More AI Weirdness – New Year’s Resolutions

Sensei Janelle Shane has made a career documenting the way contemporary AI systems actually work, which is often comical.  It’s good to check in with the blog now and again to see what she and her AI collaborators have come up with.

In 2017, she published some Christmas carols generated by a neural network. The 2019 edition of carols were even more interesting, to say the least. The AI generated songs start out OK, but turn very dark and strange, very quickly.  But who can forget the “Carol of the AI’s”, with the very Christmas-y opening line, “Come and own the yacht”.  : – )

Last week, Sensei Janelle published her AI generated New Year’s Resolutions for 2022 [1].  As always, she describes the AI and how it really worked.  In this case, she was using systems that try to predict text based on the Internet.  You give some examples, and it tries to predict what text will appear on the Internet.

She found that these systems tend to need a lot of pruning, and not just to weed out all the spam and racism on the Internet.  The algorithms seem to get stuck in a rut, elaborating on the examples beyond what humans would think makes sense.  A mention of painting and a mention of broccoli, led to a list of resolutions about painting, broccoli, and painting broccoli.

To get something reasonable, she repeatedly pruned the results, and fed the pruned list back as new examples.  This is not quite as automatic as you might want, but the results aren’t bad.

There are a couple that I might actually try to do this year:

• “Every time it rains I will stir my tea anti-clockwise.”
• “Every time a bird flies past me I will remember to breathe.”

I personally liked the attitude of,

“Under every rock I come across for a month I will write “all power to the rocks“.

And, of course, who doesn’t aspire to,

“Give a piece of cloud to a complete stranger.”

: – )

Anyway, check out the blog

And remember to breath.

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1. Janelle Shane, New Years Resolutions generated by AI in AI Weirdness, December 30, 2021. https://www.aiweirdness.com/new-years-resolutions-generated-by-ai/