Janelle Shane @janellecshane@wandering.shop

I decided to give two neural nets a go at the Great British Bakeoff technical challenges. They did both much better and much worse than I had guessed.

https://www.aiweirdness.com/neural-networks-vs-the-bake-off-technical-challenge/

I feel like we often don't acknowledge how very strange US grocery store names are. People just think it's normal to shop at a place called Big Bear or Giant Eagle or Piggly Wiggly.

So I used GPT-3 to add to a list of Perfectly Normal grocery stores.
https://www.aiweirdness.com/very-normal-grocery-stores/

Because I so dearly love it when humans play along when computers ask for silly things, I have generated drawing prompts for #botober2021!

I've managed to get GPT-3 to follow themes. Here's "animals". The rest are at this link:
https://www.aiweirdness.com/botober2021/

AI is based on math so it must be correct.

New AI Weirdness post! https://www.aiweirdness.com/clip-backpropagation/

It's easier to make an industrial demon than a unicorn cake? I experimented with @RiversHaveWings's new diffusion-guided CLIP method.

"industrial demon, matte painting, artstation HD"
"unicorn cake with golden horn and rainbow sprinkles"
https://www.aiweirdness.com/unicorn-cakes/

"How the hell did she knit this?"

I had so much fun talking to Alison Korleski on the Fiber Nation podcast about SkyKnit, my AI-generated knitting pattern project.
https://www.interweave.com/fiber-nation/ai-knitting-im-sorry-dave-i-cant-knit-that/

There's no cake fail like an AI-generated cake fail.

I had CLIP+VQGAN attempt some classic showstopper cakes. Here's its "galaxy glaze cake"
https://www.aiweirdness.com/ai-cake-fails/

Used GPT-3 to figure out how to become viral on the birdsite.

Um

Quote toot with a meme of you in a situation that makes you say "god damn it"

https://www.aiweirdness.com/quote-tweet-if-you-like-neural-nets/

Pretty striking the difference that a byline makes when asking CLIP+VQGAN to generate images.

"Internet infrastructure"
versus
"Internet infrastructure by James Gurney"

new post at aiweirdness.com!
https://www.aiweirdness.com/my-favorite-nonexistent-painter/

Tried to generate a chair made of beetle kill pine.

It's a wood with distinctive blue streaks, salvaged from trees killed by pine bark beetles. Turns out it was easier to get CLIP+VQGAN to generate the texture than the chair.

https://ai-weirdness.ghost.io/why-is-generated-furniture-so-cursed/

Asking CLIP+VQGAN to generate

"a car driving down a road in monument valley"

versus "A car driving down a desert road in monument valley | dramatic atmospheric ultra high definition free desktop wallpaper"

SAME TRAINING DATA
https://ai-weirdness.ghost.io/untitled/

What fascinates me about generating images with CLIP is that it CAN generate depth and realistic textures, but only if you know how to ask for them.

"A herd of sheep grazing on a lush green hillside" alone

vs with "amazing awesome and epic" added
https://ai-weirdness.ghost.io/the-art-of-asking-nicely/

I have a new short story that's free to read in Slate! Contains:

- AI
- haunted house
- metal

https://slate.com/technology/2021/06/skeleton-crew-short-story-janelle-shane.html

The problem with taking startup advice from a text-generating neural network is even the advanced ones know more about what sounds good than about what actually works.
https://ai-weirdness.ghost.io/ai-doesnt-understand-scale/

In which a neural net prompted with NOAA's Atlantic Basin Storm Name Pronunciations guide further erodes the already tenuous link between English spelling and pronunciation
https://ai-weirdness.ghost.io/hurricanes-and-how-they-are-pronounced/

Make your move while the AI-generated Bachelorette contestants are still available!
https://ai-weirdness.ghost.io/fun-facts-about-fun-guys/

Generate buzz with these AI food truck concepts.

Remember, GPT-3 scanned most of the internet during training so it knows what's popular!
https://aiweirdness.com/post/651804014415118336/ai-generated-food-trucks

Botsplaining: turns out it's much easier to get a neural nets to sound confident than to actually be correct.
https://aiweirdness.com/post/651171970623455232/botsplaining

It will never fail to amuse me how terrible AI-generated jokes are.
https://aiweirdness.com/post/650539219288227840/ai-writes-star-wars-jokes