These are a series of explorations of AI-generated stories using the GPT-2 simple wrapper for OpenAI's GPT model. The impetus for this project was Dan O'Sullivan's "Rest of You" class, which I took at ITP in the spring of 2020. In that class, we augmented our lives with technology in an effort to understand ourselves in ways we couldn't before. As someone who's identified as a writer, both professionally and personally, for a long time, I became obsessed with the idea of isolating and experimenting with "my style".
Was my style of communication truly transferable? Was it even the style, rather than the content, of what I wrote that defined it? Could I learn anything about how I view the world by throwing it into a machine? I wasn't sure, so I threw it into a machine anyway.
To train the model, I followed a lot of the recommendations of this blog post from Max Woolf, who loads the files for the model (using the GPT2-Simple wrapper) onto Google's Collaboratory. I made a few tweaks of my own and then trained the the medium-sized model (biggest one available on Collaboratory).
There are some truly poignant little snippets you can get from these. The best part is that they all follow my style fairly well, or at least that's what my classmates thought. What I've found is that the algorithm can produce tokens within the 100 to 200 range which are fairly coherent, but if you try and push it too much past that (the max is 1024) it tends to lose the thread of what it's talking about.
Eventually, by using the "prefix" option liberally, I constructed a coherent kind of narrative, one coherent enough at least to post on the blog which had inspired the whole project in the first place. You can see that here.
The door closed behind me, and out stepped an old man with glasses. Without a word I followed him out of the building, and into the sunset. The emerald green of his skin seemed to contrast wonderfully with the silver of the ocean waves. Behind him the buildings twinkled and twined, and behind him the sun gleamed on.
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I hate the ocean. When I was young I used to love the sound of waves crashing against rocks in the harbor, and I can still hear the clink of bronze when it’s gone. I imagine myself in some sort of meditative position, and I focus my mind there, daydreaming, and then I wake up.
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I love the rain we get here in the morning. It creates its own little daffodils in the wind and it fills the hollow spaces between worlds where once there had been thunder and lightning. It fills in the blank spaces where once there had been water and destruction and the ringing of thundering boots and the clanking of metal shutters and the spray of wet clay and the clinking of fingers. It is this very interaction between the physical and the social that I think of often.
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I dream often of midnight journeys, one long and one short. I think about the way the nights change and blend together, the way the days blend into one another, the way the weeks blend into one another. I imagine myself spiraling upwards, spiraling out of control, spiraling out of control into some sort of parallel universe populated by happy, warm-hearted people. This is not to say that I have any sort of intimate knowledge of these people, or any sort of intimate insight into their worlds, because I don’t have any sort of intimate knowledge of these people at all, but it does give me the chance to point out a few of the ways in which they are different from our own.