> I don't care if someone knows how many times I've watched Idiocracy.
I come from Germany, from East Germany. And some people there wanted to know if you had seen certain films and how often. And ‘Idiocracy’ would have been very high up on their list.
Not all films were banned right from the start (‘The Legend of Paul and Paula’ [1]), but right from the beginning the Stasi found it very interesting who had watched the film.
‘The Lives of Others’ is an outstanding film. However, it is a reappraisal of East German history and was made seven years after the collapse (the director grew up in West Germany and Western Europe).
US-America has looked at the subject of surveillance of its own population and its own (possible) collapse many times and often in a timely manner.
TLOO came out in 2006, 16 years after the DDR collapsed.
I wondered if GP was thinking of another movie so I asked ChatGPT, which told me: "The German film you’re thinking of is "Good Bye, Lenin!" — released in 2003, exactly seven years after the formal end of the DDR in 1990." (My emphasis.)
That's hilarious. Imagine going back two years and showing someone GPT-5? They might think the Pause AI movement had won. It makes you ponder an alternate timeline where the OpenAI brain trust wasn't dismantled
Which version did you use, though? GPT-5, GPT-5-Thinking, GPT-5 Pro, GPT-5-Mini, GPT-5 with Thinking (reasoning effort=high) or one of the other 18 options? Did you tell it to think harder? Maybe you are just holding it wrong?
Making what is essentially a router dispatching queries to the smallest engine susceptible to answer a question was maybe a good optimization from a techical and business pont of view.
But branding that router "GPT5" is a huge marketing mistake, because now, every time a smaller model says something stupid (as they often do), it seems that's the best OpenAI has to offer...
Interesting. There isn't one sentence in that article (English) which describes the political controversy of that movie. A single sentence mentions the film almost being banned for its 'political overtones'.
The English article is incomplete. The banner is there. I guess I could try to complete it but it’s highly my work would be struck out by an angry editor feeling territorial for a reason or another so maybe not.
The French article is a bit better - I don’t understand German sadly.
The controversy stems from the protagonists values. They put their love for each other and their search for fulfilment above other commitments which was seen as dangerously non communist. The film was cleared by the head of East Germany but the censors still imposed a tragic ending.
I come from Germany, from East Germany. And some people there wanted to know if you had seen certain films and how often. And ‘Idiocracy’ would have been very high up on their list.
Not all films were banned right from the start (‘The Legend of Paul and Paula’ [1]), but right from the beginning the Stasi found it very interesting who had watched the film.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Paul_and_Paula