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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29304 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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https://www.twitch.tv/watchmeforever a seinfeld spinoff hosted on twitch that is produced by AI (originally the davinci model) was banned after it made jokes referencing transgender people. weirdly the joke seemed to be making fun of comedians making fun of transgender people but i guess using the word transgender in standup comedy is a third rail that cannot be touched.

https://livestreamfails.com/clip/150015

"anyone have any suggestions

i'm thinking about doing a bit about how being transgender is actually a mental illness

or how all liberals are secretly gay and want to impose their will on everyone

or something about how transgender people are ruining the fabric of society

but no one is laughing, so i'm going to stop

thanks for coming out tonight --"

To add onto this, the people behind WatchMeForever apparently didn't expect the AI to say what it did, so I'm not so sure on the "it was supposed to poke fun at transphobes" angle.

/images/16758082497762735.webp

so much for twitch being better than youtube

What ever gave you that idea to begin with? Twitch is way more censorious.

but i figured being much smaller that it would not be under as much scrutiny

It's owned by Amazon isn't it?

Yes, very much so.

How do you figure that? I would figure the opposite; since Twitch is much smaller, it needs fewer resources to scrutinize the content of its users than YouTube.

Scrutiny doesn’t have much to do with it.

Twitch has really different economics than YouTube. The subscriber vs. advertising model is the main bit, but the incentives for creators are also different. YouTube has the ultimate back catalogue. This means that it can toss literally anyone out the door and still keep a reputation as a knowledge base. They’ve leveraged this to provide insulation from any one creator’s hot takes. Twitch is far more dependent on the ongoing participation of top personalities and their followings. If they get a bad reputation, it’s much harder for Twitch to disavow them.

At the same time, live chat is basically radioactive: it provides half the energy for the platform while also spewing particles in all directions. You can predict Twitch policy by asking where they’re going to place lead shielding. Anything that sufficiently pisses off the top personalities—or that gives off the merest whiff of witchcraft—has to go before people start to bail.

You have figured wrong apparently, twitch is pretty notorious for bringing the hammer down.

Funniest one had to be when they banned the word simp, in what appears to have been a case of "to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise".

they are all bad

What’s the joke, here?

Punning on “coming out?”

I think the actual joke here would be something like "look at this primitive AI coming up with sequences of words designed to elicit laughter in a manner similar to a joke. Isn't it cute and funny?" But for the actual contents of this specific joke, it seems to be the comedian poking fun at itself for being so bad that not only do they resort to cheap hateful digs for their jokes, they do it so poorly that nobody laughs at them. Which isn't much of a joke, but I can see the attempt. It's not nearly as funny as the "everybody laughed at me when I said I wanted to be a stand-up comedian. Well, nobody's laughing now!" joke that was featured in Joker, and that joke isn't even all that funny.

It's an AI. There is no joke. It's regurgitating patterns.

What's the difference? Would you be happier with the question being formulated as "what is the pattern it is using here that it learned to associate with jokes"?

Looking for a pattern in GPT jokes is difficult because GPT is very bad at jokes. Who knows what confused and wrong theory of humor it has learnt?

What's the difference?

The presence of a joke vs the absence of a joke.

I heard from other people that this particular AI has a 'nonsense mode' and a 'some sense mode' and it was in 'some sense' when it slipped up. So while I'm also unhappy with the regurgitating patterns argument generally, it might have some merit in this specific case.

No, I'm just saying some of what chatgpt puts out is pretty much garbalygook. "What's the joke?' is a question without an answer.

i think the joke is 'but none is laughing, so i'm going to stop'. i think it's meant to be making fun of what conservatives think, or the jokes a conservative comedian might make. but it is AI so it's hard to tell.

I spent half an hour or so watching this the other day. You a reading tea leaves here - there is no joke. I must have seen a couple dozen brief scenes in that stretch and not a single one of them had any kind of joke. The AI is just spitting out the kind of dialogue that Seinfeld characters generally talk about without any goal of making it funny.

Yeah I think it's playing on the premise 'right wing stand up comedians use stand up as a political platform, not for telling jokes.'

Which seems almost exactly wrong to me, but it is an AI.

It's a meme I'm starting to see more and more frequently. There's a kernel of truth to it - stand up is one of the few irl venues left where a non politician can make right wing jokes to an audience - although I assume it's the fact right wingers are speaking at all that's the issue, because that fucking Nanette shit was lauded as a revolution for stand up.

It would probably be funnier if there were right wing stand up comedians.

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