[tikkun]

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.

[snek_case]

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.

[thorum]

I suspect the solution to keeping a long story coherent is using the model at different levels of abstraction. A human writer doesn’t sit down and write a complete novel in one sitting. They go through a process of planning, character development, world building and so on. When they write a scene, they’re not holding every detail about the rest of the book in their mind, they’re narrowing down to the details that matter for that scene.

So instead of asking the AI to write a novel in one go, why not guide it through a similar process? At each step, pass in information from previous steps as context, focusing on just the details it needs at that step. Have it generate a summary, then a setting, then characters in that setting, then break the plot into chapters, and then scenes, and so on…

[Shocka1]

Yup, this makes a lot of sense to me. I could even see models broken down by director/film. So many combinations could be used - the possibilities are endless. A Tarantino model like that of Pulp Fiction might be a good one.

[labster]

Having a story remain coherent over time is not a prerequisite of Hollywood blockbusters.

[skocznymroczny]

Reminds me of that South Park episode in which Cartman disguises himself as a robot to prank Butters, but movie executives confuse him for an actual robot and make him think up movie ideas.

"Adam Sandler is like, in love with some girl, but then it turns out that the girl is actually a Golden Retriever. Or something."

[avereveard]

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 (ai story and human drawing) provide a spot on jocker

[stavros]

Those "AI writes" are more a meme than actual AI. GPT-3 writes perfectly grammatical sentences but the stories don't make much long-term sense, which is the opposite of what the story in the video has.

These videos are mostly "human writes funny, says it's AI".

[taftster]

Right. The Transformers comes to mind.

[outworlder]

> 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.

Just like most dreams. Can still be entertaining.

[ravi-delia]

In a limited capacity. Any dream I'm even a little aware of becomes extremely boring, frustrating, and claustrophobic. Even the good ones become nightmares without anything changing. That might just be me though, maybe GPT could cook up dreams which don't suck

[marc_io]

Oh, but dreams — even the most wild ones — are coherent, specially over time. They're just not usually obvious to the ego mind.

[narrator]

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.

[tablespoon]

> 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.

[lmm]

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.

[dragonwriter]

> There's far more e.g. TV being produced than anyone could watch in one lifetime.

But is there far more of what any particular person would want to watch being produced than they would want to watch? Does anyone in the mood to watch something ever accept a less-than-preferred substitute?

If so, there is meaningful room for improvement in selection. (Not that I think AI is anywhere close to making a dent in it directly, though AI aids may increase productivity of human creative talent.) E.g., Instead of writing scripts from scratch, think of an AI writing first draft scripts from treatments, after training on a corpus of treatments and completed scripts.

[Swizec]

> But is there far more of what any particular person would want to watch being produced than they would want to watch?

The older I get the more true this becomes. There’s so many things I want to watch or read that I’ll never get to.

Best you can do is prioritize by some heuristic, watch/read/listen the top N%, hope you prioritized correctly, and bail at the earlies sign of mis-fit.

[koonsolo]

Imagine having 1 AI that is trained to recognize content you personally love. Then have another AI create the entertainment content, and improved by the 1st.

[k1t]

I'm pretty sure that's Netflix.

[stavros]

Then it's doing a terrible job of it.

[quickthrower2]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[kevin_thibedeau]

It's still finitely constrained by human production capacity. Consider having AI alter an existing show to suit your tastes. That is unlimited. Don't like how the scene is lit? Have it changed. Don't like an annoying character? Have them removed.

[amarant]

Then imagine when it can do that real-time with live-action content.

Deepfakes: the video game

[eismcc]

Reminds me of when cable tv became a thing and the “57 channels and nothing on” song

https://youtu.be/YAlDbP4tdqc

[snek_case]

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]

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]

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

[sitkack]

Wow

[Melting_Harps]

> 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

[sitkack]

We are using ML and the pointy end of capitalism to create traps for the human mind (at scale). This is dangerous.

[Melting_Harps]

> We are using ML and the pointy end of capitalism to create traps for the human mind (at scale). This is dangerous.

That remains to be seen, if the extent of ML thus far can be measured by it most ubiquitous use case then it's only pitfall is making people worse spellers than they already were. Autocorrect is a form of ML that quite honestly displays the MANY shortcomings at something that has been around for what? Nearly 20 years now?

While concern is the main response to new things, I'm cautiously optimistic, I'm just finding that it's use-cases seem trivial more than impactful let alone existential.

[TedDoesntTalk]

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.

[kromem]

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.

[userbinator]

Especially adult entertainment... which I suspect will be both wild and immensely creepy.

[pelorat]

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.

[nathancahill]

We've got color TV, but it still isn't satisfying.

[tines]

Holy shit another Cake fan. Greetings!

[stevesearer]

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.

[annoyingnoob]

There is truth to the saying 'keep your audience wanting more'.

[yreg]

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.

[bitwize]

> 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.

[bamboozled]

You’ll get this when you have access to unlimited energy ?

[woleium]

~unlimited twitter bot content!

[mdale]

I think we already have that ;)

[termy]

You're joking