From a Writers’ Strike to Alan Turing

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/18

According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.

He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.

Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.

Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube. Here we – two long-time buddies, guy friends – talk about Alan Turing and AI. 

Rick Rosner: Today’s May 2nd 2023, the writers’ strike; the first one in 15 years. Started at midnight and the first big issue is streaming where 15 years ago, 2007-2008, streaming was just getting going and streaming was basically three minute little productions on YouTube or trailers for stuff running elsewhere on YouTube. There was no place to stream shows as Netflix was brand new. Back then they sent you DVDs in the mail and you watched them and you sent them back. Now streaming is huge and a lot of people watch almost no non-streaming networks and get all their entertainment off of streaming but the shitty pay that was agreed upon 15 years ago is still in effect. So, that’s a big issue that if you do a show on streaming you should get paid as much as if the show was on a broadcast network or within shouting distance.

Another issue is the producers want to pay people a day rate which is we can hire you for a day and that’s terrible, that’s never been the case before. The shortest period for which you could contract a writer was like a week and even that was not really much of a thing. Generally six weeks was the minimum and often deals were for 13 weeks. So a day rate is a real fuck you to writers but the issue that’s the most interesting is writers are striking for a prohibition of the use of AI to write which is crazy because I don’t think even a year ago, maybe even six months ago that would have been a worrisome issue. Now if you go on Twitter, 95% of everybody tweeting, more than that, are supporting the writers and the people who are just being edgelord dickheads who are like, “Look out you fucking writers, you’re going to be replaced by AI and your writing sucks and AI could do a better job than you can anyhow.”

So, it’s a thing and it echoes an issue from almost a hundred years ago though I don’t know when it was negotiated, well, 90 years ago, of recorded music versus orchestras for movies. People were arguing, I guess the Musician Guilds were arguing… I guess it was probably more in the 50s; I haven’t researched it. But that you can’t just use pre-recorded tracks; you have to score a movie, you need to have pay live musicians and the thinking is; A) you shouldn’t fuck over musicians and B) if you do fuck over musicians or in this case writers, then if you drive a class of talent out of the business then when you really need that talent they’ve gone elsewhere or just dwindled. So, when you talk about AI in screenwriting, people are thinking that you could probably…  I just saw it on MSNBC 10 minutes ago talking about how you could probably use, you maybe wouldn’t want to use it for dialogue though there’s plenty of dialogue that’s so cliché and predictable that you probably could use it for big chunks of dialogue but if you don’t use it for that you could at least use it to write an elevator pitch.

Go to ChatGPT and say give me 200 words on a movie about a robot detective in the future and then you add details from the thing you’re working on and you get 200 passable words that make a semi-convincing pitch you can work from. Also, you could probably go to GPT and say I’m working on a screenplay about a robot detective in the year  2120 and what are some cases the robot could work on and ChatGPT could maybe come up with dozens and dozens of scenarios; some of them stupid and some of them usable. I don’t know exactly how to use ChatGPT, maybe you can turn to that at various points in your screenplay when you get stuck and say well what might happen now and again you might get 30 ideas and 28 of them would be just weird and dumb but a couple of them might trigger ideas and a couple of them might be decent. I know that there is software that already does stuff like this that that asks you questions about your screenplay “Have you thought about this? What are you writing?”

I would think that they will get some prohibitions. I haven’t thought much about it but certainly part of an agreement would be that a studio can’t use AI for rewrites or to fill in dialogue, that a studio can’t use AI any place where they would get caught using AI. They can’t buy a pitch from you for a screenplay which I think is called just a screen story where you write a plot for a movie but it’s not in the form of a screenplay, it might be 10 or 12 pages where you lay out what happens in a decent amount of detail but certainly not the amount of detail and dialogue that you have in 120 page screenplay.

Last time it went on for exactly a hundred days and I’m guessing it’ll go on and other people are guessing it goes on for at least that long because that’s how long it takes for people to get desperate to start running out of material to make but I assume when the agreements finally reached in September or October, it will have prohibitions like you can’t buy my 5000 word screen story and then turn it into a screenplay with chat GPT, you have to hire a person to expand that story into a screenplay because certainly what you could do now is you could plug that 5000 words into ChatGPT and get something resembling a screenplay and if you can’t do it now, you’re going to be able to do it a month from now.

A year from now you’ll be able to do that plug a story into it and get a screenplay out of it and maybe 20% of it would be usable as is or with just changing a couple words in a sentence where two guys giving each other shit, the ChatGPT has access to every instance of two people giving each other shit for the past hundred years if it’s been printed or broadcast. So it would be able to do that and so that will be I would hope prohibited because that’ll be devastating. The studios; they come back with a prohibition that says “Well you’re not going to let us do it, you’re not allowed to do it either. You’re not allowed. Every word in the screenplay we buy from you, better come from you and not from ChatGPT.” But that’ll be less enforceable because what you want with regard to the studios is that they have to pay somebody to do the writing but when you’re writing in the privacy of where you do your writing, you’re generating material, maybe you’re replacing yourself but if you’re cheating using ChatGPT you’re still going to be the one who gets paid not ChatGPT. So, it could end up being a two-way agreement but only enforceable on one end.

Also, the quality of decent writers will turn out their own words though it will be tempting to cheat to write a scene. I could see even a good writer wanting to know how that scene would play written by a chat bot. Anyway, there you go. It’s going to take a while to resolve it. It’s weird that we’re just 18 months into the era of being shocked that AI can produce usable stuff. And all of a sudden it’s an issue in the workplace, they’re enough to help shut down an entire industry and not just the industry where you’d expect to see robots among the most creativity reliant industries and that’s shocking.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I agree with Alan Turing. I don’t think there’s any necessary operation mentally that human beings do that the computer cannot in theory do simply for the fact that a blind environmentally guided process with evolution can produce a mind and then those minds can produce things in a similar manner. It becomes an engineering problem. It is the scientific process of discovery.

Rosner: I think what Turing anticipated to some extent and what has caused most people up until now to maybe not take it as seriously as we have to now, is the idea of programming versus learning. And that’s where the self-driving cars have underperformed in that they rely a lot on programming, coming up with rules for understanding what shit is out there, what another vehicle looks like, what everything looks like; rules to figure out how to identify stuff and how to figure out what other objects are doing in the environment. And just programming something does not incorporate enough information.

We’ve been talking for years, you and I, about Big Data. The high performing or  supposedly high performing AIs of now and in the future when they perform even better are relying on running just a shit ton of data into them. If you were going to modify that Turing quote that there’s nothing that the computers can’t do that humans can do you’d want to have an addendum given that you flood them with vast amounts of information examples to build their own mental models, there’s probably a technical term for it but I don’t know that term, so I’ll just say mental models. And there’s some indication that Turing had some inkling of that in one of the quotes you said yesterday which is that the AIs can talk with each other or whatever he called them and acquired with that way.

You’re not telling AIs what to think, you’re giving AIs the wherewithal to figure out what to think like in those beer commercial and the pizza commercial, given the way they work, I guess there’s probably no way to tell AIs that people have exactly five fingers in most instances. In the beer commercial you see people with anywhere from three to eleven fingers grabbing a beer can and AI hasn’t been told the rules of physics it has to build or anything. It has to come to an understanding of it via a gazillion examples and I suppose once it starts to encroach on a rule that will lead to a compactification of its thinking around the rule. You can see in these early products that it has rough ideas of what things tend to look like but those haven’t been strengthened into rules for a lot of things; how many faces people have and how hands necessarily connect to the rest of the arms.

Also, it’s like dreams in that the AI engines, I don’t know how they do it but they can render with great detail these images that haven’t been purged of easy mistakes because they don’t have the information. I mean they have a bunch of examples, they have information in the form of a bunch of examples but that information hasn’t solidified into mental maps of rules of number of fingers. I remember when AI had trouble with teeth and earlobes and glasses. Now I think if you go to this person does not exist, the AI now understands glasses or at least doesn’t fuck up by making glasses that would fall apart because the pieces aren’t connected like you would have done two years ago.

And so eventually it’ll arrive upon five fingers on people but it’s like dreams and the images are very precise and detailed but with a lot of fucked up-ness in them the same way dreams have a lot of fucked up-ness in them because they’re built from incomplete information. Whatever information your brain is able to grab on the fly as the dream unfolds your brain’s not entirely on and it doesn’t have recourse to outside to sensory experience. It’s all pulling shit from memory and incompletely but it’s running the same processing on this incomplete shit, so your dreams have a lot of fucked up-ness and stuff that just doesn’t if you were awake enough. Sometimes you can wake yourself up but when you realize what you’re experiencing is absurd but most of the time you don’t but when you look back on what you dreamed if you can remember enough of it, there’s a lot of ridiculous shit and for the same reason just incomplete understanding based on, in the case of dreams, incomplete information.

I forgot what the original prompt was… Oh the Coda and Turing. I mean it would have been nice if he lived for another 30 years because obviously like some of the time an understanding of shit is in the Zeitgeist. Newton and Leibniz, both come up with Calculus independently but at the same time. And other people were poking at relativity at the same time Einstein was but was anybody as far along in thinking about the future of computation and artificial thought as Turing was?

Jacobsen: I think the term artificial intelligence is a misnomer. I don’t think that term fits at all. I mean take it from the big view of what you developed first and then you and I sort of talked about and developed a little bit together. If the universe is fundamentally data, then data makes the universe computable and it works because we can simulate aspects of the universe and its simulatability will imply that it’s data in some manner. And then taking it down a notch, less grandiose terms, you have a human computation which is sort of the main view of most psychology, neuroscience with computational neuroscience, for instance, and then you have the artificial intelligence which is computers which comes from the root for computation. So I think in both ways what you have really is computation in some vast kind of architecture happening in the universe but then at a lower level you have computation with human emphasis and then you have computation with whatever AI or in a more appropriate term has its emphasis. 

Rosner: I agree with you and I think a lot of people agree with you because people like to say machine learning which is a little bit of a step back from intelligence. It still has some of the same problems because learning implies like a conscious being, a thinking being who’s able to learn.  I mean there’s still some of the same problem but it’s not just a problem of terminology, it’s a problem of what figuring out where the differences are because probably at the micro level machine learning and little sets of neurons probably have generally similar systems. It’s probably unavoidably basic that if you want learning it’s going to be this kind of feedback loop with strengthening productive connections and lessening less productive connections. So, the micro of thinking and machine learning is roughly the same and then you have to figure out. It’s the way all the micros are connected that’s different in meet consciousness and AI. Do you agree?

Jacobsen: Yes.  I mean there’s aspects of human psychology we don’t take into account what people talk about because there’s an implied assumption and a lot of conversations around the singularity, the idea or the assumption being or hidden premise being that the brain is basically in a jar.

Rosner: Did you say brain in a jar?

Jacobsen: Yes. So, I mean what I think is going on is very sophisticated people, very smart people, very credential people and those that are not making a hidden premise in a lot of the conversation. They’ll talk about human computation, they’ll do a lot of reference to the brain, a lot of reference to the central nervous system and sometimes they’ll just talk about the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex to distinguish that part of the brain from the rest of the brain. Computers have a distinction in that their solid state, they’re in one place and outside of bludgeoning or something they’re not going to be really affected or some malfunctioning part or heat. Those are different variations of limitations for them.

For us, I think we’re going to find things that aren’t computation necessarily in the sense that we’re really thinking about better, sort of just part of the rhythms of the body that impact that computation in positive and negative ways that make the brain more adaptable in certain circumstances and that don’t in others. I mean a one example would just be age; hardening of the arteries, a reduction of oxygen capacity that impacts thinking, but I think there’s going to be other things that much more subtle like neural modulators that act as hormones physiologically to the body and then to the brain. 

Rosner: Just like boner town, how being horny like fucks up your thinking.

Jacobsen: Yes. They watch the blood flow go from the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, your sense of thought and self and sort of hindrance of bad behavior let’s say. That blood goes to the nucleus accumbens. So you begin to more or less  pleasure at the price of clarity of thought. And that matches any experience. So, there is hardware evidence in terms of the human brain to kind of back this up and actually process evidence in terms of love but I think when things get really sophisticated then we’ll really start to understand how being embodied is not just you’re in a body and there’s immediate interaction between nerve impulses from the brain and movement and in the intake of the senses to the brain to output movement. There will be other things. I mean a woman’s cycle, just having the monthly cycle. Men have their own cycles; things like declination of the rate of like testosterone probably age 25 to death.

Rosner: Yeah, my testosterone is obviously dropping. My hair’s not wanting to fall out as much so that’s less of a sure sign of that but my strength is down. I’m having harder time keeping muscle and building muscle and my dick’s noodlier. I haven’t had my testosterone measured in a long time; I still have a lot because it was high 15- 20 years ago last time it was measured. Anyway, I’m sliding away from the hyper masculinity which pisses me off by the way because I look at the old men in Congress who are trying to say that there are only two genders; the old Republican fuckers and you look at them and obviously those guys are super testosterone depleted and probably guys like Pence and Lindsey Graham probably didn’t have a high level of testosterone at any time. So those fuckers are closer to being intersex than I ever was and they’re the Arbiters of men or men and women or women, those fucking assholes.

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