Brief Personal Update: I accepted a new job and moved to Manhattan – more on that later. Critically, I signed a lease on an apartment after 3 years of cybernomadism. I intend to live here for a while, but I want it to feel like a spaceship on the move. Thus, it needs a proper spaceship name patterned after the names in The Culture Series, a post-scarcity intragalactic space opera where each ship has its own advanced AI personality.
GPT-2 is the newest hot shit in text generation, courtesy of OpenAI. I seeded it with the following incredients:
* the entire list of Culture Ship names appearing in literature
* relevant poetry from a witchy collaborator
* my worldbuilding docs
The final name of the ship I chose I’ll hold back for now. Here are the other names GPT-2 and I generated that I didn’t end up using. Please enjoy.
Fittingly, This One Is Still Working
Outlandish Situation (But Not Too Outlandish)
Another Nonsense Factory Item
Painted By A Genius
To Be Continued
This One Looks A Little More Like An Artifact
From The Other Side Of The Universe
About A Very Mysterious Entity
A New Lover From Another Side
Of the Universe This One Will Help Me
The Wizard’s Folly (A Very Serious Thing)
This One Looks Really Fancy
Maybe It Was Something From Another World
In The Woods Where I’m From I Found An Empty Coffin
(Note To Self: Don’t Tell The Kids I Did This.)
End Is Nigh
The Lying Kind Of Love
For You I’d Not Want To Let Go
For In An Attempt So Grand That It Exceeds Comprehension
Perfect Match for My Mood
Determination Of The Dormant Soul
(When You Are Not Looking That Is.)
Aspects About It I Found Out Later
Of Course I Also Liked To Eat
One of the Most Fun Kinds of Travel
You Could Say I Enjoy My Own Company
Outlandishness Aside, What Could I Not Like?
I Love It, It Just Does What It Says
Painted By Its Colors and Form
A Very Serious Case Of “Positivism”
Folly is Fortunate And Irreversible
Aspects Of The Folly Problem Are: The Idea That There Exists an Ultimate Truth
Uncontrollable, but Very Focused On The Present Moment
Some of my favourite space denizens:
(When You Are Not Looking That Is.) sounds like a spy ship,
Determination Of The Dormant Soul is a storage ship in deep sleep,
Painted By Its Colors and Form is an art party ship,
Aspects About It I Found Out Later is an investigator.
2 responses to “GPT-2 and Culture Ship Names”
Did GPT-2 somehow have a built-in tendency to produce names that sounded like self-aware spaceships? How would it do if it was actually trained specifically on Culture ships?
I actually seeded it with a big list of Culture ship names. GPT-2 is set up to behave just like an autocomplete, so I started it with a bullet-point style list of every Culture ship name written, and just got GPT-2 to keep writing. It managed to pick up the content & style and then keep going.