If you’ve ever chatted with a customer service rep and received such canned answers to your questions that you’ve wondered—am I speaking with a human?—you know that interactions with AI often get lost in translation. Bots and algorithms may be programmed by real people, and yet the results often lack the nuance of an interaction with another living, breathing being. But instead of working to improve those connections, AI researcher Janelle Shane is pushing the weirdness of our relationship with AI to the max. If she had a motto it might be: If it’s not broken, can we break it even more?
If you sent your romantic prospects one of her cursed candy hearts for Valentine’s Day last year, you’re familiar with her brand of tech-enabled humor. Instead of chalky Brach’s Conversation Hearts spelling messages like “True Love” or “Say Yes,” Shane’s candies were created using an AI program called BigGAN and an image-generating algorithm called CLIP that churned out horrorshow hearts with adages like “Sweat Poo,” “Stank Love,” and “Hole.”
Last year, she followed up with something slightly sweeter, but still strange, with her take on the store-bought Valentine’s Cards kits you probably handed out to your grade school classmates. But instead of a love note from SpongeBob or Harry Potter, Shane fed her trusty neural network a list of traditional Valentine’s messages and corresponding images and received a stream of, shall we say, less traditional results.
For this experiment, she used DaVinci, one of the largest OpenAI networks. DaVinci collects readily available internet text (articles, Reddit threads, comments, user reviews, etc.) and analyzes the language patterns to generate human-like writing. To create her Valentine’s cards, Shane fed DaVinci messages from 10 actual cards like, “Step into your power! - Image of a fearless ice witch” (a note from a Frozen-themed card) as well as punnier ones like, “Valentine: you’re clawfully nice! - Image of a lobster.”
So how successful was AI in picking up the subtle nuance of a good old-fashioned pun? The results were, predictably, weird, like: “Powered by this, you are my one true love! - Image of a grey slug who says ‘Oh no. Not again.’” And: “I crush you the heart cake way! - Image of a cow holding a cronut.”
Images courtesy Janelle Shane.
So why hack AI for a laugh instead of improve it? Simple. “Pushing the boundaries of how strange AI can be is just fun,” says Shane. “I’m also fascinated by testing how far I can take this.” She admits that the smarter AI gets, the harder it is for her to make it weird. “I think I have to change my approach. AI results are getting more generic. They’re training themselves to be as ordinary as possible. A lot of the AI-generated text is really boring.” So she’s focused on finding what’s still hard for it to do, like “generating a horse with the correct number of legs.”
This year brought new tech to test: the buzzy AI tool Chat GPT. Shane prompted the tool to write a poem that started with "roses are red, violets are blue," and to suggest an illustration to go with it. While the results were the most fluent, they were also the most boring, according to Shane. Here's one of its responses:
"Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
This card may be old,
But my love for you is brand new."
Exterior of the card is decorated with delicate illustrations of hearts and flowers, and has a touch of glitter to add a bit of sparkle. The overall design has a charming, vintage feel that will make your Valentine feel extra special. Whether you're looking for a unique and meaningful way to express your love or simply a charming collectible to add to your vintage card collection, this Valentine's Day card is sure to delight.
Sure, the poem might be passable if you don't want to spend the time or effort to write up sweet nothings of your own. But memorable? Or even interesting? "No," says Shane. "Of course, Chat GPT isn't optimized to be entertaining, it's optimized to look fluent and dependable in publicity screenshots. It's going for the most average card possible and it has probably found it."
If sending your lover one of her cards doesn’t seal the deal this year, and you want to avoid being the most average date possible, try her pick-up lines instead.
