So, how much money do you think Matt and Trey are going to sue them for?
False. The Hollywood strikes (plural) are not principally about AI.
A more salient issue is that streaming TV & movie services do not pay residuals.
They are about both.
Short term streaming residuals are important.
Long term AI protections are a must.
I almost feel like the AI proposal was a form of ‘dead cat’ strategy; while everyone is understandably angry about AI and fixated on that, no-one is talking about the actual issue that kicked all this off (the share of residual royalty payments)
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Just watched it. Writers have nothing to worry about for now. I do admit I laughed once, though.
I took a look and it’s honestly a lot further along than I was expecting in terms of capability. In all honesty, for low level conent this is already surpassing the minimum necessary and I can already imagine greedy, low effort art thieves going all in on these and jaming out completely shows. And I expect people will watch them, or at least tolerate some of them.
I’m rather impressed by how coherent it was. It had themes, distinct characters, a plot arc, and so forth. And some very nice meta humor. I don’t know how much of this comes entirely out of the LLM scriptwriter and how much was prompted in, but even assuming that this was done from a human-created outline it’s still a big step.
Its so wooden and all the jokes replaced with generalized statements. Did you actually watch it? Most low grade Youtube content knocks this out of the park.
The only thing these media companies will be doing by replacing a single writer with AI is making their content closer to the static noise floor of content that comes out of Youtube and similar sites already.
AI generated YouTube channels are already a thing and bring in millions of views.
You are making the same mistake I see a lot of people make when it comes to AI, which is looking at the status quo as a snapshot rather than a change over time.
The last widely reported on AI generated ‘show’ was the Seinfeld one from…checks notes…a few months ago.
The leap between what that was a few months back and this here is quite something.
So your “right now” may be true for today, but quite possibly by as early as the end of this year there will very much be something to worry about.
(Though really, there still won’t be much to worry about, as the future will almost certainly be AI plus human efforts, not either or.)
I think you’re making the same mistake as people who thought self-driving cars would be here 5 years ago. You can’t just extrapolate out technological progress. The relatively easy things get solved first and relatively quickly but we may need a decade to solve some of the most challenging scenarios.
Self driving cars were here five years ago, which is when Waymo first had driverless cars on roads. Tesla had a wide release of FSD ‘Beta’ three years ago.
And there’s a gulf of a difference on the speed at which hardware that has an 8 year average refresh cycle grows in a market and software that can reach a hundred million users in 3 months.
You’re right. We all love our fully self-driving cars and by 2026, chatbots will write longform narratives so beautifully, we won’t even need cars because we’ll all be transported anywhere we want to go by the magic of books.
Though really, there still won’t be much to worry about, as the future will almost certainly be AI plus human efforts, not either or.
Think the concern is AI+humans means a lot less humans needed to do the job
There are a few fields where there’s capped demand so extra supply would mean less humans.
But I think people will be surprised by just how much of our economy is capped by supply, and what happens to niche demand as supply rapidly increases.
The people most in trouble are the ones that really suck at what they do, and whose only job security is constrained supply.
But at the same time, lowering transactional costs (in the sense of the essay “the nature of the firm”) will mean a lot more opportunities for small and medium entrepreneurship around passion side gigs suddenly being economically viable as full time gigs.
In reality, the groups most screwed long term here are going to be larger corporations who lose the advantages of scale but are still weighed down by the hindrance of slow moving bureaucracy.
My thinking is that from a studio’s perspective it may be like a proof of concept that AI can get close enough to do what they care about make a passable imitation that gets buts in seats that will generate ad revenue or ticket sales. Fundamentally they aren’t really concerned about producing quality material as long as it sells, so if the AI can get them to something kind of good its likely worth their attention. I think that’s what writers and actors are concerned about and that is why even an unfunny south park episode is a threat. Fable can say their work is research all day long but their goal can easily change the second a studio shows up with a check in hand.
Also it is not clear here is how much human editing and tweaking was done after the AI was finished with it’s part. I suspect people kind of helped the AI get to a final product, but without them disclosing their procedure it’s hard to know.
The Danny DeVito one got me the first time.
But doing something like this during that time is totally in character for Southpark.
Indeed, they already did an episode about ChatGPT. It wasn’t bad, and in traditional South Park style it roasted both “sides” of the debate.
They say pretty clearly in their Twatter post that they are not the IP holders and the episode is for research only, so I seriously doubt Trey and Matt will care.
Likely worst case they get a cease and desist to take it down, so they do.
We think the timing is correct — we are right in the middle of the biggest strike in 60 years, by releasing the research (but not the ability for anyone to create episodes of protected IP) we hope [for] the Guilds in Hollywood to negotiate strong, strong, strong protections that producers cannot use AI tools without the express permission of artists. Frankly the IP holders also need to figure out how to negotiate with AI chatbot companies who are profiting from their work.
And what’s the problem here? They aren’t trying to profit off this tech here, they’re building a stronger case for the strike. Did the writers of this article read their source material?
Where can you watch this? I wanna see how well it works.
Embedded in this article
Thanks!
I’m guessing there was a fair amount of prompting scene by scene. It’s very impressive technically but it definitely falls flat at the moment
I’m not so sure. There were some bits where there was simply stage directions or general descriptions of things happening, like “(Mett Porker makes some racist jokes)”, with the characters just standing there staring instead of doing what was described. That looks bad, but suggests to me that very little human touch-up was done to the output. Those would have been obvious and easy for a human to fix if there was a human touch intervening any of this.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the AI was provided with a paragraph or so of prompting telling it what sort of episode to generate, and then it just let fly and we got this.
SP is already really shitty animation though, so they’re setting the bar really, really low
"Fable started in 2018 as a spinoff from Facebook’s Oculus (how times have changed since then), working on VR films — a medium that never really took off. Now it has seemingly pivoted to AI, "
I wonder how much of the ai hype is just huge investments into hardware, looking for profits.
Can you link the episode? I have been so starved from media because of this strike. I am willing to consume it
Here you go. It’s rather cardboard, but that’s kind of apt for South Park style.
Here’s the episode since it’s not linked in the article. Not bad for ai. Not really comedy either.
Reminds me of the AI Seinfeld awhile back that ran 24/7 before it got shutdown.
That was genuinely fascinating to watch.
I’ve seen a few more since that one. The SpongeBob ai stream was funny at times but got taken down a few weeks ago right after Squidward sang Frank Sinatra wonderfully.
Currently there is a family guy one going 24/7 and I keep going back to it every now and then. The prompts the viewers use is so dumb but somehow entertaining.
Cheers for the link mate
Thanks for the link!
It’s not bad. For some reason Stan Kyle and Tolkien have pretty accurate voices, then Cartman and Garrison aren’t even close.
South Park would’ve made the mett porker pig go much further lol
Tolkien?
That’s the character’s name. Why, what did you think it was?
They retconned Tokens name into Tolkien
Ah, I see, that was one leap too far for me.
Where’s the profanity, the swearing? AI, more like Artificially limited, that’s the only joke. Kyle not calling Cartman a fatass once, what?
If that’s really from the show I’m amazed. That seems super self aware, <laughs nervously>
“Our toasters, really? I always knew that little bastard was up to something”
‘Animate’ is a generous term here… there’s no animation beyond a simple idle animation, lips and eyes. Other then that every character is just frozen in place.
Just FYI, the CEO of Fable Studios is one Edward Saatchi. His father is Maurice Saatchi whose advertising agency was partially responsible for ten years of Conservative rule under Margaret Thatcher. The family absolutely has previous with union bashing.
Oh no, what if they use this technology to make cartoon version of celebrities like me say things that I would never actually say?
AI is too polite to make a compelling South Park episode honestly could be an interesting premise for a South Park episode though
Only when it’s intentionally censored and trained to react in a particular way. When it’s not, you remember it was trained on random internet content.
Exactly. Anybody who remembers the Taybot fiasco knows this. AI turns into the edgiest neckbeard incel ever when it is trained on the internet with no safeguards.
I remember how, years ago, an AI was asked to write a script for a Batman comic book, given a bunch of real comic issues as its learning input. The resulting script was horribly stilted, and hilarious to read. It was popular enough that an artist turned it into an actual comic book.
Today’s AIs have come a long way.
Edit: just out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to “write a Batman comic book script, with The Joker as the villain”. That’s it. No other input.
What came out was far less stilted than the one mentioned above, but bare-bones, extremely generic, and boring. The real Batman writers have little to fear at the moment.
It’s truly impressive and severely boring all at the same time. Thing is, this is really early.
Even if they don’t advance the AI significantly a couple more years in r&d and they could probably make something out of this at least something that would power South Park episodes.
