One of the questions in our world is why nobody can write a good story to turn into a movie. Some good literature is still being published, but movie plots are boring, senseless, or both things at the same time. And the fact that ChatGPT can write novels doesn’t create good novels.
My impression is that literature is being corrupted by money, just as everything else. One of these days, I’ll write a post about that. In the meantime, I enjoyed this scathing criticism of “Dune 2” written by Ian Kummer. I haven’t seen that movie; I found the first one sufficiently boring and cumbersome. So, it makes plenty of sense that the second one is worse.
From “The Reading Junkie” by Ian Kummer
Dune 2: The First Movie Written By ChatGPT
March 4, 2024 by Ian Kummer
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Here are my first (and probably last) impressions after watching Dune 2. It’s almost three hours long, with ponderous pacing. The shots of CGI landscape are all too long, and it felt like a third of the runtime was just staring at particle animations. The dialogue is mostly wooden exposition dumps with characters reciting stuff they already know to each other. I’m almost surprised someone didn’t say “As you know…” Elements of the book are thrown onscreen at random, and poorly. Despite all of the exposition dumps, spice and spice-addicted navigator people have no role in the plot at all. -Did you forget to explain the entire point of the conflict? -Yes I did, whoopsie.
I have to wonder if someone told ChatGPT to read Dune and generate a two-part script based on it.
All of these problems were present in the first chapter of the film, and were even worse in the sequel. It’s mentioned that Paul’s mother is pregnant, but ChatGPT apparently forgot that the fetus was eventually supposed to turn into a character with her own lines of dialogue. Paul’s native girlfriend Chani scowls throughout the whole runtime, like she needs to poop but has to wait until the speech is over. In the last scene Chani runs out of the room, like that was in fact the reason she looked so uncomfortable.
Really, I have to wonder if ChatGPT strung together a bunch of words from the book plus whatever other nonsense it scraped off the internet, and that was the whole script. The movie itself often felt like that was generated with AI too. A lot of the CGI looks terrible, literally worse than sci-fi movies from 50 years ago, and the same visual cliches are used over and over and over again. Watch this AI-generated clip:
Now imagine this clip, but 550 times longer. That’s Dune 2, not even an exaggeration.
AI is competitive with human creators not because AI has gotten better, but because humans have gotten worse. Even our concept of what AI means has deteriorated. If we asked a computer scientist from the 1950s what AI is, I’m sure he would absolutely not agree that it is simply the ability to string together random bullshit from a library of content.