This is what tea will be like in The Simulation

What would it look like if, in the distant future, a group of machine intelligences tried to make tea? Not just to brew tea, but to recreate the entire concept from long-forgotten synapses buried deep within the hidden layers of their virtual brains?

To see what that might be like, I turned to a neural network I’ve used before, a huge model called GPT-2 that can draw on words and correlations that it’s learned from scanning huge chunks of the internet. I prompted it with a list of green teas - teas with evocative names like “Yellow Furry Peak”, named for its fuzzy leaves whose pointed tips resemble the peaks of the Yellow Mountains.

My first attempt, via talktotransformer.com, produced names that seemed more like what you’d get if you randomly started mixing words from the original list - you could tell what they were supposed to be, but they had less character, as if the features had all been smoothed away. That’s one way neural net-generated stuff can go - realism, but a sort of cardboard realism.

So for my second attempt, I used another way of sampling GPT-2, gpt-2-small, that gave me more control over the output. With temperature set to 1 and truncation turned off (both ways of letting the neural net produce less-probable output), I got results that wouldn’t pass as human teas, but were exactly what I was looking for. That’s my favorite style of neural net-generated text - the type that flagrantly fails the Turing test.

Six Vermilion Unicorn

Playing The Amber Eagle

Glowing Sky Rabbit

North Circular Eye

Afternoon Supper of Peace

Cold Sheep & Thunder!

Giving Away Stardust

Green Great Gourd of Sunrise

Slippery Violet Sands

Ember Lathe

Wet Leaves

Laptime Tree Spider (Black)

Old Blue Beetle Drink

Pieces of Peppercorns

Memory boops

Headaceous Granite Drink

Fine Deerscald (fresh scent)

Indoor Cream Wave

Safe Bucket Buddy

Somewhat fair Clever Cat

1 Angry Egg

Fluffy Sandberry Tea

Squirrely Bubbles

Sonara Goat Potswreck

Travesty Bee Hatch

Kitten Pond

Winter Snail Glitter Bomb

Hating Frosty Moon Glands

Green Slime Essence

Fresh Green Skunk

Strawberry Lime Dissolution B

Ice Chlorophyll Glaze

Bleeding Apples with Sea Salt

Dangerous Rock TREET

REFILLED POWER Fraps

0-3 ½.5Gridges

26 Grief Hills

4 Cup Emulsion

Drcrated skin finishes!

Size Yes 37 (21,28,38) x 54 (9 or 15)mm

Shiny Living Veins

Blue Foam Duet

Fish Drumstick

A unique combination of leaf of fire and custard Sodium ascending Fujiyama



Bonus content: more teas!