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GPT-2 Neural Network Poetry (gwern.net)
68 points by tosh on Nov 6, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments




Who still remembers MegaHAL? The source of wisdom like:

CHESS IS A FUN SPORT, WHEN PLAYED WITH SHOT GUNS.

and

COWS FLY LIKE CLOUDS BUT THEY ARE NEVER COMPLETELY SUCCESSFUL.


Using the 2nd one as a prompt on TalkToTransformer:

"Cows fly like clouds but they are never completely successful.

They just fly in circles around a target for as long as they can. That's the reason why it's impossible to predict what their position will be exactly at any point. They have to keep changing their direction to keep track of their target.

What's interesting is that cows fly like a tornado that is heading straight towards the target. This is because of the wind speed.

This is what they do in their world:

The cow is spinning around. It is trying to keep its head below the clouds. It is looking around to see what is going on around it. As the cow spins around it does a 180 degree turn. It changes its direction. And then it changes its direction again. This process continues forever.

A tornado with no wind."


TalkToTransformer for the 1st:

CHESS IS A FUN SPORT, WHEN PLAYED WITH SHOT GUNS.

IT'S BEEN FINE FOR 100 YEARS.

BUT HONESTLY, IF THE REASON YOU CAN'T KEEP A CONFESSION TO A FRIEND IS THAT THEY'VE TAKEN YOUR MONEY,

HOW CAN YOU HAVE A CONFESSION IF IT'S ALWAYS BEEN A LIE?

WHAT MAKES YOU SO MAD ABOUT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH?

SO YOU GO TO CHURCH?

NO, I WON'T GO TO CHURCH, I JUST WANT TO KNOW WHAT THE GODS THINK.

I HAVE TO BE CONFIDENT, BECAUSE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH,

I HAVE TO BE HONEST.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH DOESN'T HELP YOU FIND OUT WHAT GOD THINKS.

I DON'T WANT TO GIVE UP MY HANDIWORKS TO ANOTHER AUTHORITATIVE GROUP.

BUT IF YOU


My attempts below look nicer to me, the all caps probably leads to data sparsity issues. The global coherence of the first one is amazing, and the line "One of the best ways to test if you are a robot is to play against yourself." from the second one is pure gold.

/////

Chess is a fun sport, when played with shot guns.

This is the ultimate expression of that.

A lot of people have asked me why I didn't include it, and I think it's because the rules of the game prohibit this sort of thing. It would be illegal to use guns to play chess.

I would have added the rules to a version that didn't contain this type of action.

/////

Chess is a fun sport, when played with shot guns.

When your friend loses to a human player and says "I don't know how you do that, that's just stupid" - this is an indication of what it means to be a robot. If you're a human player, the player who lost was probably better than you - so you are probably not the stupid human. But if you lose, it means you're a robot - and thus the game has been rigged against you, even if it's not a complete sham.

When you play Chess, you have two opponents (two computers) that are very much alike in terms of ability. This is why the game can be so fun to play: The game is not rigged against you - it's rigged against all the other humans! This is why chess is not chess at all: it is a game that can be rigged against you, just as the stock market is rigged against everyone.

One of the best ways to test if you are a robot is to play against yourself.


Who still remembers Racter [1]? Racter was (ostensibly) the "author" of a book of prose poetry, "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed" back in 1987.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter

[2] https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-policemans-beard-is-algo...


I was able to follow these directions to train gpt2 on tweets. I currently have a system that is trained on 355M . I found that it might be very effective. I have the test at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1p7tlobl5y5plBCu_enK4KawR7B8.... I got the information from trumptwitterarchive.com

I am now working on a larger system using a dataset called sentiment140. Email me and I can send links to each one .


Just a side note, this site does not seem to work well in my copy of Firefox. The pop up windows are small and remain small after clicking expand. They are so small that it's even hard to scroll through the poems, and they also close when I move the move away.


Could you expand further? Firefox version, platform, screensize, console log of warnings/errors, screenshots? I assume you are referring to the collapsible toggleable sections and not the 'popups' (which is what we call the things that pop up when you mouse over a link, but that doesn't make sense since that wouldn't affect reading the poems - none of the popups involve the poems in any way). Although if you are referring to the popups, closing when you move the mouse away is very much by design; it doesn't make sense to leave them open when the user moves away and is done with them.

I use Firefox all the time, and things seem to work fine and we aren't doing anything non-FF supported I know of, so it should be working for you...


The sections on the left hand side pop up when you move with the mouse over them - meaning, a window with the poems and explanation opens. When I move the mouse over those windows and click the triangle (Expand) for the actual poem, it makes the box containing the poem only about 1/2 a line larger, making it basically impossible to read it. When I move the mouse out of the pop up window, it disappears.

I didn't realize yesterday that you can also click the sections to open them normally. When I do that, the poems expand just fine and everything works. It's the pop ups that confused me, because I thought they are the way you intend users to navigate the page.

Firefox version 69.0.3 (64-bit) on Linux with uBlock Origin 1.23. Screen size 2560x1440, Firefox window expanded maximally. Console log says Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-18912926-1” - It's probably blocked by uBlock, I guess.

I hope that helps!


> It's the pop ups that confused me, because I thought they are the way you intend users to navigate the page.

Wait... You've been trying to read the page solely via the section popups in the table of contents? The section popups are just there to give you a preview of the section as a fun bonus Easter egg sort of feature. (I thought it was hilarious when we realized we could do it: "yo dawg...".) We never expected anyone to try to read whole pages through the little popups!




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