Since discovering Janelle Shane’s AI Weirdness blog, I’ve been fascinated by the potential of AI for generating glorious creative nonsense. Because all the early models required varying amounts of custom-training for each and every use case, though, and I never quite had Janelle’s patience and motivation, I never got really far myself, though. I dabbled around a little with textgenrnn, but didn’t really have the amount of training material necessary to really properly train that kind of model. Likewise, I never played around with GPT-2, either, though I can recommend the ShelfbrainⓅ Holy Trinity of Human Spelling instead. (If you’re familiar with Reddit, the SubsimulatorGPT2 might also be a bit of fun.)
Then along came GPT-3, which was a large enough model that it could handle a variety of content and styles without necessarily requiring further explicit training, but access was available only to the selected few. So I had to content myself with enjoying Janelle’s various experiments with it, the Star Trek GPT-NG account or last but not least Gwern’s GPT-3 AI poetry generation experiments, which contain quite a few gems.
Very recently (as of late 2021), GPT-3 has been finally released to some sort of general availability, although access still requires signing up and registering. At the same time, I’ve recently however stumbled across the existence of GPT-J, which is indeed more easily accessible to everybody via e.g. EleutherAI or Forefront’s playground (or you could even download the model and play around with it yourself on e.g. Google Colab – the initial setup of an instance takes a little while, though, so the latter isn’t quite as suitable for spontaneously playing around with it).
While the model certainly isn’t as large as OpenAI’s biggest GPT-3 offerings, and I can’t judge how true the claims are that GPT-J can make up the difference through its better training material and other improvements, after some playing around with it, it certainly seems to work well enough for trying some creative nonsense writing and other related stuff, too.
So without further ado, please enjoy the wit and wisdom of AI on the following subjects: