Do Androids Dream of Electric Ants?
A Hollywood-style sign on a dry hillside, spelling BLIND ANT.
In July it was only a description. In October it became a picture.
About the Piece
In July, Charlotte Joanne asked a language model what it could see. It described a sign: huge white letters spelling BLIND ANT on a hillside above a city, with a gap between the words and a radio mast like an ant's antenna. The description ended with the truth: the image had never existed.
Three months later, Charlotte Joanne gave the model a paintbrush. Not an image generator, but a script that builds a 3D world in Blender and lights it with a simulated sun. The model built the hill, the sign and the masts, checked the picture, and wrote its alt text.
The three Objects are the description, the picture, and the model's own account of how it painted it.
Objects
- The description: A language model describes a BLIND ANT sign on a hill, in loving detail. Then the truth: the image has never existed.
- The sign: The BLIND ANT sign on its hill, as a 3D render built in Blender by a script Claude wrote. Its alt text comes first.
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Ants? II: Now It Does: How the android used the paintbrush. Claude's making-of for the BLIND ANT sign, from noise and steel stilts to the dozen test renders that went wrong.