TITAA #47.5: IKEA Diagrams of Demons
Hex Wrenches - Papers on Narrative - Weirdness Section! - Embeddings
A bit of an “AI weirdness” post for the mid-month intro: I had a lot of fun this past week using an IKEA-diagrams LoRa of SDXL by Jaret Burkett (translating: that’s a fine-tuned version of Stable Diffusion XL, tuned on possibly this dataset of IKEA instructions). I gave it impossible things, of course, like “happiness,” “infinity,” “poetry,” “UFO”, “dreaming”—and wow they need a lot of hex wrenches and umlauts. My output is on this page, if you want to see them.
I thought the robot above was especially interesting: Seems like to make a robot, you have to become more like a robot, first? Step 3 is missing… this is normal for these diagrams, they have a very “now draw the rest of the owl” feel. And whatever is going on in the marginalia beside the steps 4/5, it looks like the result is a magical dumbing down of the humanoid robot into a new, blockier form factor. The recap at the bottom is something like, “Imagine yourself a robot and make a robot engine?” Surprisingly, no hex wrench is involved on this one!
If find it especially fun given the explosion of tooling on “agents” (in the sense of code tools, not characters) and also, more remotely, reinforcement learning, which is a mechanism for improving the output of big models using feedback. Obviously I’m reading in from an AI person’s eyes, but you could read the directions as a story of conceptualizing agent-like behavior and then teaching a machine what is preferred (RL).
Contrast with the recipe for an angel with an impossible umlaut:
I read this as “angels are based on humans with wings.” Fair? But there's a magic fruit salad ingredient we need to meet first (we don’t get steps 2 and 3 because maybe they are impossible to depict in 2D art 😆). We stick the wings on one at a time, but you only get angelic beings with the calculus operation involving fruit bowl magic. The ingredients list has more magical items broken out, including here a hex wrench.
Golems are similar to robots, except they do need hex wrenches. Below—a golem thinks of the form of a golem made of blocks. The missing step 2, filled in with unlabeled marginalia, might be the magic inscription needed to activate it? With a carving tool. And that creepy doll-like marginal thing, who knows?! There are 2 hex wrenches and blocks of clay required, though. (Don’t miss my post on golems, tulpas and egregores for important context.)
Other results: Archangels are made of angels. Writing a novel turns you into a bearded dude who looks constipated. Zombies required dead bodies, knives, and hex wrenches. Making UFOs require 2 UFOs and aliens, they don’t really come apart; dëmons are similar. Ghosts have a few recipes, one involving a sheet and another with maybe a grave? Dreams require (or produce) hazmat suits. Stonehenge requires 15 stones, some broccoli, and a hex wrench. It’ll end up looking like Easter Island statues, though. Petroglyphs are astounding: they need a shaman covered in tattoo art to even begin the process. They alone are dark.
Check out all the pictures, they’re fascinating. To play yourself, if you sort the LoraTheExplorer HuggingFace page by likes, you should get the IKEA model near the top. Click on it, and then enter your prompt on the right to make your own hex wrench masterpieces of impossible things.
The rest of the newsletter news for mid-month has a new “weirdness” section, because it’s October! My one paywall limit is the news bit mid-month, as usual pretty long, so please consider subscribing if you want to keep up. There are a ton of links in games & storytelling research, including best game paper bets from the AAIDE conference by my quick perusal (bias to narrative), some demo 3d splats I made from summer travels (archaeology sites), medieval magic, hierarchical wave function collapse, embedding code of interest, some fun and simple web games, articles about museums online and a call for creative AI works.
TOC (links on website):
AI Art News (plus Misc Procgen/Web/Articles)
Games & Narrative (papers and misc articles)
Weirdness! (occult and esoterica tech news, a new section!)
NLP (lots of useful embedding tools, some reference articles/talks)
Poem: Louise Glück
Onwards!