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[–]Felz 26 points27 points  (7 children)

I love this. This makes me really excited about the opportunities for generating a bunch of creative nonsense, then cutting it down to something half meaningful. Case in point, here's this post, with nonsense lines cut and rearranged:

Moloch whose huge flawless towers cry like song in the daytime!

Moloch whose sandstone towers surround all that is good and beautiful.

Moloch whose bricks deter curiosity!

Moloch whose temples draw water from the stagnant blood of orphans.

Moloch whose temples weep for the stars!

Moloch whose lamps touch the land deep in the ocean!

Moloch whose praises cripple the heroes of science!

Moloch whose fame and success are endless rings of image!

Moloch whose horns and keys are mentioned by names that sum up the forbidden arts of the true God.

 

Moloch whose streets hold rage courses! Civil strife! Crusades and war!

Moloch’s huddled masses living in vile mold!

Moloch whose open door is prison chains!

Moloch whose court are the host of billions of millions of nerves of passion and anger still raging up and down every dollar in the world!

Moloch the endless ever-splitting price of hell!

Moloch our secret weapons, nothing but gold and wine!

 

Moloch the soaring colossus!

Moloch the pulverizer state!

Moloch boiling with democracy! Moloch the flag of equality!

Moloch who politicians are the shining window into!

Moloch our sole tyrant!

 

Moloch whose streets waste precious things!

Moloch whose body lovingly eats the food of many nations in endless gulps of lightning!

Moloch the hideous empire in feeble lines! Moloch the death of the dreamless things! Moloch the glorious command of justice! Moloch the bloody trail!

Moloch whose spies indoctrinate society with the hope of conquering all mankind!

Moloch is cruel always and everywhere. Moloch is perfect to human purposes!

 

Moloch’s army stretches out before their champions!

Moloch whose huge airships stand in the very middle of battle!

Moloch whose knights fight to the last man all alike.

Moloch whose hundreds of breathless rifles fire high.

Moloch’s army marches on their strength! Moloch’s army tears away the fear of grandeur!

Moloch whose flags rub soiled blood in peoples’ eyes!

Moloch’s army holds their holy relics! Moloch’s army destroys every glory! Moloch whose torment is the roar of gods!

 

Moloch burning war!

Moloch whose fires blacken the hand of God!

Moloch whose waters run from the hills, traversing the oceans, scorching the glaciers!

Moloch whose blasted air clings to our lungs!

Moloch whose darkness reminds us to stand up!

Moloch whose body is flooded with burning gold!

Moloch whose skin is radiant with finality!

Moloch whose prayer is arrest and sorrow!

Moloch whose heart is crying for justice!

Moloch whose aching body is hopeless!

 

Moloch whose death is flowers of ash!

Moloch whose death is a happy accident.

Moloch whose death is my death!

Also:

Moloch whose proponies have murdered thy young!

Is "proponies" a word? Where did it get this?

Moloch whose Kung-fu decimal system smash our vibranium remains!

Okay.

Moloch whose horns and keys are mentioned by names that sum up the forbidden arts of the true God.

This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.

[–]Direwolf202 5 points6 points  (3 children)

"proponies" is not a word as far as I can observe, but remember that the model was trained on a very large corpus. A misspelling here and there is inevitable rather than possible.

[–]arizonaarmadillo 5 points6 points  (0 children)

"proponies" is not a word as far as I can observe,

It is now. :-)

[–]Hdnhdnthe sacred war between anal expulsion and retention 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Not a bad word for the kind of people who think "Friendship is Optimal" is utopic instead of abhorrent.

[–]arizonaarmadillo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

proponies

- amateurponies

:-)

[–]hillsump 4 points5 points  (2 children)

Sounds impressively Ginsbergian. I wonder what would happen if one fed it this text, then iterated until reaching a fixpoint? Would it produce just "Moloch"?

[–]ff29180dIronic. He could save others from tribalism, but not himself.[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It sounds impressively fitting with Scott's interpretation of Moloch, which is kind of creepy (or possibly just psychological suggestion).

I wonder what would happen if one fed it this text, then iterated until reaching a fixpoint?

Probably simply generating infinite Molochisms with quality degrading over time.

[–]Roxolan3^^^3 dust specks and a clown 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It would keep the "Moloch who/the/'s X Y Z!" pattern, but with no correction of the misspellings, the rest would eventually degrade into syllable salad.

[–]Hdnhdnthe sacred war between anal expulsion and retention 17 points18 points  (6 children)

Quite impressive, someone should feed Land's meltdown to this thing.

[–]daermonnan upside-down Prophet, an inside-out God 15 points16 points  (2 children)

Oh god. "Feed Meltdown to a natural language AI" is the sort of thing one says shortly before the world ends.

[–]Hdnhdnthe sacred war between anal expulsion and retention 5 points6 points  (1 child)

the world ends.

"While you're still sleepin' the saints are still weepin' cause things you call dead haven't yet had the chance to be born." ―Scatman John

[–]HalloweenSnarry 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Now that is what we need to feed to the AI: the lyrics to the entire Scatman John discography.

[–]ff29180dIronic. He could save others from tribalism, but not himself.[S] 4 points5 points  (2 children)

Too long to put in entirety. I tried to put only the first part (up to "Nanospasm."), but the results were boring.

[–]lunaranusmade a meme pyramid and climbed to the top 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Could you try "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."?

[–]ff29180dIronic. He could save others from tribalism, but not himself.[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Prompt: the first four of the five points of the introduction of the Unabomber's manifesto (the first sentence is the one you said)

Results

[–]coumineol 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Moloch whose body lovingly eats the food of many nations in endless gulps of lightning!

That's hilarious.

[–]Lykurg480The error that can be bounded is not the true error 3 points4 points  (6 children)

I suppose this is easier with poetry, as it doesnt need to be quite as coherent. Quite good though, it even took the same slightly reactionary turn as the post.

[–]ff29180dIronic. He could save others from tribalism, but not himself.[S] 2 points3 points  (5 children)

What "slight reactionary turn" ? (I suppose "the post" is Meditations on Moloch ?)

[–]Lykurg480The error that can be bounded is not the true error 7 points8 points  (4 children)

Moloch the shadow world long, Americanized and red in red!
Moloch the flag of equality!
Moloch whose spies indoctrinate society with the hope of conquering all mankind!
Moloch whose streets hold rage courses! Civil strife! Crusades and war!
Moloch who politicians are the shining window into!
Moloch boiling with democracy!

Or if you asked about the post, theres a discussion of gnon theology in there, and is itself a sorta-defense authoritarianism.

[–]_jkf_ 3 points4 points  (3 children)

it used to include a discussion of gnon theology that was edited out,

I think the gnon stuff is still in there?

[–]Lykurg480The error that can be bounded is not the true error 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Some of it was, zontargs will explain it to you if you ask.

[–]_jkf_ 4 points5 points  (1 child)

I did a diff on the two articles the other day, and while he did make some changes in that area it was mostly that he added some background information on who Nick Land is, and changes from referring to "Nyan" to "Warg Franklin".

There are still two full sections all about gnon in there.

[–]Lykurg480The error that can be bounded is not the true error 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Edited

[–]rlstudent 3 points4 points  (7 children)

Oh, I did that too https://pastebin.com/6nBFiQ30, posted on the topic about the GPT-2 model. Not sure why his answers looks way better. Probably just a lot of time generating the texts + cherry picking.

Edit: Oh, maybe it is the bigger context in the prompt and the fact that the first phrase I used in the prompt don't follow the structure of the others.

[–]sl1200mk5listen, there's a hell of a better universe next door 4 points5 points  (1 child)

This is upsettingly good (in a skin-crawling, season 1 of True Detective sense of the term.)

A man who killed his mother! The boy who killed his father! The boy who killed his mother! The boy who killed his father! The boy who killed his mother! Death!

Moloch! Moloch the fat fool! The fat fool! The fat fool, the fat fool with his fat, he who eats no food! The fat fool who eats no food!

The fat fool who eats no food! Death! Moloch! Moloch! Moloch the fat fool! The fat fool, the fat fool with his fat, he who eats no food!

The fat fool who eats no food! The fat fool who eats no food! The fat fool who eats no food! The fat fool who eats no food! The fat fool who eats no food! The fat fool who eats no food!

The world's worst tyrant!

(...)

MOLONEY! The man who sold the land to Moloch! MONEY! A little money, and the blood of a child! The little money, and the blood of a child who died! The blood of a child who died!

[–]rlstudent 3 points4 points  (0 children)

A new word, that's cool!

It seemed all gibberish at first, I tried now to read some things more carefully. It's gibberish, still, but I found some cool things. In sample 4 it starts talking about fire, for some reason:

The New Latin word "flame" (which means "the fire") was first observed in Old English in 1515 by William Smith, and the "fire" of the 19th century began to be used in 16th century English.

Sample 7 gets a little lovecraftian:

Moloch! Moloch's eyes! The eyes of that evil mace-fodder the mace-fodder! The eyes which turn the world to dust!

And no more will they be able to keep their eyes open when the world has been thrown into madness!

But what could this do for human life, what could it do for Moloch?

'Oh! Moloch! I wish I could see and hear it!'

A small voice cried over the silence, "Moloch!' I heard the faint voices of men and women and children crying out.

'C'mon Moloch! Moloch! We've had a few problems on our side! You want to go on the road?"

'B-But what does it mean for us to be on the road and walk in the footsteps of a Moloch who has just killed the world?'

It tries do describe Moloch in Sample 9, although it doesn't make much sense:

Moloch of Albrecht is a monstrous creature of a great size, about four feet tall with broad, dark-headed wings. Of his weight he is said to be over four thousand pounds. His head is covered with a blue, round-faced head and a golden-grey beard.

It also writes some poetry in Sample 18, and Moloch is described as a woman in 22 or something.

Some samples could work as some kind of surreal literature.

[–]ff29180dIronic. He could save others from tribalism, but not himself.[S] 1 point2 points  (4 children)

Eron said he had to make the AI write three separate samples for each good sample.

[–]qrios 2 points3 points  (3 children)

In addition

  • I cut out before each sample drifted away.

  • One of the samples drifted back so I cut back in

  • A few of the samples are actually concatenations of two samples with the same prompt, but I did a poor job keeping track of my copy-pastes and white-space cleanups so I'm not 100% sure which ones

  • I found it very hard to get usable responses with anything except the exact prompts used in that post (but the ones in that post do give very good results and it might be amusing to turn Eternal Howl into a Chuck Norris facts generator-esque web-toy if someone can think of a good way to distinguish bad samples from good ones).

  • The frequency of usable samples dropped off as I kept going so there's probably sampling error to account for but I won't mix p-values and poetry.

[–]ff29180dIronic. He could save others from tribalism, but not himself.[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

  • I found it very hard to get usable responses with anything except the exact prompts used in that post (but the ones in that post do give very good results and it might be amusing to turn Eternal Howl into a Chuck Norris facts generator-esque web-toy if someone can think of a good way to distinguish bad samples from good ones).

How did you managed to find the exact prompt that gave usable samples ?

(Also, congrats ! You've been linked to by a SSC post today.)

[–]qrios 2 points3 points  (1 child)

How did you manage to find the exact prompt that gave usable samples?

I knew the model did well with larger passages, and I knew it would sometimes pick up on and repeat patterns, so I started with the longest portion I felt was representative of the theme and pattern I wanted and whittled away the ends and skimmed every three samples before whittling again until I got something with a lot of "Moloch"

So, trial and error, basically.

But this was a consolation prize after like an hour of trying and failing to get it to do Dr. Seuss.

(Also, congrats ! You've been linked to by a SSC post today.)

Wow, it's like everyone who gets their hands on this thing really wants to feed it Howl.

[–]ff29180dIronic. He could save others from tribalism, but not himself.[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wow, it's like everyone who gets their hands on this thing really wants to feed it Howl.

Well, there is selection bias from this being what rationalist-adjacent people do with the thing, with the influence of Meditations on Moloch. (And a second layer of selection bias from Scott selecting what he likes from what rationalist-adjacent people do with the thing.)

I'm not sure if you had Meditations on Moloch in mind when choosing Howl to put in the thing, though.

[–]_Jacquie_ 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Wow an earlier post of this tumblr is hilarious

[–]ff29180dIronic. He could save others from tribalism, but not himself.[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

previously discussed here

[–]_Jacquie_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks!

[–]gwern 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Full GPT-2 samples on Harry Potter fanfics: https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1097652984316481537

[–]ff29180dIronic. He could save others from tribalism, but not himself.[S] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

If you're interested in that, see my latest post about making the limited GPT-2 write Star Wars fanfiction.

Also, am I reading the thread wrong ? "OpenAI asked a bot to read most of the Harry Potter fanfic movie scripts on the Internet and then asked it to write Harry Potter movies of its own." isn't what they did. It is the prompt they gave GPT-2. It's spooky that this hack works.

[–]gwern 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Not quite. She says '+1st 2 dialog lines', so I think the total prompt is "OpenAI asked a bot...disasters so far."

[–]ff29180dIronic. He could save others from tribalism, but not himself.[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, but this is still spooky.