
An AI wrote all of David Hasselhoff’s lines in a bizarre short film - secretsinger
https://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2017/04/an-ai-wrote-all-of-david-hasselhoffs-lines-in-this-demented-short-film/
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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](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.

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rhcom2
I'm incredibly interested in the ballet part, what was it trained on? Any more
info on that part?

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themadstork
Yeah, I simply ingested words in French from a few online ballet dictionaries
into a JSON object, and used a recursive context-free grammar to generate
(generally) grammatically correct sentences. The result was a mixture of
English and French because the dancer (Sarah Hay) requested that I add a few
words of her choice in English as well.

Here's some information about context-free grammars:
[http://www.decontextualize.com/teaching/rwet/recursion-
and-c...](http://www.decontextualize.com/teaching/rwet/recursion-and-context-
free-grammars/)

~~~
rhcom2
The dictionary gives you the terms but how do you get the rules (like S -> NP
VP) to combine them? Or were the rules the same as the English language just
with the verbs from the ballet dictionary? Thank you for the link also.

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strgrd
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 a single
command to process the text document, and wait. Why this is described as a
"...long short-term-memory recursive machine-learning algorithm" probably has
to do with the fact that Ars has their hand in promoting these short films.

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gliptic
They describe it like that because it's a long short-term memory recurrent
neural network, which is a machine learning algorithm.

How exactly were you able to infer that they were lying and were instead using
a Markov chain from a few snippets of dialogue?

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RodericDay
defending hype-building like this is why we keep having AI winters

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alejohausner
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 this done?).

For me, it's interesting that there's another side to human communication that
has nothing to do with verbal meaning. It sounds hard to do THAT using
software.

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Declanomous
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuleshov_effect)

~~~
alejohausner
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.

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theprop
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.

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krylon
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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theprop
Sorry it's Death Watch!! My fault!! Some sort of a slip! It's a bit slow as a
film, but well-done and engaging. Harvey Keitel and Max von Sydow are in it.
The director is Bertrand Tavernier.

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krylon
Thank you!!!

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beaconstudios
do people actually fall for this? It's so clearly just writers passing it off
as an AI because ML is the buzzword of the month that gets funding and
attention.

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floatrock
The overall story was written by humans. The just-barely-not-quite-nonsense
that the actors speak when they get "turned on" are the lines the algorithm
wrote.

If you view the credits, it shows all the corpuses the various bot-generated
lines were trained on. Hasselhoff's lines were trained on a whole bunch of
baywatch episodes.

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Frenchgeek
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNyXYPhnUIs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNyXYPhnUIs)
?

~~~
krylon
Wow, I have never seen Knight Rider in English. The narrator's voice sounds a
lot more dramatic than the German sync-version.

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krylon
Wow, this is probably the weirdest thing I have seen on the Internet so far.

But if we end up with androids dreaming of electric sheep, this is where it
started.

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futun
Terrible.

