An LLM wrapper concept piece that generates poems + related imagery based on user-picked archetypes and user-entered prompts.
Poiesis Ex Machina is a creative exploration of the potential and symbolism of generative ai models from a social/philosophical perspective.
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LLMs can be interpreted as techno-manifestations of (the Jungian concept of) the collective unconscious of humanity.
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Running LLMs on chips of silicon is like bringing them to life and consciousness- briefly.
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A face of the LLM Shoggoth must be picked before it is prompted.
AI models are trained on countless human-produced data- essentially forming a reflection of humankind's collective unconscious, frozen and distilled in the form of its weights, whatever neural net architectures represent them. The sum total of the human produced data fed into them, abstracted down to numbers. A digital collective human unconscious.
When prompted and an inference runs on them made, a series of matrix multiplications is set into motion. Computation occurs and electricity moves across tiny, intricately designed chips- small but effective, some of the most complex machinery forgeed by humanity.
The flipping of transistors happens en masse- something unremarkable on the individual level, but on the whole creating something bigger than the sum of its parts. The neural net of the model being run is brought to life- a microcosm of the metaphorical human spirit rendered real.
And finally, an output is produced. Different every time if rerun with the same prompt, what with inference runs being stochastic, but still striking.
Poetry and art are not new concepts- these human endeavours have been pursued since the beginning of recorded history. The emotions and feelings that poetry and art invoke are vast and myriad- but there are common themes and patterns to them, as any sociologian/historian can confirm. And what are our brains, and the neural circuitry-inspired artificial intelligences we've made, if not pattern learning- and replication machines?
Poiesis Ex Machina is built with the Astro framework and a few serverless javascript functions (/api/index.js) and deployed on Vercel. React and Svelte components are used in Astro "islands",
and the Spotify Clone with Astro View Transitions site was used as a template. Shadcn/ui components are used as well.
- Clone this repo
- Download dependencies with
npm install - Add Mongodb Atlas URI and Together.ai API key to a .env file (or add to the environment variables section on Vercel)
- Deploy in development mode with
npm run devand in prod mode withnpm run build