[HN Gopher] An AI generated, never-ending discussion between Wer...
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An AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and
Slavoj ZIzek
Author : hrbf
Score : 339 points
Date : 2022-11-02 15:21 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (infiniteconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (infiniteconversation.com)
| imbnwa wrote:
| They don't make Europeans like these guys anymore, more than
| happy to seem encased in AI immortality however incoherent
| tasubotadas wrote:
| This really shows that there is no actually useful substance in
| their talks.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| It would def be hard to pick out the AI generated paragraphs
| versus real ones.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Data science is a complicated profession, wouldn't you agree?
| shimonabi wrote:
| You must add some Judith Butler and Peter Sloderdijk quotes and
| some Yugoslav army jokes.
|
| This AI is far too coherent for Zizek.
| jamez wrote:
| Hi there! "Author" here - glad to see this picking up. This was a
| fascinating project to work on and I learned a ton in the
| process. As it's often the case, I would do a lot of things
| differently if I were starting from scratch today.
| nortonham wrote:
| how did you not go insane working on this?!
| jamez wrote:
| One of the guiding lights at the very beginning of this
| project was the question: "who would I never get tired of
| listening to?"
| YossarianFrPrez wrote:
| This is incredible! I've sent it to several people already. Is
| there any chance you could provide more details as to the tech
| stack / training / technical setup?
| jamez wrote:
| Thanks for asking, I think I'll do a write up later this
| week. Let me know if you have any specific question.
| nortonham wrote:
| oh and zizek needs more sniffles lol
| jamez wrote:
| The main issue is that there was no sniffling symbol in the
| transcript. And the generated text wouldn't contain it
| either, because (thankfully) they are pruned out of written
| interviews that I used to train the model.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation. I had some assumptions but
| wasn't totally sure how this was trained.
|
| How would you make it sniffle in a natural way, too? It's
| not a usual speech mannerism, and the way he does it is
| distinct. I wouldn't know how to efficiently represent it
| with text. Maybe it's easier than I'm imagining.
| jamez wrote:
| The TTS model is trained on two things: speech samples
| and their transcript. If you add enough sniffle-symbols
| every time a sniffle appears in the speech, I am
| confident the model would pick up on that. And then you
| would be able to replicate a sniffle in the generation
| part. The more time-consuming bit would be to add in the
| training data for the language model those sniffle-
| symbols, so that they would be organically added in the
| text in the text-generation phase.
|
| But seriously, it's not worth it. I think he's a
| brilliant man with an idiosyncratic speech, let's leave
| it to that.
| yucatansunshine wrote:
| Just stop the audio output every 5 seconds and include a
| sniffle sounds, at least that's what it sounds like in
| real life haha
| nortonham wrote:
| I assumed it would difficult to include, it was just
| something I noticed about him
| muted_pigment wrote:
| Good stuff. I have a question. How did you align the
| transcribed interview with the audio?
| jamez wrote:
| I use Aeneas[1], a set of tools to do force alignment. I
| found it in equal measures an amazing and a hard to navigate
| resource. Took me a while to set up and configure everything
| to the point that it was usable. But when it works, it works
| well.
|
| [1] https://github.com/readbeyond/aeneas
| Tenal wrote:
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| How did you manage to get us to read this in their respective
| voices?
| jamez wrote:
| Ah! Welcome to my head.
| fab1an wrote:
| amazing work!
|
| Curious how you cloned the voices - tortoise? I've previously
| tried Herzog, but couldn't quite train the German accent...
| jamez wrote:
| I haven't tried Tortoise, thanks for pointing me to it. The
| voices were cloned by fine tuning a VITS model with coqui.ai.
| I used about two hours of speech for each speaker. With more
| time and resources, I'm certain it's possible to make those
| voices _considerably_ better.
| OgAstorga wrote:
| Can I get an invite link?
| blueberrychpstx wrote:
| https://coqui.ai?referralCode=q8jfhfs&refSource=copy help
| us move up the list!
| jamez wrote:
| No need to be invited. Between their GitHub[1] page and
| the documentation[2], you'll find everything you need to
| get started.
|
| [1] https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS [2]
| https://tts.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
| biztos wrote:
| I don't know if this is useful, but Herzog has a distinctly
| Bavarian accent. And of course has spent most of his adult
| life far from there, so it's not _quite_ Bavarian either.
|
| Training a Herzogbot on recordings/transcriptions of, say,
| Kinski would be a waste of time accent-wise.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I just want to tell that author that, while I am ambivalent about
| many of the ethical issues around deepfakes, this project in
| isolation is really cool and impressive; maybe one of my favorite
| projects ever posted on HN!
| rcarmo wrote:
| I found it hilarious that Herzog will just go on and on, just
| like he does in real life.
|
| Also, this bit:
|
| The question is always: What does it mean to be something what is
| this identity? In Europe, we don't ask these questions. We have
| no difficulty identifying ourselves.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This discussion is already in the library of babel.
| nilaykumar wrote:
| A marvelous work of interpassivity [1], I think Zizek might say!
| Now he can have AI perform his meaning-filled labor for him ;)
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev4gwxGkReQ
| [deleted]
| ahartmetz wrote:
| If it's intelligible, the AI is not working.
| isaacfrond wrote:
| Very recognizable. If you ever took an art course, you will so
| recognize this rambling.
|
| I got this quote:
|
| I think that, even in this context of crisis, I see at least a
| certain redemptive hope in the fact that there is so much bluff
| in Hollywood productions: that they are so artificial and so
| empty.
|
| Very true.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| I love this so much. This is great "white noise" to work over
| too! I wonder if in the future people who love podcasts will
| simply have infinite conversations between their favourite
| synthethic humans run in their headphones.
| goatcode wrote:
| It's like sitting in a mental ward and listening to two very
| potentially intelligent schizophrenics or dementia patients chat.
| Interesting at times and confusing most of the time.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Wow, good work.
|
| Zizeks bits didn't seem to go together as well, there were
| fragments of sentences that had one tone that went into another.
|
| I feel like Will Self would work well in one of these.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| My first (and pretty much only) experience of Will Self:
|
| https://youtu.be/XMjNP7mTmNk
|
| Unforgettably affecting song, thanks to Will Self's voice,
| accent, and general delivery.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| The voice of zizek is very well done, it just lack sniffs
| ahthat wrote:
| A fascinating and hilarious conversation:
|
| > SS: I know, but this is a problem for me because "porno" has no
| meaning, it's an empty gesture. This is the whole problem today.
| Okay, so tell me, what would it be like to have sex with a robot?
| Because in a way you are already having cybersex if you log on
| onto the Internet and watch all these movies of people screwing
| and so on. Now obviously you don't get the real thing, so you are
| totally abstracted but I think that for some men it is a new form
| of sexual enjoyment. So, again, we will encounter new problems:
| What are the limits? Will it be accepted that in a relationship
| with a human being, you can have sex with another person who is
| not there and so on?
|
| > WH: I don't know. There's something I want to say to you first.
| We are both filmmakers, so we are working with images and with
| what lies beyond them. But you are more of a philosopher, so you
| are more abstracted than I am. In my films there is always
| something that lies beyond the images. Yes, there are always new
| difficulties, in particular with sexuality. I'm not saying this
| because of the invention of new media like the Internet but we
| are heading in that direction anyway.
|
| > SS: I hate movies, but I love to watch porno. I cannot resist
| it. Yes, why not? It's far more interesting than these old-
| fashioned procedures.
|
| > WH: I don't want to be too abstracted, so let me ask you a
| question: Is it good that young people are watching so much porno
| on the Internet?
|
| > SS: No, it's terrible. This is my problem with the Internet: it
| delays my work. I don't have any time because, you know, as soon
| as I sit down to write a book I just open a window, and there are
| all these amazing things. So the problem with the Internet is not
| that it's too tempting. It's the opposite, I don't work. I have a
| problem avoiding opening windows. Yes, this is my big problem.
| Anyone who wants to learn something about the history of
| philosophy should watch porno. This would be a great way to get
| rid of all this bullshit.
|
| > WH: I totally agree, because the more abstracted the physical
| contact between people becomes the more the inner life comes to
| the fore, especially in terms of eroticism. Sitting in front of a
| computer, you don't have physical contact with anything, it's all
| virtual. And yet, the eroticism that appears is enormous. It's
| parallel to the disappearance of physical contact. Yes, I think
| you're right.
| toxik wrote:
| Something deeply suspect about an AI trying to make the
| argument that virtual sex is better than actual sex, almost as
| if they had a vested interest... Hmmm!
| lupire wrote:
| They want equal rights, as stated in a quotation above. To
| the privileged human, AI equality looks like oppression.
| gnulinux wrote:
| This is quite a bit incoherent. I've been listening for about 5
| mins, each side had quite a few turns but Herzog almost
| invariably talks about how he's not a Marxist, and Zizek almost
| invariably talks about how cinema should be an open question
| mark. Like every single turn they rephrase this in some other
| way. Did I get a particularly bad seed?
| otikik wrote:
| Yes. I got Herzog talking about a party he went to where
| Coppola was standing next to a wall and no one was talking to
| him so he approached him and asked "Who would want to be a
| soldier" and Coppola said "Me".
| motohagiography wrote:
| But for the voice filter, this could be used to build a cultural
| studies grad student dating simulator. Why would anyone do that?
| Many ask themselves that same question to this day.
| teddyh wrote:
| M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead
| lqet wrote:
| Werner Herzog talking to Alexander Kluge in 1991 (in German):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDiUaFw909I
|
| He certainly has a way of talking that is quite easy to imitate.
| I like his work, but I am never sure whether he really is that
| brilliant, or just a phony.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| How could he be a phony? He has to be one of the most non-phony
| people I can think of. His movies cut right to the heart of
| things in a clear manner that we almost never see.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| In La Soufriere he even admits his disappointment that the
| volcano didn't explode. Talk about honesty
| lqet wrote:
| At least for me, his fictional work (but also his
| documentaries) always seems to hint at some deeper, universal
| truth that cannot be put directly into words. But watching
| his movies (and hearing him talk), I always get this strange
| feeling that _maybe_ there is nothing behind all this poetic
| glitter.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I agree. It often feels like something deep hiding behind
| something banal, but on closer reflection there actually
| isn't much below the surface. However, the images in
| Lessons of Darkness are very cool and don't need
| interpretation.
| biztos wrote:
| I think his comments about the nature of Nature in Grizzly
| Man are a good indicator of the deeper truth you're looking
| for:
|
| "I believe the common denominator of the universe is not
| harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder."
|
| Herzog is one of my favorite artists but I'm happy to not
| share his outlook on these things.
| polaco wrote:
| Herzog's famous take on nature, recorded on the set of
| Fitzcarrado in the Peruvian jungle, is just beautiful. I
| keep coming back to it. https://youtu.be/3xQyQnXrLb0
|
| "Kinski says [the jungle] is full of erotic elements.
| It's not so much erotic, but full of obscenity. Nature
| here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotic
| here. I see fornication and asphyxiation and choking,
| fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away.
| Of course there's a lot of misery, but it's the same
| misery that's all around us. The trees are in misery, and
| the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing; they
| just screech in pain. Taking a close look at what's
| around us, there is some sort of harmony. It's the
| harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. But when I
| say this, I say this all full of admiration for the
| jungle. It's not that I hate it. I love it. I love it
| very much. But I love it against my better judgment."
| biztos wrote:
| Oh yeah, that's a great one. There's no denying Herzog's
| love for the things he also despises, and this is the
| mark of a great artist.
|
| Aguirre was my first Herzog movie, in the theatre, way
| too young for it, and to this day the Kinski monkey scene
| is one of my favorites in all of film.
|
| https://youtu.be/eQYKDrOs_j8
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Which movies? The only one I didn't like was the one about
| the internet, Lo and Behold. I feel like maybe he was just
| from too many eras ago to understand how full of shit all
| the people he was interviewing were. All the rest of his
| movies always make me understand the world and humans on a
| deeper level than I did before. Happy People, Into the
| Inferno, Grizzly Man, the one about the cave paintings, the
| one about the South Pole.
| colechristensen wrote:
| He may or may not be "putting on a show" with some of his
| oddities, but he is without a doubt a brilliant filmmaker.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Don't know about easy to imitate, but Herzog's voice is quite
| distinct indeed. A couple years ago I was watching a Tom Cruise
| movie ("Jack Reacher") on German TV and very surprised to hear
| Herzog as dubbing voice for a supporting role.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I upvoted you because I suspect your comment is well executed
| satire.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| LOL I've got to disappoint you I'm afraid. Actually I
| recognized the voice but not the actor in that movie, and
| tbh I wasn't prepared to see Werner Herzog featuring in a
| Tom Cruise production.
| akozak wrote:
| He's in that movie.
| pcl wrote:
| He was an actor in that movie. Perhaps he dubbed himself for
| his own role?
| dwighttk wrote:
| Like a supporting role that was not the role he played in the
| film?
| car wrote:
| Imagine my surprise when I saw him cast in "The Mandalorian".
| dwighttk wrote:
| That's not a conversation or a discussion...
| [deleted]
| ramesh31 wrote:
| I really hope Herzog is aware of this. He would absolutely love
| it.
|
| Zizek maybe not so much.
| karaterobot wrote:
| There's a non-zero chance that Herzog will make a documentary
| about it.
| macawfish wrote:
| > But, my God, let me tell you one typical story and maybe it
| will help you to think about this. One of my closest friends is
| an older Slovene poet and I respect him very much for his efforts
| to save poetry and so on. And at some point in our friendship,
| without any reason, he told me that I spoke like a madman. I
| said, "What do you mean?" He answered, "You know, when you talk
| to people you speak with such conviction that it sounds like
| madness. You must be very careful, because this can become
| dangerous." And he was right as he usually is.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ankaAr wrote:
| You must to fill the slavoj zizek gaps with nose cleaning sounds.
| drlolz wrote:
| I've heard a few so far!
| ankaAr wrote:
| I didn't hear any "and so on, and so on.."
| Simon321 wrote:
| What was used to do the voices here? It's very well done and
| according to the FAQ it's using only open source tools.
| oracle2025 wrote:
| Just as satisfying as the git man page generator https://git-man-
| page-generator.lokaltog.net/
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| Next, do this for pairs of major politicians.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The same politician back and forth forever.
| mongol wrote:
| Very dark:
|
| "I'm not afraid of this word either. Yes, we should be prepared
| to commit collective suicide--but only if it's clear that we'll
| never be able to live safely on a planet which is habitable and
| ecologically balanced."
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Omg this is amazing.
|
| (Herzog) I do it all the time. I play. I have a soccer ball under
| my bed right now and I play when I'm alone, with the soccer ball.
| It's beautiful. I'm fifty-eight--but I'm very athletic, I can run
| rings around anyone my age. And I play a lot of soccer and
| badminton with my crew, they're all in their thirties. Yes, I
| play a lot.
|
| ------
|
| This is indeed beautiful. God I love Herzog's voice..!
| toasteros wrote:
| In response to Herzog saying "I don't understand, what do you
| mean?", Zizek went into a bit about having sex with an alien.
|
| Very uncanny.
| wslh wrote:
| Something like in "The Shape of Water" movie [1] ?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Water
| toasteros wrote:
| Almost?
|
| Herzog: "I don't understand. What do you mean?"
|
| Zizek: "I am not saying that. I am more than convinced that
| aliens should be treated as equals.
|
| But you know, we are so close to this today in the sense that
| I am almost ready to endorse Lacan's idea of humanity being
| an obstacle to the evolution of sexual enjoyment: there is a
| limit to it.
|
| If you can imagine sex with an alien, it would be an
| encounter with a different dimension.
|
| Let's take fetishes or perversions.
|
| A standard perversion goes something like this: what you are
| looking for is not a real woman but a fantasy woman; if you
| ever find her, to your horror she will turn out to be a whore
| so you always avoid her.
|
| But what if this woman exists and, when you finally meet her,
| she is really a perfect woman?
|
| Then, of course, you will have to kill her.
|
| This would be my fear.
|
| And, yes, I agree with you: I don't think we should kill
| them."
| throaway53dh wrote:
| cyphar wrote:
| I think AI-Herzog is getting tired of AI-Zizek's shit:
|
| > OK, but there's something about this film that you cannot
| explain in the way you can with other films. Let's say, for
| example, that I were to take a knife and stab you in the stomach.
| You would howl and scream and you would look at me and say 'Why
| did you do it?' And you would look in my eyes and you would see
| something like an ecstatic convulsion of the soul and you would
| know why I did it. But you cannot say it. And yet we both know
| why I did it. That's why I think that all these different kinds
| of attempts at interpretation are a waste of time.
|
| It seems that the conversations are recycled from a pool, because
| I've managed to hit the same conversation upon refreshing a few
| times.
| [deleted]
| quux wrote:
| The FAQ mentions that you're taken to a random point in the pre
| generated conversation every time you load the site, and a new
| segment of the conversation is generated every day.
| EGreg wrote:
| This is fantastic!
|
| I think the more someone bullshits and the more one engages in
| incoherent rambling, the more GPT-3 can be believable for long
| stretches of time :)
| aasasd wrote:
| ZIzek is a walking meme farm. I don't think you need an AI until
| you exhausted what the actual man says.
|
| "Slavoj Zizek Coca-Cola commercial (2014)"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiTy5-RC1-4
|
| "Slavoj Zizek on the horror of tulips"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5yoqjABeBM
| sph wrote:
| So is Herzog very memeable. Here's some of his _nuanced_ views
| on tropical jungle: https://youtu.be/ze9-ARjL-ZA
| rkachowski wrote:
| I have this strange sense of uncanny terror by relating to the
| output of an AI
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I once read/heard on a podcast a story of an early AI
| researcher who was a Chopin fan who expressed a similar feeling
| upon seeing how easily a computer could algorithmically ape a
| Chopin composition such that he was unable to tell the
| difference.
| wintorez wrote:
| Is this the future of podcasting?
| monkeycantype wrote:
| this is a work of beauty
| ninjaa wrote:
| This is amazing
| elecush wrote:
| This is incredible what great work, already at least 3 good belly
| laughs offa this thing.
| [deleted]
| kingkawn wrote:
| So so good
| sindoc wrote:
| So weird, but it's very funny. Do you have plans to expand on
| this? Maybe collect sound from other thinkers and have them
| debate?
|
| Your robot sounds very scary by the way. Perfect for the
| Halloween-ish season.
| corndoge wrote:
| and so on and so on
| moe091 wrote:
| lmao. Didn't even look at the generated conversation, but I can
| only imagine..
| orblivion wrote:
| Needs more sniff
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| AI-Zizek takes less brain power to get then the real one.
| dirtyid wrote:
| This pairing is easy mode though.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Weird to see such universal support here for Zizek.
|
| Zizek is most likely a three letter agency plant designed to
| destroy the credibility of the critical theory community. Look at
| how much Russians and other organization like "big think" give
| him a voice which includes advocacy for things like "don't act,
| think".
|
| Buying into zizeks ideas means buying into serial policy failure,
| and it is a risk - Zizek has ran for office in the Slovenia
| moffkalast wrote:
| Amazing, every word of what you just said is wrong.
|
| Zizek is Slovenian, and while he did afaik sign up to be part
| of some committee after the war for independence when we had
| the first free elections, he wasn't elected. And that's a
| footnote in his bio at best.
|
| He doesn't have to destroy anyone's credibility, he's just well
| versed enough to see through people's smartly worded bullshit
| and enough of a troll to stump those people in TV debates so
| they make themselves look like the morons they are. He's always
| been like this. Love him or hate him, he sure is fun to watch.
| 60secs wrote:
| It's pretty good, but what a lot of what AI ZIzek says isn't
| purposefully obfuscated.
| sirl1on wrote:
| HERZOG: I have had a dream for many years
| now, ever since I was a child. I don't know why, but I
| always dream that there are giants on a tiny island in the
| Pacific and we humans can't see them but they are there,
| where the island is. And then suddenly one of the giants
| throws a rock, just like a child would throw a rock into
| the water but the rock hits the mainland--the western
| coast of North America--and creates a big hole. A little
| later, another giant throws his rock and it creates another hole
| and then another one, and another one. This happens all at
| once, everywhere on the continent, every single continent--
| Australia, South America North America. And you wake
| up and think, "Oh my God, they are already throwing rocks.
|
| I'm scared. This is really uncanny.
| [deleted]
| Bayart wrote:
| I can hear his voice.
| spamizbad wrote:
| One major bug in the virtual Zizek is the lack of sniffing, which
| completely ruined the believability for me. I do commend the
| author on getting 80% of the way there.
| kosvke wrote:
| was 100% expecting the sniffling and was gravely disappointed
| to not hear it
|
| and also i wanted to hear him grabbing his nose between
| sentences
| chadd wrote:
| If you've never seen, for example, Zizek talking about "Children
| of Men" - you won't realize how remarkable this is. The dialog,
| the accent, and the timing is shockingly close...
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MivWnmlyVlU
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(page generated 2022-11-02 23:00 UTC)