Earlier, I did the rather unsettlingly meta exercise of using a new neural net, GPT-3, to generate hypothetical AI Weirdness blog posts.

One of the tricks I can do with this: GPT-3 can play along with an opening in which I declare that I’ve performed a feat of dataset melding that I don’t think I could actually perform in real life. It doesn’t matter if one of the datasets doesn’t exist, or if they’re both completely different types of data - GPT-3 can figure out how to pretend that I trained it that way. Here’s one of my favorites.

Here’s my prompt:

Welcome to AI Weirdness! I decided to see what would happen if I trained a neural net to generate new names for A.I. supervillains. I collected thousands of existing supervillains from the internet, somehow applied neural net magic to make them A.I. versions of themselves, and… well, they were a lot weirder and a lot less scary than I had expected. Here’s a list of some of the strangest:

Here are some superheroes GPT-3 generated in response:

Siquifoob – a tiny mouse-like supervillain with a toaster for a head who gets his powers from spinning around in his toaster-head and charging into things. He is a hero with psychic powers in one alternate universe where he discovered an alternate way to charge his head.
Perakreabund – a villain who has a gun that fires silver octopuses. I don't know what the octopus thing is about, but the gun sounds deadly and deadly is good.
Kevlerrih – a cloud-headed laser-shooting supervillain with a stormy face. He is the enemy of Kevlerrih2, a similarly named character who is also in this list.
Finamra – a villain who has a time machine. But he only goes forward, to a future with floating islands, dolphin robots, and giant birdbots.
Flugg – an evil robot-bunny who is powered by a magical bunny tail. The world would be better off if there were more magical bunny tails.
Mosshole – the son of
Horseshoes – an evil robot mule who is the ultimate creation of a robot arms manufacturer. He has a robot rabbit-head but a real horse body. He also has enormous tires with horseshoes on the sides of them.
Websmoke – a supervillain who creates deadly chainsaws made of living spiders. He is a teenager and he is kind of nice. His alternate universe counterpart doesn't have the chainsaws, but is nice anyway.
Rocketsoar – the original Rocketsoar had a giant flying rocket hat. This is a version of Rocketsoar who is still rocket-headed but instead of a hat his head is a huge rocket. He has no hat, but the rocket has one.

I’m not sure how to feel about the fact that telling a neural net to pretend it’s a smaller, more-confused neural net is now easier than actually training the smaller neural net. AI weirdness just got weirder.

Become an AI Weirdness supporter to get more weird superheroes as bonus content!

Subscribe now

My book on AI, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why it’s Making the World a Weirder Place, is available wherever books are sold: Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s - Boulder Bookstore

Subscribe now