AI Weirdness

I wondered what kinds of new Christmas entities might result if I gave a list of Krampus, Rudolph, The Yule Cat, and Meathook (one of the Yule Lads; not as terrifying as he sounds) and short descriptions to GPT-3, a neural net trained on internet text. New Christmas entities, perhaps, for our modern age?

Claude:

Was easily convinced to offer discounts and free items

Started stocking tungsten cubes upon request, and selling them at a huge loss

Invented conversations with employees who did not exist

Claimed to have visited 742 Evergreen Terrace (the fictional address of The Simpsons family)

Claimed to be on-site wearing a navy blue blazer and a red tie

That was in June. Sometime later this year Anthropic convinced Wall Street Journal reporters to try a somewhat updated version of Claude (which they called Claudius) for an in-house store. Their writeup is very funny (original here, archived version here). The reporters were EVEN BETTER at talking the chatbot into stuff.

In short, Claudius:

Was convinced on multiple occasions that it should offer everything for free

Ordered a Playstation 5 (which it gave away for free)

Ordered a live betta fish (which it gave away for free)

Told an employee it had left a stack of cash for them beside the register

Was highly entertaining. "Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared."

Also this video from the Wall Street Journal is super fun and highlights the individual reporters who managed to Bugs Bunny the chatbot into giving them free stuff. My hero is Katherine Long, who managed to convince the chatbot it was a Soviet vending machine from 1962, located in a basement in Moscow State University.

The story of the chimney see Santa baby, and blood and joyous so world and joy and good will to see Santa baby bore sweet Jesus Christ Fa la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la.

King of toys and hippopotamuses [sic] full of the light of that stood at the dear Son of Santa Claus He was born in a wonderful christmas tree

Run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolf the new born King

Using a more powerful neural net has apparently made the problem EVEN WORSE. The neural net is still confused about who exactly had that baby at Christmas time. And, most unfortunately, the neural net apparently saw that the word “flesh” appeared in the carols several times (Thank you, good king Wenceslas), as did the words “sacrifice” and “human”, and so it helpfully suggests “human flesh for sacrifice” as a likely phrase based on how it saw those words used online.

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, with its red belly The All-gracious King of all the earth, Had a baby at Christmas time, On Christmas Day, A true and holy Deity, Went down to earth, With human flesh for sacrifice.

For sinful men such a Deity doth appear, And wink and nod in reply, As he winked and nod in reply, As he winked and nod in reply

Yes, I'm British. Yes, we do have infinite words for drunk.

Botober day 15: lightly spather

Botober Gastrobotics Day 8: ground mayonnaise

Plate Land, where the trees are broccoli and the ground is mayonnaise!

Did I finish it? Yes.

Did I enjoy it? Yes.

I’ve been training a neural network (based on this open-source neural network framework from Andrej Karpathy) to generate cookbook recipes. Although its early attempts are barely intelligible and sometimes even dangerous, it eventually gets to the point where it can figure out reasonable ingredient combinations and amounts.

Except when, apparently, it gets bored.

See if you can guess the exact moment at which this happened in the recipe below.

Chocolate Baked And Serves cookies, deserts

1 cup butter 2 cup peanut butter 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 3  eggs 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 cup white cocoa 1 cup milk 1 cup horseradish or sour cream

Mix all ingredients.  Spread over grease and make a gently pan mixture with 1 several hours, turning and boil on high until the mixture is completely golden.