TITAA #48: Magic Mirrors and Radios
Cocteau's Orpheus - Gaslit by DALLE-3 - Narrative Research - Magic Doors & Books
For Halloween, I revisited an old favorite, Jean Cocteau’s classic film Orpheus/Orphée. The film is a modern (1950) retelling of the Orpheus legend, with death personified in a beautiful if bad-tempered “foreign” Princess. In this world, she is driven about by a dead chauffeur in shiny black Rolls Royce, escorted by two homicidal guards on motorcycles; to get to the Underworld, she travels by mirror. Cocteau’s film present two wonderful themes worth another look right now—the poet’s search for inspiration in a “random” tech signal and mirror portals.
Fair warning: Orpheus himself is unlikeable. He’s whiny, narcissistic, and obnoxious to his doting wife. He is famous, but past his time; his worst critics are the young artists who hang out at the Poet’s Cafe. Orpheus is told at the cafe that he must “astonish us.”
After a strange trip to the Princess’s ruined chalet, Orpheus ends up with Death’s car in his garage. Finally, he finds inspiration. Ignoring his wife, he camps out in the car to listen to the surreal transmission on its magic radio: “Silence moves faster when it’s going backwards. Two times. I repeat. [It’s said 3 times.] …. A single glass of water illuminates the world.” And more. Orpheus says, “The most insignificant of these sentences is more amazing than all my poems. I would give my whole life’s work for one of these sentences.” He takes notes. He is finally free of his writer’s block. (Unimpressed, Eurydice: “You can’t spend your whole life inside a talking car. It’s not serious!”)
The radio broadcast is a broadcast from the world of the dead. Some, but not all, the messages are transmitted at the Princess’s orders by her former lover, the young poet Cegeste from the Cafe who is now her undead servant. Cegeste is mostly making up random stuff— but has included some lines he wrote before death including “The bird sings with its fingers.” In the sea of fascinating surreal noise, this human authored line—by a rival!—particularly catches Orpheus’s attention. His use of this “stolen” work, all unknowing, finally gets him in trouble with his fellow poets and the police. It’s not clear to me if they are more angry for his plagiarism or for him being linked to the other poet’s disappearance.
Cocteau said he based the radio’s undead signal on the coded messages sent to the French resistance during the war. Apart from the AI art parallels (a signal in the noise from the work of the dead), I’m amused by the radio’s similarity with the modern paranormal researchers’ “Estes method”, in which a device is “used to scan through radio frequencies, and is believed to be a communication tool between the living and the dead.” Ironically, Cocteau admits he stole the singing bird line from Apollinaire’s art, according to this great Criterion site article by Mark Polizzotti. He doesn’t seem to have gotten in much trouble for it.
But I remember loving this movie mostly because of the mirrors. Heurtebise, Death’s magic chauffeur and the movie’s only likable character, says,
“I'll give you the secret of secrets. Mirrors are the doors through which Death comes and goes. Look at yourself in a mirror all your life... and you'll see death at work like bees in a hive of glass.”
The mirrors make a complicated symbol, characters in their own right. At an early point, the radio says, “It would be better if mirrors reflected more.” (See page 115 here.) As the Princess and Orpheus look at one another through that mirror, it shatters. And when Orpheus sees his wife in the car mirror—he is still obsessed by the radio—she is gone, the terms of the Underworld agreement broken.
Needless to say, there is a ton of folklore and superstition about mirrors. They’re inherently weird liminal objects: Bloody Mary is a spirit haunting mirrors who can be summoned ritually. Breaking a mirror causes 7 years of bad luck. Souls can be confused and trapped in a mirror world after death (the opposite of the Princess using of them to get to the underworld). What you see in a mirror is your soul; so vampires, who don’t have souls, have no reflection. Mirrors are used for scrying, of course. Dream selves can become confused or frightened by mirrors. (The dream element is huge in Orphée as well. Death tells him he is dreaming when he’s not; she steps out of the mirror to watch him as he dreams.) And this is a good creepy take on a Borges story from an excellent overview article by JA Hernandez:
According to Borges, folklore from Ancient China says that the reflections of ourselves in mirrors aren't reflections at all but instead are another species that mimic us so they can learn our ways. Eventually, after enough mimicry, they'd emerge from the mirror to take our place. When they came out of the mirror, we no longer had a "reflection."
Hernandez also links to this fantastic article about selling a haunted mirror. Well, there is a ton of material on this topic, and my new “weird” section in the mid-month newsletter can go to town!
Onto the links! There’s a lot here again (links to sections on the web page):
AI/Art Creativity (Mostly DALLE-3, Some 3D, Misc Procgen Etc)
Narrative Research Latest
Data Vis (lots of text vis)
AI and Art Creativity News
I guess the biggest news is the release of DALLE3 to GPT4 Pro users, which has meant a bunch of entertaining reverse engineering of what the chat model is injecting in terms of prompts and how you can interact with it. (E.g., Simon Willison’s Prompt Engineering DALLE-3.) From a creativity perspective, the output is less “pretty” than Midjourney’s defaults, but it can be steered more. Ish.
HOWEVER. I feel gaslit pretty regularly. The GPT4 chat side doesn’t really know what’s in the image, especially in detailed debates over the content. It comes off like a patronizing sales person or my (former) terrible accountants, saying they’ve done a thing when they haven’t. It doesn’t truly understand, despite the improved training data with better captions as described in the Dalle-3 paper. (And a few days later, a similar look at better captions published by Google Research.) For instance, we went back and forth on illustrating “The bird sings with its fingers," after this initial good take:
But when I asked for fingers in place of a beak, I got these and insistences that they both had beaks with fingers.
I tracked down the original, in case you’re curious — hah, no birds. Of course.
I’ve had other similar exchanges. I cannot, no matter what I do, get a picture of an asteroid impacting the side of a space ship. I keep trying to illustrate Aniara, the bleak Swedish SF movie I’ve written about before. Here’s the last pic and the little story it told me about an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PICTURE after a lot of arguing:
The sophisticated spaceship is seen traversing the vast and uninterrupted darkness of space, on its course towards Mars. The surrounding space is profound, entirely devoid of any celestial bodies, including the sun, accentuating the ship's lone journey. A solitary shooting star, depicted as a tiny, radiant, flaming rock, is seen streaking across this void, its path directed towards the spaceship. The bright tail of the shooting star stands out brilliantly against the encompassing obscurity. The spaceship, illuminated solely by its own lights, showcases its detailed design set against the pure backdrop of space and the distinct shooting star.
I got kind of mad. But it can be hilarious too. Ethan Mollick’s Halloween costume generations were the best of the “weird” DALLE-3 of the past two weeks (link to tsfka twitter if you’re logged in, which why would you be). Here’s some of mine, costumes for programmers:
I am told the Bug Hunter has “a pair of oversized glasses that humorously have ‘Error 404’ printed on the lenses,” which they do not, and that the Recursous Witch’s hat has little hats on it, which it does not. FYI, Janelle Shane just reported similar confident gaslighty behavior from Bard’s image description in her post here. Not a good look.
In other news…
Latent Consistency Models are really fast and there’s code. (A plugin allowing use with Auto1111 web ui, h/t DreamingTulpa.)
3D - Interesting Movement
Wonder3D is my favorite of the recent 3d generator demos I’ve tried. It took a hard photograph and still did something sensible with one of the objects in it. Zero123++ isn’t bad either (link to demo site). Camenduru made colabs for them too. There were also a bunch of nerf performance papers this week, and some more without code. I kept playing with splats and succeeded in viewing one in VR. Ping me if you want tips/links.
DreamSpace, by Yang et al, “dream” your room into a weird sf panorama or whatever. Also in VR. Code coming? I’m super intrigued. Maybe the Quest 3 will accelerate stuff like this.
3D-GPT: Procedural modeling scenes with help from LLMs. No code yet but I am really into their videos.
Misc Arty/Procgen/Video/Copyright
Paul Trillo’s AI-Fx video shot in the Louvre. Weirdness galore! “A leak in the ceiling of the Louvre pulls Jacques into an emotional vortex where a cosmic teardrop dissolves the museum’s masterpieces into their rawest forms.”
🎬 Runway’s Video Contest “Gen48.” There are 65 entries. Wow.
A Journey Into Shaders, an interactive beginners tutorial page by Antoine Mayerowitz. Useful but quite intro.
3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan by Thomas Kole - this is a dataviz story, with images that look like photographs.
Metric Tensors for Artists, a great interactive post by Jake Rice. (Probably h/t Alex Champandard.) Particle guidance.
Common Canvas paper and dataset from MosaicML— creative commons licensed images. “Our largest model achieves comparable performance to SD2 [Stable Diffusion 2] on a human evaluation, despite being trained on our CC dataset that is significantly smaller than LAION and using synthetic captions for training.”
The Internet Artifacts interactive museum from neal.fun. This is a bit heart-rending for those of us oldies… IRC, USENET, etc. I was there then! I still dream about old vt100 terminals in libraries that lead to MUDs and MOOs. Speaking of which… Writing Games has a list of MUD resources!
©️ Copyright/Legal takes: Generative AI Legal Explainer and Rebecca Tushnet in the Harvard Gazette (my hero for her legal arguments in support of fanfiction) on writing and generative AI. Largely in line with Tushnet’s comments, the artists’ case against Stability training was just dismissed, it seems (link to ruling news). Nightshade, for “poisoning image gen models” on your stuff. I like some of the poisoned output quite a lot, actually. Bring back the glitchy days?
Narrative Research
A HF demo for Zero2Story that uses the PalmAPI from Google, SD, and MusicLM. It does the whole setup, place, mood, characters, etc… in a multi-step UI.
“A Quantitative Study of Non-Linearity in Storytelling,” by Andrew Piper and Olivier Toubia. Keys: “a collection of 2,348 books published since 2001”… “We find that narrative non-linearity is strongly associated with the communication of non-instrumental (imaginary) information, but only very weakly negatively associated with a book's success.” Word2vec.
“Experimental Narratives: A Comparison of Human Crowdsourced Storytelling and AI Storytelling” by Nina Begus. “The analysis reveals that narratives from GPT-3.5 and particularly GPT-4 are more more progressive in terms of gender roles and sexuality than those written by humans. While AI narratives can occasionally provide innovative plot twists, they offer less imaginative scenarios and rhetoric than human-authored texts. The proposed framework argues that fiction can be used as a window into human and AI-based collective imaginary and social dimensions.”
“End-to-end Story Plot Generator” by Zhu et al. “We study the problem of automatic generation of story plots, which includes story premise, character descriptions, plot outlines, etc.” and a lot of expensive calls to OpenAI, usually. They make fine tuned models based on Llama that are cheaper.
“Affective and Dynamic Beam Search for Story Generation” by Huang et al. “AffGen introduces ‘intriguing twists’ in narratives by employing two novel techniques—Dynamic Beam Sizing and Affective Reranking.”
Games Adjacent
Tommy at AI & Games has a dive on the AI in Inworld’s demo detective game, but note it’s sponsored by them (which, I admit, I still haven’t tried - I’m going to do that for the mid-month post in 2 weeks).
AI in Games: Complicated Characters by rabbit rabbit. Connecting LLM characters to the game state. No big surprises to anyone thinking about this problem hard, but it’s nice to see some spelling out with a giant flowchart, and some use of variables for NPC state.
Library of Realities - non-game VR applications reviewed and catalogued.
🔎 Alan Hazelden’s recent Mystery Games recs links.
Trust and Safety Tycoon… a moderation simulation game. I’ve done the real thing, this is a bit squicky for me.
“Generative AI: Should Indie Game Devs Use It?” in CreativeBloq via Jon Ingold who goes hard on “the writing is crap.” But others are more moderate about how useful the tools are for programming boilerplate, etc. It’s the art that gets most question marks, partly for morality of use.
Data Vis
Rob Simmon continues his GDAL satellite imagery series with Part 7 on data transformation. One can only hope he’ll extract all this from Medium and publish as a complete ebook someday.
TimeSplines, a sketch-based time-line drawing/authoring tool recently presented at IEEEVis. I like the variety!
Prompt Comparison: Visual comparison of differences like gender biases in LLM output. With a demo.
Geometry of Truth data explorer - more interactives, for a paper by Samuel Marks and Max Tegmark. They use PCA to show relations between true/false statements extracted from LLaMa 13B.
All of Tamara Munzner’s talk slides.
Amelia Wattenberger’s UIs for using embeddings creatively: Basically good visualizations in a nice UI.
NLP
There’s a ton of recent action and low-level interesting details. Just some easy-to-use highlights:
Zephyr model and an alignment training handbook from HuggingFace. With:
Supervised fine-tuning: teach language models to follow instructions and tips on how to collect and curate your own training dataset.
Reward modeling: teach language models to distinguish model responses according to human or AI preferences.
Rejection sampling: a simple, but powerful technique to boost the performance of your SFT model.
Direct preference optimisation (DPO): a powerful and promising alternative to PPO.
Good slides from Matthew Honnibal and Explosion.AI — “How Many Labeled Examples Do You Need for a BERT-Sized Model to Beat GPT4 on Prediction Tasks?” With some key references on OpenAI LLM models vs. fine-tuned task models on NLP tasks like named entity recognition or relation identification.
A tutorial on doing embedding search (RAG) on tables, text, and images, on LangChain. Via Chris Albon.
Voyager from Spotify… another performative lib for approximate nearest neighbors search for e.g., embeddings.
Book Recs
There are a couple themes in this month’s reads (accidental as usual) - magic doors and Wuthering Heights. Strange!
⭐️ 🚪 The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera (fantasy). I raved about this while reading it and when I finished it, but it’s really hard to do justice to in a capsule review. Fetter has been raised by his crazy mother in a rural town to kill his father, who is a kind of messianic warlord. His shadow was severed from him as a child, and he has odd powers… he can see “demons” and float. Fetter repudiates his destiny and moves to the city, which is a modern bureaucratic, caste-conscious metropolis. He falls in with revolutionaries who are all “unchosen,” folks with mysterious abilities who no longer follow their gods’ paths. He becomes a spy, and studies the strange “bright doors” that appear there, which have no back side and evidently go nowhere. His mother starts calling him on an unconnected phone, and myths start coming true. Fantastic genre blending, sometimes funny, with a horrifyingly Kafka-esque refugee prison camp bit. Very Highly Recommended.
The Quiet Room: A Rabbits Novel by Terry Miles (fantasy/sf). I was a huge fan of the first one and still haven’t listened to the podcast. This was less good, but I really liked the actual quiet room’s setting and architectural, uh, details. Very back roomsy. In this book, we learn a little more about "the game,” which is based on synchronistic coincidences and some kind of metaverse with a possible AI component. For fans of alternate realities and borders and locked doors, plus synchronicity and games. But do read the first one.
Flight to the Lonesome Place by Alexander Key (children’s fantasy). I’m not saying jump up and read this — but it’s one I remembered since childhood, have periodically tried to find, and just rediscovered in an ebook edition! The only thing I remembered was the concept of a wavy border concealing an entry to another reality. I am a fan of the magic doors and mirrors in all forms. This turns out to be the tiniest bit of this book, despite my long term memory of it, and it’s a kind of deux-ex-machina in the middle of the trials of a bunch of kids with “powers” trying to escape bad people. I still enjoyed it.
🐺 My Brother’s Keeper by Tim Powers (fantasy/horror). This is a supernatural romp about the Brontë family, with nice misty moors and weird cultists and werewolves. A very unfortunate promise to the fairies when the kids are young spells future ruin. Emily is the heroine here, along with a shaggy-haired Heathcliffy type. There is a great pagan goddess element with another mysterious door effect.
Starling House by Alix Harrow (fantasy/horror). Another with a nod to Wuthering Heights! And a weird living house in a cursed mining town. Monsters appear from the mist and a strange old house that Opal has been dreaming about summons her to meet the current owner. How does it relate to the creepy children’s book written by the first owner of the house, about the Underland? There are locked doors. This book is atmospheric and gritty, but sometimes also a bit operatically romantic. I enjoyed, but not a 5 star for me.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers (sf cozy). I bounced off one of her early ones because it was too low stakes cozy for me, but this one hit the spot. It’s a novella-sized, one sitting read, if you want. A tea-making monk in a sci fi land of plenty, suddenly bored, goes on a pilgrimage to find a historic site; this requires entering real wilderness, without good roads, and meeting a long lost robot that has its own questions about life.
TV Recs
I keep wanting to skip this section because I feel like I’m so far in the trash stratum, or often “meh,” that would would care? But let’s do it!
Our Flag Means Death s2 on HBO Max. Yay, more gay, gay piracy. And sharing of feelings. CW for some violence including pirate “surgery.” Zheng was amazing!
Bodies on Netflix. If you liked time-travel brain-bender Dark, this is thematically related, but doesn’t need flow charts. A multi-time period mystery in which several London detectives from the 1800s on find what looks like the same body in an alleyway. I enjoyed it, but it felt a bit pat until the very end which dangled a few questions and characters. Maybe there will be more?
Wheel of Time s2 on Amazon Prime was better than s1, imo. I cared more about the gang. The magic slavery angle was rough going, but wow. Lanfear was terrific.
The Changeling on Apple TV+. Welp, I wondered at this choice of Victor LaValle’s novels (but it’s been in the works for some time)—and I think I was right to worry? This is hard going, since you have to live through a very overwhelmed new mother deciding her new baby is a monster and doing something about it. It’s very grim and it ends on a non-ending, two things which may turn off a bunch of folks.
The Terror, AMC’s take on Dan Simmon’s supernatural horror novel about a terrible voyage to find the northwest passage. I have not read the book, but there is an excellent Wikipedia page about the historical expedition it is based on. I watched cuz enough people on the Weird Studies Discord have rec’d it. Terrific world building and class politics. I couldn’t put it down, but be warned: tons of gore, body horror, illness and other CW’s for men stranded with nothing to eat but tainted cans. It’s another of those “the people are the worst.” Plus a shaman and a monster. After this, I watched The Thing finally, for another monster in a cold place who is always highly rec’d.
You might like this “Crowdsourced Gentle TV List.” I apologize for not knowing who shared it.
Game Recs, Kind Of
Observation from No Code (sf adventure). This is an older sf story puzzle game, set on a multi-country space station that is mysteriously transported to Jupiter orbit. You play as a damaged AI, who can move between camera views and a small navigation sphere. You are helping crew member Emma figure out what happened and where her shipmates are. It’s evident early on that some kind of alien intelligence, and maybe a biotoxin, are at work. So there are reminders of Lone Echo here, a game series I adored (in VR). However, I had various UI issues, including the text on the map screen being almost illegible, and some puzzles are frustratingly hidden or not active till you do something in a sequence. (A walkthrough helped.) I did like spinning through space, for the most part, and loved the atmosphere on the station. Some reviewers thought it was too hard to navigate. This game also presented me with a directive I didn’t like: “KILL HIM.” There’s stuff to unpack there. Ymmv.
Alan Wake Remastered, Remedy. I loved Control (as you saw last month), so I thought I’d play this on “Easy” setting before the new one came out. I haven’t finished it yet. The gist is that a famous writer of schlock horror who is recognized everywhere he goes (hah, as if) tries to relax in a creepy Northwest Pacific Bright Falls full of ghosts (the “taken”) in the misty woods at night. They are a bit like the baddies in Control. His books seem to be coming true, his wife is kidnapped. Lots of combat with a flashlight and running through the dark woods and wondering where the path is. Wake himself is kind of a dick, though. Atmospheric for sure, making me think of the (much more) wonderful What Remains of Edith Finch because of the setting. Both of these games are deeply discounted right now on Steam. (I got Remastered Alan on sale on Epic’s store but doubt it’s necessary unless you’re on console.)
VR: Obduction from Cyan. I’m working through the catalog of VR titles: this is an old one from the creators of Myst. I will not lie: I do not love it apart from the art. The base 4 number thing made me say “FU” and flip to a walkthrough guide immediately. (I sense some of you unsubbing.) I suppose I am one of those cranky old gamers who doesn’t want it to be that hard because I just don’t have that many hours? Or I’m not that bright.
I even struggled using a walkthrough that I started slavishly following so I could get to the scenery bits. You know it’s rough when the walkthrough has stuff like “Before you go, save yourself some time by taking a left and flipping that switch.” Because if you don’t do that thing you would never know to do here, you will spend a shitload of time trying to fix it later. There are also a lot of pauses while stuff loads (being an old image-heavy game), including in the middle of long puzzles with a lot of walking back and forth across landscapes. Walkthroughs famously don’t solve the slog parts like having to finish the long puzzle, or kill the bug monsters, or whatever. So I include it here for the art and immersion, primarily. Walking around the worlds, especially the world of stone cliffs and giant machinery is worth the price of admission, but only just. I’m not sure I can be bothered to do the last cart thing to get to the end few scenes (though I do like the rides).
Poem: “Ash”
Strange house we must keep and fill. House that eats and pleads and kills. House on legs. House on fire. House infested With desire. Haunted house. Lonely house. House of trick and suck and shrug. Give-it-to-me house. I-need-you-baby house. House whose rooms are pooled with blood. House with hands. House of guilt. House That other houses built. House of lies And pride and bone. House afraid to be alone. House like an engine that churns and stalls. House with skin and hair for walls. House the seasons singe and douse. House that believes it is not a house.
—Tracy K Smith in the New Yorker
I found that poem in the nice roundup of spooky poems in the last Tor.com newsletter by Holly Smith. It’s a great fit for Starling House, rec’d above. And Rose/House that I have rec’d previously. There’s also a related wonderful Emily Dickinson I didn’t know:
One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted —
One need not be a House —
The Brain has Corridors — surpassing
Material Place …Mid-month (in two weeks) will have the “weirdness” and esoterica new section in the paid news links part. Please subscribe if you’re into that! Drop me a comment, too.
Best, Lynn (@arnicas on the sfka twitter, mastodon, and bluesky)