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Citizens there gather their tools at the bottom of a giant staircase and climb up countless stairs, only to find out that what they were planning to do has already been done by the time they reach the top.
Dissapointed, they descend to grab a new set of tools and make new plans for tomorrow, only for the same thing to happen again.
> 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.
Opus Eutropia has a few isekai circle cities with one of them... ON the river, giving no space for ship traffic.
Slop has never been this beautiful before!
Citizens of this city high in the sky imagine it so fully in their minds that no one there needs to open their eyes to walk the streets and live their normal lives. But if one makes the mistake of opening their eyes and tries to see the city directly, they would immediately fall through the clouds to the ground deep below.
The website gives you a good hint before opening up the visuals. So, I got an idea.
I don't really know about Marco Polo. My only knowledge comes from the Netflix series, which doesn't talk about these invisible cities.
The book is a trip and the dreamy sort of narration matched it perfectly. My wife and I would spend evenings listening to one city at a time, on a walk around our little park, one headphone in each ear. I don't know if it was just the environment or the time in our lives, but we both really look back fondly on this book.
PS I didn't open the gallery. Nice idea but I don't care about visualizing something I should feel.
How Opus 5.5 imagines these cities is a question for Opus. The real experience is how we imagine - and I believe there are no two people who have exactly the same mental image of an invisible city.
Talk about missing the entire point of the piece of literature.
Having looked at some of them (and it being one of my favorite books) ... it won't do that. These visualizations are as terrible as they are unnecessary.
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.
https://camillovisini.com/drawing/fc4jc6-le-citta-invisibili...
https://camillovisini.com/drawing/p2yrdj-le-citta-invisibili...
One is art. When completed, they can look at it and be reminded of the journey of creation, a labor of love. It could be put away, or displayed for all to enjoy.
With AI generated stuff, sure it looks amazing at first glance but I definitely don’t want to zoom in, since I know it’s all a cardboard facade with no passion. Look a bit too closely and you’ll see the bridges that make no sense, the bunch of nonsensical threejs cylinders etc.
I don't dismiss the ability of models to create. I dismiss their ability to create finished goods. Humans should always be involved, especially with creative works. Models are great at modeling existing creations and solutions — head starts on long roads — but it's the person that needs to walk it and take the journey.
Abandoned one-shot drafts are akin to speaking words but never finishing a sentence before moving onto the next thought. There's no there there.
We're in an environment awash in 'content' where every person has an infinite slop producing machine, and a lot of people are publishing nearly zero effort drafts, awed by the appearance of meaning.
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.
Seeing the same thing done to Calvino (and Weaver's) sublime prose feels downright criminal.
Vanadium (chrome)
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 :).
If something that previously took weeks for a human to design, now takes 10 min, that means a whole week of salary went up in smoke.
When have we automated enough?
The problem also is, if a human took weeks to design this, it would be much better. This is quick but also bad.
To me, this is the depressing sentiment. The idea that, somehow, the goal isn't to produce useful things but to spread work out over a period of time in order to maximize payment.
At a high level,I conceptualize my job as "doing useful things." Whether that's design, writing code, debugging, sysadmin, CI/CD, writing doc, whatever. I just want to be useful. If there's some tool that makes that easier, I am happy about it. I don't think that tool will result in my getting paid less. But if it does, oh well.
For example, I didn't learn about lenses or earthquakes or fusion messing with the controls on these.[1] I didn't know what to look at.
However, there were interactive exhibits at the Children's Museum I spent a long time exploring and loved. That's because they were carefully designed to really teach the concept?
It turns out the more technology you throw at something does not equate to ease of learning.
Put in the hands of the educator, they will be able to add those illustrations, design for the light bulb moment, etc, and the tools at their disposal just got much better.
You'd not be amazed by seeing a 2 sentences prompt and thus you are not amazed by this work either.
I've been thinking of this line recently — really gets at the heart of the matter for me. There is no substitute, no shortcut, no alternative for effort.
Now imagine the same thing but each person is using Opus 5.5 - I’d wager there would be a lot of commonality among each of the outputs.
- Each phrasing the prompt(s) differently
- Each having different history accumulated in context
If you asked me to issue the same prompt as you to write some web artifact, chances are mine would be substantially stylistically different, simply because at some point in the past half-year, Clause started styling everything in LCARS form for some reason.
Whether the differences would be substantial or surface-only? Probably depends, but chances for substance increase with iteration. Real artists don't zero-shot their masterpieces either.
I’m saying if you provide the same prompt to Opus 5.5 across 12 different people, you’re going to get some similarities that immediately arise.
I’ve mentioned this across many HN threads - I call it the LLM corollary to “garbage in, garbage out”: "generic in, generic out". If you prompt with more specificity, you’re obviously going to get different and potentially better results. But at that point, the artist is doing more of the work.
A while back, I tried a similar test asking for LLMs to come up with engaging D&D puzzles that would fit organically into an underground labyrinth environment. This is a pretty general prompt. Let's just say that the results were about as inspired as a tepid bowl of tapioca.
rock on
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.
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.If the creator truly wanted viewers appreciate the end product they'd start with the one shot output and spend their weekend iterating on each city either by hand or with Claude. But they didn't want to do that, they wanted to show off what Claude/GPT could do in 6hrs. That's the whole blog post.
I expect we're going to see more and more amazing "hobby projects" that did involve both a few hundred dollars in tokens and hours of human creativity and effort in combination.
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
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)
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.
Phyllis fades from color to black and white except for two houses. The fairground has a big top with tiny bleachers and a guy inside. The happy city has people with their arms raised in a V. People in the marketplace city wear hats and some are carrying bundles on their heads. There are weird cactus plants in the hanging city. In the half-fairgroud city, there's a statue on one of the trucks. The city that copies the dead has a set of pallbearers carrying a wrapped corpse down the stairs. The people on top of Argia are laying with their ears to the ground, listening for the animated sound waves coming from below.
And on and on and on and on. I just can't even.
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stared (author) 8h ago on HN
Source code: https://github.com/stared/invisible-cities-opus-5.5