Listener Mail: Morbius Saves Christmas

northeast coast, and I received an email from you. I got it in my hotel room one morning, and it was an email full of the most twisted statements about the characteristics of alligator persons. Talked about what alligator persons do in the bog and fog, the fact that alligator persons have no eyes, that alligator persons have no skin, And I was like, what is this that Rob is

sending me? Uh? And it turns out you were copying and paste ing AI generated stories that you were getting ready to record an interview with the I think at least one of the authors of a book about stories composed by machines, and uh that that you were experimenting with a tool that was linked to the authors of this book, and so I, even though I was on vacation, I was like, well, I've got to play with this a little bit too, And and wow, it's been out

some good stuff I've I've played with AI generated stories before. You various tools people have put together, but I gotta say this is the best one I've ever encountered. Yeah, it's it's quite addictive. So if this is if you want to taste you this, you can go to story hyphen Machines dot net. This is the website for the new book Story Machines, How Computers Have Become Creative Writers

by Mark Sharpell's and Raphael Perez Perez Uh. Tomorrow's episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind is an interview with Mike Sharpell's about the book about the subject of the book. But yeah, on the website here, they have a story generator that's powered by GPT three from open Ai and it has just it's very simple. It's just two little fields. You can put in a title, and you have the option of putting in some text for the story, like an opening line. Then you press you essentially press in

create and uh GPT three will put together a little fiction. Uh, it will. It will create a little story for you, or a fragment of a story. And the results, you know, sometimes they're a little wonky. Sometimes it didn't quite work,

but sometimes it's quite impressive. So I think the first thing you sent me was queuing off of rocky erics and lyrics that you paste it in, and it produced a kind of bone chilling, repetitive, almost religious chant like paragraph of of statements about alligator persons that really did read like it like an ancient Egyptian holy text. Um. Yeah,

I had some fun also putting in Um. I forget what I put in on that one, but there was one where I just put in a line from from some of his lyrics, the lyrics Gremlins have pictures of the Anniversary of Christ. I put that into the title and it it really blew me away. It composed the following quote. The Gremlins have been planning for this day for centuries. They have been watching and waiting, and finally

the time has come. They have pictures of the Anniversary of Christ, and they are going to use them to destroy the world. The Gremlins are going to show the world the pictures of the crucifixion and the world will be destroyed. The gremlins are laughing and celebrating because they know that the world is about to end. I mean,

that's pretty creepy. And it's also better than most AI generated text I've come across in the way that it sort of maintains a sensical nous throughout that you get the feeling from one sentence to the next that the sentences are not only with a valid grammatical structure, but there's some kind of coherent sense of meaning that continues from one statement to another, which a lot of a

I generated text doesn't have. Yeah, it's capable of some some really impressive things, like you can you can put in the first line from a given short story by an author, and it will continue to compose that story in the style of that author in many cases, especially if it's a recognizable style, and it clearly it's So this has got to be drawing from a kind of like corpus of the Internet, because when I have used like proper names or something in a sentence that I input,

it draws in other usually correct information about that proper name that I've put in, or or appropriate associations with that name that are pulled from the Internet. So the first thing I tried to do. I don't have the original text I came up with, but I was just doodling around with this when you sent it to me

one morning. We're getting ready to leave the hotel and I type in um Morbius Saves Christmas and the title because I figured we've reached the point where the more bus memes have have become so overplayed that they're actually good again. They've come full circle. And I don't remember what the opening line was, but I did Morbius Saves Christmas and something, and it came up with a story that I found delightful, though it was a little bit confused.

It seemed to at some point in the story shift to where more Bias was also Santa Claus and people were addressing Morbius as Santa Claus. But I just did it again with with a title and an opening line, and I think it did much better this time. Would you like to hear it? I want to hear it. Yes, So this is Morbius Saves Christmas by the machines. It says twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house,

not a creature was stirring except Michael Morbius. Morbius had been up all night trying to fix the broken Christmas tree. He was exhausted, but he was determined to make it look good for Christmas morening. He had just finished fixing the last ornament when he heard a loud crash from upstairs. He raced up the stairs and found that the tree had fallen over. Morbius was devastated. He had worked so hard on it and it was ruined. Just then he heard a voice from down the hall. It was Santa Claus.

Santa was not happy. He had been waiting all night for the tree to be fixed, and now it was ruined. Santa told Morbius that he would have to replace the tree, and he would have to do it himself. Morbius was too tired to argue, so he just sighed and followed Santa down the hall. Santa put Morbius to work fixing the tree. Every time Morbius tried to take a break, Santa would scold him and tell him to get back to work. By the time Christmas morning came, the tree

was fixed and Morbius looked like a genius. Santa was so happy that he gave Morbius a gift. It was a virus that could kill any living thing. Morbius was shocked and scared, but he knew he had to keep the virus secret. He would use it to kill any creatures that ruined his Christmas. Again, that is wonderful. Like I felt like that could be bound in a book with the with the appropriate illustrations and it would just fly off the shelves. I mean, yeah, that is good.

In fact, if I had not seen it be generated in real time by this tool, I would suspect if somebody just posted that on the Internet that like that was one of those fake ones that like actually a human road and they just said I fed as scripts into an AI and it generated this. You know, you know that joke. Yeah, yeah, but but no, this is really by a machine would kill any living thing, and he would use it to kill anything that ruined his Christmas. Again. Beautiful,

absolutely beautiful. I one thing I enjoyed doing. So there are a lot of ways to play with it, you know, putting in some sort of counterintuitive elements and seeing how it plays out. But I enjoyed toying around and seeing what it would do with prompts or titles that had to do with machines writing books, because how can you resist? And h I found one of the most successful ones I did is that I gave it the title of

a Jorge Louis Borges story, the Book of Sands. So the Book of Sands is an excellent I think US nine seventies short story, uh, the typical Borges and that it's, you know, more about a concept than anything. It's about a book that is infinite, that is in another language, with all sorts of strange writings. It becomes a man's obsession, and then he realizes that it's monstrous and he needs to destroy it. But he realizes he cannot burn it because what happens when you burn an infinite book you

create infinite smoke, and it would destroy the environment. So he has to hide it away in a place where books canna be alone and left alone, and that, of course is a great library. But I figured, okay, I'll give it the Book of Sands as its title, and I gave it a little prompt I wrote, I gave I gave it the following quote. Once a scholar researching and the ancient Library of Zool made an alarming discovery,

a machine that could write books. The machine had been writing boks for hundreds of years by the time he discovered it. The scholar was shocked to see what the subject of these books happened to be. Okay, and then the machines take over and they write the following. The book's theme was the history of each grain of sand on the on the beach. The scholar read the first

page of one of the books with amazement. He told the story of how a particular grain of sand had been formed, how it had been moved by the wind and the ways, and how it had eventually come to rest on the beach. The scholar was amazed that such a thing was possible. He wondered how the machine could

know so much about each grain of sand. The scholar continued to read the books and soon realize that the machine was not just writing about the history of the grains of sand, but was also writing about the future. The machine could see into the future and knew what would happen to each grain of sand. The scholar was terrified. He knew that if the machine could see into the future, he could also see into his own future. He knew that the machine would eventually write a book about him.

The scholar ran from the library and terror he never returned. The machine is still writing its books. It has written millions of them by now. Each book is the history of a grain of sand. Uh, surprisingly beautiful. And that one actually, unlike the others, which are very delightful and pleasing, that one kind of cracks the Turing test, one that I could see that having been written by an actual

human writer. Yeah. Now, of course, one thing that we'll get into in the interview tomorrow is that of many of the things, so a machine is not going to match up to a human in a number of ways. One of the key ones ways that it doesn't match up is it has no morality. It kind of make moral storytelling choices, and it can't uh read back over what it's written and you know, build it up from there. So we have to take all of that into account.

But still these results are quite impressive. I mean, I think also they would be somewhat limited by length, right, because these are each basically a paragraph, and it's going to be kind of a dice roll, like how good the illusion is kept up for the length of that whole paragraph? And uh, and like, I imagine if you get into longer and longer works, you would start seeing the cracks more and more and things would start to

feel wrong. Yeah, yeah, I want to assume so. But with this machine, I think the length limit is something like two words, and sometimes it'll it'll stop before that. Other times it will seem to stop like you're really getting it gets it gets its energy going, and then you're out of words and you have to sort of guess where the computer might have gone from there. Well. Actually, so a funny thing about my my second Morbius Saves Christmas here was that, uh, the first time I tried it,

it stopped in the middle of a sentence. It's it said, uh, you know, Santa was so happy he gave more Beus a gift. It was a virus that could kill any living thing more bus was And then it stopped and I was like, well, wait, how do you get it to keep going? So I just reinput the text it already created, and then said create again, and sure enough, it did give me like two more sentences. Then then we got how he was shocked and scared, and how

he would use it to kill any creatures that you know. Ever, ruined Christmas again. All right, well, I encourage everyone out there listening to this, uh, tune into the episode that airs tomorrow. Uh, and then go and check out this website for yourself, and if you have something, if if in toying around with it, you to create something quite interesting, send it our way. We'd obviously love to take a peek at what you and the machine have put together.

All right, shall we get into the listener mail proper then, Joe, Oh, yes we should. I guess we've got fewer messages than usual this week, but we'll probably have more next week. So uh, first message, this is in response to our episodes on Cauldrons. We did a bunch of those and uh multiple time correspondent Renata got in touch. Renata says Hi Joe Robin Seth. I enjoyed the references to Welsh mythology in the latest Cauldron episode and would love to

hear more episodes involving Welsh mythology. I only recently became aware that Wales has its own rich lore with unique characters and stories. Of course, it shouldn't be surprising for a culture with a long literary history to have a full fledged mythos I was just surprised how little it comes up. Maybe that's because the creatures and characters are

so tricky to pronounce. I could see that. Um. My interest started from watching a mini series called The Owl Service, which I learned about from a documentary about Full Corror. If you haven't seen The Owl Service, I highly recommend it. It's on YouTube and is eight episodes long that the quality isn't great. There appears to be a DVD on Amazon for Region two as well. The plot of the

show involves elements from the Mabinogion. The Owl Service was also a book, but the TV series has strong Wickerman and psychomania vibes and really catches the mood perfectly. Wow, well we're not. You definitely know how to get my attention. Anything that is psychomania meets wicker and I'm on board for that. So I looked this up. Uh, and to clarify, it looks like it was I think a a TV series in the late sixties maybe and it Oh, it's

got that sixties look. There's a guy with a tie that is approximately seventeen miles wide and uh, and his his hair is the flattest. I don't know it seems worth a look. Yeah, this was a Granada television production. Jillian Hills is in it, so yeah, this this, uh, this sounds like something we should take a look a look at, for sure. Renata says in the end, I made it through all four cauldrons, enjoyed it way more

than I thought I would. But just backhanded, I don't know, as always, thank you for the endless hours of entertainment,

best Renata. No, not not backhanded at all. I mean four four episodes about cauldrons, and it may seem like like that's a bit much at first, but then you realize, oh, this it really does go deep, and it's amazing how much we can take cauldrons for granted, you know, it's four episodes of this, you know, all the research we put into it, and I didn't even think of one example of a fantasy, modern pop culture use of cauldrons.

That it was literally staring at me from not only from the bookshelf, but at times the book was on the bed next to me where we record, and it's a Dungeons and Dragon's book currently in print, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. Uh so cauldron right there in the title, there's some wonderful illustrations of various fantasy cauldrons in the book. There's even a version of the Cauldron of Rebirth in that book, ready to go in your Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

But for some reason, I'm just so used to seeing it, I didn't even put connected. I didn't even think, Oh, cauldrons, that's what we're talking about this week. Maybe I should mention this book that's lying next to me. So you have more D and D experience than me, are cauldron's a regular occurrence within the game universe. I'm my D and D group is actually convening this very night, and I don't think we have in poundered one in our

campaign yet. Um. I mean, I guess that you had depends on I guess it's kind of encounterdependent, right, Like if you encounter witches, Yeah, there's gonna be a cauldron, right, and that's just that's just gonna be. It's gonna get dragged in there. Um And uh, yeah, I know, I don't know. There may be specific um like classic adventure modules that that have one, classic storylines that involve one,

but certainly, uh, they're in there in the book. They have the rules created for them, so they're they're easy to plug in, the magical ones, and he the mundane cauldrons. Yeah, you can't have as many as you want. I mean, your character could probably go out and buy one, and it wouldn't be a problem for your dungeon master to facilitate that. Let's see, if it was my character, you probably try to shoplift one. I don't know how you can get a cauldron out under your shirt. Oh yeah,

you would have to have some magic. You'd have done some help from a mage to pull that off. Okay, So Rob, do you want to get into some weird house cinema responses Yeah, let's do it. Let's see what do we have here? We have list your mail from Andrew. Andrew writes, gentlemen, I was listening to your most recent weird House Cinema episode on The Battle Beyond the Stars

this morning on my commute. It was during your discussion of the great film composer James Horner that I glanced up and noticed a vanity plate on the car in front of me. It's simply read Horner. I thought this too much of a coincidence not to write in I have no supporting evidence for this occurrence, So I guess you'll have to take my word for it. I believe you,

because why wouldn't I know? But Andrew continues, Also, there was a brief mention during the episode of the previously covered film Message from Space, wherein Interstellar nuts or seeds transport information across the universe. This reminded me of Kevin J. Anderson's epic space operas Saga of the Seven Sons. In the book series, messages can be sent instantaneously by priests who are mentally linked to massive trees from a specific

planet called world trees. As long as the tree is a board a ship or on a planet, the priests can send a message to any and all other world trees in existence. Not exactly the same, but a unique use of flora to convey information. Not sure why I didn't think of it long ago. Well, that's very interesting. I was. I'm not familiar with this series, have been familiar with the with the author, but but I've never

read this. Yeah, I'm not familiar either. Isn't there some kind of like big magic tree on the Wookie planet and in extended Star Wars canon, Yeah, they do have a big old tree there. Yeah, there's a big tree and uh in Avatar. Oh that's right, Yeah, I mean that they also used that for communication. Oh yeah, they do. Yeah, I mean it's the basic idea of the world tree. You know, this thing that that is a bridge that

connects our world to to heaven. So it makes sense that it would be a way of conveying messages and so forth. And then Andrew has one last paragraph here. Lastly, the first season of the Halo TV show recently wrapped up. I was wondering if a Halo Tech episode was in the cards. The show was a little less than terrific, but I enjoyed it. As an individual who spent much of his teams in whenis playing the video games, I am especially interested in the faster than light travel capabilities

achieved through accessing quote unquote slip space. Also, i'd be interested to hear your take on Hawaii species. Humans who have mastered the art of intergalactic space travel still rely heavily on rattletrap motorcycles and souped up Dodge Magnum's to get around on the ground. I have no Halo knowledge, really. I mean, I've got friends who are into it, but I've never been an Xbox person, so I never got access to the Halo stuff. I well, I you know, I can't complain. I got the last of Us instead.

But Rob you you've you've done Xbox, if you've done Halo. I've never done Halo. It's weird, weirdly enough. I think it's because when Halo was initially really big, I didn't have an Xbox yet, and then after I got an Xbox, I don't know, I was just drawn to other games instead. So, uh, yeah, I don't really have an opinion one way or another. I remember a friend of mine telling me about a really cool episode in the first game where you like

discover a new type of enemy. There's like you think there's one type of enemy, but then there's like a new parasite or something that shows up supposed to be really scared. I remember that having an impact on gamers and people talking about that. Yeah, so I don't know,

maybe I should pick it up. It's there are several of those many, probably of those big game franchises that I just I never never got around to playing, And there's some of them where I'm kind of like, maybe I'll play it if it if it drops to five dollars, I'll pick it up and then and then it and then it doesn't or then it's like, oh, we're on a new system now, Well, if they do an HD remake of it, I'll maybe I'll play it and then they do an HD remake of it and then I'm back.

But it's more than five dollars, so I guess I'll wait it out. Yeah. I remember the Sword also, right, people talking about the Sword multiplayer, like, when you get the sword, you're like unbeatable or something. The ultimate in space age technology, right, yeah, rattletrap, motorcycles, dodge magnums, and swords all right. Yeah. I don't know much about the TV series. I remember reading that it had come out, that it was a big deal, but I haven't even

really read reviews of it. Maybe I just know that it would be a hard sell for family viewing time. Ah yeah, yeah, Okay, let's do one last Weird House message. This is from Jemima. Jemima says, Hi, Robin Joe. I have recently been getting really into your Weird House Cinema podcast. It's so much fun listening to you talk about old movies i've never heard of, then tracking them down so I can experience the glorious weirdness for myself. Thank you

for that. Coincidentally, I've been rewatching my favorite Nickelodeon cartoon, The Angry Beavers. Imagine my delight when you mentioned the cartoon in one of your old episodes, and then my horror when you said that you have seen it. B movie, horror and sci fi parodies are a staple of the series. You have to see it. I'm sorry, I don't even

remember what episode we mentioned the Angry Beavers in. Uh. Maybe it was a voice actor who who had a crab and we mentioned because we often mentioned credits, some of which we've seen, some of which we have. Not that that makes sense. Uh well, okay, so Jemima continues. My favorite example is The Day the World God Really Messed Up, which is a dedicated half hour alien invasion mind control parody starring veteran actors of the genre. Which is how Oh I'm sorry, I should read ahead, which

is how it came up on Weird House. Oh. I guess it still holds true that I don't remember what episode this was, though I've linked the IMDb page for you to check it out. I don't know how you would feel about doing a weird house cinema review of an Angry Beaver's mini movie. But I think you'd have a lot of fun talking about all the references and homages if you did, I'd certainly enjoy listening to it. Jemima from Australia, ps. The Last Unicorn is my favorite

movie of all time. Maybe not quite weird enough for the show, but thanks for giving it so many shout outs and pointing listeners in the right direction. Okay, So I look up this Angry Beaver's uh sci fi parody you mentioned, and it does have the voices of Peter Graves and Adrian Barbou, who I think could very well have come up in movies we covered on the show at some point. I know we've we've made fun of the Peter Graves monologue from It Conquered the World at

least five hundred times. Doing a quick search on all my notes, it looks like it probably came up in our episode on Not of This Earth. Oh okay, and as I as I, as I zoom in even even more into my notes, it looks like we were talking about Jonathan Hayes or actually I think you you brought up this connection and you played Jeremy a quote, no good creep who works for the alien. Oh yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, so apparently did a lot of Corman

movies and then shows up in Angry Beavers. Well, so, I vaguely remember The Angry Beavers from when I was a kid, and I would not have expected that was what it was about. I don't think I ever really watched it, but it Yeah that this comes as a surprise. Well, and now I'm interested to check it out now that I know that they have this is a staple of calling back to these various old movies. I would have assumed it was a standard you know, zoinks cartoon headbasher.

All right, well, thanks for writing in. Uh. It's great to hear from everybody here and and definitely keep it coming. We'd love to hear your AI generated stories. We'd love to hear your thoughts on current, past and future episodes of stuff to blow your mind, a Weird House Cinema listr mail, and our our artifact Monster Fact episodes all of its fair game, you know, also episodes you'd potentially

like to hear in the future. Let us know we're always eager to hear from you listener Mail publishes every Monday on Stuff to Blow Your Mind in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed, which you can find absolutely in where you get your podcasts. If you are somewhere digitally or physically and you can get podcasts there, you can you can almost certainly get this podcast. Just ask for it by name. Huge thanks as always to

our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.