Yesterday I ran across an amusing blog post from research scientist Janelle Shane who, just for the hell of it, has been “training this neural network to generate cookbook recipes by letting it look at tens of thousands of existing recipes.”
The recipes are pretty odd, as are the names the software picks for them, especially when Shane cranks up the “creativity” variable.
Here are a few that grabbed my attention:
- Cream Of Sour Cream Cheese Soup
- Artichoke Gelatin Dogs
- Crockpot Cold Water
- Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Cake
Also yesterday, I ran across a horrifying post in the Incels subreddit in which the regulars attempted to come up with new pejorative terms for women. Oddly, many of the suggestions that weren’t completely obscene (“sperm garage”) or creepy (“future sex cadavers”) or just plain awkward (“the annoying, dumb, inferior pieces of flesh around the vagina that don’t invent or discover things”) ended up sounding, well, a bit like Shane’s computer-generated recipe titles.
So here’s a little quiz of sorts. I’ve mingled recipe titles from Shane’s neural-network experiment with anti-woman slurs from the Incels subreddit post. See if you can tell which are which!
- Cheese Hog
- Whole Chicken Cookies
- Sausage Jockey
- Meat Pockets
- Salmon Beef Style Chicken Bottom
- Completely Meat Circle
- Squeal Pig
- Roasties
- Bunny Boiler
- Cabbage Pot Cookies
Answers below!
In case you’re wondering, the neural-network-generated recipes will not actually produce anything resembling real food. The recipe for Greased Casserole with Slices of Lemon Juice, for example, requires a weird assortment of ingredients, including “1 cup cold boiled frosting,” “2 sprigs of bread,” and “1 sour and large fish.”
The instructions can be similarly baffling. One early recipe demanded that human chefs “bake until juice” and “sprinkle over skin greased with a boiling bowl.”
Things got even weirder when Shane plugged recipes into a neural network trained on H.P. Lovecraft, resulting in instructions like this:
Whip ½ pint of heavy cream. Add 4 Tbsp. brandy or rum to possibly open things that will never be wholly reported.
In a later experiment, she flipped the script, entering “phrases from Lovecraftian horror [into] an innocent neural network trained on 30MB of cookbook recipes,” which resulted in this almost perfect sentence:
Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance with the steamed chicken.
In conclusion, neural networks are fun. Certainly a lot more fun than incels.
ANSWERS: The computer-generated recipe titles are Whole Chicken Cookies, Salmon Beef Style Chicken Bottom, Completely Meat Circle, and Cabbage Pot Cookies. The rest are slurs for women.
@Jack:
I’ve no idea whatsoever; I’ve never watched anything she’s in, simply because I’ve not gotten around to it. I’ve only watched the first season of TOS and most of TNG. Looking over her Memory Alpha article, I can’t find anything particularly morally bankrupt about her.
@Handsome
Wait I thought title was for Captain Sisko. Virus bombed a planet so Maquis cannot live on a colony planet, committing a conspiracy to get the Romulans to fight the Dominion, he did alot of things that no other captain would ever do. In the Pale Moonlight is considered to be one of the most divisive of episodes in the entirety of the IP.
@Lady_Zombie
I figured as much. :/ I mean the two reason this person gave off hand was the Tuvik situation and teaming up with the Borg that one time, and I really doubted even with my limited experience and knowledge of Star Trek Kirk and Picard probably have done things equally questionable because there’s no way Star Trek would be that popular of a show if the characters were 100% moral and did everything perfect and shit.
Another reason I figured it was probably because she’s a woman is because one of the people in the comments called Janeway a Mary Sue. And, like, surely you wouldn’t apply that to even Kirk and Picard, especially Kirk?
EDIT: I saw your response and this was a, uh, response to that.
@Ooglyboggles
I have no clue. I’m not much of a Trekky but apparently so is this asshole if he didn’t consider that shit, wow.
My comments keep disappearing. How weird.
@Lady_Zombie
Hmm, it may depend on if you’re posting on mobile or desktop, what browser you’re using and whether or not the site is being a butt because your name has a “_” in it.
I’ve heard that recipe before. Last year’s Desert Bus for Hope had a running theme of neural network/predictive text generated work.
The Ford Focus manual was my favourite:
So, Janeway is the Hilary Clinton of Star Trek?
I don’t actually have anything useful to add. I only watched the original series and TNG. I’m making my way through the various series on Netflix but am only on season 4 of TNG right now.
If we’re making Trek queries though, which series should I watch after TNG? I was thinking I’d do Voyager next but if that’s wrong for some reason, someone let me know please.
Apparently. Nothing like male characters getting a pass while women characters have every fault of theirs put on blast.
I’m sure used to that in the A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones fandom. Daenerys is always given a harder time than the male characters (for rejecting Jorah as much as for her political decisions) and after Joffrey and Ramsay is probably the most hated. Sansa is more hated for being a bratty teen at the beginning of the story than male characters are for killing scores of people.
I’m not all that knowledgeable about Star Trek (I’ve only seen maybe 10 episodes of DS9, out of order, when I was like 8), but I have watched every Voyager episode. I wouldn’t say Janeway was the most morally bankrupt captain, necessarily, but I would say that she was written more inconsistently than the others were. She she would behave in accordance with her deeply held ethical convictions, but what those convictions were, IMHO, changed week to week depending on what the writers needed her to do. My impression was that Janeway would seriously consider moral dilemmas and then come to a conclusion that an earlier version of Janeway would have found repugnant beyond belief.
Hmm, now people are saying that Janeway is “bipolar” because of the way her decisions were made.
I think I’m just gonna mute that YouTube comment before I say something I regret.
@Viscaria
Yeah, apparently the inconsistent writing is a big factor in how people are viewing her, calling her “bioplar” and shit. I wonder if maybe D.C. Fontana not editing the scripts may be a factor in the inconsistencies of her character.
What the fuck. I can’t say I’ve read the books but I’ve seen enough episodes and Daenerys and Sansa are amazing. FFS they’re both teenagers and kept pretty level-headed considering the shit they’ve been through.
@Handsome Jack
Why do people… this.
Yeah, from how you’re describing it, it sounds like they may have some legitimate things that they’re complaining about under the piles of crap, but they’re also being giant jerkbags, so who cares. (They called her a Mary Sue? Really? Why not just say “she’s a captain and a giiiiiirl and I don’t find that believable.”)
Of course, I’m not immune to the whole “female characters must be scrutinized much more carefully than male ones” phenomenon, so my analysis of what is and isn’t legitimate criticism may be skewed by that as well.
Daenerys is worse than Hitler because she had all the slavers in Astapor killed but all the thousands of people that were killed, raped or held captive over a succession war resulting from aristocratic family feuds? Oh well. Kings will be kings, I guess! Euron Greyjoy murders, plunders, and rapes his way through the world? That’s okay because he’s a badass!
Woo-hoo! Something for Resisters who don’t have a fax machine — and still want to communicate with members of Congress. It’s f.r.e.e.!
The Resistance Now: robots join the movement
This week in the resistance
A robot joined the fight to defend Obamacare – which remains in place indefinitely following a stunning defeat for Donald Trump this afternoon.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/24/the-resistance-now-newsletter-resistbot-healthcare-bill
Because neurotypical people care very little about people with mental illnesses and neuroatypical people. You gotta remember these are the people who think every single white dude shooting up shit is “insane” and shit.
@WWTH
“But violence only begets violence. :))) She should have sit down and talk to them. :))) She’s just sunk down to their level sweaty only evil people kill for any reason : ))”
@Handsome :Punkle Stan: Jack
“If you kill them that makes you a hypocrite.”
Why do people keep thinking that the label of “hypocrite” is somehow inherently worse than bigot? It’s words like these that give literary pacifist characters a bad rep. Stupid power fantasies adhering to the dichotomy of pacifism = naive and war = wise.
@Ooglyboggles
Because we fetishise as a culture sticking to your guns no matter the cost. I think it goes back to matyring and shit, so, like, it’s all Christians fault as usual. (Joking a bit btw.)
I’d argue that people think that the labels of “hypocrite” and “bigot” are both bad, but that hypocrisy and bigotry themselves are fine. It’s why people will fight tooth and nail to redefine bigotry such that they aren’t classified as one, rather than facing into it and changing their ways.
numerobis:
Jeez, Americans! “Oh no, some of these angles are not exactly ninety degrees! What eldritch horror!”
Original Topic: I got every one right! Wait, crap, that means I actually understand their mindset far too well. Maybe I need to take some space from trainwreck-watching for awhile.
Later topic: I agree with other posters: Janeway wasn’t the most morally-ambiguous captain, that definitely goes to Sisko, and he was also the most interesting-written one because of it. Janeway, on the other hand, was the worst-written one. Not because of her gender, or actress (who had plenty of complaints about some of the crap she was asked to read), but because the writers for Voyager were horrible. They could not keep her character and her deeply-held convictions straight from episode to episode. If one insisted that she be held as a serious character, then yes, she would have been morally-bankrupt simply because she’d grossly violate every principle she stated over the course of the series, then somehow violate the opposite principle later. But the problem is that you simply can’t accept her as a cohesive character, in part because the writers were in such a tug-of-war over what her principles were supposed to be that they were a complete blur. Whereas when Sisko did something shady, the audience was MEANT to be uncomfortable along with him as he wrestled with the conundrum. It’s clear which of the two concurrent series attracted all the good writers.
What do you guys think of versions that remove the worst of Lovecrafts racism? is it a responsible thing to do, or should his work always be analyzed or even enjoyed responsibly with his racism in mind?
It’s complicated because I think it really is important to understand that about him. Lovecraft should be held accountable for his views, so to speak.
At the same time, if a twelve year old black kid checks out Lovecraft at the middle school library, I think it’d only fair there be a version that doesn’t have horrible racist screeds in it.
I’m kind of pulled in two directions here.
@Victoria
I dont see why there couldn’t be copies for general audiences and scholarly copies that preserve the original text. Just put the more adult and racial charge version behind the desk of the library for people to ask for or at least have copies that have forwards that explain how Lovecraft was pretty bigoted and shit and maybe offer cleaned up versions along side in stores.
I mean people section off porn and crap because it’s “adult”, why not shit that overly racist? (Not just stuff that has racism in it I mean stuff which the works have an obvious racist tone.)
Which actually reminds me: I saw copies of, you won’t believe it, Birth of a Nation in Walmart. So that’s great.
@Handsome Jack
That makes sense. I think a lot of people are shocked when they actually read some of Lovecrafts work and realize how racist he really was.
Like I was reading a collection that specifically didn’t have the really racist stories like “Medusas coils” and whatnot, but I still got a dose of “oh my God, this man really hated anything different from him”
Like even certain groups of white people, like those from the Appalachian mountains, he’d describe in horrifying prejudiced details.
but it was also really brilliant stuff and I could see how so many horror stories and movies are inspired by his work. Like the one about finding a monster in a cave that turned out to be a man, twisted by never seeing the sunlight.