"You will need a girl of great surprises to join you."

September 19, 2020 9:37 AM

Looking for YT videos to distract you? Try Today Is Spaceship Day! (12:29) This animated short (and children's book) was scripted by an AI trained on text from Star Wars, Harry Potter, Stephen King, and a YA novel. It's much more coherent than Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash, but still delightfully baffling.
posted by Countess Elena (10 comments total)

I think it might have been even better if he'd used a voice AI to read it instead of narrating it himself.

But yeah, I think human authors are safe for a bit longer.

At least as far as from scratch stuff goes. I do wonder a bit about AI assistance with filling in once given characters, scenarios, etc from a human. It probably wouldn't be useful on its own, but it could provide stuff a human writer could clean up.

An AI/Human collaboration story could be pretty interesting, and possibly written quite a bit faster than a purely human written story.

IIRC that's already happening to some extent with news reporting, the AI produces a framework and the human cleans it up instead of writing it all from scratch.

Translation has been like that for many years now, almost no one starts translating a book, or whatever, by hand. They run it through a machine translator and then use the original to clean up the machine translation.
posted by sotonohito at 9:53 AM on September 19, 2020

The author had an inordinate liking for adverbs, I wrote, critically.
posted by njohnson23 at 12:05 PM on September 19, 2020

“Harrison could not help noticing that there was a bang and a flash of bright light from the ground, and he felt a surge of fury that was quite unconnected with his own stupidity.”

I mean, this reads like a lot of fanfic I have seen. If it’s indistinguishable from fanfic, does this mean it has passed some variant of the Turing test?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:11 PM on September 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

"In deep conversation with a wave of cold sweat" pretty much describes my mental state for the last eight months.
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 1:39 PM on September 19, 2020 [6 favorites]

The intro to the video suggests this was written in Botnik, which has been discussed here before but I don't think really qualifies as "Written Entirely By AI."
posted by one for the books at 2:04 PM on September 19, 2020

My kids made me watch this three times in a row; they loved it and were ROLLING with laughter.

Now they're quoting it!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 3:13 PM on September 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

THE DARK MYSTERY BEYOND
posted by Foosnark at 7:25 PM on September 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

scripted by an AI trained on text from Star Wars, Harry Potter, Stephen King, and a YA novel.

all good fun. May I suggest for a followup text from Naked Lunch, Finnegan's Wake, Mrs. Dalloway and something by L. Ron Hubbard (for randomness).
posted by philip-random at 8:10 PM on September 19, 2020

"They had learned the hard way to deal with all sorts of terrible misfortunes."

Sums up this year quite nicely.
posted by dbscissors at 10:54 PM on September 19, 2020

Yeahhh, they dead
posted by Jacen at 6:47 PM on September 20, 2020