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Star Wars are irredeemably silly in so many ways.. and It could've been much better, yes, but I kind of enjoyed the silly actionand finally seeing some protagonists die.
I'm not sure why you're so pissed. AI can already write better dialogue than most scriptwriters. Certainly better than George Lucas ever did.
With generative AI, we'll finally get some proper SF on the screen. There's risk that good actual SF could end up produced as miniseries etc.
Well, the first response that went through my head was something like, "well, if you're content with AI slop for entertainment, you do you, but that's cold comfort to those of us who expect more than that". That's probably too mean and contemptuous a thought, though, so let me back up and try again.
I've yet to see anything to convince me that AI can write a half-decent film script. Even if, for the sake of argument, it can do better than the worst human writers, I'm trying not to be content with the bottom of the barrel, or even the middle of the barrel. George Lucas definitely has limitations as a writer and director, though I think some of them are overstated. He struggles with some types of dialogue more than others; and at any rate, I think much of that is compensated for by his immense skill as a visual director. Lucas can compose a scene or a shot incredibly well, far better than most of his contemporaries. For films like Star Wars, which are substantially about immersion, awe, and atmosphere, I can't underrate that.
I'm a bit curious what you mean by 'some proper SF'? What sort of SF do you think AI would make possible? What are you hoping for?
Let me quote a famous screenwriter
Older LLMs write slop by default bc the training data is weighed towards obnoxious California tier crap. If you take the barest amount of care they stop writing slop bc tasteful writing is in their weights. As I found out when I was enraged by slop while experimenting with roleplay. Most people don't have taste so don't care, don't even seem aware they're reading slop. In short, if your LLM powered RP or ERP has slop in it, it's a skill ( you were using dumb models or can't prompt a SOTA model properly) or taste issue. So, I have no problems saying someone used to LLM writing could use it to write a script that's better than okay and definitely well above typical Netflix tier shit.
Newer ones seem to almost avoid slop even without anti-slop prompts. E.g. consider this fake SlateStarCodex essay by Gemini. You can kinda tell it's not Scott A but it's not easy. It has almost zero of of the typical LLM tells.
Something better than Baen-tier mil-sf slop or silly hippie crap from Le Guin getting filmed. Either a good film based on some golden age classics, or modern actual SF getting filmed.
You wouldn't count Le Guin's work as being among golden age classics? Or by the golden age, are you restricting yourself to the 50s and early 60s? Again I'm just a bit curious what you'd think of specifically.
I'm not really convinced by the AI example - I think the LLM essay you link on Twitter doesn't really read like an SSC article. And I'm more inclined to take Paul Schrader's comment as an indictment of film executives than a defense of LLMs. Obviously you and I are going to have a hard time arguing literary taste with each other, but I would say, at least, that my experience with LLM writing (and I have spent some time prompting it, writing, roleplaying, etc.) has been that it is only capable of a very superficial, formulaic level of production.
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