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

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.

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.

“I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.”

Herzog is one of my favorite artists but I’m happy to not share his outlook on these things.

"Kinski says [the jungle] is full of erotic elements. It’s not so much erotic, but full of obscenity. Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotic here. I see fornication and asphyxiation and choking, fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there’s a lot of misery, but it’s the same misery that’s all around us. The trees are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing; they just screech in pain. Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of harmony. It’s the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It’s not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.”

Aguirre was my first Herzog movie, in the theatre, way too young for it, and to this day the Kinski monkey scene is one of my favorites in all of film.

https://youtu.be/eQYKDrOs_j8

Very uncanny.

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

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."

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

[1] https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS [2] https://tts.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

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

How would you make it sniffle in a natural way, too? It’s not a usual speech mannerism, and the way he does it is distinct. I wouldn’t know how to efficiently represent it with text. Maybe it’s easier than I’m imagining.

But seriously, it's not worth it. I think he's a brilliant man with an idiosyncratic speech, let's leave it to that.

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

> 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.

> 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.

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 :)

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

This AI is far too coherent for Žižek.

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 Czech Republic

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.

"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."

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!

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.

https://youtu.be/XMjNP7mTmNk

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

Žižek maybe not so much.

“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

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

(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..!

  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.

  M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead

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

"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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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? :)

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