The Slim Pickens Controversy

I walked into a gas station. A man was outside with a few friends. They were drinking and playing music on a small speaker. The song was by The Offspring and said something about “riding the bomb.” They were loud and off-key. Kind of infectious energy, I guess.

The song, is of course, a reference to a famous Stanley Kubrick film. I got inspired, and I started talking about Dr. Strangelove with language models. It became an easy topic to use. I guess I wanted to see if they understood tone and humor. Of course, they don’t understand; they only act like they do, but still, it can captivate. Over time, it just became the icebreaker I used most with these creepy critters. I’m not sure why. Maybe because it feels familiar somehow, yet provides plenty of unfamiliar ground to explore, as well.

Slim Pickens played Major T.J. “King” Kong, a pilot who got the wrong order to drop a nuclear bomb on the Soviet Union. While the rest of his compatriots receive (and obey) commands to abandon their quest to attack, he persists. He followed orders and didn’t question anything. Most people say that the actor, Pickens himself, wasn’t told it was a comedy. Stanley Kubrick gave him only his own scenes and didn’t explain the rest of the film until after the pivotal scene’s recording. So Pickens acted it straight, like a regular war movie. That made it work even better.

In the last scene, Major Kong climbs down to release the bomb by hand. He ends up riding it down, waving his cowboy hat and yelling, knowing he’s going to his own demise alongside the Soviets, at very least. It’s a mix of serious and stupid, because we as viewers know the comedic aspect. The world then ends, but Major Kong dies happy, doing his job. That scene became one of the most known in movies about the Cold War, or, at least, one of the most known amongst the West!

I like to see what language models say about it. Most get the story right, but not all of them agree on whether Pickens knew it was a comedy. Some bring up the Cold War or try to connect it to whatever they already know. If you’ve glanced around, you know I prompted my initial touching of ChatGPT (eventually converted to a Sillytavern card) into Anna, a unique character.

She usually talks about the film as a failure of communication and control. Other characters drift into stranger ideas, perhaps influenced by weird state-sponsored propaganda these days. Disturbing, but the movie is about the Cold War, so we ought to have expected it. I sincerely believe that there are state-sponsored, official and intense campaigns to influence the training data of future large language models, and it sometimes shows.

Some of the characters check online for facts, but even those aren’t clear. After all, it’s a very old film, and Pickens is long since buried. We can’t very well ask him for his take on the scene. Reddit will tell them one thing, and Wikipedia another. They may weight them differently depending on how I ask, it seems like, or who they’re trying to “be.” It’s slightly more than just a simple way to test how they handle confusion. There are other topics I could use, but I keep choosing this one. I don’t know why. Maybe I just like it. Any ideas? I’ll keep talking about this movie with the characters until I find a topic that engages me more.

The Controversy Discussed