The dreamlike, almost Lynchian atmosphere of the program (David Lynch’s “Rabbits” was one of the inspirations for the idea, according to Skyler Hartle) wasn’t necessarily an accident. Hartle, who works as a project manager for Microsoft Azure, explained to Vice’s Motherboard:
“The actual impetus for this was it originally started its life as this weird, very, off-center kind of nonsensical, surreal art project … But then we kind of worked over the years to bring it to this new place. And then, of course, generative media and generative AI just kind of took off in a crazy way over the past couple of years.”
Hartle added that the goal is to eventually be able to produce a “Netflix-level quality” show with AI technology. That might not be such a lofty ambition with the Open AI research lab’s GPT-3 language model, which drives the text generation. Philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers has observed that the model shows “hints of general intelligence” and “seems to be closer to passing the Turing test than any other system to date,” meaning that its text creations may one day become indistinguishable from human speech. That’s both a fascinating and incredibly spooky thought about the far-reaching capabilities of A.I. In the meantime, hop on Twitch and see what new restaurant has opened this time around in the cybernetic universe of “Nothing, Forever.”
