7 ms·

I always had the crazy idea of "infinite entertainment": somehow we manage to "tap" into the multiverse and are able to watch TV from countless of planets/unive

I always had the crazy idea of "infinite entertainment": somehow we manage to "tap" into the multiverse and are able to watch TV from countless of planets/universes (I think Rick and Morty did something similar). So, in some channel at some time you may be able to see Brad Pitt fighting against Godzilla while the monster is hacking into the pentagon using ssh. Highly improbable, but in the multiverse TV everything is possible. Now I think we don't need the multiverse for that. Give this AI technology a few years and you'll have streaming services a la Netflix where you provide the prompt to create your own movie. What the hell, people will vote "best movie" among the millions submitted by other people. We'll be movie producers like we are nowadays YouTubers. Overabundance of high quality material and so little time to watch them all. Same goes for books, music and everything else that is digital (even software?).

gfody 4y ago
> So, in some channel at some time you may be able to see Brad Pitt fighting against Godzilla while the monster is hacking into the pentagon using ssh. that's the movie GAN, more interesting would be the zero-shot translations of epic foreign/historic films into your native culture
temp_account_32 4y ago
Isn't everything representable in a digital form? I think we're in the very early era of entertainment becoming commoditized to an even higher degree than it is now. I envision exactly the future as you describe: Feed a song to the AI, it spits out a completely new, whole discography from the artist complete with lyrics and album art that you can listen to infinitely. "Hey Siri, play me a series about chickens from outer space invading Earth": No problem, here's a 12 hour marathon, complete with a coherent storyline, plot twists, good acting and voice lines. The only thing that is currently limiting us is computing power, and given enough time, the barrier will be overcome. A human brain is just a series of inputs, a function that transforms them, and a series of outputs.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> So, in some channel at some time you may be able to see Brad Pitt fighting against Godzilla while the monster is hacking into the pentagon using ssh. Don't know if this is sarcasm, if it is, ignore the rest of the comment. Honestly, it sounds terrible. Good shows are well written, coherent and, most of all, narrow in scope. If an AI can write the next Better Call Saul, great. Randomly patching together tropes sounds more like kids drawings, that are interesting on an artistic point of view, maybe, given their limited knowledge of reality and narrative, but terribly boring and confusing as a form of entertainment. Unless the audience is kids, they love that stuff, for reasons we don't understand anymore as we grow up.
- bigyikes 4y ago
  The point of the quoted remark is to illustrate the exotic possibilities of “Multiverse TV”. It’s not an example of quality content you /would/ watch, it’s merely some content you /could/ watch. Multiverse TV has everything, from Better Call Saul to zany strings of tropes.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    The point is that nonsense "multiverse TV" has been a thing since I can remember watching TV. Endless entertainment it's already there, you can't watch it simply because most of the content you're talking about is not on air and streaming platforms don't buy it, because it's shit. Not that I don't like shit, I've watched more troma/SyFi/random low budget Asian movies (I am a huge fan of ninja movies) than necessary, but if we stop to think that there are already 6 or 7 sharknado movies (that are exactly the kind of endless entertainment you talk about, they are probably generated in some way), maybe it's not the volume of content that's missing, but probably content that's worth watching.
- mtkhaos 4y ago
  I think you are forgetting that a good portion of social media users are used to short term content.
  - 4y ago
StrictDabbler 4y ago
"Highly improbable, but in the multiverse TV everything is possible." Quick reminder, there are infinitely many even numbers and none of them are odd. A given infinite (or transfinite) set does not necessarily contain all imaginable elements.
- Invictus0 4y ago
  Ok... I don't think anyone would expect an infinite supply of water to also include vodka and wine. He specifically said "infinite TV".
  - StrictDabbler 4y ago
    Does any universe have a "just a completely dark room" channel? How many dark room channels are there? Is there a universe with channels focusing on these subjects: "Video of the last tears of terminal cancer patients as Jerry Lewis tells jokes about his dick" "This guy doesn't like ice cream but he eats it to reassure his girlfriend that he isn't vegan" "A single hair grows on a scalp" "Infant children read two-century-old stories about shopping for goose-grease and comment on the prosody" "Gameshows where an entire country's left-handed population guesses how you'll die" This is the whole point of the Rick and Morty cable bit. There are things that would not be on TV in any universe that invents TV. It's hilarious to pretend they would be.
    - Invictus0 4y ago
      It's clear you have a misunderstanding of infinity. In a show, there are a certain number of frames. In one frame, there are a certain number of pixels. Each pixel can be one of some number of colors. An infinite TV would be able to show every combination of every color of pixels, follow by every combination of frames, simultaneously and forever. All those shows are in there. Not only that, but all of this is also countably infinite.
      - crabmusket 4y ago
        Don't forget to posit an infinite curator who watches every channel on the infinite TV and responds to queries for channels with something sensible, not a random garble of pixels.
CamperBob2 4y ago
The Library of Babel, now only $19.95 per month!
jacobn 4y ago
The model was trained on 2.3B images, but how many TV shows are there to train it on? There are quite a few books written, so maybe transfer learning from that?
- judge2020 4y ago
  > how many TV shows are there to train it on? None, according to the MPAA.
  - ronsor 4y ago
    ML training already involves scraping copyrighted content. I'm sure big tech megacorps would fight any lawsuits they receive.
Alupis 4y ago
I think a more interesting thought is how entertainment boils down to a sequence of 1's and 0's... and if we could somehow get enough of that sequence right, we could unveil video/audio/images of real people doing things they've never done - such as Brad Pitt fighting Godzilla. Imagine uncovering a movie that was never made but featured actors you know. If Steven Spielberg can make the movie, then there is an undiscovered sequence of 1's and 0's that already is that movie, a sequence that could be discovered without actually making the movie. Imagine "mining for movies"... Of course that sequence is likely impossible to ever predict enough of to actually discover something real... but it's a fun thought experiment.
- kilovoltaire 4y ago
  If you like thinking about that sort of thing, and haven't read it yet, check out the short story "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
Reminds me just a bit of the Culture series, where in the distant future computing power is essential infinite. In the series, many of the great AIs of unfathomable intellect spend their free time on the "Infinite Fun Space," which is simulating universes with slightly different starting conditions and physical laws.
ortusdux 4y ago
Sounds like the "interdimensional cable" bits on Rick and Morty. Reportedly the co-creators would get back-out drunk and improvise the shows. My favorite is house hunters international, where ambulatory houses are being hunted by guys with shotguns. https://screenrant.com/rick-morty-interdimensional-cable-episodes-improvised/ https://screenrant.com/rick-morty-interdimensional-cable-epi...
thatfrenchguy 4y ago
I’m curious how much this prevents new styles from emerging though, rather than rehashing of things that already exist.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sircastor 4y ago
There are a handful of TV series canceled too soon that of love to see new episodes of. There are tremendous issues of consent involved, but it’s a nice dream to have. It’s a slippery slope to be sure, but imagine taking your well-honed fanfic script, loading it in a system and getting a ready-to-watch episode never before seen.
wpietri 4y ago
I think much more likely, at least this side of the singularity, what we'll have is infinite dreck. And for some people, that will be enough. It's extremely hard to make good content. Teams of extremely skilled, well-paid people, even ones who have succeeded before, fail regularly. And that's with complicated filtering mechanisms and review cycles to limit who has access and keep the worst of it from getting out. But not everybody needs everything to be actually good. My partner will sometimes unwind on a Friday by watching bad action movies; the bad ones are in some ways better, as they require less work to understand and are amusing in their own way. Or there's a mobile game I play when I want to not think, where you have to conquer a graph of nodes. The levels are clearly auto-generated, and it's fine. I think that kind of serviceable junk is where we might see AI get to in a couple of decades, made for an audience that will get a weed gummy and a six pack and ask for a "sci-fi action adventure with lots of explosions" and get something with a half-assed plot, forgettable stereotypical characters and visuals that don't totally make sense, but that's fine. You won't learn anything, you won't be particularly moved, and you won't ever watch it again, but it will be a perfectly cromulent distraction between clocking out and going to bed.
- jrvarela56 4y ago
  Whenever I think of AI and its implications, I find it useful to think of our current version of the AI: The Market. Its profit-maximizing function is the canonical paperclip maximizer. We are going to absolutely drown in crap. Just as we do now, it's just going to flood the internet at an unimaginable pace. We'll probably train AIs to help us find stuff and tell what's real/true/etc; it's going to be a heck of an arms race. It's going to be one hell of an arms race.
yojo 4y ago
Anyone have an idea of how many orders of magnitude advancement we are away from this? Like, it takes a high end GPU a non-trivial amount of time to make one low resolution image. A modern film is at least 30 of those a second, at far higher pixel density. It seems like you get a 10x improvement in GPU perf every 6-8 years[1], and it might take more than a couple of those. Plus you need to encode the ideas of plots/characters/scenes, and have through-lines that go multiple hours. It seems like with the current kit it’s hard to even make a consistent looking children’s book with hand picked illustrations. My gut is we are more than a few years off, but maybe I’m underestimating the low hanging fruit? 1: https://epochai.org/blog/trends-in-gpu-price-performance https://epochai.org/blog/trends-in-gpu-price-performance
cerol 4y ago
> Overabundance of high quality material and so little time to watch them all. If a tree falls down in a forest, and there is no one there to hear it. Does it make a sound? If you can generate infinite material, how do you judge quality? You're extrapolating an idea based on what movies are, fundamentally. But you don't take in consideration what movies are not. Watching a movie is also a social experience. Going to the movie theater, waiting years for a big blockbuster title, watching something with friends. Word of mouth recommendation is a very big thing. If a close friend recommends me something (be it a movie or a book), I'm much more inclined to like it just for the human connection it provides (reading or watching something other people enjoyed is a means of accessing someone else's psyche). If every time you watch a movie you have the knowledge that there is a movie that is slightly better a prompt away, why bother finishing this one? If you know you probably won't finish the movie you generated, why bother starting one? So what do you do? You end up rewatching The Office. Sure, if you tell me this will be possible in a couple of years, I won't object. The point is: will you pay for it on a recurring basis? Because if you don't, this will be no more than a very cool tech project. ---- I've recently had this idea for a sci-fi book: in a future not so distant, society is divided between tech and non-tech people. Tech people created pretty much everything they said they would create. AGI, smarter-than-human robots, you name it. But, it didn't change society at all. Companies still employ regular humans, people still watch regular made-by-human movies and eat handmade pizzas and drink their human-made lattes in hipster coffeshops. So tech people are naturally very frustrated at non-tech people, because they're not using optmizing their lives and business enough. And then you have this awkward situation where you have all these robots with brains of size of a galaxy lying around, doing nothing. And then some of them start developing depression, for spending too much time idle. And then the tech people have to rush to develop psychiatric robots. And then some robots decide to unionize, and others start writing books about how humans are taking jobs that were supposed to be automated.
c3534l 4y ago
It does feel like we could at least get procedurally generated streaming music. Music is limited enough that it feels possible, and people are more than willing to rate and save music they like. The social element of raiding another person's curated playlist could take over the romantic notion of an artist's personal expression. Curating such lists of procedurally generated music could make everyone a musician.
- noitpmeder 4y ago
  See this recent thread for more on this == https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32559119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32559119

gfody 4y ago

> So, in some channel at some time you may be able to see Brad Pitt fighting against Godzilla while the monster is hacking into the pentagon using ssh. that's the movie GAN, more interesting would be the zero-shot translations of epic foreign/historic films into your native culture

temp_account_32 4y ago

Isn't everything representable in a digital form? I think we're in the very early era of entertainment becoming commoditized to an even higher degree than it is now. I envision exactly the future as you describe: Feed a song to the AI, it spits out a completely new, whole discography from the artist complete with lyrics and album art that you can listen to infinitely. "Hey Siri, play me a series about chickens from outer space invading Earth": No problem, here's a 12 hour marathon, complete with a coherent storyline, plot twists, good acting and voice lines. The only thing that is currently limiting us is computing power, and given enough time, the barrier will be overcome. A human brain is just a series of inputs, a function that transforms them, and a series of outputs.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> So, in some channel at some time you may be able to see Brad Pitt fighting against Godzilla while the monster is hacking into the pentagon using ssh. Don't know if this is sarcasm, if it is, ignore the rest of the comment. Honestly, it sounds terrible. Good shows are well written, coherent and, most of all, narrow in scope. If an AI can write the next Better Call Saul, great. Randomly patching together tropes sounds more like kids drawings, that are interesting on an artistic point of view, maybe, given their limited knowledge of reality and narrative, but terribly boring and confusing as a form of entertainment. Unless the audience is kids, they love that stuff, for reasons we don't understand anymore as we grow up.

bigyikes 4y ago
The point of the quoted remark is to illustrate the exotic possibilities of “Multiverse TV”. It’s not an example of quality content you /would/ watch, it’s merely some content you /could/ watch. Multiverse TV has everything, from Better Call Saul to zany strings of tropes.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  The point is that nonsense "multiverse TV" has been a thing since I can remember watching TV. Endless entertainment it's already there, you can't watch it simply because most of the content you're talking about is not on air and streaming platforms don't buy it, because it's shit. Not that I don't like shit, I've watched more troma/SyFi/random low budget Asian movies (I am a huge fan of ninja movies) than necessary, but if we stop to think that there are already 6 or 7 sharknado movies (that are exactly the kind of endless entertainment you talk about, they are probably generated in some way), maybe it's not the volume of content that's missing, but probably content that's worth watching.
mtkhaos 4y ago
I think you are forgetting that a good portion of social media users are used to short term content.
- 4y ago

StrictDabbler 4y ago

"Highly improbable, but in the multiverse TV everything is possible." Quick reminder, there are infinitely many even numbers and none of them are odd. A given infinite (or transfinite) set does not necessarily contain all imaginable elements.

Invictus0 4y ago
Ok... I don't think anyone would expect an infinite supply of water to also include vodka and wine. He specifically said "infinite TV".
- StrictDabbler 4y ago
  Does any universe have a "just a completely dark room" channel? How many dark room channels are there? Is there a universe with channels focusing on these subjects: "Video of the last tears of terminal cancer patients as Jerry Lewis tells jokes about his dick" "This guy doesn't like ice cream but he eats it to reassure his girlfriend that he isn't vegan" "A single hair grows on a scalp" "Infant children read two-century-old stories about shopping for goose-grease and comment on the prosody" "Gameshows where an entire country's left-handed population guesses how you'll die" This is the whole point of the Rick and Morty cable bit. There are things that would not be on TV in any universe that invents TV. It's hilarious to pretend they would be.
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    It's clear you have a misunderstanding of infinity. In a show, there are a certain number of frames. In one frame, there are a certain number of pixels. Each pixel can be one of some number of colors. An infinite TV would be able to show every combination of every color of pixels, follow by every combination of frames, simultaneously and forever. All those shows are in there. Not only that, but all of this is also countably infinite.
    - crabmusket 4y ago
      Don't forget to posit an infinite curator who watches every channel on the infinite TV and responds to queries for channels with something sensible, not a random garble of pixels.

CamperBob2 4y ago

The Library of Babel, now only $19.95 per month!

jacobn 4y ago

The model was trained on 2.3B images, but how many TV shows are there to train it on? There are quite a few books written, so maybe transfer learning from that?

judge2020 4y ago
> how many TV shows are there to train it on? None, according to the MPAA.
- ronsor 4y ago
  ML training already involves scraping copyrighted content. I'm sure big tech megacorps would fight any lawsuits they receive.

Alupis 4y ago

I think a more interesting thought is how entertainment boils down to a sequence of 1's and 0's... and if we could somehow get enough of that sequence right, we could unveil video/audio/images of real people doing things they've never done - such as Brad Pitt fighting Godzilla. Imagine uncovering a movie that was never made but featured actors you know. If Steven Spielberg can make the movie, then there is an undiscovered sequence of 1's and 0's that already is that movie, a sequence that could be discovered without actually making the movie. Imagine "mining for movies"... Of course that sequence is likely impossible to ever predict enough of to actually discover something real... but it's a fun thought experiment.

kilovoltaire 4y ago
If you like thinking about that sort of thing, and haven't read it yet, check out the short story "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges

CobrastanJorji 4y ago

Reminds me just a bit of the Culture series, where in the distant future computing power is essential infinite. In the series, many of the great AIs of unfathomable intellect spend their free time on the "Infinite Fun Space," which is simulating universes with slightly different starting conditions and physical laws.

ortusdux 4y ago

Sounds like the "interdimensional cable" bits on Rick and Morty. Reportedly the co-creators would get back-out drunk and improvise the shows. My favorite is house hunters international, where ambulatory houses are being hunted by guys with shotguns. https://screenrant.com/rick-morty-interdimensional-cable-episodes-improvised/ https://screenrant.com/rick-morty-interdimensional-cable-epi...

thatfrenchguy 4y ago

I’m curious how much this prevents new styles from emerging though, rather than rehashing of things that already exist.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sircastor 4y ago

There are a handful of TV series canceled too soon that of love to see new episodes of. There are tremendous issues of consent involved, but it’s a nice dream to have. It’s a slippery slope to be sure, but imagine taking your well-honed fanfic script, loading it in a system and getting a ready-to-watch episode never before seen.

wpietri 4y ago

I think much more likely, at least this side of the singularity, what we'll have is infinite dreck. And for some people, that will be enough. It's extremely hard to make good content. Teams of extremely skilled, well-paid people, even ones who have succeeded before, fail regularly. And that's with complicated filtering mechanisms and review cycles to limit who has access and keep the worst of it from getting out. But not everybody needs everything to be actually good. My partner will sometimes unwind on a Friday by watching bad action movies; the bad ones are in some ways better, as they require less work to understand and are amusing in their own way. Or there's a mobile game I play when I want to not think, where you have to conquer a graph of nodes. The levels are clearly auto-generated, and it's fine. I think that kind of serviceable junk is where we might see AI get to in a couple of decades, made for an audience that will get a weed gummy and a six pack and ask for a "sci-fi action adventure with lots of explosions" and get something with a half-assed plot, forgettable stereotypical characters and visuals that don't totally make sense, but that's fine. You won't learn anything, you won't be particularly moved, and you won't ever watch it again, but it will be a perfectly cromulent distraction between clocking out and going to bed.

jrvarela56 4y ago
Whenever I think of AI and its implications, I find it useful to think of our current version of the AI: The Market. Its profit-maximizing function is the canonical paperclip maximizer. We are going to absolutely drown in crap. Just as we do now, it's just going to flood the internet at an unimaginable pace. We'll probably train AIs to help us find stuff and tell what's real/true/etc; it's going to be a heck of an arms race. It's going to be one hell of an arms race.

yojo 4y ago

Anyone have an idea of how many orders of magnitude advancement we are away from this? Like, it takes a high end GPU a non-trivial amount of time to make one low resolution image. A modern film is at least 30 of those a second, at far higher pixel density. It seems like you get a 10x improvement in GPU perf every 6-8 years[1], and it might take more than a couple of those. Plus you need to encode the ideas of plots/characters/scenes, and have through-lines that go multiple hours. It seems like with the current kit it’s hard to even make a consistent looking children’s book with hand picked illustrations. My gut is we are more than a few years off, but maybe I’m underestimating the low hanging fruit? 1: https://epochai.org/blog/trends-in-gpu-price-performance https://epochai.org/blog/trends-in-gpu-price-performance

cerol 4y ago

> Overabundance of high quality material and so little time to watch them all. If a tree falls down in a forest, and there is no one there to hear it. Does it make a sound? If you can generate infinite material, how do you judge quality? You're extrapolating an idea based on what movies are, fundamentally. But you don't take in consideration what movies are not. Watching a movie is also a social experience. Going to the movie theater, waiting years for a big blockbuster title, watching something with friends. Word of mouth recommendation is a very big thing. If a close friend recommends me something (be it a movie or a book), I'm much more inclined to like it just for the human connection it provides (reading or watching something other people enjoyed is a means of accessing someone else's psyche). If every time you watch a movie you have the knowledge that there is a movie that is slightly better a prompt away, why bother finishing this one? If you know you probably won't finish the movie you generated, why bother starting one? So what do you do? You end up rewatching The Office. Sure, if you tell me this will be possible in a couple of years, I won't object. The point is: will you pay for it on a recurring basis? Because if you don't, this will be no more than a very cool tech project. ---- I've recently had this idea for a sci-fi book: in a future not so distant, society is divided between tech and non-tech people. Tech people created pretty much everything they said they would create. AGI, smarter-than-human robots, you name it. But, it didn't change society at all. Companies still employ regular humans, people still watch regular made-by-human movies and eat handmade pizzas and drink their human-made lattes in hipster coffeshops. So tech people are naturally very frustrated at non-tech people, because they're not using optmizing their lives and business enough. And then you have this awkward situation where you have all these robots with brains of size of a galaxy lying around, doing nothing. And then some of them start developing depression, for spending too much time idle. And then the tech people have to rush to develop psychiatric robots. And then some robots decide to unionize, and others start writing books about how humans are taking jobs that were supposed to be automated.

c3534l 4y ago

It does feel like we could at least get procedurally generated streaming music. Music is limited enough that it feels possible, and people are more than willing to rate and save music they like. The social element of raiding another person's curated playlist could take over the romantic notion of an artist's personal expression. Curating such lists of procedurally generated music could make everyone a musician.

noitpmeder 4y ago
See this recent thread for more on this == https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32559119 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32559119