The Infinite Conversation

November 2, 2022 8:02 AM

From the site: "an AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. Everything you hear is fully generated by a machine. The opinions and beliefs expressed do not represent anyone. They are the hallucinations of a slab of silicon."
posted by Strange Interlude (41 comments total)

"It has to be a separate mode of expression.
Otherwise you lose something essential.
And that's why, when I write poems, they
are not my poems— they are someone else's poems.
I'm not the author and I do not claim to be the author."

Shoutout to Cyber Herzog for trying to keep me calm about all this, thanks pal!
posted by EatTheWeek at 8:17 AM on November 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

If there is one artifact of humanity that ends up surviving after humans are long gone, it will end up being this. It will be a worthy tombstone.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 8:18 AM on November 2, 2022 [8 favorites]

It's clear that we had in phenomena like Nazism or Stalinism a palpable experience of how not only God dies but also humanity itself dies.

God, this is exactly my shit. This is so stupid and I will listen to it for five hours every day.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 8:24 AM on November 2, 2022 [16 favorites]

Something about the relaxed political / artistic ramblings of a certain type of public intellectual makes them ripe for this sort of thing. I'd like to hear a Chomsky version.


Zizek:

I know how to do it.
By the mere power of imagination, I can pull a private cinema around me.
It’s more difficult when it concerns a
whole society and this is a problem today.
This is why I think that it is
one of the functions of TV series and
fantasy movies: they organize public experience in a
way that has nothing to do with cinema.
For example, at one point, after 9/11, when the
American government tried to introduce an official public prayer
there was an outcry against it and people said, “Let’s do
TV prayer.” People thought they can pray while they watch Grey's Anatomy.
posted by Hume at 8:29 AM on November 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

It works because their real speech is almost always inscrutable. When the AI spits out inconsistent and self-contradictory language in their voices, it sounds like it might be wisdom that we just have think harder about to understand.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 8:32 AM on November 2, 2022 [19 favorites]

I would prefer a Beckett AI, pumping out an infinite dialogue between Vladimir and Estragon, forever
posted by chavenet at 8:36 AM on November 2, 2022 [6 favorites]

Lol, at one point the Herzog-Bot quoted Nietzsche in the original German, but it mangled the pronunciation, pronouncing the words as though they were English.

AI has a ways to go yet.
posted by jedicus at 8:38 AM on November 2, 2022 [4 favorites]

I knew it couldn't be the real Herzog when he didn't know how to pronounce 'Goethe'.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 8:43 AM on November 2, 2022 [4 favorites]

Yeah, a friend and I are enthusing over this, and I think the key to Zizek's is that his preferred rhetorical mode is "intentionally saying provocative bullshit that's half snake oil, with the belief that sometimes outlandish nonsense can point more directly to truth than sincerity can." In other words, it's completely plausible that an AI trying to mimic Zizek would wind up genuinely saying things that Zizek himself finds interesting.

I felt conflicted about this, but then I asked AI Brian Eno what he thought and he said it's okay.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 8:46 AM on November 2, 2022 [15 favorites]

The spectral hands of Forum 2000 and The Conversatron, dead so long they barely have mentions in Wikipedia, beckon from their shallow graves.
posted by figurant at 8:48 AM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

"What troubles me most about United States is not even that there
are poor people but poor people who are getting richer and richer
with every fancy Mercedes and so on..."
posted by mittens at 9:03 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

There's a bit in the third act of Her (2013) where the AIs decide to instantiate a cybernetic Alan Watts, and let the protagonist talk to it for a while. This is exactly that. It's awesome. All I need now is another AI laying down some beats on top of this, and a Stable Diffusion-generated animation loop of someone doing their homework.
posted by phooky at 9:15 AM on November 2, 2022 [6 favorites]

I know, but this is a problem for me because “porno” has no meaning - it’s an empty gesture. This is the whole problem today. Okay, so tell me, what would it be like to have sex with a robot? Because in a way you are already having cybersex if you log on onto the Internet and watch all these movies of people screwing and so on. Now obviously you don’t get the real thing, so you are totally abstracted but I think that for some men it is a new form of sexual enjoyment. So, again, we will encounter new problems: What are the limits? Will it be accepted that in a relationship with a human being, you can have sex with another person who is not there and so on?

-- ErsatZizek

I don't even...I mean...how
posted by jquinby at 9:21 AM on November 2, 2022 [5 favorites]

Back in the 60s around MIT you'd run into demonstrations of ELIZA, which was "to show the superficiality of communication between man and machine." Machine conversations have come a long way, but it is interesting that this Infinite Conversation has pretty much the same purpose, as described in the About tab, "Right now, any motivated fool can do this with a laptop in their bedroom. This changes our relationship with the media we consume online and raises questions about the importance of authoritative sources, breach of trust and gullibility."
posted by beagle at 9:27 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Person: Which cube is sitting on the table?
Computer: THE LARGE GREEN ONE WHICH SUPPORTS THE RED PYRAMID.
Person: Is there a large block behind a pyramid?
Computer: YES, THREE OF THEM: A LARGE RED ONE, A LARGE GREEN CUBE, AND THE BLUE ONE.
Person: Put a small one onto the green cube which supports a pyramid.
Computer: OK.
Person: Put the littlest pyramid on top of it.
Computer: OK.
Person: Does the shortest thing the tallest pyramid's support supports support anything green?
Computer: YES, THE GREEN PYRAMID.
posted by neuron at 9:28 AM on November 2, 2022 [5 favorites]

Infinite seems to be the number of seconds it takes to load, in my case.
posted by symbioid at 9:30 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

figurant: Massive nostalgia pop from me seeing you mention the Conversatron, which occupied a substantial portion of my college-age mind back in the day.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 9:33 AM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

Lol, at one point the Herzog-Bot quoted Nietzsche in the original German, but it mangled the pronunciation, pronouncing the words as though they were English.

AI has a ways to go yet.

It's amazing how quickly tech can go from "that's impossible" to "that's indistinguishable from magic" to "oh yeah, that thing, nothing special"

Like, this site created a realtime, endless audio conversation between two well known people, with both the voices and the content pretty convincing. That's insane. This isn't ELIZA. This wasn't possible even a few years ago, now it can be done with easily available software. But we're already, "Yeah, but why can the AI generated German speaker only speak English?" (Which, admittedly, is funny. But still: This shit is magic!)
posted by gwint at 9:50 AM on November 2, 2022 [18 favorites]

"I would prefer a Beckett AI, pumping out an infinite dialogue between Vladimir and Estragon, forever"

Vladimir: (pause.)

Estragon: (pause.)

Vladimir: (pause.)

Estragon: (pause.)

Vladimir: (pause.)

Estragon: (pause.)

[...]
posted by Horkus at 9:57 AM on November 2, 2022 [16 favorites]

METAFILTER: the hallucinations of a slab of silicon
posted by philip-random at 10:16 AM on November 2, 2022 [4 favorites]

I'm with gwint on this

I'm just barely restraining the urge to fling my monkey shit at people every day, this is more than my brain can handle
posted by elkevelvet at 10:20 AM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

But we're already, "Yeah, but why can the AI generated German speaker only speak English?"

Herzog just informed Žižek that the critic Robert Hughes (who's still dead, afaik) is currently writing a chapter about him for an upcoming book. There's still a long way to go.
posted by theory at 10:33 AM on November 2, 2022

"I have a similar fantasy, which I've never spoken about.
If someone would lock me in a
room, and there were a revolver in there
and five naked women, who were completely shameless;
if he would then leave and close the door
and I would know that he would come back
in one hour—I don't know what would happen to me.
I don't know if I could resist this temptation or not.
The revolver is right there and five naked women.
I don't know what would happen to me."

I guess AI-Herzog has a fantasy about getting his ass kicked by five naked women?
posted by praemunire at 10:42 AM on November 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Beckett AI, pumping out an infinite dialogue between Vladimir and Estragon -- for ever!"
-- A.I. George Orwell
posted by gauche at 10:57 AM on November 2, 2022 [9 favorites]

The 23 yr old inside me applying to Philosophy PhD programs is screaming "This is GOLD, Jerry, GOLD!"
posted by Capt. Renault at 10:59 AM on November 2, 2022 [12 favorites]

Of course we are working in the field of
cinema, but really what we're doing is something else.
Philosophy in the ancient sense, like with the Stoics
or the Epicureans, would take place in the forest
around the fire, with wine.
They were not professional philosophers either.
Yes, I think the same goes for filmmaking.

🤔
"If I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees... then the birds will drop dead from the trees. I am the Wrath of God. The earth I pass will see me and tremble. But whoever follows me and the river, will win untold riches."
posted by clavdivs at 12:29 PM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

Herzog just informed Žižek that the critic Robert Hughes (who's still dead, afaik) is currently writing a chapter about him for an upcoming book. There's still a long way to go.

did you forget to preface this observation with ACTUALLY
posted by elkevelvet at 12:36 PM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was wondering how much of the AI-generated Zizek text is actually just undigested chunks of actual Zizek books. And then I remembered that several of Zizek's own books consist of undigested chunks of other Zizek books.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 12:38 PM on November 2, 2022 [7 favorites]

This is a little bit like ELIZA in the sense that A.I. was a human language parser who would identify subjects provided by the user and generate responses based on those items. This does the same way, but at exponentially greater levels of sophistication. GPT-3 and the like are nifty bits of modern wizardry. That, of course, and the Deepfaked speech in realtime.
posted by Apocryphon at 12:49 PM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

The author of the site is answering some questions on HackerNews.
posted by bouvin at 1:14 PM on November 2, 2022 [2 favorites]

Žižek:

For example, we should mention here the recent
Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ
it isn’t simply a ridiculous religious movie; it does something in visual terms
with special effects that are pretty much unrivalled.
So, for me, this is the future of cinema.
…

Herzog:

I don't think so.
…
I've seen very young people having fun at
soccer stadiums; they are doing all these things together
stirring up excitement, leaping up and down like crazy and chanting things out loud.
It’s almost religious, but not in the
sense that you see something or hear something
or “understand” something.
It has nothing to do with understanding or seeing.
There is something much deeper going on there.
And I think the people who go to
soccer matches, they will never go to the movies.
I have never seen soccer fans go to the movies.

posted by PresidentOfDinosaurs at 1:41 PM on November 2, 2022 [3 favorites]

what would it be like to have sex with a robot?

I was half expecting the next quoted line to be "Would you like to find out?"
posted by gimonca at 1:59 PM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

just. so. spot. on…
posted by progosk at 4:43 PM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

What will be the first auto generated podcast, I wonder?
posted by rebent at 7:17 PM on November 2, 2022

They already exist.
posted by now i'm piste at 8:09 PM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'd like to hear a Chomsky version.

The first time I viewed it, they were kinda credibly dissing Chomsky.
posted by ovvl at 8:50 PM on November 2, 2022

"Zizek" just complimented "Herzog" on being one of the few foreigners who can pronounce his name. "Herzog" then told "Zizek" he has to change his name, because it's illegal in Germany to have a name like this. "Zizek" first demanded a "serious reason" then said, ok, I'll change it at the passport office, no problem.
posted by praemunire at 9:44 PM on November 2, 2022 [1 favorite]

That AI podcast with Bro Jogan and Steve Jobs is cray cray.
posted by credulous at 1:29 AM on November 3, 2022

I'm having trouble finding the story, but I swear I read recently that AI face generators sometimes simply pass through the faces they were trained on. In other words, sometimes you're not seeing faces that are generated, but instead seeing faces that are remembered. Any chance some of that is happening here?
posted by clawsoon at 4:57 AM on November 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

Now we need a voice for the Chomskybot.
posted by charred husk at 9:43 AM on November 3, 2022

clawsoon: ", but I swear I read recently that AI face generators sometimes simply pass through the faces they were trained on."

I didn't read that, but I've played around with midjourney enough to know it knows basically one female face. She's young, around 20, big disney eyes, short brown hair. It's really hard to get it to create any other female face. I would be 0% surprised to know that she looks remarkeably like somebody who rejected whoever was in charge of the dataset.
posted by signal at 5:07 PM on November 3, 2022 [2 favorites]