Janelle Shane

A wooden structure on stilts, with a slatted railing and huge crossbeams

Remember those wooden playgrounds? AI doesn't.

By Janelle Shane On January 07, 2022 - 4 min read

I remember when my hometown got one of these giant wooden playgrounds. It must have been in the early 90s and a kid could get lost for hours in there. Or injured or full of splinters or chromated copper arsenate I guess, which is why you don't see

My Resolution: Take photos of each of my toes daily.

New Years Resolutions generated by AI

By Janelle Shane On December 30, 2021 - 7 min read

This month I'm beginning 2022 as the first Futurist in Residence at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building. It's weird to think of myself as a futurist. I write a lot about the algorithms we're calling artificial intelligence (AI), but rather than deal with

Christmas entities

By Janelle Shane On December 22, 2021 - 2 min read

When you think about it, Christmas can get pretty weird. There's the classic Christmas story of the Bible, and then there are all these extra entities that aren't in the book but which become somehow part of Christmas. And some of them are quite unsettling. There&

2022: French stick - Artisanally crafted, wooden, low-fat stick, thin enough to fit in a toaster.

Predicting the next toy fads with AI

By Janelle Shane On December 14, 2021 - 2 min read

Few could have predicted that the must-have toy of 1998 would be an owl-like bilingual hamster doll with infrared sensors, or that in 1975 kids would be begging their parents for a toy that is literally a single rock in a cardboard box. But could AI have predicted it? Could

A screenshot of the AI Weirdness 2021 Advent Calendar, with one of the doors highlighted

An AI advent calendar

By Janelle Shane On December 01, 2021 - 2 min read

When I was a kid I looked forward to opening advent calendar doors in December, although the pictures behind the doors were pretty forgettable. A bell. A snowflake. If you were lucky, a squirrel. So I thought I'd see if I can generate something a bit more interesting,

Santa's head and a single pancake are visible, and three blobs that might be attempts at sloth faces.

Bonus: the advent calendar images that didn't work out

By Janelle Shane On December 01, 2021 - 3 min read

I built an advent calendar by using GPT-3 to generate descriptions and Pixray to illustrate them! But some of the descriptions were too long for the calendar doors, or else Pixray seemed to really struggle with them. I've collected some of my favorites here!

Remember those wooden playgrounds? AI doesn't.

New Years Resolutions generated by AI

Christmas entities

Predicting the next toy fads with AI

An AI advent calendar

Bonus: the advent calendar images that didn't work out

Writing

Subscribe

Recent Posts

Minecraft with object impermanence

Bonus: In Which The Adventurer Attempts to Build a Website

Botober 2024

Bonus: "Ignore all previous instructions" gets weirder

An exercise in frustration

Bonus: A unicorn goes downhill

Follow

Minecraft with object impermanence

Bonus: In Which The Adventurer Attempts to Build a Website

Botober 2024