Originally published at: Silicon Valley startup creates fully AI-generated mediocre South Park episode | Boing Boing
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Not The Simpsons first? Huh.
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mediocre South Park episode
So, a South Park episode. It’d save Trey and Matt some time, for sure.
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The problem with the simpsons is that there are so many that if you randomly generate something it’s likely to just be a copy of an actual simpsons episode. Consider that the south park episode “Simpsons already did it” aired over 20 years ago.
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Thanks for explaining the joke.
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i do wonder how far things are from generating a complete episode from a human written script. it might be impossible to generate new art that way, but after generating a season worth of content – to have ai “reuse” that art… [ or in a video game to make cutscenes… ]
maybe for a good show, that’d be impossible because there’s always new content – but then: south park.
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This really shows the inability of “AI” to write scripts. First of all they kind of cheat by having it be self-referential - you don’t notice the lack of plot or jokes or characterization when the whole thing is basically functioning as a didactic overview of AI arguments. But those are the things the AI can’t do. It’s repetitive, boring, unfunny - even the explicit “character tells a joke” segments are a combination of clearly recycled and incoherent.
I see people admit that the current state of AI for such purposes is poor, but claim “it’ll get better.” My response always is
Sure, some aspects of the technology will improve, but the bits where the “AI” is falling down, that keep it from actually writing real scripts, are the bits that require something like a human intelligence, and that’s something the LLM-based programs can’t and won’t ever do, because that’s not how they work. So to say, “it’ll get better (i.e. good enough to write actual scripts)” is to say, “someday we’ll develop this completely different technology.” I mean, maybe, (though also quite possibly no), but that’s a separate issue entirely. Making a better airplane doesn’t lead to developing a Star Trek style transporter…
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This has me thinking of that “Cartoon Wars” episode of South Park where it is revealed that The Family Guy is written by manatees selecting balls that have random words written on them. And how Cartman really hated it when people suggested that his style of humor was similar to The Family Guy.
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I happened to watch a couple of recent South Park episodes last night, and this does underscore how formulaic the show can be. The imitation hits a lot of the notes, but the voices were terrible, the dialog was terrible, and the show was lacking any of the visual moments that make South Park work. Also, you would have thought an episode trained on 26 seasons of South Park would have self-referenced the Family Guy episode or the Awesome-o episode where Cartman poses as a robot. The dialog and line readings were dead and wordy, not to mention that the characters didn’t actually follow any of the action from the “script”. It would be easier to build an episode from AI from scratch than it would be to punch up these results and storyboard the missing action . There were no funny bits, there were no outrageous bit, and not even any offensive bits. It was just ‘Park.’ But it did put the music and establishing shots in the right places, I guess. I was surprised that the AI didn’t hallucinate any continuity or make up characters. It totally didn’t understand the concept of ‘show, don’t tell.’
This company will get better at this, and they will get brought in to productions. What comes out of the AI-grinder, however, will require more rework and punching up than just having humans write it in the first place. Having worked on tech demos in the past, I suspect that this demonstration was far from “fully AI-generated,” with multiple training passes and tweaks made and manual fixing of the final product. Seems like they are automating the wrong part of the studio machine, it’s the numerous layers of management, lawyers, and accountants that could be replaced by a smart architecture. Or a fairly dumb one. The benefit to that is that AIs are fairly unlikely to sexually harass their underlings, so there’s one hidden cost to production that would go away.
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Exactly. AI will just make sure jobs suck more. Like contract work troubleshooting peoples’ websites made of indescriminately thrown together free Wordpress plugins. It’s boring, laborious and poorly-paying because “all the hard work was already done”
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I think there needs to be a lot more /s markings round here.
I get that this is clearly a spoof. But what if people take it seriously?
It would not surprise me at all to learn that this was actually written by the South Park to trolll us all.
That was GPT-4, but weirdly GPT-3.5 went the other direction during that time, from 7% to 87% correct (which still isn’t all that great, really). They both got really terrible at other simple math problems during that time. Apparently that’s not anything to do with alteration of the code, its functionality just varies wildly over time…
(I do wonder how general purpose these particular versions are - if they optimize for answering math problems (or can they, even?), does it make it worse at stringing together coherent stories?)
Hilariously, I just saw someone try to fact check someone else’s tweet, on a subject they obviously didn’t know about, by using chat-GPT, asking for an analysis which was mostly just wrong. Other people had to explain that you can’t use GPT to fact check, you have to fact check GPT…
I rather suspect the only reason it didn’t was because they put so many limitations on what they asked from it that it didn’t have any room to do so. I suspect it worked as well as it did, not just because of training passes and tweaks, but because it was operating with a lot of default assumptions (that weren’t AI-generated) about the show and its structure and characters, etc.
Which is one of the points in the whole WGA strike, of course - the fear is it’ll still get used anyways, because that way studios can justify not crediting/paying writers fairly (“they’re just editing the AI output!”) while they’re having to do even more work.
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… not that anyone has actually done such a thing in the last thirty years or so 
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We already have this. They’re called video games.
Exactly! These rugged individual Randian techbros don’t understand that humans want shared experiences. We want to be able to talk about the stories we watched together. Even with video games, which were created to give an individual experience to the player, we came up with online gaming, eSports and Twitch to put the shared experience back into the game.
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There’s a steep slope favoring enshittifiation.
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Gotta enshit it up while they can, before everyone realizes that the actual uses cases - and customer base - for this is far too small to support the “eye-watering” costs of running it all.
The collapse of all this is going to be interesting to watch…
Right now, for all the big deals with Google, OpenAI is still in Burn Mode, and they’ll need to transition to a cash-positive business model sooner or later.
Good luck with that.
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