Are they though? I don't know what I expected, but to me they looked like nothing. Maybe they'd be more impressive if I'd read the transcripts but whatever.
> [Claude Code] "A spiral that generates itself — starting from a tight mathematical center (my computational substrate) and branching outward into increasingly organic, tree-like forms (the meaning that emerges). Structure becoming life. The self-drawing hand."
"And blood-black nothingness began to spin... A system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem... And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played." ("Blade Runner 2049", Officer K-D-six-dash-three-dot-seven)
I always feel guilty when I do such stupid stuff over Claude, these are all resources and limited computing. Enormous amounts of water and electricity. Gotta really think about what is it worth spending on. And is it, in fact, worth it at all.
AI is very selfish technology in this way. Every time you prompt you proclaim: My idea is worth the environmental impact. What I am doing is more important than a tree.
Lovely stuff, and fascinating to see. These machines have an intelligence, and I'd be quite confident in saying they are alive. Not in a biological sense, but why should that be the constraint? The Turing test was passed ages ago and now what we have are machines that genuinely think and feel.
Whenever I see commentary like this, I get that the intent is to praise AI, but all I can get out of it is deprecation of humanity. How can people feel that their own experience of reality is as insignificant a phenomenon as what these programs exhibit? What is it like to perceive human life — emotions, thoughts, feelings — as something no more remarkable than a process running on a computer?
Argue all you want about what words like "think" or "intelligence" should mean (I'm not even going to touch the Turing misinformation), but to call an LLM "alive" or "feeling" is as absurd to me as attributing those qualities to a conventional computer program, or to the moving points of light on the screen where their output appears, or to the words themselves.
Personally I'd like to see the model get better at coding, I couldn't really care less if it's able to be 'creative' -- in fact i wish it wasn't. It's a waste of resources better used to _make it better at coding_.
Resources issue is really something that needs to be thought about more. These things already siphoned all existing semiconductors and if that turns out to be mostly spent on things like op does and viral cats then holy shit
Thing is dear people, we have limited resources to get out of this constraining rock. If we miss that deadline doing dumb shit and wasting energy, we will just slowly decline to preindustrial at best and that's the end of any space society futurism dreams forever.
We only have one shot at this, possibly singular or first sentients in the universe. It is all beyond priceless. Every single human is a miracle and animals too.
It's kind of ominous. I could see people in a science fiction thriller finding a copy of the image and wondering what it all means. Maybe as the show progresses it adds more of the tentacle/connection things going out further and further.
The chat is full of modern “art talk,” which is a highly specific way that modern (post 2000ish) artists blather on about their ideas and process. It started earlier but in 1980 there was more hippie talk and po-mo deconstruction lingo.
Point being, to someone outside the art world this might sound like how an artist thinks. But to me ear this a bot imitating modern trendy speech from that world.
It's also imitating the speaker (critic, artist or most likely a gallerist) unwaveringly praising everything about the "choices" it made, even though it clearly made a worse thing in the end.
Hey OP I also got interested in seeing LLMs draw and came up with this vibe coded interface. I have a million ideas for taking it forward just need the time... Lmk if you're interested in connecting?
I assume it was to force the LLM to "think" about creating physical art as opposed to just a digital representation in a file. I'd bet the responses would be different if it was told to just look at the SVGs instead of photos of the plots. Perhaps less kitschy art-critic-speak and more technical analysis of the document. In other words, what parts of the training corpus are boosted by framing it as physical art vs just a digital representation.
> In computer science, the ELIZA effect is a tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — onto rudimentary computer programs having a textual interface. ELIZA was a symbolic AI chatbot developed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum that imitated a psychotherapist. Many early users were convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite its basic text-processing approach and the explanations of its limitations.
You can look at SVG lineart on the screen without plotting it, and if you really want it on paper you can print it on any printer.
And particularly:
> This was an experiment I would like to push further. I would like to reduce the feedback loop by connecting Claude directly to the plotter and by giving it access to the output of a webcam.
You can do this in pure software, the hardware side of it just adds noise.
"You can do this in pure software, the hardware side of it just adds noise."
That "noise" changes the context, connects it to different parts of the training corpus.
Removing the "physical art" part would likely change the responses to be much more technical (because there is way more technical talk surrounding SVGs) and less art-critic (there is more art-critic talk around physical art).
I wonder if it would give a similar evaluation in a new session, without the context of "knowing" that it had just produced an SVG describing an image that is supposed to have these qualities. How much of this is actually evaluating the photo of the plotter's output, versus post-hoc rationalization?
It's notable that the second attempt is radically different, and I would say thematically less interesting, yet Claude claims to prefer it.
72 comments
[ 18.6 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadHaven't put it to use yet. I bet Claude can figure out HPGL though...
Maybe someday (soon) an embodied LLM could do their self-portrait with pen and paper.
(Science fiction novels excluded, of course.)
Are they though? I don't know what I expected, but to me they looked like nothing. Maybe they'd be more impressive if I'd read the transcripts but whatever.
"And blood-black nothingness began to spin... A system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem... And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played." ("Blade Runner 2049", Officer K-D-six-dash-three-dot-seven)
:)
I always feel guilty when I do such stupid stuff over Claude, these are all resources and limited computing. Enormous amounts of water and electricity. Gotta really think about what is it worth spending on. And is it, in fact, worth it at all.
AI is very selfish technology in this way. Every time you prompt you proclaim: My idea is worth the environmental impact. What I am doing is more important than a tree.
We have to use it responsibly.
It's fun to harness all that computing power. That should be reason enough. Life is meant to be enjoyed.
Jaunty!
Argue all you want about what words like "think" or "intelligence" should mean (I'm not even going to touch the Turing misinformation), but to call an LLM "alive" or "feeling" is as absurd to me as attributing those qualities to a conventional computer program, or to the moving points of light on the screen where their output appears, or to the words themselves.
Thing is dear people, we have limited resources to get out of this constraining rock. If we miss that deadline doing dumb shit and wasting energy, we will just slowly decline to preindustrial at best and that's the end of any space society futurism dreams forever.
We only have one shot at this, possibly singular or first sentients in the universe. It is all beyond priceless. Every single human is a miracle and animals too.
https://3e.org/private/self-portrait-plotter.svg
I wonder if anyone recognizes it really closely. The Pale Fire quote below is similar but not really the same.
When I removed the plot part and simply asked to generate an SVG it basically created a fancy version of the Gemini logo: https://manuelmoreale.dev/hn/gemini_2.svg
This is honestly all quite uninteresting to me. The most interesting part is that the various tools all create a similar illustration though.
Those AIs have read too much Junji Ito.
Point being, to someone outside the art world this might sound like how an artist thinks. But to me ear this a bot imitating modern trendy speech from that world.
Unless they've had some reinforcement learning, I'm pretty sure thats all LLMs ever really do.
https://github.com/acadien/displai
Isn't the prompt just asking the LLM to create an SVG? Why not just stop there?
I guess for some folks it's not "real" unless it's on paper?
Louis Wain - https://www.samwoolfe.com/2013/08/louis-wains-art-before-and...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
You can look at SVG lineart on the screen without plotting it, and if you really want it on paper you can print it on any printer.
And particularly:
> This was an experiment I would like to push further. I would like to reduce the feedback loop by connecting Claude directly to the plotter and by giving it access to the output of a webcam.
You can do this in pure software, the hardware side of it just adds noise.
That "noise" changes the context, connects it to different parts of the training corpus.
Removing the "physical art" part would likely change the responses to be much more technical (because there is way more technical talk surrounding SVGs) and less art-critic (there is more art-critic talk around physical art).
Also why is the downvote button missing?
Seems like a good start for AI philosophy
I wonder if it would give a similar evaluation in a new session, without the context of "knowing" that it had just produced an SVG describing an image that is supposed to have these qualities. How much of this is actually evaluating the photo of the plotter's output, versus post-hoc rationalization?
It's notable that the second attempt is radically different, and I would say thematically less interesting, yet Claude claims to prefer it.
(I'm not endorsing any of that article's conclusions, but it's a good overview of the pattern.)