from Hacker News

A full episode of South Park generated by AI

by gdcohen on 7/19/23, 8:17 PM with 75 comments

  • by CSMastermind on 7/19/23, 10:15 PM

    Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36782314

    I'll readd my comment from that thread:

    This isn't AI generated it was created with some assistance from AI.

    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.

    The backgrounds were AI generated in collaboration with humans iterating on the prompt and hand selecting the results. The characters were animated traditionally including the intro.

  • by cwkoss on 7/19/23, 10:59 PM

    Weird watching south park with zero humor in it.

    Its giving 'pokemon go to the polls' energy - people using a random pop culture reference to flaccidly try to promote their ideological preference.

    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.

    Here's an example of what AI can actually do - full synthesis of script, visuals and audio. It is incoherent but also strangely unsettling: https://www.tiktok.com/@never_ever_never_land/video/72531490...

  • by Imnimo on 7/19/23, 10:34 PM

    This paper rings a lot of alarm bells for me. It's rambling, written in a very odd style, and contains a lot of useless figures. Is this one of those fake paper pranks or something?

  • by all2 on 7/19/23, 9:55 PM

    There's a dead comment here that mentions the political correctness of the model used to generate the episode. I think this is valid criticism, especially because efforts to "clean" training data of limiting ideologies has shown some fruit.

  • by binkHN on 7/19/23, 10:24 PM

    Oh dear. I see a wave of horrible AI-generated cartoon videos targeting kids coming to a YouTube near you soon…

  • by xivzgrev on 7/19/23, 10:05 PM

    Wow that’s actually better than I expected. The Seinfeld show was awkward and clearly AI.

    The scene with the pig was actually funny - the AI only tells racist jokes because it’s trained on the internet.

    Assuming AI came up with that, that’s amazing

  • by theptip on 7/20/23, 1:02 AM

    > The Slot Machine Effect refers to a scenario where the generation of AI-produced content feels more like a random game of chance rather than a deliberate creative process. This is due to the often unpredictable and instantaneous nature of the generation process. Current off-the-shelf generative AI systems do not support or encourage multiple creative evaluation steps in context of a long-term creative goal

    I’m really interested to see the new UIs we come up for this. Rather than a sequential conversation, perhaps more like a tree of possible dialogs/scenes.

  • by hotdogscout on 7/19/23, 9:26 PM

    GPT-4 is too politically correct to emulate South Park and it shows.

  • by RyanAdamas on 7/19/23, 8:31 PM

    So much for the writers strike; also love how Cartman's voice is becoming more like the others given AI has to track Parker's voice changes over the years.

  • by mattl on 7/19/23, 9:26 PM

  • by demaga on 7/20/23, 7:40 AM

    It would be OK-ish if it was purely AI-generated. But given how much manual effort it took to create this, it is not that impressive.

  • by mvdtnz on 7/20/23, 8:33 AM

    I don't think writers have much to worry about for a long long time. Nor animators.

  • by yardshop on 7/19/23, 11:00 PM

    If it gets any better, then Matt and Trey can really say: Dey dook rr jerbs!!

  • by SV_BubbleTime on 7/20/23, 12:13 AM

    IDK about anything else, but Mett Porker is pretty damn funny.

  • by Dwedit on 7/20/23, 3:35 AM

    AI Cartman sounds absolutely nothing like Cartman.

  • by stevefan1999 on 7/20/23, 10:14 AM

    My childhood relived :)

  • by htk on 7/20/23, 9:27 PM

    Misleading title.