That Is Not ChatGPT Which Can Eternal Lie

June 21, 2023 10:45 AM

Do you enjoy reading the fiction of that in/famous author of weird fiction, H. P. Lovecraft? Have you ever said "but what if we had endless Lovecraft fiction?" Researchers attempted to simulate Lovecraftian fiction with GPT-4 [link to ArXiv preprint].
posted by cupcakeninja (26 comments total)

I bumped into this when it showed up in my Google Scholar notifications a couple weeks ago. Today I thought "hmmm, that was kinda neat," and thus the post. Lovecraft is hugely problematic, of course, but the project is horrifascinating. I've read more cosmic horror, pastiche Lovecraft, etc. than is good for a person, so I personally don't want more, but--what happens when people do? Or when GPT-17 spits out the next five Jane Austen novels?
posted by cupcakeninja at 10:51 AM on June 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Just train it on Fox News transcripts. That should nail the Lovecraft racism.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:51 AM on June 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

“An object created to condense the voice of an author into an endless regurgitation worshipped by the population as art leading to decadence and decay of originality” is itself a fairly Lovecraftian concept, though one admittedly lacking tentacles.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:56 AM on June 21, 2023 [20 favorites]

"Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to [t]alk that ought to crawl."
posted by SPrintF at 11:01 AM on June 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

GtM, you've hit upon precisely the thing that this generation of AI lacks: tentacles. Luckily, this can be easily rectified.
posted by phooky at 11:10 AM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm not so sure you need to train AI on Lovecraft specifically in order to yield something Lovecraftian.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:16 AM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

This seems like a very half-assed methodology and they don’t even share the interesting bit, the actual text - that’s “on request.”

Asking GPT for a self-evaluation, and then admitting that this isn’t very useful? Asking human readers “without prior exposure to Lovecraft” to distinguish based on a couple hundred words of example text? Lovecraft is probably a good candidate for experimenting with automated pastiche because his style is so distinctive, but it feels like they’re setting the bar on the floor, here.
posted by atoxyl at 11:18 AM on June 21, 2023 [13 favorites]

If anyone wants this vibe but not glorifying a horrific racist and anti-semite or giving clicks to a soulless content-stealing algorithm, I highly recommend following the work of actual human writers like ctrlcreep.
posted by fight or flight at 11:18 AM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

really looking forward to the day the horror fanbase forgets Lovecraft in favor of Mervyn Peake. Tamsyn Muir is pioneering that effort imo
posted by paimapi at 11:30 AM on June 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

This seems like a very half-assed methodology and they don’t even share the interesting bit, the actual text - that’s “on request.”

That's the unknowable part of the unknowable horror.
posted by condour75 at 11:34 AM on June 21, 2023 [10 favorites]

really looking forward to the day the horror fanbase forgets Lovecraft in favor of Mervyn Peake. Tamsyn Muir is pioneering that effort imo

Currently following a podcast that is doing a Book of the New Sun read through, and a continuum from Gormenghast to BotNS to Locked Tomb has been suggested in Discord.

Then someone mocked up a BotNS cover where it’s retitled Gormenghast 40000.
posted by Artw at 12:27 PM on June 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

Looks like I have to read the Gormenghhast trilogy again. I seem to have no choice.
posted by Splunge at 12:59 PM on June 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

The Financial District, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean businesses that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping arch, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by District rents, the shiftiest of these outfits laid hold on the great consultancies, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These offices, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid. This tower, mottled evenly with black glass, arose like a middle finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the red aircraft warning light made of it a gimlet eye; by day it saw no evil and cast its long shadow.
posted by flabdablet at 1:43 PM on June 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

Would be far more interested in ChatGPTs “1001 Tales of How The Butlerian Jihad Was Lost.”

Sing me your songs of monkey-conquest, machine.
posted by Ryvar at 2:46 PM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

a continuum from Gormenghast to BotNS to Locked Tomb

This is an article of faith in our Wolfe-adoring household.
posted by doctornemo at 2:59 PM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

While peering upwards towards that gimlet eye, standing below it on a dark empty street, you could slightly turn your head to reveal the strange eldritch geometries of the buildings surrounding you. Their shadows cast barely legible glyphs spelling out the blasphemous names of the old ones. Monuments to their invocations, voiced silently by small, clammy creatures dripping bay water on the concrete as they shuffle up California Street to gather on this night to surround the huge, black Banker’s Heart and then begin howling to call the others to come out of the waters for their night has come. The great plague has cleaned away those who once occupied these places. An older, more malevolent species has come back to reclaim what was theirs.
posted by njohnson23 at 3:59 PM on June 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

I asked ChatGPT-4 just yesterday to create a solitaire card game based on the Lovecraft mythos using standard cards and items I would have laying around, and it made up 'Eldritch Solace.'. It uses tokens and dice, and has you track Sanity Tokens, Occult Energy Tokens, and uses an Investigation Row of cards as well as Ancient Tomes piles. Combination of solitaire and resource management. Looked pretty playable.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 4:41 PM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

This will never work, since GPT-4 does not know what it is to fear swarthy Italians and seafood.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 4:58 PM on June 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

To be fair, back in the good old days we fed Lovecraft into a simple Markov Chain Generator and it produced similar results. It's even better when you combine dear old HP with some other source material: the Anarchist's Cookbook, or the (Perl) Camel Book, for example.
posted by nickzoic at 5:18 PM on June 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

H. P. Lovecraft goes shopping. Yes, that's the premise.
posted by tigrrrlily at 9:03 PM on June 21, 2023

The Prose that Came tofrom Sarnath
posted by allium cepa at 12:12 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

A.I.! A.I.! Cthulhu Fhtagn!
posted by JohnFromGR at 3:46 AM on June 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

Broke: Large language model faithfully recreating Lovecraft prose to the extent that some readers found it indistinguishable from the real thing shows how far the technology has progressed.

Woke: Large language model faithfully recreating Lovecraft prose to the extent that some readers found it indistinguishable from the real thing shows that he did hack work.
posted by N8yskates at 8:38 AM on June 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Be eating vast masses of Lovecraft pastiche has been a pastime for unaugmented humans since the 20s and I note the field is still Lovecraft and then “all the pastiche writers”. The ones that got beyond that stopped writing pastiche and did their own thing.
posted by Artw at 8:42 AM on June 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

i programmed an AI to do HPL, & it produced Kavanaugh's verdict on the Navajo water rights case.
posted by graywyvern at 4:31 PM on June 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Taking this as my cue to reread Isekaid Shoggoth, my favorite shoujo-ai lovecraft otome webserial. ❤️‍🔥🐙👍
posted by sebastienbailard at 3:40 AM on June 24, 2023