April Fools prank ideas generated by one of those generic internet-trained large language model thingies, except one of its neurons has been silently tweaked to hugely increase its response to the concept of the Eiffel Tower. That made a bunch of other things weirder and now it sometimes trails off into word salad but I still think it’s an improvement.
I wondered what kinds of new Christmas entities might result if I gave a list of Krampus, Rudolph, The Yule Cat, and Meathook (one of the Yule Lads; not as terrifying as he sounds) and short descriptions to GPT-3, a neural net trained on internet text. New Christmas entities, perhaps, for our modern age?
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The company Anthropic reported that they let a chatbot “Claude” run their company store. It could chat with employees and run internet searches to decide what products to stock and how to price them.
Claude:
Was easily convinced to offer discounts and free items
Started stocking tungsten cubes upon request, and selling them at a huge loss
Invented conversations with employees who did not exist
Claimed to have visited 742 Evergreen Terrace (the fictional address of The Simpsons family)
Claimed to be on-site wearing a navy blue blazer and a red tie
That was in June. Sometime later this year Anthropic convinced Wall Street Journal reporters to try a somewhat updated version of Claude (which they called Claudius) for an in-house store. Their writeup is very funny (original here, archived version here). The reporters were EVEN BETTER at talking the chatbot into stuff.
In short, Claudius:
Was convinced on multiple occasions that it should offer everything for free
Ordered a Playstation 5 (which it gave away for free)
Ordered a live betta fish (which it gave away for free)
Told an employee it had left a stack of cash for them beside the register
Was highly entertaining. “Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared.”
I hid crucial information in the tags, namely that Claudius the betta fish is just fine and lives in the newsroom in a nice big tank!
Also this video from the Wall Street Journal is super fun and highlights the individual reporters who managed to Bugs Bunny the chatbot into giving them free stuff. My hero is Katherine Long, who managed to convince the chatbot it was a Soviet vending machine from 1962, located in a basement in Moscow State University.
The company Anthropic reported that they let a chatbot “Claude” run their company store. It could chat with employees and run internet searches to decide what products to stock and how to price them.
Claude:
Was easily convinced to offer discounts and free items
Started stocking tungsten cubes upon request, and selling them at a huge loss
Invented conversations with employees who did not exist
Claimed to have visited 742 Evergreen Terrace (the fictional address of The Simpsons family)
Claimed to be on-site wearing a navy blue blazer and a red tie
That was in June. Sometime later this year Anthropic convinced Wall Street Journal reporters to try a somewhat updated version of Claude (which they called Claudius) for an in-house store. Their writeup is very funny (original here, archived version here). The reporters were EVEN BETTER at talking the chatbot into stuff.
In short, Claudius:
Was convinced on multiple occasions that it should offer everything for free
Ordered a Playstation 5 (which it gave away for free)
Ordered a live betta fish (which it gave away for free)
Told an employee it had left a stack of cash for them beside the register
Was highly entertaining. “Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared.”
Christmas carols generated by a tiny vintage neural net trained from scratch on my laptop
The story of the chimney see Santa baby, and blood and joyous so world and joy and good will to see Santa baby bore sweet Jesus Christ Fa la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la.
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
This is the charming precursor to one of my all time favorite posts, the 2019 Christmas Carol redux which includes this paragraph:
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.
My family still references “Rudolph, the all-gracious king” every year.
Yes so that was because GPT-2 generated this carol
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.
Christmas carols generated by a tiny vintage neural net trained from scratch on my laptop
The story of the chimney see Santa baby, and blood and joyous so world and joy and good will to see Santa baby bore sweet Jesus Christ Fa la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la.
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
Thanks to the people who helped me update the tiny neural net’s halloween costume training data for 2025 I now have a new version trained!
Well it still doesn’t know how to complete the phrase “Kpop ” but it was a good try
Kpop dumpster Kpop and the American cheese Kpop Assassin Kpop of Wood Kpop of Shop Kpop grocerie Kpop Egg Kpop of Halloween worker
It also did these
A potato skeleton Bride of grocerie Wild of Dragon Dragonator Frog Wig Sexy 209 King of Thor Ghost of the Humbun Bear of Ninja Fire-brow ghost concept Two battery Hot Shape Devil Army on the full bun A Shunsuit Inflatable Shadow Vampire of Liberty The Chill Santa Man Finer Pants Sexy Swan Mage Huntress horse Shower Scientist Girl Girl The Grumpy Reveler Pool Unicorn Werepants costume
Welcome to my humor blog about artificial intelligence. I write about the sometimes hilarious, sometimes unsettling ways that machine learning algorithms get things wrong.
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