We all love stories about AI supplanting humans. Or face-planting, while trying to outdo humans.

(I am actually better than this with Photoshop; I do these quick and dirty like because I want to express something about the crudity and randomness of AI)

This would perhaps make a fun game: Would would AI Santa bring you?

1. A bottle of bees
2. 5 gallons of waxed cucumber
3. Some pickled socks
4. A dozen pear-shaped situations
5. A pocket vroomer

Janelle Shane trains AIs to produce surrealism – this is something I highly approve of (because it’s better than training them to fire missiles at civilians, or detect colored people in facial recognition systems for Homeland Security) – she’s come up with some fun items. [register] She trained her AI to write christmas carols.

I took one of Janelle Shane’s christmas carols and whacked on it in photoshop

The story of the chimney see
Santa baby, and blood and joyous so world and joy and good will to see
Santa baby bore sweet Jesus Christ
Fa la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la.
King of toys and hippopotamuses [sic] full of the light of that stood at the dear Son of Santa Claus
He was born in a wonderful christmas tree

That doesn’t make any less sense than traditional christmas carols, really. Plus it has hippopotamuses, which is my favorite kind of muse.

Here’s another one of her carols. I could easily imagine singing this for the neighbors, then running down the driveway while the shotgun pellets scream overhead:

It’s Christmas time peetime story with my baby tonight
The sandman and ass and all the reindeer so bright.
Then I heard ol’ Santa baby
The sandman of the moon
…
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas
I wanna give it to you Ding dong, ding dong Christmas day

If that doesn’t fill you with christmas cheer, I can’t help you.

But I tried, I asked Deep Dreams to re-render a picture of christmas ornaments into something that a shoggoth might hang on its christmas offering:

[deep dreams]

Janelle Shane’s twitter feed is [twitter] and it’s a good source of the occasional “ha!” moment, if you enjoy that kind of thing.