Escape rooms
Now that so many of us are spending so much time in our own homes, the thought of being stuck in a room is very much on our minds. If you’ve ever done an escape room, you know that you can pay to be stuck in a room - except that you get to choose your own form of peril and there’s generally less time spent baking and watching shows. In case we run out of ways to be trapped in a room, Jesse Morris, an actual escape room designer, sent me the names of about 1100 existing escape rooms so I could train a neural net to generate more.
I gave all 1100 escape room names to the 124M size of GPT-2 and trained it for literally just a few seconds (if I gave it more training time it would probably have memorized all the examples, since that’s technically a solution to “generate names like these”).
The neural net did pretty well at escape rooms! It could draw not only on the names themselves, but also on other things it had seen during its general internet training. (And sometimes it seemed like it thought it was doing movie titles or computer game levels). I had to check to make sure it didn’t copy these from the training data:
The Forgotten Castle
Scarlet Room
The Silent Chamber
It did its best to make spooky rooms, although there’s something off about these maybe:
Maw of the Ice Throne
Malvo’s Death Star
Cryopod
Void Bomb
The Floor is Haunted
The Tortoise and the Crypt
Nuclear Zombies Nursery
And these escape rooms just sound weird:
The Cat Abounds
The Mail Dragon
I’ve found Grandpa’s 2.0 Bison
Countdown to the Pizza Shop
Chocolate Truck
The Elevator Belongs to Me
Three Dogs and a Bison
Forgotten Pharaohs Pet Shop
The Room with a Chance of Being in it
These sound commonplace in a frankly rather unsettling manner.
Cat House
Cake Shop
Sausage Experience
Cabinet of Sainsbury Adventure
Cutthroat Tea House
The Body Shop
Escape from Wonderful World of Gumball
I’m super curious about these celebrity/pop culture escape rooms:
Miss Piggy’s Curse
The Haunted: The Lorax
Mr. T’s Clocks
The X-Files: Tee Time
Miss A.I.’s Deco Room
For the images above, I used GPT-2-simple to prompt a default instance of GPT-2-778M with a couple of example escape room descriptions, plus the name of the escape room I wanted it to generate a description for. It figured out how to copy the format, which I found super impressive. Then to generate creepy images to go with the descriptions, I used artbreeder to combine different scenes. “Scarlet Room”, for example, is “vault” plus “theater curtain” plus “prison” plus “butcher shop”.
AI Weirdness supporters get bonus content: more escape rooms and descriptions than would fit in this blog post. Or become a free subscriber to get new AI Weirdness posts in your inbox!
My book on AI is out, and, you can now get it any of these several ways! Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s - Boulder Bookstore