"It's almost like a science fiction story set in the past, but it's about the technology of the future", says Mio

Imagination has no bounds, particularly when a machine trained on millions of words and stories is asked to churn out a story. In a recent instance GPT-3, the LLM developed by Open AI has scripted a story, with a cockroach as its protagonist. Well, compared to the fantasy stories like Harry Potter and Game of Thrones, this is only a piece of the universe you get to rule. The only thing that makes it unique and noteworthy is the fact that a machine is at work.  For his animated movie, Surplus Intelligence, produced by Mio Ying, GPT-3 with its AI-generated screenplay, makes a cockroach fall in love with artificial intelligence, all for keeping an eye on it. The story is set in a quasi-medieval fantasyland, a village named Walden XII whose inhabitants are all cockroaches. The AI-personified man is accused of stealing the village's power stone, a crime which the cockroach attempts to absolve, all by mining Bitcoins. Talking to wired, Mio said, "It's almost like a science fiction story set in the past, but it's about the technology of the future. I didn't alter what the AI wrote. GPT-3 generated a short story at first. We broke it down into parts and fed it back to GPT-3 to develop more from it, which later became the chapters in the film, and we selected what made the most sense from each variation." 

Artificial intelligence churning out weird stories has its own history, wherein episodes of story plot going off the expected mark with either impossible twists or unacceptable analogies can be found in plenty. When Zack Braff, tried to infuse an AI flavor into his character in the 'Scrubbs' sitcom, according to what he has read out on Twitter was near to insanity. One of the dialogues in the revived scripts goes like, "Being in a hospital is a lot like being in a sorority. You have greasers and surgeons and even though it sucks about Dr. Tapioca, I'm not even that sad", hardly makes sense for a character like his. If it sounds like a predictive text gone wrong, blame it on the trainer. The fact that the language model developed by Botnik Studios trained it on frequent and recurrent word pairings and sentences from Scrubs justifies the delirium it ends up creating. With 'Surplus Intelligence', the story is different though. Revealing how GPT-3 is trained for script writing, Miao Ying said, he trained GPT-3 with both American and Chinese literature so he says the movie leans towards Americanism at times and Chinese philosophy at others.

The story seems to be resorting to creating symbolism between the villagers and Chinese people, making a slant reference to social credit scoring and its acceptance among Chinese people. Chinese Social credit scoring system – a data-powered project which is designed to shape the behavior of citizens and enterprises – is often found at loggerheads with Chinese people for its spying potential. "All of Miao Ying's work is a satirical look at what digital means in China," says Barbara Pollack, who curated Mirror Image, an exhibition presenting artworks by 19 Gen-X Chinese-born artists. Talking about how much we accept algorithmic influence in our lives – consciously and otherwise – he said the romance he wanted to blossom took to the path of subservience to Artificial intelligence in the story. He adds, that people are so accustomed to, or rather find it difficult to think outside that framework. He expresses his disappointment in the romance blossoming between the roach and the AI man, something which he thinks is akin to saving a bad actor in spite of its shady intentions. In that case, the GPT-3 has made its case as a storyteller – bringing the deepest creative instincts to the fore. Who knows, next time it could make a scoop of ice cream fall in love with a Hippopotami bloat?