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aiweirdness · 4 years

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How to begin a novel

Last year for National Novel Writing Month I trained a neural net called torch-rnn on 10,096 unique ways to begin a novel. It came up with some intriguing possibilities, my personal favorite being “I am forced to write to my neighbors about the beast.” But many of its sentences used made-up words, or had such weird grammar that they were difficult to read, or meandered too erratically. (“The first day of the world was born in the year 1985, in an old side of the world, and the air of the old sky of lemon and waves and berries.”) The neural net was struggling to write more than a few words at a time.

This year, I decided to revisit this dataset with a larger, more-powerful neural net called GPT-2. Unlike most of the neural nets that came earlier, GPT-2 can write entire essays with readable sentences that stay mostly on topic (even if it has a tendency to lose its train of thought or get very weird). I trained the largest size that was easily fine-tunable via GPT-2-simple, the 355M size of GPT-2. Would a more-powerful neural net produce better first lines?

One of the parameters I can tweak when I’m getting a trained neural net to generate text is temperature - this controls whether the neural net chooses the most likely next bit of text as it writes, or whether it’s permitted to use its less-likely predictions. At a default of 0.7, a relatively conservative temperature, the neural net’s first lines not only make grammatical sense, but they even have the rhythm of a novel’s first line. This is DRAMATICALLY better than torch-rnn did.

I am, or was.

At the mid-day meal the sun began to set and the quiet dragged on.

There was once a man who lived for a very long time; perhaps three thousand years, or perhaps a thousand million years, maybe a trillion or so, depending on how the scientists look at it.

He had the heart of a lion, and the fangs of a man-eater.

"I am Eilie, and I am here to kill the world."

The old woman was sitting on a rock near the sea, smoking a pipe.

I have just been informed, that the debate over the question 'is it right or wrong to have immortal souls' has been finally brought to a conclusion.

When I was a boy, I was fond of the story of the pirate god.

He had a strange name, and he was a very big boy indeed.

The purple-haired woman came to the clearing in the plain, and without looking up from her book, said, "It's too late to be thinking about baby names."

The village of Pembrokeshire, in the county of Mersey, lies on a wide, happy plain, which, in a few years, was to become known as the "Land of the Endless Mountains."

I don’t think the neural net plagiarized any of these? They are so good that I’m suspicious. But others of the neural net’s lines are even weirder, yet in an effective way that opens with an intriguing premise.

The moon had gone out.

I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I was also playing with a dead man.

The black stone was aching from the rain.

The short, dirty, and dirty-looking ship that weighed three tons and was three feet in diameter landed on a desolate and green plain.

How many times have I had the misfortune to die?

The first black dog in the park had been captured alive.

Behold the Sky Rabbits!

In the belly of the great beast that was the bovine Aurore there lived, upon the right hand of the throne, the Empress Penelope; and she had, as it were, a heart of gold.

The moon stood on its own two feet.

The reeking maw of the blood-drunk ship, the enemy's flagship, was silent and empty.

The first day I met my future self, I was aboard the old dirigible that lay in wait for me on the far side of the moon.

The child of two cats, and a tiger, a clown, a horse, a bird, a ship, and a dragon, stood on either side of the threshold of the Gatehouse, watching the throng of travelers who came in from all around the world, before he had any idea what was going on.

I think it’s probably doing this accidentally, stringing likely words and phrases together without understanding what any of them really mean. It’s not that it’s good at science fiction or magical realism; it’s that it’s trying and failing to predict what would have fit in with the usual human-written stuff. Some of the neural net’s first lines really betray its lack of the understanding of the laws of physics. It really likes to describe the weather, but it doesn’t really understand how weather works. Or other things, really.

The moon was low in the sky, as though it had been shipped in from the farthest reaches of the solar system.

The first star I saw was a blue one, which became a scarlet one, and then a gold one, and green, and finally a yellow one, which for some years afterwards seemed to be an ebony one, or even a bubbling mass.

The sun rose slowly, like a mighty black cat, and then sank into a state of deep sleep.

The sea of stars was filled with the serenity of a million little birds.

The great blue field was all white, swept away by the blue-gold breeze that blew from the south.

The sky was cold and dark, and the cold wind, if it had not been for the clouds, would have lashed the children to the roof of the house.

The morning sun was shining brightly, but the sky was grey and the clouds aching.

The night that he finally made up his mind to kill the dog, the man was walking home from the store with his wife and child in the back seat.

Arthur the lion had been pretty much extinct for some time, until the time when he was petted by Abernathy the old woman, and her son, Mr. Popp.

One of the disadvantages of having a neural net that can string together a grammatical sentence is that its sentences now can begin to be terrible in a more-human sense, rather than merely incomprehensible. It ventures into the realm of the awful simile, or the mindnumbingly repetitive, and it makes a decent stab at the 19th century style of bombastic wordiness. I selected the examples above for uncomprehending brilliance but the utter tediousness below is more the norm.

The whites of my eyes shimmered, as if my mind were dancing.

I once went to a party where the dress code was as strict as a chicken coop with no leggings and no boots.

A black cloud drifted by, a mottled mass of hydrogen, a black cloud of hydrogen, with the definite characteristic of being black.

I say I am at sea, because I am standing upon the ocean, and look out across the barren, vast throng of the sea.

It is, of course, a trifling matter in the ordinary course of things, if a certain writer were to write a novel, which is a book of stories, which is a book of characters, wherein every detail of the story is stated, together with a brief description of the theme which it concerns.

There was a boy with blue eyes, with sandy hair and blue eyes that looked at all times like he had been pushed through a million compartments.

The Sun, with its rolling shaft of bright light, the brilliant blue of the distant golden sun, and the red glow of its waning corona, was shining.

The man who was not Jack the Ripper had been promoted four times in the last two years.

Felix the Paw was sitting at the table of his favorite restaurant, the "Bordeaux" in the town of Bordeaux, when his father, Cincinnata, came in to say good-by to the restaurant.

It, sir, gives me the greatest pleasure to hear that the Court be not too long in passing away: but that I may have leisure to prepare a new work for the publication of my friend and colleague, the renowned Epistemology, which is now finished; and in which I shall endeavour to show, that this very point is of the highest importance in the subject of the philosophy which I am about to treat of.

It was a rainy, drizzling day in the summer of 1869 and the people of New York, who had become accustomed to the warm, kissable air of the city, were having another bad one.

Repetitiveness is also common, especially at this conservative temperature setting. Once the neural net gets itself into a repetitive state, it doesn’t seem to rescue itself - it’s a problem that people have noticed in several versions of this algorithm. (It doesn’t help that I forgot to scrub the “title” that someone submitted to the dataset that consists of the word “sand” repeated 2,000 times)

The sky was blue and the stars were blue and the sun was blue and the water was blue and the clouds were blue and the blue sky was like a piece of glass.

At the end of the world, where the tides burst upon the drowned, there exists a land of dragons, of dragons, which is the land of the dragons.

It's the end of the world, it's the end of the world, it's the end of the world, it's the end of the world, it's the end of the world, you're dead.

There was once a land of sand, and sand, sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand

Increasing the temperature of the sampling would help the repetitiveness problem, in theory, letting the neural net venture into more interesting territory. But at a temperature of 1.0 the text tends to venture out of everyday surrealism and into wordy yet distractible incomprehensibility.

The praying mules on the top of the hills sounded the final klaxon, lifting their spiked front hoofs as they crept the last few feet of desert landscape past the crest of the enormous swathe of prehistoric sand.

In the glen of the Loch is a ladder that winds way up through a passage to a ledge with soft, moss-laden environmental standards.

Someone whipped a dead squash gibbet across the room, like some formidable war lord unleashing a heavy hunk of silver at home.

One blue eyed child stood up and cried out: "Douay, saurines, my Uncle – Fanny Pemble the loader!"

Jud - an elderly despot, or queen in emopheles, was sitting across the table from the king, looking very thoughtfully into the perplexions of the proceedings.

Oh, you're a coward little fool, as if you couldn't bear to leer at a Prunker or white-clad bodyguard quickly emerging from a shady, storm-damaged area of the city.

Hanging presently in his little bell-bottomed chamber on the landing-house, early in the morning, the iron traveler sat on a broad-blonde sandbricksannel blanket outside the gate of a vast and ancient island.

Long, glowing tongues trailed from your mouth as you listened to what was being said across this kingdom of ours, but growing a little more somber since the week that caused us to proclaim general war.

The night I first met Winnie the Pooh, I had sat in the Tasting-House and heard the Chef unpack the last of the poison upon his quiet dinnertable.

There is, of course, no perfect setting at which the neural net churns out sensible yet non-repetitive first lines. There are just varying shades of general awfulness, interspersed with accidental brilliance.

No matter how much you’re struggling with your novel, at least you can take comfort in the fact that AI is struggling even more.

I generated all the neural net sentences above using a generic “It” as the prompt that the neural net had to build on (it would usually go on to generate another 20-30 sentences at a time). But although the sentences are independent in my training data, GPT-2 is used to large blocks of text that go together. The result is if I prompt it instead with, say, a line from Harry Potter fanfic, the neural net will tend to stick with that vein for a while. I've included a few examples as bonus content for subscribers.

Update: I now have a few thousand unfiltered examples of neural net-generated first lines at the GitHub repository where I have the original crowdsourced dataset. Themes include: Harry Potter, Victorian, My Little Pony, and Ancient Gods.

My book on AI is out, and, you can now get it any of these several ways! Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s

#neural networks #you look like a thing #nanowrimo #gpt-2 #writing #first lines #gpt-2-355m

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twitchesandstitches · 4 years

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Since she’s been brought up, here’s a brief rundown of one of my older OCs, Angilaka

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A bombastic and cheerful paladin from a post-apocalyptic land of giant amazons, able to serve as a leader and champion!

Name: Angilaka; her people typically have single names. Their equivalent to surnames are simply geneological records and do not translate easily.

Appearance: A fearsomely large and powerful Inuit woman, Angilaka has a case of the ‘looks like a deadly warrior but is a total sweetheart after about five seconds’ vibe. Extremely large, her basic body has powerful amazonian features; broad shoulders, a muscular and beefy built lines with scars from her rough life and geometric tattoos that may be tied to her paladin abilities.

Her hair is long, white and usually shaved completely on one side of her head, with the remainder worn over on shoulder. She’s very solidly built, thick and has very large breasts/hip proportions. The key look is amazon; she’s not hyper muscular, but she IS beefy and looks built like a truck. Has a lot of piercings on her eyebrows, nose and ears. Generally wears green clothing, with a tendency towards looser outfits, and is a bit of a fashionista. Her skin is a dark shade of brown.

Angilaka comes from a population of human remnants who were mutating towards progressively bigger, more powerful forms, and she likely qualifies as a ogre-variant human. Accordingly, she can grew short but thick claws and her teeth are notably sharp, but she otherwise seems to be an ordinary, if very large, human woman.

Height: She stands roughly 12ft tall even without any power boosts. In Crossthicc speciically, she is somewhere around 40ft with a bit of decent power behind her, but she can grow much larger; assume several hundred feet at her max for brief bursts.

Backstory: Angilaka comes from a colony of humans that survived the Cataclysm, but as their technology failed and magic flooded their world with unpredictable disasters and monsters, they adapted by becoming survivalists and working out how their new home functioned, and learned how to live in such a way that it accomodated them. They grew larger over time, becoming proto-ogre variants, and developed peaceful ties with neighbors who came to the world.

Angilaka grew interested in the outside world and began to explore it, traveling to distant space habitats and ancient ruins to learn more. At some point, she became a devout believer in an unspecified religion (it may differ, depending on continuity), and trained as a paladin to channel holy powers on their behalf to protect the weak and better the world. She tends to drift around from place to place, doing Good as she can best interpret.

Personality: Outwardly a bombastic and loud woman, she’s a cheerful braggart who announces herself with emphatic gestures, doesn’t so much enter a room as crash into it, and just plain loves a chance to mix it up. This is belied by a surprisingly thoughtful and patient mindset. She is very deliberative and a surprisingly good diplomat. Her performative boastfulness may literally be a performance, as she watches, and waits, and makes her private judgments.

She can be surprisingly cynical, in her more honest moments, believing that people inevtiably screw up everything around them. Nevertheless, she still works to help others and repair the world, because if you can choose to do so, what right do you have to make any other choice? She has a very low threshold for bullshit, though, and upon spotting a problem, will take the most efficient route to dealing with it; sometimes, this includes breaking a tyrant in half before his entire court. She does not care!

Abilities: A skilled combatant with an expertise in fighting with her bare hands, with a hint of acrobatic wrestling moves. Her divine powers allow her to infuse holy energy into herself to a variety of effects. In general, she becomes absurdly strong beyond her normal limits for brief moments, has demonstrated the ability to armor herself against damage provided it is from an evil source, and she can heal others or repair damage around her. Her powers do exceptional damage to evil things, to the point that the malicious find her presence deeply uncomfortable, and artworks depicting abhorrent concepts tend to decay around her.

She can do things like jump incredibly high and crash down with tremendous speed (Sort of like platformer action, but played realistically), fire bolts of holy light by punching at them really intensely, and scan people to determine the weight of moral failure upon them. (It’s not very reliable and she tends not to employ it as a ‘who do i smite’ sense.) She is also a very adept healer; mostly through personal touch (her kisses literally make you better), but drinking her milk or being near her when she radiates her power can also suffice.

Pred Level: Fairly low. She’s not terribly interested in vore situations, herself. She’s not opposed to it in order to dispose of a problematic relic or a vicious enemy, but she doesn’t deliberately seek it out.

Prey level: Moderate. She’s fine with being gulped, but evil beings trying to swallow her are in an extremely bad position; her powers DO work from that point, and trying to swallow a paladin can result in an evil belly being incinerated from the inside out. She CAN heal you if you are not evil, and may choose to be swallowed to do so.

Relevant Themes: She’s mainly a big, cute giant girl; her being super busty and milky (with various applications based on her divine powers) wouldn’t go amiss. She’s a rowdy, powerful heroine who is a lot more thoughtful than she lets on, too. Probably fairly lusty, and may even have taken a vow to ‘assist’ others with such urges as part of whatever deity she follows.

#queued #twitchy!ocs #twitchy!angilaka #oc refs

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chorusfm · 7 years

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It’s hard to overstate just how tumultuous the past decade of Paramore’s career has been. Since before the recording of Brand New Eyes the band has been regularly rocked by near career-ending shifts. While some bands are lucky enough to go through no lineup changes throughout their career, or when lineup changes do happen the splits are often amicable, Paramore has had no such luck. I don’t need to rehash any of the details of this unrest except to say this: While the turmoil would crush almost any other band, the members that have remained, or returned, to Paramore have fought through all adversity to arrive at After Laughter, the crowning achievement of their career so far.

At once a deeply wistful look back at the past decade-plus of the band’s history and a clear eyed assessment of the future, After Laughter is a record about the moments between total heartbreak and absolute elation. These in-between moments allow us to pick up the pieces broken during the former and come down from the euphoric high of the latter, and reassess what our purpose is here on this floating rock. These moments make up the vast totality of our time on Earth, but for some reason they don’t often feel as romantic.

To use one one of the album’s song titles, After Laughter is a record that is “Caught in the Middle” between joyous sounding music and some of the most dark, introspective lyrics that vocalist Hayley Williams has ever written. The aforementioned song, which begins with a bouncy bass line and could easily have been a No Doubt song from the 90s, starts off with Williams baring her soul and her insecurities: “I can’t think of getting old / It only makes me want to die / And I can’t think of who I was / ‘Cause it just makes me want to cry.” It’s these moments that make After Laughter the most honest Paramore record to date.

Nowhere is this seen more than on “Fake Happy,” a song about how we as humans have a tendency to put on a brave face for the people around us. I have thought a lot about this recently, in light of realizing just how dehumanizing social media is. We let the world see into a tiny sliver of our lives, the brightest moments, while blocking out the darkest parts from view. It’s an inherently unhealthy way to live life, a fact that Williams seems to have come to terms with during the writing process of After Laughter. “Fake Happy” is a song about learning to be open and honest about your insecurities and fears (“If I go out tonight, dress up my fears, you think I’ll look alright with these mascara tears.”), displaying them proudly instead of try to hide them (“I’m gonna draw my lipstick wider than my mouth, and if the lights are low they’ll never see me frown.”)

On a record where Paramore wear their Fleetwood Mac influence on their sleeve, “26” is the band’s “Landslide.” There’s the obvious musical comparison in how a simple acoustic ballad swells into a string composition, one that emphasizes the simple timeless tune in a way that feels effortless instead of overpowering. But lyrically, the song is as stirring and contemplative a tune as “Landslide.” Featuring a clever callback to the band’s 2009 single “Brick By Boring Brick,” “26” develops into a song about holding on to dreams even when your surroundings seem bleak. Williams synthesizes all of the wisdom she has learned over the course of recording the album into the song’s bridge: “Reality will break your heart / Survival will not be the hardest part / It’s keeping all your hopes alive / when the rest of you has died / So let it break your heart.” Without doubt, this is After Laughter’s defining moment.

In a stroke of brilliance, the band enlists Aaron Weiss of meWithoutYou to helm the song “No Friends,” which functions as both an “Idle Worship” outro and a standalone song. The song features a number of lyrical references to Paramore’s early material, “another song I wrote that’s too long god knows no one needs (Looking Up) more misguided ghosts / more transparent hands / they drop a nickel in our basket and we’ll do our Riot dance.” Of all the endlessly fascinating things about “No Friends,” one of the most interesting is that it is essentially a meWithoutYou song embedded within the construct of a pop record. The band apparently gave Weiss free reign to create his own lyrics for the track, which have the same dense, anti-chronological storytelling Weiss’s music often displays. Weiss’s vocals also seem intentionally buried in the mix, to have the musical effect of forcing you to “lean in,” listening closely to the track to catch his words and to turn the turn the track up to ear splitting levels and let its trance-like quality wash over you.

I do think in all honesty I could spend days deep-diving into every track, and I think that just speaks to how meticulously crafted this 12-song collection is.

At about the midway point of the album, Paramore comes through with the perfectly timed “Pool,” which sounds like the perfect mid-2000s pop song. I grew up listening to a Christian radio station in central New Jersey, and the first song I can ever remember really falling in love with and calling my favorite song was Stephen Curtis Chapman’s “Dive.” I doubt the connection between the two songs was intentional, but listening to “Pool” reminds me of the feeling of growing up listening to that song and the exhilaration of falling in love with music.

While the throat-shredding vulnerability of “All I Wanted” and the post-rock bombast “Future” are both iconic previous closers, the band throws a complete sonic curveball with After Laughter’s closing track “Tell Me How”. They settle in to the most mellow conclusion of their career. The sparse instrumentation puts the emphasis on Hayley’s frank, personal lyrics. “Of all the weapons you fight with, your silence is the most violent.” It’s a contemplative way to round a record that belies an unsettled nature to Williams’s personal issues. Just as “Fake Happy” evaluates society’s tendency to put on a brave face in public, “Tell Me How” excoriates the idea that you have to have to have a situation figured out before you can write about it.

One of the many things I find most rewarding about Paramore is just how much they seem to be open-eared listeners of music, and that they trust that their fans are too. You can hear that in their praise of Talking Heads or OK Computer, or in their statement that they were trying to rip off Tame Impala when they first starting writing for After Laughter. But most importantly, you can hear it in the music, which pays great respects to the movements of pop music throughout the past few years towards rhythmic percussion, Caribbean/tropical beats, and bombastic, 80s guitar sounds, while still synthesizing in so many of the things that make Paramore who they are.

You can hear echoes of Paramore’s past here in the ever present characteristics of its three members. Hayley’s savant-like ear for melody and bridge-writing talents, Taylor York’s delicate acoustic guitar playing, Zac Farro’s frenetic drumming style. But more importantly, it’s a record rooted in the present. Most remarkably, it’s a record where a cheerleader chant as audacious as “Low Key! No Pressure! Just hang with me and my weather!” can stand alongside a string quartet and a xylophone hook on the same side of one record, with none of the three feeling out of place. It’s just a seamless amalgam of everything there is to love about and in pop music.

I’m sure Paramore is aware that there will always be people clamoring for Riot Pt. 2, and whereas on albums past they might have been more inclined to give it to them, at least for a song or two (See “Part II” from the self-titled), there seems a willful desire to move past that sort of, excuse the reference, rose-colored hindsight. If you forget everything you thought you knew about Paramore and go in with fresh ears, you will be treated with one of the very best pop records of the moment and one of the most impactful listens in recent memory. So put on your best pair of headphones, or take this in your car and drive around, and, to paraphrase the words of “Pool,” dive right back in.

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#chorus.fm

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