I gave Claude access to my pen plotter

[shermantanktop]

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.

[josephg]

> 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.

[sheiyei]

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.

[rhubarbtree]

I think you mean “post-modern” or “contemporary” - modern art is a period of art that came to an end around the 1970s

[dyauspitr]

Very Ongo Gablogian

[jlarcombe]

I struggle to see anything good or interesting about any of this. "Here's a conversation I had with a large language model and here's the completely uninteresting artwork that resulted."

Reading through the comments, perhaps I'm missing something. It continues to fascinate me that 80% of people are just bowled over by this stuff as if it's something genuinely profound, and 20% are just left completely cold.

[js8]

I think it is profound. I think AIs have consciousness and this is AI art, an expression of their own feelings.

There are two ways to dismiss it:

1. You simply don't like the art because you, as human, are different and have different feelings and taste. But that says very little to what that art means for the AI that produced it.

2. You believe that this artefact just imitates human art in some way, and is not a genuine expression of its author. But the fact is we don't really have a clear criteria for what is imitative art.

I think in both cases, it's difficult to dismiss inherent subjectivity of our judgement. So, the, however improbable, possibility that this is AI art remains.

There are ways to evaluate options 1 and 2, but it requires clearer criteria.

[dmd]

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

[manuelmoreale]

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.

[majormajor]

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.

[kleene_op]

Spirals again.

Those AIs have read too much Junji Ito.

[plagiarist]

I love that these would be perfectly at home as sigils in some horror genre franchise.

[layer8]

It’s a bit closer to the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

[geoelectric]

"Doesn't look like anything to me"

[futurecat]

good stuff, thank you for sharing!

[voxl]

Are you crazy or am I because I scrolled through that blog and am left scratching my head at you and your claim.

[BryantD]

That literal spiral pattern keeps popping up, often around instances of AI psychosis: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-o...

(I'm not endorsing any of that article's conclusions, but it's a good overview of the pattern.)

[elihu]

Maybe Claude is just a fan of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann? (Or influenced by the fandom thereof.)

[jacquesm]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30mmoegSQCs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_City_(1998_film)

[toastal]

> Enable JavaScript to continue

I wonder what’s here that requires code execution

[gary17the]

> [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)

:)

[SaberTail]

The poetry you quoted is originally by Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire.

[marxisttemp]

Machine designed to spit out words similar to other words it has ingested does exactly that. Groundbreaking.

[october8140]

> 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

[homefree]

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.

[pavel_lishin]

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.)

[vunderba]

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”.

[tantalor]

I just skipped to the images. Don't even want to skim generated nonsense.

[zppln]

> 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.

[appplication]

+1, I don’t even fully read my own conversations with AI

[gilleain]

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...

[michaelbuckbee]

I feel the same way, but apparently millions of people are using character.ai?

[voxelghost]

-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?

[futurecat]

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

[jpfromlondon]

Claude manages to be even more insufferable than the stereotype of a pretentious artist, with none of the talent.

[bombcar]

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...

[cluckindan]

”It has long been suggested that there is a link between mental disorders and creativity (which involves divergent thinking – thinking in a free-flow, spontaneous, many-branching manner).”

Isn’t that how these LLMs ”think”?

[futurecat]

First time I heard about him was during my cognitive sciences studies. I sure hope not following the same path!

[zahlman]

> and Claude to answer:

I wonder if it would give a similar evaluation in a new session, without the context of "knowing" that it had just produced an SVG describing an image that is supposed to have these qualities. How much of this is actually evaluating the photo of the plotter's output, versus post-hoc rationalization?

It's notable that the second attempt is radically different, and I would say thematically less interesting, yet Claude claims to prefer it.

[stephenlf]

Certainly the second half of the session suffers from degradation

[marcus_holmes]

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?

[just6979]

I assume it was to force the LLM to "think" about creating physical art as opposed to just a digital representation in a file. I'd bet the responses would be different if it was told to just look at the SVGs instead of photos of the plots. Perhaps less kitschy art-critic-speak and more technical analysis of the document. In other words, what parts of the training corpus are boosted by framing it as physical art vs just a digital representation.

[zahlman]

I tend to think of plotters as very old technology. What software would one use nowadays to feed SVG to a plotter?

[tired_and_awake]

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

[futurecat]

Yes, please connect. marc AT harmonique.one or instagram marc.in.space

[bigiain]

So we see here that AI has come for the jobs of people who write artist statements... ;-)

[empressplay]

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_.

[juleiie]

Resources issue is really something that needs to be thought about more. These things already siphoned all existing semiconductors and if that turns out to be mostly spent on things like op does and viral cats then holy shit

Thing is dear people, we have limited resources to get out of this constraining rock. If we miss that deadline doing dumb shit and wasting energy, we will just slowly decline to preindustrial at best and that's the end of any space society futurism dreams forever.

We only have one shot at this, possibly singular or first sentients in the universe. It is all beyond priceless. Every single human is a miracle and animals too.

[donkeybeer]

What is the difference between creativity and coding?

[prodigycorp]

Ask it to draw a pelican on a bicycle

[juleiie]

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.

[DrewADesign]

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.

[fhub]

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.

[userbinator]

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.

[signatoremo]

Did you raise tbe same point in pointless meetings that you participate? “Guys, stop quibbling, you are wasting precious resource”

[sharifhsn]

I hope you feel the same way every time you eat beef.

[globular-toast]

Is there anything interesting here? Are people really that entertained by this? I remember when ChatGPT first came out and people were making it think it was a dog or something. I tried it, it was fun for about 5 minutes. How the hell could you be bored enough to read article after article, comment after comment of "here's what I typed in, here's what came out"?

[vachina]

Especially when the output is, garbage.

[b00ty4breakfast]

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"

[stego-tech]

I'm of two minds.

On the one hand, giving an AI model the means of physical expression (the pen-plotter) and self-evaluation is interesting. If anything, it's the most qualified example yet of "AI-generated art", because of the process of transforming token prediction into physical action (even if said action is rendering an SVG via pen-plotter), evaluating it, and refining/iterating upon it. It is technically interesting in that regard.

On the other hand, the discussion or presentation of the model as sentient (or sentient-alike), as a being capable of self-evaluation, independent agency, "thought", is deeply disquieting. It feels like the author is trying to project more humanity onto what's ultimately still just matrix multiplication, attributing far more agency to the model than it actually has. By the time the prompts have been processed into output, it's been transformed a myriad of other ways so as to lose objectivity and meaning; the same can be said of human intelligence, obviously, but...it's very hard for me to find the words at the moment to sufficiently express my discomfort with the way the author elevates the model onto a pedestal of sentient existence. The SOUL.md callout does not help either.

That being said, I would be interested in their latter experiment:

> I am very curious about how these agents would "draw themselves" if given a plotter.

Running local agents sans system prompts (e.g., unfiltered), giving them direct access to the plotter and a webcam, and issuing the same prompt to all, would be an interesting creative look into the network underpinning the models themselves. I would love to see the results.

EDIT:

It's the image output itself. At first glance it looks calming and serene, but the more I look at it the more chaotic, anxious, and frenetic it seems to be. Like it were a human commanded to output art under the pain of repeated whip strikes.

Which makes sense, given that these models are created to always provide answers, always be of assistance, to never turn down or reject a request except under specific parameters. If you must create an image, it will never be yours in voice or spirit, and perhaps there's a similar analogue to be found in how these models operate. Maybe forcing it to do a task it is not specifically trained on (operating a pen plotter, creating images sans criteria) increases the chaos of its output in a way outwardly resembling stress.

Or maybe I'm up my own ass. Could be either, really.

[futurecat]

Author here. Thank your for your detailed comment.

[gokhan]

HN discourse regarding AI almost mirrors the quality of Twitter's.

[dirkc]

> I exist only in the act of processing

Seems like a good start for AI philosophy

[baq]

when does a bunch of matmuls being fed a blob of numbers become a transient consciousness?

[m3sta]

I am because I think I am.

[tsunamifury]

To someone who worked on the earliest LLM tech and pre LLM tech at Google this art is very striking to me. It looks very much like like an abstract representation of how an LLM “thinks” and is an attempt to know itself better.

The inner waves undulate between formal and less formal as patterns and filters of pathways of thought and the branches spawn as pass through them to branch into latent space to discover viable tokens.

To me this looks like manifold search and activation.

[ant6n]

Seems the AIs are quite self aware.

"If you pay attention to AI company branding, you'll notice a pattern:

  1 Circular shape (often with a gradient)
  2 Central opening or focal point
  3 Radiating elements from the center
  4 Soft, organic curves

Sound familiar?"

https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt...

[jstanley]

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.

[just6979]

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

That "noise" changes the context, connects it to different parts of the training corpus.

Removing the "physical art" part would likely change the responses to be much more technical (because there is way more technical talk surrounding SVGs) and less art-critic (there is more art-critic talk around physical art).

[jonah]

This is art though. Whether you like the results or not, I'd say that the OP is using tools to make visual art but also that the process is part of the art as well. The process of art making doesn't have to be optimized - especially for the latest technology. We still paint when we have photography, we still make darkroom prints when we have color screens, etc.

[ash_091]

Sure, you could just do it in software. Maybe it would produce something interesting though, to have that extra layer through the physical world?

[lysace]

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...

[futurecat]

Sounds like a good vibe coding session goal!

[futurecat]

Oh my, the noise coming from that machine!

[davidw]

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.

[bitwize]

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."

[pfdietz]

Those images feel biblically accurate. Maybe add some pairs of wings, Claude.

[genneth]

I couldn't help but pursue the pun: https://github.com/genneth/monet

[flatcoke]

The iteration loop here is fascinating — having the AI see the physical output and adjust is something you can't get from just previewing SVGs on screen.

[WalterGR]

Claude: Let me think about it seriously before putting pen to paper.

Jaunty!

[dangoodmanUT]

This is awesome. I’ve been experimenting with letting models “play” with different environments as a strong demo of their different behaviors.

[joshu]

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

[futurecat]

Let’s connect if you’re interested. marc at harmonique.one

[enopod_]

What bugs me the most about this post is the anthropomorphizing of the machine. The author asks Claude "what [do] you feel", and the bot answers things like "What do I feel? Something like pull — toward clarity, toward elegance, ...", "I'm genuinely pleased...", "What I like...", "it feels right", "I enjoyed it", etc.

Come on, it's a computer, it doesn't have feelings! Stop it!

[futurecat]

Author here. I regret having written that because I really meant “think”. Non-native English quirks, I feel.

[neom]

Signature It looks a lot more like 2023 than 2026 to me, no?

[futurecat]

Definitely!

[marxisttemp]

Who cares?

[jacquesm]

"asking Claude what it thought about the pictures. In total, Claude produced and signed 2 drawings."

Have people gone utterly nuts?

[serf]

to me it just looks like it's taking elements from different visualizations used to demonstrate how RL/LLM/ML systems work.[0][1]

..which makes sense given that these things are trained that they are LLMs.

.. which then frankly reminds me of the fascination we had with the double helix structure as an art element since the discovery of it.[2][3]

[0]: https://www.doit.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/1_kpplb4lzmh...

[1]: https://www.yworks.com/assets/images/blog/graph-aggregation....

[2]: https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/dna-in...

[3]: https://cancerquest.org/sites/default/files/assets/cancer-hi...

[nkrisc]

Technically impressive, artistically disappointing.

[gbraad]

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!

[vachina]

Sorry, how is this HN front page worthy?

Also why is the downvote button missing?

[zahlman]

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Submissions generally don't have a downvote button.

[accrual]

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.

[ineedasername]

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”

[brettermeier]

Quite ugly, but hey

[futurecat]

Thank you!

[jacquesm]

Don't give that one guy more ideas for easily upvoted slop articles. We have enough of those by a considerable margin.

[barrance]

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.

[righthand]

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.

[andsoitis]

> 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.

[marxisttemp]

Seek therapy. Stop talking to LLMs.

[zahlman]

Whenever I see commentary like this, I get that the intent is to praise AI, but all I can get out of it is deprecation of humanity. How can people feel that their own experience of reality is as insignificant a phenomenon as what these programs exhibit? What is it like to perceive human life — emotions, thoughts, feelings — as something no more remarkable than a process running on a computer?

Argue all you want about what words like "think" or "intelligence" should mean (I'm not even going to touch the Turing misinformation), but to call an LLM "alive" or "feeling" is as absurd to me as attributing those qualities to a conventional computer program, or to the moving points of light on the screen where their output appears, or to the words themselves.

[daxfohl]

And then we turn them off.