Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OnScreen: AI generated long form sci fi TV show

bengarney.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 22 posts

Re: OnScreen: AI generated long form sci fi TV show

#11

Post by mike_hearn »

bengarney wrote: post #10
HanClinto wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've definitely hit on something here. > That said, I don't think having AI write the scripts from scratch is the right way to go here. The dialogue for the first episode still smells of RLHF, with characters being far too complimentary to each other and having bizarre verbal ticks. And is it needed? The world is full of people with smart stories who want to tell them, but we're in an era when reading is in decline…

Great feedback. Thank you Mike and HanClinto. I am planning on doing some more articles/director commentary as it goes along. I have a number of episodes in the queue and each one is better than the last. My plan is to release an entire season of 12 or so. The "I'm a GPT that wants everyone to be friends and how" is increasingly better in those episodes. Even incremental improvements in stuff like background music ma…

You should link not to the first episode but a playlist that you update in reverse order, so the best episodes come first. It wasn't clear to me that the quality would improve with each episode, and honestly getting through the first was a bit of a struggle.

How much funding do you think you need for an MVP that's more Copilot-like? I might be interested in taking part in a seed round. Having AI do everything is a fun challenge, but I think the sort of people who would actually pay for a product would want to have some creative control and let the AI handle the parts they don't want to or can't do.

The Minecraft-esque graphics probably aren't an issue, but scaling up to provide all the needed assets probably is. There are AIs that can generate 3D models but having a consistent art style is required for it to work visually and you provided that here. Finding a way to quickly and cheaply scale the "kitbashing" seems key to any kind of productization.

Re: OnScreen: AI generated long form sci fi TV show

#13

Post by HanClinto »

bengarney wrote: post #10
HanClinto wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've definitely hit on something here. > That said, I don't think having AI write the scripts from scratch is the right way to go here. The dialogue for the first episode still smells of RLHF, with characters being far too complimentary to each other and having bizarre verbal ticks. And is it needed? The world is full of people with smart stories who want to tell them, but we're in an era when reading is in decline…

Great feedback. Thank you Mike and HanClinto. I am planning on doing some more articles/director commentary as it goes along. I have a number of episodes in the queue and each one is better than the last. My plan is to release an entire season of 12 or so. The "I'm a GPT that wants everyone to be friends and how" is increasingly better in those episodes. Even incremental improvements in stuff like background music ma…

> I am planning on doing some more articles/director commentary as it goes along.

Speaking for myself, I expect that the behind-the-scenes commentary would be the most interesting part of the project!

> The "I'm a GPT that wants everyone to be friends and how" is increasingly better in those episodes.

How long does the pipeline take to run? (apologies if this was part of the blog series and I missed it). Depending on how close to a self-running CI pipeline the whole process is at, I think it might be interesting to run benchmarks against various versions of the pipeline and evaluate its performance at each stage. I feel like I could evaluate the improvement of the "let's make everyone be friends!" writing if I'm comparing Episode 1 (compiled w/ v0.3) against Episode 1 (compiled w/ v0.8), instead of Episode 1 vs. Episode 12.

Crazy idea: If one could somehow quantify the quality of consistency, dialogue, camera work, etc -- then you may be able to watch numbers-go-up in an actual graph sort of way (I'm imagining a multi-agent system where various agents are responsible for monitoring various aspects of script and production quality -- almost like an actor/critic setup).

But at the very least, being able to A/B comparison between v0.3 and v0.6 could be very interesting for people interested in the internals.

> I've taken it about as far as I can on a solo basis. The next step is a team of 4-5 people levelling it up. Every piece could be 10x better, and it would be a different beast entirely if that happened. I think there are some super exciting directions this could go.

I think that's the really cool thing about what you've built here -- it's a complete pipeline, and every piece is present -- even if the pieces aren't in their final form, the fact that you've pieced together an entire pipeline is extremely compelling.

> (PS - Hi Han!)

Hi!! It was a very cool surprise to see your name pop up on my HN feed this morning. :D

Re: OnScreen: AI generated long form sci fi TV show

#14

Post by bengarney »

mike_hearn wrote: post #11
bengarney wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great feedback. Thank you Mike and HanClinto. I am planning on doing some more articles/director commentary as it goes along. I have a number of episodes in the queue and each one is better than the last. My plan is to release an entire season of 12 or so. The "I'm a GPT that wants everyone to be friends and how" is increasingly better in those episodes. Even incremental improvements in stuff like background music ma…

You should link not to the first episode but a playlist that you update in reverse order, so the best episodes come first. It wasn't clear to me that the quality would improve with each episode, and honestly getting through the first was a bit of a struggle. How much funding do you think you need for an MVP that's more Copilot-like? I might be interested in taking part in a seed round. Having AI do everything is a fu…

Good call on the playlist. I'll do that soon. I agree, ep1 is rough.

I shot you an e-mail on a v2. (An MVP would be less; I realized I sent you the pitch for a full v2.)

There are a LOT of art packs out there for a ton of different looks and genres. Building sets is quick and easy even with kitbashing. I think you could synthesize 3d content in a lot of ways (vid2vid, Gaussian diffusion generative models, prop placement by LLM, clever use of stable diffusion/firefly for mattes, etc.) or have a small stable of fiverr types to make art for people on demand in a specific style...

Re: OnScreen: AI generated long form sci fi TV show

#15

Post by bengarney »

HanClinto wrote: post #13
bengarney wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great feedback. Thank you Mike and HanClinto. I am planning on doing some more articles/director commentary as it goes along. I have a number of episodes in the queue and each one is better than the last. My plan is to release an entire season of 12 or so. The "I'm a GPT that wants everyone to be friends and how" is increasingly better in those episodes. Even incremental improvements in stuff like background music ma…

> I am planning on doing some more articles/director commentary as it goes along. Speaking for myself, I expect that the behind-the-scenes commentary would be the most interesting part of the project! > The "I'm a GPT that wants everyone to be friends and how" is increasingly better in those episodes. How long does the pipeline take to run? (apologies if this was part of the blog series and I missed it). Depending on…

I agree, BTS is definitely very interesting.

But I had 8 kids 5-15 watch all of Ep1 _AND_ choose to watch Ep2 afterwards last night. They actually sat and watched, too, instead of having it on in the background... AND they were bummed they couldn't watch the super secret pilot episode (which has MAJOR audio issues - I couldn't bring myself to inflict it on them).

So I think something is there.

I agree, there are some great opportunities to track things somewhat more quantitatively. It takes ~15 minutes and $10 bucks to generate a script depending on how fast OpenAI is feeling. So in a real scale v2 it would be very reasonable to explore this.

Man, I sure hope I get to build this further!

Re: OnScreen: AI generated long form sci fi TV show

#16

Post by bengarney »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #12

I oncde tried to make ChatGPT output a transcript for a TV show called "The Cardassians", about the exploits of Gul Dukat and his wealthy family. Thought it would be funnier than it ended up being.

Writing comedy is really hard! Great concept for a show, tho. TBH a good example of something that could be interesting and viable with a tool like On Screen but never make it as a studio or even indie production.

The scope and target complexity of the series I'm making with On Screen is _dramatically_ cut down from what I started with, and it's still a bit of a stretch for the models at times. I started at DS9/Babylon 5 and ended up at Flash Gordon...

Re: OnScreen: AI generated long form sci fi TV show

#18

Post by bengarney »

greatgib wrote: post #17

Quite close to this topic, someone did kind of fantasy (not so) short stories with video all AI generated: https://youtube.com/@WardenCinematics

I'd label Warden an "AI maximalist" approach. Also has a lot of merit and is very interesting, but much harder to have fine control or tweakability, and much much harder to do fully hands off. "Hands off"-ability is an important metric because it's useful to not babysit every second of footage.

Re: OnScreen: AI generated long form sci fi TV show

#19

Post by HanClinto »

bengarney wrote: post #15
HanClinto wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am planning on doing some more articles/director commentary as it goes along. Speaking for myself, I expect that the behind-the-scenes commentary would be the most interesting part of the project! > The "I'm a GPT that wants everyone to be friends and how" is increasingly better in those episodes. How long does the pipeline take to run? (apologies if this was part of the blog series and I missed it). Depending on…

I agree, BTS is definitely very interesting. But I had 8 kids 5-15 watch all of Ep1 _AND_ choose to watch Ep2 afterwards last night. They actually sat and watched, too, instead of having it on in the background... AND they were bummed they couldn't watch the super secret pilot episode (which has MAJOR audio issues - I couldn't bring myself to inflict it on them). So I think something is there. I agree, there are some…

> So I think something is there.

Yes, I think so! That's super encouraging about holding the attention of a room of kids!

> It takes ~15 minutes and $10 bucks to generate a script depending on how fast OpenAI is feeling. So in a real scale v2 it would be very reasonable to explore this.

Yeah -- still a bit large to truly put into a CI pipeline that is running against every commit tho. :-/

Do you mind sharing your context window size? I always want to use local LLMs for rapid iteration -- I think 32k window isn't too difficult (Mixtral supports this out of the box, I think?), but I've heard of people pushing 100k tokens locally. Even so, that's peanuts compared to what hosted LLMs are doing, and if quality of writing is your bottleneck, then you wouldn't want to stray too far away from GPT-4 / Claude.

> Man, I sure hope I get to build this further!

Yeah!! It really feels like you've latched onto a nugget of something here, and I'm excited to see what's next!

Re: OnScreen: AI generated long form sci fi TV show

#20

Post by pvankessel »

bko wrote: post #7

I was disappointed at the black mirror new season, so I asked gpt to write a new episode synopsis and it was actually more interesting to me than any of the last seasons episodes! Title: "Retrospect" In the near future, a tech company called "MemorEase" creates a device named "Retrospect", a neuro-implant that allows individuals to vividly relive past memories. The device grows immensely popular, as people enjoy the…

Heh, that's actually pretty compelling - it sounds like a darker twist on the plot of a Stargate episode I recently rewatched: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisions_(Stargate_SG-1)
Post reply on HN