Janelle Shane’s Tweets

A machine learning humor blog by Janelle Shane. Odd ice cream flavors, confusing pickup lines, cursed candy hearts, and the occasional phantom giraffe.

Mar 23, 2021

My book is out in paperback in the US! Order it here: YouLookLikeAThing.com Contains: - phantom giraffes - AIs that hack their matrix - incomprehensible knock-knock jokes - floating sandwiches - fluffernutters

A stack of paperback copies of You Look Like a Thing and I Love You, with a giraffe peeking out from behind

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Some other places you can find me: My newsletter! Aiweirdness.com Mastodon: wandering.shop/@janellecshane aiweirdness.tumblr.com Instagram (sporadically): Janelle.Shane

aiweirdness.com

AI Weirdness

Parrot Makes Shopping List

Nov 17

Got sent this bird content by

@GretchenAMcC

who said it seemed like something I would have come up with

youtube.com

The humans in the house have NEVER intentionally added anything to Alexa's shopping list. But maybe Bibi the Bird did? Someone apparently loves...PoetryStraw...

badidea

@0xabad1dea

Nov 16

how far we've come

AI painting, "Julius Caesar enjoying an Orange Julius at the mall"

it is a much better depiction of the prompt than the previous image

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badidea

@0xabad1dea

May 27, 2021

AI prompt: "Julius Caesar enjoying an Orange Julius at the mall" it appears to have made a drink machine

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Want to join mastodon but not sure what instance to choose? Please consider these (AI-generated, nonexistent, at least not yet) possibilities: aiweirdness.com/ai-designed-ma

molecule.lab
Users post messages that are not constituted of letters, but are instead made up of Molecules.

frozen.forest
Users must provide a source of warmth in order to post.

dinosaur.pocket
All messages must consist of the two letters 'D', for fear that the dinosaurs will eat people's pocketbooks.

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crumb 

@aicrumb

Nov 11

prompt "willy wonka" i wonder how many permutations are in the training data

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Sometimes you get approximately what you asked for, sometimes you get mythical beings

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Kingfisher & Wombat

@UrsulaV

Nov 8

Sitting at the airport waiting for Kevin’s plane and poking the latest version of the Midjourney AI. In some ways, this is a huge step forward. It got great at understanding “cartoon.” In other ways…well, I wanted a Labrador fisherman character holding a fish.

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Nov 6

Any phone with built-in lidar lasers should work (yes, actual tiny lasers bouncing invisible infrared light off your surroundings). This was an iPhone 13 pro.

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Prof. Susan Webb

@GeophysicsWebb

Nov 6

Which phones are the best for this? It looks like fun! twitter.com/JanelleCShane/…

I just finished a preprint and let me just say that a gaslamp murder mystery where the gas is the swirling atmosphere of Jupiter is GENIUS

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Doctora Malka Older

@m_older

Nov 5

promo time in case these are the Last Days of Twitter

! The Mimicking of Known Successes:

f/f romance

murder mystery

on Jupiter

academia

long train journeys

tea March 7 from @TorDotComPub Pre-order links

publishing.tor.com/themimickingof

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Joan Deitchman @jdeitchman@mastodon.social

Nov 5

My dad’s phone has a 3D LiDAR Scanner. His cat is wondering why he’s laughing so hard

0:18

7.2K views

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I had so much respect for

@ruchowdh

and the META team, and Twitter will be so much worse without them

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@JoanDeitchman

Nov 4

Yep, the team is gone. The team that was researching and pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice. The team that was studying algorithmic amplification. The team that was inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies. All that is gone.

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Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model - Waxy.org

Andy Baio

@waxpancake

Nov 1

Last week, a Redditor fine-tuned an AI image model on the work of one illustrator, sparking a debate about the ethics of reproducing a living artist's style. I talked to that artist to see how she felt about it, and the person who made it.

waxy.org

How does it feel to be turned into an AI image model? To find out, I opened a door to the multiverse and interviewed the creator and unwilling subject of a controversial DreamBooth model.

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Matthew R Francis

@DrMRFrancis

Nov 1

AI-generated art is popular right now, but is it ethical? I spoke to

, and

for

sinews.siam.org/Details-Page/t featuring a truly terrible bit of non-AI generated art by me, which is partly redeemed by bad puns

Torie Bosch

@thekibosch

Oct 31

Celebrate Halloween with one of my all-time favorite Future Tense Fiction stories, by

Read a New Short Story About a Haunted House, A.I., and a Rock Star

slate.com

The latest tale from Future Tense Fiction.

Janelle Shane (@janellecshane@wandering.shop)

Oct 30

There’s also this tool for finding people who’ve put their mastodon handles in their Twitter bios

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Darius Kazemi

@tinysubversions

Oct 30

This is cool! Note to anyone using this that some of the results here might be email addresses due to formatting issues but I've already found a few people I didn't know had Fediverse accounts I want to go follow twitter.com/luca/status/15…

Folks looking for other folks on #Mastodon : I’m at wandering.shop/@janellecshane It’s a fun sci-fi coffee shop themed instance, well moderated. Imagine if Murderbot was your moderator. ☕️ 🕳

wandering.shop

1.66K Posts, 114 Following, 4.86K Followers · I train neural networks to write humor at aiweirdness.com | Also a research scientist in optics. She/her

Hilarious

episode in which they attempt drawing prompts from Ada’s messed-up Halloween #botober list

youtube.com

Drawing Weird A.I. Halloween Art Prompts

Nathan challenges Jacob, Karina, and Julia to draw art prompts generated by a neural network!The prompts we used:https://www.aiweirdness.com/botober-2022-dra...

Oct 30

I think I remember someone tagged me in a drawing youtube channel that did a couple of the #botober drawing prompts - but I was so busy at the time I forgot to watch it and now I can't find it in my mentions. Or did I imagine the whole thing?

Oct 28

It's not that #dalle2 doesn't know what a tapir is - it's more like it's bad at picturing more than one kind of animal at a time. Here's a tapir in a tapir costume for comparison. aiweirdness.com/bonus-how-to-d

A very recognizable tapir wearing a bold black and white tunic similar to a medieval warhorse's tunic.

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I have no explanation for #dalle2's tapir costumes.

Hooded costume has holes for the cat's own ears, but also two pink ears above that, topped with a unicorn horn. Its back has short black spikes.

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Costume has black and yellow bee stripes, two short cowlike horns, and some kind of unidentifiable snowman thing on a stick emerging from the back of the neck.

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Cat in a red-trimmed yellow robe. Topping the robe's hood are three floppy green horns.

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#dalle2's anteater costume is a puzzle. It shouldn't even *have* horns.

Cat wearing a tight blue and gold shirt like a starfleet uniform. It has an enormous dongle thing above its head, like a quail's head feathers.

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A weasel or fisher cat in a satin shirt with a fluffy white hood, topped with a black and orange striped horn.

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Cat wearing a golden shirt and a white hood with four blue horns on it.

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#dalle2's elephant costume has somehow become a unicorn.

Cat's costume has floppy fabric ears and black, green, and yellow spots. Above the cat's own face is a cute button-nosed face and above that is a tall yellow unicorn horn.

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Another category of costume that gives it trouble: things with horns and snouts. Triceratops:

Cat's costume has a high back lined with black spikes, black spots, and a pink underbelly. An enormous green unicorn horn juts above the opening for the cat's head.

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Cat is a bit squat like a bulldog (or triceratops), and has a thick flat tail. It has a black fabric triceratops frill, plus a spiky green frill inside that, plus an orange horn, plus three curved white horns.

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Doglike cat is barking at a pumpkin. It wears a big fabric triceratops hood covered in large white spikes, plus a pair of huge in-line forehead spikes.

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Another failure: scorpion costume. #dalle2 seems to revert to generic "insect" features when trying to put together a scorpion costume. "yes i know you wanted to be a scorpion but this is what they had. you look lovely."

The cat is wearing a black and yellow striped t-shirt with a black and yellow hood with cow horns on it. The cat is also wearing striped double butterfly wings.

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A cat in a hooded t-shirt. The hood has orange ears and black antennae with pom-poms on them. The hem of the tshirt is orange, and standing along the cat's spines are mesh plates like stegosaurus spines.

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The cat is wearing a black hooded t-shirt with double pom-pom antennae on the hood. The cat has two wide yellow bee wings.

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When I try to get DALL-E2 to dress my cat up as other animals, one common failure mode seems to be... this. "studio photo of a relaxed tortoiseshell cat wearing a giraffe costume"

Slumped in a giraffe-patterned hoodie is an extremely short-necked giraffe.

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My cat would hate wearing a costume, so I've resorted to using #dalle2 to imagine her dressed up for Halloween. It does some costumes better than others. aiweirdness.com/ai-imagines-my

Three cats in costumes with long thin ball-tipped fabric spikes of various lengths and thicknesses. prompt reads: "Studio photo of a playful black cat wearing a sea urchin costume". Next to one cat is a shell. Another cat has short diamond spikes all over its back as well.

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Mark Parody Riedl (@riedl@sigmoid.social)

@mark_riedl

Oct 26

When we conclude that "GPT-3 is capable of X", we may no longer be doing fundamental AI research. Instead we may be doing something more akin to anthropology (or ethnography) on this mysterious group called OpenAI and this mysterious black box that they left us.

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Optics labs have a much less glamorous version of

@Afro_Herper

’s #FindThatLizard challenge: #FindThatSetScrew

Image of a patch of short textured grey carpet about the size of a hand towel. There’s a small metal screw in the picture, nearly impossible to detect

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Joanna (is looking for library work!)

Oct 25

It's just like Liszt to finish the piece despite being turned into a tapir.

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@joannahuntill

Oct 24

Nobody knows how or why he was turned into a tapir during #botober, but it didn't matter. The people still couldn't get enough of Franz Liszt.

A digital pencil illustration of a tapir enthusiastically playing the piano. His clothing and hair are styled after pianist Franz Liszt, and he has a rose between his teeth.

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Mark Parody Riedl (@riedl@sigmoid.social)

@mark_riedl

@normalcatpics@sigmoid.social

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@normalcatpics

Lisa Eldred

@firstcrusader

Opossum With a Clock Within its Mouth

A sonnet featuring #botober art by

@kenpriebe

wasabijane.com

A sonnet by me with an illustration by the amazing Ken Priebe.

Here's an example of a site I'm pretty sure is at least partially AI-generated, which came up in search results for "do woodchucks like peanut butter" I used the GPTrue or False browser plugin to analyze it, and it's coming up with 0.1% chance that the article is human written.

Site reads in part "According to some researchers, it is found that groundhogs are like peanuts and also they can eat them. groundhogs are Mainly herbs, plant people eat a variety of plants, including from people’s gardens. But they can also eat things that we consider insects, such as worms, other insects, and snails."
GPTrue or False browser plugin reports that there is a 0.1% chance the text is human written

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I'm also curious how many of these low-quality search results are AI generated with something like GPT-3, as opposed to being stolen and automatically reworded. i.e. the sites that end up referring to the New York Times as Novel York Instances

Informal poll: how often are you seeing AI-generated articles in your search results, on what types of searches (if any) do you tend to see them, and have you altered your search methods at all to avoid them?

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Chris Albon

@chrisalbon

Oct 22

I’ve been tinkering with AI writing tools and here is my biggest takeaways: 1. Amount of low quality content used to flood Google results and drive ad impressions will approach infinity. 2. Internet users will flock to where the humans are. Wikipedia, Reddit, Quora, etc.

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Dr Kate Compton #BotGirlSummer

@GalaxyKate

Oct 22

declaring a new term: A Bach Faucet is a situation where a generative system makes an endless supply of some content at or above the quality of some culturally-valued original, but the endless supply of it makes it no longer rare, and thus less valuable

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Sneak preview of my

presentation for tomorrow! I'm talking at 11:30 Pacific on Saturday the 22nd, and I believe you can still get tickets! roguelike.club

Caption reads "dslr photo of the giraffes attending a birthday party". Features generated images of giraffes wearing party hats, surrounded by balloons and spotted cake.

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Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr

@doctorow

Oct 21

What's worse than a tool that doesn't work? One that *does* work, *nearly* perfectly, except when it fails in unpredictable and subtle ways. 1/

An old fashioned hand-cranked meat-grinder; a fan of documents are being fed into its hopper; its output mouth has been replaced with the staring red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey; emitting from that mouth is a stream of pink slurry.

Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

PublicBenefit
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Texture.png

Jollymon001
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:22_HFG.jpg

CC BY 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

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Timnit Gebru is on Mastodon

@timnitGebru

scottjshapiro@mastodon.social

I have my PhD in "AI" & spent my career in tech as an engineer & then researcher. The skills required to understand how a system harms society aren't the same as those required to build it. Ppl don't need to know how face recognition works to know that it harms them.

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@scottjshapiro

I beg you, if you work on the Ethics of AI, please learn something about AI.

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An AI like GPT-3’s goal is to sound like every other lifehack listsicle from the mid 2010s. In training it’s rewarded for blending in, not for new ideas.

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Ali Abdaal

@AliAbdaal

24 hours ago, I tried an experiment - I tweeted a thread with 15 productivity hacks. It’s become one of my highest performing tweets of all time, with over 1 million impressions and 23,648 engagements. The truth is - the entire thread was written by an AI. Let me explain… 1/ twitter.com/AliAbdaal/stat…

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