Seltzerlizard

by Douglas Robert Turek

    They always know where to go.  It’s part of the job.  They came across a car that had run into a ditch.     “Oh, look here Raven!  It’s a car crash!”     “Oooh, he’s fresh, isn’t he?”     “I don’t think he’s dead quite yet.  He’s just been smooshed around.  Silly man wasn’t wearing his seat belt, was he?”     “Oh, wait, he was.  See there.  He’s nearly cut through it with scissors.  Poor thing’s passed out.  Must have lost a lot of blood.”     “Groan.”  The man’s chest still rose and fell slightly.     “Oh, not too much.  He lives….so far.”     “Oh Coyote, don’t sound so dramatic. One might think you were in this for a meal.  That’s not dutiful.  It lacks class.”  Raven nipped at one of his wings to remove a mite and remain neat.     “He’s very close to dying.”  He licked his lips.     “I don’t  believe this!  That’s so unprofessional.  You nasty little fucker.  You want to eat him!”     “Well, don’t you?”     “Oh sure I’d like to eat him, but only if its necessary.  I would never suppose to tip the balance one way or the other.  That’s thinking like a glutton, and gluttony is a sin, especially for our profession.”     “Profession?  It’s a cosmic imperative.  It’s a role placed upon us by the whole of the cosmos!  It’s what we do and what we are.  You make it sound like we saw an ad in the papers.  Profession!  Mediators between death and life wanted, must be archetypes.  Carrion eating a plus.  We exist to seek out these situations and see them through to one end or another.  Eating is a fine end.  Tell me he doesn’t smell delicious!”     “Yeah, he smells almost dead.  But that’s the point, isn’t it?  Almost dead means the same as alive.  Therefore he’s alive, therefore his fate, so far, is to live.  What are you doing?”     “I’m having a look around.”     “Coyote!  We don’t rummage around in people’s cars,” he squawked.     “Yes we do!  We do it all the time!”     “Only when they’re dead!”     “And here I thought you liked shiny things!  Aren’t you related to magpies?  Look at all the stuff that’s spilled out of his car;  if he lives, he’ll never notice, and if he does, he’ll chalk it up to the crash.  If on the off chance that he’s the most persistent man in the world and comes back looking for anything I take, I shall be happy to put it on the ground with a little dirt scuffed around it, and he’ll be none the wiser and feel happy about the whole thing.  Feel better about it?”     “Fine.  What’s he got, then?”     “Ooh, look here.  He has some comic books.  A whole box!  And some school books.”     “What’s he got?”     “I’ll be damned!  He’s got a book by Claude Levi Strauss!  That’s hilarious!”     “That’s they guy, right?  The one who identified us as mediators between life and death?”     “Yeah, he was delicious, too.”     “And what sort of comics does he read?”     “Claude Levi-Strauss?  I doubt he reads much these days.”     “No, this guy here!”     “Geez, the car’s filled with comics.  The boxes are all sorted according to publisher.  He’s got them in shiny bags, too.”     “What’s that one next to your foot?”     Coyote tipped out the box near him and swiped and shuffled them with his paw to see better.     “It says Funny Animal Comics.  Yeah, it’s filled with Disney, Harvey, Gold Key, a bunch of others.”     “It’s a miscellaneous box, then?”     “Yes, it’s a…oh no.”     “What’s that?”     “Well, this one here has a wolf on it.  And there’s one here with two crows.  That’s you, sort of.”     “Oh, I see where this is going.  I should have encouraged you to eat him.”     “Well, it stands to reason.  Remember that drowning man we found?  He had the book with him.  It did sort of consolidate our essence, reading that.  There isn’t anything we’re really immune to when it comes to thought and the in between world.  We know the power of words firsthand.  They made the world, they made us.  I don’t even think we were animals to start with, but we’ve ended up that way.”     “So the question is do we consider this to be a survey of animal spirit roles on par with Levi Strauss or beliefs or words that made the world?  These are even more modern myths than what he was talking about.”     “You cut right to the chase, don’t cha raven?  Yes, it’s a survey of sorts. Shit!”     “Oh, what are you upset about?  You’ll still get to eat things.  It’s a natural part of Coyotes and therefore any consistent interpretation will have to include that!”  Raven was gesturing with a lit cigar held in his outstretched wing.     “Yeah, but now I have to wear a hat.”

In 2017 I decided to find out what would happen if I trained a neural net on 240 Christmas carols (collected by The Times of London and reader/neural net hobbyist Erik Svensson). The result? A neural net that was very confused about how Christmas works:

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.

You can kind of understand where the confusion came from.

But that was 2017, when I was training char-rnn from scratch on my laptop. Now in 2019 I have access to the much more powerful GPT-2, trained by OpenAI on 40GB of text from the internet. GPT-2 runs on the big processors on Google Cloud (through Max Woolf’s gpt-2-simple colab notebook), and has much better memory than char-rnn (which struggled to complete a single sentence). Did GPT-2 learn enough about the way words like Santa + reindeer are mentioned online versus Jesus + manger to figure out how to separate multiple kinds of carols? I gave the same 240 carols to the smallest version of GPT-2 (the 124M size), and then asked it what comes after “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”. Here’s what it added.

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

The wretched world is run by ox and ass The wretched world is run by ox and ass, And in vain build I.

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.

Some of the neural net’s renditions of Rudolph are disturbing in much more surrealistic ways.

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer

I was riding by a hansom lettering me On Christmas morning, The snow was everywhere; And the wind was cruel and cruel Against me like ants, Like ants, like ants.

Or this rendition, which I swear to god is verbatim

Rudolph the Red Nosed reindeer Was the best sleigh in all of Nantucket The horse was lean and tanned The woman was full of perfume The only thing keeping the goose from falling off the ground Was the reins Like strings of spaghetti And if you could just cut it down You could even make a bow Like a bow and arrow But if you wanted to make a bow you had to use a lot of power

Right down to the little lamb Its red head was covered in feathers Its heart was full of sugar And the most prized food item was its head

Everywhere in the barn there were beavers’ eyes Some would go, “Where is the sugar?” But to them it was simple, it came from a good source And they found sugar in olden times Families that lived in the stable all had it

I can also get the neural net to generate custom carols. Here’s what it produced when I asked it to write “The Carol of the AIs” and I can’t tell whether it has misunderstood what Christmas carols are all about, or understood some of them only too well.

Carol of the AI’s

Come and own the yacht It’s a very special day, It’s a very special day

We’re all so proud of you We’re buying this We’re buying this now

Now it’s Christmas eve And everyone’s shouting “Santa Claus!” “HO HO HO!”

It’s a very special day It’s a very special day It’s a very special day

One downside to using a neural net that was pretrained on a bunch of general internet text is that some of its carols involve an improbable level of swearing and gun violence. You can read the full versions of those (and a few others).

by Douglas Robert Turek

            Odinclaus has one eye.  He traded his other eye for a second sight.  It was an alchemic ritual.  He boiled up a slaughtered boar, sugar, roots of ivy and holly, and the sap from an oak that grew on his father’s land.  After stirring the mixture for three days, without sleep, he threw in two coins, one silver and the other gold.  He drank the mixture until he could not drink anymore, then buried the coins in the earth, where his family had designated his future gravesite.  He then asked the earth for a magic eye, and offered his own eye in exchange.  As weeks went by, his left eye clouded over as it turned to stone.  He fashioned a patch from leather, with rope made of linen.  When he covered his blind eye, he found he could remember magic, and the horrible responsibility that went with it.  In gaining second sight, he became a servant to it.

            Odinclaus does not regret his sacrifice or resent his gift.  He knows of another like him, so far south that the world goes past warm and turns cold again.  This other is missing his right eye, and performed the same ritual.  His eye is covered with a patch of bark held fast by bands of silk.  They are the only two wizards in the world, and it is because of their work that the world keeps turning

            It is time for the winter rite.  Though the days are all now dark, Odin keeps track by watching the stars and minding his books.  He gathers wood for his fire, and more for his cauldron. 

            They have not yet arrived, but Odinclaus is preparing.  He lights a small fire under the cauldron to melt the freshly gathered new snow, sent as a gift from the sky.  He adds the moss, the lichen, the sand, and half of his supply of butter.  The blood has not arrived yet. 

            He knows they are coming, and not just because of his star charts.  His stone eye can see beyond the horizon, and they are approaching. 

            A magnificent stag appears, with great antlers.  Its coat is shiny and there is a small creature asleep on its back.  Odinclaus waits for it to move into his camp, stroking his long white beard and smoking a long clay pipe.

            The stag walks right up to the cauldron.  It is, after all, time.  The small creature on its back stirs and wakes up, yawning and stretching.

            “Greetings Sleipnir.  I give you the first of my thanks.  Who is your friend?”

            “I am Donner, Herr Wizard.  The stag chose me at our meeting.”

            “You know you will walk back alone?  You know what lies before you?”

            “Yes, Wizard.  I am honored to serve.”

            “Very well.  You have them?”  The small creature reaches into his purse, big on his small body, and pulls out a flask of wine and a silver knife.  “Is it sharp?”

            “The wine?  Yes.  The knife more so.  I have been sharpening it on our journey.”

            “Good, I hope your herald does the same for you.  I will cut.  We will both drink.  You will stay in my home for as long as it takes.  Then I will send you back to your people.”  The small creature nods, though he is nervous.  His people are long experienced with magic, but this is the winter rite, and he has grown up hearing tales about it.  The wizard Odinclaus takes the knife from the creature Donner and walks to the stag, who has lowered its throat over the cauldron.  He cuts its throat swiftly, as broadly as possible.  The stag stands, quaking, as its life pours out into the gentle steaming stew, until it falls over, staining the snow in the flicker from the cauldron’s fire.  Now the rite begins. 

            The wizard stirs for hours, instructing Donner to build up the fire when it goes dimmer.  The snow melts in a widening circle around them.  Odinclaus can see with his stone eye his southern counterpart uttering a prayer of thanksgiving.  At last, the wizard dips in a small metal cup and drinks the cauldron’s brew.  It is right.  He and Donner alternate drinking until they are full to bursting, then they pass the flask of wine back and forth until it is gone.  Donner has fallen asleep with drink, and the wizard carries him into his hut and puts him on a blanket before the fire.  In the morning, Odinclaus and Donner will feast again on the cauldron’s contents, and they will also feast on the stag Sleipnir.

            In the morning, Donner has grown two small soft horns on his head.  He is becoming the king of his people.  After twelve days, he is crowned, the cauldron is empty, and the wizard bids him farewell to walk back to his kingdom.  King Sleipnir walks away to the still dark horizon, on new legs, and Odinclaus starts salting the stag meat, which he will eat throughout the year to maintain his immortality.  He hums to himself as goes about his work, and, every so often, laughs in anticipation of the coming dawn, “Ho ho ho.”

 .

Power Nelson, from Prize Comics No.5, July 1940.