Like many people, Alex Woolner was immediately fascinated by ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot that hit the Monstrous Crochet Creations of ChatGPT Internet in November 2022. But instead of asking him to write a satirical film, poem, or newspaper (OK, not that). Naturally) he turned to his hobby: making cute animals called amigurumi.
“The crochet patterns themselves are like codes,” said Woolner, who works for a study abroad organization that combines the arts with an event called Attack Bear Press.
“I want to see what ChatGPT will produce if I ask it for a crochet pattern.” The result is… well… adjectives like “extreme” come to mind.
His creations (or rather, artificial intelligence) were quickly recognized by viewers: they included Gerald the Narwhal, XL, Newt, and Norma, the normal fish, as well as artificial intelligence experiments with cats, octopuses, and various mollusks.
The problem is that ChatGPT is a form of language; it speaks in words. He doesn’t know what a cat looks like, and he doesn’t even know what crochet is. associate frequently occurring words with training data.
The result is highly logical writing that often fails when subjected to the scrutiny of an expert – a so-called “correct guess”.
Woolner knew right away that ChatGPT’s crochet pattern wasn’t good—the number was off and the piece was too big, attached in the wrong place, or missing. It often reverts to AI to determine colors, place wings or eyes, or interact with random instructions.
The Monstrous Crochet Creations of ChatGPT
Ultimately, he saw his work as a collaborative effort and fun, fearing that intellectuals would wipe out creative expression and destroy habitats. “I think if there’s a way for people and art to continue to create and to approach AI as a tool and as a collaborator, that’s interesting,” he said. “Because then we can begin to explore different forms, new forms of art, and creative expression—things we couldn’t do before or without.”
ChatGPT’s meteoric rise has sparked an intellectual frenzy, raising fears that the technology could disrupt jobs, search engines, and schools. But online designers have discovered one area that is not safe from computers: fiberglass art.
OpenAI
OpenAI – Google on-screen with Microsoft Bing – ChatGPT double image exposure on mobile
Everything you want to know about AI but are afraid to ask
Many TikTok users have applied ChatGPT to write patterns for crocheting, producing “cursing” results that test the limits of AI.
In January, Alexandra Woolner, a TikTok user who has been knitting since 2019, came up with the idea to use ChatGPT to make a stuffed animal – first asking her to write a pattern for a narwhal.
This common crochet style is like coding in its own way, with patterns and punctuation marks to show the creative process. “Ch” is “chain” and “sc” is “single crochet”. Meanwhile, an asterisk (*) means that the statement must be repeated, and brackets [] separate the repeated sequence from the statement.
ChatGPT returned
Woolner was impressed that Monstrous Crochet Creations of ChatGPT returned a comprehensive guide that looked like a pattern. Following that exact pattern, they’ve created what they describe as an “AI-generated crochet narwhal animal.” According to Woolner, while the product is physically confusing, it is interesting that the language-learning tool created the pattern that resulted in the ocean.
ChatGPT’s meteoric rise has sparked an intellectual frenzy, raising fears that the technology could disrupt jobs, search engines, and schools. But online designers have discovered one area that is not safe from computers: fiberglass art.
OpenAI – Google on-screen with Microsoft Bing – ChatGPT double image exposure on mobile
Everything you want to know about AI – but are afraid to ask
Many TikTok users have applied ChatGPT to write patterns for crocheting, producing “cursing” results that test the limits of AI.
Alexandra Woolner
In January, Alexandra Woolner, a TikTok user who has been knitting since 2019, came up with the idea to use ChatGPT to make a stuffed animal – first asking her to write a pattern for a narwhal.
This common crochet style is like coding in its own way, with patterns and punctuation marks to show the creative process. “Ch” is “chain” and “sc” is “single crochet”. Meanwhile, an asterisk (*) means that the statement must be repeated, and brackets [] separate the repeated sequence from the statement.
Woolner was impressed that ChatGPT returned a comprehensive guide that looked like a pattern. Following that exact pattern, they’ve created what they describe as an “AI-generated crochet narwhal animal.” According to Woolner, while the product is physically confusing, it is interesting that the language-learning tool created the pattern that resulted in the ocean.
“The consensus among those who saw it was that it was bad and ugly, but it was also very good,” they said. “It came out shockingly when it was so bad. It was a strange combination, an uncanny valley.
The Monstrous Crochet Creations of ChatGPT
Human intelligence has a hard time deciphering crochet patterns because they rely on numbers, says Jessica Newman, director of the Security Intelligence Center at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity.
ChatGPT is a large form of artificial intelligence, meaning it is trained on a large database of text to simulate human communication, predicting the words coming from behind. These skills are not easy to translate into numbers. The result? ChatGPT is not good at math.
“It may seem paradoxical that computational systems would be bad at math and good at creativity, but this reveals an important fact about generative AI systems in general: they don’t understand context,” Newman said. “They don’t know what words or numbers really mean, they predict things to come.”
“Like a Stranger”
To delve into our own ChatGPT crochet journey, we asked Guardian editor and crocheter extraordinaire Diana Ramirez-Simon to try out the narwhal and assess whether the app’s capabilities have improved since Woolner’s first attempt in January. The results do not convince me that ChatGPT is better at creating crochet patterns.
“It’s funny,” Ramirez-Simon said of the AI-generated narwhal. “After reading the chapter, it was clear that it wasn’t going to be anything animal. It was almost extraterrestrial.”
