Janelle Shane
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janelleshane.com
Janelle Shane
@janelleshane.com
I write about the strange side of AI at aiweirdness.com

Also a laser scientist.

She/her. Colorado, USA
Pinned
When I wrote a book on AI in 2019, it focused on AIs making sneaky shortcuts.

Aside from the vintage generative text (Pumpkin Trash Break ice cream, anyone?), the algorithmic shortcutting is still completely recognizable today.

www.janelleshane.com/book-you-loo...
Book: You Look Like A Thing — Janelle Shane
www.janelleshane.com
Reposted by Janelle Shane
Every so often I think about the two grads students in my old lab who had to sort through hundreds of thousands of seafloor images to find ecologically interesting regions. One built this super sophisticated machine learning algorithm that was, honestly, very very impressive.
November 8, 2025 at 2:36 PM
Finished Snake-Eater by @tkingfisher.com today and I will be thinking about it for a while and probably rereading it soon. Just low key in tears in the hotel breakfast room but it’s not because I’m sad, it’s because dogs are so good
November 7, 2025 at 4:49 AM
There are freshly signed copies of You Look Like a Thing And I Love You at the Denver Airport Terminal B Tattered Cover!
November 6, 2025 at 10:14 PM
Reposted by Janelle Shane
"If Grokipedia is getting things about me wrong, what else is it getting wrong in other articles, where I do not have the same level of domain knowledge?" - @scalzi.com
A Review of Grokipedia, Using Myself as Test Subject
What? You didn’t know that Grokipedia exists? Well, it does, and it’s Elon Musk’s attempt to run Wikipedia out of town on a rail: An “AI”-generated compendium of infor…
whatever.scalzi.com
November 3, 2025 at 10:03 PM
I wrote a "haunted house" story featuring crappy AI and remote human workers who are doing their best!

It's called "The Skeleton Crew", and you can listen to it here
slate.com/podcasts/fut...
Welcome to the A.I. Haunted House
On this month's episode of Future Tense Fiction, Janelle Shane discusses her short story “The Skeleton Crew.”
slate.com
October 31, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Reposted by Janelle Shane
BOO! 👻🎃👻

No costume for Halloween? No problem. Channel your inner sea urchin: go into your closet (or sunken treasure chest), and throw on all the outfits at once! A few clams, some snails, and carnivorous sponges for drama ought to help keep your fellow partiers in high spirits.

#Ecosde2Cañones
October 31, 2025 at 6:31 PM
Relatedly, a question for people with agricultural knowledge:

if a paper says "samples were obtained from AG-Link International and were obtained from a Holstein bull (“Fillmore”)." does that mean the bull's name was Fillmore?
There is a point to making a laser out of bull semen, of course. The researchers point out that the laser's quality was an immediate indication of the sperm count in the sample.
October 31, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Reposted by Janelle Shane
I trained the tiny neural net on the latest set of reader-submitted Halloween costumes and do I have some costume suggestions for you! www.aiweirdness.com/tiny-neural-...
October 28, 2025 at 4:56 PM
Reposted by Janelle Shane
my name is Oz
and wen the stone
is broke to bits
and all alone
i lie in sand
it stretches bare
you read my words
you pls despair
Ozyman, Ozyman-
dias does what no mortal can
and his works? are they there?
no, but maybe still despair
This is just to say

I have looked on
the works
that were in
the desert

and which
you were probably
thinking
would still stand

Forgive me
they were trunkless
so vast
and so old
October 30, 2025 at 12:27 PM
Reposted by Janelle Shane
Today's extremely cursed research rabbit hole: apparently the biological things people have made into lasers include:
Cicada wing
Egg white (goose, which is clearer than chicken)
Potato
Chicken meat
Peacock feather
Vitamin B2
Olive oil
Spinach
Coral
Sunflower oil
Butter
Bone
Human organs
Bull semen
October 29, 2025 at 9:18 PM
Today's extremely cursed research rabbit hole: apparently the biological things people have made into lasers include:
Cicada wing
Egg white (goose, which is clearer than chicken)
Potato
Chicken meat
Peacock feather
Vitamin B2
Olive oil
Spinach
Coral
Sunflower oil
Butter
Bone
Human organs
Bull semen
October 29, 2025 at 9:18 PM
Reposted by Janelle Shane
Ghosts can be where you least expect them, especially wherever you last saw your earbuds. 👻✨
October 29, 2025 at 2:12 PM
Reposted by Janelle Shane
Hi bluesky I made you a giraph ok thanks
October 29, 2025 at 7:38 AM
A tool you can trust!
I got an invitation to use the "Nature Research Assistant", put up a paper on intuitive physics and asked it for more references to relevant papers; can you guess why I marked those parts in red
October 28, 2025 at 1:33 PM
It certainly is game-shaped! Highlights include:
- Dee, my favorite Delie
- Train to Uptoown
- Sideways train to Uptoown
- Helpful mini-map in corner
- Normal Use of Ladder
I think this is my favorite frame
October 24, 2025 at 5:53 PM
Reposted by Janelle Shane
for days 19-22 I used this quoted list for prompts 😂
I consider it #Botober the Halloween edition.

I picked Moth fairy, Hungry Boats, Mid wonka, and The Skypug. I *will* draw more >:-)

#botober2025 #inktober #inktober2025 #art

bsky.app/profile/jane...
October 23, 2025 at 1:14 PM
Okay, from what I can tell a "time crystal" is like a repeating gif made of matter (but, like, quantum). And what they've done in this paper is like finding a way to externally affect what's in the gif.

Note the sharpie mark on the super high tech equipment. Engineers!
In new work, a team at Aalto University say they have, for the first time, connected a time crystal to an external physical system. The research could pave the way for next-generation sensors or memory systems for quantum computers.

Read the story: https://bit.ly/3L0g19n

#Quantum #Technology 💡 ⚛️
October 22, 2025 at 10:00 PM
Just found a tiny bell pepper that had slipped down into the lining of my coat. That could have been an unpleasant surprise in a few weeks.
October 22, 2025 at 5:52 PM
I recently finished Automatic Noodle by @annaleen.bsky.social and am recommending it to everyone I see. Post-apocalyptic in a sense but not desperate because so many of the characters care about each other and their community and want to build them up. I have a feeling I’ll be rereading this soon.
October 22, 2025 at 4:04 PM
Reposted by Janelle Shane
This remains the funniest way to hear about an internet outage, though.
October 20, 2025 at 8:41 AM
I was just telling someone today about those dish soap bottle aprons and I believe this is proof that I wasn’t making them up. If you were to clothe a bell pepper it’s just what you would use
October 20, 2025 at 3:55 AM
Reposted by Janelle Shane
So you need a fresh costume idea. Don't ask chatgpt!

no what you need is one of these costumes

tiny neural net running on my laptop, trained on user-submitted halloween costumes

best quality costumes guaranteed
www.aiweirdness.com/halloween-co...
October 17, 2025 at 5:18 PM
So you need a fresh costume idea. Don't ask chatgpt!

no what you need is one of these costumes

tiny neural net running on my laptop, trained on user-submitted halloween costumes

best quality costumes guaranteed
www.aiweirdness.com/halloween-co...
October 17, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Reposted by Janelle Shane
Award-winning pain researcher here. This is not something that can be done. Hope this helps.
“In nursing homes, neonatal units, and ICU wards, researchers are racing to turn pain—medicine’s most subjective vital sign—into something a camera or sensor can score as reliably as blood pressure.”
AI is changing how we quantify pain
Artificial intelligence is helping health-care providers better assess their patients’ discomfort.
www.technologyreview.com
October 15, 2025 at 2:02 PM
Haven’t had a proper lemuffir in years

I heard they might be opening a lemuffiry downtown
October 13, 2025 at 7:30 PM