​Earlier this year, I asked GPT-3,
​the new text-generation ​artificial-intelligence system from OpenAI,
​to give me some ideas for videos.
​There were a couple of good ones in there,
​but the problem was that ​almost all of them were fictional.
​Videos on this channel are usually ​about real things in the real world,
​and no-one's managed to connect up ​a fact-checker to the AI yet.
​But that got me thinking:
​what about channels who aren't ​limited that way?
​What about channels which ​talk about broader topics,
​or their own opinions, ​or do ridiculous challenges?
​Could the AI come up with ​new ideas for them?
​So I called up some folks,
​I gave the AI a few recent video titles ​from their channels, and I asked it...
​come up with more like that.
​Now, I wasn't allowed to ​do live demonstrations,
​that's in the OpenAI terms of service ​I agreed to,
​but ahead of each call,
​I got GPT-3 to generate ​a hundred ideas
​and then I picked the ​most interesting ones.
​Or at least, the ones where the AI ​didn't completely go off the rails.
​If you look at my list, I might have ​20, 30, 40, 50, 100 ideas there,
​but I don't want to do any one of them.
​It's not easy to come up with good ideas.
​Mehdi Sadaghdar runs ElectroBOOM,
​a channel that has really technical ​videos about electronics,
​but which is, perhaps unfairly, best known ​for Mehdi repeatedly shocking himself.
​...that created [arc sound]
​[bleep] [arcing continues]
​One thing that he had in common ​with all the folks I talked to:
​they all have a list of ideas.
​It might be a whiteboard, a spreadsheet, ​a text file, but everyone had The List.
​I didn't have much hope that GPT-3 ​would work well with Mehdi's channel,
​because surely you can't just jam ​some electrical-sounding words together
​and get something sensible out of it. ​Right?
​The very first one that it sent out ​was "charging phones from a Tesla coil".
​Uhh...
​I mean, if you have a super-powerful ​Tesla coil, yeah, that's possible.
​So if I was able to charge my phone,
​or at least try to charge my phone ​through Tesla coil,
​which is not a bad idea...
​although, yeah, I'd have to find ​a disposable phone for that one.
​The next one was ​"Lemon Lime Lightning: 2 MILLION VOLTS!"
​That sounds quite clickbaity ​...but maybe not possible.
​There's one that just says ​"24K Gold Plated Electrical Banana Award".
​I don't know what that is.
​That sounds like a good idea.
​It sounds like somebody tried to ​electroplate a banana with gold,
​and give it as an award to someone else?
​Not bad... these titles, I would say, ​from the clickbaity point of view,
​they are not actually bad, right?
​Let me write it down, ​it might be a good idea...
​"Using Tesla's Induction Motor Design ​to Test Solar Panels"?
​--buh?
​That feels like nonsense to me.
​That feels like a bunch of ​random words stuck together.
​"How To Build A ​3D Printed Plasma Speaker".
​...what?
​Let me think about...
​And those were the best ideas.
​GPT-3 wasn't great at coming up with ​things within the laws of physics.
​So what about for a channel ​that's more about
​exploring concepts and ​interesting questions
​rather than really ​specific science?
​We like to take big questions
​and then try and reduce them down ​to a silly little quest.
​That's Sabrina Cruz, one of the team ​behind the project Answer in Progress.
​Now I just need to get this ​steaming pile of garbage I call my code
​to actually function(!)
​...and her pitch sounded like ​exactly what GPT-3 should be good at.
​It nailed your video title style.
​Ooh!
​"why buying pets is a scam".
​Oh my god!
​Well, looks like I have a ​new video idea to work on.
​It definitely matches the ​correct level of clickbaitiness
​that we go in with, ​where it's just like,
​hey, I have a very bold hypothesis.
​Let me do something that ​barely argues it!
​All right, well, it was downhill ​from there, 'cos it was...
​Oh no.
​"how to destroy your career with 1 email".
​I mean, isn't that relatable content(?)
​Aw geez. ​Do you remember that one...
​Google did a prank one year for April Fools?
​Oh my god.
​With the minion emojis?
​Now that's an email that ​could ruin your career.
​Oh my god. Right!
​So what we've just ​done there is workshopped a story.
​Boom.
​Okay, I think it'd be optimistic to say ​either of those could be a full video,
​but there's enough there that it might ​spark some bigger idea.
​"how to fix your posture".
​...sorry.
​Which, incidentally, yeah, I'm leaning ​over a laptop at the minute...
​No, that's literally the video ​I'm working on right now.
​No kidding!
​Yes it is.
​I'm working on a video ​about why my back hurts so badly!
​Wow. Okay. Um...
​The singularity is going to happen ​like next week, I assume.
​That sounds like a success,
​but there's a bit of... almost ​cold reading going on here?
​Because the AI sent out a hundred ideas, ​I picked the best ones,
​and then Sabrina connected one of those ​to a better idea she already had.
​Even the title she gave, ​"why my back hurts so badly",
​is way better than anything ​the AI came up with.
​So the best of the best ​were plausible video ideas.
​But I did show Sabrina more of the full list, ​and, well, most of them weren't winners.
​These are all formatted so that ​they would feel like
​it would at least come across the table ​when we're thinking about titles,
​but a vast majority are just, ​like, that sounds good.
​Let me think about it for a second...
​Right.
​Wait, what does that even mean?
​I think they've really captured the subtle ​negativity that just overflows my channel.
​Maybe score half a victory for GPT-3 there.
​What about if we go from ​factual exploration to opinion?
​I have a big Google Document of ​videos I would like to do,
​once the current ones ​that'll take forever are done.
​And that list always gets longer ​and none of them get done,
​cos I'm always like, oh but this one should, ​now I've had a new one!
​So, one day I'd like to get to that list,
​but it's just continuously growing.
​Harry Brewis is better known as hbomberguy,
​and he's one of very few ​video essayists I know
​who can somehow keep my interest long enough
​that I'll watch a feature-length piece ​about a show I've never even seen.
​But when your release schedule is ​a two-hour video every few months,
​idea generation isn't really ​your production bottleneck.
​But I wanted to see if the system could ​at least come up with some suggestions.
​It got obsessed with video games.
​Well, yeah, that's gonna happen(!)
​So I switched which videos of yours ​it was trying to riff off,
​and if there was one word even remotely ​about video games in there,
​everything was about video games.
​It's the only thing that it can ​make sense of out of all of this!
​"The Last Of Us Is Disappointing, And Here's ​Why".
​That's really good! ​Oh my goodness.
​That's actually the perfect video title ​for a video about The Last of Us,
​because people who don't like ​The Last of Us
​will be like, ah, finally, validation,
​and people who do like it will be like, ​ah, I've got to see this.
​I mean, it did just nick your format.
​It locked on to all your formats and went,
​"I know what to do with this, ​just sub in different names."
​I should have said something like,
​"ah, that's pointlessly contrarian, ​who would name a video that?"
​Oh god, I need to save that. ​That might come in handy!
​We also have "Mass Effect 3 Was A Mistake, ​and Here's Why".
​...I mean, not correct, but close, yeah.
​That's what I was thinking, because ​obviously the opinion has to match up with...
​It has to be contrarian enough!
​One that came from nowhere:
​"How Bethesda Broke Me, and Here's Why I'll ​Keep Buying Their Games Anyway"
​That's so specific!
​I wonder why ​it got that from my videos?
​That's really good.
​This one I don't understand? You might:
​"On Quantic Dream, David Cage, ​and the Uncanny Valley."
​That's really good, actually.
​That's incredible.
​Quantic Dream are... they're basically trying ​to be films instead of games in a lot of ways.
​There's a lot of advanced motion capture ​stuff and facial animation.
​So there is a lot of ​uncanny valley stuff in there.
​That's just a straight-up good video title.
​Okay!
​I was going to jokingly say ​I should make one of these,
​but that's probably the one ​I would make so far.
​A lot of my stuff is just whatever I thought ​would make for an interesting concept,
​or I would find challenging to explain, ​I think that's really fun to try and do.
​If I wanted to make a video along those lines, ​that would be the title for it.
​But I probably wouldn't make ​those specific videos.
​Some of those ideas were actually good.
​Like, at least two of those I could make.
​And now I kind of want to, just so...
​A video essayist not only ​has to stand behind their ideas,
​but also put in exhaustive research ​and be passionate about a subject.
​And while it could be useful ​to have a system
​that'd take a video outline and ​have it autocomplete in a certain style
​and make the arguments you want it to,
​text generation just isn't there yet.
​Which leaves us with channels ​that are about experiences.
​Folks who aren't creating factual ​or documentary or opinion videos,
​just plain ol' regular entertainment.
​Now, I did try to get in touch ​with a few channels who do
​beauty, or makeup challenges, ​but I didn't get any replies.
​They're in such different worlds
​that I just don't have ​any contacts in common.
​I did give the AI a list ​of makeup challenges,
​and if anyone wants to try ​the No Water Makeup Challenge,
​the Curtain Makeup Challenge,
​or the If I Only Had More Time ​Makeup Challenge, go right ahead,
​I just don't know what those are.
​But there was one more ​person I talked to.
​And he's an expert on getting ​the title and the idea right.
​A perfect idea is an idea ​that is clickable
​but also highly highly entertaining ​throughout the entire video.
​And a lot of people are either good at ​picking great videos or great clickbait,
​and very very very few people ​can pick both.
​It's very hard.
​Because some things that are ​very clickable might be a moment.
​Like, getting punched by the ​strongest man in the world, right?
​That's an interesting video ​but that's only ten seconds.
​It's not a 15-minute video.
​And if you try to make it a 15-minute ​video, then it's a bad idea.
​Not like, you just take things ​and stretch it out,
​it has to be a really entertaining video ​at that length,
​while still being clickable.
​That is the perfect idea.
​Jimmy Donaldson is better known as MrBeast,
​and fifty million subscribers ​watch his channel that's a mixture
​of ridiculous stunts and ​hyperactive philanthropy.
​As we talked, it was really clear ​just how much thought goes into
​the titles, the ideas, ​and every frame of every video.
​The AI... does not have that context.
​It's just putting words together.
​The very first thing it came out with was:
​"I Paid People To Take Selfies With Me".
​Yeah, I can see where it would get ​that inspiration from,
​but there's no, like, 'oomph'. ​What's the virality?
​"I Bought A Haunted House".
​I can see where it got it from ​and the inspiration,
​but what it's missing is a twist.
​Back to the selfie one, right?
​If it was like "I paid people to ​take selfies with me",
​and I looked like Shrek ​but I had like a knife in my hand,
​then it's kind of interesting,
​but obviously that's not ​what it's thinking.
​Or, with the haunted house,
​I bought a haunted house and offered people ​a million dollars to play in it.
​Yeah, iIt feels like there should ​be an "and" in there somehwere.
​It's missing that little twist, where ​you apply that, and boom, now it's viral.
​It also had one which feels like ​an entire series on your channel,
​just put in a blender so it's just mush ​and no-one wants to watch it, which is:
​"I Paid People To Do ​Weird Things On Camera".
​I'm like, that's...
​That's my channel in a nutshell!
​It's exposing me!
​A lot of GPT-3's ideas felt like someone ​trying to imitate the MrBeast channel
​without really understanding ​what humans like to watch.
​So while it didn't go well,
​it did perform a little bit ​better than I expected.
​And I think it was Jimmy ​that gave the best summary:
​This could be very very effective
​in giving you something close ​to what you'd want,
​and then you just use that as ​inspiration to derive something good.
​AI works best as a co-pilot.
​At least, for now.
​Because one of the clichés about ​artifical intelligence is that
​as soon as it can do something, ​that doesn't count as AI any more.
​Playing chess? ​It's just brute-forcing numbers.
​Categorising images?
​There's no thought there, ​it's just training a model.
​Coming up with a list of plausible ideas, ​with an okay but not great hit-rate?
​That's something that would have been ​impossible just a couple of years ago.
​But now?
​It's just putting ​some words together.
​In a few years' time, ​who knows what else
​it's going to be easy to dismiss ​in the same way?
​Let me just stop tape...
​Wait, here, let me give you a little ​clip to go at the end of the video?
​Yeah, yeah, go for it.
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