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An AI wrote all of David Hasselhoff’s lines in a bizarre short film

arstechnica.com

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Re: An AI wrote all of David Hasselhoff’s lines in a bizarre short film

#11

Post by Declanomous »

alejohausner wrote: post #4

Ok, so it's not very smart AI; emacs's eliza might do as good a job. But setting aside the article's lack of technical rigor, and its scientism, the film itself is interesting. I was impressed by how the actors could convey feeling, even with a randomly generated script. I imagine that, in acting school, actors have to do this sort of thing as an exercise: learn how to convey feeling using random words or grunts (is…

Are they actually conveying emotion, or is the kuleshov effect [1] at work? I know one of the things they teach film actors is to 'act less' when they don't know what to do. We as humans tend to interpret the actor as displaying an appropriate emotion if their face is otherwise somewhat neutral.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect

Re: An AI wrote all of David Hasselhoff’s lines in a bizarre short film

#13

Post by alejohausner »

Declanomous wrote: post #11
alejohausner wrote: post #4

Ok, so it's not very smart AI; emacs's eliza might do as good a job. But setting aside the article's lack of technical rigor, and its scientism, the film itself is interesting. I was impressed by how the actors could convey feeling, even with a randomly generated script. I imagine that, in acting school, actors have to do this sort of thing as an exercise: learn how to convey feeling using random words or grunts (is…

Are they actually conveying emotion, or is the kuleshov effect [1] at work? I know one of the things they teach film actors is to 'act less' when they don't know what to do. We as humans tend to interpret the actor as displaying an appropriate emotion if their face is otherwise somewhat neutral. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect

Cool! I had thought that Eisenstein came up with that, but it looks like Kuleshov taught Eisenstein.

I guess that's why there's an Oscar for editing! The temporal context of a shot matters as much as the shot itself.

But even if my reaction to the film is conditioned by editing, and not just Hoff's acting, I still find it weird that I'm feeling things that don't depend much on the content of the words he's speaking.

Re: An AI wrote all of David Hasselhoff’s lines in a bizarre short film

#16

Post by [deleted] »

orthoganol wrote: post #8
strgrd wrote: post #3

Today I learned that Markov chain generation = "AI." Shame on Ars staff for conflating this parlor trick as "artificial intelligence," and failing to explain how this rather simple process works. For fucks sake, they find the raw screenplay of a movie like Knight Rider, regex out the crap, download a Markov chain generator off of github, and train their model on the text. And of course by "training", I mean they run…

Probably because they trained an LSTM model to learn conditional probabilities between words and then sampled using markov methods to actually generate the sequences. It's actually pretty standard and not particularly innovative, technically, in that you can google already existing tutorials on exactly how to do that (even in Keras - forget lower level stuff). At any rate, this doesn't work well, typically. I'm sure…

[deleted]

Re: An AI wrote all of David Hasselhoff’s lines in a bizarre short film

#17

Post by minimaxir »

strgrd wrote: post #3

Today I learned that Markov chain generation = "AI." Shame on Ars staff for conflating this parlor trick as "artificial intelligence," and failing to explain how this rather simple process works. For fucks sake, they find the raw screenplay of a movie like Knight Rider, regex out the crap, download a Markov chain generator off of github, and train their model on the text. And of course by "training", I mean they run…

The tutorials of which are all extensions of the char-rnn project. http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

A large amount of AI-generated text just swaps in the source dataset, generates the text, calls it AI, and gets many blog posts written about "artificial creativity."

Re: An AI wrote all of David Hasselhoff’s lines in a bizarre short film

#18

Post by themadstork »

Hey, I'm one of the creators of this -- I trained the LSTMs that wrote the computer generated segments in this film. The ballet choreography was generated with a context-free grammar, because I couldn't find enough material to make a ballet choreography LSTM.

Here's our film from last year, Sunspring, which was written entirely by an LSTM trained on science fiction screenplays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY7x2Ihqjmc

It's worth noting that this year I used subtitle files rather than screenplays to train our LSTMs, so we only had dialogue rather than dialogue + action descriptions. The Ars Technica article explains everything.

Re: An AI wrote all of David Hasselhoff’s lines in a bizarre short film

#19

Post by themadstork »

strgrd wrote: post #3

Today I learned that Markov chain generation = "AI." Shame on Ars staff for conflating this parlor trick as "artificial intelligence," and failing to explain how this rather simple process works. For fucks sake, they find the raw screenplay of a movie like Knight Rider, regex out the crap, download a Markov chain generator off of github, and train their model on the text. And of course by "training", I mean they run…

I'm one of the creators, and I assure you we did not use Markov. I trained the LSTMs myself.

Re: An AI wrote all of David Hasselhoff’s lines in a bizarre short film

#20

Post by krylon »

theprop wrote: post #14

Interesting. Sidenote: a 30+ year old film Death Wish (about a woman who's dying young and how her life becomes a reality tv show) predicted AI-written novels.

Can you tell me the name of the director, producer, or some of the actors?

That sounds like a very interesting movie I would like to watch very much. But search for Death Wish only turns up tons and tons of the one with Charles Bronson going postal.

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