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#TITAA 50.5: Monsters are Monstrous

Max Ernst's Collages - Multi-Character Agent Tools - Surreal Animation - Cheese & UFOs - Cluster Labeling Tools

Lynn Cherny

Jan 15

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Max Ernst plate — *From Max Ernst’s collage novel “A Week of Kindness,” Vol 3 (MoMa)*

My mid-month newsletter always has more “weird” than usual. In the past two weeks, I’ve coincidentally seen a bunch of papers or articles on “monsters.” A brief recap before the extravagent linkfest of awesomeness! (And a web link, if you prefer it.)

The intro picture comes from Max Ernst’s 1933 collage novel A Week of Kindness, which have an Edward Gorey-esque vibe, especially Volume 3, “The Court of the Dragon.” You can browse it on MoMa’s site, by which I mean look at every single page, it’s amazing! Ernst used Gustav Doré, fashion mags, and pictures from popular 19th-century novels.

Picture frames in the background discreetly display peculiar images, pistols fire at unseen targets, and reptiles lurk in the shadows. People’s backs are carrying dragon and angel wings, embodying their true inner spirits. In the darkest chapter of his novel [chapter 3], Max Ernst shows us the worst demons of the upper class. [article]

In this work, we see “true” visions of humans as monstrous, much like the way the “real monsters” in zombie shows are the surviving humans eating each other.

A find via Semantic Scholar: In “The (Mostly) Unseen World of Cryptids: Legendary Monsters in North America” by David Puglia, Puglia notes, “The modern age paints a gallery of figurative monsters too—terrorists, criminals, and shadowy figures that embody society’s deepest fears….The evolution of monsters reveals our shifting, sometimes cryptic perspectives on humanity, inclusion, and alienation.” (His paper is excellent, if you’re interested in why we might care to look at folk stories and how Europe’s differ from America’s.)

“The digital age, with its serpentine networks and dots-per-inch, serves as a breeding ground for legends of terror and wonder. Far from relegating monsters to forgotten history, technology might have breathed new life into them, sculpting digital dragons and cyber chimeras.” (—Puglia)

An amuse-bouche on digital monsters: I recommend Rosebud, by Paul Cornell, a good sf novella of “monsters,” some human, some AI, and maybe an alien. “The crew of the Rosebud are, currently, and by force of law, a balloon, a goth with a swagger stick, some sort of science aristocrat possibly, a ball of hands, and a swarm of insects.” Which of these was once human? Does it matter? Well, among the former humans, there are LGBTQ+ characters who were viewed as monstrous in their lifetimes.

In “Are AI Language Models in Hell?” Robin Sloan outright calls LLMs monsters. At least, he sees them as “monstrous” but not in the “bad” sense, more in the way they are cruelly limited as creations. “For the language model, time is language, and language is time. This, for me, is the most hellish and horrifying realization.” The outline he draws speaks more about us as the monsters, of course. Remember people always confuse Frankenstein and his creation. He says, “Really, I just think monstrousness ought to be recognized, not smoothed over. Its contours, intellectual and aesthetic, ought to be traced.”

Which brings me to a work on the way we think about monsters, and “the bad way” of being monstrous: “Why Monsters Are Dangerous (pdf),” an interesting new paper by Olivier Morin and Oleg Sobchuk. They look at concepts of imaginary animals as cognitive anthropologists to investigate why “imaginary animals tend to be frightening, that is, they tend to be monstrous” rather than just “grotesque” or strange. Entities that conflate properties like living and dead (zombies again), or animate/inanimate (haunted houses) may be monstrous — and presumably also large language models might qualify here, as they do for Sloan. But they tackle the question of why monsters often aren’t just anomalous (“category-busting”) but are also scary: monsters are usually predatory. Which takes us right back to Max Ernst’s collage bourgeoisie.

There is a bumper crop of cool stuff below… a bunch of new work on agent character frameworks (with code or code very soon), a ton of cool “weird & esoteric” links, good game recs lists, and a handful of very useful scatterplot labeling tools and some new search/RAG tips & code.

TOC (links on the web page):

AI Art (and Misc Procgen)
Games & Agents (Agent Tools, Games Proper)
Esoteric & Weird Mid-Month List!
NLP & DataVis (Cluster Labeling, Search/RAG)
A Poem...

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