Helix Nebula
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2022–2026
0:16 · 33K views · Feb 26, 2020
A very short clip from the TV series Westworld about whether it matters if you cannot tell a human from an artificial being.
HN invokes it as a quick reference in discussions of AI-generated content and indistinguishable AI output.
3 comments from Hacker News
> An erotic novelist has their human brain and human instincts to guide them in writing their work. An ML agent trained on all the erotic novels written, weighted by critical and popular success would might be quite capable of generating sequels, "original" stories, or even stories bespoke to each reader. Good Will Hunting suggests first-hand experience is irreducible: "You can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel." [LINK] To which Westworld counters: "Well if you can't tell, does it matter?" this video I think the cowboys have it. For the moment though, it's still up to humans to decide how this plays out.
One of my favorite dialogues from Westworld [0] is such a perfect fit for the whole creative AI industry discussion: Are you real? - If you can't tell, does it matter? [0]: this video
There's the quality of the written commentary (which is all that matters for anyone only reading, never posting on HN) and the quality of the engagement of people that do write comments (which include how much their learned, the emotions they had, and other less tangible stuff) I think HN is optimizing for the former quality aspects and not the latter. So in that sense, if you can't tell if it's written by a bot, does it matter? (cue Westworld this video )