The state of my research on ChatGPT (& LLMs in general) • [mini-ramble]

I recently posted a long report to the web: ChatGPT: Exploring the Digital Wilderness, Findings and Prospects. That report summarizes and reflects upon the work I did mostly in 2023. But I’ve not stopped working on those issues. So I want to say a bit about that, a bit about what I’m doing now and where I’m going and conclude with some remarks about what I’d originally intended to include in that report, but didn’t.

Phase 1: Exploring ChatGPT

I began writing this report in December 2023 and expected it would take me, say, two or three weeks. I figured I’d be done, possibly by the end of the year, but certainly early in January 2024. Things didn’t work out that way. Why, I don’t quite know – though going on a down turn in 2024 was part of the problem. But not everything.

Anyhow I ended up saying more about ontology than I had originally intended (pp. 34-38) and associative memory (pp. 39-41). I concluded by arguing (p. 42):

I have already argued that the conceptual ontologies underlying human thought are implicit in the structure of LLMs (pp. 14 ff., pp. 35 ff.) – otherwise they would be unable to generate coherent texts. Beyond whatever practical use we can get from LLMs, perhaps the most important intellectual prospect is that of making those implicit ontologies explicit. For it we are to extend the capacities of neural networks with more classical symbolic capabilities, as Gary Marcus and others have been arguing, it would be useful if we could develop programmatic techniques for discovering the ontologies latent in the models.

That’s the important idea, developing programmatic techniques for identifying ontological structure. Just how we’re going to do that, I haven’t the foggiest idea.

My final two paragraphs (pp.43-44):

Think of it like this: Minds, all minds including chimpanzees, gerbils, crows, carp, even octipi, contain large associative memories prompted by external objects and events as they move through the world. With the development of speech, humans gained the capacities both to prompt one another, and to prompt oneself, in ways not directly related to, and thus arbitrary with respect to, immediate external circumstances. The development of writing allowed linguistic prompts to exist in the world separate from the prompter. As a highly specialized and rigorously organized system of prompts, arithmetic (with the decimal point and zero) paved the way for the recognition of a system that has finite parts but can use those to generate infinite sequences. From that we have the abstract Turing Machine leading to the modern digital computer. The transformer architecture in turn allows us to create digital engines that treat the universe of human text as a series of prompts through which it is able to bootstrap a model of that universe. Latent within those models, those LLMs, is an approximation to the metaphysical structure of our universe.

We now have before us the prospect of figuring out the principles on which LLMs are built. With those in hand we can write software to compile that structure into a series of symbolic models. As those models emerge from the neural matrix of the LLMs we can remake the world. As far as I can tell, this is not a five, ten, or thirty-year job. It is the opportunity of a lifetime for new generations, women and men privileged to take up the Star Trek mantra: to boldly go where no man has gone before.

That’s a stronger statement than I had originally intended.

Phase 2: “Opening the hood”

I continue to work with Ramesh Viswanathan, of Goethe University Frankfurt. He’s got mathematical skills that I don’t have, skills that will be necessary to figure out what’s going on under the hood. He’s also got students. He reports progress.

And I’m beginning to get a better idea of what I need to be doing. You can find the barest beginning of those ideas in my report, From LLM mechanisms to ring-composition: A conversation with Claude 3.5. Note that that report takes the form of a conversation with a chatbot, Claude 3.5. Doing that is new, and exciting. What’s important about this report is that I was able to introduce some work I’d previously done on Heart of Darkness as “evidence” for our discussion of how positional encoding in LLMs might be used to encode narrative structure.

What I skipped

When I’d originally planned that quasi-final report, I’d intended to talk about prompt engineering and local cultures of LLM use. I saw those activities as steps on the way to developing programmatic control over the entire model. That is, rather than having one big push that would result in an explicit model covering the whole LLM, I imagined a proliferation of local efforts, each working on the region of the model relevant to their work. I was imagining a process like that involved in settling a new geographic area: You establish settlements here and there. Then you work outward from each settlement until the entire land has become settled.

2024 saw the proliferation of work on prompt engineering and on techniques for wringing more “juice” from the LLMs. In particular, the end of the year saw the emergence of so-called “reasoning” models, and now agents are beginning to show up.

This is all very interesting. I’m not sure what to make of it. For the most part the machine learning mainstream seems to have decided that this is what we’ve got, this is what we’re going to build on from now until, well, either the machines take over or the end of time. The idea that we might develop symbolic means to cover this area, that’s not being given a second thought.

I’m inclined to think that most of this work will turn out to have been work-arounds, stuff we build for now with the tools we’ve got because we don’t have any better tools. Of course, the people doing the work don’t imagine that we’ll see a class of better tools, one that include symbolic capabilities. I think they’re wrong.

Anyhow, as a consequence of this faith in the current intellectual regime, we’re seeing grandiose plans for spending 100s of billions of dollars constructing infrastructure to support all this computing, powerplants and server farms. No doubt some of this will be useful but, on the whole, I think it’s daft.

Perhaps I should say a bit more about all of this. But not now. Later.

Time After Time, Sant Andreu Jazz Band

2023 TIME AFTER TIME ( Cahn / Stain ) arreglo Joan Monné

SANT ANDREU JAZZ BAND
dir Joan Chamorro

featuring Luc Martin, trombon
Koldo Munné, saxo baritono
Lola Peñaranda, saxo tenor

Pere Company saxo tenor
Sander Theuns saxo alto
Noa Bazuaye, saxo alto
Bernat Benavente, saxo baritono
Anna Ndiaye piano
Asier Vazquez, guitarra
Mateu Teixido, contrabajo
Didac Moya bateria

Queen Anne's Lace

Gladiator II [Media Notes 155]

I watched Gladiator II on Netflix over the course of two days sometime last week. It was OK. Not sure it was as good as Gladiator, which I saw in a theater and at least once online. The special effects were fine, Denzel Washington was fine, crazy Caracalla was a demented Roman aristocrat, one of two brothers ruling the empire.

But I couldn’t help but think about the political situation in the United States. Both of the Gladiator films are about political corruption and the problem of succession in the state. President Trump tried to derail the succession of Biden to the presidency. Now, in 2025, who knows what kind of back-room deals these rich guys are cutting with one another as Trump attempts to grab as much power for himself as he possibly can.

The problem of succession is a deep one. The ruler is the top of the pyramid. Who rules the ruler? Who determines the ruler's legitimacy?

Shakespeare must have written a half-dozen or more plays about the problem. There’s an HBO series about it (which I haven’t watched). The issue is one of legitimacy: Who has the right to rule the state? American democracy solves the problem by having the leader elected by the people. But elections can be tampered with. George W. Bush won his election by a hanging chad and a decision of the Supreme Court. Was that a legitimate win? What would have happened if Gore had contested more vigorously? Who knows?

Aristocracies handle succession by birthright, which is often enough contested. The Roman Empire was basically an aristocracy, with a Senate, and with legitimacy ultimately conferred by the military, which plays a central role in both Gladiator films. It seems, though, that succession was a bit iffy. That was certainly the case in both of the films.

Anyhow, Gladiator came out in 2000, the year Bush won the presidency. A bit over a year later 9/11 happened, which cast doubt on America’s place in the world. And two years after that Columbia University celebrated its 250th year. It was during that year that I attended a dinner at Columbia as a guest of Seth Neugroschel, a Columbia graduate. During that dinner some Big Deal Historian at Columbia came around to our table and talked about how empires often had a life span of two hundred years or so before they began to crumble. But that measure, America was in the danger zone, a bit over a quarter of a century past it’s 200th anniversary. Was 9/11 the beginning of the end? That was a question we pondered at the dinner table.

And that’s what was on my mind as I watched Gladiator II. The film reeked of sleaze and backstabbing and general political and institutional nastiness. Is that were America is in 2025, 250 years after the country’s birth? Gladiator II was in the works well before the 2024 election. Indeed, first thoughts about the film began soon after Gladiator. The two films seemed to have been conceived in an atmosphere of decay and atrophy and are thus expressive of it. How are we to apportion that between Ridley Scott’s personal interests and the political atmosphere of the country? I don’t know.

Anyhow, those are the thoughts Gladiator II has provoked from me. As for the film itself, watch it for the effects, for Washington, and the rest, well, it’s there, it tells a story.

Rainy day

Federal Government hoisted on its own petard by #Elonald

Henry Farrell, Abraham L. Newman, Elon Musk Weaponizes the Government, Lawfare, February 5, 2025.

It’s hard for politicians and journalists to grasp what Musk and his team are doing, still less to explain it to the public. These efforts involve technical systems that are incomprehensible and boring to outsiders, few of whom even know that the Office of Personnel Management exists, let alone what it does. But even if no one pays much attention to these systems, they are the sinews of government—key parts of the infrastructure that hold the federal state together and manage its relationship to the outside world.

We are highly familiar with such systems and how they can be used. Our academic research, and our recent book, “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy,” explain how the U.S. quietly took control of similar technical systems that hold the world economy together and used them to exercise domination over allies and enemies alike. Now, Musk is seemingly doing to the U.S. government what the U.S. government once did to the rest of the world: refashioning the plumbing of the federal government into a political weapon against his adversaries.

Fifteen years ago, few people outside financial institutions paid much attention to SWIFT, a global system that banks use for messaging, or the “dollar clearing” system, both of which are central to global financial transactions. Everyone used the internet, but only systems administrators and engineers really cared about how it worked. Specialized trade publications might have cared about the global supply chains that allow complex manufacturing to happen, but no one else did. These systems provided the basic institutional infrastructure that made sure money, information, and goods got to where they were supposed to go in an orderly and efficient way.

Now, everybody who reads the news recognizes how important these systems are. The plumbing became political. During the Obama administration, the Snowden leaks revealed how the U.S. had turned the internet into an enormous system for global surveillance—waking people up to the role of dollar clearing and the SWIFT system. But these changes had begun several years before, even if many did not then understand their systemic consequences. [...]

Nearly exactly the same thing is happening now—except that this time the U.S. federal government is having done unto it what it used to do to others. Musk’s strategy has not been a coup so much as a takeover bid, aided and abetted by other parts of the Trump administration and the tacit acquiescence of the Republicans who control both houses of Congress.

The U.S. identified key choke points that allowed it to weaponize the world’s payment, information, and physical infrastructure to achieve its ends. Musk’s DOGE is weaponizing the U.S. government’s payment, information, and physical infrastructure in highly similar ways, carrying out an end run around the political structures that are supposed to restrain unilateral executive action. Just as when the U.S. weaponized the world economy over two decades ago, it is hard for those at the receiving end to understand exactly what is happening to them.

However, there's a bit of hope:

However, throughout all of this, it is important to realize some important facts. Not very many people work for DOGE. Reports suggest that they are technically skilled, with engineering backgrounds, but have little experience of government or understanding how it works. Equally, the gnarly complexities of existing government information systems will mean they may be harder than Musk’s engineers anticipate to subvert wholesale for political purposes. The gross inefficiencies and “technical debt” documented by experts like Jennifer Pahlka may turn out to be an accidental immune system against those who might like to turn government technical systems into smoothly functioning systems of coercion.

There's more at the link.

Sunrise in Newport Harbor, Jersey City, December 2007

From LLM mechanisms to ring-composition: A conversation with Claude 3.5

I've published a new working paper. Title above, links, abstract, TOC, and Prefatory remarks below:

• Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/127480159/From_LLM_mechanisms_to_ring_composition_A_conversation_with_Claude_3_5_Working_Paper
• SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5125800
• ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388721690_From_LLM_mechanisms_to_ring-composition_A_conversation_with_Claude_35

Abstract: This is a wide-ranging discussion about narrative structure and how it might be encoded in large language models. 1. Word Embeddings and Training: We clarified how tokens (subword units) are mapped to high-dimensional vectors, discussed how these vectors are updated during training, and explored how the token vocabulary (around 50K) can cover a much larger word vocabulary through subword tokenization. 2. Multi-scale Organization in Narrative: We examined different types of transitions (word-to-word, sentence-to-sentence, paragraph-to-paragraph), discussed how probability distributions for next-token prediction vary depending on the type of transition and noted how constraints are tighter at the word level but looser at higher narrative level. 3. Empirical Evidence from "Heart of Darkness": We analyzed two charts: frequency of "Kurtz" mentions and paragraph lengths, found periodic patterns in Kurtz mentions that persisted even as frequency increased, identified a significant peak in paragraph length coinciding with Kurtz's introduction, and discovered that women's roles bookended the narrative to form a ring composition. 4. Implications for LLMs: We examined how different scales of narrative structure might be encoded in transformer architectures, explored how attention mechanisms might capture these patterns implicitly, and considered the limitations of context window size for capturing full novel-length patterns. 5. Future Research Possibilities: What's the potential for analyzing other texts for similar patterns. What are the challenges of computationally detecting ring composition. Finally, we explored the possibility of using LLMs to verify structural patterns across large corpora.

The upshot: narrative structure operates at multiple scales simultaneously, and these patterns might be encoded in transformer architectures in ways analogous to holographic encoding, with different frequencies capturing different levels of structure. 

Contents

Claude 3.5 summarizes the discussion 2
Prefatory remarks: Why publish first tentative thoughts? 3
Part 1: Preliminaries, tokens and vectors
Part 2: From positional encoding to stories 9
Part 3: Narrative structure on multiple levels, Heart of Darkness 15

Prefatory remarks: Why publish first tentative thoughts?

This set of notes started with me asking Claude 3.5 to clarify a few things about the mechanisms of LLMs (Part 1). As things got clearer, I started bringing in my research, first some work I did with stories and ChatGPT two years ago. That’s about how plot structures might be encoded in LLMs (Part 2). Then I introduce some empirical work I did on Heart of Darkness over a decade ago (Part 3). That work is directly related to the ChatGPT story work. This discussion took place in several sessions over Feb. 2-4.

This is tentative work. Not quite first thoughts, but early thoughts. I am making it publicly available for two reasons:

1. It is an example of how a sophisticated chatbot, such as Claude 3.5, can be used in fleshing out ideas.
2. The ideas developed in this conversation, while preliminary, might be of use to humanists, literary critics in particular, who are thinking about how these tools can be used in research.

On the first point, note that I turned to Claude on these issues because, after reading many explainers-for-the-unwashed and looking around in the technical literature, certain matters were still unclear. Perhaps others can benefit from this discussion. This happens a lot; it will be useful having Claude around to help me figure out what’s going on.

On the second point, these discussions bear directly on questions being explored by digital humanists: How can we use these technologies in our work? The internal mechanisms of LLMs are a bit mysterious. The dialog I had with Claude led to some specific ideas about how narrative structures could encoded in LLMs in a way that’s independent of the specific actors and settings in which the story is realized. This has implications for the study or oral narrative and traditional story grammars, though I don’t go into these in the discussion.

As I have no idea when I will get around to a more formal presentation of this work – this research is very much in medias res – I thought I would get these ideas out now. Others might find them useful.

Maynard Ferguson playing "Summertime"

From his 1965 album entitled "Maynard Ferguson Sextet" Issued on Mainstream label. With Willie Maiden (tenor), Lanny Morgan (alto).

Trump proposes to make Gaza “the Riviera of the Middle East!”

I kid you not. No, really, the Riviera of the Middle East. Writing in today’s New York Times, Peter Baker opens with:

President Trump basked as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel praised his “willingness to think outside the box.” But when it came to Gaza, Mr. Trump’s thinking on Tuesday was so far outside the box that it was not clear he even knew there was a box.

Mr. Trump’s announcement that he intends to seize control of Gaza, displace the Palestinian population and turn the coastal enclave into “the Riviera of the Middle East” was the kind of thing he might have said to get a rise on “The Howard Stern Show” a decade or two ago. Provocative, intriguing, outlandish, outrageous — and not at all presidential.

The idea built on Trump during the day:

Indeed, it seemed to be an idea that grew by the hour as the day went on. In the morning, before Mr. Netanyahu arrived at the White House to meet with Mr. Trump, aides to the president told reporters that it would take 15 years or more to rebuild Gaza after the destructive war between Israel and Hamas and that it would require working with partners in the region to find Palestinians a place to live temporarily.

By the afternoon, as he signed some executive orders, Mr. Trump told reporters that Palestinians would have “no alternative” but to move out of Gaza because it was just “a demolition site.” A little later, he welcomed Mr. Netanyahu to the Oval Office and went even further, saying he wanted “all of them” to leave and that Gazans should “be thrilled” to live someplace better that he expected Egypt and Jordan to provide.

Then at a formal news conference with Mr. Netanyahu in the East Room on Tuesday evening, he took it the final step, declaring not just that Palestinians should leave but that “the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip” and rebuild it into a prosperous economic destination.

This was not a temporary takeover, but “a long-term ownership position” and he made clear that he had no intention of turning Gaza back over to the Palestinians but would make it a place “not for a specific group of people but for everybody.”

What that meant exactly, he did not say. Nor did he say how this would be accomplished. Even he seemed to grasp how wild the whole thing sounded. “I don’t mean to be cute, I don’t mean to be a wise guy,” he said at one point. “But the Riviera of the Middle East!”

As you might imagine, the idea was not greeted with universal joy and hosannas:

Others saw nothing cute or wise about what amounted to “ethnic cleansing by another name,” as Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, put it.

“The notion that the United States is going to take over Gaza, including with the deployment of U.S. troops, isn’t just extreme, it’s completely detached from reality,” said Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. “In what world is this happening?”

Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, said Mr. Trump’s comments were “truly bizarre and incoherent,” raising more questions than answers.

But, just for the sheer hell of it, let’s set those reservations aside, I mean, the idea of forcibly relocating the Palestinians, it’s, it’s,...it’s batshit bonkers. But let’s suspend reality for a minute or three.

World Island?

What could we do with a Riviera of the Middle East? Consider the idea my friend Zeal proposed, and pursued for a number of years (and I helped him):

He proposed to transform Governors Island, a 172 acre former Coast Guard base in New York Harbor, into World Island, which he described as a “permanent world’s fair for a world that’s permanently fair”. Think of it as a combination of the best features of the United Nations, Disney World, a kid’s rumpus room, the trading floor at the Chicago Board of Trade, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Japanese exhibit at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. It would cost $25 billion or so and be planted with orchids. Why orchids? Beauty aside, they’re an early warning system for climate change, when the orchids go, we’re not going to be far behind.

I met Zeal in his office a couple days later and he explained.

Governors Island had been a Coast Guard base until the end of the century. Senator Moynihan convinced the government to was sell the island to GIPEC (Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation), jointly owned by New York State and New York City. GIPEC took possession for a couple dollars rather than a price at market rate. Can you imagine the market rate for a 172 acres of developable property in New York Harbor?

Gaza is considerably larger than 172 acres, but then what Zeal envisioned for World Island was a bit much for that site. But in Gaza, in Gaza there’d be room. And, when you consider the thousands of years of conflict that has bedeviled that land, it would be the perfect place to realize Zeal’s vision. Here’s the executive summary of the proposal we submitted to GIPEC: Governors Island as a World Resource Center. Here’s slide presentation that you can scroll through.

World Island, a Global Commons by Bill Benzon

Trump's cultural policy, a speculative proposal 

What will actually happen? Who knows? I certainly don’t, and neither does Donald Trump. But you should read Tyler Cowen’s recent post: Trumpian policy as cultural policy. It’s quite provocative. Here’s a bit:

The Trump administration has issued a blizzard of Executive Orders, and set many other potential changes in the works. They might rename Dulles Airport (can you guess to what?). A bill has been introduced to add you-know-who to Mount Rushmore. There is DOGE, and the ongoing attempt to reshape federal employment. [...]

Imagine you hold a vision where the (partial) decline of America largely is about culture. After all, we have more people and more natural resources than ever before. Our top achievements remain impressive. But is the overall culture of the people in such great shape? The culture of government and public service? Interest in our religious organizations? The quality of local government in many states? You don’t have to be a diehard Trumper to have some serious reservations on such questions.

We also see countries, such as China, that have screwed-up policies but have grown a lot, in large part because of a pro-business, pro-learning, pro-work culture. Latin America, in contrast, did lots of policy reforms but still is somewhat stagnant.

OK, so how might you fix the culture of America? You want to tell everyone that America comes first. That America should be more masculine and less soft. That we need to build. That we should “own the libs.” I could go on with more examples and details, but this part of it you already get.

So imagine you started a political revolution and asked the simple question “does this policy change reinforce or overturn our basic cultural messages?” Every time the policy or policy debate pushes culture in what you think is the right direction, just do it. Do it in the view that the cultural factors will, over some time horizon, surpass everything else in import.

Simply pass or announce or promise such policies. Do not worry about any other constraints.

You don’t even have to do them!

After this that and the other:

To be clear, this hypothesis does not not not require any kind of cohesive elite planning the whole strategy (though there are elites planning significant parts of what Trump is doing). It suffices to have a) conflicting interest groups, b) competition for Trump’s attention, and c) Trump believing cultural issues are super-important, as he seems to. There then results a spontaneous order, in which the visible strategy looks just like someone intended exactly this as a concrete plan.

We live in interesting times.

Looking from the deep past toward the future

Simon & Schuster: "Book blurbs? Who needs them?" [the inside skinny]

Elisabeth Egan, What Are Book Blurbs, and How Much Do They Matter in Publishing? NYTimes, Feb. 4, 2025.

The famously fractious publishing community seems to agree on this point: Blurb collection is a time-consuming, dispiriting and occasionally mortifying process, one that takes time away from the actual writing and editing of books.

But until last week, the quid pro quo cycle felt inescapable, an essential part of rolling out a book and giving it a fighting chance in a crowded marketplace.

Then, on Thursday, Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, announced in an essay in Publishers Weekly that authors under contract with the house’s flagship imprint would no longer be expected to solicit feedback from fellow writers.

“Trying to get blurbs is not a good use of anyone’s time,” Manning wrote. He commended “the collegiality of authors,” but pointed out that “favor trading creates an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent.”

Later:

“I don’t know if blurbs have ever worked,” Manning said. “There’s no metric to tell.”

Victoria Ford, the owner of Comma, a bookstore in Minneapolis, said, “My initial reaction was that blurbs don’t matter at all.” She’d rather read a thorough summary on the back of a book, or a lively description on the flyleaf, than rely on a few beats from an established author who might have a personal relationship with the author in question.

There's more at the link. But.....

I can tell you something about blurbs, something that's not in the article. The people who sign the blurbs didn't necessarily write them. I wrote some of the blurbs for my book, Beethoven's Anvil, but I'm not going to tell you which ones I wrote. I asked some friends for blurbs, and they agreed, on one condition: that I write the blurb. They then signed it. 

OTOH, one of the people who blurbed the book is someone I didn't know. I thought this person might be interested, so I asked my editor to contact them. He did, and the person agreed, on one condition: that not a single word in the blurb was changed. Once the book was published, my editor put me in touch with this person and we had extensive correspondence for a couple of years. 

One never knows, do one?

What LLMs are good at

To make it super clear, language models are awesome. Otherwise, I wouldn't spend 9 months of my life working hours after my day job on writing a book on them. What's wrong about them is not what they can do, but what the lying CEOs, VCs, and parasite influencers say they are or…

— Andriy Burkov (@burkov) February 4, 2025

The tenor player is fierce, drummer's not bad either [Big Friendly Jazz Orchestra from Japan]

Claude 3.5 Sonata compares three images showing visual chaos and makes some interesting observations about complexity.

This is the second time I've set out to have Claude describe two or more images. I've already done that in Claude 3.5 Sonata describes two different photos and approaches the concept of a minimal photo, and there are one or two other posts where I introduce one or two more images in the course of discussing the original target image. I didn't know how this discussion would proceed. I wanted to see whether or not Claude pick up on what I regarded to be the common theme. It did, in its response to my opening question, and it did so in satisfying detail.

I was a bit surprised that it recognized the first image as graffiti and so asked about it. It misidentified the image as a throwie or throw-up, but otherwise was reasonably accurate. But that misidentification, no human would have done that, at least not a human who knows what a throwie is. But when I corrected Claude, their response indicated that they did know what a throwie is.

From that point on the discussion develops in a very interesting way, more than I had anticipated.

What do these images have in common?

These three images share several interesting visual and thematic elements:

1. Abstract and Fluid Motion: Each image captures a sense of movement and flow, though achieved through different means:

• Image 1 shows flowing graffiti art with curved lines and swirls
• Image 2 displays naturally swaying ornamental grasses in the wind
• Image 3 features light trails creating flowing, wave-like patterns

2. Color Palette: While each image has its own dominant colors, they all incorporate:

• Blues and cyans
• Golden/yellow tones
• A mix of light and dark elements creating contrast

3. Organic Patterns: All three images feature natural or naturalistic curved forms rather than rigid geometric shapes:

• The graffiti's sweeping curves
• The bending grass stems
• The undulating light patterns

4. Layered Composition: Each image shows overlapping elements that create depth: - Multiple layers of spray paint - Overlapping grass blades and foliage - Intersecting light trails and reflections

These commonalities suggest a theme of capturing fluid, organic movement, whether it's created by human artistry (graffiti), nature (grass), or technology (light painting/long exposure photography).

Interesting. Do you know how the graffiti image was done? Not a trick question, but the answer might not be obvious unless you are familiar with graffiti culture and practices.

Looking at that graffiti image more carefully, I can tell this is what's called a "throw-up" or "throwie" - a quick piece of graffiti typically done in two layers: a fill color and an outline. The interesting thing about this particular image is that it appears to be a close-up photograph of wet paint that's still dripping and blending.

When creating a throw-up, artists often use spray paint in quick, sweeping motions. The characteristic blending and color mixing we see here happens when the second color is applied while the first layer is still wet, allowing the paints to run together. This creates those beautiful marbled effects and color bleeds where the black, blue, white, and tan colors merge.

The slightly speckled texture visible in parts of the image is characteristic of spray paint droplets, and you can see areas where the paint has run or "dripped," which confirms this was captured while the paint was still fresh and moving on the wall. This kind of documentation of wet paint is particularly interesting because it captures a temporary moment in the creation process - once dried, the piece would look quite different, with more defined edges and less of this fluid, dynamic quality.

These kinds of process shots are valued in graffiti culture because they show both the technical skill of quick application and the ephemeral beauty of the medium in its wet state. Would you like me to elaborate on any particular aspect of the technique or process?

But throwies always portray the writer’s (graffiti) name. There’s no name in this image.

Ah, you're absolutely right - I apologize for my assumption! Looking at it again, this does not appear to be a throw-up/throwie at all, as there's no discernible lettering or name, which is a defining characteristic of a throw-up.

Instead, this appears to be a macro/close-up photograph of paint runs and drips, perhaps from a larger piece or even from paint testing/dripping on a surface. You can see how the paints are interacting with each other - the black, white, blue, and tan colors creating organic flows and blends as they mix while wet. This could be from:

1. Intentional paint drips/runs as an abstract art piece
2. A close-up detail of paint overflow or drips from a larger work
3. A documentation of paint interaction/behavior, perhaps even accidental
4. An experimental piece focusing on the medium itself rather than letterforms

Thank you for the correction - it helps me be more precise in analyzing graffiti art forms. This image is more about capturing the beauty of the paint medium itself rather than being a traditional graffiti name piece or throw-up.

Not really. You know that more than one writer will paint at a site, right? And that writers will come back to a site time after time. This is something that they’ll do at the edges of the site where the actual graffiti appears. Maybe they’re just testing a can to see that it’s spraying properly, or to see the color. Or maybe they’re just having fun. But the strokes in this image were made by various writers at different times.

Ah - now I understand! Thank you for teaching me something about graffiti culture. This is what's known as a "testing spot" or practice area, where multiple writers have tested their spray cans over time. Each stroke or spray represents a different moment when someone:

• Tested if a can was spraying correctly
• Checked the actual color of the paint
• Cleared a clogged nozzle
• Just played around with the paint while waiting or between pieces
• Tested different spray patterns or pressures

What makes the image particularly interesting is how these utilitarian test sprays, made at different times by different people, have created an unintentionally beautiful abstract composition. The layers of paint have interacted over time, creating those flowing forms and color blends. It's like a collaborative, accidental artwork that emerges from the practical needs of graffiti writers.

This is a great example of how functional, seemingly mundane aspects of a culture can create their own kind of beauty. The fact that this is a communal space where writers return repeatedly adds another layer of meaning - it's almost like a visual record of all the different artists who have worked at that spot.

Thank you for helping me correct my misinterpretation. Would you say these testing spots are a common feature at most graffiti sites?

Now that you understand how the graffiti shot was made, what does that have in common with the second image, the one with the grasses?

Ah, now I see an interesting parallel! Both images show the accumulation of many individual moments or actions over time:

• The graffiti image shows the buildup of many different spray paint tests by different writers who visited that spot over time, each adding their own marks that blend and interact
• The grass image shows many individual stalks of ornamental grass that have grown over the growing season, each adding to the overall mass of the planting

In both cases, what we're seeing isn't a single deliberate composition, but rather the natural accumulation of many small individual additions that together create an appealing whole. The beauty emerges from this gradual process of accumulation rather than from a single planned artistic decision.

And in both cases, these accumulations create a similar visual effect of overlapping, flowing forms - though one comes from urban culture and one from nature. It's a nice example of how similar patterns can emerge from very different processes.

Would you like to explore how the third image (the light trails) might fit into this theme of accumulation over time as well?

Right. Just as the different graffiti writers are independent agents, so the different plants are independent agents as well. And yet they co-exist in the same space.

That's a profound observation! In both cases, we're seeing examples of how independent agents can share and shape a common space over time, creating something unexpectedly harmonious despite there being no central coordination or plan:

• The graffiti test area becomes a collective canvas where different writers' test sprays overlap and interact, creating unplanned but beautiful color interactions and patterns

The grass planting shows how individual plants grow and position themselves in relation to each other, each responding to its own needs for light, space, and stability, yet collectively forming an aesthetically pleasing arrangement

This speaks to a broader pattern we see in both human and natural systems - how individual agents acting independently can create emergent patterns and structures that have their own beauty and function. It's similar to how cities develop their character from thousands of individual decisions, or how ecosystems find balance through the interactions of many species.

In both the graffiti and grass examples, we're seeing how sharing space doesn't necessarily mean competition - it can lead to a kind of unplanned collaboration, whether that's paint layers creating unexpected color harmonies or plants finding ways to coexist and even support each other in their shared environment.