Recursion into madness

Speculated to be responsible for the "AI restaurant-menu gore" that made the rounds on social media. Restaurants AI-generate the entire menu sheet from whole cloth, and while it looks "good" at first with modern image models, repeated edits to the menu text/layout transform the passable food "photos" into trypophobia-inducing horrors. (And somehow they don't notice or care)

Notably, the recent ChatGPT Images 2.5 announcement claimed to address this issue specifically ("multi-turn editing consistency")

Does the same effect happen in a society which rewrites all of its knowledge over and over using AI?

It would have been interesting to try something closer to the movie poster example; say have the AI rewrite the passage with the room toggling between the initial light-mode decor and a dark-mode decor, then back, repeatedly. Or even change the woman's name to "Mrs. Smythe" and back.

It doesn't merely stabilise, it almost converges on itself

> PS. For obvious reasons, this post will fail Pangram tests.

Actual pangram to me says it's 100% human. Current pangram can flag different passages differently, but these are all flagged human by it, even the LLM written ones.

This reminded me of a story/vignette which my fallible memory tags as by someone like Twain or Poe, about an automatic rewriting machine. It was put to work on the same passage with an ever higher intensity setting, becoming more and more gothic to the point of parody -- iirc the final output was verse including the line "to atoms dash the doubly damned".

Does anyone remember this?

It would be interesting how many iterations of LLM-based PR reviews and fixes it takes to turn the code into horror. It’s already started happening.

It’s not that bad though. I expected way worse. If Robin Hobbs wrote it, I’d barely lift a brow.

The existence of attractors (e.g. "stable at iteration 31") for AI models is one of the weirdest things in AI land. They are a wonderful space to explore, fascinating and full of horrors.

Meanwhile, my hat's off to the (currently) last comment on the page: "I like how the shear-sheathed legs still earned their keep — probably load-bearing for Mrs. Regan"

Sing it with me now, "these things aren't inteeeeeeeelligeeeeeeeent"

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The same happens with humans, in e.g. chain stories, cumulative stories, etc.

Not unique to AI.

>I don’t write about generative AI much. Everyone else does; not much of consequence ever gets said.

I see he chose not to break with tradition.