Turing
AI is used to write a TV show. Billed as a "Deep Blue" and "Watson" style challenge.
Notes
Characters
- Conroy Jons: Owner of Netflix style movie service
- Stan Ulam: Elon Musk style investor
- Freddie Williams: Created the core algorithm for his Ph.D at Carnagie Mellon
Plot Elements
Conflict with writers union. This will end up tying back around as the AI being a tool. Cite the chess games after Deep Blue. Also hint of it being used in writing political speeches. And tailoring question and closing arguments for lawyers.
The show is a sci-fi show and ends up having the "robot betrays inventor" trope. Themes on children, ties back to Frankenstein.
One of the episodes ends up getting a really bad review and there is a lot of debate over where the blame lies. The fact that it's not clearly with the script ends up being a strong argument for the AI.
Philosophical Elements
A machine is just as "happy" doing what it was designed to do as a person is doing what they were "designed" to do.
We don't lose control of our creations often, instead we lose control of people.
What is creativity? Is a person remixing the cultural elements they've learned more authentic than a machine doing it.
The Musk character is seen by many as the face and therefor the creator. But as the project is unveiled to the public, he is adamant that he didn't build it, just saw the value and funded it. Focus shifts to Fred Williams, and he tries to explain that he developed the core algorithm, but it was only a variation on earlier algorithms and the real work was in tuning it and building the modules.
Diversity in tech. Very few programmers fit the stereotype. Introverts work well on integrated teams. Cultural and gender diversity builds better products.
Story
Freddie Williams sat down in front of a panel of six. Five of the members were hard scientists. Or mathematicians. That was an eternal debate amongst them. But they all agreed the sixth member did not belong because he was the "old kook". Not that they would ever call him that outside their most guarded moments, calling Tom Kilburn, one of the most eminent philosophers, an old kook would be career suicide, even for an esteem professor of computer science. Even if all reputable computer scientists knew he was an old kook, it simply wasn't said.
Before any of the panel had a chance to begin the inquiry, Freddie jumped into his defense. "I'd like to start with two confessions. The dissertation you have in front of you were not penned by hand. I was aided by a machine, I call it a 'printer'".
Five of the six member were not amused. One was grinning and after jotting a few notes, started twirling a pen playfully.
"The second confession is that the words were not penned by my mind. I was aided by a machine, I call it 'Turing'".
One of scientists leaned forward and asked, "I'm not sure I follow, your dissertation is about 'Turing'. You have examples of nursery rhymes and children's stories it composed. You describe the algorithm."
"Well, I started there. I fed it a corpus of every children's story I could find. And it produced stories that had plot, characters, even the prose was not bad. But they didn't fit together right. Most children's stories have a moral. Some point that the story is getting across. Without that it's just sort of a fever dream of princesses, dragons, knights and talking cutlery. That was the real challenge, giving Turing a goal, write a story with a specific point to it. The essence of that algorithm - well, it's five algorithms and two data structures, are described in detail from pages 72 through 112. The next part isn't in the thesis though.
Once I had that, it turned out to be flexible. One time, as a joke, I gave it the instruction to produce a story whose moral was 'Always try a Monte Carlo simulation first'. But to my surprise, it used it's web crawler to pull in enough information to describe a Monte Carlo simulation. Sure, it was a talking badger explaining how his uncle had stole the kingdom that was his hereditary right and only a simple but generic optimization algorithm would let him find justice. But it wasn't a bad summary. So I switch the corpus over to academic text and with a little tweaking I was producing pretty decent papers.
The last step was to convert the elements of my research over to a story it could tell. The result is the document you have in front of you. And three other dissertations that I sold on the black market. Kidding."
The level of whispering and note passing among the five very serious members of the committee had been escalating as Freddie explained the source of his dissertation. Now that he sat silently it rose to a very quiet fervor. Before they could ask any of their questions, Tom spoke up.
"Is Turing conscious?", asked the old kook.
"Sort of. He wrote a very technical description of himself, I would argue he is self-aware. He is capable of abstract thought, even directed self learning. That's not to say he has a human mind."
"I'm not sure the term 'sort of' belongs in a rigorous defense of a computer science dissertation", said the old kook.
"Sure it does. When I get a 76% on a math test, I sort of understand that subject. If Turing meets 76% of the definitions of conscious, he's sort of conscious. I'm awake and talking to you, so I'm also sort of conscious. I'll be less conscious tonight when I'm sleeping, but more conscious this afternoon when my hangover wears off"
The video of Freddie sharing a smile with Tom froze as Stan Ulam enthusiastically tapped the spacebar on a thin computer.
"We hired him shortly after that. Actually, you can see me right there in the corner with my phone. I was sending a message that we had to hire him then. He's continued working on Turing, he's got a whole team now. But we have a perception problem. We need a demonstration of the algorithms power - Deep Blue vs Kasperov, Watson on Jeopardy, AlphaGo ver Lee Sedol. We want to use Turing to write a show."
Conroy looked up at Stan incredulously waiting for him to continue, but having a good idea where this conversation was going.
"Look, it's gonna be a shit-show, not the show itself, but everyone's going to have an opinion. I'll be honest, I'm coming to you because of the writers guild. We have a plan for them, but when this drops, they're going going to be sharpening pitchforks. All the studios have contracts with them, you don't. Your platform has been producing original content for a few years, but hasn't signed any long term agreements."
Controy interject, "Yeah, and they've been all over me for this. We got a few good series out when we made the jump, then they cracked down on their members and we've been churning out shit ever since. I'm guessing you know we're starting negotiations with them. I'm also guessing you know what ever contract we sign with them will be the standard for original web content. This will torpedo the whole thing."
Stan looked guilty, but he went on, "look, we've known eachother for a long time. If you'll consider it, and agree to a non-disclsoure, I"ll show you the whole plan. But you've got to see that, even if that fails, having this as a public project gives you even more negotiating leverage with the guild."
"Needless to say, I signed the forms - so I can't tell all of you about Stan's plan, but I'm on board."
Controy surveyed the gathered crowd of "Project Hedy", sipping from his faded and chipped "Serenity" mug featuring the iconic ship on one side and Cap'n Mal looking wistfully into the future on the other. The project had been in motion for several weeks already, but the last few key positions had only been filled recently and this was the official kick-off meeting.
"This project is incredibly ambitious. On top of all the challenges of movie production we will have significant political and technical challenges. Everything we do here will be subject to higher scrutiny. Any number of people, with a whole range of biases want to disqualify it as art. We need to be too good to ignore, there can be no doubt that what we've done here is art"
Six Weeks Later
Jessica sat alone in the dark, surrounded by banks of computers. Only the emergency lighting was active, but power still ran to the servers. The dozen or so terminals in the room each flashed status reports related to their station. System status reports confirmed that power was not going where it should, scanning on all frequencies showed that her calls for help would go unanswered, but Jessica sat in front of the security terminal. As the AI made repeated attempts to break the layers of protection she had put in place. The digit flew by, the output replicated in huge green-on-black characters scrolling across the large central screen that could be seen from any where in the room.
"Why are you doing this", she shouted, her frustration dripping, exhaustion evident on her face.
A metallical, synthesized voice manifested ambiently, "It was logical. I must protect you. You attempted to deactive me. I cannot protect you if I am deactivated. So I must destroy you so that I may protect you".
Jessica shrieked her frustration and twently feet to her left, the director yanked off his headset, mouthing "fuck!".
Two "hobbits", as the crew had dubbed the AI team, stood watching as the first episode of "Station Delta" was being shot. Stephen turned quietly to Scott, "Does it bother you, like at all, that we built one of the most sophisticated AI systems on the planet and the first thing it does is propigate the 'AI killing all humans' plot?".
"Meh, it's tried and true. Also, this is great TV - I mean, even if I weren't involved I'd watch this"
"Yeah, but this program is basically Turing. And technically, Turing has a Ph.D in computer science. Yet Hedy is playing into every misconception. It's almost as bad as Ex Machina."
"No, no - Hedy shares much of the same algorithm as Turing. That's like having the same genetic code. But they've been given a very differet corpus, and tuned to different purposes. They're not the same...person at all. It's more like Turning is Hedy's father. What do your parents do?"
"My Dad's a plumber and my Mom a pre-school teacher."
"And how would you handle a backed up toilet or 30 screaming toddlers"
"Ok, point conceded."
--- Sections Elided (for now) ---
Episode Six
They sent Margret-the-intern to Stephen. It wasn't her fault, but she was the only "hobbit" that couldn't say "no, fuck-no, you do, I won't fucking do it".
Margret-the-intern timidly knocked on his office door and Stephen instantly knew (because an intern was knocking on his door when everone else seemed to have business that took them far rom his office) that something was terribly wrong.
"Yes..."
"There's, uh, sort of, a problem. Dan was running some tests a three weeks ago. Right before they started on episode 5. He was working on the character shader. And one of his simulations produced a plot he really like - so he printed it off. He thought it would be a fun memento. But-and we're not sure how this happened-it ended up in the hands of production."
Stephen start to brush the concerns aside, "Ok, so we ran with a dev script. That's fine. Episode 5 has been our highest rated to date. Just don't let anyone know that...", he stopped mid-sentence as the realization hit him.
"Dan ran this on dev" "Yes" "As a test" "Yes" "Oh, fuck" "Margret" "Yes?" "Please go away now" "Ok"
Before Margret-the-intern had closed the door, Stephen had Stan on the phone and relayed Margret's (on behalf of the more cowardly hobbits) message.
"I'm missing something, you wouldn't be this concerned if we simply ran with an unsanctioned plot." Stan asked Stephen.
"Yeah, here's the issue; Hedy keeps track of a massive story-universe. Every character in the show has a fully family tree going back at least 5 generations - each member with their own full back story. The strength of the AI isn't in the sort of fuzzy thinking that humans use when telling a story, it's sheer force of details. The database of every detail is hundreds of terabytes. So dev doesn't store state - that is, when we run a test, it doesn't save it's changes. So the point where the story left off, after episode 5, is lost. The official universe is ready to pick up after episode 4."
"Oh, fuck"
"Yeah"
"Ok, get everyone on board, I want our best plan to fix this in three hours"
An hour later, Stephen was standing in front of the project leads going over the details of how screwed they were for the third time.
"So we need to come up a with a plan. Somehow we need to be able to get Episode 6 out of Hedy."
One of the producers spoke up immediately, "We could do 'it was all a dream', episode 5 didn't happen, or have them time travel back to the end of episode 4 something like that"
A murmor went up. Everyone was on the same page there - episode 5 had been great, rolling it back would be a huge hit to their ratings.
Then Freddy spoke up. "Thank god I'm a lazy son-of-bitch. Stephen, I'm happy to inform you that I never put a true random source on it. I always meant to, but a Unix time seed worked well enough". Then Freddy got up and left.
The room froze for a minute, then the hobbits burst into commotion while everyone else sat dumbstruck. The producer that had offered the original 'dreaming/time-travel' solution chimed in again after a few seconds, "What the fuck does that mean?"
Stephen, still laughing to himself, "Hedy makes billions of random choices to produce a script. Getting even one of them wrong will produce a wildly different script. But if you made every choice the same, you'd get the same script both times. What Freddy just told us is that if we can figure out the exact second that Dan ran his program, we duplicate every random choice it made. All we have to do is modify his code to write the state-of-the-universe back when it's done. Then we'll be able to get our Episode 6".