Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. First, I always… Well, I always wanted to do something in the sci-fi-ish space. But only if I could do it… I was like, “Well, what is sci-fi?” It’s science fiction, right? Science is a theory plus fiction. And so I’ve always thought the best sci-fi for me was when it wasn’t just kind of space opera, but there was a real obvious sort of hypothesis. The story was Blade Runner is my favorite, and that’s… it’s obvious, you know, the replicants are better than the humans. And so this, I finally felt we found an interesting hypothesis. The AI is more intelligent than us, but he’s also as broken as we are. That was an interesting hypothesis to explore. You know, what happens when AI runs rampant in its own fake digital world? I felt that we had a hypothesis that was worth exploring and could give us some really interesting visuals and give us a really interesting story to tell. And it would be incredible to create a sort of AI video game as the world is developing smarter and smarter AIs. It allows us as humans to play the game and to reflect on the thing that we humans are creating. It’s a real commentary as the thing is happening. So I have to ask, as a person… you, as a person who loves literature, and one of the, if not the greatest writer in video game history. Kurt in the book… …of A Bitter Paradise has this nice line that I think is thoughtful. “At one point in college, I even wanted to be a writer. How ridiculous is that? A writer. Language models ended that fantasy for me and millions of others, so instead I decided to get a master’s in marketing and started to sell language models.” So you as a writer and creator of some of the most legendary narratives… In recent history, how do you feel about LLMs being able to write in a way that looks awfully human? I’m not that afraid of them for large-scale concepts. I don’t think they’re going to be very good at that. I think it’s harder if… You know, I began, and I was too shy to tell anyone I wanted to be a writer. That’s why I ended up in video games. And I would scribble away, writing manuals and writing on PS1 games, all 12 lines of dialogue in a game. Sometimes I wouldn’t even get that job and I’d just write the website copy. And then by doing, and then work your little bits and pieces. And then, you know, I’d luckily done enough work that when GTA III turned up, it was the first thing that resembled real writing. I had all of the small bits of skills that I could assemble into it. Based on my fairly limited understanding of how language models work, if you’ve… They’re not going to, they’re not going to replace good ideas. They can’t really come up with good new ideas. What they can do is do low-level stuff. So I think it’s going to be harder for people to start out in some of these spaces. If you’re not a very good concept artist, you’re in a lot of trouble. If you have original ideas, I think you’re fine. But I think… I also think that they’ve done the sort of first 90% of the work to sound human, 95% possibly in some areas. The last 5% is going to end up being about 95% of the work. I think that last bit in, with tech in my experience, with things like facial animation, always been the last bits and pieces take far longer than the first bit. And so I’m probably a hideous Luddite, but I’m less scared than a lot of people. I think you’re going to end up with a lot of work that looks the same. It’s going to help people be creative in some ways. It’s going to get some people who probably shouldn’t be in that space out of that space. But if you’ve got talent, I think it’ll be fine.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.