ASCII art is tricky because there’s way more of it online than you think.
I mean, this is generally true of everything, which is why evaluating LLM originality is tricky, but it’s especially true for ASCII art because it’s so compact, it goes back as many decades as computers do, and it can be generated in bulk by converters for all sorts of purposes (eg). You can stream over telnet ‘movies’ converted to ASCII and whatnot. Why did https://ascii.co.uk/art compile https://ascii.co.uk/art/breakfast ? Who knows. (There is one site I can’t refind right now which had thousands upon thousands of large ASCII art versions of every possible thing like random animals, far more than could have been done by hand, and too consistent in style to have been curated; I spent some time poking into it but I couldn’t figure out who was running it, or why, or where it came from, and I was left speculating that it was doing something like generating ASCII art versions of random Wikimedia Commons images. But regardless, now it may be in the scrapes. “I asked the new LLM to generate an ASCII swordfish, and it did. No one would just have a bunch of ASCII swordfishes on the Internet, so that can’t possibly be memorized!” Wrong.)
Anyway, Claude-3 seems to do some interesting things with ASCII art which don’t look obviously memorized, so you might want to switch to that and try out Websim or talk to the Cyborgism people interested in text art.
ASCII art is tricky because there’s way more of it online than you think.
I mean, this is generally true of everything, which is why evaluating LLM originality is tricky, but it’s especially true for ASCII art because it’s so compact, it goes back as many decades as computers do, and it can be generated in bulk by converters for all sorts of purposes (eg). You can stream over telnet ‘movies’ converted to ASCII and whatnot. Why did https://ascii.co.uk/art compile https://ascii.co.uk/art/breakfast ? Who knows. (There is one site I can’t refind right now which had thousands upon thousands of large ASCII art versions of every possible thing like random animals, far more than could have been done by hand, and too consistent in style to have been curated; I spent some time poking into it but I couldn’t figure out who was running it, or why, or where it came from, and I was left speculating that it was doing something like generating ASCII art versions of random Wikimedia Commons images. But regardless, now it may be in the scrapes. “I asked the new LLM to generate an ASCII swordfish, and it did. No one would just have a bunch of ASCII swordfishes on the Internet, so that can’t possibly be memorized!” Wrong.)
But there’s so many you should assume it’s memorized: https://x.com/goodside/status/1784999238088155314
Anyway, Claude-3 seems to do some interesting things with ASCII art which don’t look obviously memorized, so you might want to switch to that and try out Websim or talk to the Cyborgism people interested in text art.
Claude-3.5 Sonnet passes 2 out of 2 of my rare/multi-word ‘E’-vs-‘F’ disambiguation checks.
On the other hand, in my few interactions, Claude-3.0′s completion/verbalization abilities looked roughly matched.