A Lovecraft AI at the Art in Silico Gallery 2023 at the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC), Michigan Tech.
Related: “Sentiment analysis of Lovecraft’s fiction writings”, Heliyon, January 2023.
03 Thursday Aug 2023
Posted AI, Lovecraftian arts
inA Lovecraft AI at the Art in Silico Gallery 2023 at the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC), Michigan Tech.
Related: “Sentiment analysis of Lovecraft’s fiction writings”, Heliyon, January 2023.
06 Tuesday Jun 2023
Posted AI, Kittee Tuesday
inKittensAI.com, an AI image generator for H.P. Lovecraft. I tried it. No sign-up needed, at least for the first try. A bit slow, only one image at a time, but it obviously has some idea what Lovecraft looks like. Kitty has strange legs and a leg-tail. Possibly a shoggoth cross.
Meanwhile, on Dream by Wombo (one of the three best free ones), every day is Halloween. Three new free style modules…
26 Friday May 2023
Posted AI, Lovecraftian arts
inReaders will recall the young Lovecraft roaming in Cat Swamp, Providence. It was also a richly wild and raggedy hunting-ground for botanists, at around the same time (c. 1900), and thus the plants of the swamp were both drawn/painted and preserved as botanical pressings. Brown University now shows many of these in their online Herbarium catalogue.
So, something a little different for this Friday’s ‘Picture Postals from Lovecraft’.
Using some of the Brown (literally brown) scans of the botanical plant-books as sources, and sprinkling a little magic AI pixie-dust over them brings them back to horrible Lovecraftian life…
21 Sunday May 2023
Posted AI, Lovecraftian arts
inA possible merry task, for a dull Sunday…
A new competition offers $300 for the best sci-fi prompt. The aim is to craft a prompt for an AI-writer that will produce a ‘mind-blowingly readable’ first chapter of a science-fiction novel, such that the story makes seasoned readers want more. Deadline: 31st December 2023.
I assume the organisers are willing to also accept donations to improve the prize-pot or provide second-place prizes or training workshops for entrants.
Also, the fledgling AI Art Weekly newsletter has a Lovecraft challenge. Unfortunately entries can only be submitted on Twitter, which counts me out. But some may be interested, not least by the $50 prize.
Possibly a candidate for the free Dream by Wombo AI’s new “Horror” style module…
… or you could just choose the cute kitties.
19 Wednesday Apr 2023
Posted AI
inAnother day, another open source chat AI. We’re up to three now. The new Open Assistant.io is a fully and properly open-source ‘chat’ AI, and only requires a Google login to use for free. At present there’s a Llama 30B model for the public, based on Facebook’s escaped Llama. So perhaps not so good for writing Python code. My initial try timed out… I had no response after ten minutes. But that may be due to heavy initial use. I reloaded and found a message about being in a long queue. Still, it’s a serious and worthy/big attempt to begin a fully open chat AI. As the group’s leader says “we’ll soon have them running on toasters”, rather than closed subscription-only corporate servers in Whereizitagin.
The two other open AIs OpenChatKit (not great) and the FastChat portal to open models (can be very good) had no such problems with the question, which was…
Q:
Explain the possible future uses of AI for the analysis of the letters of H.P. Lovecraft. Do not refer to fiction or stories by Lovecraft.
FastChat using Vicuna 13b had the best response, which I edit and bullet-point here…
A:
* to extract relevant information such as themes, topics, and sentiments;
* to categorize the letters based on their content;
* to identify any recurring motifs;
* to analyze the writing style and evolution over time;
* to analyze the historical context, e.g. references or allusions to historical events, people, or places;
* to develop a model of the cultural and historical context in which Lovecraft was writing;
* to analyze the letters in terms of their literary merit;
* to identify any stylistic or technical elements that are particularly effective or innovative;
So it’s unaware of the concept of a writer’s ‘circle’ and the importance of mapping that. It’s more like a reply by an English Literature student rather than a historian. It’s also unaware of the outlines of Lovecraft’s life, and but it’s aware he was an author who wrote letters and can thus given very generic advice common to any prolific letter writer.
Eventually I reloaded the recalcitrant Open Assistant.io and had an answer to the above question in a reasonable time. It was not as good as FastChat but did offer three items, among a whole lot of blather and boilerplate text about AIs in general…
* to offer deeper insights into Lovecraft’s personality traits, beliefs, moods, interests, etc;
* to establish named entity recognition, for specific details about individuals, locations, events, dates, organizations, products, etc;
* to create entirely new pieces of correspondence.
So here there may be a hint of some awareness of the interaction between the man and his circle, and even that there will be interest in the products he used (the new-fangled invention called ‘ice-cream’ and so on). There’s also what might seem a rather naughty awareness of AI’s future ability to confect new Lovecraft-alike letters. Which implies extraction from the letters of a workable and convincing ‘style model’ and ‘topic web’. And Lovecraft is the ideal candidate, now that the letters are nearly all published. Yes, there are others who are comparable. But what modern kid wants to chat with Voltaire or Cicero?
A few other items which might have been mentioned are (off the top of my head)…
* analysis of letter length and seasonality of contact, re: determining his ‘favourite’ correspondents;
* the identification of common abbreviations or nicknames, and the amalgamation of these with reference to the same person when properly named. Thus “Sonny” would = Long;
* extraction of weather and season data, matched to location;
* extraction of suitable passages or names which could then be woven into new stories;
* identification of his childhood memories across the entirety of the letters;
* identification of ‘shop talk’ regarding rates of pay, markets, editors etc;
* to add guidance annotations for audio reading;
* generating AI images from his descriptions;
* to establish and offer translations of slang and archaic words.
* to power a videogame in which Lovecraft is a character and you can talk at length with him.
19 Wednesday Apr 2023
Posted AI
inA new AI category / tag for Tentaclii, to group such posts. I’ve gone back and retrospectively tagged some of the more recent posts, even back to 2011’s “H.P. Lovecraft gets turned on”. Wobbly though current AIs are (they’re definitely not shoggoths, quite yet), they’re going to be coming for everything including Lovecraft. Also relevant as assistants for the many writers, editors and small publishers who read Tentaclii.
18 Tuesday Apr 2023
Posted AI, Scholarly works
inI’ve learned of an interesting new type of text extraction and query AI. They seem to have become public during March / Easter and I’d not previously been aware of them. You upload a single PDF, have an AI auto-tag, segment, summarise the segments, and cross-page links built for its various topics and facts, etc. Probably more, ‘under the hood’.
All this is done in order to make the PDF more searchable in the form of “chat”. After upload and analysis you can “chat” with the uploaded PDF, by asking it natural-language questions. Results have natural language answers, and links to the relevant page-numbers. Which means you can check that the AI isn’t getting it wrong (as they often do) due to dodgy ‘facts’ in the model inputs and/or confabulation when forming the reply.
Such things are exemplified by the likes of ChatPDF, Humata, Unriddle, Docu-Talk and Docalysis. Doubtless Microsoft Office is also ‘on the case’ with this sort of thing, if they don’t already have it in Office 365. I no longer have access to 365, and it’s difficult to discover a good overview explaining their vast range of new AI assistants.
Anyway, the new assistants are perhaps useful for those who want to plump up a traditional back-of-the-book index, and be sure they’ve not missed anything. Doubtless you’ll think of other uses.
As usual with such services, you don’t know where the PDFs or the questions are going after they hit the remote servers in Whereizitagin. So sending PDFs or asking questions that could reveal business or research secrets is not advisable. But I imagine that this sort of ‘one-book analysis’ is not too processor-intensive, so doubtless there will be local non-cloud versions soon enough. If there aren’t already.
But I also wonder what would happen if one uploaded a single-file PDF of the collected fiction (or even letters or essays) of H.P. Lovecraft. To what extent would it be like ‘talking’ with Lovecraft, and how original would it seem? In other words, would it be doing a minimum of comparing statements across disparate pages, then bringing them together in a way that offers a more powerful insight into the topic in question? And could a further ‘style model’ be built from the PDF, which would mean that the replies are given in a Lovecraftian manner?
Meanwhile, a second fully and properly ‘open source’ chat AI is released, OpenAssistant. The first was OpenChatKit a month ago.
10 Monday Apr 2023
Posted AI, Lovecraftian arts
in10 Monday Apr 2023
Posted AI, Astronomy, Lovecraftian arts
inWhat might have been… a well-fed and hairpiece-augmented Lovecraft imagined at age 65, at the end of a career as the venerable and respected astronomer who discovered the planet Pluto.
In this alt. history picture one might imagine that it’s 1956 and his retirement portrait is to adorn the newly-built hallways of NASA. As a writer, in his youth he published a few classic Dunsanian fantasy tales, but then fell silent in fiction. Yet he has just published a slim volume expounding a curious new ‘cosmic’ philosophy, a work said to be exciting some keen interest among European intellectuals.
The picture is more ‘Nick Cage plays Lovecraft’ than Lovecraft, perhaps, but that’s one of the tendencies that Wombo veers towards. The other is Buster Keaton. An AI isn’t making visual distinctions, it just knows a certain set of facial images are associated with the keywords 1920s (Keaton) and with Lovecraft (Cage). There are three ways I know of to control that. One is luck and a good text prompt. The other is a knockout word presented as $Buster$ and the other is to upload a ‘seed’ image of the real Lovecraft.
Thanks to the Dream by Wombo AI and Photoshop. I know I said I’d keep AI generated images off Tentaclii, but it’s getting so good now…
29 Wednesday Mar 2023
Posted AI, Odd scratchings
inThe AI image-generator Dream by Wombo is getting better by the day. The following picture was generated by Wombo and was only my third-try with the simple prompt…
War-Nymphs of Venus, females, science-fiction illustration, painted by Frank Frazetta
… using the free VFX v.2 style module. Looks at those hands, Wombo is getting hands more or less right now. A year ago they’d have been a horrible mangled mess.
Thanks to Links of Steel for the idea about plugging in “War-Nymphs of Venus” as an AI-gen prompt. The title is from a story in Planet Stories (Spring 1941).
20 Monday Mar 2023
Posted AI, Odd scratchings
inCQuill Writer has an additional free dictionary for writing assistance…
Classical Sci-fi. Based on 1950’s Sci-Fi authors, devoid of modern terms.
Unzip and paste to… C:\Program Files\CQuill Writer\Dictionaries
20 Monday Mar 2023
Posted AI, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
inIt was only a matter of time before text-generating AI became as open and free as graphics AI. The first such is here now and ‘live’, OpenChatKit…
“a ChatGPT-like dialogue language model that is fully open-sourced, with full access to code, model weights, and training data. The released OpenChatKit model can perform natural-language reasoning tasks, answer questions about documents with retrieval, and browse the Web much like BingChat. The model has 20 billion parameters and is trained on 43 million instructions. […] The release also comes with fine-tuning guides that allow users to easily fine-tune the model for their own applications. […] Apache-2.0 license.”
20 billion is not enough for complex tasks (it can’t write long working Python scripts, or pop out complete essays/stories), but it’s good enough to be useful so long as you know how to ask the question. For instance…
Show me an example of the use of taskkill in a Windows batch file
… gets a line of valid working code. Though you still need to know to wrap it in @echo off and exit, and then save as a .BAT file.
But this is just the starting release. The initial live/free public demo is here, if you want to see what arcane Lovecraftian blurblings it might produce if given the correct prompt. It’s fast and easy to use. Though obviously knows nothing about R’lyeh as a holiday destination. Pity.
I’m uncertain if it can be operated purely locally on a desktop PC, being open source. (Update: Yes it can, it now has a downloadable “7B” model). If not then such things can only a matter of time and the right slot-in card.
So far, this is the only genuinely free / public and ‘no sign-up’ text-generating AI I know of.
Meanwhile, Grammarly will reportedly be plugging in AI auto-writing assistants sometime in April 2023. For a price, of course.