Hacker Cinema
The Illusionist
2006 · Film · 110 min
Directed by Neil Burger
With his eye on a lovely aristocrat, a gifted illusionist named Eisenheim uses his powers to win her away from her betrothed, a crown prince. But Eisenheim's scheme creates tumult within the monarchy and ignites the suspicion of a dogged inspector.
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"""I have an idea for a movie club, where two movies with a tenuously connected theme are watched (separately) and then discussed. If you've seen the movies "XXX", and "YYY", tell me what is similar about them, what's different, what are some possible "connected themes" and who tackled the topic better?"""
...time passes...
"""Now that you understand the idea behind these pairings, recommend five more pairings, but don't give any hints as to their connections, just five bullet points with "A vs B" movie titles. Bonus points if there is at least a 10-year gap between them, and they are both not box-office blockbusters (but make sure they are slightly more popular or recognizable movies, not exclusively low-distribution non-critically-acclaimed indie movies)."""
* Children of Men vs Snowpiercer * Lost in Translation vs Frances Ha * No Country for Old Men vs Hell or High Water * The Prestige vs The Illusionist * Drive vs Nightcrawler
...I know guidance is "don't just post AI output", but this is specifically a human-to-human discussion around novel(?) ways to interact with AI/LLM's. I've found they're _really_ good at conceptual-venn-diagrams.
There's a book "Algorithms to Live By" (ie: look for matching socks via BFS/DFS or whatever). Asking the AI: "you know a bunch of algorithms, what are the top three that should have been in the book?" => "what are the weakest that could have been removed?"
Recently during performance reviews, we had to write our self-assessment and had guidance from on high like: "make sure you talk about people skills, technical skills, customer impact, etc." ...so yada yada: "I'm so amazing, I'm so great" => "Dear AI, I've been given this guidance `...`, please compare my handcrafted storytelling against the guidance `...` and tell me where I have missed covering a requirement" => "...now please give help w.r.t. simplifying or cleaning up the section on $INCREDIBLE_TECHNICAL_ACHIEVEMENT b/c I was focusing on describing my personal impact, but need help making it more digestible for others".
The combination of instant, tailored feedback and the fact that they've read the whole internet, "watched" every movie (read the script, read critics reviews, reddit, forum discussions, etc), read most published books, and that they're 80%+ plumbers, doctors, lawyers, car mechanics, etc. make them an unstoppable research assistant, especially when crossing connections that would normally be "expensive" to do so.
Example: ask a [doctor+lawyer+plumber] about the health and legal impacts of lead solder in pipes or whatever. Instead of needing to schedule 3 people's times, wait for them, pay them, etc, you can get instant "free" feedback, educate yourself, and then have a more solid foundation to branch out from there. Such incredibly useful tools!
Even before LLMs, there was a _lot_ of deception and cheating in university. I -- and I do not say this with pride -- used to write essays for my classmates for money. In my own defense, I needed the money. I also know that in addition to homework for money, many fraternities and sororities kept copies of prior exams and assignments, and getting access to these was one of the perks of membership. Knowing what kind of questions to expect (let alone the exact questions) can easily give someone a few extra IQ points for free.
Personally, I felt that the drive to automate the parts of the professors' workloads that mattered (i.e. teaching and grading and evaluation and research), only so that they can be given work that matters less the more they do it (i.e. publishing slightly different flavors of the same paper, to meet KPIs), was oddly perverse.
The multiple-choice test and the puzzle-solving test and really any standardized test can be exploited by any group that is sufficiently organized. This is also true in corporate interviewing where corporations think (or pretend) that they are interviewing an individual, whereas they are actually interviewing a _network_ of candidates who share details about the interviewers and the questions. I know people who got rejected in spite of getting all the interview questions correct (the theory is that nobody can do that well, so they must have had help from previously rejected/accepted candidates).
The word "trust" shares a root with the word "tree" and "truth" and "druid". Most exams and interviews are trying to speed-run trust-building (note that "verification" is from the latin word that means "true"). If trust and truth are analogous to "tree", then we are trying to speed-run the growth of a tree -- much like the orange tree, in the film, _The Illusionist_. And like the orange tree, it is a near-complete illusion, a ritual meant to keep the legal department and HR department happy.
The LLMs have simply made the corruption of academia accessible to _all_ students with an internet connection (EDIT: and instantaneous and cheap, unlike a human writer).
There has never been a shortcut to building trust. One cannot LLM their way into being a (metaphorical) druid.
I do not look forward to the Voight-Kampff tests that will come to dominate all aspects of online and asynchronous human interaction.
Note that, short of homework/classwork that _can't_ be gamed by an LLM (for some fundamental reason), even the high-quality honest students will be forced to cheat, so as to not be eclipsed by the actual low-quality cheating students[0].
I imagine that we may end up wrapping around to live in-person dialectics, as were standard in the time of Socrates and Parmenides[1]. If so, this should be fun.
[0]: If left unaddressed, we may see a bimodal distribution of great and terrible students graduating college, with those in between dropping out. If college is an attempt to categorize and rank a population, this would be a major fault in that mechanism.
[1]: Not to the exclusion of the other kinds of tests, writing is still important, critical even. But as a kind of verification-step, that should inform how much the academic community should trust the writing (I can imagine that all the writers here are experiencing stage-fright as they are reading these words).
> An acrobat, dressed entirely in black tights, scaled the building and entered through a window after the committee had completed their search of the room. According to the magicians, "the ghost" was a bit of gauze coated with phosphorescent paint that the acrobat removed from their pocket and waved around the room.
If they made a movie that just reenacted Tibbles and Wynter's illusions and other ingenious acts from the period, it'd be even more fantastical and thrilling than those in The Prestige and The Illusionist.
Unfortunately, Amazon Prime now has ads. Not as much as cable TV, but still very annoying now that I am used to no ads.
I watched the Illusionist last night on Prime video, and not only was there a minute of unskippable ads at the start, but there were 30 seconds of ads in the middle of the movie as well.
A thing to note is that it was a CAM recording of the film that was leaked.
I have only ever watched one cam recording of a movie before. I think it was 'The Illusionist.' I was at a friends house, he slapped it on. The color saturation was wrong, the sound was like mono and the camera appeared slightly off so the very top or bottom of the screen was cut off. It wasn't completely unwatchable but it spoiled the movie. Its like watching a film through a neighbours window.. crap.
Piracy has far more effect on DVD sales. This is for 4 reasons. The price of DVD's, the inconvenience of going out and getting the DVD, the bullshit adverts and unskipable junk before the film and the menu which takes 20 seconds to display before you can press PLAY.
If there was a DVD quality recording of the avengers I think it would have easily had 5x more downloads, probably 10x. However, realistically the cinema is an experience. If you enjoy the cinema you are going to watch a film like this at the cinema - then maybe download it. I am firmly of the opinion that if you make a blockbuster film, whether it leaks or not it will do well.
Even if this was the result of an illusionist, it highlights something I've often thought of, and has come up on HN a few times: that very similar products and movies will come out at just about the same time. The best examples I can give are from movies, and how close together certain movies are made and released, that have very similar plots:
Deep Impact (May 1998) -> Armageddon (July 1998)
The Illusionist (September 2006) -> The Prestige (October 2006)
Paul Blart: Mall Cop (January 2009) -> Observe and Report (April 2009)
These movies came out too close together for one to copy the other, so either the directors and studios were in it together on these movies (entirely likely I suppose: I don't know much about the movie industry; if anyone does know why this occurs, I'd be very interested), or one studio got wind of what the other was doing and made a "copy" before the original even came out, or else something much more subtle is going on.
In the startup / tech world, I think this happens too, because we all tend to follow the same blogs, news sources, etc – so any subtle (probably unintentional) message that makes one of us think of a new product makes 1000 of us think of a nearly identical product, at the exact same time. To me, that highlights execution is so important, and ideas are a "dime a dozen".