As you will no doubt be aware, one Anthropic researcher claimed there is a greater than one in 10 chance that AI will end all of humanity as we know it within the next decade. However, now that I’ve given it some thought, I think this statistic might actually be a little conservative. This is because I have just watched an episode of a sitcom created by AI, and if I ever have to do it again I’m genuinely going to die of boredom.
The show is No Big Deal, and it premiered on YouTube on Friday. I was apparently only the 376th person to watch it. This is by no means a recommendation that you become the 377th, more a warning to avoid it if your algorithm ever decides it hates you enough to suggest this.
No Big Deal bills itself as “The Office meets Dragons’ Den”, in that it is a workplace comedy about a group of angel investors who have to listen to various product pitches. In the first episode, the products include a toilet that analyses your poo and a sofa you can have sex on. The investors are nightmarish waxworks who speak with all the nuance and cadence of a satnav telling you that you just missed a turning.
If you’ve watched any AI-generated content recently, you’ll know the faults it has, and they are all present here. Shot-to-shot continuity is essentially nonexistent, with characters changing positions every time the camera cuts to a new angle. Background noise either is or isn’t there, seemingly on a whim.
The characters – who all fitfully look enough like real-life actors to make the whole thing seem icky and exploitative – move around with not a trace of life behind their eyes. It remains completely impossible to care about anyone once you know they’ve been made by AI. Perhaps the most depressing thing about No Big Deal is the fact that it was purportedly written by a human.
Although all the characters, locations and scenes were churned out by a machine, the show was apparently written by Andrew Dickinson. Dickinson, once himself an angel investor, originally intended for the show to be made as a traditional television production. When he realised that this would be slow and expensive, he turned to AI.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
