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Hive Mind

How ChatGPT resets the levels

December 22, 2022 Follow Up, Geek Alert, Hive Mind, Meta

On a recent Scriptnotes, I showed off ChatGPT to Craig and Scriptnotes guest Rian Johnson. We asked it to write up a plot summary for a future Knives Out movie set in space.

We got an answer similar to this query I just ran:1

In the far-flung future, wealthy space entrepreneur Harrison Thorne is found dead in his luxurious space station, the victim of an apparent suicide. However, Detective Benoit Blanc, a renowned investigator known for solving even the most complex cases, has a hunch that foul play is at work. As he begins to investigate, he finds that every member of Thorne’s eccentric and contentious family has a motive for murder.

As the detective delves deeper into the mystery, he must navigate the tangled web of lies and deceit spun by the suspects, all while trying to stay one step ahead of the cunning killer. With the help of Thorne’s loyal assistant Marta, Blanc must unravel the truth before the killer strikes again.

As the body count rises and the tension mounts, it becomes clear that no one is above suspicion in this high-stakes game of space-age crime and deception. Will Detective Blanc be able to solve the case before it’s too late, or will the killer get away with murder in the cold vacuum of space?

None of us were blown away by the plotting. It felt like it was copy-pasting ideas from the first movie, with a lot of generic pitch filler. Still, we all agreed that the sentence-by-sentence writing was surprisingly good. It didn’t feel like it was written by a bot.

When we asked it to write a scene, it was functional but weightless. Here’s one based on the summary above:2

INT. SPACE STATION – DAY

Detective BENOIT BLANC, a middle-aged man with a southern drawl, walks through the sterile corridors of the space station, his face etched with determination. He approaches a door labeled “Harrison Thorne – CEO.”

BLANC

(to himself)

Time to get to work.

He opens the door and enters the office, which is spacious and well-appointed. A young woman, MARTA, sits at a desk, typing away on a computer. She looks up as Blanc enters.

MARTA

(stands up)

Can I help you?

BLANC

(flashes badge)

Detective Benoit Blanc, ma’am. I’m here to investigate Mr. Thorne’s death.

MARTA

(nods)

I see. Well, Mr. Thorne was a good man. I can’t believe he’s gone.

BLANC

(nods sympathetically)

I understand. Is there anything you can tell me about his final days, or any unusual circumstances leading up to his death?

MARTA

(hesitates)

I’m not sure. I mean, he was under a lot of stress with the business, but he always seemed to handle it well.

BLANC

(nods)

I see. Well, thank you for your time. I may have more questions for you later.

MARTA

(nods)

Of course. I’ll do whatever I can to help.

BLANC

(smiles)

Thank you, ma’am. I’ll be in touch.

Blanc exits the office, deep in thought. The investigation has only just begun, and he has a feeling that it won’t be an easy one.

To be generous, it’s not nonsense. Unlike earlier attempts at algorithmically-generated screenplays, you can follow what happens, and characters do feel like they’re talking to each other. But there’s no nuance or character motivation despite the endless parentheticals.

It’s not a scene, but a simulacrum of one.

Listener JR, who makes his living using tools like these, wrote in with an interesting perspective:

Language models are built on “training data,” which is the text you feed into a learning process to produce the output. For very sophisticated models, the training data is vast: for something like ChatGPT, it includes something like all the text you can scrape off of the last twenty years of the Internet, or so.

But this means ChatGPT is about as smart as the average writer on the Internet has been over the past twenty years — and indeed, the models that comprise GPT drag the results toward the average, not the extraordinary, because the average has much nicer statistical properties than the extraordinary for companies that seek to produce a marketable, scalable product from their models, which requires the ability to tweak, diagnose, and defend what you’re selling.

ChatGPT isn’t optimized for breathtaking originality because that’s not its goal. It’s meant to be conversational and approachable, not wild and daring. It’s giving you hamburgers rather than Japanese wagyu sando with white truffle shavings because 90% of the time, that’s what you want.

JR continues:

Ultimately what these models mean is that with the click of a button you can now be just as good as the average writer who posts content to the Internet, and so the old “average” is now the new “zero.” If you wrote at the average level of the Internet in 2022 you now write at the zero level.

That’s a big idea, so let’s turn it over in our hands a bit.

Let’s imagine we can pick something that represents the average quality of English writing on the internet. It might be an article about holiday lobster prices or a piece of Peloton marketing copy.

from yahoo news: Dec. 21—Maria Minella shopped at Schiff's Marketplace on Tuesday night to stock up for an upcoming family tradition. The Madison Twp. resident purchased smelts, scallops and smoked whiting from the Scranton store on North Main Avenue. They were a bit pricier than in years past, but that didn't matter much to her. "We like to do seven fishes for Christmas Eve," she said. "It's special for the holidays, so you pay a little extra to keep up with the family tradition." While prices of some fish are rising, the cost of other traditional Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve staples is dropping, according to area grocers.

screenshot from Peleton blog post: We get it: Staying motivated to work out regularly can be hard. But that’s where an accountability partner comes in. An accountability partner is there to cheer you on and encourage you to keep going, even on the hard days. They’ll drag you out of bed in the morning and keep you focused on your goals. And you’ll return the favor for them, of course—because accountability partners support and lift each other up.   Looking to find an accountability partner of your own? We asked some of our Members to share how they found accountability partners and how that support has helped them achieve their goals.

Could any English speaker write at that level? No.

You probably don’t have to think that hard to come up with several people in your life who can’t write up to the standards of “Yahoo News article” or “Peloton blog post.”

Many folks don’t write, won’t write, can’t write.

In fact, if we want to consider it “median” writing quality rather than “average,” then approximately half the English speakers on the internet couldn’t hit this level of sophistication.

Only now, with tools like ChatGPT, they can. It’s very good at taking awkward, ungrammatical writing and making something decent out of it.

I fed ChatGPT this text —

if youre stove won’t light here’s what you do 1) check that that the gas is on turn the knob do you hear it 2) lisen if it’s clicking that’s the igniter. if it’s not clickign you could light it with a match 3) lift off the burner cover cuz sometimes that the issue 4) try another burner

— with the instruction to “Rewrite this as a good blog post.” Here’s the result:

If Your Stove Won’t Light: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you’re trying to cook a meal and your stove won’t light, it can be frustrating and time-consuming. Here are some steps you can try to troubleshoot the issue:

  1. Check that the gas is on. Turn the knob and listen for the sound of gas flowing. If you don’t hear it, the gas may be turned off or there may be a problem with the gas line.

  2. Listen for the igniter. If you hear a clicking sound, that means the igniter is trying to light the gas. If you don’t hear a clicking sound, you can try lighting the burner with a match.

  3. Lift off the burner cover. Sometimes, food or debris can accumulate underneath the burner cover and prevent the gas from lighting. Removing the cover may resolve the issue.

  4. Try another burner. If all else fails, it’s possible that there is a problem with a specific burner on your stove. Try using a different burner to see if it lights properly.

By following these steps, you should be able to get your stove working again in no time. If the problem persists, it may be a good idea to call a professional for assistance.

Imagine you’re a technician asked to document how a system works. You could describe the steps and let ChatGPT do the writing. Would you still need to proofread it, to make sure it’s not hallucinating something wrong? Absolutely. But most reluctant writers are competent readers. They should be able to spot when it’s gone off track.

Where I think these tools have even more benefit is for people who don’t feel confident in English. Type in your native language and let the AI do its work, translating not just the words but the intent.

Which brings us back to JR’s thesis, that a tool like ChatGPT resets the levels. In a world in which everyone can write at the old “average” level, what happens?

I’m not sure. There’s not a great comparison in recent human history. Calculators enabled ordinary people to do a lot more number-crunching, but were they transformative? (For the human calculators of Hidden Figures, perhaps so.)

A world filled with AI-polished text might push us in unexpected directions. To err is human, and we might find language incorporating mistakes to porve a hooman wrote it. Or we might use these tools like Instagram filters to make us look like someone we aspire to be.

Personally, I don’t think screenwriters are particularly endangered, at least not in the short term. Future tools may be trained and tuned for scriptwriting, but they’ll be working off a corpus of all the screenplays that have come before. And that’s how it’s always been.

JR notes:

All writers are competing against the cumulative past of our species and its semi-automatic weapons of creative destruction, and are competing to stand out from an average defined over the past couple of decades or so.[…] Writers should only worry about automated writers as much as they are already worried about the agglomerated capacity and output of our species up until the present moment, which, eh, we can do better.

  1. The prompt is “Give me a plot summary for a Knives Out set in space.” ↩
  2. Prompt: “Write me a scene from this movie where Blanc first meets Marta, in screenplay format.” ↩

Pour one out for “Hold my beer”

March 9, 2017 Hive Mind, Words on the page

Here’s a delightful structure of Twitter joke that is getting awfully clammy:

BRITAIN: Brexit is the stupidest, most self-destructive act a country could undertake.
USA: Hold my beer.

— Brian Pedaci (@bpedaci) November 9, 2016

Me: you can't have a tornado, be 70 degrees and snow all in one week.

Missouri: Hold my beer.

— John Oliver (@John_oliver21) March 8, 2017

GOP Donor 1: “I just really want to murder poor people.”
GOP Donor 2: “But can we be made richer in the process?”
Paul Ryan: “Hold my beer."

— ❄️ Ashley Lynch ❄️ (@ashleylynch) March 8, 2017

GOP: we haven't said anything mind-numbingly stupid in 24 hours

Ben Carson: HOLD. MY. BEER.

— Young Salad (@houstonbred) March 6, 2017

I haven’t done meaningful forensics on “hold my beer,” but my best guess is that the phrase was originally used as setup rather than punchline.

That’s how the Twitter account @HoldThisBeer uses it:

Hold my beer while I do tricks on two skateboards at once pic.twitter.com/biyZCL7ZZ2

— Hold My Beer (@HoldThisBeer) December 14, 2016

Similarly, this BuzzFeed article from 2014 uses “hold my beer” as context for foolhardy fails. That’s also how you see it used on r/holdmybeer.

In this format, “hold my beer” is the frame, not the art.

But it’s as a punchline that “hold my beer” really comes into its own.

Here’s the generic structure:

SPEAKER A: There’s no way to top this outrageous thing I said or did. SPEAKER B: Hold my beer.

Since it’s destined to die from overuse, let’s look into how it works.

Speaker A has to be well-known — at least to the target audience. If we don’t recognize the name, the rest of the joke won’t make sense. In some cases, a headline takes the place of Speaker A.

"The Patriots achieved the greatest comeback of all time"

Barcelona: "Hold my beer"

— The Soccer Life (@TheSCRLife) March 8, 2017

The thing Speaker A did or said needs to be plausible, with bonus points for recent. There can’t be anything strained about the setup.

Speaker B needs to be recognizable. As with Speaker A, the joke only works if you know who Speaker B is. Either the speaker is already famous, or is temporarily famous because of recent events. The speaker can also be the tweeter:

Friend: Dude, she's lovely, sweet, sexy, smart, funny, and rich. No way you can possibly fuck up this one, congrats bro.

Me: Hold my beer.

— Ike Davis (@IkeDavis10028) March 8, 2017

Speaker B either just did something foolish, or can be imagined doing something foolish. To me, this is one of the most interesting aspects of this structure: it works both speculatively or retroactively. But like all things Twitter, the time horizon is very short. It’s hard to imagine the joke working more than a day or two after the inciting event.

When you encounter failed “hold my beer” tweets — and trust me, I found a lot of them — it’s usually because the writer missed one of these four important aspects.

Life after beer

The carcass of a dead meme can provide home for other jokes that subvert the expected payoff:

GF: I'm sick of people barking patriarchal instructions at me.

Me: Hold my beer.

— Tom Neenan (@TNeenan) January 26, 2017

Ohio State: we're bad
Rutgers: hold my beer
Ohio State: no
Rutgers: please
Ohio State: no
Rutgers: but we're Rutgers
Ohio State: NOT TONIGHT

— Yeezmar Hallarsan (@ramzy) March 9, 2017

And it’s worth paying attention to the variant forms that continue to chug along, such as “hold my drink” and “hold my earrings.”

In the end, I think “hold my beer” has been a great joke structure for a time that feels bonkers. Every day as we scroll through Twitter, we silently ask ourselves, “Wow, could it get any crazier?”

Hold my beer.

Podcaster as cult leader

April 21, 2015 Hive Mind, Psych 101

In a post that has since been taken down, Danny Manus warned that screenwriters are unwittingly being drawn into cults:

To be honest, I’m not even sure the professionals themselves are aware of their Jim Jonesy behavior and what type of insulated, self-aggrandizing, arrogant dome of cynicism and power they are creating. So, in hopes that there is still time to save others from drinking the Kool-Aid, and as a public service to inform those unknowingly responsible, here are some ways to know if you’re leading a cult.

…

– You cast aspersions on outside computer programs or software your followers may use (…and then launch your own and charge for it).

– You advise your followers that they need to move closer to you, and can only truly be part of your world if they are living nearby in the same town.

– You create your own terminology for words and concepts that don’t require new terminology (or perhaps your own FONT because the font others use aren’t good enough for you?).

While the first bullet point could apply to Marco Arment, I have a strong hunch that Manus is mostly referring to me and Craig Mazin, and our Scriptnotes podcast.

If he’s calling me a cult leader, he’s not altogether wrong.

By these standards, most popular podcasters are cult leaders.

Sound of My Voice

Here’s the thing: I’m fascinated by cults. I read books about Jonestown. I watch movies like Martha Marcy May Marlene. I wrote a pilot for Fox about an apocalyptic cult in the Santa Ynez Valley.

I know cults, and podcasts are inherently kind of culty.

Week after week, you’re hearing the same voices talking in your head about the same topics. You begin to learn the hosts’ quirks, opinions and predilections. They feel like friends even though they’re strangers.1

Podcasts never abandon you. They are with you when you’re alone in the car, or riding the train, or washing dishes. They take you out of the tedium of the moment and engage you in something more interesting.

Podcasts offer secret knowledge. Anyone can watch The Daily Show, but to listen to a podcast you have to know it exists. You have to seek it out. You have a source of information almost no one else in the world does.

Some podcasts even provide a special wardrobe, say, a t-shirt.

Yet there are some significant barriers to podcasts becoming full-on cults.

For starters, listening to a podcast is a solo experience, while cults are inherently group activities. Social media can get you part of the way — but you’d want to do some live shows so your fans can interact with each other.

Second, the opt-out is way too easy. True cults have ways to punish apostasy. With podcasts, you can simply stop listening, or delete the show from your podcasting app. No one is going to know that you bailed.2

Cult-like isn’t the same as cult

I don’t believe podcasters are cult leaders in the sense of Jim Jones. Manus is comparing the murder of 913 men, women and children to a few mean Facebook comments.

A podcast like Scriptnotes — or The Talk Show, or Serial, or the Slate Political Gabfest — does share some characteristics with a cult. It has charismatic leaders voicing an opinion. It singles out heroes and villains. Just like Apple and Android, a podcast can attract fans and fanatics.

Should podcasters be aware of the dangers of cult-like behavior? Absolutely. So should bloggers, tweeters, Viners and YouTubers. Any time you have a crowd, you have to consider responsible crowd management.

Manus writes:

Those who spout off about how THERE ARE NO RULES – but then continue to tell you exactly what to believe and think and how to act and who to do business with – are either wildly hypocritical, or completely oblivious.

I don’t think Craig and I are hypocritical or oblivious. We’re mindful of our responsibility to both our audience and the industry, and always aim to be inclusive rather than isolationist. If we’re cult leaders, we suck at it.

But I guess that’s what a modern cult leader would say.

  1. Meeting people in person, I’ve experienced both sides of this asymmetric familiarity. It’s weird both ways. ↩
  2. I’ve stopped listening to several of my friends’ podcasts. No, not yours. Another friend’s. ↩

Rude Awakenings

March 11, 2015 Directors, Genres, Hive Mind

As longtime readers know, I love me a supercut. This one by Roman Holiday explores the trope of characters sitting up in bed after a nightmare:


I love how the camera circles from left to right. I love that we don’t hear the screams. Stripped of context, it becomes clear what an artificial cinematic construct the wake-scream (or the sweaty wake-gasp) really is. Most people will never experience this kind of event in real life.

And yet: Movies are about extraordinary circumstances. Movies involve heroes taking a journey they’ll take exactly once. So on some level, the wake-scream is less a cliché than a signifier that yup, we’re in a movie, and we are headed on a specific kind of ride. That’s probably why we see them in the first act and not the third.

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