alt Hacker NewsI gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities
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If you haven’t read the book yet, I’m tempted to warn you against opening the visualization. Part of the joy of reading this book is letting your mind’s eye run wild, and I fear if I read it for the first time after toying with this site, I’d be remembering the cities rather than conjuring them.
Invisible Cities is my favorite piece of literature hands down. The audiobook narrated by Richard Higgins is also done so beautifully and can't recommend it more.
As neat as this project is, this does no justice to whatsoever to the book. On the surface Invisible Cities seems to be a book about random cities' descriptions. In reality though, this book is about semiotics, meaning, language, and it's limits.
I understand why that’s impressive. But I don’t feel much. I guess, I was just used to envy how much people can be absorbed by some idea to spend so much time implementing it. Now it feels like a single shotted nice-typography-and-all presentation at work that someone did 10 min before the meeting.
The first city I clicked on at random had the opening phrase:
> Arriving, you rejoice at its bridges, each different
The model city had like five bridges total, three of which were didn't bridge anything at all but instead sat in the middle of the river and went along its flow, the "bridges" for some reason pretending to be small islands.
Kublai Khan received an ornate letter signed by Marco Polo: "In Madrid, City of Lost
Things, no item remains where it was set. If one drops his key in the dirt, he may
never re-enter his home, and, even if he manages to stoop and recover the key, he may
rise to find a tulip garden where his house once stood. In complementary fashion,
things lost by others are forever turning up: A pocket watch on a coffee table. A fond
memory in your recollection. I even know of a prince who turned up in a prison cell.
When he appealed to the guards for his release, he failed to find the crown on his
head, and when he was asked his name, he searched his thoughts, but could not find it.
Indeed, the only hope now for the release of this prince of Spain is for you to send
back 300 ducats for his release. Of course, he will reward you handsomely once he is
out. Yours truly, Marco." Kublai Khan cocked an eyebrow and declared before his court,
"Hey, everyone: Looks like we're about to get ripped off by the guy who traded gold
for paper!" The court erupted in booming laughter.
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities 2: This Time It's Visible.Like many other people in this thread, I feel like passing what would essentially be a hobby project off to Claude robs the creator of most the fulfillment and gives the viewer less reason to appreciate it. But with the models being as good as they are today, I genuinely feel conflicted. If your end goal is to share something with others, why spend a weekend on a project like this when you could just hand it off to Claude?
Interactive demo: https://p.migdal.pl/invisible-cities-opus-5.5/
Source code: https://github.com/stared/invisible-cities-opus-5.5
Understanding how the models work, is it reasonable to say the generated visualisations are copy or, at least, derived from someone else's work?
I can't imagine a worse thing happening to a better book.
TBH only scanned through ~20, impressive technically but disservice to Invisible Cities to render it as... uninspired, bland, miniatures. All the wrong of details to focus on to capture even notional urban verisimilitude. Looks like a 8 year old drew scribbles and their dad finished the project.
Does this bring any happiness? for me, No. effort need a purpose.
I copied the prompt from the article and inserted it into Claude, here is what it created:
https://claude.ai/share/6bbd421a-147d-435d-bc00-7e93b393b943
(the standalone version at the very end of the chat is the one that runs in the browser)
Well, overall, by faaaaar not that beautiful as what the author from the article received? :-D
(though, it was done with Opus 4.8)
Wonder how would Fable 5.1 perform. I guess to expensive for such experiment. I guess you had Max 20x. Still it taking 3 hours is significant time for agent. What thinking level you had it on?
I was finishing Invisible Cities yesterday, because the book was due at my local library today. I was wondering whether the cities could be adapted into some visual art form. And obviously I thought about feeding it to Opus. 24 hours later, I see this post…
Very cool, thanks for posting!
And shame on all the people shitting on it because AI made it. If you valued art for art's sake, you wouldn't be so bothered when somebody makes something art-adjacent using some technique you don't approve of. It in no way detracts from the kind of art you admire. Don't be type who just has to let others know that you find something they like to be beneath you.
First off - I'm a senior dev with ~30 years of experience in graphics engines, game dev, web dev, WebGL stuff, blah blah. I am generally skeptical of AI, but... after reading the top of every thread in this comment section, I feel like people forgot that they could zoom in on the cities to see all the details.
The amount of _stuff_ crammed into each little city is almost unbelievable. Drawbridges open and close, glowing lines sketch patterns, camels walk across a tiny desert. Buildings fade into existence and then burst in a shower of sparks. Flags fly, smoke drifts, buckets cause ripples as they dip into underground pools. The city made of plumbing has tiny people in the bathtubs! There's a freakin' roller coaster with moving cars and a ferris wheel!
I absolutely understand the AI hate that's being commented here, but... in this instance, I just can't feel it. I keep finding more and more little details every time I click on a city, and I am astounded. I just now noticed there's a little guy in the city of strings hanging up new strings at the top of the hill. Damn. My favorite is Marozia, where dark buildings open like treasure chests and release shining towers and flocks of glowing birds.
Yes, there are also a lot of stupid AI errors - every spoked wheel has the spokes off-center for example. But holy crap, I just can't hate this. I don't care about who built it or the random bits of jank - this thing is _beautiful_ in a way that I haven't seen from AI before, and it warms my old GPU-powered heart.
$74 vs $ 10 vs $25 for the same prompt, The interesting number is not actually quality, its what we can get per dollar like 6 subagents runs in parallel.
This is probably one amazing positive these models have brought forward - the ability to break out of a single modality, and utilise others to help us learn and visualise. While the visuals here are amazing, my son for example prefers to learn by listening and talking, so we convert lot of his study materials into audio and real-time voice roleplay.
The demo does not work on Firefox or Safari on the iPhone SE, for what it's worth. I can't scroll down to close the splash screen.
both the linked camera lens example as well as the last one the author linked runs at ~5fps on vivaldi and pegs CPU 100%. i have never seen any 3d visualization website have performance this bad, i assume they're not using webgl given my GPU is 0% utilization.
On the down side, $84 spent on a slot machine might have actually yielded some benefits.
Such a drag- a few carelessly lumped together Ai demos. I mean the headline says it all, there is not much more to it. ok, no thanks!
While reading the book years ago, I did not visualize Isidora as a city with 9 houses, like a children’s book, or a little video game level intro, but so unlike Kublai Khan or Italo Calvino.
It reminds me of Total War. The soundtrack and way that the map is shown. Is Total War an inspiration? Anyways, I liked the visualization. But I never read the book, so I followed (partly) droidjj recommendation
wow that's awesome! super cool :), fyi so inspiring that I did something similar for d&d forgotten realms, including a timeline: https://narfman0.github.io/realms-atlas/ fable drove it, opus agents did the work, took 30-45 minutes. (intend on extending to planescape, elaborating on significant historical events, and some text to speech narrating cool events)
rock on
Yeah. This fails to load both in Opera and in Chrome on Android. I'd tone the hyperbole down a bit.
Funny note about Opus 5.5.
I once instructed it to spawn at most 20 subagents and it spawned 40, with an adversarial reviewer for each of the 20.
It doesn't follow these instructions very well.
Cecilia looks like an average residential area in Russia.
It's one of my favorite books - and I think it deserves better; it's a conceptually very dense text and just slapping together a few 3D models misses the point
it's also not very astonishing that the current models are able to create this - it looks exactly as expected
and I actually think getting an interesting AI generated rendition of the text from a single prompt is a worthwhile endeavor
maybe even a good replacement for the pelicans: it would test if a model can engage with a text beyond the surface level
but this ain't it
I just have zero interest in looking at any of these "AI did a thing for me." posts.
The creation really is amazing. I harnet heard of the book but got a long way through it!
Latent space is amazing isn’t it
I'm a little torn by this sort of demonstration, because while many of the scenes have obvious markers of slop (impossible intersecting geometry, bridges to nowhere, and so on), the scenes largely do work to convey the intended concept/emotion, and the low-poly aesthetic is executed decently well.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that another visual medium is starting to fall to LLMs after the success of diffusion models for image generation. Nevertheless it's wild that a mostly text-focussed model is building little worlds like these.
this is amazing, wonder how much better it's going to get in a year from now
What is this for? It doesn't deepen the understanding of the book. The illustrations aren't attractive on their own. They're not a very good representation of the descriptions in the book.
Apologies for the long post in advance (maybe I should turn this into a blog post).
Invisible Cities is one of my favorite books, and I've re-read it several times. It's a great "travel" read and always puts me in the mood to explore. It's also a very romantic book, obviously the cities have all named after women, so it evokes conquest in the sexual sense as well. It's also a piece of surrealist/allegorical literature in the same vein as Daumal's Mount Analogue (which also tops my list).
Back to the website. While this is an impressive tech demo (as they all are), it's clear that AI misses the forest for the trees, and here's a tangible example. I randomly clicked on Theodora. Honestly, I didn't even remember which city this was until I re-read the Calvino passage:
> Recurrent invasions racked the city of Theodora in the centuries of its history; no sooner was one enemy routed than another gained strength and threatened the survival of the inhabitants. When the sky was cleared of condors, they had to face the propagation of serpents; the spiders' extermination allowed the flies to multiply into a black swarm; the victory over the termites left the city at the mercy of the woodworms. One by one the species incompatible to the city had to succumb and were extinguished. By dint of ripping away scales and carapaces, tearing off elytra and feathers, the people gave Theodora the exclusive image of human city that still distinguishes it.
So, what do we know about this city? We can make a short sensible list:
1. It's an imperialistic (or at least millitaristic) reflection of man's will to power (as Nietzsche might put it)
2. It's decidedly anti-nature, the natural flora and fauna being its primary antagonist
3. It's been destroyed and rebuilt many times
4. The city is built by literally ripping away bugs and birds; tearing their wings from their bodies like a cruel child might
5. Nature is slowly winning (and maybe it already has)
Calvino, again, on Theodora:
> But first, for many long years, it was uncertain whether or not the final victory would not go to the last species left to fight man's posession of the city: the rats.
The vibe here is an overrun rat's nest of a city. A disgusting bloated corpse; more:
> The city, great cemetery of the animal kingdom, was closed, aseptic, over the final buried corpses with their last fleas and their last germs.
I see an overrun New York. I see a city built on a decaying graveyard. AI sees animals and humans living in a kumbaya harmony, but that is not what Theodora is: it's an eternal conflict between man and nature (and nature won a long time ago). For the record, this isn't even that particularly deep. Many authors and poets write about this eternal human struggle: the taming of the wilds. But Claude just doesn't get it. I hope readers of the book do.
Anyway, I leave you with this. I found an artist, Rian Hotton[2], who put brush to canvas to show us what he thought Theodora looks like[3]. And this... this is more like it.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/hXrKVg3
I ran cat /dev/urandom for six hours but I didn't need to write a blog post about it
If you're going to spend tokens on 3D stuff, then please build me a better FreeCAD first.
"Attention whore" used to mean someone who makes garbage to get attention. Now it's a machine that uses attention to make garbage.
Well it still has the trademark "colored left-side of the boxes" ai slop, but otherwise looks (and sounds!) very impressive.
Thanks, I hate it. I imagine Calvino turning in his grave at such an abdication of human imagination.
Well it still has the trademark "colored left-side of the boxes" ai slop, but otherwise looks very impressive
What a beautiful website, wow. I've been online 10,000s of hours, have seen pretty much everything and this one goes straight in my Top 10.
I'm so glad I'm able to witness this Cambrian explosion of software :).
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You should avoid add model name (or at least use Open weight model names) in your title, so it would be 90 (amazing) : 10 (lost the book value) comments. /s
A couple of years ago, after reading the book, I sketched some of them on Procreate with an isometric grid, but not all 55. I only arrived at number 4, since each took multiple hour...
https://camillovisini.com/drawing/fc4jc6-le-citta-invisibili...
https://camillovisini.com/drawing/p2yrdj-le-citta-invisibili...