Posted in: Disney XD, streaming, TV | Tagged: ai, artificial intelligence, Gravity Falls

Gravity Falls Creator Responds to Learning Scripts Used to Train AI

Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch responded on social media to learning that scripts from the animated series were used for AI "training."

While the new three-year SAG-AFTRA and WGA respective deals with the AMPTP came the hope that there would be proper protection and guardrails in place when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI). Specifically, so that actors, writers, directors, and others don't end up finding their livelihoods replaced by AI and to protect likenesses and existing creative work from being thrown into a generative AI blender without their consent. Unfortunately, writer and programmer Alex Reisner exposed the reality in a piece for The Atlantic, exposing that more than 139,000 television and film scripts were and are being used in a data set created to train AI. In terms of what's on there, Reisner noted that on the television side, there were 700+ episodes of Matt Groening's The Simpsons and Futurama, 150+ episodes of NBC's Seinfeld, 45 episodes of ABC's Twin Peaks, and full runs of HBO's The Wire, HBO's The Sopranos, and AMC's Breaking Bad. Shonda Rhimes had 500+ scripts in her name, while Ryan Murphy's name is on well over 300 scripts. And you can add Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch's name to that list

As you can imagine, there are a whole lot of writers righteously pissed off about this, with that number growing each day as more and more of them find their works being thrown into the AI mix. Earlier this week, Hirsch took to social media to respond to finding a number of scripts from the beloved animated series in the mix. "Oh, neat, they're stealing episodes of 'Gravity Falls' to train AI," Hirsh shared. "Hypothetical question: is it possible to encode a virus into a TV script? No particular reason." In a follow-up, Hirsch included an audio clip of the "heartwarming moral" from "Grunkle Stan" that's now going to be added to the end of every episode.

Here's a look at Hirsch's posts regarding his discovery, followed by a look back at what Reisner shared in their reporting:

"I can now say with absolute confidence that many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers' work. Not just on 'The Godfather' and 'Alf,' but on more than 53,000 other movies and 85,000 other TV episodes: Dialogue from all of it is included in an AI-training data set that has been used by Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and other companies," Reisner wrote in his piece, which also included access to search the database to see if your favorite writer/series was included.

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