As I record this, it's February 2021. We're nearly two months into
Britain's third lockdown right now, and I've got a problem. I'm out of ideas. I've now recorded all the computer science
and language ideas I've got, at least, all the good ones, and to be honest, I'm kinda
burned out on those anyway. I can travel to film stuff, but it has to be outdoors,
and within England. Apparently I filmed most of those stories
years ago when I was starting out. I tried hiring a couple of freelance researchers, they were wonderful,
they did their best, they found some stories that would be great
for other people or for BBC documentaries. But there seems to be some aspect to a video
that's "right for this channel" that I can't put into words. And if I can't do that,
I can't expect anyone else to. But: I just got access to GPT-3, the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence
text generator made by OpenAI. I'm not going to go into the details
of how it works here, other people have done that
far better than I can, but in short: it has read and stored a
huge amount of the web. And if you give it some text, it will try to continue that text
in the same style. But it's not just repeating
what it's already seen: it's coming up with brand new,
never-before-written sentences. It is incredibly clever
in specific but very limited ways. And the challenge of "come up with
new video ideas in this style" is exactly what it's meant to be good at. So I gave it a list of
some of my previous videos: ones that I'd filmed solo in England,
and I asked it: come up with more. Maybe it could find the connection
that I can't describe, pull from all the billions
of things in its memory, and find the stories that I've missed.
[loud car driving by] It took a little bit of tweaking to
get the prompt and the parameters right. At one point it generated part of a
fake interview with me, which was weird. But pretty quickly it was churning out
plausible-sounding video titles. In the end, I generated more than
a thousand of them. I knew most of them wouldn't
be any good, but I thought, maybe it can manage
at least one in a thousand? And... it sorta did. Now, OpenAI's terms of service don't
let me give you the full list. I have to curate them,
and show you a sample. Those are the terms and
conditions I agreed to. But that's not actually much of a problem,
because most of the titles were just... dull. Which is fair enough, most of the video ideas I come up with also get
discarded almost immediately because they're just not good enough. The AI suggested titles like
"The World's First Bridge Over A Motorway". "An Industrial Warehouse
In The Middle Of Nowhere." and "The Beach Where You Can Hear the Sea." [ocean waves] I... can hear the sea. Most of the ideas were plausible,
they're valid sentences, they're just not interesting. There were a few suggestions
that were just nonsense. "The British Road That Is Also A Boat." "The Cliff That Refuses To Be A Cliff." "The Green Death And
The Industrial Revolution." I'm actually fairly sure that
last one's a Doctor Who episode. GPT-3 has a setting called "temperature", which is basically how
predictable it should be. If I turned the temperature down too low, it just repeated existing video titles
over and over back to me. Too high, and I got ideas like
"Jeremy Clarkson's Lottery of Death" which I swear was a genuine suggestion
it gave me and which I assume will be coming to Amazon Prime next year. But when I got the temperature right,
it did actually suggest some real places! "The Abandoned Homes of Wigan Pier". Well, Wigan Pier's a derelict industrial site
in the West Midlands that's being redeveloped, it's not a story I could tell, and it's not
one I know about, but someone else could do that. "The Super-Sized Megalithic Stones of Avebury". I made a video about Avebury years ago when I was just starting out,
filming on my phone, Avebury is like Stonehenge but better. A+ suggestion... if I hadn't already done it.
It also suggested stories about the RRS Discovery, an early 20th-century
steamship that explored the Antarctic, about the Aberfan disaster, where more than
a hundred people died in a mining landslip, about the New River, an aqueduct
that runs through London, and about the Post Office Railway,
where I've actually visited before, just not to film. None of those were quite right
to make a video about, sadly, I couldn't find the narrative hook
that means they work for this channel, but they're close. It also suggested "The Failed Bomb Plot Pigeon". That was an article that was used
on Citation Needed a few years ago! It even suggested a video idea that I've
already filmed but that I haven't released yet. I'll keep that title secret for now. But... yeah. It worked. I wasn't expecting that. Videos talking about testing AI are usually
comedy about how bad the results are, they're not supposed to work. There were some suggestions outside the UK, too. "The Airport Which Lands Planes On Water." I googled it, and that would be
Vancouver Harbour's seaplane terminal. I've been there. I've seen it before,
I'd never thought to film it. Also, there's "How The CIA Plotted To
Kill Castro With Explosive Seashells." Which actually happened, that's a real thing,
but I googled those words and they have never been put in
that exact order anywhere online. It's not a video I can film,
but it's a good idea for someone. But the most interesting category of suggestion was the one where the AI came up with videos
that I would love to make... but which are completely fictional. Because of course it would:
it doesn't understand any of the words, it's not checking if they're true,
it's just looking for patterns. So with the help of an animator,
here are some videos that I can't make because they're not real. The Village That Was Saved
By Synchronised Traffic Lights. The White Cube At The End Of The World. The Sanity-Defying Crossroads
on the Isle of Skye. How A Secret Gadget In The Beam Of The
Olympic Stadium Helped Deliver Britain's Medals. The Long Forgotten History of
the British Moon Landings. The Island With A Gravity Defying
Vertical Mountain. The Strange Light That
Floats Over Oxfordshire. The Lost Village of Lofthouse
That's Now Invisible. The Dream of a Russian Utopia
in East Yorkshire. I want to film all of those! There were hundreds of perfect video ideas
for my channel. But... they're not real. They're all in some weird parallel universe, and I don't have a word, I don't think there's
a word in the English language for nostalgia for a thing that never existed,
that never could have existed. But what if those were videos? What if I could click on any of those
topics and get a video about it? So as an experiment,
I took one of those subjects, the one about the Russian utopia
in East Yorkshire, and I told the AI to write the script. I just gave it one instruction. And it did it. Really well. So I filmed it,
or at least the start of it. Which is why I'm standing here, in another
locked-down windswept bit of England, because the AI gave me exactly
what I asked for... even though it wasn't true. In the late 1800s,
a wealthy Russian noblewoman by the name Baroness Helena von Hahn
had a dream. A dream of a perfect world in which
the relentless march of capitalism would be slowed enough to allow people
to enjoy their lives and not be forced to work constantly. She found her chance when she
learned that Thomas Kirby, an English businessman and entrepreneur
had just bought up large tracts of land in an area called Holderness,
in West Yorkshire. Through her friendship with his sister,
she convinced him to sell it to her. The site was dubbed "Kirby's Dream". The baroness then set about building
schools, hospitals and parks on the site as well as planting thousands of trees. Unfortunately, it was too good to last. I didn't run that a hundred times
and pick the best script. That was the first draft it gave me. None of that's real. There was a Russian noblewoman with that name,
but she wasn't a Baroness. There are no records of an enterpreneur
called Thomas Kirby, the land purchase never happened. This is Holderness! And it's just farmland,
there never was any Russian utopia. I could have asked for a script
for any of the thousand video titles. Or a thousand different scripts
for any of them, a thousand different failed
Russian utopias in Yorkshire. There's a reason that the company, OpenAI, is putting limits and ethical guidelines
on its text generator, because they're the only things
stopping people from asking for human-sounding political arguments,
or fake angry customer reviews, or... well, anything. Three years ago, text generation
like that was impossible. New technologies do tend to
follow a sigmoid curve, nothing happens for ages, then there's a massive revolution and
it feels like the world's changing, then it reaches a new fairly steady state. That happened with the web,
with smartphones, and I suspect it's happening with AI. The catch is, we don't know
where we are on that curve yet. You never do until it flattens out. It's possible that this
is as far as we go, that the best we'll get is that
an AI can generate a fake script, and it's a novelty. But if someone can take that and
add the requirement that what it writes has to be true, that it has to crossreference
with history books and encyclopedias, like IBM's Watson did to win Jeopardy
ten years ago... well, if that happens,
my job will get a lot easier. Until then, I'm going to ask it for another
thousand ideas and see what it comes up with. I thought I should check,
and, yeah. It's fine. It's still there.
This was especially good. It’s shocking to see how far GPT-3 has taken us.
Anything he posts is good
If this is interesting to you, check out the top posts of /r/SubSimulatorGPT2
It's amazing how realistic some of the AI generated posts and comments are there.
I've seen a few GPT-3 demos but this is easily the most impressive. Most of the others I've seen read like empty syntax - like a student padding to a word count - but this generated script could entirely have fooled me had it just popped up on Tom's channel one day. I still think this sort of AI is essentially a party trick and doesn't imply any deeper intellect but it's a seriously impressive trick.
r/writingprompts needs to get on this for idea generation. Some of those sounded like stories I'd like to write.
An example AI-generated video idea
I had a thought a few weeks ago: The next Lord of the Rings remake is going to be made by AI for a single persons enjoyment.
It is extremely worrying that a group is withholding this technology from everyone.
It never ends well when one group has a major technological advantage over everyone else. Now this tool, which was supposed to be open source is under the thumb of the billionaire class.
He totally just used the premium Dragon version of AIDungeon.