Martian Virus

Last year I trained a neural net to generate new names for kittens, by giving it a list of over 8,000 existing cat names to imitate. Starting from scratch, with zero knowledge of English or any context for the words and letter combinations it was trying out, it tried to predict what letters might be found in cat names, and in which order. Its names ranged from the strange to the completely nonsensical to the highly unfortunate (Retchion, Hurler, and Trickles were some of its suggestions). Without knowledge of English beyond its list of cat names, it didn’t know what letter combinations to avoid.

So I decided to revisit the cat-naming problem, this time using a neural net that had a lot more context. GPT-2, trained by OpenAI on a huge chunk of the internet, knows which words and letter combinations tend to be used together on the English-language internet. It also has (mostly) figured out which words and letter combinations to avoid, at least in some contexts (though it does tend to suddenly switch contexts, and then, yikes).

When I trained GPT-2 on the list of cat names using Max Woolf’s colab notebook, it still retained a lot of what it had learned from the rest of the internet. Gone were the strange names like “Tilly-Mapper” and “Balllucidoux” - it had a bunch of real words it could use instead. Here are some of the names it came up with - and the Morris Animal Refuge (who you may remember from that time they used neural net names for their guinea pigs) has given some of these names to some highly adoptable kittens.

First, neural net can do fancy:

Taffeta Pompompur Monocle Tom Glitter Notion Tinnitus Cheesemonger M. Tinklesby Linklater Soap

It can also do the opposite of fancy:

Scat Cat Butthole Gangrene Moisture Grotesque Petard Oilbag Buttwig The Cream Meatbag Dr Fart Fudge Putty Scumbag Constipation BUTT

And it can also do names ranging from tough to downright sinister:

Miss Vulgar Lillith The Vamp Elle Fury Deadbolt Romeo of Darkness Starmaker Fist Warning Signs Bibles Smoked The Firestarter Higher Rune Scarlet Be Thy Coat Kill All Humans Bones Of The Master Mr. Sinister Evil Whispers Spawn Serendipitous Kill Stranglehold

(Starmaker and Sparky Buttons are from a litter that had upper respiratory infections that damaged their eyes, but even though their world is kinda cloudy, they love to play and cuddle.)

I’m a particular fan of the Very Weird cat names:

Honeystring Dr Leg Tom Noodle Pinball Scene Peanutbutterjiggles You’re Telling A Lie Beep Boop Thoughts Bobble Bun Atmosphere You Name It Whiskeridoo Sparky Buttons

Seemingly This Guy Various Authors Chicken Whiskey Fish Especially Thelonious Monsieur Ringo Shuffles Sweet Cakes EXTAs (Eye Stalks) Checker Spin Donut Quin Two Patz Grandpa He Glad Funky Moe Fluttering Feelers Accepted A Tribute Chewie Bean PLEASE Gregory Chimney Notable PRODUCT LEGEND Weird Science Platinum Not Suitable For Character the Enforcer

Did I mention these cats are adoptable? If you live near Philadelphia, you live near these kitties!

Archaeologists believe that the Whale Bone Alley of Yttygran Island, Siberia was built as a shrine and sacred meeting place by the Inuit in the 14th century. At the time, there was a temporary Ice Age that resulted in a prolonged winter, and food shortages that could have led to conflicts between Inuit tribes. Whale Bone Alley may have been the neutral place where they could come together to discuss their problems, take part in sacrificial offerings, and store their meat in the square pits that once existed between the bone walls. 

The argument Pinto makes is that the story and the doll normalize 24-hour surveillance in the mind of a child, which makes them susceptible to more passively accept police-state surveillance as adults.

“I don’t think the elf is a conspiracy and I realize we’re talking about a toy,” Pinto told The Post. “It sounds humorous, but we argue that if a kid is okay with this bureaucratic elf spying on them in their home, it normalizes the idea of surveillance and in the future restrictions on our privacy might be more easily accepted.”

It’s based in a theory that was developed by Jeremy Bentham and popularized by Michel Foucault in which students, prisoners, factory workers and others were thought to function better (for whatever value of better) in a system called a panopticon, in which an individual is potentially under surveillance 24-hours a day, but never actually KNOWS whether or not he or she is being surveilled. 

Pinto said she’s not the first person to be troubled by Elf on the Shelf’s surveilling. She’s said parents routinely contact her to say they changed the rules of the game after it made their families uneasy. And many kids, she said, often intuitively feel like spying and being a tattletale is wrong.

“A mom e-mailed me and told me that the first day they read the elf book and put the elf out, her daughter woke up crying because she was being watched by the elf,” Pinto recounted. “They changed the game so it wouldn’t scare the child.”

In addition to the problem of normalizing surveillance in the mind of a child, this also forces the child into a situation where they never feel like they are free to simply be themselves; they are forced to be “on their best behavior” at all times, unable to relax and make mistakes and do the job of growing up and being a child, because they never know if the elf is spying on them, ready and waiting to report back to Santa Claus that they’ve been bad.

the creators of this monstrosity are exactly what you would expect