Neural networks can be good at naming things, I’ve discovered. Recently I’ve been experimenting with a neural network called GPT-2, which OpenAI trained on a huge chunk of the internet. Thanks to a colab notebook implementation by Max Woolf, I’m able to fine-tune it on specific lists of data - cat names, for example. Drawing on its prior knowledge of how words tend to be used, GPT-2 can sometimes suggest new words and phrases that it thinks it’s seen in similar context to the words from my fine-tuning dataset. (It’ll also sometimes launch into Harry Potter fan fiction or conspiracy theories, since it saw a LOT of those online.)
One thing I’ve noticed GPT-2 doing is coming up with names that sound strangely like the names of self-aware AI spaceships in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. In the science fiction series, the ships choose their own names according to a sort of quirky sense of humor. The humans in the books may not appreciate the names, but there’s nothing they can do about them:
Hand Me The Gun And Ask Me Again Zero Credibility Fixed Grin Charming But Irrational So Much For Subtlety Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall
Now compare some of the effects pedals GPT-2 came up with:
Dangerous But Not Unbearably So Disastrously Varied Mental Model Dazzling So Beautiful Yet So Terrifying Am I really that Transhuman Love and Sex Are A Mercy Clause
Give Me A Reason Thou Shalt Warning Signs Kill All Humans
Did GPT-2 somehow have a built-in tendency to produce names that sounded like self-aware spaceships? How would it do if it was actually trained specifically on Culture ships?
A reader named Kelly sent me a list of 236 of Iain M. Banks’s Culture ship names from Wikipedia, and I trained the 345 million-parameter version of GPT-2 on them. As it turns out, I had to stop the training after just a few seconds (6 iterations) because GPT-2 was already beginning to memorize the entire list (can’t blame it; as far as it was concerned, memorizing the entire list was a perfect solution to the task I was asking for).
And yes. The answer is yes, naming science fiction AIs is something this real-life AI can do astonishingly well. I’ve selected some of the best to show you. First, there are the names that are clearly warship AIs:
Not Disquieting At All Surprise Surprise And That’s That! New Arrangement I Told You So Spoiler Alert Bonus Points! Collateral Damage Friendly Head Crusher Scruffy And Determined Race To The Bottom
And there are the sassy AIs:
Absently Tilting To One Side ASS FEDERATION A Small Note Of Disrespect Third Letter of The Week Well Done and Thank You Just As Bad As Your Florist What Exactly Is It With You? Let Me Just Post This Protip: Don’t Ask Beyond Despair Way Too Personal Sobering Reality Check Charming (Except For The Dogs)
The names of these AIs are even more inscrutable than usual. To me, this makes them much scarier than the warships.
Hot Pie Lightly Curled Round The Wrist Color Gold Normally Comes With Silence 8 Angry Doughnut Feelings Mini Cactus Cake Fight Happy to Groom Any Animals You Want Stuffy Waffles With Egg On Top Pickles And Harpsichord Just As Likely To Still Be Intergalactic Jellyfish Someone Did Save Your Best Cookie By Post-Apocalyptic Means LGRPllvmkiqquubkhakqqtdfayyyjjmnkkgalagi'qvqvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
At least it does sound like some of these AIs will be appeased by snacks.
Bonus content: more AI names, including a few anachronisms (“Leonard Nimoy for President” for example)
About two weeks ago, I had my right shoulder replaced. This was the second time I’ve had surgery on that shoulder, after multiple knee surgeries and arm surgeries, and abscesses and god knows what else. This surgery took place in the middle of what’s now, to me, a very familiar, and very tedious dance with my doctors around pain, pain management, and painkillers.
The way it works is this. Everyone knows that surgery, and the injuries that lead to surgery, are painful. Everyone also knows that the best way to treat pain of this kind is through the regular administration of opiates. However, because these drugs are addictive, everyone has to act as if they don’t know anything of the kind.
So instead of just prescribing the drugs, and preventing the pain, the doctors and nurses will wait until the patient asks for the pain medication. Or they’ll prescribe pain pills, but not enough to get the patient through to the next meeting with the doctor. They put the onus on the patient to beg for relief of his/her pain. Ideally with a buffer in between, like a nurse or a pain management specialist, so that the decision never comes directly from the person you’re interacting with, but an intercessor. This is why some patients end up medicated up to the gills, and others are left to grind their teeth and just get through it.
It’s really stupid. I suspect it heightens rather than lessening patients’ feelings of dependence on these drugs, which can do so much to reduce their acute pain and chronic discomfort. Instead, they’re doled out in a semi-arbitrary fashion, generally carefully rationed but sometimes overprescribed, based on your willingness to perform pain for someone else and that person’s level of compassion or complicity with your suffering.
This is all to say: no, I’m not on pain medication. Yes, I’m terribly uncomfortable. No, I’m not uncomfortable enough to jump through hoops and beg for more drugs. (Maybe if I were, things would be different.) And at the times I was most uncomfortable, those were the times when medicine was the least available to me, by design.
We’ve got to get over our weird Puritanical crap about pain and pain medication, and accept the fact that in certain contexts, we need the drugs. And by “we,” I mean myself, the medical system; everybody. We can’t be responsible for the entire opioid epidemic every second of every day. Sometimes we just need to be able to go to sleep.
I broke my knee cap and was on crutches, in a cast and the same week had root canal. There were complications with the root canal. I had to get angry and return twice to the oral surgeon’s office to get adequate pain medication. In February. In New England. With significant snow and ice on the ground. Not something I will be forgetting. Good luck on your surgery. Your doctor may be more generous with Tramadol, which will relieve pain without giving you the warm fuzzy feeling of most narcotics.
i think the horror genre as a medium to express female trauma is really good and can be done in a way thats truly impactful and beautiful but when men utilise it to fulfil some fantasy of theirs and completely miss the mark and it just turns into them getting off to women’s pain makes me wanna truly commit unspeakable acts and by that i mean storm hollywood and kill every male director in sight
i don’t think this was particularly asked for or wanted, but here is a list of women-led horror movies that (to my knowledge) explore female pain and trauma without exploiting it (women-directed films in bold):
what ever happened to baby jane? (1962) dir. robert aldrich
possession (1981) dir. andrzej żuławski
mirror, mirror (1990) dir. marina sargenti
ginger snaps (2000) dir. john fawcett
the others (2001) dir. alejandro amenábar
trouble every day (2001) dir. claire denis
in my skin (2002) dir. marina de van
a tale of two sisters (2003) dir. kim jee-woon
high tension (2003) dir. alexandre aja
sympathy for lady vengeance (2005) dir. park chan-wook
