SHOW-1 and Showrunner Agents in Multi-Agent Simulations

The interesting thing here is that Matt and Trey have codified intentionality as a primary writing tool, and whatever this is, doesn&#x27;t mention that once. That&#x27;s a pretty major thing to overlook, like a blind spot or achilles&#x27; heel of the AI devs.<p>In fact, this is a blind spot of ALL AI that I&#x27;ve yet seen.<p>Matt and Trey approach writing scenes with the following intent: if a scene can be described as following up a previous scene with &#x27;AND THEN&#x27;, it fails.<p>If the following scene can be described as &#x27;BUT&#x27; or &#x27;THEREFORE&#x27;, they write it and it goes in the show.<p>This is so simple, yet it&#x27;s completely absent from what AI is doing, and seemed absent from the example script (I&#x27;d have liked a written version of their fake South Park script, as it was pretty insufferable). I&#x27;m not sure what beyond expanding context length will be needed, context length is merely a technical problem… but this is a significant failing in what we get out of AI.<p>This is where the sea of meaninglessness comes from. Good creators have a great deal of context and intentionality in their work, and for all that Matt and Trey are puerile and crass, they&#x27;ve got a clearly expressed agenda artistically (and philosophically).<p>There&#x27;s also human creators who are very facile, but very prone to &#x27;AND THEN&#x27;: AI will have a much easier time replacing humans like this, than replacing Matt and Trey.

AI Mett Porker (I see what you did there)<p>Maybe in my lifetime an AI could generate a few more seasons of Firefly (that got cancelled too soon)?<p>Another AI challenge would be to super-impose Harrison Ford onto Alec Baldwin in the movie Hunt for Red October. That would give nice continuity to the Jack Ryan character across the Tom Clancy movie series (Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger)

I skimmed the paper and didn&#x27;t see an answer to this: how much of the video did the AI actually generate? how much of it was touched up by humans and how much of it was actually drawn&#x2F;animated solely by humans?

So in addition to worrying about fake AI stuff that is presented as real, we now also have real stuff presented as fake AI.

Was the intro generated as well, or lifted directly from the real show?<p>There is a significant drop in believability as soon as the first scene of the generated show starts after the intro. Look at the first few seconds of the first scene. Here, the three boys are just standing statically in the hall while they are talking.<p>Now take South Park Episode 1, Season 1, from 1997.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.southparkstudios.com&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;940f8z&#x2F;south-park-cartman-gets-an-anal-probe-season-1-ep-1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.southparkstudios.com&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;940f8z&#x2F;south-park-...</a><p>Look at the first few seconds of that opening scene after the intro in this very first episode of the real show. Notice that even though there is a lot of time where some of the characters don’t move at all, they still feel a lot more alive than what you saw in that video that is in the OP. And I think part of it is also the use of exaggerated expressions when they <i>do</i> move. The others not moving is ok, because the ones that do move provide a lot of entertainment with those movements and expressions. And of course the voice acting is very passionate as well.<p>In the years since then the South Park episodes have gotten even better and better animation.<p>Maybe I am being too harsh, but the lacklustre animation in the first few seconds of the first scene of the OP video made me not watch any more of the video.<p>If you want to take on South Park, and you want to beat it at its own game, the bar is very high. Both in terms of script, voice acting, and animation.

I&#x27;ve got some &#x27;AI&#x27; actors endlessly repeating a scripted &#x27;show&#x27;, part experiment, part entertainment, all weird, it runs on gtp4all so I can throw the same script at different models and see the variance and performance on a consistent creative task, you can interact with the story via chat, it &#x27;remembers&#x27; previous interactions, sort of, interactions won&#x27;t affect the outcome, that&#x27;s scripted, but it will change what the actors talk about in each scene, it all runs off a simple yaml script that&#x27;s meant to be &#x27;easy&#x27; to edit. It runs TTS using either ElevenLabs for £££ or Coquai for free, and Bark when I get a GPU, Stability AI creates accompanying images, although they don&#x27;t sync with the audio, they might at some point...as admin I can mess with max token length and some other settings without restarting which is nice, it runs pretty much 24&#x2F;7 on a £250 pc, it&#x27;s designed to run at four or five times the speed you see the &#x27;dev&#x27; channel: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitch.tv&#x2F;m88t" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitch.tv&#x2F;m88t</a><p>any questions you can drop them in the twitch chat... or here...

Assuming I&#x27;m reading the paper correctly this wasn&#x27;t AI Generated so much as it was AI Assisted.<p>They used AI to generate character dialog and voices (easily the worst parts of the video) while the humans guided the plot and picked the lines of dialog that would be used.

I wonder how I would have appreciate this if I didn&#x27;t know it was AI generated and thought it was some fan-made thing.

Definitely could be something the South Park guys made as a joke.

Weird watching south park with zero humor in it.<p>Its giving &#x27;pokemon go to the polls&#x27; energy - people using a random pop culture reference to flaccidly try to promote their ideological preference.<p>I hated it, and was only impressed until I realized how much manual human labor went into its construction. The editorial influence of the humans involved was far too heavy handed. I would have preferred something alien, weird and incoherent.<p>Here&#x27;s an example of what AI can actually do - full synthesis of script, visuals and audio. It is incoherent but also strangely unsettling: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tiktok.com&#x2F;@never_ever_never_land&#x2F;video&#x2F;7253149022129638682" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tiktok.com&#x2F;@never_ever_never_land&#x2F;video&#x2F;72531490...</a>

I wonder how Trey Parker and Matt Stone would react to this?

I believe this sort of system is one of the main reasons why WGA and SAG-AFTRA are striking. Even though this seeks to &quot;augment&quot; the writing process, it ultimately leads to not needing a writer at all. It also just requires an actor provide enough audio to generate a believable voice. All of the limitations to fully automated episodic generation are essentially temporary.

Writers Guild has nothing to worry about

The irony of the scene of the writer&#x27;s guild protest commentary

It would have been an opportunity to honor Sponge Bob. Not that I&#x27;ve watched it, but my nephews did and over the years I&#x27;ve read almost only positive things about it.

Related discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36781061">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36781061</a>

I do enjoy reading actual dialog coming from Kenny. :)

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