Since 2019 I've used various language models (from the large to the very tiny) to generate drawing prompts for what has become an annual October tradition. (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and my personal favorite is 2022, when the GPTs were small enough to be absolutely bonkers.)

After a failed attempt to get Gemma 3 to be as interesting as the early GPT3's (I gave up after it suggested "The Autumnal Autumning" twice in one list), I decided to go very old-school.

Specifically I'm using a tiny neural net called char-rnn, originally introduced by Andrej Karpathy in 2015, and updated by my friend Dylan Hudson to work with modern libraries. I installed it on my laptop, and then for training data I turned to a dataset that I had fun with in the past, a list of 42,000 registered racehorse names from the Jockey Club. Char-rnn runs only on my cat hair-covered laptop, and it has no general internet training, only what I gave it.

Presenting this year's lineup!

These may not all be winning bets, but they'll hopefully be fun to draw. Mostly I just want to see people draw horsies! Or very much not horsies, it's up to you! Or not draw - every year people interpret these prompts in all sorts of interesting media, from flash fiction to fiber art to poetry. Use the hashtag #botober2026 if you post your art so I can check it out!

There's bonus content for AI Weirdness supporters, which this week is a list of racehorses that didn't make the cut, for one reason or another.

Via press release from Rep. McGarvey’s office. Video of interview below.

This morning, Congressman Morgan McGarvey (KY-03), Co-Chair of the Congressional Bourbon Caucus and Kentucky’s only Democrat in Congress, joined Ali Vitali to sound the alarm on Trump’s newest Canadian import ban and the Canadian boycotts and de facto trade bans still hammering Kentucky bourbon.

McGarvey has been a vocal critic of Trump’s trade war with Canada, which buys more Kentucky spirits than any other country, and warned that the bans will further damage the state’s $9 billion signature industry, fuel U.S. inflation, and force higher prices on U.S. consumers.

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“There are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined.”

Whoa, for the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder has released four additional songs from that recording session. “We didn’t add these songs to the album, but they were part of what I was feeling and discovering as we made it.”

The real problem for the frontier AI labs is not that their models are too powerful and already “misaligned” with the goals their creators set for them. Rather, it is that the models are being trained in ways that may be leading to a type of intelligence that will become less predictable.