BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who The BBC has decided to exterminate its experiments using generative AI to promote venerable sci-fi show Doctor Who. The broadcaster announced its intention to use AI to create some promos in early March, a move that earned it a thorough pasting from fans – including the folks behind the Doctor Who Companion website, which …
Funny enough, there legitimately was a "Who Trek" crossover comic at one point, titled Assimilation², revolving around a cross-dimensional teamup between the Borg and the Cybermen... eventually going very, very wrongly for the former (Cybermen have no organic matter to be Borgificated, but Cyberization works just fine on the Borg). So the Doctor has, canonically, been on a Starfleet vessel at one point.
I thought Cybermen had human brains as the only remaining vestige of human bodies? Hence the emotion and pain dampening gadget on their front. There was an episode or two around humans being herded into Battersea power station to have their heads chopped and brains inserted into the mechanical bodies.
You are both right.
It was not the most canon-caring story line.
I suggest trying "Ensign Two: The Wrath of Sue"[1] for your Doctor Trek / Star Who reading pleasure.
[1] hmm, the server is having trouble today, so not a good idea to give the easy-to-click URL right now :-(
I think it's possible to be political and still be entertaining. For instance, The Sun Makers is politically straight out of an excessively activism-focused student union but is still an entertaining watch because the priority isn't placed on viewer indoctrination.
I think it's possible to be political and still be entertaining.
And to be honest, I like it that way. Science Fiction has a long and proud history of social commentary and indeed satire. It's the place writers go to discuss topics that the mainstream publishers or broadcasters are scared to go near.
In the Soviet Union, Sci-fi was a hotbed of political commentary because the censors didn't treat it as serious literature and as long as communism had prevailed on Earth, you could do whatever you liked with aliens that bore a remarkable resemblance to certain leaders. See, e.g. the Strugatsky brothers.
Even in the US, Kirk and Uhura had their early interracial kiss, and ST:DS9 had a transgender storyline in the 1990s. The networks would have run screaming if you'd told them that Dax was a thinly disguised trans character.1
But I also prefer it done subtly and intelligently, if only because it gives the consumer the smug satisfaction of "I understood that reference". A lot of Chibnall's storylines were downright patronising. It definitely feels like Chibnall exclusively targeted a younger audience, where you have to lay it out a bit more obviously. Which is fine in that Dr Who has always been family entertainment and isn't post-watershed like Torchwood. But he didn't get the balance right of leaving some more sophisticated stuff in for older viewers (in the way that Pixar masterfully blend really adult themes for the parent's benefit into what are notionally children's films. How many adults can get through the first 10 minutes of "Up" without tearing up?).
In his defence, some were quite well delivered - the Rosa Parks episode for instance. Graham's discomfort at having to sit and watch history unfold, knowing he mustn't intervene is a standout moment. It's notable though that some of the better episodes weren't written by Chibnall - "Rosa" was written by Malorie Blackman.
1Even the Klingons respected her new identity, in S2 episode "Blood Oath":
Kor: "Curzon, my beloved old friend" (pulls Jadzia into big hug)
Jadzia: "I'm Jadzia now"
Kor: (smiles, continues hug) "Jadzia, my beloved old friend" (without missing a beat, switches to using exclusively female pronouns in all future interactions).
While I prefer subtlety, I don't think even on the nose commentary is a sure-fire recipe for a bad end product. The example I would use is Arachnids in the UK. It was fairly standard Who at the core concept but failed to be an enjoyable watch because, in my opinion, the villain was written as a Trump stand-in. This meant (as far as Chibnall seems to be concerned) he couldn't be charismatic, sympathetic or have any other interesting depth; he could only be an unpleasant, weak-charactered, ignorant businessman, which was made all the more bland by everyone else having to be entirely good in their motives and actions.
In some ways, this sort of storytelling reminds me of 'uplifting' American Christian cinema.
As so amusingly described above, I am currently pertwee through the classic episodes. And having just watched "Three Doctors", I can confidently state that all three of them were credited in episode four as:
.
Dr. Who
$ACTOR
.
Make of that what you will.
...
No, not you Omega, you already caused quite enough trouble by willing things as it is.
Anon,
If I click on your Rick Astley link and it doesn't lead to William Shatner "singing" 'Never Gonna Give You Up' on the Youtubes, I'm going to be sorely disappointed.
Maybe that could be even "better" than his interpretation of 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'?
@I ain't Spartacus - be careful what you wish for. Not singing, but asking, which in Shatner's case is probably close enough.
https://twitter.com/williamshatner/status/1181940779826106368
Although if you search "william shatner singing never gonna give you up" on Google, the first video suggestion is ironically appropriate...
Capaldi really does look like a Vulcan - more Spock than Spock ;) Although he might have trouble with the traditional deadpan Vulcan delivery but as an uninhibited Vulcan reprising his "In the Thick of It", Caledonian Mafia role might liven up the franchise. :)
Looks like Matt Smith messing with r2d2 and I thought it was quite clever AI grayed his hair and generally aged him until I realized it probably lifted the images from "The Time of the Doctor" during the latter part of the siege of Trenzalore.
The Doctor's two enduring adversaries, dalek and cybermen, weren't AI but basically cyborgs which demonstrates that, while machines can be really nasty, it takes biological intelligence to take it up to another level for evil. :)
Old Shatner with tube of toothpaste? Peter Capaldi with Anson Mount hair?
R2D2 has a fairly consistent look and style but the Doctor has a selection of faces giving Leonardo some difficulty latching on to a specfic one.
Spambots have been able to produce content faster than humans can delete it since the '90s. Perhaps one day AI will be able to sift through the dross an pick out a few good stories for me. Targeted ads convince me it will not happen any time soon.
"In a world of AI generated content, no one will bother reading what no one could be bothered to write"
Hmm, sounds like The Register's sibling site, Dev Class (and the other ones)… ;-P
(But seriously, I genuinely would be interested in reading more programming/developer content on The Register, especially on the actual Register, where the comment section and the informed commentariat provide at least half the value.
But the sibling sites don't have comment sections, for some reason, and for the most part don't seem to be very much more than reheated press releases, so I'm not really sure what purpose they actually serve (Does anyone here actually read any of the sibling sites?). I suppose if you can convince advertising weasels that those sites get a lot of crawler-bot user visits, and the advertisers will pay for ad slots on them, then there's a bit of flesh on a corpse for a vulture to chew on?)
Yeah, supposedly, Disney is only buying distribution rights for the "rest of the world", hence the new series being series 1 on Disney+ and series 14 on the BBC. But it's blindingly obvious that Disney will be taking more and more control over it. I wonder how they'll manage to to fit Doctor Who into the Marvel and/or Star Wars franchises?
I tried Leonardo after an article here on El Reg mentioned it. It's fun to fool around with, but apparently asking Leonardo to put Star Destroyers in the sky above Earth is still subject to some sort of copyright (because I fail to see how it can be a lack of reference material) - the spaceships are triangular, but Star Destroyers they ain't.
That said, I understand - and subscribe to - the notion that AI-generated blurbs on shows published by the BBC should never happen.
Unfortunately, I am also aware that this is reality, and in our current reality, there is nothing AI will not be applied to, whether successful or not.
Live with the times . . .
Surely marketing blurb created by text and picture generating algorithms from IP that you own yourself is a perfectly legitimate use of the technology? It's putting a few very low level marketing copywriters out of a job, assuming it works - but I'm not sure it's much of a threat to anything.
I'm a lot more impressed by the image-generating tech than the text stuff - although I strongly suspect there's a lot of selection bias. People generate a bunch of images and only show the best ones. But nonetheless that seems technically a lot harder than summarising text.
::sigh:: is there nothing Doctor Who fans won't complain about? I've watched and generally enjoyed the show since Pertwee, and could reasonably have been described as a Who nerd in my teens (in fact, I was), but fans' tendency to complain really gets on my wick.
Of all the things you could do with AI, this seems like such a trivial use as to be insignificant. As long as the description is accurate, what does it matter how it was created??
I find it hard to believe large groups of Dr Who fans would carpetbomb the BBC over an AI language model that wrote draft marketing script for their PR campaigns.
Most Dr Who fans of the nerdier variety stopped watching it when Capaldi left.
My assumption, reading between the lines, is that this is more likely to be a concerted effort by journalists/writers/unions to prevent the BBC from spreading the use of AI generative models in their industry. As it directly affects their careers.
While I am ... disheartened to see anyone lose their careers, IMO 'modern journalism' has degraded so far that I find it a truly embarrassing sector. We're torn between awful social media clickbait content, awful politicisation/social campaigning with minimal regard for truth, a horrendous problem with PR/bias degrading the trust between reader and writer, cheesy predictable advertising that everybody hates except marketing droids, all combined with what has become a highly formulaic and predictable writing structure. This all creates a situation where in the absence of people saying something interesting - if you had a choice between an AI that can get the job 95% complete in 1 second for basically £0.01, or an expensive human...I would choose AI.
It's a sad state of affairs when I routinely have to assume journalists are writing deceptively (is it PR? is it an ad? is it a campaign?) - on virtually any topic I have to verify the story against multiple website to understand what is happening (there's usually some weird kind of social engineering bias messing with the core facts).
PS of course I love the register journalists ;) It's why I keep coming back for mooaaaar!
They might start making dodgy adverts featuring daleks
The BBC's intention was fine. AI would write it, a human would check it. So we know where it went wrong.
Anything that pretends to be 'intelligent' will know any human just before beer o'clock on a Friday will sign off anything without a glance. Injecting a deliberate error and checking whether it has been removed would seem an obvious step in such a process. Otherwise why not just get rid of the meatbags and hack Barb's measurement computers to sample the AI Bot community instead. A Bot rating of what is now mostly CGI would be more objective?
So like the luddites smashing power looms, the arty nerds are enraged by generative AI, mainly as they fear their ability to charge £££££/$$$$$ for derivative crap is at risk of anyone can spit out something "good enough".
Coming from the same lot who run witchhunts on places like wetcanvas over such sins as daring to draw the same location as someone else (the same location thousands flock to every year) or using the same publicly available stock image as it's "plagiarism"
And that's not even getting onto their major beef "amateur artists" and "mummy crafters" for the sin of "devaluing the market" by charging ££-£££ rather than ££££-££££££
Meh screw them and their neo-luddite ways
(My wife is an illustrator and even she rolls her eyes at the online groupthink about AI)
Coming from the same lot who run witchhunts on places like wetcanvas over such sins as daring to draw the same location as someone else (the same location thousands flock to every year) or using the same publicly available stock image as it's "plagiarism"
They'd probably have apoplexy if forced to sit through Irwin Allens full back catalogue :-) He not only reused props and even entire sets, he even slipped in film from previous shows and films, all to save money :-)
I see no mention of this in the Bootnote itself, but the picture ofDoctor Who in a Starfleet uniform is absolutely fascinating because what I'm seeing is an actor who appears to be a mutual cousin of Peter Capaldi and David Tenant (or maybe if Tenant had a kid with Capaldi's daughter). It's just mind-boggling that the AI could generate family resemblances that way. But logical, I suppose, other than the fact that I don't see Matt Smith or Jodie Whittaker in the mix....
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