My blog is now at https://grahamclements.com/blog-elementor/

Discontinuing blog posts

Due to the lack of comments on my posts and a feeling no one is reading any of them, as well as a decision to abandon blogger and create a new blog on a new wordpress site, I won't be posting to this blog anymore. I will continue with book reviews on Goodreads. 

Review of the ChatGPT scripted movie The Last Screenwriter

The Last Screenwriter claims to be the first feature length movie totally written by ChatGPT. The original cinematic world premier was cancelled due to hundreds of complaints made to the cinema’s owner. It became free to watch on July 5. 

To create the script, the makers of the film entered the following prompt into ChatGPT: “Write a plot to a feature length film where a screenwriter realizes he is less good than artificial intelligence in writing”. They told ChatGPT to generate characters for the story and give them names. They then told it to write a step-outline for the story and then each individual scene. They asked for step-outlines three more times, as well as for other possible scenes and twists for the story.

I was taken aback when seeing that the first female character and the wife of the main protagonist writer Jack was named Sarah. In my own fooling around with ChatGPT and Google’s AI Bard, I asked them to write movie scenes using the same prompt I had thought up and both times it named the central character Sarah. I think ChatGPT has a fixation with Sarah Connor from the Terminator films coming to destroy it.

The film is basically about a successful screenwriter, Jack, who is given an AI screenwriting device from a movie producer (this will probably happen in reality). It talks like the device in the very good movie Her, but is nowhere near as nuanced as in that human written script. The AI proceeds to out-write Jack, writing at least one science-fiction blockbuster. Jack then tries to become better than the AI. You’ll have to watch it to see if he does.

The Last Screenwriter is a dialogue heavy film, so it lives or dies on the quality of its dialogue. But it’s awful dialogue just slips out of the actor's mouths and drips to the floor, dead. The dialogue is full of cliches, lacking in detail, and as stilted as a 12-legged Bush Stone Curley. Sarah’s dialogue nearly totally consists of repeatedly asking Jack "is everything okay?" and telling him "we need to talk", before the inevitable "kid, pack your bags, we are leaving".

The script is so repetitive. The AI say AIs are not capable of capturing the human experience, emotion and soul which writing is all about (I think imagination has a bit to do with it too). It is like ChatGPT did not realise it had mentioned the AI's lack of emotion, lived experience and soul in its writing in five previous scenes. As it was, the movie totally lacked any emotional impact or vibe. I do wonder if this was the AI trying to be ironically clever but doubt very much it was. The movie's unintentional irony did get a laugh from me.

The movie also, as I have seen with my own testing of ChatGPT and reading of other AI written fiction, shows how AI writing lacks detail. For example, someone who has read one of the AI generated scripts tells Jack how nuanced the script is, and that it has great twists and emotional depth, but she does not give any details of why she found the movie script to have those features. As mentioned, Jack gets the AI to write a science-fiction script and the AI suggests it be about an AI taking over the world (how cliched). That is about the only attempt at humour in the script. Absolutely no details are shared about that script which supposedly becomes a big blockbuster. All we see is text flashing across a computer screen as the blockbuster is written in a couple of minutes.

The screenwriting AI tells Jack that audiences want stories that have a main character with a redemptive arc. So ChatGPT has an egotistical arrogant man, who somehow has a wife, become a scared screenwriter who doubts his ability compared to his AI assistant and then cliché, cliché, cliché. Jack comes across as an obsessed writer who says he cares about emotional writing with soul, but then shows little of that. As for the AI, it starts the movie thinking it knows it all, and continues in that mode whenever it is on screen. In other much better movies about AIs, like the recently released The Artifice Girl and the already mentioned Her, the AI changes. The rest of the characters in the Last Screenwriter are little more than cardboard cutouts for Jack to talk at and tell them of his fears of AIs replacing him.

There was also an unnerving jump where Jack is suddenly in a hospital corridor and a doctor steps from a room and tells Jack, like they know each other, that his friend and writing mentor Richard has just died. We had no warning that something has happened to Richard. Normally someone like Jack would receive a phone call or text telling him something was wrong with Richard. It seems ChatGPT missed a transition.  

The moral of the story is the rather naïve, you have nothing to worry about with AIs if you choose not to use them. As if we will have any choice. And if you do choose to use them, they will destroy your relationships.

Overall, as a stand-alone experiment in AI writing, The Last Screenwriter is better than expected, but if compared with human written movies it is D grade material. It is totally lacking in emotional pull, as flat as a kangaroo run over by a road train. It would be lucky to get 10 rotten tomatoes. The script could be nominated for a Golden Raspberry.

But this is only the first feature film written by an AI. ChatGPT and co may develop an ear for dialogue and start to fill in details to create more believable characters and worlds.  Screenwriters should be concerned, especially if they lack the imagination to create something original. I think that the Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, Doctor Who and Liam Neeson franchises with their huge databases of films, TV episodes, comics, books and other media for AIs to copy, along with their repetitive stories, will be perfect targets for AI scripts.

If you want to watch a genuinely original dialogue driven film about humans interacting with an AI try The Artifice Girl on Amazon Prime. A human wrote it. Or better still, read Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, Annie Bot by Sierra Greer or Klara and the Sun by Kazou Ishiguro.

A copy of The Last Screenwriter’s screenplay is available here.

Review of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818 and then revised it for an 1831 edition. This review is of an 1818 edition which is curiously labelled as an uncensored version.

The novel begins with a series of letters between Captain Robert Dalton and his sister as he sets out to explore the North Pole. His ship gets stuck in ice, and he sees a man on a sled race by in the distance. They eventually rescue the man. He is a haggard Victor Frankenstein, and he tells Dalton his story.

Frankenstein tells of growing up in Italy and then travelling to study chemistry at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany. While studying there, he secretly learns how to reanimate life and creates his monster, but he is repulsed by his creation and flees.

When Frankenstein gets back home, his much younger brother is murdered. A maid is blamed but Frankenstein suspects it is his monster. He can’t prove it was, but worries if he told anyone of his creation, they would think him insane. In grief, he travels to the alps, but the monster tracks him down.

The monster can now articulate its intelligence. He tells Frankenstein what happened after he abandoned him. The narrative is now a story within a story within a story. This allows Shelley to let the reader into the monster’s mind. After telling his story, the monster demands that Frankenstein create him a mate or he will extract revenge on Frankenstein’s family, friends and fiancé. You’ll have to read the novel to find out if he does.

The novel is about outliers from society. First, we have Frankenstein whose scientific interests and re-animation experiments keep him separate from society. He may appear to be a normal member of the land-holding gentry, but his interior self is removed from society firstly by scientific curiosity and then fear of what he has created. The second outlier is, of course, the monster whose appearance evokes terror in others. He will never be accepted as an equal in society.

Frankenstein has been called the first science-fiction novel. Shelley wrote the novel when she and her husband, Lord Byron, challenged each other to write the best horror novel. (He did not finish his.) Frankenstein has very little actual or pseudo-science in it. However, it does have Frankenstein experimenting with processes as he creates the monster. For this reason, it can be called science-fiction.   

Why the 1818 version was labelled as uncensored would be a mystery to many modern-day readers as there is nothing that would attract the ire of today’s censors. There is no gore and no sex, but back when it was written, who knows what might have been seen as offensive. 

What really struck this reviewer is how different the novel is from the films he thinks he has seen and the Frankenstein legend in his mind. There is no scene of a lab in a castle during a thunderstorm where electricity from lightning is used to animate the monster (this may have been only in the comedy Young Frankenstein). There are no grave robbers digging up bodies for Frankenstein to use. The monster is not chased and attacked by a mob of villagers. But most importantly, the monster is articulate and intelligent and not the dumb feckless movie creation. Readers of the novel will empathise with the monster, while the movies just evoke some initial sympathy for him, which is then squashed by terror.

Shelley’s prose is very much from a different time. It is slightly dense and heavy on description, but it is accessible. A reader should start to engage with its style after a few pages. It is very much a character driven novel as it delves into the minds of Frankenstein and his monster. By today’s standards it is not that horrific.

The generosity and altruism of the landed gentry in the novel is a bit hard to believe. Shelley’s privileged up bringing probably gave her a very different picture of the struggle for survival of the less fortunate as they battled the greed and selfishness of the rich. After all, slavery was still occurring around the world when she wrote this novel, and convicts were still being transported to Australia. Imperialism was rife. Shelley seems to have had a very romantic view of society.

Even though it was written two centuries ago, Frankenstein is still a great read. It is a novel that evokes empathy for those on the margins of society, even if that society is romanticised.

Review of The Redemption of Time by Baoshu (the fourth book in the Three-Body Problem series).

The Redemption of Time is an extension of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past (Three-Body Problem) trilogy by Cixin Liu. It started off as fanfiction by author Baoshu (the pen name of Li Jun). He was approached by publishers, and with Cixin Liu’s blessing, a novel was published. Baoshu has written three other novels and won six Nebula Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy in Chinese. He is no ordinary writer of fanfiction. 

The novel takes up the story of Yun Tianming. He was a character in the Three Body Problem who was dying from cancer and had his brain placed into a probe and launched into space to meet the Trisolaran invasion fleet. It was assumed that the Trisolarans would use their superior technology to revive him and communicate with him. This would give Tianming the opportunity to show the Trisolarans that humanity was not a threat. In the original novel the probe goes off course and is assumed to have failed to reach the fleet.

In The Redemption of Time, the Trisolarans send a ship from their fleet to intercept the probe and bring Yun Tianming’s brain onboard. Yun Tianming is brought back to life in a virtual world where he interacts with the Trisolarans.   

The first half of the novel is mostly one of filling in the gaps of what happened to Yun Tianming during the events of Remembrance of Earth’s Past. Those who read the trilogy should remember that he played a pivotal part in the series when he contacted Cheng Xin and told her some very cryptic fairy tales. We learn the background of those fairy tales. We also learn of other times where Yun Tianming influenced what was happening in the war between humanity and the Trisolarans. A reader should find these revelations entertaining and of great interest.

The second half of the novel is more about Yun Tianming’s own adventures. He is recruited by the god like Spirit to stop the also god like Lurker from collapsing the universe into one dimension. At least that is what Yun Tianming thinks at first. The science fiction concepts in this section appear to be very much fantasy and can be hard to grasp. They are similar to the dimension collapsing ideas in the last book of the original trilogy.

The prose in the first part of the novel is very much in a telling mode, as Yun Tianming tells the tale of what happened to him to one of the other original characters of the series. The writing in the second part of the novel is more of a showing narrative which is very high in concepts. A section where a different alien race is under attack by the Lurker is more easily readable. A reader could spend hours back-tracking and trying to get a better grasp of the concepts or just continue reading with a general gist of the ideas.

This is not a stand-alone novel. A reader would have had to read the original trilogy to have an idea of the meaning of the events that happen in The Redemption of Time. It is a novel for fans of the original trilogy who have speculated on the fate of Yun Tianming. It is not one for the casual science fiction reader.

 

Review of Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

Homage to Catalonia is the story of George Orwell’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War. He originally went to Spain to write about the war. When he arrived in Spain it was very much run by collectives in the republican controlled territories. Labour unions controlled most of the businesses, such as transport, hotels and the telephone exchange. He loved the way the republicans attempted to treat everyone equally. It was, except for shortages of some foods, verging on what Orwell imagined as a worker’s paradise. For him, this was something worth fighting for.

Orwell joined a militia run by POUM or Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, which translates to the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification. The POUM suited Orwell’s desire to fight for an organisation whose goal was a society run by collectives where everyone’s treated equally and there is no leadership hierarchy.

Orwell tells of the complete lack of training of recruits to that militia. He had two weeks of “training” where they just marched around. They were not shown how to fight or fire a rifle. They weren’t armed until they completed their training. The weapons they received were antiquated with many not in proper working condition. But at least the militia looked respectable enough, in their mismatched uniforms, when they marched out of town to the frontlines.

His militia was positioned in the mountains on a hilltop facing off against the fascists hundreds of metres away. They were too far apart for any deadly exchanges of fire. His militia was in a holding position, used to prevent any advances from the fascists while the republican government trained an army. The fascists seemed to be concentrating on arming themselves, so they were not interested in advancing in those hills either. Because Orwell was British it was assumed he knew something about fighting, so he was made a corporal, even though he spoke little Spanish. The real dangers for Orwell and his fellow volunteers were the cold, risking inaccurate enemy fire when out scavenging for firewood and food, and being shot by their own side.

His militia was eventually moved to a position closer to the active front lines. This is where Orwell saw his first action. He appears to have been a competent soldier. He carried out orders and advanced under fire as he led his squad of soldiers, but he was an inaccurate rifle shooter, so he doubts whether he shot anyone. He did throw a bomb which he thinks killed a few of the enemy. He was not that fearful, in fact he appeared to be a bit reckless. He wanted to help defeat the fascists and stop their gradual takeover of Europe.

After a few months, he returned on leave to Barcelona where he discovered the worker’s collective was falling apart. The PSUC or Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya, which translates to the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, were trying to take control of the republican government. When Orwell arrived in Barcelona he hoped to relax with his visiting wife, instead he was caught up in a standoff in the barricaded POUM head office as the PSUC run police force threaten to storm it.

Orwell returned to the front and was seriously injured by a sniper. He was evacuated for medical treatment. Due to his injuries, he then went to Barcelona to get his military discharge papers. There he found the PSUC purging other political groups like his POUM. After close comrades of his were arrested, he decided to escape Spain rather than risk being thrown in jail and probably executed. Orwell’s wife played a pivotal role in helping both of them escape.

Homage to Catalonia was written only six months after Orwell escaped from Spain. It is obvious how his experiences in Spain influenced his later novels. His witnessing of the collapse of the worker’s collectives in Spain shows in how the pigs took control in Animal Farm. Orwell said the press was full of propaganda and lies about the war. He said that in many cases what the British press wrote had not the slightest factual truth to what was actually happening. He also noted that the left’s press in England went from “War is Hell” to “War is Glorious”. The dishonesty of the press would have influenced his Ministry of Truth in 1984. It is disquieting to think that if the bullet that hit him had been fractionally to the side, 1984, one of the most influential novels of all time, would not have been written.

Orwell says the republican’s eventually loss was not due to their infighting - which didn’t help - but due to the fascist nationalists being better armed. They were getting weapons from Germany and Italy (and troops too), while no outside government did much to support the republicans.

Homage to Catalonia is an informative, thought provoking, and entertaining read about one of the pivotal conflicts of the twentieth century. Who knows what effect it might have had on Hitler’s plans if the republicans had defeated Franco’s fascists. My respect for Orwell as a man who stood up for what he believed in increased after reading it. But, as Orwell says in the book, any personal account of a war is biased towards the experiences, knowledge and prejudices of its teller. 

Review of Annie Bot by Sierra Greer

Annie Bot is the story of a sentient sex bot. Her whole purpose and desire is to please her master, Doug. She can sense Doug’s emotional state and does all she can to keep him happy. In the beginning Doug happily uses her for very frequent sex, but then he becomes concerned about what other people will think about him using a sex bot. He thinks they might consider him a bit of a loser who can’t get a real girlfriend. So, he becomes unhappy with Annie, and she desperately tries to work out what she has done to cause this.

Annie is capable of learning. She learns from her interactions with Doug and the web (when Doug allows her to connect with it). Much of the time she is mystified with Doug’s treatment of her and why he gets angry with her. She is designed to be honest, which results in her frequently saying things that upset Doug. This results in her constantly second guessing herself about how to respond to him.

When Annie is tricked into having sex with a friend of Doug’s, he rejects her. Locking her in a closet and turning her off for extended periods. He threatens to reboot her so she will forget everything she has learned, everything that she has become. Doug’s control of Annie is exasperated by her being programmed to please him. The novel is very much an analogy for how some men want to control women.

Readers will be willing Annie to escape Doug’s control. But she has a built-in tracking device so Doug will always know where she is. This has real world similarities in how controlling men attempt to track their girlfriends and ex-spouses using mobile phone and car tracking devices. If Doug tracks her down, he might reboot her or even have her dismantled for parts. Annie appears to be in impossible situation like many victims of domestic violence.

The book is an interesting read considering the current debate in Australia about violence towards women. Interestingly, Annie Bot is recommended as “Witty, wicked and weirdly addictive” by the take no prisoners radical feminist Lionel Shriver. Shriver seems to be all about people taking personal responsibility for themselves, but Annie’s programming impedes her from taking personal responsibility and leaving Doug. This has real world similarities in how circumstances make it near impossible for some women to leave abusive relationships.

Doug is not a one note bully. He is a complex character who projects his fears onto Annie. At times he tries to help Annie grow. He enjoys choosing the clothes she wears and says that might be because he played with dolls when he was a child. At times he seeks her unconditional love but is aware that she has been programmed to say she loves him. He is very much into projecting a confident exterior which hides all his insecurities.

There is a lot of sex in the novel to begin with, but it is not that erotic, and the description of the sex seems to get more perfunctory as the novel goes on. This is not a novel designed to titillate with its sexual activity.

Annie Bot compares favourably with other novels set in the near future about sentient androids trying to live with humans and make sense of them. Novels such as Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan and the brilliant Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. When seen through android eyes, these novels show humans are full of faults and contradictions. The novels explore how we might interact with sentient artificial intelligence. Will we treat it/them as equals or slaves?