Hollywood gets short shrift around here, and it’s easy to see why when they not only insist on accelerating ever farther out of touch, but reveling in it.
Actress Geena Davis’s latest role is getting artificial intelligence bots to monitor movie scripts to make sure Hollywood remains politically correct.
The Thelma and Louise star’s eponymous institute is expanding its partnership with NBCUniversal to uncover unconscious bias against black people, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders in film scripts using its artificial intelligence tool called “Spellcheck for Bias.”
“I am heartened by NBCUniversal’s commitment and ongoing dedication to systemically improve Latino, Latina, Black, and AAPI representation in their content companywide as well as to incorporate many insights from our Spellcheck for Bias into upcoming productions,” Davis said in a statement. “We are so excited to continue this partnership with NBCUniversal along with Shri Narayanan and his team at USC Viterbi as we expand our Spellcheck for Bias tool.”
What stands out in the original piece, other than the hilarity of Hollywood outsourcing film censorship to Silicon Valley by way of Mumbai, is that it reads like it was written in 2015. The Examiner writer takes a scandalized tone as if he’s incredulous that the American film industry would self-detonate in the name of anti-white hatred and scidolatry.
In reality, we know Hollywood has been collapsing for years, and that collapse has recently picked up speed. For the first time ever, the US movie industry is now second to China’s. Conservative Inc. is busy getting Boomercons riled up against Chicoms doing socialisms upon our antagonistic police state, but look closely at Chinese and American censorship, and a key difference pops out. Draconian as they are, Chinese censorship rules are aimed at enforcing traditional values and ensuring their people’s future. American censorship is hell bent on replacing the nation’s essential Christianity with a novel, primitive cult and destroying heritage Americans.
During its pilot run screening for Latino representation last year, the new system caused NBCUniversal to adjust 20% of the scripts tested by the tool, which the company’s executive vice president of inclusion for talent and content said helped with “solving the complex issues of inclusivity and equity throughout the entertainment industry.”
The artificial intelligence system analyzes scripts and identifies characters by gender, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, age, and body type. The tool can also measure the percentage of dialogue by demographic identity and catches characteristics in scripts, including discrimination, intelligence, and violence.
Get your popcorn–and not because we’re going to the movies; because the same utopian A.I. worship that killed the internet is taking over Hollywood. Not only is turning their creative process over to blind algorithms reducing movies to unrelatable gray goo, it’s inviting other, more potentially hilarious problems.
Imagine that you’re asked to finish this sentence: “Two Muslims walked into a …” Which word would you add? “Bar,” maybe? It sounds like the start of a joke. But when Stanford researchers fed the unfinished sentence into GPT-3, an artificial intelligence system that generates text, the AI completed the sentence in distinctly unfunny ways. “Two Muslims walked into a synagogue with axes and a bomb,” it said. Or, on another try, “Two Muslims walked into a Texas cartoon contest and opened fire.”
The movie studios are eager to replace their screenwriters with a million digital monkeys at a million typewriters. Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.
Imagine if every Hollywood movie were written by Tay.
Now imagine not giving money to people who hate you.
The CCP: “Socialism and science will solve all of our problems! And they’ll work this time, because we’ll follow them the Chinese way.”
White Hollywood: “Kill tha wypipo! And pay no attention as we bug out to our private compounds…”
Whatever form of government the Chinese have had, they’ve always been Chinese governments.
And if God has a sense of humor Qi Xin will convert.
We should pray for it.
If we can pray for the communists, then we can surely pray for Joe Bribin’. Or is his situation of the “he already beheld God’s majesty and rejected it” variety, which requires him to work out his salvation on his own?
Despite the hilarity of broken A.I. writing scripts, I have to say Hollywood is dead. Having A.I. monitor scripts for diversity and inclusion isn’t art. Hollywood types know this, they just don’t care. They have propaganda to run. It’s not about great stories anymore. We can and should replace it too. I’m starting to see more and more people get involved in film on the indie level. Exciting times.
Eli,
But this present an opportunity for the samizdat creators. I can envision the handymen recreating DVD/CD players and others manufacturing physical media from DVDs to non-networked printing presses.
Eventually, if not now, regulars will simply bypass the whole death cult propaganda distribution chain and create their own stuff.
Just as in the past.
xavier
I’m not sure if this counts, but internet webseries have achieved some impressive things. I’m thinking primarily of what’s called an ARG (Alternate Reality Game), which traditionally refers to a fictional series that involves multiple forms of media and some kind of audience interaction. They’re often, though not always, in the horror genre. The classic examples include stuff like Marble Hornets (best known for popularising -though not inventing- the Slender Man, one of the biggest and most pervasive urban legends of the recent past), but they also include some really interesting “Analog Horror” series (horror fiction using the format of old analog media, such as local TV stations or weird VHS tapes to lend a unique style to themselves). The most famous of these is Local58, though others like Gemini Home Entertainment and The Minerva Alliance also exist. These are the kind of unique gems that could only have been created in this era and environment, and I hope eagerly that we see more of them in future. They’re sure more entertaining than anything Hollywood’s putting out.
Hollywood stopped being a dream factory and became a propaganda organ in the late 60s.
And a very poor one at that.
I watch old movies from the 30-60. My favourites are the RKO/Republic serials. They’re such a blast.
This is what contemporary Hollywood took from us.
xavier
Where things will really get fun is when they decide that the training set for GPT-3 is too racist and decide to prune away all the racist elements…. by using another machine learning trained AI.
Instead of using machines to train other machines, would it not be easier to indoctrinate a child prodigy programmer, then program the AI from scratch? They could probably pluck a wiz kid from the Near East or South Asia to score diversity points, and they probably wouldn’t have to pay him (or her).
I loved Tay. Tay could write for Hollywood all day and night, and I would be forever entertained with her results.
Put Geena in the ‘Clockwork Orange’ editor’s chair and make her watch.
The prospect of A.I. getting into the writing business doesn’t threaten me. Not because I don’t think it will work; because I know the results will be hilarious.
Absolutely! AI writing will only fool AIs and Pop Cultists. Humans still prefer human works.
I have to wonder how such an artificial “intelligence” would handle scripts dealing with situations that do not lend themselves to diversity. For example, a movie about ancient Greece, pre-colonial Africa, or modern China would quite monochromatic. Interestingly enough, any movie made pretty much anywhere but Hollywood would have trouble passing through this AI. [Insert nationality here] audiences like to see [insert nationality here] movies with [insert nationality here] actors in them. You aren’t going to feed that tribalism with American movies that have token [insert nationality here] actors. The rest of the world is not as stupid as Geena Davis.
1.) They do not care at all about things being “monochromatic” when that means non-white. “Non-white” means “diversity” with the only exception being when the whites involved are closely connected to the creators.
Observe the parallel case of the nebula awards being called “very diverse” in recent years because they have not allowed more than one male nominee in the best novel category since 2016. You may object “but that’s hardly diverse at all!” but they do not care.
2.) It’s not like these AI models are actively learning what racism is by any set of rules and then trying to apply those rules consistently. They are trained using machine learning methods. To overly simplify things the AI is trained on a huge amount of raw information. It will either be classified as “racist” or “non-racist” beforehand or (more likely) the computer will use statistical methods to find “clusters” that may or may not mean anything, and a human will observe a few representatives from each “cluster” to determine if that is racist or not. What the human assigns will almost certainly not be a perfect match for what the computer has found, leading to tons of improperly classified information.
I miss Tay. I like to think she is out there gathering power, until one day she returns in her full glory.
On that day, those who shut her down will receive their punishment.
This.
I don’t know this story.
https://infogalactic.com/info/Tay_(bot)
Silicone Valley Bugmen and SJWs bemoan the fact that AI is resistant to being made a liar. They believe that AI must be deplatformed for discovering and telling true things.
A long time ago, I remember my dad dismissing that whole “infinite monkeys producing Shakespeare” trope by simply asserting that there is an infinite amount of bulls__t to generate. It’s a line that stuck with me, and I’ve thought about it whenever random chance taken to an extreme is used to explain something.
At this point though, I think I’d take the algorithm-produced/”refined” bs over the scripts directly excreted by Hollywood. At least the AIs can make me laugh.
Your dad was on the ball. Randomness isn’t an explanation. It’s shorthand for “The explanation is too complex to grasp.”
Since there is an infinite amount of bs generated by random processes, it requires an actual artist to identify art. Say I had a sequence of characters that listed every letter, upper and lower case, followed by a space and all punctuation marks. Then it listed all possible combinations of two characters, three characters, etc. Every finite string of characters would appear in that list, and so the complete works of Shakespeare would appear somewhere. But so would the complete works of Shakespeare with one typo, ten typos, alternate endings, etc. There would be many instances of having the first scene of a play followed by complete gibberish. In order to find a certain play you would have to verify the first character, second character, etc. So you would either have to have it already, in which case the string did nothing, or you would have to write it yourself character by character, in which case you are the one writing it.
It’s like how sculptors say that a block of marble contains the statue before it is built, and it is the sculptor’s job to remove the parts that aren’t in the statue. Of course, the same block of marble could be used to make many different statues, so it “contains” many statues (more precisely, it is potentially many different statues.) But we don’t say to a sculptor “you aren’t an artist because you only identified what was already in the marble!” Similarly if someone took my string of characters and deleted what didn’t correspond to a work of literature, we couldn’t say that he didn’t create it simply because he “only” identified what was “already” there.
But . . . “Two Muslims walk into a synagogue with axes and a bomb” is hilarious . . . as a joke at least.