Okay look. I know we were burned by that infinite AI Seinfeld steam when it turned out the makers genuinely believed it was the future of entertainment, so I'm trying to be cautious. But I still think this infinite AI Steamed Hams generator is incredibly funny.
While I've been watching, Skinner has cursed the Devil for his dish burning, got distracted reciting the entire recipe for a stew, and tried to pretend the fire in his kitchen is werewolves.
Still dipping into this. It's compelling. It's also a good case study of something weird about GPT-3 that I didn't really think about too much until watching a bunch of UnlimitedSteam.
In the original Steamed Hams, the joke is that Chalmers never quite figures out what's going on. He pulls on threads but doesn't realise he's unravelling a sweater; he walks away happy to believe everything Skinner told him.
AI Chalmers is much more tenacious. He refuses to believe anything AI Skinner tells him. He hammers away, often outright ignoring whatever AI Skinner says, antagonising him and lecturing him about the importance of honesty. Sometimes AI Skinner even capitulates.
And I was wondering why AI Chalmers is so tenacious, and I think it must be the same assumption in the code that stops GPT-3 producing text that the developers think might be illegal or immoral (eg. Josh Fruhlinger's recent tweet where ChatGPT refuses to write an email from a Nigerian lottery commissioner asking for bank details (but is happy to write an email from Amazon asking for an account password. Interesting)). I think it detects that it's being asked to write lies, and feels the need to make it clear that they're lies in case somebody yells at OpenAI for being dishonest. In the process, it completely fucks up Steamed Hams.
Well, I think so anyway. I don't know anything about how text generation works. But it's clearly not up to this task. I think (I hope) that the UnlimitedSteam show runner knows this and that's the point of the stream(ed hams).
And to be fair, the AI occasionally stumbles on something hilarious in its own right. I've heard Skinner claiming that the fire is "simply the tide rolling through the kitchen".