With the movie I like how you sit there and you think, oh, what am I looking at? Why is the power stone described as a burrito? I like the feeling of, you get serious and then something makes you angry, so you think, is this serious or a joke?
I wanted to develop a romantic story. It is a form of Stockholm syndrome: you are not aware of how much you are controlled by the algorithm. You get so drawn into it that when the algorithm does something really bad, you try to save it. I love that the part about bitcoin was written by GPT-3, I think because it was trending last year. I was really, really surprised.
You trained GPT-3 using translated Chinese online novelsprayer books, American and Chinese ideological texts, and Walden Two, a 1948 utopian novel by behavioral psychologist BF Skinner. What has GPT-3 made of your resources?
The online novels are basically S&M novels, similar to Fifty Shades of grey. In the Chinese version, instead of falling in love with a CEO, the characters mainly fall in love with people in power, such as the third generation of red aristocrats. The writing is so bad, and they have so many chapters. I think all the romantic parts in the script come from that and the repetition of the language. I also fed it American and Chinese ideologies. So it creates a kind of fantasy land. Sometimes you think it’s about America and sometimes you think it’s about China.
I really like Skinner’s idea of behavioral theory. his novel Walden Two means that if you only reinforce positive behavior, you may not need to punish people. You get an organic system in which people only do positive things. This movie is almost like a simulation, as if Walden Two would run for many, many versions. That is why the village is called Walden XII.
Why do the villagers make cockroaches?
I feel like we’re just data. It’s like cockroaches: there are so many of us and it’s very easy to replace.
In the movie, AI “shepherds” maintain something like a social credit system among the population. The AIs have different personalities: a goth/punk young migrant worker who is part of the… shame (“smart”) subculture, a super-nationalist Wolf Warrior and the intellectual who tries to save the cockroach. How did you come up with them?
I wish they were different classes: superheroes, workers being replaced by AI, outsourced farmers and the privileged class, etc. They were actually inspired by both the American and Chinese dreams, with one emphasizing social mobility, the others that made China great again. In a dystopian future, much worse than a ‘filter bubble’, Big Data can give government much more power so that it can influence every day-to-day activity, and you won’t even feel like you’re being watched. And on the other hand, in the fantasy land of Walden XII, there are stupid AIs inspired by the kind of retired middle-aged woman called a “Chaoyang da ma” who does square dancing. She has a notebook – it’s completely analog – and she writes down what her neighbors are doing. I was really amazed by this super high tech algorithm next to this raw spying on your neighbor. Which is more powerful?
