1y ago

Fable Studios created an AI-generated episode of South Park... during a Hollywood strike over AI.

techcrunch.com Maybe showing off an AI-generated fake TV episode during a writers' strike is a bad idea | TechCrunch

It's a complex time to be in media — but it doesn't take much to see this is probably a bad time to show off an AI that makes whole TV shows.

So, how much money do you think Matt and Trey are going to sue them for?

64 comments

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)

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.
  
  I can imagine this being a problem for low effort youtube kid shows, like the ones that caused the whole elsagate controversy.
  
  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.
  
  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
- 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.

Where can you watch this? I wanna see how well it works.
- Embedded in this article
  
  Thanks! Clips were dull and weird. The first clip felt like “insert name here” material. The longer episode everyone just stares straight ahead and speaks in monotone. I have to wonder how much the material was “massaged” or edited to get the final result.

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.
  
  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?

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>

‘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.

"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.

SP is already really shitty animation though, so they're setting the bar really, really low

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.
- They played around with making an AI generated episode of black mirror but it wasn't good enough to be compelling.

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.

You can definitely tell the writing was AI. The characters spoke like they are in an infomercial. I couldn’t watch the whole thing.

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.

Oh no, what if they use this technology to make cartoon version of celebrities like me say things that I would never actually say?

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.

The video is password protected now. Did anyone get a chance to download the episode?

The better question is: do they have to sue the AI instead?

When the printing press came out during the Ottoman Empire, those who wrote handwritten books started a rebellion. Today, there is no professional group that writes by handwriting. There will always be anti-AI protests. But if a technology has emerged that makes a job cheaper and faster, you can't avoid it. I recommend that you eliminate the professions that will disappear when directing professions for your children.
- In a world where you must work, making jobs disappear is a death sentence. And don't you start babbling about "new jobs being made". There's no guarantee they'll pay as much and be as available as the ones lost. AI is not a thing to look forward to, judgning by how it's used. It probably could've been used for good but tech millionaires aren't good people.
  
  Agree, AI is going to extrapolate. As AI becomes more capable it will replace more jobs. At the limit there will be zero jobs for human beings. So what happens then? The economy will no longer function. Even the argument that new technology creates new jobs falls down because AI could eventually design and build itself along with any other machine that's needed. We'll be wards of our technology, but it won't even be ours anymore. AI will be in control.
  Some like to say people concerned about jobs lost to mechanization are just reacting to some kind of irrational fear and are failing to understand progress. However there is some rationality there. If you take mechanization to the limit it could upset our society at the least, or at worst cause our extinction.
  
  automation is going to happen though, it's far to cost effective to avoid.
  businesses that could automate but don't won't be as competitive as those businesses that embrace automation. eventually they'll disappear

64 comments