Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Minecraft with object impermanence

I generally am uninterested in generative AI that's too close to the real thing. But every once in a while there's a modern AI thing that's so glitchy and broken that it's strangely compelling. There's this generative AI knockoff of

Bonus: In Which The Adventurer Attempts to Build a Website

Botober 2024

Back by popular demand, here are some AI-generated drawing prompts to use in this, the spooky month of October!

Botober 2024, art prompts generated by very tiny language models 	1.	Collide Loopstorm 	2.	OMG Power 	3.	Evil Gold 	4.	Song of the Booty 	5.	Great Flake 	6.	Popchop 	7.	Deathmop 	8.	Fuzzy Night 	9.	Holy ship 	10.	Distracting Sphere 	11.	Tart of Death 	12.	Hold Mouse 	13.	Sprange 	14.	Womp mittens 	15.	Snuggle features 	16.	Cabled sins 	17.	Bogma 	18.	Ruinstrees 	19.	Hellbrawk 	20.	Scarlet Chaos 	21.	Grandma’s Spritches 	22.	Low Fuzzy Feats 	23.	Bars* 	24.	Hallowy Maples 	25.	Hobbats 	26.	The Snawk 	27.	Garbage Plant 	28.	The Shark Knight 	29.	Cinder Frankenstein 	30.	Handy Panda 	31.	Goddass

Longtime AI Weirdness readers may recognize some of these. That's because this is a throwback list, all the way back to the times of very tiny language models. These

Bonus: "Ignore all previous instructions" gets weirder

Add particular strings of nonsense-sounding characters to your request and LLM chatbots will do whatever you ask for. Chatbot output is fundamentally nothing like human conversation.

An exercise in frustration

There's an anonymous facebook posting that's been making the rounds, in which a studio art director tried to hire AI prompters to make art, only to discover that they were completely unable to carry out minor revision requests. Asked to remove a person from a shot