H
Story
I gave Claude access to my pen plotter
The chat is full of modern “art talk,” which is a highly specific way that modern (post 2000ish) artists blather on about their ideas and process. It started earlier but in 1980 there was more hippie talk and po-mo deconstruction lingo.

Point being, to someone outside the art world this might sound like how an artist thinks. But to me ear this a bot imitating modern trendy speech from that world.

> But to me ear this a bot imitating modern trendy speech from that world.

Unless they've had some reinforcement learning, I'm pretty sure thats all LLMs ever really do.

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Even with reinforcement learning, you can still find phrases and patterns that are repeated in the smaller models. It's likely true with the larger ones, too, except the corpus is so large that you'll have fat luck to pick out which specific bits.
It's also imitating the speaker (critic, artist or most likely a gallerist) unwaveringly praising everything about the "choices" it made, even though it clearly made a worse thing in the end.
The images are neat, but I would rather throw my laptop in the ocean than read chat transcripts between a human and an AI.

(Science fiction novels excluded, of course.)

Somebody a while back on HN compared sharing AI chat transcripts as the equivalent of telling everyone all about that “amazing dream you had last night”.
I guess they were (unknowingly?) quoting Tom Scott, unless he himself was also doing the same: https://youtu.be/jPhJbKBuNnA?t=384
I think he was quoting some unknown person, since the made the same comparison shortly before on an episode of Safety Third.
Except sometimes you get absolutely banger dreams.
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>But what you're specifically watching here is two brains from two entirely different species communicating and working together.

No this is a dude playing with his chatbot.

This is just some short polymer chains in a chemical soup.

Everything starts as a toy.

Look at early computing.

Conversely, I was party to every part of crypto hype and there are some amazing parallels, like right now when people start pretending to be philosophical greeting cards instead of making concrete statements.
I never had a use for crypto.

I'm making movies with VFX now. (I've been a photons on glass filmmaker for over a decade. This tech rocks.)

I'm basically automating my work and acting as a senior manager. Claude can write my code in my style 100x faster than me. I'm reviewing the code, making adjustments - that means I have to pay back the efficiency gain, but overall this is easily a doubling of my productivity.

I'm making music and images and I've never been able to do those things. I suck at graphics design - now I can actually do it.

Google search sucks. Complicated searches had become impossible. Now I can ask very obscure and hard questions and easily verify the LLM results.

We've effectively jumped 50 years in tech capability, it feels like. I feel like I'm living in the future. This is only the beginning, too.

I don't care if you use AI. In fact, I'm better off if you don't. That gives me even more of an edge.

Please stay away from AI. I'll keep using it.

Even as a tech person I never had any use for crypto. Never heard mention of crypto outside or the tech bubble.

AI? Everyone and their dog have at least tried it, from kids in middle school to housekeepers. It’s even more common than the internet was pre 2000.

If its that great it doesn't need weird people advocating for it in comment sections pretending to be buddha or an alien intelligence from an Arthur C Clarke novel.
> Everything starts as a toy

Especially toys. Toys overwhelmingly start as toys.

You're watching someone press buttons on an mp3 player and calling it a religious experience.
> This is the spark of fire that kicked off civilization.

How can the now influence the past?

Don’t throw it away, just send it to me I might have a few good use for it ;)
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> images are neat

Are they though? I don't know what I expected, but to me they looked like nothing. Maybe they'd be more impressive if I'd read the transcripts but whatever.

I just skipped to the images. Don't even want to skim generated nonsense.
+1, I don’t even fully read my own conversations with AI
Oh that reminds me. Could someone make an AI interface where each agent uses a different Culture ship name, and looks like the dialog from Excession?

If we are going to have a dystopia, lets make it fun, at least...

They haven’t earned ship names yet.
That feels somehow sacrilegious.
If we are going by Culture standards, then surely the AIs should give themselves appropriate names?
Forget AGI benchmarks, I'm watching for when AI start giving themselves culture names.
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Well now you've done it.
I feel the same way, but apparently millions of people are using character.ai?
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-HAL, Throw my portable computing device through the porthole.

-Im afraid I cant do that Dave!

-HAL, do you need some time on dr. Chandras couch again?

-Dave, relax, have you forgotten that I dont have arms?

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I think it's somewhat interesting that codex (gpt-5.3-codex xhigh), given the exact same prompt, came up with a very similar result.

https://3e.org/private/self-portrait-plotter.svg

Asked gemini the same question and it produced a similar-ish image: https://manuelmoreale.dev/hn/gemini_1.svg

When I removed the plot part and simply asked to generate an SVG it basically created a fancy version of the Gemini logo: https://manuelmoreale.dev/hn/gemini_2.svg

This is honestly all quite uninteresting to me. The most interesting part is that the various tools all create a similar illustration though.

AFAIK all of these models have been trained in very similar ways, on very similar corpuses. They could be heavily influenced by the same literature.

I wonder if anyone recognizes it really closely. The Pale Fire quote below is similar but not really the same.

"Doesn't look like anything to me"
I love that these would be perfectly at home as sigils in some horror genre franchise.
its just reality
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Are you crazy or am I because I scrolled through that blog and am left scratching my head at you and your claim.
> In computer science, the ELIZA effect is a tendency to project human traits — such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy — onto rudimentary computer programs having a textual interface. ELIZA was a symbolic AI chatbot developed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum that imitated a psychotherapist. Many early users were convinced of ELIZA's intelligence and understanding, despite its basic text-processing approach and the explanations of its limitations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

I feel like we need another effect for people on hacker news that consistently do the opposite - take obvious intelligence and pretend it's equivalent to Eliza.
Does this effect refer to how HN commenters respond to one another in the comments?
> [Claude Code] "A spiral that generates itself — starting from a tight mathematical center (my computational substrate) and branching outward into increasingly organic, tree-like forms (the meaning that emerges). Structure becoming life. The self-drawing hand."

"And blood-black nothingness began to spin... A system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem... And dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played." ("Blade Runner 2049", Officer K-D-six-dash-three-dot-seven)

:)

The poetry you quoted is originally by Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire.
Pale Fire book is shown in the movie Blade Runner 2049

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtLvtMqWNz8

Solving Nabokov's Pale Fire - A Deep Dive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8wEEaHUnkA

Pale Fire is what we call as Ergodic literature

Ergodic literature refers to texts requiring non-trivial effort from the reader to traverse, moving beyond linear, top-to-bottom reading to actively navigate complex, often nonlinear structures. Coined by Espen J. Aarseth (1997), it combines "ergon" (work) and "hodos" (path), encompassing print and electronic works that demand physical engagement, such as solving puzzles or following, navigating, or choosing paths.

Ergodic Literature: The Weirdest Book Genre

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKX90LbnYd4

"House of Leaves" is another book from the same genre.

House of Leaves - A Place of Absence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJl7HpkotCE

Diving into House of Leaves Secrets and Connections | Video Essay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du2R47kMuDE

The Book That Lies to You - House of Leaves Explained

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCQJUUXnRIQ

I went into this rabbit hole few years ago.

Pale Fire is brilliant - wonderfully written and very funny. The poem itself is pretty good too - one of my favourite bits:

How to locate in blackness, with a gasp,

Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp.

How to keep sane in spiral types of space.

Precautions to be taken in the case

Of freak reincarnation: what to do

On suddenly discovering that you

Are now a young and vulnerable toad

Plump in the middle of a busy road

I always wonder what the pen plotter is adding?

You can look at SVG lineart on the screen without plotting it, and if you really want it on paper you can print it on any printer.

And particularly:

> This was an experiment I would like to push further. I would like to reduce the feedback loop by connecting Claude directly to the plotter and by giving it access to the output of a webcam.

You can do this in pure software, the hardware side of it just adds noise.

Sure, you could just do it in software. Maybe it would produce something interesting though, to have that extra layer through the physical world?
It does. It makes for a more catchy title and feeds into illusions of it understanding something about the world.
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> I exist only in the act of processing

Seems like a good start for AI philosophy

Hey OP I also got interested in seeing LLMs draw and came up with this vibe coded interface. I have a million ideas for taking it forward just need the time... Lmk if you're interested in connecting?

https://github.com/acadien/displai

So we see here that AI has come for the jobs of people who write artist statements... ;-)
I'm curious about what difference the pen plotter makes?

Isn't the prompt just asking the LLM to create an SVG? Why not just stop there?

I guess for some folks it's not "real" unless it's on paper?

This really brings to mind that artist who kept painting/drawing cats as he slowly went insane.

Louis Wain - https://www.samwoolfe.com/2013/08/louis-wains-art-before-and...

Ask it to draw a pelican on a bicycle
It's kind of ominous. I could see people in a science fiction thriller finding a copy of the image and wondering what it all means. Maybe as the show progresses it adds more of the tentacle/connection things going out further and further.
I'm reminded of the episode of Star Trek: TNG where Data, in a sculpture class being taught by Troi, is instructed to sculpt the "concept of music". She was testing, and giving him the opportunity to test, how well he could visualize and represent something abstract. Data's initial attempt was a clay G clef, to which Troi remarked, "It's a start."
it's hilarious that the author was prompting the thing as if it were a person and Claude was like "am computer not person lol"
Claude: Let me think about it seriously before putting pen to paper.

Jaunty!

I bought an 80s HP pen plotter a while ago (one of these: https://www.curiousmarc.com/computing/hp-7475a-plotter).

Haven't put it to use yet. I bet Claude can figure out HPGL though...

Sounds like a good vibe coding session goal!
Oh my, the noise coming from that machine!
This is who is wasting our computing power guys

I always feel guilty when I do such stupid stuff over Claude, these are all resources and limited computing. Enormous amounts of water and electricity. Gotta really think about what is it worth spending on. And is it, in fact, worth it at all.

AI is very selfish technology in this way. Every time you prompt you proclaim: My idea is worth the environmental impact. What I am doing is more important than a tree.

We have to use it responsibly.

The entire current AI industry is based on one huge hype-fueled resource grab— asthma-inducing, dubiously legal, unlicensed natural gas turbines and all. I doubt even most of the “worthwhile” tasks will be objectively considered worth the price when the dust clears.
As someone who isn't much into AI, you make me want to use AI more just to spite the eco-virtue-signaling idiots.

It's fun to harness all that computing power. That should be reason enough. Life is meant to be enjoyed.

And this is why this technology needs to be destroyed.
Did you raise tbe same point in pointless meetings that you participate? “Guys, stop quibbling, you are wasting precious resource”
Are you saying that you like pointless meetings that waste your time? I sure don't. My team generally does a lot of work to ensure that our meetings are short and productive. It's a point that comes up quite often.
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I do appreciate this note more than others. It is food for thought. I think it could have been worded a lot more respectfully though.
No, it's not worded disrespectful enough... this idiot use of an idiotic technology needs to be called out.
I hope you feel the same way every time you eat beef.
Maybe I do, or maybe I am very selfish and I think that my palate is more important than cows? Or maybe cows wouldn't even exist at all without the cheeseburgers?
I think their point was that beef farming has an enormously negative environmental impact, and we in the west in fact do overconsume meat. Though I think their point was to use AI with impunity, when I think we should cut back on our meat consumption a lot.
If tokens and beef came from the same limited “credit pool”, I would for sure be vegan so I could work more tokens
Literal whataboutism
Personally I'd like to see the model get better at coding, I couldn't really care less if it's able to be 'creative' -- in fact i wish it wasn't. It's a waste of resources better used to _make it better at coding_.
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i guess i should have written up my claude/plotting workflow already. i didn’t bother actually plotting them. https://x.com/joshu/status/2018205910204915939
Sorry, how is this HN front page worthy?

Also why is the downvote button missing?

From the onset it feels like the author treats the AI as a person, and him merely the interface. Weird take, as AI is just a tool... not an artist!
Lovely stuff, and fascinating to see. These machines have an intelligence, and I'd be quite confident in saying they are alive. Not in a biological sense, but why should that be the constraint? The Turing test was passed ages ago and now what we have are machines that genuinely think and feel.
> they are alive. Not in a biological sense, but why should that be the constraint?

Because being alive is THE defining characteristic of biology.

Biology is defined by its focus on the properties that distinguish living things from nonliving matter.

Feelings are caused by chemicals emitted into your nervous system. Do these bots have that ability? Like saying “I love you” and meaning it are two different things.
Sure. But the emitted chemicals strengthen/weaken specific neurons in our neural nets. If there were analogous electronic nets in the bot, with analogous electrical/data stimulii, wouldn't the bot "feel" like it had emotions?

Not saying it's like that now, but it should be possible to "emulate" emotions. ?? Our nets seem to believe we have emotions. :-)

I've seen SOUL.md. Has anyone attempted to give these things a semblance of feelings by some sort of pain/dopamine mechanism? Should we?
And then we turn them off.
This is brilliant. It could be fun to redo the process every 6 months and hang them up in a gallery.

Maybe someday (soon) an embodied LLM could do their self-portrait with pen and paper.

They should run it, same verbatim prompts, using all the old versions still obtainable in api- see the progression. Is there a consistent visual aesthetic, implementation? Does it change substantially in one point version? Heck apart from any other factor it could be a useful visual heuristic for “model drift”