Janelle Shane

@janelleshane

I write about the strange side of AI at aiweirdness.com Also a laser scientist. She/her. Colorado, USA

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Janelle Shane@janelleshane· 12d

Extremely bugs bunny coded adversarial attack

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· 26d

The alpine plants episode of @leafittouspod.bsky.social reminded me of a recent hike at Niwot Ridge where I came across a research plot where they’d evidently needed to keep track of tiny plants. They had chosen little plastic flamingos as markers. leafittouspod.podbean.com/e/s2-episode...

Hillside above treeline with scrubby alpine plants, a few flowering. Some sheer slopes and a little snow in the background - it’s a crystal blue Colorado day

Closeup of the square research plot from the previous photo, where it’s clear the border is made of string and landscaping stakes, and that the plot is intricately scattered with various colors of tiny plastic flamingo

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· 29d

This is my rock! I think my great aunt collected it in Montana. One of a whole flock of rocks I have to remember her by. No idea why the grains go in two directions!

Some kind of water polished banded greenish grey and brown rock, the grains going in two directions.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Jul 4

Who am I to argue?

Fancy ice cream coupe style dish with two scoops of vanilla ice cream in it. (Two different varieties of vanilla.) there are cherries on top of each scoop that in retrospect make it look like a small white frog peeking out of the dish.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Jun 26

I was on the podcast A Better Way To Money talking about what happens when you ask a chatbot for financial advice. Remember, just because a chatbot says it's a financial advisor (or a squirrel) it doesn't mean it's true. Listen wherever you get your podcasts!

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Jun 25

but how will we know it's the visible light range unless it's staring intensely back at us? www.photonics.com/Articles/Coh...

Diagram from a technical article showing the solar spectrum next to an icon of a glossy sun, and a rainbow bar that shows where UV, visible, near-IR, and SWIR ranges line up on that spectrum. Superimposed over the rainbow bar is an anime style dramatic eyeball, more or less indicating the visible range.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Jun 24

i found her

A photograph of a rocky hillside in Scotland (taken by Janelle Shane). Microsoft Azure’s image recognition API captions it as “a close up of a hillside next to a rocky hill” and tags it with hillside, grazing, sheep, giraffe, herd

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Jun 19

Tried this and 1. Yeah I’m in these models all right 2. Even these tiny summaries contained an outright fabrication (I did not create AI Dungeon) and half-truths (I am way more “random science blogger” than “researcher” when it comes to “AI”)

Result screenshot from InTheWeights.com for Janelle Shane. Summary reads “AI Researcher and author”, 858 strength, top 2%. Bars are shown for like 14 different LLMs, and the page is showing the snippet generated by QWEN 8B which says “AI researcher and creator of the AI Dungeon game, known for her work in machine learning and natural language processing”

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Jun 11

If image recognition algorithms have giraffes, I guess LLMs have Elias Thorne the lighthouse keeper. Fascinating explanation

They sampled 20,000 total stories from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, and the Allen Institute for AI's chatbot using five prompts, and found that the same 11 words—names like Elias, Mara, and Elara, and occupations like lighthouse keeper, clockmaker, and librarian—appear in more than 88% of generated stories, with little difference between models.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· May 6

Had a great time listening to @marthawells.com at the book launch for Platform Decay! Old Firehouse Books in Fort Collins did a fantastic job organizing everything.

A hotel ballroom with somewhere around 150 people in it. Martha wells and interviewer are visible way at the front of the room.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Apr 29

Oh god my cat came in while I was playing Now she’s obsessed

Screenshot of the cursor camp game with a striped cat attacking one of the cursors

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Apr 21

over-the-top cuteness on the kakapo cam as the two chicks fall asleep in a pile right in front of the camera, with their mother dozing nearby www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_j3...

infrared camera still of two kakapo chicks, now with just a little fuzz left between their grownup-style feathers. One is resting their little fluffy cheek on the other's shoulder. The mother can only be seen as a large feathery lump to one side.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Apr 9

Inkjet printed structural color! This is the kind of effect that gives butterfly wings their color. Normally the printing process destroys the structure, but this group made a structure impervious to the dreaded clumping effect and it looks very cool. www.photonics.com/Article.aspx...

Peacock design printed on black in four metallic-looking colors, blue, yellow-green, green, and bronze-yellow. Red is notably absent, but the metallic effect is still very cool, looking like what you'd get from drawing with metallic gel pen

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Apr 1

New AI Weirdness post! In which a large language model attempts to give April Fools prank ideas, except with one of its neurons tweaked to make it obsessed with the Eiffel Tower. www.aiweirdness.com/get-working-...

Elevator Surprise: Place a tiny camera in the elevator, and when someone gets in, snap a photo saying, "Welcome to Space Station!" Or build a miniature model of the Eiffel Tower next to it for a dramatic effect.

Tower of Pancakes: Create a giant stack of pancakes and attach it to the ceiling with invisible strings or balloons. They won't believe it's real!

Lost Cat: Suspend a toy cat from the ceiling using fishing lines. Watch as friends climb chairs trying to catch it.

Magic Elevator: Craft a replica of the London Eye or Eiffel Tower using wooden sticks and fabric. Paint it gold and install it beside elevators. Call it "New Year's Eve Countdown."

Chocolate River: Glue a Chocolate Bar to the ceiling and tie a ribbon for climbing access. See who dares to brave the sweetness!

Cake Melted Magic Trick - Bake a cake and melt it using a hair dryer. People will assume magic happened.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Mar 30

I mean this sure is a comic book! People sure worked hard on it. I’m not sure who the target audience is. lasers.llnl.gov/education/co...

Page of a comic book showing teens in space age leotards standing around and talking about the definition of laser fusion. One of them is about to summon the Professor to explain fusion better!

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Mar 20

The #kakapo nestcam is normally in black and white (dark nest in a hollow tree trunk, uses light the bird can't see) but every once in a while if there's a good afternoon sunbeam there's enough light for color. Today, the cutest view of the parrot's round face www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfGL...

A very round parrot sits on a nest deep in a hollow tree trunk, just out of reach of an encroaching sunbeam. The parrot is mossy green with black speckles and a fluffy yellowish face, and a gleaming bright eye. Absolutely adorable.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Mar 11

That post from @primawesome about coyotes and his neighbor's cats, but altered to read: The USGS director told me volcanoes keep eating his webcams so I asked how many cams he has and he said he just goes to procurement and gets a new cam afterwards so I said it sounds like he's just feeding webcams to volcanoes and then his intern started crying.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Mar 11

That first Kilauea lava webcam hit at 11:12:57, which looks really cool. No idea why the colors all turn red like that for half a second

Webcam screenshot showing some squiggly motion blur and deep magenta blobs against a black background

Less motion blur, still magenta, starting to look like a field of rocks

The magenta color is fading into a light pink wash and now the image is clearly a big rock (lower left) against a field of smaller rocks

Same view as before, now stationary and grey, like a normal camera image of some very jagged grey rocks.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Mar 11

This is the part between two hits where the lava turned purple for a while. I usually associate that with WAY too much IR hitting the camera (source: used an iphone camera to look at the spots from powerful IR lasers) but I'm not sure what would cause that just temporarily.

Blurry image from volcano webcam. Note that just the lava plume and the lava on the ground are purple, not the sky or the other parts of the ground, making it less likely to me that we lost an entire color channel due to a loose cable or something. But excess IR is usually filtered out with a physical filter so how could this happen yet be corrected later?

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Mar 11

They manage to get it pointed back at the volcano at 14:09:34 which is honestly impressive considering how many direct hits it has taken

screenshot of volcano webcam. Image is very blurry but is barely recognizable as the lava plume from an erupting volcano

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Feb 27

www.optica-opn.org/home/gallery... Wow that is pretty And a little cursed, I always think getting additional lasers in new colors from a transparent crystal is spooky

Two laser beams cross inside a diamond and produce at least 10 new laser beams at different colors and angles

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Feb 17

Me too! High levels of cat occlusion today

Computer screen with a word document open, nearly entirely blocked by two cats on the desk

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Jan 26

Wait looking at the data a bit more closely, two of the 10 people occasionally reported a sensation of pain. The paper calls it a "strong effect", and that participants wore earplugs to block "Audible frequencies emanating from the skin". Sounds a bit intense!

Research paper figure showing the response of 10 people to having their fingertips or the base of their finger hit with the pulsed laser. Given the choice of pain, cold, itch, pressure, heat, and vibration, everyone chose either vibration or heat most of the time, with pressure being a distant third. Very occasionally people reported itch or cold, and two people reported pain on a couple of occasions.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Jan 26

I agree with the several experts quoted in this article: this is nuts. Turning AI generated text into “good enough” for critical safety regulations will require so much expert work that they might as well pay the experts to write the regulations in the first place.

These developments have alarmed some at DOT. The agency’s rules touch virtually every facet of transportation safety, including regulations that keep airplanes in the sky, prevent gas pipelines from exploding and stop freight trains carrying toxic chemicals from skidding off the rails. Why, some staffers wondered, would the federal government outsource the writing of such critical standards to a nascent technology notorious for making mistakes?

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Dec 24

Been thinking about this list of Christmas Entities I generated using GPT-3 www.aiweirdness.com/christmas-en...

The Three Christmas Weasels
Christmas Weasels aid Santa Claus by tracking everyone or everything. They have pointy ears, yellow fur, and tails and bodies half red and half green, and can open doors with their teeth.

Hostile Choir
The Hostile Choir is a group of 13 dark, gray-skinned men in robes of purple with glowing red eyes, whose appearance heralds death. They sing an ominous song alternating between "[X], [X], you're dead" and "Bum bum bum bum / You're dead".

Chrishmak
A gigantic tree spider that lives in the heart of the Yulelog. To have him perform circus tricks, one must tell him over and over, "Chrishmak is truly a wonderful entertainer," as he grows with each shout of praise.

Underwear Gnomes
A non-anthropomorphic race of sly little thieves who steal underwear and replace it with awful versions made of leaves and bark.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Dec 17

then in 2019 GPT-2 generated this carol www.aiweirdness.com/the-ais-caro...

Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, with its red belly
The All-gracious King of all the earth,
Had a baby at Christmas time,
On Christmas Day,
A true and holy Deity,
Went down to earth,
With human flesh for sacrifice.

For sinful men such a Deity doth appear,
And wink and nod in reply,
As he winked and nod in reply,
As he winked and nod in reply

The wretched world is run by ox and ass
The wretched world is run by ox and ass,
And in vain build I.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Dec 17

On this day of Christmas I bring to you: Christmas carols generated by a tiny vintage neural net. This is from 2017, when I trained the neural net from scratch on my laptop using just Christmas carols. In retrospect I can see the neural net got mixed signals www.aiweirdness.com/christmas-ca...

The story of the chimney see
Santa baby, and blood and joyous so world and joy and good will to see
Santa baby bore sweet Jesus Christ
Fa la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la.

King of toys and hippopotamuses [sic] full of the light of that stood at the dear Son of Santa Claus
He was born in a wonderful christmas tree

Run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolph, run, run Rudolf the new born King.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Nov 28

An interesting article illustrating why we go to the effort to make extra narrowband lasers …AND a cautionary tale about using LLMs to write alt text!

Diagram is of an objective lens design, with the light traveling through a torpedo-shaped series of 12 lenses. Other diagram details show the amount of spherical aberration at a few closely spaced ultraviolet wavelengths - in other words, illustrating chromatic aberration in the lens design.

Original alt text reads:
Diagram showing the dimensions and layout of an Airbus A320 fuselage cross-section, with length and radius measurements indicated in millimeters.

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Nov 25

I approve of this (cromberry yaas is a pie generated by a very tiny old-school neural network) www.aiweirdness.com/how-to-make-...

Line drawing of a covered pie with a red filling. The caption reads "Cromberry Yaas". The pie is saying "yaas"

Janelle Shane@janelleshane· Nov 12

Lovely display of #aurora in north #boulder tonight!