Janelle Shane

Botober 2023

By Janelle Shane On September 30, 2023 - 5 min read

Since 2019 I've generated October drawing prompts using the year's most state-of-the-art text-generating models. Every year the challenges are different, but this was one of the hardest years yet. Large language models like chatgpt, GPT-4, Bing Chat, and Bard, are all tweaked to produce generic, predictable

Drawing of a walrus with "imagine a tiny little walrus. you call them a 'snowbonk' and put them in the fridge so they chill"

Trolling chatbots with made-up memes

By Janelle Shane On September 24, 2023 - 2 min read

ChatGPT, Bard, GPT-4, and the like are often pitched as ways to retrieve information. The problem is they'll "retrieve" whatever you ask for, whether or not it exists. Tumblr user @indigofoxpaws sent me a few screenshots where they'd asked ChatGPT for an explanation of

Image is of a brown baby giraffe with no spots. AI gives long descriptions but fails to report that it has no spots.

AI vs a giraffe with no spots

By Janelle Shane On August 28, 2023 - 4 min read

On July 31, 2023, a giraffe with no spots was born at Brights Zoo in Tennessee. She's a uniform brown with pretty white highlights around her face and belly, like a Jersey cow or a white-tailed deer. Image recognition algorithms are trained on a variety of images from

Baby one-piece bodysuits with designs of Galaxies on Ice, Dandelion Underwater, and Fart Whale

Baby onesie designs

By Janelle Shane On August 04, 2023 - 5 min read

A reader wrote in a while ago with a suggestion: they were about to have a baby and wondered if I could use AI to come up with some new ideas for baby onesies. I can't find the letter any more, and I don't remember how

Non-native speaker essays misclassified as AI-written 48% up to 75% of the time vs 0%-12% for native speakers

Don't use AI detectors for anything important

By Janelle Shane On June 30, 2023 - 4 min read

I've noted before that because AI detectors produce false positives, it's unethical to use them to detect cheating. Now there's a new study that shows it's even worse. Not only do AI detectors falsely flag human-written text as AI-written, the way in

Botober 2023

Trolling chatbots with made-up memes

AI vs a giraffe with no spots

Baby onesie designs

Don't use AI detectors for anything important

Writing

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An exercise in frustration

Bonus: A unicorn goes downhill

Hidden 3D Pictures