A name only made better by the ship class, "Psychopath"!
Talking of which. I really love how the class names of the various warships are, lets say, less than subtle. Something of a self referential reminder that in war, one must accept that you're always the villain of someone's story, and war is never pretty.
How much of this is the AI doing work and how much of it is the author cherrypicking 20 names out of 1000? I still think it's remarkably impressive that an AI can do this, but it's good to put it into perspective.
GPT-2 generated text in general has much higher signal-to-noise ratio on output. (about 10% are good, which is much, much better than the 1% with RNN approaches)
Holy shit those are close to culture names. Weeeeird. I wonder how Banks thought up the names for his ships? He did a good enough job of it that the Halo writers were inspired by it and followed in the same vein. It's a departure - before Banks, sci fi authors (think star trek for example) just followed navy naming conventions.
I really would like to learn enough to play with these tools as the author as, sounds great fun.
The Colab notebook linked in the article (which I made) is designed to make it as user-friendly as possible to finetune GPT-2 and generate text from it. Unfortunately "as possible" is load-bearing in this case, as GPT-2 is slightly more difficult to work with.
In the case of short-form content like this, using a single-column CSV with each document as a row will automatically prepend/append the texts with appropriate start/stop tokens, which you can then force the model to generate text within those bounds and regex out the text you want. (this is what gpt-2-simple does with the prefix, truncate, and include_prefix parameters to generate())
Truth And Reconciliation, Undiminished Entelechy, Pillar Of Autumn, Forward Unto Dawn, Say My Name, In Amber Clad, Ready Or Not, Glasgow Kiss, Do You Feel Lucky, Tripping Light...
Hand Me The Gun And Ask Me Again (and the whole first list on the page) are examples of names from The Culture, not actually AI generated. Protip: Don't Ask fits it nicely though!
Semi-related fun fact - SpaceX's landing barge names are taken from these: Just Read the Instructions, Of Course I Still Love You, and (under construction) A Shortfall of Gravitas.
I imagine the Ramp of Lies is so named because nearly every hold is deceptive. Many seemingly decent crimpers are just tricks of light and shadow, the jugs are all remarkably less positive than they look, and even the problem itself seems slabby but is actually on a gravity hill.
Just FYI, if you follow the links, it tracks back to the same blog. As do many/most internet posts about "weird AI names for things", at least in my experience.
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I've had a good time this morning (re-)reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_in_the_Cult....