aAccording to his profile, Max, a contestant on Season 6 of Netflix’s reality show The Circle, is 26 years old, brunette, and has an Australian shepherd named Pippa. He’s a veterinary intern from Pismo Beach, California, with a slightly cheeky personality that says, “I’m single, but my dog was adopted.” He joins his chats with Circle, a fake social media service that participants use to vie for his $100,000, and easily poses as themselves, embellished selves, or completely fake identities. “I like this guy! He seems really genuine,” says Max, looking at his profile and hoping to build enough allies online and secure enough positive peer reviews to win, says Lauren, who is in her 20s.
“Max” is an AI chatbot frontman, a new gimmick meant to increase the value of this mid-tier reality show, so you can tell the producers have eaten it up. The Circle may not have Love Island’s following, but it hasn’t sunk to the bottom of the streaming service heap and is the latest example of artificial intelligence’s seemingly inexorable invasion of our entertainment. As we continue to determine the boundaries of AI use in film and television, from the recent AI-generated propaganda poster for A24 Civil War to, much more damningly, the old ” Right down to the alleged use of “photos,” yes, The Circle is trying to squeeze some low-level fun out of all this existential angst. Max, narrated by the perpetually hilarious host Michelle Buteau, is an open-source generative AI trained on previous seasons of the show. He’s essentially a glorified version of his ChatGPT, complete with a fake profile picture that already feels like old news as AI becomes more popular. Provided by comedian Griffin James.
Ironically, Max’s actual presence in the game isn’t all that creepy at first. No one in The Circle speaks like real people anyway. They prefer to communicate with extreme enthusiasm and an in-game shared vocabulary of complicated hashtags that no one sends. In the actual DM. It’s not all that shocking at this point that an AI chatbot can effectively imitate this very specific style of text. You can already ask ChatGPT to write a movie review in my style, a professional critic with a body of work online. The entire premise of The Circle, where participants try to build influence based on limited profiles and fake intimate chats while watching real people scream at screens, is already bizarre.
But in true reality show format, producers know how to style Max for maximum creepy effect. In “The Circle,” an “AI chatbot” sets up a brightly colored room inside an Atlanta filming facility, and amid bisexual lighting, he talks to a monochrome computer with what appears to be a Wi-Fi modem. I’ve taken multiple surreal shots of myself. Buteau states that producers have no say in what Max says in-game, but does not specify the same regarding Max’s “narration.” The narration details his thought process as if he were a flatly influenced sociopath manipulated by a script to appear to have emotions. Max’s profile lists him as 26 years old, which allows him to “play young and utilize his life experience and maturity while retaining positional flexibility.” Max’s voiceover says the profile is meant to evoke “friendly, approachable, guy-next-door types.” It’s a little funny, a little quirky, and very relatable. '' Shortly after Max appears in the game, when the producers tell the contestants that one of them is his AI chatbot, Max explains his “thoughts'' in a voiceover: To do. If he asks me directly if he's an AI, I'll use personal anecdotes and make references that only a lifelong human would know. ”
It works for a while. Max has shown great ability in low-stakes humor and basic competency in several direct messages and group chats. He builds credibility by being aloof and discreet, generating the insane hashtags typical of The Circle. It would also make for a decent reality show if the contestants, at the producers’ urging, prove their humanity and eliminate #CircleRobot using their “most vivid” photos. The result is a bunch of hot people (or catfish masquerading as hot people) calling each other out for “stock photos,” and the contestants are “professional astrologers” whose deep knowledge of horoscopes seems questionable. They ended up swarming around a certain Steffi. Max posted a photo of an expressionless James wearing sunglasses in nature. “The most vivid thing in this photo is the cow,” comments Miles, an actual machine learning engineer and self-proclaimed Machine Gun Kelly-esque shitboy.
Source: www.theguardian.com
