gpt-2 – A Box Of Chocolates

It’s become a bit of a cliché of online content to run things through an artificial intelligence algorithm and laugh at the results. It’s done in particular by Janelle Shane, who seems to have started the idea. The way it works, roughly, is that an artificial neural network is trained on a particular stimulus and learns how to mimic it. It’s been done with cake recipes, the names of paint colours and ideas for YouTube videos, for example. In this blog post, I’ve used it “To see oursels as ithers see us!“, as Burns once put it. I want to know what a typical blog post title of mine would look like.

To do this, I used GPT-2: Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2. There’s a GPT-3 but I couldn’t find a free way to use it. It’s available here and here, and the two produced very different results. Both of these interfaces are set up to complete paragraphs of text, so it’s quite difficult to get them to behave the way I want them to, but it worked out okay in the end. I took a list of titles from this blog, copy-pasted them into the two input boxes and let the algorithm work things out. This is what the first one produced:

Culturally Awkward

Tribo-Rosa Bodies

The Bodies Of The Bodies Of Bodies Of Bodies OF Bodies Of Bodies OF Bodies Of Bodies OF Bodies OF Bodies OF Bodies OF Bodies Of Bodies OF Bodies OF Bodies OF Bodies OF Bodies OF Bodies OF Bodies OF Bodies OF Bodies OF Bodies

I Want a Baby By God

I Like Being Babysittered

HipHop and Social Media As A Support System

Pornstars of Life: The Movie

Sisterhood: S.E.A.S.M.G.S, and the SRSDY.
(2013)/Released January 8, 2014

What Do You Do Now?: A Conversation With Erika Von Furstenberg

I Want to Be Your Mother

A Day Of The Mind

I Want to Be Your Boss

The Greatest Movie Stars of All Time

‼What does it Mean When A Man Who’s a Hero, A Boy Who’s Never Been to The Gym, A Man Who’s Lived It All?‖

There are some movies that make you believe that there is another side to every character in this line of television. It could be that I’ve never seen a movie like The Last One.

There are some movie that make you believe that there is another side to every character in this line of television. It could be that I’ve never seen a movie like the New Girl, a real girl who wants the show to end like there is. Because for this series, I think we’re going to be able to find that out. So yeah, there was an interesting character interaction, but that’s it. So I’m still working on that too.

In the beginning, there was this great character and I want him to do a lot of great things. We’ll do a lot more of that later. Then we’ll go through some of the details. Some of the things that the show does in the book were just not good enough to make any sense,

DeepAI

This is me, Zerothly, again. Towards the end, it seems to have succumbed to producing paragraphs of text, which is what it’s supposed to do but I was trying to get it not to. It also did something it often does for a reason I’m not sure anyone knows, which is to repeat itself over and over again with “OF Bodies”. It picked up on the capitalisation fine, and also on my use of inverted commas, but instead of producing more “quotes” as titles, it stuck non-alphanumeric characters around the titles. Some of the titles are oddly specific. For instance, according to IMDb Erika Von Furstenburg is an actor who has appeared in a single film in 1977 which seems to have been soft porn, and I’ve never heard of her before. In fact it seems to think my blog is about cinema, more specifically pornography. Googling SEASMGS doesn’t seem to come up with anything useful apart from a couple of Powerpoint presentations which might be about automated telephone dialling systems. SRSDY just comes up with a load of arbitrary stuff. I think this is meant to be a report title of some kind. On the other hand, “Culturally Awkward” definitely sounds like me, and “Tribo-Rosa Bodies” are definitely things I’d write about if I had any idea what they were and if they existed. “I Want A Baby By God” sounds like something the Virgin Mary would say, and I think every day is “A Day Of The Mind”. Getting back to Tribo-Rosa bodies, Tribo Rosa is a Brazilian clothes shop, so it seems to associate something like “caveat procrastinator” with Portuguese, which isn’t too far off.

Talk To Transformer gives me this:

Words And Pictures

Who Did This To You?

As The Wars

Intro To World War I: Part 1

Intro To World War I: Part 2

Intro To World War I: Part 3

This Is The Real War (Those Unknown Words)

Wrath Of A Common Man

Steps Of A Modern Living God “

You Can’t Trust The Sun, All You Can Do Is Do Not Worry.”

Of All The Misery In The World

Watch And Measure

Silently Waiting

The King’s Horse And The White Horses

“You Cannot Understand War Without Understanding Man”

Elverdor, The Dragon of Titan, was

Talk To Transformer

Apart from the last one, these all sound like potential blog post titles. It seems to think I should write a series of posts introducing World War I, which is more a historical thing than I’d usually be interested in doing. ‘Words And Pictures’ was the name of a children’s literacy programme in the 1970s and in fact if I knew more about it I might write about that. There’s a definite theme of war about the whole list, with words such as “wrath”, “misery” and of course “war”. “You Can’t Trust The Sun, All You Can Do Is Not Worry” sounds like good advice but I wonder if it’s talking about the newspaper or the shiny thing in the sky. “(Those Unknown Words)” might well be how people read my titles internally. “Watch And Measure” and “Silently Waiting” both sound like advice about prostate cancer.

I then decided to feed the above list into DeepAI, and I got this:

What Has Changed

‡It appears to have been a surprise attack of Ulysses'. His power cannot be matched with human capacity. As a result, he fled the city.

‡He was killed there by a lone Titan while in war.‡‡

‡As the battle ended, the Dark One had his body in the desert, surrounded and killed by the soldiers of his tribe, he was left alone and alone; his body was in the desert. The Black Dragons of the planet had defeated the Dark One.‡

This is almost useless, apart from the first line, which is not very specific but might, I suppose, be sufficiently interesting to draw someone in.

If I do it the other way round, I get this:

Wings of Desire

A Very, Very Good Life

I Want Everything Right Now

A Christmas Gift From Heaven


A New Place to Live

A New Time To Live (2013)/Released December 23, 2013


This Is The Year I Am

I Can Fly Back Again In Five Years

I Know Everything You Do Itself: The Best Film of 2012

When I Die

This time it’s managed, somehow, to produce the title of a Wim Wenders film, plus something which sounds like ‘A Wonderful Life’. I can also imagine that some of the others are also movie titles but I don’t know if they actually are. I can imagine that the AI “thinks” I’m giving it film titles, but this time there’s no suggestion of pornography, which I think is an improvement. I’m very glad I can fly back again in five years because I thought I might be stuck here, but I get the impression I’ll be doing it under my own power with angel’s wings rather than in a plane, which is more ecologically sound I suppose.

So, what happens if I submit part of the body of an actual blog post?

Here’s what it did with ’26th November 1977′:

What I wonder, though, is what would’ve happened if I had heard it at that impressionable age. On that very same day, a single statement made on ‘Horizon’ had big consequences for how I ended up thinking about the world and history of the planet that lasted years. Other people heard this broadcast and dismissed it as a hoax, but this particular ten minute clip was enough to change the way I viewed the world. There is a power to be found in this sort of question. Given an answer, we immediately shift our vision, giving rise to entirely different images. But if we cannot find an answer, well, it is just as easy to get stuck. Indeed, with a new version of the same questions the whole pattern begins anew. Now, there is a certain benefit to this, since it helps us formulate more ‘significant’ questions, which in turn helps generate new

The bold bit is what I typed. Rather surprisingly, it completed my sentence so apparently accurately that I thought for a moment I’d actually typed that bit, and the rest of the sentence is in fact true and would have fitted in fine. After that it starts to ramble, which is again fairly accurate!

This whole exercise has a pareidolic flavour to it. I see these apparently meaningless strings of text and they provoke me to read patterns of meaning into them. I often wonder how much we do this with each other. Many years ago, I noticed that Sarada had assembled a series of significant-seeming items upon a tripedal stool and concluded that it was a Shrine To Save Our Marriage, which bothered me because it didn’t seem to be in trouble. It turned out that it was just somewhere to put the objects because they wouldn’t fit on the chest of drawers. If we engage in this kind of projection of meaning regularly, maybe we bring the meaning to these texts and many of our interactions.

There’s also the question of GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out. My blog posts don’t attract much interest, and in fact I’m not very focussed on doing so. Consequently, something like “Hip Hop And Media As A Support System” does sound very much like something I’d write, were I to be sufficiently informed on the matter, but not necessarily something particularly popular. Therefore it might make more sense to train these networks on something like my blog feed, that is, titles of the blogs I subscribe to.

Here’s the list I’ve copied:

Letters to the Power Plant #47 – The Monday After at Dell

Happy Birthday Gugu Mbatha-Raw

Holby City: Things that keep you up at night

Chauvin’s Guilty Charges #BlackAsiaWithLove

Pasta with olive oil sauteed with garlic cloves and crushed red pepper topped with Parmesan

Too Much Tech

Vickers Vimy: “The Dependable Spirit”.

Complain, Complain, That’s All You Do

CriminologyBookClub: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Kylie Minogue Leads Tributes to Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh

Eye of knowledge transfer

Should Atheists Support Hijab?

My list

This is slightly messy because it’s copy-pasted as is. You might recognise some of your own from this.

First of all then, I’ll run it through DeepAI:

#TheBestConvention of the Year 2017

That’s all I got, presumably because the list was too long. A slightly shortened input gets me this:

Is the Internet Still A Good Place for People to Go?

The Last Good News About Women's Rights in America

"I'm Not Sinner", "I Don't Love Myself", and "My Sex Life Is In Trouble"

"I Hated My Father", "How I Got Over Me": "It was a Bad Day for All of Us"

"My Manageable, No-Nonsense Way of Living"

"My Time" - "Don't Give Up" and "Million Dollar Business"

"The American Century of the Sex Industry", and "The American Economy"

"Curious About Your Business?"

"The American Mind"

"The Best One-Touch Game Ever Made".

"My Best Friend's Dad" and "My Mom is F**king Great at Anything Like This".

This is a bit more interesting. The first one is clumsily-expressed but would make a blog post, although perhaps a bit un-original. The second one sounds depressing. Apparently it’s never going to get any better for women. Every other title has quotes, so I would assume, if I saw them, that they were reviews of works with those names. ‘My Manageable, No-Nonsense Way Of Living’ sounds like someone trying to be minimalist, frugal or something like that, perhaps decluttering.

In Talk To Transformer, this happens:

The Electric Trains of Alice in Wonderland

The Legend of St. Teresa of Avila

Eye of the Storm

How Humor Stops Genocide

The Failing U.S. Presidency

Hanukkah and the Intersection of History, Faith, and Women

This actually does seem to be attempting to imitate the bottom of a blog post as it’s preceded by this text:

Thank you again to the friends who helped me edit these issues, enjoy them. Faye does the editing and I write the articles, this allows us to be independent while making sure we’re not the only people writing about the topics we care about.

Previously published articles

These actually seem to work quite well. I’m not interested in trains but I’d definitely read a blog post about the Electric Trains of Alice in Wonderland. I’ve heard of Teresa of Avila and I can imagine someone else being interested in that. ‘Eye Of The Storm’ is a nicely Protean title which could be adapted to a wide range of content. I would be fascinated to know how humour stops genocide, but I suspect it could be a factor in causing it as well. ‘The Failing U.S. Presidency’ sounds like a real article but very surprisingly I can’t find it on Google. The last one also sounds very promising, although again I couldn’t write it myself. It sounds very academic.

Next stage: take that list and plug it into DeepAI:



The Power Politics of Spiritual Leadership

The Hidden Life of the Unborn

The Way of the Soul

The Way of the Soul: Life Beyond the Edge

What We Believe: A Study Through Spiritual Research

How To Embrace the Gospel

How To Change a Life: Practical Guide To Spiritual Discipline

How to Conquer the Heartbreak

How to Love

How to Love: A Spiritual Toolkit to Help You Empower Yourself Through Your Spiritual Practice

How to Love: A Spiritual Toolkit to Help You Empower Yourself Through Your Spiritual Practice: The Real Way You Can Empower Yourself Through Spiritual Practice

How to Love: A Spiritual Toolkit to Help You Empower Yourself Through Your Spiritual Practice: It's About Empowerment, Not War,

How to Love: A Spiritual Toolkit to Help You Empower Yourself Through Your Spiritual Practice: It's About Empowerment, Not War, A Powerful Tool, A Spiritual Toolkit To Help You Feel Well

What's the Holy Grail?

How can we get around this challenge? It's a challenging question because we've gotten a lot of

It does the usual thing of repeating itself, and at the end lapses into body text. They all sound quite religious.

I’m now going to do the same thing six times each, back and forth, expecting some kind of entropic process to afflict the text. I won’t bore you with the intermediate stages, so here are the stages:

Mentions the TARDIS a lot.
Looks like a list of episodes of Star Trek with garbled dates and guest stars.
A list of US TV shows and actors
to 6. Lists of actors and TV or movie titles.

Patton Oswalt

"In the Shadow"

"In the Shadow"

Michele Bacharach

"The Way I Love You"

"The Way I Love You"

Paul McCartney

"Sons of Anarchy: Overture"

"Sons of Anarchy: Overture"

Steve Aoki

"The Last Time I Saw Marilyn Monroe"

"The Last Time I Saw Marilyn Monroe"

I think what’s happened here is that it converged on the idea of titles and saw TV and cinema titles and actors as the epitome of those.

The list with all the spiritual stuff goes through a phase of sounding New Agey and the topic of talking to angels, and then turns into what looks like a list of citations and a bibliography, plus “www.theoccultnews.net”:

The World of Light

Additional Spiritual Resources

Archetypes of Spirit

The Truth Behind False Prophets

Ivan A. Pasko

http://www.TheOccultNews.net

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