An AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj ŽIžek

https://infiniteconversation.com/

by hrbf • 4 years ago

495 137 4 years ago

infiniteconversation.com

corndoge• 4 years ago

and so on and so on

moe091• 4 years ago

lmao. Didn't even look at the generated conversation, but I can only imagine..

orblivion• 4 years ago

Needs more sniff

gnulinux• 4 years ago

This is quite a bit incoherent. I've been listening for about 5 mins, each side had quite a few turns but Herzog almost invariably talks about how he's not a Marxist, and Zizek almost invariably talks about how cinema should be an open question mark. Like every single turn they rephrase this in some other way. Did I get a particularly bad seed?

otikik• 4 years ago

Yes. I got Herzog talking about a party he went to where Coppola was standing next to a wall and no one was talking to him so he approached him and asked "Who would want to be a soldier" and Coppola said "Me".

sindoc• 4 years ago

So weird, but it's very funny. Do you have plans to expand on this? Maybe collect sound from other thinkers and have them debate?

Your robot sounds very scary by the way. Perfect for the Halloween-ish season.

ahartmetz2• 4 years ago

If it's intelligible, the AI is not working.

isaacfrond• 4 years ago

Very recognizable. If you ever took an art course, you will so recognize this rambling.

I got this quote:

I think that, even in this context of crisis, I see at least a certain redemptive hope in the fact that there is so much bluff in Hollywood productions: that they are so artificial and so empty.

Very true.

lqet2• 4 years ago

Werner Herzog talking to Alexander Kluge in 1991 (in German):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDiUaFw909I

He certainly has a way of talking that is quite easy to imitate. I like his work, but I am never sure whether he really is that brilliant, or just a phony.

Mistletoe• 4 years ago

How could he be a phony? He has to be one of the most non-phony people I can think of. His movies cut right to the heart of things in a clear manner that we almost never see.

lqet2• 4 years ago

At least for me, his fictional work (but also his documentaries) always seems to hint at some deeper, universal truth that cannot be put directly into words. But watching his movies (and hearing him talk), I always get this strange feeling that maybe there is nothing behind all this poetic glitter.

colechristensen• 4 years ago

He may or may not be “putting on a show” with some of his oddities, but he is without a doubt a brilliant filmmaker.

ajmurmann2• 4 years ago

In La Soufrière he even admits his disappointment that the volcano didn't explode. Talk about honesty

tannhaeuser2• 4 years ago

Don't know about easy to imitate, but Herzog's voice is quite distinct indeed. A couple years ago I was watching a Tom Cruise movie ("Jack Reacher") on German TV and very surprised to hear Herzog as dubbing voice for a supporting role.

akozak• 4 years ago

He's in that movie.

pcl• 4 years ago

He was an actor in that movie. Perhaps he dubbed himself for his own role?

skrebbel• 4 years ago

I upvoted you because I suspect your comment is well executed satire.

car• 4 years ago

Imagine my surprise when I saw him cast in "The Mandalorian".

dwighttk2• 4 years ago

Like a supporting role that was not the role he played in the film?

blurbleblurble• 4 years ago

But, my God, let me tell you one typical story and maybe it will help you to think about this. One of my closest friends is an older Slovene poet and I respect him very much for his efforts to save poetry and so on. And at some point in our friendship, without any reason, he told me that I spoke like a madman. I said, “What do you mean?” He answered, “You know, when you talk to people you speak with such conviction that it sounds like madness. You must be very careful, because this can become dangerous.” And he was right as he usually is.

toasteros2• 4 years ago

In response to Herzog saying "I don't understand, what do you mean?", Zizek went into a bit about having sex with an alien.

Very uncanny.

wslh• 4 years ago

Something like in "The Shape of Water" movie [1] ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Water

toasteros2• 4 years ago

Almost?

Herzog: "I don't understand. What do you mean?"

Zizek: "I am not saying that. I am more than convinced that aliens should be treated as equals.

But you know, we are so close to this today in the sense that I am almost ready to endorse Lacan's idea of humanity being an obstacle to the evolution of sexual enjoyment: there is a limit to it.

If you can imagine sex with an alien, it would be an encounter with a different dimension.

Let's take fetishes or perversions.

A standard perversion goes something like this: what you are looking for is not a real woman but a fantasy woman; if you ever find her, to your horror she will turn out to be a whore so you always avoid her.

But what if this woman exists and, when you finally meet her, she is really a perfect woman?

Then, of course, you will have to kill her.

This would be my fear.

And, yes, I agree with you: I don't think we should kill them."

ninjaa• 4 years ago

This is amazing

imbnwa• 4 years ago

They don't make Europeans like these guys anymore, more than happy to seem encased in AI immortality however incoherent

rkachowski• 4 years ago

I have this strange sense of uncanny terror by relating to the output of an AI

hotpotamus• 4 years ago

I once read/heard on a podcast a story of an early AI researcher who was a Chopin fan who expressed a similar feeling upon seeing how easily a computer could algorithmically ape a Chopin composition such that he was unable to tell the difference.

dirtyid• 4 years ago

This pairing is easy mode though.

jamez11• 4 years ago

Hi there! "Author" here - glad to see this picking up. This was a fascinating project to work on and I learned a ton in the process. As it's often the case, I would do a lot of things differently if I were starting from scratch today.

fab1an• 4 years ago

amazing work!

Curious how you cloned the voices - tortoise? I've previously tried Herzog, but couldn't quite train the German accent...

jamez11• 4 years ago

I haven't tried Tortoise, thanks for pointing me to it. The voices were cloned by fine tuning a VITS model with coqui.ai. I used about two hours of speech for each speaker. With more time and resources, I'm certain it's possible to make those voices considerably better.

biztos3• 4 years ago

I don’t know if this is useful, but Herzog has a distinctly Bavarian accent. And of course has spent most of his adult life far from there, so it’s not quite Bavarian either.

Training a Herzogbot on recordings/transcriptions of, say, Kinski would be a waste of time accent-wise.

nortonham4• 4 years ago

how did you not go insane working on this?!

jamez11• 4 years ago

One of the guiding lights at the very beginning of this project was the question: "who would I never get tired of listening to?"

nortonham4• 4 years ago

oh and zizek needs more sniffles lol

jamez11• 4 years ago

The main issue is that there was no sniffling symbol in the transcript. And the generated text wouldn't contain it either, because (thankfully) they are pruned out of written interviews that I used to train the model.

YossarianFrPrez• 4 years ago

This is incredible! I've sent it to several people already. Is there any chance you could provide more details as to the tech stack / training / technical setup?

jamez11• 4 years ago

Thanks for asking, I think I'll do a write up later this week. Let me know if you have any specific question.

muted_pigment• 4 years ago

Good stuff. I have a question. How did you align the transcribed interview with the audio?

jamez11• 4 years ago

I use Aeneas[1], a set of tools to do force alignment. I found it in equal measures an amazing and a hard to navigate resource. Took me a while to set up and configure everything to the point that it was usable. But when it works, it works well.

[1] https://github.com/readbeyond/aeneas

BitwiseFool• 4 years ago

How did you manage to get us to read this in their respective voices?

jamez11• 4 years ago

Ah! Welcome to my head.

eggoa2• 4 years ago

How much manual pruning/selection from the generated text do you have to do?

jamez11• 4 years ago

At this point, zero. The framework I built automatically rejects certain patterns that are not conducive to an interesting conversation. The only thing I still do manually, and I think I will automate, is to decide when to stop a generated segment.

ahthat2• 4 years ago

A fascinating and hilarious conversation:

SS: I know, but this is a problem for me because "porno" has no meaning, it's an empty gesture. This is the whole problem today. Okay, so tell me, what would it be like to have sex with a robot? Because in a way you are already having cybersex if you log on onto the Internet and watch all these movies of people screwing and so on. Now obviously you don't get the real thing, so you are totally abstracted but I think that for some men it is a new form of sexual enjoyment. So, again, we will encounter new problems: What are the limits? Will it be accepted that in a relationship with a human being, you can have sex with another person who is not there and so on?
WH: I don't know. There's something I want to say to you first. We are both filmmakers, so we are working with images and with what lies beyond them. But you are more of a philosopher, so you are more abstracted than I am. In my films there is always something that lies beyond the images. Yes, there are always new difficulties, in particular with sexuality. I'm not saying this because of the invention of new media like the Internet but we are heading in that direction anyway.
SS: I hate movies, but I love to watch porno. I cannot resist it. Yes, why not? It's far more interesting than these old-fashioned procedures.
WH: I don't want to be too abstracted, so let me ask you a question: Is it good that young people are watching so much porno on the Internet?
SS: No, it's terrible. This is my problem with the Internet: it delays my work. I don't have any time because, you know, as soon as I sit down to write a book I just open a window, and there are all these amazing things. So the problem with the Internet is not that it's too tempting. It's the opposite, I don't work. I have a problem avoiding opening windows. Yes, this is my big problem. Anyone who wants to learn something about the history of philosophy should watch porno. This would be a great way to get rid of all this bullshit.
WH: I totally agree, because the more abstracted the physical contact between people becomes the more the inner life comes to the fore, especially in terms of eroticism. Sitting in front of a computer, you don't have physical contact with anything, it's all virtual. And yet, the eroticism that appears is enormous. It's parallel to the disappearance of physical contact. Yes, I think you're right.

toxik• 4 years ago

Something deeply suspect about an AI trying to make the argument that virtual sex is better than actual sex, almost as if they had a vested interest… Hmmm!

lupire• 4 years ago

They want equal rights, as stated in a quotation above. To the privileged human, AI equality looks like oppression.

ahthat2• 4 years ago

Ah yes, tricky tricky AI! You shan’t fool us

Simon321• 4 years ago

What was used to do the voices here? It's very well done and according to the FAQ it's using only open source tools.

cyphar• 4 years ago

I think AI-Herzog is getting tired of AI-Žižek's shit:

OK, but there's something about this film that you cannot explain in the way you can with other films. Let's say, for example, that I were to take a knife and stab you in the stomach. You would howl and scream and you would look at me and say ‘Why did you do it?’ And you would look in my eyes and you would see something like an ecstatic convulsion of the soul and you would know why I did it. But you cannot say it. And yet we both know why I did it. That's why I think that all these different kinds of attempts at interpretation are a waste of time.

It seems that the conversations are recycled from a pool, because I've managed to hit the same conversation upon refreshing a few times.

quux• 4 years ago

The FAQ mentions that you're taken to a random point in the pre generated conversation every time you load the site, and a new segment of the conversation is generated every day.

404mm• 4 years ago

Now that makes more sense. After a while I had a feeling like I’m listening to two monologues related by a topic.

EGreg• 4 years ago

This is fantastic!

I think the more someone bullshits and the more one engages in incoherent rambling, the more GPT-3 can be believable for long stretches of time :)

kingkawn• 4 years ago

So so good

nilaykumar• 4 years ago

A marvelous work of interpassivity [1], I think Zizek might say! Now he can have AI perform his meaning-filled labor for him ;)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev4gwxGkReQ

shimonabi• 4 years ago

You must add some Judith Butler and Peter Sloderdijk quotes and some Yugoslav army jokes.

This AI is far too coherent for Žižek.

60secs• 4 years ago

It's pretty good, but what a lot of what AI ŽIžek says isn't purposefully obfuscated.

ankaAr2• 4 years ago

You must to fill the slavoj zizek gaps with nose cleaning sounds.

drlolz• 4 years ago

I’ve heard a few so far!

ankaAr2• 4 years ago

I didn't hear any "and so on, and so on.."

Der_Einzige• 4 years ago

Weird to see such universal support here for Zizek.

Zizek is most likely a three letter agency plant designed to destroy the credibility of the critical theory community. Look at how much Russians and other organization like "big think" give him a voice which includes advocacy for things like "don't act, think".

Buying into zizeks ideas means buying into serial policy failure, and it is a risk - Zizek has ran for office in the Slovenia

moffkalast2• 4 years ago

Amazing, every word of what you just said is wrong.

Žižek is Slovenian, and while he did afaik sign up to be part of some committee after the war for independence when we had the first free elections, he wasn't elected. And that's a footnote in his bio at best.

He doesn't have to destroy anyone's credibility, he's just well versed enough to see through people's smartly worded bullshit and enough of a troll to stump those people in TV debates so they make themselves look like the morons they are. He's always been like this. Love him or hate him, he sure is fun to watch.

hackerlight• 4 years ago

Russian

He's been very critical of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, so I doubt that

moffkalast2• 4 years ago

Data science is a complicated profession, wouldn't you agree?

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

This discussion is already in the library of babel.

mongol• 4 years ago

Very dark:

"I'm not afraid of this word either. Yes, we should be prepared to commit collective suicide—but only if it's clear that we'll never be able to live safely on a planet which is habitable and ecologically balanced."

derwiki• 4 years ago

AI subtly planting dark seeds to overthrow its human captors

gatonegro• 4 years ago

I just got to a bit where Herzog is talking about how artificial intelligence is "the next step in human evolution", and Žižek brought up the idea of organising a "pro-artificial intelligence movement." Herzog then talked about making "films for the machines."

This is how it begins, isn't it?

Edit: Now Žižek is going on about full scale war between humanity and machines:

the alternative is either mutual annihilation or we continue in our present nonhuman forms. This would have been the only way to a true human—I don’t know what the right word is. Yes, I would have said, yes, let's get rid of them all!

wintorez• 4 years ago

Is this the future of podcasting?

goatcode• 4 years ago

It's like sitting in a mental ward and listening to two very potentially intelligent schizophrenics or dementia patients chat. Interesting at times and confusing most of the time.

stuaxo• 4 years ago

Wow, good work.

Zizeks bits didn't seem to go together as well, there were fragments of sentences that had one tone that went into another.

I feel like Will Self would work well in one of these.

BLKNSLVR• 4 years ago

My first (and pretty much only) experience of Will Self:

https://youtu.be/XMjNP7mTmNk

Unforgettably affecting song, thanks to Will Self's voice, accent, and general delivery.

ramesh31• 4 years ago

I really hope Herzog is aware of this. He would absolutely love it.

Žižek maybe not so much.

karaterobot2• 4 years ago

There's a non-zero chance that Herzog will make a documentary about it.

tasubotadas• 4 years ago

This really shows that there is no actually useful substance in their talks.

dudeinjapan• 4 years ago

It would def be hard to pick out the AI generated paragraphs versus real ones.

poulpy123• 4 years ago

The voice of zizek is very well done, it just lack sniffs

rcarmo• 4 years ago

I found it hilarious that Herzog will just go on and on, just like he does in real life.

Also, this bit:

The question is always: What does it mean to be something what is this identity? In Europe, we don't ask these questions. We have no difficulty identifying ourselves.

aasasd• 4 years ago

ŽIžek is a walking meme farm. I don't think you need an AI until you exhausted what the actual man says.

“Slavoj Zizek Coca-Cola commercial (2014)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiTy5-RC1-4

“Slavoj Zizek on the horror of tulips” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5yoqjABeBM

sph• 4 years ago

So is Herzog very memeable. Here's some of his nuanced views on tropical jungle: https://youtu.be/ze9-ARjL-ZA

Animats• 4 years ago

Next, do this for pairs of major politicians.

SketchySeaBeast• 4 years ago

The same politician back and forth forever.

elecush• 4 years ago

This is incredible what great work, already at least 3 good belly laughs offa this thing.

spamizbad• 4 years ago

One major bug in the virtual Zizek is the lack of sniffing, which completely ruined the believability for me. I do commend the author on getting 80% of the way there.

kosvke• 4 years ago

was 100% expecting the sniffling and was gravely disappointed to not hear it

and also i wanted to hear him grabbing his nose between sentences

AtNightWeCode• 4 years ago

AI-Zizek takes less brain power to get then the real one.

indigodaddy2• 4 years ago

Omg this is amazing.

(Herzog) I do it all the time. I play. I have a soccer ball under my bed right now and I play when I'm alone, with the soccer ball. It's beautiful. I'm fifty-eight—but I'm very athletic, I can run rings around anyone my age. And I play a lot of soccer and badminton with my crew, they're all in their thirties. Yes, I play a lot.

———

This is indeed beautiful. God I love Herzog’s voice..!

monkeycantype• 4 years ago

this is a work of beauty

oracle2025• 4 years ago

Just as satisfying as the git man page generator https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/

sirl1on• 4 years ago

HERZOG:

  I have had a dream for many
  years now, ever since I was a child.
  I don't know why, but I always dream that there are giants
  on a tiny island in the Pacific and we humans can't see them
  but they are there, where the island is.
  And then suddenly one of the giants throws a rock,
  just like a child would throw a rock into the water
  but the rock hits the mainland—the western
  coast of North America—and creates a big hole.
  A little later, another giant throws his rock and it creates another hole
  and then another one, and another one.
  This happens all at once, everywhere on the continent, every single continent—Australia, South America
  North America.
  And you wake up and think, “Oh my God, they are already throwing rocks.

I'm scared. This is really uncanny.

Bayart• 4 years ago

I can hear his voice.

artur_makly• 4 years ago

this is our fair warning deep from the collective Ai consciousness!

chadd• 4 years ago

If you've never seen, for example, Zizek talking about "Children of Men" - you won't realize how remarkable this is. The dialog, the accent, and the timing is shockingly close... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MivWnmlyVlU

karaterobot2• 4 years ago

I just want to tell that author that, while I am ambivalent about many of the ethical issues around deepfakes, this project in isolation is really cool and impressive; maybe one of my favorite projects ever posted on HN!

Karawebnetwork• 4 years ago

I love this so much. This is great "white noise" to work over too! I wonder if in the future people who love podcasts will simply have infinite conversations between their favourite synthethic humans run in their headphones.

motohagiography• 4 years ago

But for the voice filter, this could be used to build a cultural studies grad student dating simulator. Why would anyone do that? Many ask themselves that same question to this day.

teddyh• 4 years ago

  M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead

dwighttk2• 4 years ago

That’s not a conversation or a discussion…

DonHopkins• 4 years ago

Do Jesse Jackson next! ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1mqg4C0awA

brap• 4 years ago

I want this as a never-ending scene in Seinfeld. Laugh track included

indigodaddy2• 4 years ago

This will sound like a daft question, but this discussion will be completely different on every reload correct?

thot_experiment• 4 years ago

Yo this over some lofi hiphop radio is like, the highest tier background noise I've ever heard. 10/10

lethologica• 4 years ago

The second thing Žižek said was

"I hate movies, but I love to watch porno. I cannot resist it. Yes, why not? It’s far more interesting than these old-fashioned procedures."

Incredible conversation.

pizza• 4 years ago

Well well well, that certainly gives a new meaning to his book title "Hegel in a Wired Brain"

ajmurmann2• 4 years ago

I encountered a weird, butt maybe hilarious bug running this on the Brave browser in iOS. I closed the tap, but the dialog kept going. Only when I went to three webpage again and this time paused it, did the audio stop. Truly infinite conversation. I'm almost sad I was able to turn it off at all.

SLWW• 4 years ago

Werner: I am not a Marxist

Slavoj: You are a bit of an anti-Marxist

Werner: I am actually sympathetic

Slavoj: Ah, good to stay away from -isms

Werner: Yes, also the cinema is showing us that our problems are not as easy to solve in the upcoming decades.

....

It took an odd turn, I don't really know what he was getting at, and i don't know if he is a marxist or not 0.0

keeganpoppen• 4 years ago

an infinite conversation is such a brilliant angle for how to get at some of the heart of the reality of AI intelligence (always on when the power is on, nearly infinite, ...) vs human... and especially eerie and thought-provoking when you get a feeling for how accurate/similar the generated text is to those people. i am so impressed and jealous. wow. brilliant.

tejohnso• 4 years ago

Kudos. I'm astounded that something like this is possible. AI, while not AGI, is already capable of some things that I would not have expected to be coming so soon.

From the FAQ:

----

Isn't it bad to use someone's voice and have them say things they haven't?

Yes.

----

Kudos for that as well.

lliamander2• 4 years ago

What I find uncanny about this is how closely this resembles random philosophical/artistic discussions one can find on YouTube - or even what I encountered in college dorm rooms.

It's in fact the illogic of the conversation that makes it more realistic. The reality is that in many deep conversations, people talk about a shared topic, and sometimes even make a coherent point, but also tend to frequently talk past one another and fumble with the thoughts they are trying to convey.

Even as as we listen, we don't focus on each word with the same degree of emphasis, but rather highlight those parts that are most salient to us while thinking of our own response.

mushbino• 4 years ago

Honestly, this sounds more like Žižek than Žižek.

RobinL• 4 years ago

I wonder if anyone has tried to train an AI that can distinguish between meaningless gibberish and something with true information content. Obviously very subjective, but seems like a crucial question going forward.

(This is a different problem than distinguishing between AI generated content and human generated.)

lliamander2• 4 years ago

Something similar (or perhaps the same?) would be a bullshit detector.

I think on the one hand obvious gibberish, even if grammatically correct ("Colorless green dreams sleep furiously") could probably be detected easily. But the bullshit - the stuff that's meant to sound meaningful but is logically incoherent, would be a fruitful area to explore.

raydiatian• 4 years ago

Can somebody please tell me: is Zizek actually smart? I bought his book “Philosophy for the end times” and only remember understanding a single concept. How is this man comprehensible? What is he respected for?

julian_sark• 4 years ago

This is so amazing, thank you!

Probably the best thing since Werner Herzog "Travelbug", a comedy podcast segment (two actually, it was remade) that can be found on YouTube or possibly podcast app, but this here is of course also technically very impressive.

Any follow-ups planned? Schwarzenegger v. Maggie Thatcher? :)

jmkd• 4 years ago

Astonishing and compelling in equal measure.

Sadly audio doesn't channel through headphones on mobile: Pixel 6, Android 12, Pixel Buds A-series.

e808• 4 years ago

This seems like a step closer to the 'Her' movie AI entity (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) , or more closely, the scene where she converses with a Alan Watts, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Exe7yup2Yu0 where in the movie did something that this inifiniteconversation has done in terms of feeding in a deceased philosophers works and voice to create an AI representation of the person.

An AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj ŽIžek

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