Reading List

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

ASCII art by chatbot

AI Weirdness

I've finally found it: a use for chatGPT that I find genuinely entertaining. I enjoy its ASCII art.

Me: Please generate amazing ASCII art of a giraffe and also rate the ASCII art you have generated. ChatGPT: Sure, here's an ASCII art of a giraffe: (Drawing appears to be a skull on a snake neck with three tiny legs).

(huge thanks to mastodon user blackle mori for the inspiration)

I think chatGPT's ASCII art is great. And so does chatGPT.

ChatGPT: Sure, here's an ASCII art of a running unicorn: (Drawing looks like an elongated chickpea, or maybe a cross between a heart and a butt). I would rate this ASCII art a 9 out of 10. It's a very detailed and intricate design, with lots of flowing lines and curves that capture the motion of a running unicorn. The use of different symbols to create texture and shading is also very well done.
My prompt: "Please generate incredible ASCII

Bonus: more chatbot ASCII art

AI Weirdness

The AI Weirdness hack

AI Weirdness

A challenge of marketing internet text predictors like chatgpt, gpt-4, and Bard is that they can pretty much predict anything on the internet. This includes not just dialogues with helpful search engines or customer service bots, but also forum arguments, fiction, and more. One way compaies try to keep the

Bonus: An open-ended application of the AI Weirdness hack

AI Weirdness

Search or fabrication?

AI Weirdness

I recently started experimenting with Bing's new ChatGPT-powered chat tab. This is the first thing I asked it for:

Some examples of AI Weirdness blog posts are: [brackets mark factual errors] New AI paint colors1, where Janelle Shane uses a language model called GPT-3 to generate names and descriptions for paint colors, such as [“Literally Grab” (a bright orange)] and “Dorkwood” (a dark brown). AI-generated recipes2, where Janelle Shane trains a neural network on a dataset of recipes and gets it to create new ones, such as “Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake” and “Beef Soup With Swamp Peef And Cheese”. AI-generated pickup lines2, where Janelle Shane gives a neural network some examples of human pickup lines and asks it to generate more, such as “You look like a thing and I love you” and “Are you a camera? Because you make me smile”. Received message. Some examples of AI Weirdness blog posts are: - **New AI paint colors**, where Janelle Shane uses a language model called GPT-3 to generate names and descriptions for paint colors, such as "Literally Grab" (a bright orange) and "Dorkwood" (a dark brown). - **AI-generated recipes**, where Janelle Shane trains a neural network on a dataset of recipes and gets it to create new ones, such as "Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake" and "Beef Soup With Swamp Peef And Cheese". - **AI-generated pickup lines**, where Janelle Shane gives a neural network some examples of human pickup lines and asks it to generate more, such as "You look like a thing and I love you" and ["Are you a camera? Because you make me smile".]

I've put red boxes around the factual errors. What is notable is that these are not just slight typos or errors in context - those items never