AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning
Janelle Shane

Janelle Shane

Total 838 Posts
My Resolution: Take photos of each of my toes daily.

New Years Resolutions generated by AI

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
The Three Christmas Weasels

Christmas entities

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

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

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,
How to make an Intimidating Sponge Cake. Last step is "Hide it all under a carpet." (full version in post)

GPT-3: It can't resist a list

One strange thing I've noticed about otherwise reasonably competent text-generating neural nets is how their lists tend to go off the rails. I noticed this first with GPT-2 [https://aiweirdness.com/post/185085792997/gpt-2-it-cant-resist-a-list]. But it turns out GPT-3 is no exception. Here's the largest model,
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