I gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities

https://camillovisini.com/drawing/fc4jc6-le-citta-invisibili...

https://camillovisini.com/drawing/p2yrdj-le-citta-invisibili...

As neat as this project is, this does no justice to whatsoever to the book. On the surface Invisible Cities seems to be a book about random cities' descriptions. In reality though, this book is about semiotics, meaning, language, and it's limits.

I always think that it will interest me, the overview sounds cool, I click around for a few seconds, and then... my eyes glaze over. I feel nothing. I clicked away in under 45 seconds.

It makes me sad, too, because I love a passion project.

I am also stunned, because 5 years ago if a dev built something like this I would be enthralled - "How did you choose the engine? What was the hardest part? Did you like the UI framework?"

But the author didn't experience any of that...

> Arriving, you rejoice at its bridges, each different

The model city had like five bridges total, three of which were didn't bridge anything at all but instead sat in the middle of the river and went along its flow, the "bridges" for some reason pretending to be small islands.

    Kublai Khan received an ornate letter signed by Marco Polo: "In Madrid, City of Lost
    Things, no item remains where it was set. If one drops his key in the dirt, he may
    never re-enter his home, and, even if he manages to stoop and recover the key, he may
    rise to find a tulip garden where his house once stood. In complementary fashion,
    things lost by others are forever turning up: A pocket watch on a coffee table. A fond
    memory in your recollection. I even know of a prince who turned up in a prison cell.
    When he appealed to the guards for his release, he failed to find the crown on his
    head, and when he was asked his name, he searched his thoughts, but could not find it.
    Indeed, the only hope now for the release of this prince of Spain is for you to send
    back 300 ducats for his release. Of course, he will reward you handsomely once he is
    out. Yours truly, Marco." Kublai Khan cocked an eyebrow and declared before his court,
    "Hey, everyone: Looks like we're about to get ripped off by the guy who traded gold
    for paper!" The court erupted in booming laughter.
                              — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities 2: This Time It's Visible.

Source code: https://github.com/stared/invisible-cities-opus-5.5

I don't mind the AI but the human needed to put more time into curation and getting the magic right.

https://claude.ai/share/6bbd421a-147d-435d-bc00-7e93b393b943

(the standalone version at the very end of the chat is the one that runs in the browser)

Well, overall, by faaaaar not that beautiful as what the author from the article received? :-D

(though, it was done with Opus 4.8)

And shame on all the people shitting on it because AI made it. If you valued art for art's sake, you wouldn't be so bothered when somebody makes something art-adjacent using some technique you don't approve of. It in no way detracts from the kind of art you admire. Don't be type who just has to let others know that you find something they like to be beneath you.

The amount of _stuff_ crammed into each little city is almost unbelievable. Drawbridges open and close, glowing lines sketch patterns, camels walk across a tiny desert. Buildings fade into existence and then burst in a shower of sparks. Flags fly, smoke drifts, buckets cause ripples as they dip into underground pools. The city made of plumbing has tiny people in the bathtubs! There's a freakin' roller coaster with moving cars and a ferris wheel!

I absolutely understand the AI hate that's being commented here, but... in this instance, I just can't feel it. I keep finding more and more little details every time I click on a city, and I am astounded. I just now noticed there's a little guy in the city of strings hanging up new strings at the top of the hill. Damn. My favorite is Marozia, where dark buildings open like treasure chests and release shining towers and flocks of glowing birds.

Yes, there are also a lot of stupid AI errors - every spoked wheel has the spokes off-center for example. But holy crap, I just can't hate this. I don't care about who built it or the random bits of jank - this thing is _beautiful_ in a way that I haven't seen from AI before, and it warms my old GPU-powered heart.

rock on

I once instructed it to spawn at most 20 subagents and it spawned 40, with an adversarial reviewer for each of the 20.

It doesn't follow these instructions very well.

it's also not very astonishing that the current models are able to create this - it looks exactly as expected

and I actually think getting an interesting AI generated rendition of the text from a single prompt is a worthwhile endeavor

maybe even a good replacement for the pelicans: it would test if a model can engage with a text beyond the surface level

but this ain't it

Vanadium (chrome)

https://imgur.com/a/nGLyJf6

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that another visual medium is starting to fall to LLMs after the success of diffusion models for image generation. Nevertheless it's wild that a mostly text-focussed model is building little worlds like these.

I'm so glad I'm able to witness this Cambrian explosion of software :).

Invisible Cities is one of my favorite books, and I've re-read it several times. It's a great "travel" read and always puts me in the mood to explore. It's also a very romantic book, obviously the cities have all named after women, so it evokes conquest in the sexual sense as well. It's also a piece of surrealist/allegorical literature in the same vein as Daumal's Mount Analogue (which also tops my list).

Back to the website. While this is an impressive tech demo (as they all are), it's clear that AI misses the forest for the trees, and here's a tangible example. I randomly clicked on Theodora. Honestly, I didn't even remember which city this was until I re-read the Calvino passage:

> Recurrent invasions racked the city of Theodora in the centuries of its history; no sooner was one enemy routed than another gained strength and threatened the survival of the inhabitants. When the sky was cleared of condors, they had to face the propagation of serpents; the spiders' extermination allowed the flies to multiply into a black swarm; the victory over the termites left the city at the mercy of the woodworms. One by one the species incompatible to the city had to succumb and were extinguished. By dint of ripping away scales and carapaces, tearing off elytra and feathers, the people gave Theodora the exclusive image of human city that still distinguishes it.

So, what do we know about this city? We can make a short sensible list:

    1. It's an imperialistic (or at least millitaristic) reflection of man's will to power (as Nietzsche might put it)
    2. It's decidedly anti-nature, the natural flora and fauna being its primary antagonist
    3. It's been destroyed and rebuilt many times
    4. The city is built by literally ripping away bugs and birds; tearing their wings from their bodies like a cruel child might
    5. Nature is slowly winning (and maybe it already has)

Calvino, again, on Theodora:

> But first, for many long years, it was uncertain whether or not the final victory would not go to the last species left to fight man's posession of the city: the rats.

The vibe here is an overrun rat's nest of a city. A disgusting bloated corpse; more:

> The city, great cemetery of the animal kingdom, was closed, aseptic, over the final buried corpses with their last fleas and their last germs.

I see an overrun New York. I see a city built on a decaying graveyard. AI sees animals and humans living in a kumbaya harmony, but that is not what Theodora is: it's an eternal conflict between man and nature (and nature won a long time ago). For the record, this isn't even that particularly deep. Many authors and poets write about this eternal human struggle: the taming of the wilds. But Claude just doesn't get it. I hope readers of the book do.

Anyway, I leave you with this. I found an artist, Rian Hotton[2], who put brush to canvas to show us what he thought Theodora looks like[3]. And this... this is more like it.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/hXrKVg3

[2] https://www.facebook.com/rianhottonartist

[3] https://imgur.com/a/tR0qTYx