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by Applejinx 1070 days ago
The interesting thing here is that Matt and Trey have codified intentionality as a primary writing tool, and whatever this is, doesn't mention that once. That's a pretty major thing to overlook, like a blind spot or achilles' heel of the AI devs.

In fact, this is a blind spot of ALL AI that I've yet seen.

Matt and Trey approach writing scenes with the following intent: if a scene can be described as following up a previous scene with 'AND THEN', it fails.

If the following scene can be described as 'BUT' or 'THEREFORE', they write it and it goes in the show.

This is so simple, yet it's completely absent from what AI is doing, and seemed absent from the example script (I'd have liked a written version of their fake South Park script, as it was pretty insufferable). I'm not sure what beyond expanding context length will be needed, context length is merely a technical problem… but this is a significant failing in what we get out of AI.

This is where the sea of meaninglessness comes from. Good creators have a great deal of context and intentionality in their work, and for all that Matt and Trey are puerile and crass, they've got a clearly expressed agenda artistically (and philosophically).

There's also human creators who are very facile, but very prone to 'AND THEN': AI will have a much easier time replacing humans like this, than replacing Matt and Trey.

4 comments

Excerpt of them discussing the but/therefore rule: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGUNqq3jVLg
Beyond not being similar to Matt and Trey, I've started being able to recognize ChatGPTs writing style. It loves re-iterating a portion of what was said by it or someone else - "yes, AI could be a tool to ..." Which makes for awful entertainment writing.

The joke about Trump was pretty good, though.

I’m not entirely sure I get it. You can literally prompt the LLM with “therefore” or “but,” and it’ll continue. You simply take the text generated prior and append “therefore,” and it’ll keep generating. If you want to lend more intentionality you can frame it with “therefore <insert intention>” and it’ll continue generating with that intention.

I’ve been up all night flying internationally but I might have misunderstood.

No, not really. The body of text GPT is trained on gets its own interpretation of 'but' and 'therefore'. If you feed it 'therefore' maybe it'll start writing legal documents. If you feed it 'but' maybe it'll just contradict itself, or express some triviality.

What you'd need for Matt and Trey style 'but' and 'therefore' is entire prompts being introduced in the background and switched out. Imagine thousands of words of prompt. 'but' means, fundamentally obstruct something about where your whole prompt is heading, like a screenwriter introducing a twist that must be resolved before the story can continue. 'therefore' means describe something that unfolds obviously as a result of all that's been introduced in the prompt.

These are not sentence-level issues, not output-level stuff. These are prompt level. More than that, they're prompt level with intentionality: you have to understand how a 'but' will fundamentally obstruct your prompt, how a 'therefore' will integrate both your original prompt and the obstruction.

Assume you have to coherently switch around your prompt introducing new fundamentals, and still have that make sense. It might get you rather formulaic results (but, Luke loses his mentor! therefore he must study and meditate and get to the final goal through his own transcendence!) but that just shows you it's working. That's how you get from a pile of arbitrary time-wasting, to a capital S Story.

From there on out, it's about which stories to tell, how far you can depart from the norms while still providing the intentionality and purpose, and what the purpose is :)

I think that’s sort of unfair and untrue, have you used GPT? Yes if you naively use “therefore” you might. But it explicitly semantically matches the context. If the context is a south park story and with prompting in the context of how to respond to trailing therefores it will almost certainly follow the semantic context prompted with. Now - is it as good as Matt and Trey? Of course not! It’ll produce a relatively bland imitation.
My understanding from paper is every character had separate prompt, and somehow they mixed it together.

'BUT' approach would require opposite, start with story, somehow integrate character quirks.