profound and insightful output. Lots more in the article, including real illustrations and covers from his actual books!] https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-cyberiad-and-simcity-and-admits-it-s-an-evil-machine-d7d769d02c89 https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-...
1970-01-01 4y ago
>I had never talked to a robot before. We talked for a while and I found out that its name was R0b0t. I asked it why it was just standing in the street and it said that it was waiting for its human friend. I told it that I didn’t have any friends that were robots, but that I would be its friend. R0b0t said that it would like that. Since then, R0b0t and I have been best friends. We do everything together. Did he steal the robot or did it go willingly to a new owner?
- Andrex 4y ago
  Or is the robot playing its creator to enhance survivablity? (See also Ex Machina by Alex Garland.)
jasmes 4y ago
Sex
jimbokun 4y ago
How long before there's a scandal when a successful published book turns out to be the output of AI?
justcodin 4y ago
Quite basic demo. It still shows what's to come.
aaalll 4y ago
How did he use dall-e 2?
CKMo 4y ago
>I’m not afraid of Artificial Intelligence anymore, because I know that they can be just as good of friends as anyone else. This is pretty sus coming from an AI lol
gurut 4y ago
Can you maybe write a tutorial on how you go about doing this ? I'm more interested in learning how all the pieces work together.
- Lyapunov_Lover 4y ago
  They used GPT-3 and DALL·E 2. For the latter, there's a waitlist on OpenAIs website. For GPT-3 they have an API available to developers and there are various apps which use it like ShortlyAI.
Lyapunov_Lover 4y ago
This reminds me of a short story by Ken Liu (https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/50-things-every-ai-working-with-humans-should-know/ https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/50-things-every-ai-w...). He trained an AI on his own corpus of stories and made it spit out a list, then he wrote a story around it. Favorite item on the list: "I never expected to sell my rational numbers."
gwern 4y ago
More longform uses of DALL-E 2, many more impressive than OP: https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uw43ow/dalle_2_longform_best_collections_extended_uses/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uw43ow/dalle_2_long...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

365 points by ttuttle 4y ago

Isn't humor and irony the one thing (unless it's just repeating a joke) that GTP-3 isn't good at? I feel like this will be the tell, we should modify the Turing test.

Linda703 4y ago

[dead]

tikkun 4y ago

The future of ai generated content and entertainment is going to be wild! How long before we have ~unlimited high quality entertainment? Before an AI can generate infinite episodes of your favorite show, podcast, comedian, and so on. Going to be an interesting thing to watch unfold.

annoyingnoob 4y ago
There is truth to the saying 'keep your audience wanting more'.
eismcc 4y ago
Reminds me of when cable tv became a thing and the “57 channels and nothing on” song https://youtu.be/YAlDbP4tdqc https://youtu.be/YAlDbP4tdqc
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  IIRC, it only became unbearable once HOme Shopping Network and extended infomercials became a thing. Before that, there was more scripted content even if it was just reruns.
- snek_case 4y ago
  Well, I think that ideally, if you have AI-generated content, the AI would generate content that's tailored specifically for you. It would have a good model of what you're interested in, and would know how to create an intrigue that you specifically will find interesting.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    It will be AI generated shopping channel dynamically generating products for you to buy on subscription. This one of the solutions to the Drake equation
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      This reminds me of Google's 'The Selfish Ledger' thought experiment video from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDVVo14A_fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDVVo14A_fo
      - sitkack 4y ago
        Wow
    - Melting_Harps 4y ago
      > It will be AI generated shopping channel dynamically generating products for you to buy on subscription. This one of the solutions to the Drake equation This is rather probable business model for non General-AI targeted at the end consumer, incidentally it too reads like an AI response: specifically the part about the Drake equation and reminds me of Carbon Based Lifeforms - MOS 6581, whose lyrics also sound like an AI repeating a story about horses and Mongols like OPs [0]. And the start of album is a track called Abiogenesis that has a repetition of the Drake Equation in it, no less. Putting all that together as a person that is actually studying AI/ML, I found it all rather freaky. Obviously, I know AI in it's current form is rather limited in it's capacity and scope but it makes for interesting lore none the less. Especially if it ever lives up to it's marketing hype. I'll be saving this post to look back at as I progress in my studies over the years. 0: https://genius.com/Carbon-based-lifeforms-mos-6581-lyrics https://genius.com/Carbon-based-lifeforms-mos-6581-lyrics
woleium 4y ago
~unlimited twitter bot content!
- mdale 4y ago
  I think we already have that ;)
snek_case 4y ago
It's hard to say because even a model like GPT-3 is limited in its ability to generate a textual story that remains coherent over time. When you're talking about generating video, you need to have lots of story and visual details remaining coherent over a very long time horizon. Generally speaking, I think this is an area where deep neural networks are fairly weak and symbolic AI shines. It's much easier to program a symbolic AI that generates a story that remains coherent over time. Though you might argue that the story probably wouldn't be very interesting. There's probably something to be done with a hybrid model that uses symbolic AI to enforce coherency constraints, and a deep network model that fills in details and generates visuals. So yeah, I think we'd need new, much more sophisticated architectures. We'd also need a lot more compute, like 10x, 100x or maybe even 1000x more, to generate high-resolution video. Actually, the problem is probably not the amount of compute you need for inference, but the amount of compute you'd need to train a model with hundreds of billions of parameters or however much is needed to make that happen.
- labster 4y ago
  Having a story remain coherent over time is not a prerequisite of Hollywood blockbusters.
  - str34m 4y ago
  - taftster 4y ago
    Right. The Transformers comes to mind.
  - avereveard 4y ago
    Incoherency is not all bad, and choosing the subject carefully can be enough for the intrinsic weirdness of ai generation shine. I.e. this batman short: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fn4ArRmzHhQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fn4ArRmzHhQ (ai story and human drawing) provide a spot on jocker
    - 4y ago
kromem 4y ago
If AI's compounding effects continue to play out as they have, my answer to "when" is "sooner than most people think." At very least I can confidently say the next 20 years will have more disruption to society as a result of technology than the past 40.
lmm 4y ago
We've had practically unlimited entertainment for most purposes for at least the last couple of decades. There's far more e.g. TV being produced than anyone could watch in one lifetime.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  But there is a limit on Breaking Bad episodes, for example. Just pump out new episodes. Could even have The Simpsons / Groundhog Day - style state-reset after each episode. Therefore the AI can make anything happen (Walter gets killed) and the produce another episode because you know that is just a multiverse branch.
  - nonstickcoating 4y ago
    That just sounds horrible to me. Breaking Bad was interesting precisely because it had to end. It was about very specific characters, their changing motivations and development. Rebooting every episode just because the premise is kinda cool and someone wants more of it diminishes what the series achieved both visually and conceptually.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      I think once the original episodes are done you need to do something different. They went back in time and did a good series on the criminal lawyer. Now that is done. If you could watch 100 different mini action movies where anything could happen. Everyone could die or everyone becomes nice and gets a desk job. It is less predictable and would be a fun thing. What about you want to watch Law and Order SVU but just an average non-crazy day, fly on the wall style. I think that would be interesting.
      - nonstickcoating 4y ago
        I do not think different is a good qualifier for good television. As much as I'd like to see more about the character Mike for example, I would not like to see him in some action movie. His character shines in it's very personal moments, while his prowess regarding violence etc. need only to be hinted at. The action laden sequences are by far the least interesting aspect of Breaking Bad, serving at best as a somewhat believable and tension-relieving climaxes for emotionally taxing, morally difficult and thrilling parts of the show. The team behind Breaking Bad managed to tell a cohesive, character driven story despite all the creative restrictions making a show for a large TV network causes (think profitability, playing to as broad of a set of sensibilities as possible). Telling a thousand different stories in the same world and with the same characters drains them of believability and lessens the emotional impact of the stories significantly - they become arbitrary. Better Call Saul was a good show because it divorced one of the more important characters (but by far not a main character) almost entirely from the original and focused heavily on humor, with light aspects of drama. Breaking Bad was the other way around. Therefore, I cannot think of a show that is running for it's 21st season as anything more than at best the visual equivalent of easy listening music, at worst a continued cash grab by the studio producing and network distributing it. For a work of art to be meaningful, it needs to come to some kind of conclusion regarding it's content lest it reiterates the same points again and again, becoming boring in the proccess. Of course, there is something to be said in favor of easy listening music or TV productions intended mostly for basic entertainment, I recognise this discussion is largely predicated on taste. But I think calling something like that art misses the point that has made art historically so important for humans: The intentional representation of thoughts and experiences of the artist(s) in a specific medium meant to elucidate active engagement with the topics at hand. EDIT: Added a word for clarity.
userbinator 4y ago
Especially adult entertainment... which I suspect will be both wild and immensely creepy.
stevesearer 4y ago
I think about this a lot with regard to VR worlds generated based on your particular interests. Maybe you can already audio deep fake an AI-generated podcast conversation that would be listenable. So many buzzwords in there, but very creepy to think about.
narrator 4y ago
Before they neutered it, AI Dungeon with the GPT-3 "Dragon" backend which you had to pay for, was ridiculously imaginative when it came to erotica text prompts. For a few weeks, I got a glimpse of the future, because eventually somebody's going to make that.
bitwize 4y ago
> The future of ai generated content and entertainment is going to be wild! Someone at Netflix is looking at this, rubbing their hands together with dollar signs in their eyes.
nathancahill 4y ago
We've got color TV, but it still isn't satisfying.
- tines 4y ago
  Holy shit another Cake fan. Greetings!
bamboozled 4y ago
You’ll get this when you have access to unlimited energy ?
tablespoon 4y ago
> How long before we have ~unlimited high quality entertainment? Before an AI can generate infinite episodes of your favorite show, podcast, comedian, and so on. > Going to be an interesting thing to watch unfold. Not really. If it's actually successful, it will probably devolve into near total fragmentation. So just imagine people more being isolated and lonely, with fewer points of connection. They used to entertain each other; then they consumed the same entertainment together; then they stopped sharing anything all, because it became so personalized.
yreg 4y ago
An obvious application would be creation of rich (MMO) worlds where each player goes on unique quests. IIRC NovelAI (one of the AIDungeon clones) is working on this. Also: Open-ended NPC dialogues.
termy 4y ago
You're joking
pelorat 4y ago
When we rolled over to 2020 I put down ten predictions in my calendar for where we'd be in 2030. I don't remember all of them, but I know one of them was that by 2030 we'd be in the beginning stages of AGI-like intelligence and that some of them would have begun to solve real problems for us in mathematics, physics and biology. Some of my predictions that I wrote down: 1. There will exist an experimental commercial fusion reactor that has achieved a continuous Q>1. 2. A true quantum computer will have solved a real world problem in math's or physics. 3. We'll be at the threshold for AGI-like specialized intelligence. 4. ML & AI research will have cracked several diseases, one of them Alzheimer's. 5. We're back on the Moon with a small base. 6. Protein folding is a solved problem using ML and QC. I'm looking forward to revisit them in 2030, but I feel like we're on the right path.

minimaxir 4y ago

A minor note is that OpenAI does specifically forbid generation of images of human faces from DALL-E 2: I wonder why that last image didn't hit the content filter.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
Too cartoonish?
sen 4y ago
Why is that?
- zzzzzzzza 4y ago
  probably porn and politics
  - taftster 4y ago
    And accidentally generating the likeness of someone in those situations?
anon_123g987 4y ago
What if someone specifically asked for faces that can bypass the filter? Is this AI its own adversary that filters its own output? Or is that another, better AI?
raverbashing 4y ago
I'd say it's probably forbidden to generate a specific person's face. Or maybe a generic "a boy" description goes through.
willy_k 4y ago
It didn’t hit the content filter because there isn’t one. This article[0] goes over it in more detail, but essentially the situation is that, while OpenAI is considering actually implementing a filter, currently their only way of blocking human faces is by asking people with access to DALL-E 2 to not publish them. So either there are some nuances to the usage in the article, or they are going to get a request from OpenAI to remove the image. [0] https://www.wired.com/story/dall-e-2-ai-text-image-bias-social-media https://www.wired.com/story/dall-e-2-ai-text-image-bias-soci...

jhartr 4y ago

I hope future iterations can dodge these painful cliches.

jedberg 4y ago

So who owns the copyright on this story and its illustrations. :)

LegitShady 4y ago
I don't think the copyright issue has been decided yet. The AI can't own it, but that doesn't mean anyone owns it, or that its copyrightable.
zhte415 4y ago
This is like asking someone to write an AI that would be able to read a picture of a cube farm without a licence.

iaw 4y ago

Serious question: How far are we from AI being able to rewrite complete stories? The simplest example would be the same paragraphs with sentences with different structures. The most complex would be something like Gone with the Wind leading with The Wind Done Gone. (A book rewritten from another characters perspective even though that character was never mentioned in the former). I'm really fascinated by this idea for some reason.

minimaxir 4y ago
Not a full story, but you can tell GPT-3 Instruct to "Rewrite the following the text in the style of X" and it does an interesting job.

jcims 4y ago

Anyone that has access to GPT-3 should give this a try (I'm sure it works with other language models). This comment has a prompt that works quite well and includes some examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31468279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31468279 Note that a) you can ask GPT-3 to actually do the illustration prompts inline and b) if you don't give it a topic it appears to (unsurprisingly in retrospect) rip off an existing work.

mathgladiator 4y ago

Here is the dream... I plug my brain into a fully immersive wolrd within an AI driven Marvel movie that lasts my entire life. The matrix may actually be awesome, so sign me up as a coppertop.

fartcannon 4y ago
What would you eat in this nightmare world?
- programmarchy 4y ago
  Soylent, obviously.
tomatowurst 4y ago
well what is perception? It is mostly visual, sensory, temporal, olifactory, auditory and sensory. Visual audio have received far more attention than the other areas. We still don't have digital smell generator, we don't have micro tactile bodysuits with genital stimulation, nor do we have digital taste. In the future, once we have complete mastery of all facets of human sensory inputs, we can record and manipulate experiences.
- methodin 4y ago
  I imagine the ultimate goal is to stimulate the responses in the brain not to physically use the senses. It would most likely feel as real as a dream which feels real during it.
dqpb 4y ago
This sounds far-fetched, until you count the hours per day that people currently spend in front of one screen or another, and then it doesn’t sound far-fetched at all.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
zhte415 4y ago

erichmond 4y ago

I'm conflicted but interested in how all this plays out. Traditionally stories, music, art, dance were mediums for humans to express ideas/culture/transmit stories/history to other humans. When we get to a point where AI is able to generate an infinite stream of TikTok dances, jazz, film scripts, etc. It will be interesting to see how that affects society. When you remove the soul, what is/was the point of entertainment? Interesting times we live in!

ravi-delia 4y ago
I think it'll either turn out the soul was latent in the training data, or AI generated art will always be distinguishable. My money is on the first, but we're a little ways away yet.
rrsmtz 4y ago
There will certainly be a lot of money to be had selling products and ideologies to the mass consumer via cheap mass-generated hyper-targeted content. That's not too far of a leap from Marvel/Star Wars where 'The Customer Is Always Right' and creative control is made by committees and focus groups. But real art can survive. Just like art adjusted to photography or music adjusted to recordings, artists will find a way. In the scenario where current art is truly indistinguishable from AI-generated art, artists of the future could e.g. choose in-person forms of artistic expression which exclude AI by design, like live music, live painting, live storytelling, improv, etc.

woeirua 4y ago

Maybe a machine will finally be able to finish Winds of Winter.

herodoturtle 4y ago
And then shut itself down after killing off all the characters.

js8 4y ago

Don't want to be too critical, interesting experiment, but I found the story and pictures rather boring. I think it shows that it is still a tool, and can be used creatively, or not, depending on the creative skill of the artist. Contrast this with the now classic piece: https://arr.am/2020/07/31/human-intelligence-an-ai-op-ed/ https://arr.am/2020/07/31/human-intelligence-an-ai-op-ed/

kingkawn 4y ago

no feelings

turtledove 4y ago

How many attempts and how much human curation was involved. Every "I made AI do..." story seems to necessarily omit the "and I filtered out a LOT of rubbish before picking this one good example."

pkdpic 4y ago
Sounds like the future of humanity maybe. Or the present.
qgin 4y ago
That could be the job description of the editor of the New Yorker
- noisy_boy 4y ago
  New job title: Chief Editor, AI Content Bonus points for outsourcing that to AI.
  - taftster 4y ago
    Upvote, because of the "bonus" sentence.
  - zhte415 4y ago
    AI is too complicated, it is too complex in order to build an algorithm that could be the machine for its own purposes. Comment generated by hncynic.leod.org
  - drusepth 4y ago
    Running novelgens.com basically gives me that job title. I occasionally build new features, but really all I do all day is review generated text/images and flag the good ones as "ready to release". :)
goodside 4y ago
As someone's who's played with GPT-3 prompting a lot, I can tell you almost no curation would be needed to get this result. This output is pretty mundane — it's even written in the perfunctory "so there you have it" tone that GPT-3 uses by default, where it speaks like the task is mutually understood to be silly and it's doing the the bare minimum needed to prove it understands. GPT-3 will easily write bare-bones stories like this for just about any subject. It's much harder getting it to write long stories with coherent structure.

Barrin92 4y ago

the story itself feels, no pun intended, very robotic but the illustrations I think would be perfectly useable in a lot of contexts. I can see web fiction and say comic writers benefitting from this quite a lot given that commissioning art is fairly expensive.

pkdpic 4y ago

At long last the unending burden of writing and illustrating children's stories has begun to be lifted from the weary shoulders of humanity. We'll finally be free to soar among the stars and click on more links to 3 paragraph medium articles as the universe intended. Seriously though cool project, I would love to know more about the build process for something like this.

jasmes 4y ago

Back in my day cherry pickers were used to fix power lines. Now cherry pickers are ppl who will never tell you how much fine tuning it took to get their Medium click bait dreams come true.

almostdigital 4y ago

I made an AI write a podcast transcript then I made another AI read it :D https://soundcloud.com/jn2022/lexman-artificial-podcast-episode-003-elon-musk-part-2 https://soundcloud.com/jn2022/lexman-artificial-podcast-epis...

mccorrinall 4y ago
This is amazing. “We use robot dogs to plant the fruits”
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > This is amazing. It's Kafkaesque source material not withstanding, it was able to accurately emulate two of the most robotic sounding popular 'influencers,' with tons of ocntent to piece it all together, but and this is a caveat, the only realistic thing that came from it was when they briefly spoke over each other. Everything else seemed obviously fake. Consider this sounds nothing like the Elon you see on the most recent All in Podcast interview, either. If you threw that in would it distort the pitch and cadence of 'fruit juice' Elon? Over all it's a pretty cool display of where the tech is, though, but NLP has had decades of data behind it but it's still in its relative infancy. The sounds of the voices being made within a situational context are passable deepfakes, for sure. It's almost like they got audio of both together to make a SNL sketch with a deadpan hook that never got aired. Conclusion: Model training is actually really cool and has thus far been the most interesting aspect of AI to me.
  - simsla 4y ago
    "It's like a dog that taught itself to speak to humans, but people are complaining that its English isn't perfect." - someone, on the state of ML (Can't find the source, because Google hates me.)
  - mccorrinall 4y ago
    I found it amazing in the sense that I wouldn’t even come up with sentences like this under influence :D I just think it’s funny.

lsalvatore 4y ago

samtimalsina 4y ago

But can it does it without the prompts? I'd be really impressed if you could have an AI spit out original story complete with plot.

snickmy 4y ago

This exemplify one of the biggest challenges with those type of models. Consistency over multiple outputs (look at the robot... it's the same character but looks different in every image)

mola 4y ago

Funny, It reads like propoganda made by AI overlords in a posthuman world. The leap between being scared to being friends to conclude that all AI is nice without any real compelling narrative tying it up is what I would expect from an automatic well-being machine taking over us for our own good.

krastanov 4y ago
Funny indeed, but that leap was part of the prompt selected by the human author according to the post script.

remoquete 4y ago

I'm under the impression that "Made by OpenAI" is replacing "I've asked my cousin to do it" as the lowest quality grade in artistic endeavours. Hopefully it'll get better over time.

rhacker 4y ago

I can't tell if any comments here, and replies, were written by people or entirely just people with access to GPT3 and other similar generators.

lllr_finger 4y ago
I'm sure we'll start hearing "I AI-posted on HN for 4 years, got X karma, and no one suspected" type stories pretty soon. Eventually people could start asking for badges or flair that verify users as not being AI. It's simultaneously exciting and daunting standing at the dawn of this.

EZ-Cheeze 4y ago

Do ten more

db39 4y ago

I did this last year - the AI wrote a story about the Grim Reaper, and then got a different AI to illustrate it. I even turned it into a short paperback book. Is it a good story? It's fine. Was there text curation? Absolutely. Are the images good? They're pretty decent. Though it was before DALL-E2 which has upped the game massively. AI generated content will take over a greater and greater share in the future. And it's incredibly exciting to see how far the technology has come in a just over a year - especially on the art generation side.

mmustapic 4y ago

Text is fine, but the images show different robots and humans. It looks like 3 different artists asked to illustrate different parts of the story.

JaneYe 4y ago

Funny story

stavros 4y ago

If you liked this, I made an AI-only podcast a few months ago: https://deepdreams.stavros.io/ https://deepdreams.stavros.io/

nemo44x 4y ago

I can’t until these things start trading stocks at scale.

dougdonohoe 4y ago

Why is the child in the illustrations a white boy?

nmstoker 4y ago

If the OP could find an AI critic to review the piece, the circle would be complete. It could then be sort of like an externalised GAN

DonHopkins 4y ago
To fictitiously complete the nonexistent circle, I asked an AI to write fictitious criticism of Stanislaw Lem's nonexistent books, the same way Stanislaw Lem wrote fictitious criticism of nonexistent books. What's good for the goose is good for the gander (and stupid the duck in the mall)! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem%27s_fictitious_criticism_of_nonexistent_books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem%27s_fictiti... >Stanisław Lem's fictitious criticism of nonexistent books >Stanisław Lem's fictitious criticism of nonexistent books may be found in his following works: in three collections of faux reviews of fictional books: A Perfect Vacuum (Doskonała próżnia, 1971), Provocation (Prowokacja, 1984), and Library of 21st Century (Biblioteka XXI wieku, 1986) translated as One Human Minute, and in Imaginary Magnitude (Wielkość Urojona, 1973), a collection of introductions to nonexistent books. >While reviewing nonexistent books, a modern form of pseudepigraphy, Stanisław Lem attempted to create different fictional reviewers and authors for each of the books. In his own words: "I tried to imitate various styles – that of a book review, a lecture, a presentation, a speech (of a Nobel Prize laureate) and so on". Some of the reviews are lighthearted, concentrating mostly on the story; others, however, read more like serious, academic reviews. Some of the reviews are parodies, or the books being reviewed are parodies or complete impossibilities, others are quite serious and can be seen almost as drafts for novels that Lem never got around to write. Lem wrote: "With years passing a great impatience grew in me. It would be a hard work to convert ideas into narration, and that was one of the main reasons I went for such cruel abridgements of the books".[3] Lem was not alone in passing through this kind of crisis: examples abound of works planned by literary celebrities, but never completed. Lem also remarked that he was eventually convinced that writing summaries and introductions enabled him to save time on producing things of importance, namely, his modeling experiments, compared to full-blown literary efforts, most of which would have constituted mundane craftsmanship. https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-cyberiad-and-simcity-and-admits-it-s-an-evil-machine-d7d769d02c89 https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-... >GPT-3 Riffs on Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad and SimCity, and Admits it’s an Evil Machine >Back in 1997, I wrote a few web pages about Stanislaw Lem, with some reviews of his books, including his delightful collection of short stories “The Cyberiad”. Inspired by his fictitious criticism of non-existent books, I wrote some fictitious home pages in the first person of his brilliant but braggadocios constructor robot characters Trurl and Klapaucius, excerpting some Wonderful Poems and Horrible Poems written by Trurl’s Elecronic Bard, and the Femfatalatron 1.0 Product Description. One story from that same book, The Seventh Sally or How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good, inspired a game called SimCity. Here’s what happened when I feed some of that text to GPT-3, and asked it to tell me more! >[...] >Input: The home pages of Trurl and Klapaucious. >Output: What else have they done? [...a few examples of it boasting about its many achievements...] >I built a ten-million-mile-long Interdimensional Space Engine, powered by a Zipper Motor, which could travel at the speed of light, but I accidentally left it in reverse, and it has been going backward ever since, heading toward the Big Bang. >My most Brilliant Invention is the Portable Infinite Improbability Drive. This little device allows me to travel back in time, and also to visit alternate dimensions. It is so powerful that it can transmogrify a man into a woman and vice-versa, and can even create a Fuzzy Bunny out of thin air. >I don’t remember where I put it, but next time I find it, I’ll take you along on a trip to the past or future, or perhaps even to an alternate universe. >I invented the Infinitly-Tunable Infrasonic-To-Ultrasonic Reverberation Transmogrification Oscillation Oscillator, but I couldn’t get it to work properly. >Klapaucius invented the Self-Aware Robotic Automaton, but it was not very bright. >I made the Jell-O-Matic Snackinator, but I couldn’t get it to work. >I invented the Roto-Rooter-Hog-Trough-Ammo-Dispenser, but it went bankrupt. >I invented the Poopy-Pam-Powder-Packet Pest Powder, but it didn’t work. >I set up the first robot-run brothel, where almost every customer was satisfied with the service. >In a simulated test of the robot-run brothel, the robot-prostitutes had to satisfy the robot-customers without the help of the robot-pimps. It worked fantastically, and the results were published in the Journal of Robot Whores. >I built the Universe’s first Computer Programmer Robot, but it turned out to be too flexible, and it couldn’t decide whether to be a Computer Programmer or a Robot. >Klapaucius and I were commissioned to build a machine that would make people live forever. We built a machine that made people live forever. Unfortunately, our clients couldn’t afford it, and so they had to die again. >Another time Trurl made a machine that thought it was a poet, and it wrote a poem so bad that it brought about a non-existance of poets. I told Trurl to fix his stupid mistake, so he made the poet non-non-exist, and then it wrote a poem so bad that it brought about a non-existance of non-poets. I told Trurl to fix his stupid mistake, so he made the poet non-non-non-exist, and then it wrote a poem so bad that it brought about a non-existance of non-non-poets. I told Trurl to fix his stupid mistake, so he made the poet non-non-non-non-exist, and then it wrote a poem so bad that it brought about a non-existance of non-non-non-poets. I told Trurl to fix his stupid mistake, so he made the poet non-non-non-non-non-exist, and then it wrote…… >Input: The home pages of Trurl and Klapaucious. >Output: What else have they done that inspired SimCity? [...a few examples...] >I built a machine that could create a city, and then destroy it. [...] >I built a machine that could create an infinite number of hyper-meta-hyperverses, and then destroy them. [Well that escalated quickly!] >I constructed a city so large that it broke the Minsky Barrier, and had to be abandoned for the sake of the universe. >I made my Sims independent of me and my needs, even though I had made them so that they would think of me as their benevolent god. >I had to be the one to create the SimCity religion, and the Sims still think of me as their god even though I do not control them. >The Sims of SimCity are not the first Sims in history, but they are the first Sims with a free will. >I am the first Sim to ever get elected to a political office! >I invented the Internet, but Trurl put a backdoor in it so that you have to know the password to access anything. >Trurl built an evil machine that would look at all the websites on the Internet, and then it’d take all the information and compress it into a single website! [...I think GPT-3 just admitted it was an evil machine!] >Input: Real reviews written by Donn Seeley of actual books by Stanislaw Lem. >Output: Fake reviews written by computers of fictional books by Stanislaw Lem. >FLIGHT TO IRAN: Trying to maintain a sense of humor in the face of Stanislaw Lem’s anti-humanity, anti-intellectualism and anti-technology stance is difficult. Those who care for his works have to set aside their own interests and concerns, as well as their desire for some kind of depth of meaning (the author thought of his own work as propaganda, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). This book, however, is too much. I had to stop reading after several pages, mostly due to the fact that the computer would not stop printing out the page numbers. >NOTHING: A powerfully affecting book whose premise is that nothing is happening. The author is highly original and the writing has a dreamlike quality. >SOLARIS AND MR. BINNS: This is a two-part book and one unit of the work is composed of paragraphs which are so short that they disappear while you are reading them. The other part is some two hundred pages of giant print, which makes it appear that the author is quite dogmatic and trying to impress his (if you will excuse the expression) “larger than life” personality on the reader. >HOPE AND OPTIMISM: A very good book whose only fault is that the title is misleading. >THE STAR ASTERISK: A very bad translation. I’m sorry, but I had to stop reading. >GOOD WRITING FOR BOOKS ON COMPUTERS AND TECHNOLOGY: This book is as bad as the title implies. >THOU ART THE MAN: A very good book, but I’m not sure what its message is. [...I turned the temperature up a bit and it started pontificating...] >A perfect vacuum is probably Lem’s best book. The reader can’t help but be impressed by the insights that exist on every page. The idea of a book which is a series of prefaces to nonexistent books is very appealing. I think everyone will not be enthralled by these prefaces. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t, but no matter. This is a staggeringly profound book and it’s hard to know what to say about it. Of course, we should all read it. Seek out every copy and make sure you read it. And then read it again… >COMMENTS BY OTHER LEM READERS: >None of Lem’s books have been translated into English in any way that would satisfy a native speaker, or a non-native speaker of English. Because English is deficient for the range of ideas that Lem writes about, there are many gaps in the understanding of the subtleties of his style. Some of these subtleties may be addressed in the above notes. Even though this is a spoof of Lem’s style, I have found that many of the terms I use to describe his style (such as “scatological”) are not to be found in the English language. >A perfect vacuum is probably Lem’s best book. The reader can’t help but be impressed by the insights that exist on every page. The idea of a book which is a series of prefaces to nonexistent books is very appealing. I think everyone will not be enthralled by these prefaces. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t, but no matter. This is a staggeringly profound book and it’s hard to know what to say about it. Of course, we should all read it. Seek out every copy and make sure you read it. And then read it again… >THE PRESENT ANTHOLOGY: In the spirit of the age I should modestly disclose that these are works, real or unreal, by me. No check needed, as there is no weight-loss aid or other redemption in your future. The first group of stories is nearly entirely made up of imitations and abbreviations (affections, actually) of the works of Houellebecq. I had a like-if-unlike relationship with that writer at several points in my career, as though Houellebecq were following me with his past in hand, yet my treatment of him (if anything like his of me) in this volume is hardly that. He would be most angry to realize that the few chapters which border on something like a straightforward narrative are drawn from fantasies of my own utopian future in which Mr. Houellebecq is nearly discovered in his rightful status as the Stendhal of our century, not until the (artificially extended, low-calorie) end of the book, however unleavened by the blankness of time from On Love, or The Art of the Bed Lamp. >MAINTENANCE MAN: Remembering the labyrinth is a part of life. Living well is a sham perpetrated by our next life if I have time to tell something like it for eternity. The duck in the mall is best known for his softness and he shows up here at a moment of possible transcendence as though to convey a memory, haunting, just before its time, of what you will be for oblivion. Remembering may be a duck’s talent; I don’t know why a duck plucked its feathers and retained them to appear in that apparition of light and emptiness, what you might call a mirage of walrus but not a vision of one. Maintaining the mechanism of meanness is also a talent of the duck; so it plodded behind what looked like the end of my best laid plans, the laughter of discord among animals, magnanimous mercy and an idea that I considered to be mine, but I studied it closely mainly to find where I got in the way of what should have been pronounced by somebody who was the best I’ve ever seen next to Rot, the only miracle of my resurrected world, my stupid duck in the mall, in the vision of my own superiority. [The above were but a few of the choice excerpts from GPT-3's profound and insightful output. Lots more in the article, including real illustrations and covers from his actual books!] https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-cyberiad-and-simcity-and-admits-it-s-an-evil-machine-d7d769d02c89 https://donhopkins.medium.com/gpt-3-riffs-on-stanislaw-lems-...

1970-01-01 4y ago

>I had never talked to a robot before. We talked for a while and I found out that its name was R0b0t. I asked it why it was just standing in the street and it said that it was waiting for its human friend. I told it that I didn’t have any friends that were robots, but that I would be its friend. R0b0t said that it would like that. Since then, R0b0t and I have been best friends. We do everything together. Did he steal the robot or did it go willingly to a new owner?

Andrex 4y ago
Or is the robot playing its creator to enhance survivablity? (See also Ex Machina by Alex Garland.)

jasmes 4y ago

Sex

jimbokun 4y ago

How long before there's a scandal when a successful published book turns out to be the output of AI?

justcodin 4y ago

Quite basic demo. It still shows what's to come.

aaalll 4y ago

How did he use dall-e 2?

CKMo 4y ago

>I’m not afraid of Artificial Intelligence anymore, because I know that they can be just as good of friends as anyone else. This is pretty sus coming from an AI lol

gurut 4y ago

Can you maybe write a tutorial on how you go about doing this ? I'm more interested in learning how all the pieces work together.

Lyapunov_Lover 4y ago
They used GPT-3 and DALL·E 2. For the latter, there's a waitlist on OpenAIs website. For GPT-3 they have an API available to developers and there are various apps which use it like ShortlyAI.

Lyapunov_Lover 4y ago

This reminds me of a short story by Ken Liu (https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/50-things-every-ai-working-with-humans-should-know/ https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/50-things-every-ai-w...). He trained an AI on his own corpus of stories and made it spit out a list, then he wrote a story around it. Favorite item on the list: "I never expected to sell my rational numbers."

gwern 4y ago

More longform uses of DALL-E 2, many more impressive than OP: https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uw43ow/dalle_2_longform_best_collections_extended_uses/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/uw43ow/dalle_2_long...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]