AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning
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

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

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

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
Emoji include some kind of baby seal-horse and a sun-lion-eagle griffin.

The emoji of the future

Some of the recent image-generating models have this thing where they can fill in the blank parts of images. It's handy when you want to show them exactly how to give you more of the same. Like these animal emoji. See if you can tell which ones I
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