As I record this, it's February 2021.
We're nearly two months into Britain's third lockdown right now,
and I've got a problem.
I'm out of ideas.
I've now recorded all the computer science and language ideas I've got,
at least, all the good ones,
and to be honest, I'm kinda burned out on those anyway.
I can travel to film stuff,
but it has to be outdoors, and within England.
Apparently I filmed most of those stories years ago when I was starting out.
I tried hiring a couple of freelance researchers,
they were wonderful, they did their best,
they found some stories that would be great for other people or for BBC documentaries.
But there seems to be some aspect to a video that's "right for this channel"
that I can't put into words.
And if I can't do that, I can't expect anyone else to.
But: I just got access to GPT-3,
the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence text generator made by OpenAI.
I'm not going to go into the details of how it works here,
other people have done that far better than I can, but in short:
it has read and stored a huge amount of the web.
And if you give it some text,
it will try to continue that text in the same style.
But it's not just repeating what it's already seen:
it's coming up with brand new, never-before-written sentences.
It is incredibly clever in specific but very limited ways.
And the challenge of "come up with new video ideas in this style"
is exactly what it's meant to be good at.
So I gave it a list of some of my previous videos:
ones that I'd filmed solo in England, and I asked it: come up with more.
Maybe it could find the connection that I can't describe,
pull from all the billions of things in its memory,
and find the stories that I've missed. [loud car driving by]
It took a little bit of tweaking to get the prompt and the parameters right.
At one point it generated part of a fake interview with me, which was weird.
But pretty quickly it was churning out plausible-sounding video titles.
In the end, I generated more than a thousand of them.
I knew most of them wouldn't be any good, but I thought,
maybe it can manage at least one in a thousand?
And... it sorta did.
Now, OpenAI's terms of service don't let me give you the full list.
I have to curate them, and show you a sample.
Those are the terms and conditions I agreed to.
But that's not actually much of a problem, because most of the titles were just... dull.
Which is fair enough, most of the video ideas
I come up with also get discarded almost immediately
because they're just not good enough.
The AI suggested titles like "The World's First Bridge Over A Motorway".
"An Industrial Warehouse In The Middle Of Nowhere."
and "The Beach Where You Can Hear the Sea."
[ocean waves]
I... can hear the sea.
Most of the ideas were plausible, they're valid sentences,
they're just not interesting.
There were a few suggestions that were just nonsense.
"The British Road That Is Also A Boat."
"The Cliff That Refuses To Be A Cliff."
"The Green Death And The Industrial Revolution."
I'm actually fairly sure that last one's a Doctor Who episode.
GPT-3 has a setting called "temperature",
which is basically how predictable it should be.
If I turned the temperature down too low,
it just repeated existing video titles over and over back to me.
Too high, and I got ideas like "Jeremy Clarkson's Lottery of Death"
which I swear was a genuine suggestion it gave me and which I assume
will be coming to Amazon Prime next year.
But when I got the temperature right, it did actually suggest some real places!
"The Abandoned Homes of Wigan Pier".
Well, Wigan Pier's a derelict industrial site in the West Midlands that's being redeveloped,
it's not a story I could tell, and it's not one I know about, but someone else could do that.
"The Super-Sized Megalithic Stones of Avebury".
I made a video about Avebury years ago
when I was just starting out, filming on my phone,
Avebury is like Stonehenge but better.
A+ suggestion...
if I hadn't already done it. It also suggested stories about
the RRS Discovery, an early 20th-century steamship that explored the Antarctic,
about the Aberfan disaster, where more than a hundred people died in a mining landslip,
about the New River, an aqueduct that runs through London,
and about the Post Office Railway, where I've actually visited before,
just not to film.
None of those were quite right to make a video about, sadly,
I couldn't find the narrative hook that means they work for this channel,
but they're close.
It also suggested "The Failed Bomb Plot Pigeon".
That was an article that was used on Citation Needed a few years ago!
It even suggested a video idea that I've already filmed but that I haven't released yet.
I'll keep that title secret for now.
But... yeah. It worked. I wasn't expecting that.
Videos talking about testing AI are usually comedy about how bad the results are,
they're not supposed to work.
There were some suggestions outside the UK, too.
"The Airport Which Lands Planes On Water."
I googled it, and that would be Vancouver Harbour's seaplane terminal.
I've been there. I've seen it before, I'd never thought to film it.
Also, there's "How The CIA Plotted To Kill Castro With Explosive Seashells."
Which actually happened, that's a real thing, but I googled those words
and they have never been put in that exact order anywhere online.
It's not a video I can film, but it's a good idea for someone.
But the most interesting category of suggestion
was the one where the AI came up with videos that I would love to make...
but which are completely fictional.
Because of course it would: it doesn't understand any of the words,
it's not checking if they're true, it's just looking for patterns.
So with the help of an animator, here are some videos that I can't make
because they're not real.
The Village That Was Saved By Synchronised Traffic Lights.
The White Cube At The End Of The World.
The Sanity-Defying Crossroads on the Isle of Skye.
How A Secret Gadget In The Beam Of The Olympic Stadium Helped Deliver Britain's Medals.
The Long Forgotten History of the British Moon Landings.
The Island With A Gravity Defying Vertical Mountain.
The Strange Light That Floats Over Oxfordshire.
The Lost Village of Lofthouse That's Now Invisible.
The Dream of a Russian Utopia in East Yorkshire.
I want to film all of those!
There were hundreds of perfect video ideas for my channel. But... they're not real.
They're all in some weird parallel universe,
and I don't have a word, I don't think there's a word in the English language for
nostalgia for a thing that never existed, that never could have existed.
But what if those were videos?
What if I could click on any of those topics and get a video about it?
So as an experiment, I took one of those subjects,
the one about the Russian utopia in East Yorkshire,
and I told the AI to write the script.
I just gave it one instruction.
And it did it. Really well.
So I filmed it, or at least the start of it.
Which is why I'm standing here, in another locked-down windswept bit of England,
because the AI gave me exactly what I asked for...
even though it wasn't true.
In the late 1800s, a wealthy Russian noblewoman
by the name Baroness Helena von Hahn had a dream.
A dream of a perfect world in which the relentless march of capitalism
would be slowed enough to allow people to enjoy their lives
and not be forced to work constantly.
She found her chance when she learned that Thomas Kirby,
an English businessman and entrepreneur had just bought up large tracts of land
in an area called Holderness, in West Yorkshire.
Through her friendship with his sister, she convinced him to sell it to her.
The site was dubbed "Kirby's Dream".
The baroness then set about building schools, hospitals and parks on the site
as well as planting thousands of trees.
Unfortunately, it was too good to last.
I didn't run that a hundred times and pick the best script.
That was the first draft it gave me.
None of that's real.
There was a Russian noblewoman with that name, but she wasn't a Baroness.
There are no records of an enterpreneur called Thomas Kirby,
the land purchase never happened.
This is Holderness! And it's just farmland, there never was any Russian utopia.
I could have asked for a script for any of the thousand video titles.
Or a thousand different scripts for any of them,
a thousand different failed Russian utopias in Yorkshire.
There's a reason that the company, OpenAI,
is putting limits and ethical guidelines on its text generator,
because they're the only things stopping people from asking for
human-sounding political arguments, or fake angry customer reviews,
or... well, anything.
Three years ago, text generation like that was impossible.
New technologies do tend to follow a sigmoid curve,
nothing happens for ages,
then there's a massive revolution and it feels like the world's changing,
then it reaches a new fairly steady state.
That happened with the web, with smartphones,
and I suspect it's happening with AI.
The catch is, we don't know where we are on that curve yet.
You never do until it flattens out.
It's possible that this is as far as we go,
that the best we'll get is that an AI can generate a fake script,
and it's a novelty.
But if someone can take that and add the requirement that
what it writes has to be true,
that it has to crossreference with history books and encyclopedias,
like IBM's Watson did to win Jeopardy ten years ago...
well, if that happens, my job will get a lot easier.
Until then, I'm going to ask it for another thousand ideas and see what it comes up with.
I thought I should check, and, yeah. It's fine.
It's still there.