I watched this exceptionally bad AI TV show – we should all be terrified

Have you ever dreamt of watching a TV series written by a toaster, directed by a hoover, and cast by a fridge freezer? 

If so, then boy oh boy do we have the reality show for you. 

It’s called Non-Player Combat, and it claims to be ‘the world’s first 100 per cent AI-generated reality TV show’.

The series’ premise is simple: six artificially generated contestants are dropped on a mysterious island off the coast of South America, where they try to murder each other for our entertainment.  

At its core, it’s a rather stale mix of the Hunger Games, Survivor, and any number of battle royale games currently clogging up Steam’s free-to-play category. 

It’s basically the type of idea someone might have when they’ve only seen two movies and half a TV show in their entire life and then tried their hand at writing, because ‘how hard can it be?’.

Now, of course, just because something’s derivative doesn’t immediately make it bad. 

Afterall, as Shakespeare once said (while ripping off the Bible, so he would know), ‘there be nothing new but that which hath been before’.

That’s a posh way of saying everyone’s ripping everyone off at the end of the day, so don’t worry about it.  

So, with that in mind, is Non-Player Combat any good? Well, to the surprise of absolutely no one, it turns out that you shouldn’t trust household appliances to try and make a TV show. 

After all, I wouldn’t trust my coffee machine to write an episode of EastEnders – I just don’t think it would nail Kat Slater’s unique voice. 

In fact, I would go so far as to say, with absolutely zero hyperbole, that Non-Player Combat is one of the worst things I’ve ever had the misfortune to sit through.

It’s witless, cold, repetitive and duller than a trip to a factory that specialises in making exceptionally brown cardboard boxes. 

Now I know that AI proponents will immediately brand me a technophobe with plans of leading a legion of neo-Luddites on a server-smashing rampage across the country.

And yes, I must admit I do have some prejudice towards AI. 

Call me a maniac, but I thought the idea of robots and AI was to have them do all the stuff we don’t want to, so we can make the art. 

Instead, we’ve somehow ended up in a world where we’ve outsourced creativity to our air fryers while we do the grunt work. 

My own general distaste for AI art aside, however, what do I specifically dislike about Non-Player Combat? 

Well, the show’s plagued by the usual problems we’ve come to expect from AI slop. 

There’s a visual incoherence to the setting and the characters that makes watching the show feel like you’re on a particularly traumatic acid trip. 

Sometimes the players in the game have one ponytail, then in the next shot they’ve got two, their teeth sometimes merge into one mega tooth before separating again while they’re talking, and the backgrounds keep changing between shots. 

It’s enough to give you a headache, and it doesn’t help that sometimes the AI looks startlingly real, but then in the next shot, they look like a half-melted waxwork. 

The bizarreness of the visuals makes watching it really quite difficult, and that’s without mentioning the flat narration and bland dialogue.

All the characters in the show talk like they’ve been trained to say the most inane reality show cliches. 

Seriously, they make people who say stuff like ‘it’s called Love Island, not friend island’ or ‘you’re my type on paper‘ and think they’re Oscar Wilde look original. 

I was also very amused by the constantly shifting ‘first priorities’. Most notably, one contestant gets dumped in the desert, and they immediately say ‘My first priority is water. 

That makes sense, right? 

Well, not 10 minutes later, we see the same blank-faced robot gobbling down a beetle and saying food was his first priority. Clearly, some wires got crossed that day… 

I’ll be honest, though, none of that bothered me. I have exceptionally low standards for AI-generated content, and for the most part, Non-Player Combat lived up to those expectations.

It was ugly as all sin and blander than cheap vanilla ice cream, but that’s par for the course with this artificial sludge. 

What I can’t forgive, however, is how dull the show is. Seriously, if there’s one benefit to AI, it’s surely that you can do anything.

So, why does Non-Player Combat look like it has the same budget as a mid-tier BBC or ITV show?  If we’re going to waste electricity and water on this claptrap, surely it should look like a blockbuster?

Nothing exemplifies this more than the guy who has to fight a polar bear. 

That should be an amazing fight sequence that pits man against beast, but it’s more like a slide show of a particularly boring mauling. 

Here’s the thing, though, it doesn’t have to be a bear; it could be a two-headed hippopotamus, or a dragon, or a 16-foot-tall giant made of green-headed ducks. 

What I’m saying is that AI frees us from the constraints of the everyday, so why would you make the fight so boring? 

Now, arguably, the reason for this is that the tech, as impressive as I reluctantly admit it can be, just isn’t there, yet.

As I already said, the bear fight looked like a fight scene from a student film, and I don’t think putting a giant creature in there would improve the stunt choreography.

Still, I think it limitations of AI and those who like to use it to make art. They can do anything, yet they choose to do stuff we’ve seen before.

Why? Well, in my opinion, it’s because they care more about the end product than the creative process, to the detriment of the art they’re trying to make.

If they valued the process, they wouldn’t ask a machine to make a TV show for them; they’d learn the skills to do it themselves, which would help them see the possibilities beyond repeating what came before.

And that’s ultimately my main rub with experiments like Non-Player Combat.

Those who push AI will tell you that it democratises AI by lowering the bar for entry. But I think the sad thing is that all it really does is lower standards.

Yet, as scathing as I’ve been in this review, the people behind Non-Player Combat will have the last laugh.

This tech is only going to get better and better, and while I’m laughing right now. I don’t think I will be in a few years. 

Non-Player Combat is streaming now at http://www.aimation.world and on YouTube. Non-Player Combat is streaming now at http://www.aimation.world and on YouTube.

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