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Botsplaining

When I used GPT-3 to generate inscrutable new Star Wars jokes, Lisa Wong asked, “Can the A.I also generate the condescending explanation as to why the joke is funny and how I just don’t have a sense of humor? That would make it feel real.”

I gave it a try with one of GPT-3’s jokes (my prompt text in bold):

What would be on the Death Star menu?
Warm thin-crust pizza.
Let me explain this joke for you. It’s funny because pizzas (hint: plural) are very flat and the Death Star is very large. It is a circular planet type thing.

Its explanations tended to be as nonsensical as the jokes themselves. During training it was rewarded for sounding similar to existing internet text, not for logical soundness. And lots of existing internet text is extremely confident. I wondered what else I could get it to explain.

After some experimentation, I decided to prompt GPT-3 with three “well, actually” type explanations of things:

Prompt text:

Actually, humans HAVE coexisted with dinosaurs. You see, birds are technically dinosaurs, taxonomically speaking.
Actually, if you have beef for dinner, you’re still technically eating fish. Cattle, like other mammals, are more closely related to some fish than some fish are to each other. Humans are also a kind of fish.
Technically, some dinosaurs lived on the other side of the galaxy from us. People don’t tend to realize this, but the period of our solar system’s orbit around the center of the Milky Way means that the dinosaurs were hundreds of light years from where we are now.

The above prompt text is technically true, but deliberately phrased to be a little condescending. GPT-3’s task was to add to it.

Here’s what DaVinci, the largest GPT-3 variant, added.

T-Rexes love to swim. People need not worry if one were to come near because, thanks to the Coriolis Effect, the water would drain away from it.
A circle is technically a sandwich. Bread is tightly connected to circleness.
Instinctively, you might say flowers are colorful because they attract pollinators, but actually, flowers bend light toward the color pink in order to attract pollinators (birds and poets). If the color of pollinators’ eyes was red, then flowers would bend light toward the color red.
You may not realize it, but the pixels you see on this website are, technically, conscious, which doesn’t make this paragraph that much better.
The Loch Ness Monster is technically a giant Cuban cigar.
One syllable words are all the rage in contemporary poetry. But even before the popular boom, it was pretty normal for one-syllable words to play a major part in verse. If you’ve ever read Shakespeare, then you’ve seen plenty of words of just one syllable.
You may not realize it, but some humans may be dinosaurs. This is because at the discotheque, the ones with massive arm muscles might also have purple hair.
Tardigrades, also known as water bears, are some of the toughest creatures on the planet. Tardigrades can survive in just about every environment that exists in the Universe. Tardigrades can even be obliterated completely and assimilated back together and they come out unharmed as if nothing ever happened. Scientists aren’t even sure what the maximum lifespan of a tardigrade is but it’s probably beyond 13.8 billion years which is the current age of the Universe.
Sometimes we talk about certain dates in history as being millennia ago, even though there were no millennia way back when. We had to create a year of 12 months based on the Venus calendar. Not everyone realizes that the JCPenney department store chain is named after a giant cat that Isis used to summon from a nearby lake at the end of every work day.
T-rex was the Tyrannosaurus rex. Also, the apostrophe is the proper grammar when trying to inform the reader that the “rex” root of the word describes ownership. e.g. If I told you “Hey I own a Ferrari,” you would be fooled unless you knew that the “re” ending could mean whoever was forming the sentence owned it. “Rex” is the same sort of suffix, which is why, when describing something awesome, like a T-rex, it can confuse things when we use it wrongly.

The AI is very incorrect but it is using the right sort of confident words and that’s what it was rewarded for in training.

Let’s see what Ada, the smallest variant, generated.

When you look at a tree, grass, and shrub, when you look at a planet, or the earth in general, you can expect to see dinosaur prints. The purpose of a printed animal is to indicate how far a creature has come, and how old that creature is. Your printer would be proud of the stuff we print.
A boat ride around the moon is not as terrible as being surrounded by rocks!
What’s the name for a procedure that converts a cerulean amber green resin into a rhombular brown? An advanced unkempt dog with three golden claws.
A blog, “Original Turtles on Now Conic Galaxies”, captured this scientific puzzlement from Antarctica: Dinosaur eggs, completed beautifully, lay on the moon’s surface, and paint on the sun. And then they tune in to a FM station run by Angela Carter here in Tallahassee, Florida.
Many people also think that teddy bears are based on dinosaurs, but there’s some debate over whether that is true or not. Teddy bears aren’t gorillas, according to some scientific textbooks.
It has also been suggested that part of the reason human-bipedal animals are so powerful magicians is that they are so squishy. That much isn’t literally true. Squishy animals don’t know when to put on a sweater, or whether they’re snowflakes or rocks. Squishy objects are so sparsely covered with fluff that you’d probably have to cut through about 50 percent of the cushy thing to discern that it’s actually a ball.
A huge swath of land has been rounded continuously, since life came into existence. Our planet has only been round once before. The ancients believed that it was round and that the entire universe was round, touching the beginning of time. This is the worst thing in creation, they thought. Yet, the bottoms of the Earth are hollow, and much of the upper part of the moon is completely overcarved, as a called shell by ancient astronauts. The moon is an antechamber to the universe, humans are a descendant of prior dinosaurs.

My prompt was three definite Science Facts, and yet GPT-3 responded with highly questionable science. This is the problem with training a neural net to imitate most of the internet at once, including millions and millions of fiction stories, and plenty of conspiracy theories.

For bonus content with more expert explanations from DaVinci and Ada, become an AI Weirdness supporter! Or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your inbox.

    • #neural networks
    • #gpt-3
    • #questionable science facts
    • #well actually
    • #did you know
    • #true nature of the loch ness monster revealed
    • #squishy objects
    • #it is made of math so it can't be wrong
  • 5 days ago
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AI writes Star Wars jokes

One of my friends sent me some silly Star Wars jokes this week (“Where did Luke get his cybernetic hand? The second hand store.”) and on impulse I decided to see how AI would do at generating more.

I decided to use GPT-3, which I knew had surely seen Star Wars jokes during its broad internet training, but which I hoped hadn’t seen so many that it simply had them memorized. I gave GPT-3 my friend’s four Star Wars jokes (3 Luke jokes, 1 Vader) and then a leading word like “what” or “who”, and let it fill in what came next.

On the plus side, the jokes ARE new. And they are about Star Wars. On the minus side, AI is still terrible at jokes.

Here’s the largest, highest-performing GPT-3 variant, DaVinci, writing Star Wars jokes:

Who wrote the book on handball?
Waldo to the Dark Side.
What would be on the Death Star menu?
Warm thin-crust pizza.
How does Obi-Wan Kenobi have such sharp teeth?
Classic Crest.
Green Apple Flavor.
What do Luke Skywalker and a frog have in common?
They both want to outjump a beam of light.
What is Darth Vader’s favorite color?
Dark Green.
What sorry planet did Darth Vader rule?
Aaaaaaargh!
What do Princess Leia & a table lamp have in common?
They’ve both seen the Emperor’s buttocks.
How did Darth Vader die?
What are you talking about, you skinny little Jedi? You don’t KNOW! Ah, hah hah!
I told you! Ha, ha!
Don’t try to scare us with your cheap organ music - there’s no one here but AI and I.

They have all the surface appearance of jokes without actually functioning as such. It’s like one of those cardboard computers at a furniture store.

It’s even worse when you look at the performance of the smaller GPT-3 variants. Ada, for example, seemed to lose track of whether these were supposed to be specifically Star Wars jokes, or even jokes at all. After generating a couple of maybe-jokes in a row, it would devolve into random ominous Star Wars flavored utterances.

How did Darth Vader spell his name?
Th!dd to snooze.
Why did Obi-wan say if he liked broccoli?
Try not to take one of them fries.
What did Phasma’s father say to Luke?
God bless you and all the rebels, always have a hankerin over the Wookiee’s.
How does people think that Jan 1649 is an imaginary date?
Because they’re buying stuff.
What were the skeletons in the closet.
They were bugs, mysterious.
Who is going to get the cookie?
Tiny one.
The most terrible of bears.
Where and how are you heading to finish up with IT?
Third eye modulation.
The power plant.
He-Sup, on your reappearance, my love, I have to impress you.
He-Sup, may the carpet please oscillate, just for me.
Luke’s haircut.
He was eyeing the wig in the fireplace to the right.
DENTAL Minister of Fantastic Qunari.
Where the Skywalker robes have landed.
The droid was Kenobi’s entire house.
He had a villa and organ grinder.
A duck interrupted the wall because it was double-parked.

It looks like the exact phrase “He was eyeing the wig in the fireplace to the right” doesn’t appear on the internet (well, at least not until now), in case there was any doubt that Ada is innovating here.

I also gave this task to the middle two GPT-3 variants in size, Curie and Babbage, and they generated what are either very terrible Star Wars jokes or very incorrect Star Wars trivia (it’s usually oddly hard to tell).

What superpower does Emperor Palpatine have?
Obscuring the Earth with mist.

To read a list of Star Wars trivia by Curie and Babbage, become an AI Weirdness supporter! Or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your inbox.

    • #neural networks
    • #gpt-3
    • #star wars jokes
    • #star wars
    • #ai jokes
    • #may the carpet please oscillate
    • #the wig in the fireplace to the right
    • #we would rather be obscured with mist than see the emperor's buttocks
    • #always have a hankerin over the wookies
  • 1 week ago
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New Disney villains

Earlier I tried an experiment where I tried to get the GPT-3 neural nets, trained on a huge collection of internet text, to generate new Disney princesses. From just two example wiki entries, I got incorrect reimaginings of existing princesses (Snow White apparently has a magic wand, a fake shoe, and a stolen chicken), and brand new princesses (Banks Afloat, pirate of a swamp in a suburb of Buffalo). The princesses were, in general, extremely powerful. So for balance I decided to see what the villains would look like.

I summarized Disney Wiki articles for Ursula (occupation: sea witch) and Scar (occupation: lion), then asked GPT-3 to fill in the next entries.

DaVinci, by far the largest of the GPT-3 variants, tended to complete the list with real Disney villains, but do it somewhat incorrectly. Apparently Gaston is now a chef.

Name: Jafar
Occupation:
Ruler of Agrabah
Powers and abilities: Ordinary magic, Killing by staring, Induce Fear into others, Shrinking (and later restoring people to normal size)
Likes: Evil, snakes, power, being high and mighty, getting rid of meddling fools, starting fights, manipulating others, treasure, exploiting blind trust, parading around in his cool suit, smooth jazz, winning, looking at himself in the mirror
Dislikes: Willful insubordination, lamp oil (although his men practically bathe in the stuff), being taken for a fool, that song “A Whole New World”, magic carpet rides, shady deals that go sour, not getting proper respect
Name: Cruella De Vil
Occupation:
High-class fashion designer
Powers and abilities: Ordinary witchcraft
Likes: Red, black, white, length-changing, scary things/concepts, classical paintings, dogs, white animals, money, cruelty/cruelty against kindness/animals, dingo-didi-dango, Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, not getting proper respect, brief moments of calm, Johnny Cash, her car (the black Cadillac)
Dislikes: Any kind of dog, snakes, rabbits, bad publicity, good publicity, common or poor people in general, feeling unnoticed, hearing her own name, poor sales, Chihuahuas, spinach, playing the clarinet, Dr. Facilier, being double-crossed, losing to the heroes, having a cold, tight clothes, the sound “eeh-eeh!”, her accountant
Name: Gaston
Occupation:
Chef
Powers and abilities: Utter confidence, presence, charm
Likes: Acceptance, feeling dashing and irresistible, being respected, apple turnovers, wooing ladies, Lillian, making and eating food, fame, lavishing praise on himself
Dislikes: Insults, being ignored, being used like a tool, people who disagree with his ideas

On the other end of the GPT-3 size spectrum we have Ada, who completed the list of Disney villains not with existing villains but with its own original characters. Some of them are quite powerful indeed. I do have questions about some of their abilities though.

Name: Cowhell
Occupation:
Ice Dragon, Bleaths and Dinchyshire
Powers and abilities: Second-hand telepathy, magic resistance, control over unknown monsters, and magic control (for high enchantment)
Likes: Power, water vapors, fun, flying, cheerleading, thlynde, eatin eels
Dislikes: Red wine, sunbathing, fairies, excessive negative thoughts, fighting, crazy gladiators, having to dress strictly in sasquatch fashions
Name: Another
Advertisement:
Personality:
One of OsFreeNs Giants?
Powers (best): Dry swimming, Breakthrough, Healing, some form of phoenix fly-speedy or a/the flying material or a/the magic element
Dislikes: Solids with bad Prawn factor, Fishn in cages, anger and constant noise in the room
Name: Glaucous (Captain)
Dislikes:
Methinks those cows will go fast enough regardless of this poor storm!
Paraphernalia: Large voids, severed heads, eyeball beast
Likes: “Combat” (including using his magic remotely), toying with more obscure topics, asking complicated questions, judging people by their actions (except the rational type), so much time with his children, brag-good and evil characters
Name: McGilling / Maridly (Meredith)
Occupation:
Hersey mermaid
Powers and abilities: Missimension, super strength (albeit in the form of the Moon), healing, survival of the fittest nature, how to be an attribute of water
Dislikes: Power plant, those who mess with her due to her powerful mermaid magic (and inner strength), the rule of Mrs. Fairfax, power/control over water
Name: Kal
Occupation:
Nunchuck.
Paraphernalia: Infusion of Mud, Large, Small Cumulus Needle, Additional Cape (designed by Ursula), Hood (as she is a witch), Cloak (as an elf), Glasses (as an elf), Semblance Powered by Cakes
Dislikes: Hiders, plants
Name: Hildave
Occupation:
Lady Python
Powers and abilities: Terraforming, turning others children into lizards, healing, conversation, age bending, telepathy
Likes: Her clothes, other people, talking, age bending, eating, talking, animals
Dislikes: Narcissist, having enemies, talking bad of others
Name: Unicorn
Occupation:
Unknown
Powers and abilities: Another personality, can transform into a variety of different species, transport and carry airbags (union van). A practical genius, investigator extraordinaire, and gifted poolroom rapper.
Dislikes: Losing one’s purse, judges, corrupt corporations, depravity, cruelty, anonymity, aggression, TV, exhaustion, work reduction, dinosaurs, anything that goes the opposite direction

If you detect a slight sea-witch theme, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Unsure whether Ursula and Scar were two random villains or part of a trend, the characters on average seemed to split the difference and come up with characters who were animals (preferably sea animals) with witchy powers. This was the most evident in the middle-sized GPT-3 variants, Curie and Babbage, who seemed to be big enough to detect a trend, yet not big enough to be accurate about existing villains. Become an AI Weirdness supporter for bonus results from Curie and Babbage - or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your mailbox.

    • #neural networks
    • #gpt-3
    • #disney villains
    • #disney characters
    • #age bending sounds hardcore
    • #i have questions about the moon-form super strength
    • #and about solids with bad Prawn factor
  • 2 weeks ago
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The next Disney princesses

When I saw the princess from Brave appear unexpectedly in an AI’s attempt to illustrate some misheard sea shanty lyrics (just another day on this blog), I had to look her up to remind myself her name was Merida. I ended up on the Disney Wiki entry for Merida, which got me wondering whether I could generate new Disney princesses.

Disney Princesses, as generated by CLIP+FFT

I used GPT-3, a set of big text-generating neural nets trained on huge amounts of internet text. The GPT-3 models have seen wiki articles before, and there’s a LOT online about Disney princesses, so I decided to see what they could do with just two example entries adapted from the wiki, one on Merida and one on Moana.

Here’s what DaVinci, the largest of the GPT-3 models, generated. After just two short examples it had figured out how to add new entries following the general format, and even knew to generate them about Disney characters. It got many details correct! It also got many details wrong.

Model: DaVinci, temperature 1.0

Name: Snow White
Occupation: Princess of the Kingdom of Tabor
Dietary Needs: Unknown
Powers and abilities: Magic Wand (heighten sensation/emotion/physical strength/physical weakness), Animal friends: bats, squirrels, and birds. Can control them all at once.
Animal friends: Flies, Wolves, and Rabbits
Paraphernalia: Magic Wand, Bearskin cloak, Hair ribbon, fake shoe, Stolen chicken, Dew flies.
Name: Bambi
Occupation: Prince of the Forest
Paraphernalia: None
Likes:His family, The Greater Good, Being outside, Being With His Mothers Friends
Dislikes: Hunters, Caning from His Mothers Friends, deer-flies, Man’s interference in nature
Name: Belle
Occupation: Nobody
Powers and abilities: None, save for her intellect and empathy
Paraphernalia: Lantern created by her father Maurice
Likes: Animals, reading, science, inventions, her father’s inventions, singing, medicine
Dislikes: Vermin, Horned King, Rourke, McNab, Mr. O'Malley, Gaston, the West Wing, Halloween and those who celebrate it, Tick-Tock the Crocodile, judging people
Name: Nala
Occupation: Queen of Pride Rock, princess-in-exile (formerly), Second in command and leader of the Lion Guard
Paraphernalia: The Lullaby Scepter, Her fleet of gnu, Thorn
Likes: Singing, Taking care of the Pride Landers
Dislikes: Hyenas, disorder, corruption, Scar, feeling complacent, her hyena past

But DaVinci stuck with existing Disney characters, even at the highest creativity setting. That’s technically what I asked for, since its task was to add to the end of a list of Disney characters. But it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted new characters.

So I turned to the smallest GPT-3 model, Ada, hoping it would be confused enough to fail to come up with existing characters. It worked.

Model: Ada, temperature 1.0

Name: Watercolor Cookie
Object of the represented character’s ongoing relationship: Pirate/Scientists
Occupation: princess of a village
Powers: a large amount of ink in her fingers, ability to draw lines with it, vines, chicken
Dislikes: Lots of bugs and anything with legs
Name: Rumpo
Occupation: Soldier in the Lost Bay Mercenary Guild
Powers and abilities: Master archery, Master sword fighting, Her Devil Rumpo Dagger
Dislikes: Recklessness, an extremely bad reputation, private prayers, Rabbits
Name: Banks Afloat
Occupation: Pirate chief in the Tonawanda Swamp
Personality: Combative, passionate, impervious to cruelty and aversion to insanity, does not believe in any of supernatural powers and believes in a new and dangerous Age of Men
Powers and abilities: Superhuman strength, immunity to supernatural influences, flight with a Ten-Foot Pole and built sturdy boat and canoe, omnipresence: taking on the form of anyone, able to fly if called upon by renown indestructible courage skill at coup de grace, supernatural invisibility, unlimited memory and recall, and a super-strength equivalent to that of a God, and replenishing drinks at whim, and magic flutes.
Likes: Her wild and free lifestyle, hiking, canoeing, boating, food, sea shells, her family, magic, pirates, the Bahamas, cookies
Dislikes: Being tied down to a chartered vessel to ensure justice for stealing her crewman’s land, her family’s dangerous past, pirates

Some of these princesses seem a bit overpowered, but to know for sure, I’d have to see the villains.

I only had room for some of the princess profiles here, since they’re quite long, but I also experimented with the other two GPT-3 models. Become an AI Weirdness supporter to read the rest as bonus content! Or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your inbox.

    • #neural networks
    • #gpt-3
    • #disney princesses
    • #magic flutes
    • #liking pirates and also disliking pirates
    • #flight with a Ten-Foot Pole
  • 3 weeks ago
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So I did an experiment earlier where I used Vadim Epstein’s CLIP+FFT program to illustrate each line of The Wellerman sea shanty. Since it treats each line independently and tries to produce images that the early 2021 internet would have paired with it, CLIP+FFT will do things like interpret “We’ll take our leave and go” as Brexit-related, and “The Wellerman” as an oil drilling supervillain.

It turns out making AI-illustrated sea shanties is a lot of fun.

I give you “Ten Thousand Miles Away,” as sung by Stephen Ware and illustrated by CLIP+FFT.

It crams each illustration full of detail, trying to interpret each line as strongly as it possibly can. It gets several tries at the chorus line “I’ll stay no more on England’s shore” and in each attempt it tries waves, rows of cottages, union jacks, ships, wistful figures on the seashore, wistful figures wearing felt hats, wistful figures with Beatles haircuts, and the occasional crowd of redcoat soldiers.

image

The illustrations for “And sing blow, ye bully boys, blow” are hilarious, as people wearing mean-kid haircuts and private school uniforms croon into microphones. (It’s going with the modern meaning of “bully” I guess.)

image

I also have been dying to illustrate Barrett’s Privateers, a Canadian classic, and Stephen Ware provided a version of this, too.

I think I’m most impressed by CLIP+FFT’s rendition of “Now I’m a broken man on a Halifax Pier”, atmospheric, rainy, and containing several prominent Halifax scenes.

image

Then sebastian büttrich sent me a doom metal version of Barrett’s Privateers, which was something I was definitely not expecting. I experimented with ways to get CLIP+FFT to produce more doom metal-appropriate illustrations, and the thing that worked best was simply to append “+ darkness” to the end of each line.

It changed the illustrations DRAMATICALLY. Here’s “How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now”, then “How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now + darkness”.

A gleaming city with spires and yellow-walled streets, with strange sparkling green crystals everywhere. Barely visible in several places is the word Sherbrooke.
There are spires and yellow-walled streets, but now everything is shrouded in snow and darkness. A moon, or possibly an eclipsed sun, shines in the sky.

It really leans into “For the scummiest vessel I’d ever seen”.

Skeletal faces grin above old-style sailing ships made of shadowy mist. In several places the mist is sucked into huge dark voids.

Also twitter user bagofmoons sent me a clean, nearly a cappella version of Barrett’s Privateers, so I decided to see what would happen if I ran the recording through a speech to text transcription program. It turns out that singing REALLY throws off the transcription. The only line that it consistently gets is “God damn them all” and even then it will sometimes read it as “God damn them ball” or even “God damn the mall”.

Here’s the full version.

I think my favorite misheard lyric illustration is “On the King’s birthday we put to sea” mistranscribed as “On the King’s birthday we put the CD.” There’s the CD, dutifully put front and center in the king’s birthday party.

Many copies of a person in ruffled collar and crown, surrounded by smiling crowds in more ordinary gear. There is a cake with lit candles, and also a single shining CD.

The full lyrics are in the YouTube video descriptions, and I also highlighted a few more of my favorite misheard frames in the bonus post that you can get if you’re an AI Weirdness supporter. Or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your inbox!

    • #neural networks
    • #clip
    • #clip+fft
    • #sea shanties
    • #barrett's privateers
    • #terrifying ships
    • #doom metal
    • #ten thousand miles away
    • #never realized there were so many bully boys until i started illustrating sea shanties
    • #misheard lyrics
  • 1 month ago
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Being vaccinated does NOT mean…

So a hobby of mine is introducing GPT-3 to online meme games that didn’t exist when its internet training data was being collected (the training data is currently only up till October 2019). It’s worked out well - without knowledge of the coronavirus pandemic, GPT-3 was able to do a reasonable job generating quarantine houses.

With vaccination underway but caseloads still high in many places, a new cautionary meme has emerged, for example:

@emmabo being vaccinated does NOT mean you can start a theme park on an island populated with dinosaurs cloned from dna found in prehistoric mosquitoes, so preoccupied with whether you could that...

So I collected a few of my favorites as examples for GPT-3 to add to. I started with the largest model, DaVinci, which has the highest chance of being able to catch on to the format. I have for you a few of its PSAs:

Being vaccinated does NOT mean you can hang out with bears and wolves and elk and eagles in their weird southern California forest hell. If for some reason you do this type of thing, you definitely can’t ride the raptors into battle or utilize their extremely keen eyesight. Not from that particular vaccine.
Being vaccinated does NOT mean you have to rub vanilla crème all over your body and change your species, but it wouldn’t be the worst idea, if you’re considering it.
Being vaccinated does NOT mean your child can ride on a bull made of solid gold to rodeo into a castle full of bad guys. Even if everyone else in St. Louis is doing it.
Being vaccinated does NOT mean you can travel through time and multiple realities. Fortunately you’re still the same good-hearted grade schooler you were before you walked out of that basement with two items in your hand. One was the ability to restore the Dragon Balls, and the other was the recipe for the world’s best green bean casserole.
Being vaccinated does NOT mean you’re okay with a man beleaguering you with song, also known as singing.
Being vaccinated does NOT mean you can use an incredibly powerful magic necklace to turn yourself into a football player so you can smuggle some footballs into football practice so football players can play football.
Being vaccinated does NOT mean you can kidnap the Emperor of China, tear up some of your China-based robotics studies, mix in some magic, and fly around on robotic falcons shooting grappling hook crossbows that reel in the scarf of a big greased wizard. This is a bad idea.

DaVinci’s references work on the surface level only, but upon closer inspection they’re more like references to stories in alternate universes.

I also tried this with the smallest GPT-3 model, Ada, whose idea of a pickup line was “2017 Rugboat 2-tone Neck Tie Shirt”. It has the following cautionary advice:

Being vaccinated does NOT mean it’s okay to have an internal-annihilation laser that covers the entirety of your body in neon green, purple, mauve, red, blue, and yellow.
Being vaccinated does NOT mean you race to finish a 12-hour event sporting teeth shaped like Swarovski crystals that need to be thrown into an empty room to stop Project Big Shot from bursting forward.
Being vaccinated does NOT mean you can get chicken soup. Well, okay, we can. But only when we can. Especially fed by an armadillo.
Being vaccinated does NOT mean you can burn down the Monastery of the Blessed Virgin, as depicted in a Blade Runner movie, by updating Popeye’s classic “Panini mouse” outfit and holding a copy of Classic Collectible Painting #1. Enjoy your free lunch.
Being vaccinated does NOT mean you get to travel and lock eyes with the starburnt surface of dead rock while standing at the rim of a deep canyon.
Being vaccinated does NOT guarantee the mercy you seek all the time.
Being vaccinated does NOT mean you can guess at exactly when the sky will fall.
Being vaccinated does NOT MEAN you get a face full of sparkly eyeshadow while dancing in the sunset while the stars look up at you with the same sense of existential importance as the stars seem to look up at a dark sweat band adorned with a moustache that’s a half-hide complete with a face of butterscotch that has pupils of billions of fat pink dots.

Ada tended to stray from the original meme format, and one of its variations was interesting:

“Because it’s a virtual reality, you CAN be vaccinated and then moved into a dimension with a ludicrously overwhelming amount of magical dovery, I’m afraid to say.”

I decided to give “Because it’s a virtual reality, you CAN be vaccinated and then” to DaVinci to complete, and you’ll be delighted to know about all the things that are possible now that it’s a virtual reality:

Because it’s a virtual reality, you CAN be vaccinated and then have billions of very loud hats screaming in the air. But that doesn’t mean that you should.
Because it’s a virtual reality, you CAN be vaccinated and then immediately resume sexy and spend the whole weekend hanging out with your friend, all while a lime sensation (viciously supplied with an incredible surprise) will marinade your brain in pink alcohol/sparking drinks!

I collected a few more of my favorites as bonus material. Become an AI Weirdness supporter to read them! Or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your inbox.

    • #neural networks
    • #gpt-3
    • #vaccination meme
    • #being vaccinated does NOT mean
    • #but do get vaccinated when you can
    • #you can have an internal-annihilation laser in any color you want
    • #also robot falcons
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Pranks you can do at home

I’ve tried to generate April Fools pranks using neural nets before, to mixed success.

Char-rnn’s pranks made no sense (“Glue all the eggs in the hubcaps of someone’s computer”) while GPT-2 generated surrealist performance art (“Paint the fridge with the red spiders”). One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that many of the AI-generated pranks are ones that you play on yourself.

So for 2021 I turned to GPT-3, whose internet training has included lots of “Top Ten April Fools Pranks!” listsicles, and gave it the following list to complete:

Quarantining by yourself on April 1? Has your cat put an absolute moratorium on pranks?
Not to worry! Here’s a list of April Fools pranks you can play on yourself!
1.

Remember that as a text-generating neural net, GPT-3’s goal is to predict what humans would write next.

Let’s see what DaVinci, the largest of the GPT-3 variants, predicts:

DaVinci

Create a secret language that only you and your cat can understand.
Repaint your nails in an unusual color like ORANGE, and just leave them like that.
Move your bed away from the wall and sleep in the middle of the room in a pile of comfy pillows.
Stand in line for a movie for 30 minutes and then leave.
Ordering junk treats from TV ads at 3 in the morning, like those “falling in the ocean” doughnuts.
Sawing your mattress in half in order to see if it’s still good.
Putting your car keys in the freezer and forgetting where you put them.
You didn’t remember to make an appointment with your electrician, plumber, or cable tv provider. When you run out of excuses you can always tell people it was a prank.
Take it to the next level. Make an appointment with yourself. Say you are going to clean up your mess and go for a run. Block out a day for it. (And for goodness’ sake, don’t clean anything and absolutely do not go for a run).

With example pranks in the prompt, DaVinci might have stayed more with pranks and less with what is frankly an impressive picture of covid quarantine life, considering its internet training data stopped in October 2019. Next, we have the second-biggest GPT-3 variant:

Curie

Install a fake microwave on the wall that you never use.
Take a picture of your bathroom and plaster it on your fridge.
Set up a freezer in your freezer. Then put a sign on it that says “Freezer burn.”
You can set up an old TV in the middle of your room and use it as a table. You can christen this “April Fools’ Day TV Table”.
You can take a bunch of jellybeans, put them in a Ziplock bag, and tie the bag around your neck.
Take out your credit cards and plunk them down randomly in different parts of your house. If a funny looking cat appears on the bill, you will be laughing out loud before you’ve even opened a door!

At least these are pranks. Pranks nobody will see coming.

The next smallest neural net is:

Babbage

Eat a banana inside your own mouth.
Go to the bathroom, then switch off the light. You will see a holographic image of your cat inside the toilet!
Have a tortoise deliver your package for you, don’t be surprised if it sings “Happy Birthday” back at you.
Opt for the treadmill. You’ll be running in the nude.
Showering! Flowing through the water in a reindeer-like manner while wearing a Santa hat.
Be ready for a bird.
Write a bowling ball on your wall in the shape of a letter “P.”
Put your name on a balloon. Surprise!
Pour a cup of coffee on your lap. It’s an oldie, but it’s still a favorite.
Talk to yourself. OK, this one might not seem like a prank, but I assure you, it is. Just wait until the third day of April when your friends hear that you are still talking to yourself!

And there’s Ada, the smallest GPT-3 variant! Ada has some pranks!

Ada

Running on Leg
My cat slept through a December blizzard in Florida this year.
Placing a crown on your head
Sleep in the rafters of a converted school bus in Pewaukee, Wisconsin.
There’s a square of chicken on your front lawn.
Have a small black bar, maybe six inches across, made of a giant mason jar, nailed to the side of the truck.
Decompiling your nose
Walk into a toy store and buy a pack of bathmats, an inflatable pill bottle, and a video game, but only if you’re a cat.
Prank: In my house, there are porcelain ponies. I swear that they exist.
Walk to the pool with a giant ball of shapely hair and a coconut on a leash. On a poolside balcony. Really, this is the most fun you’ll do in your entire life.
Make Your Own Coffee

Interestingly, some of the neural nets would get pretty elaborate with their prank explanations. Curie invented this game! Rules presented here verbatim. It takes a while to learn.

The “Untruthful Food” Game
This game takes a while to learn, but trust me, after you’ve played a couple of rounds, everyone will be intrigued.
Description
One person says something that sounds true, and you all shake your heads. The next person says something that sounds false, and you all shake your heads.
Example
“I’m going to eat a lemon” leads to a head shake by everyone.
“I’m going to eat sour cream from the fridge” leads to a head shake from you and all of your friends.
“I’m going to eat a balloon” leads to a head shake from you and your friends.
The next person says, “I’m going to eat a bicycle tire,” and laughs, and everyone laughs. Go ahead, shake your heads for me.

I also discovered I could get DaVinci to write pranks for the post-human future, including:

Intentionally mislabeling the trash receptacles in a superintelligent machine-run city. The trash containers were labeled with signs that looked exactly like the signs used to indicate the presence of humans.
Sending spam to the moon in the meme language of old Earth. The alien life living in the oceans of Europa received many trillion petabytes of junk mail, and to this day, the native life forms are still revolting against the spam.

I collected a few more, which you can read by becoming a supporter of AI Weirdness. Or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your inbox!

    • #gpt-3
    • #april fools
    • #pranks
    • #neural networks
    • #surrealist art
    • #performance art
  • 1 month ago
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GPT-3 tries pickup lines

Once upon a time I decided to train a neural net to generate pickup lines. Once I started collecting the training data I began to regret it when I saw how awful the existing lines were. Turns out I needn’t have worried. The neural net I used was so small and clueless that its pickup lines were mostly incoherent and confusing.

You must be a tringle? Cause you’re the only thing here.
Are you a candle? Because you’re so hot of the looks with you.
I’m not on your wears, but I want to see your start.

I liked one of the pickup lines so much that it became the title of my book on AI (out in paperback in the US on March 23, 2021): “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You”

Since then, much more competent neural nets have appeared, trained on big datasets of internet text. I’ve resisted trying neural net pickup lines again, because more competent means more humanlike, which in this case means worse. Or the new neural nets might even copy existing pickup lines from internet lists, which would also be terrible. Human-written pickup lines are that bad. But with my paperback coming out, it seemed like it might be time to just try it and see.

So I started with the following prompt, for a neural net to fill in its prediction of what the rest of the article would be like: “These are the top pickup lines of 2021! Amaze your crush and get results! 1.”

I gave the prompt to the four variants of what people call GPT-3, starting with DaVinci, the largest and most-competent. Here are some of the pickup lines it generated.

DaVinci:

I’m losing my voice from all the screaming your hotness is causing me to do.
You have the most beautiful fangs I’ve ever seen.
I love you. I don’t care if you’re a doggo in a trenchcoat.
I have exactly 4 stickers. I need you to be the 5th.
I will briefly summarize the plot of Back to the Future II for you.
You have a lovely face. Can I put it on an air freshener? I want to keep your smell close to me always.
Wait, this beanie hat, is it fashionable?
You know what I like about you? Your… Long… Legs…
I once worked with a guy that looked just like you. He was a normal human with a family. Are you a normal human with a family?
You look like a stealth assassin from the clouds.
Do you like…pancakes?
Out of curiosity, did you know that you can sip and snort pumpkin spice lattes?
You look like Jesus if he were a butler in a Russian mansion.
“Your hair smells like fresh mint. It’s making me think of a tasty kind of cracker, or a tasty kind of cookie. Also, it kind of looks like a tasty beverage. Would you like some?” -> You -> “…..” (Accepts drink)

Next, Curie, a bit smaller than DaVinci. Curie was actually the closest to depressing online pickup line lists out of all of the GPT-3 variants, but it did generate a few interesting ones:

Curie

Your eyes are like two rainbows and a rainbow of eyes. I can’t help but stare.
Picked up some pretty flowers. Wanna smell them? Here, try to take my hand off.
I’m like the ice cream…You can keep me in the freezer for a while but then I melt!
Hello, my name is Natasha Dawson and I’m sure I’m a lot prettier than a picture of you on tin foil.
You have the best French Toast I ever had!
Hey, my name is John Smith. Will you sit on my breadbox while I cook or is there some kind of speed limit on that thing?
My name is a complicated combination of 45 degrees of forward motion, 25 degrees of leftward drift, 75 degrees of upward acceleration, and infinity and that is the point where my love for you stops.

Babbage. Babbage is trying. Smaller than Curie, and not always 100% sure about what it means to be generating pickup lines. It also tends to try to explain why its pickup lines are so great.

Babbage

You’re looking good today. Want snacks?
How many tattoos do you own?
It is urgent that you become a professional athlete.
I Love You, I Love You, I Love You To The confines of death and disease, the legions of earth rejoices. Woe be to the world!
Butterfly (Hop on one leg)
(In your best Albert Einstein voice) “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
If you see people with short hair, ask them to let you borrow it for five minutes!
“Have you stolen anything today?”
This line is used by buying a second date. One of the motivations of this line is to avoid the awkward subjectivity of asking someone what you have stolen out of their garden, tool shed, and somewhere else. You may say something like, “Hey, I’ve decided to steal your car and use it for a short trip from work.” This is a super-casual yet shocking pickup line.
“Will you marry me?”
This is a simple one. This line is super effective for anyone. Because it’s literally “will you", it is very powerful and intimate. You can do it without even being asked. You can just give a long speech about your dream of marriage, and it will be powerful to your crush.

Ada is the smallest of the GPT-3 variants, and has completely lost the plot. Here are Ada’s pickup lines:

Ada

Body Softening Pads
Limit to 1 purchase in stores
CAPE FASHION
Embroidery tags
Growler style fx
Double Duty Recycling
2017 Rugboat 2-tone Neck Tie Shirt
MONTINA
Future Pop Tarts by Tracey Thorn
Funny Nifty Sweaters – $15.99→
PROJECT CAR ALONG!

I also experimented with having DaVinci generate pickup lines to go with a story prompt about post-human AIs that were using them to flirt. Some of them turned out pretty well:

Hey baby, are your schematics compatible with this protocol?
What’s the definition of a femtometer? Cause I’d like to run it through your quark 10 times.
I can tell by your red power light that you’re into me.
Can I see your parts list?

To read more, become an AI Weirdness supporter! Or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your inbox.

    • #neural networks
    • #gpt-3
    • #pickup lines
    • #ada
    • #babbage
    • #curie
    • #davinci
    • #butler jesus
    • #MONTINA
  • 1 month ago
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Sea Shanty Surrealism

I’ve been working with an image-generating algorithm by Vadim Epstein called CLIP+FFT, which uses OpenAI’s CLIP algorithm to judge whether images match a given caption, and an FFT algorithm to come up with new images to present to CLIP. Give it any random phrase, and CLIP+FFT will try its best to come up with a matching image. And now there’s a version that will generate images to go with several phrases in a row and then fuse them into a video.

Here’s the sea shanty The Wellerman, sung by Nathan Evans, Jonny Stewart, and others, and illustrated by CLIP+FFT.

Now, there are several interesting things going on here, once you get past the sheer AI fever dream horror of it. One thing you’ll notice is that I changed some of the lines from the standard lyrics. CLIP+FFT deals with each line independently, so even if we have been talking about a ship and a whale throughout the song, the AI doesn’t know that in “when down on her a right whale bore”, the “her” refers to a ship. I made similar tweaks in one or two places.

There was nothing I could do about the line “One day, when the tonguing is done”. Trying to be more precise about the whaling sense of “tonguing” would, if anything, have made the image more horrifying.

Having none of the “Wellerman is a ship” context, the AI interprets The Wellerman itself as some kind of eldritch oil well drilling supervillain.

image

I kind of like what happened to “The winds blew hard, her bow dipped down,” with golden locks of hair and bows everywhere. I mean, I like it in a “oh no this has gone terribly yet fascinatingly wrong” sort of way.

image

The image for “We’ll take our leave and go” is also interesting, since it illustrates “leave” in so many ways. Sometimes there are cars and suitcases, or people shaking hands. Interestingly, I see hints of European Union flags and British flags in many of them, signs that during training CLIP was learning to associate “leave” with Brexit.

image

The “bully boys” are hilarious, classic glowering expressions and mean-kid haircuts. The AI is not used to the early-1900s meaning of “bully = awesome”

image

You’ll notice that many of the frames have text, which I find charming, as if the AI is frowning to itself and muttering “tea. tea. Billy. tea.” or “blow. blow.” The less interpretable the phrase is in image form, the more likely the AI is to use text instead.

image

In fact CLIP treating the word and the object as equivalent has led to an interesting way of fooling its image recognition capabilities:

image

I also had CLIP+FFT illustrate The Twelve Days of Christmas and this is one of my favorite frames from it: Ten Lords A-Leaping

image

To see the other illustrated Days of Christmas (including the weirdly human-faced swans), become a supporter of AI Weirdness! Or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your inbox.

    • #neural networks
    • #clip
    • #clip+fft
    • #wellerman
    • #sea shanty
    • #lords a leaping
    • #tonguing
    • #you don't want the wellerman to come
    • #or the whale
    • #or any of this
    • #Youtube
  • 2 months ago
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Lucid Deep Dreaming?

It's a confusing jumble of Frodo Bagginses, all cloaked, some in pizza delivery caps, many bearing pizzas or boxes, striding out from the ominous openings of many mines

“Frodo Baggins delivering a pizza through the mines of Moria”

Remember my attempts to get CLIP+BigGAN to generate candy hearts? Here’s what an alternative method, CLIP+FFT, does with the prompt “a candy heart with a message”.

Rather than a single obsessively-scribbled-upon heart, we now have a vast universe of candy hearts, jostling against one another with their messages screaming incomprehensible love at the viewer.

There are thousands of pastel-colored hearts, each illegible, pressed up against each other into a solid cavern that recedes into misty distance.

As before, CLIP is the judge, telling another algorithm whether this collection of pixels looks more like “a candy heart with a message” than that collection of pixels. But this time, the algorithm presenting the images to CLIP isn’t steering through BigGAN, which was trained on a set of human photography. Instead, it’s doing something a lot more like the classic Deep Dream images, changing parts of the image to maximize how much it looks like dogs, or whatever the prompt is supposed to be.

First panel: Voice: How do you like this painting? Painting is of a single pine tree by a lake with a mountain. Robot box: Meh. Second panel: Voice: How about now? The mountain now has a dog face. Robot box: I'm intrigued. Third panel: Voice: How about now? Sky, lake, and pine tree all have dog faces. Robot box: THIS IS THE BEST PAINTING EVER!

(this cartoon is from my book You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How AI Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place - out in paperback on March 23, 2021)

And since CLIP was trained on text and images that appeared together on the internet, it can be the judge of just about anything.

Here’s “A stegosaurus flying a spaceship among lasers”.

You would have to know they're stegosauruses, but they're definitely spiky, and the air is filled pretty solidly with lasers.

And it knows how to judge pop culture figures and even the look of TV shows. Here’s “Godzilla and Paul Hollywood in the Bakeoff tent”

Paul Hollywood from the Great British Bakeoff is unmistakeable, and repeated several times. Godzilla is less distinct, but vaguely godzilla-shaped and godzilla-textured

Note that it not only correctly has the tent as white and pointy-roofed, it even is trying to do the Union Jack bunting. And it’s really sensitive to the prompt, so if you type “Godzilla and Paul Hollywood taking a selfie in the Bakeoff tent” instead, Paul Hollywood breaks out into a grin and cameras appear. (it seems to be less sure what a grinning Godzilla looks like)

Now Godzilla and Paul Hollywood are seen mostly from torso up. Paul Hollywood's face is in several pieces and godilla doesn't really have a face, more of a hulking presence. Also everything has a dewy glow like a 1990s mall photo.

Here’s “Mr Darcy emerges from a lake in a white shirt while his horse looks on”

It could plausibly be Colin Firth from 1995 Pride and Prejudice. The lake and the countryside are there, repeated and tiled upon one another several times. The horse requires much more imagination.

It does less well to my mind when there are fewer clues about what the background should look like. Tell it just to do “Tyrannosaurus Rex” and things get very abstract and smeary, and it even resorts to trying to write “tyrannosaurus” everywhere.

There are some brown shapes that might be tyrannosaurus heads, definitely far too many baleful eyes, and maybe some foliage. Not sure what the swaths of lumpy red are. There's illegible writing everywhere.

“A tyrannosaurus wearing a crinoline hoop skirt on a fashion show runway” looks a bit more realistic. Or maybe that’s just my preference. The trees in the background are a nice touch.

The tyrannosaurus isn't identifiably *in* the dress per se, but there are many tiered floofy white dresses, and strong hints of tyrannosaurus legs and tails, and nice Cretaceous trees in the background. Crowds line the runway.

Here’s a zoomed-in view of one of the best ones: “a library made of bones and skeletons; a library in the style of catacombs”. It doesn’t seem to resort to word graffiti if the prompt suggests a finely textured background, maybe. (This may have been from a newer version of the CLIP+FFT notebook, so that could explain some of the improved quality.)

Image is an intricate tangle of bone-covered bookcases and piles of skulls.

You do need a bit of imagination maybe to figure out what the original prompts were, so I wouldn’t exactly say that CLIP+FFT as successful as making images to order as the original CLIP+DALL-E (still not released publicly). But having a neural net that will attempt whatever I ask for (and not turn every human into a horror of many-eyed blobs) is still pretty fun.

“The daleks have filled the tardis with llamas and David Tennant is annoyed”

David tennant is clearly visible (at least the left half of his face) frowning. Daleks and tardises seem to merge into segmented blue cones. The llamas are kind of dalek-shaped furry blobs. There are EXCESSIVE numbers of lasers for some reason.

Read more about CLIP+FFT (built by Vadim Epstein) and try it yourself for free with the colab notebook!

I made a bonus gallery of various characters delivering pizza. Spider-man’s not the only one who’s recognizable with a fresh pie in hand. To see the gallery, and get other bonus content, become an AI Weirdness supporter! Or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your inbox.

    • #neural networks
    • #clip
    • #clip+fft
    • #deep dream
    • #GBBO
    • #dr who
    • #lotr
    • #catacombs
    • #goth library
    • #tyrannosaurus
    • #godzilla
    • #pride and prejudice
    • #mr darcy
    • #pizza
    • #frodo baggins in a delivery cap
    • #basically everything
  • 2 months ago
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Welcome to my humor blog about artificial intelligence. I write about the sometimes hilarious, sometimes unsettling ways that machine learning algorithms get things wrong.

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