Artificial Intelligence and Creative Feedback Loops

When I told my friend Peter Sarkisian that DreamStudio AI had released a new AI-powered text-to-image generator, he dove in with a degree of obsession common to artists. Within 24 hours, Peter had produced dozens of gorgeous H.R. Giger style illustrations depicting post-apocalyptic machines in alien landscapes. Many of these could have been mistaken for professional storyboard frames, rendered in the process of making a science fiction movie.

I wondered to myself, what if we asked an AI to write a screenplay for one of these images?

My curiosity was well-timed. A few months ago, over 1,000 volunteers completed BLOOM, the most ambitious open science Large Language Model completed to date. Researchers fed a vast sample text comprised of 46 natural languages and 16 programming languages into a supercomputer in the outskirts of Paris. After crunching the data non-stop for 117 days, 176 billion language parameters were successfully nestled into a neural network. The result? An AI that can generate convincingly human-like text to complete any prompt.

My first experiments were fairly encouraging. For example, feeding BLOOM this prompt:

The funniest joke I ever heard about naked mole rats goes like this:

... resulted in something that had at least a passing semblance of humor:

The funniest joke I ever heard about naked mole rats goes like this: Two naked mole rats walk into a bar, the bartender asks, "What'll it be?" One mole rat says, "More gin, please." The other mole rat says, "Water." The bartender says, "What?" The mole rat answers, "I couldn't hear you over the splash!”

Asking BLOOM To Write a Script

Referring back to Peter's artwork, I supplied BLOOM with my own description of the image, and two lines of dialogue to suggest the format of a film script:

A mechanical dinosaur towers over an apocalyptic landscape. It lumbers over inhospitable canyons of dust and lava. We hear voices coming over the radio:

MAN'S VOICE: Let's not get too close to that thing.

WOMAN'S VOICE: But we have to get close if we want to destroy it.

BLOOM Continues...

It's the only way.

We cut to a dramatic scene:

PHYSICIST's VOICE: This stuff looks a lot like Stone Age technology. This mechanical dinosaur's... this dinosaur robot's... operated by rotors that must be made of ferromagnetic metal.

JAMES's VOICE: It's like somebody used the technologies that caused the great extinction to build this mechanical dinosaur.

It was engineered by the ancient aliens to hunt dinosaurs, like a predator that's been brought back to life.

We've found the rotors.

They're made of ferromagnetic metal, and there's enough of it to have made one, maybe two predators.

But as we approach to destroy the beast, its voice calls:

MAN'S VOICE: To the modern predator of Earth, I am the machine called the Destroyer. Walk softly and carry a big one. They'll be back.

The radio crackles again:

MAN'S VOICE: They may have scattered to the winds, but they have left a few eggs.

You must destroy the eggs, if you are to stop them.

So we do, destroying the eggs and killing the Destroyer. But our plan is ruined. The tech didn't just raise the beast; it created generations of survivors, who are just waiting for a new chance to rise again.

As James suggests, one way this could happen is if the Destroyer wasn't fully controlled by its command computer, but instead used an AI that was able to modify itself and its surroundings through trial and error. In our first fight, the AI may have just run into an obstacle (like metal armor) and adapted. Then, the next time, it may have evolved to deal with this threat.

Over time, the AI could grow more and more powerful, and would likely begin repairing its body and upgrading its weapons and abilities, just like any other creature. It could even preserve the memory of past fights and incorporate that knowledge in its programming. Eventually, it would be able to hide from us in its metallic shell, and when we destroyed it, it would leave behind a legion of eggs, each one a fully armed and developed machine with a new evolutionary move up its sleeve...

The Future Cinematheque

In my estimation, BLOOM's initial attempt at scriptwriting was surprisingly coherent. I felt the beginnings of a story stirring. But had I continued to mash on the "generate text" button, the AI would certainly have veered off track. In several of my experiments, the text engine got stuck in hilarious feedback loops like this:

Basically I'm looking for anything that could give a fish the ability variety personality gospel dancer gospel dancer gospel dancer gospel dancer gospel dancer gospel dancer gospel dancer gospel dancer gospel dancer gospel dancer gospel dancer gospel dancer ...

Technological hiccups like this offer a measure of relief. They suggest to us that, for the time being, certain realms of human creativity remain out of bounds for our nascent AIs.

But do you remember how text-to-image generators such as DALL-E caught us off guard with their apparently sudden ability to create frame-worthy illustrations and photographs? There may come a day when we are surprised to find ourselves bemused and bewitched, leaning back to watch a feature length film whose camera work, characters, scripts and music were born from just this:

A mechanical dinosaur towers over an apocalyptic landscape. It lumbers over inhospitable canyons of dust and lava. We hear voices coming over the radio...