Stanisław Lem foretold the current LLM mania in 1964

Some time ago I visited a used book fair and came across this awesome piece of 80s scifi-asthetic.

This book is a collection of short stories by the Polish author Stanisław Lem originally published in 1964. Its English title is The Cyberiad. One story, about Trurl's electronic troubadour, turned out to be surprisingly topical.

Spoilers for the whole story follow

The inventor Trurl (revealed in other stories to be a robot) wants to create a machine that can generate poetry. He begins by obtaining several hundred tonnes of books to use as training data.

Trurl gets to work constructing the electric poetry machine. In the process they have to create massive data storage containers that stretch further out than one can see using binoculars. This is considered a necessary evil to get this great invention going.

The machine will not work as expected. As a last resort Trurl rips out all logic circuits and replaces them with "narsistors". Then things start working.

Trurl invites his friend Klapaucius over to test the new machine. They give it all sorts of weird and wacky instructions like "create a pastoral love poem that also contains mathematics and cybernetics". Basically they do a whole bunch of prompt engineering. They talk and behave exactly like people of 2021-2023 did when LLMs first appeared.

Eventually the machine causes uproar among poets and there are protests demanding it to shut down. These go nowhere in part because the media secretly love the machine. They are using it to create their own content for pennies and thus don't want to see it come to harm. As all of this is going on various people develop symptoms quite similar to modern day AI psychosis.

Things eventually crash when Trurl gets the machine's electrical bill, which turns out to be astronomical. He needs to get rid of the machine and manage to dump it on a visiting dignitary who takes it to his home planet where causes a supernova explosion. Trurl deems that to be sufficiently far away to not be his problem any more.

The difference between fact and fiction

In the story all the problems are caused by the fact that the machine's output is vastly higher quality than anything humans can create. Even the great Stanisław Lem could not predict that in reality the output would turn out to be mediocre garbage and still lead to all the same problems.

Even though the story specifies that the machine is given some "basic instructions" first, nobody tries to do a prompt injection attack on it. That would only appear almost 30 years later in 1993's Paranoia novel Title Deleted for Security Reasons. An earlier example may well exist somewhere, it almost always does.

Digitizing super 8 film yourself

In our previous post we looked at fixing a super 8 film projector. While watching film with a real projector has its own charm, it is inconvenient to say the least. First of all you make the entire room properly dark or you can't see anything. This is regardless of the fact that the projector bulb is consuming 100 watts of power to show the image. Even if you manage not to burn the film, merely running it through the projector causes wear, scratches and tearing. While film typically ages very well, eventually it will turn into magenta goop or gets eaten by vinegar syndrome. Thus you really want to convert all these films into high quality digital files.

There are several companies that offer this service. If you only have a few reels, using those is the smart thing to do. I, on the other hand, have so much material that using a commercial service would cost thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of euros. Fortunately, this is a fairly common problem and there are dozens of existing projects on the Internet to be inspired by. 

The main technical problem with super 8 film is that it is very small. A sequence of 10 super 8 images is approximately as long as a matchstick. The fact that projectors can display 18 frames per second with sub millimeter registration is an astounding achievement of mechanical engineering. How do they do that? Very difficultly.

Many of the DIY solutions start by taking an existing projector and modifying it to run slower. Then you remove the projection lens and aim a digital camera with a macro lens at the gate. This yields incredible results quality-wise but requires a fairly expensive macro lens and typically the modification on the projector is destructive. So that's out. Some more searching eventually lead me to this Github project.

The basic idea is simple. Instead of using a projector or trying to replicate a film transport (which proper tension and all that) instead rely on the basic stiffness on film and drive it directly with stepper motor. Film is not aligned mechanically but instead by detecting the sprocket hole with some straightforward machine vision code. Time to fire up the ol' 3D printer and order components. This is what the end result looks like after assembly

The thing at the top left that looks like a space cannon prop from a scifi movie is actually a microscope lens. Not only can it do > 1x optical magnification, it does it at a cost of about 25 euros. The downside is noticeable chromatic aberration. The small flat thing on the other end is the Raspberry Pi HQ camera module that can do 4k at 12 bits per channel. The whole thing is run via a single Raspberry Pi 3 with a stepper motor hat. The board at the bottom is used to distribute 12V DC power to the lamp and motors.

Before going further, let's just spend some time appreciating just how awesome colors look in this film. Props to the chemical engineers at Kodak. And remember, the original image is about one third of the size of your smallest fingernail.

The Github repo says that you probably need to adapt the code to your setup. I basically ended up reimplementing all of it from scratch. In the process I learned that OpenCV has its own GUI toolkit which is both simple (one could even say simplistic) and perfect for this use case. The first attempt took nine hours to process one 3.5 minute reel of film. Then I realized that trying to do 4k on material that physically maxes out at approximately 2k with the processing power of a potato is not a recipe for success. Halving the capture resolution and a few other optimizations brought the runtime down to about one hour per reel.

With this, some more custom software for image processing and stabilization coupled with FFmpeg scripts one can start to go through the archive of films. Doing so raises a fair bit of questions. For example:

Is that a 3 year old child driving a jury-rigged go-kart on a frozen lake on his own without even wearing a helmet?

Yes it is. A bit later an adult drives the car but he is too heavy so the ice cracks under him. No one seems particularly concerned. This may seem strange to us but you have to understand that this was the very early 70s. The concept of safety had not been invented yet.