Tim Boucher

Just wanted to capture for posterity the full unedited text I sent to the Debrief for their article on the AI Creators Letter sent to US Congress.

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AI technology is poised to have massive impacts across all of society. Consequently, a whole-of-society approach is needed to confront these changes, and to direct them into forms which will most benefit humanity and the flourishing of the creative human spirit. 

Too frequently, the high level conversations about the proper paths of evolution for these technologies are dominated by the big established players from industry, government, civil society and academia. Their voices – and the social and economic incentives driving them – tend to drown out everyone else. But it is not just engineers, entrepreneurs, politicians, professors and experts who will be impacted. It is everyone. 

The AI Creators Letter, developed by a dozen or so professional artists actively using AI tools, in collaboration with Creative Commons, Fight for the Future, aims to level this playing field by asking the US Congress to include artists as an essential component in ongoing conversations about the potential of AI. 

We believe artists can bring to the table a uniquely creative and humanistic perspective backed by countless hours of first-hand experience and deep intuitive understanding of these tools and their best uses. We believe that artists can act as representatives of that defining spark and spirit of expression, and the enduring values of human culture passed down through the ages, of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. 

The future has always been made by artists, writers, and people using their imagination to envision new possibilities, and make them into realities through the creative act. 

Just like artificial intelligence itself, which was first the province of science fiction, a great deal of modern technology as we know it today was first dreamed up, and then written down, painted, or sung by visionaries who explored and pushed the boundaries of reality beyond the known into something new and other.

As artificial intelligence picks up steam in practical applications, it only makes sense from an innovation perspective once again to turn to artists and creators of all stripes to help us find the right course – one which neither policymakers alone, nor academics, civil society, or industry would find without artists and our open-ended journeys into the what-ifs presented by modern technologies.

Over the summer, I had the opportunity to participate in an online panel with Amnesty International & Fight for the Future, and representatives of a few other organizations on the topic of generative AI and social media. You can watch the full video here:

Other videos in this series are also available here.

The piece that I delivered on request of the organizers was slightly tangent to the main topic, and relates to what I perceive as the large systemic failures of so-called “AI Safety” and ethics.

I went into this in a great deal more detail in this post where I deeply queried Anthropic’s Claude on these topics. And these were the more high-level notes that I intended and somewhat failed to follow for my presentation.

I thought this line from Sen. Schumer’s floor remarks about the upcoming AI Insight Forums (fora?) was “fun”:

But these Insight Forums will supercharge the committee process by getting to the root of AI: where to start, what questions to ask, how to move forward. They will provide the nutrient agar to help committees do their work.

I like this idea of nutrient agar, and that this should be an organic process of discovery. But seeing that the first such forum will be behind closed doors with no press allowed and entire composed of captains of industry, I have to wonder a little bit… are we going to get the best cultures to grow on our nutrient agar?

Good coverage here by the Debrief about the AI Creators letter to the US Congress, which I participated in drafting. Along with AI artist Nettrice Gaskins I was able to provide some quotes which got used in the piece.

In my estimation of things, this coverage is more substantial than the one by Techcrunch, which didn’t bother to ask any of us artists about their involvement, and reads to me more like an opinion piece than anything.

Thanks to the Debrief for being open to dig deeper!

Paradise Point is the 114th installment of the AI Lore books series, and the third by VOMISA, an enigmatic artist from the turn of the century

Like the other two VOMISA books, The Dissolving Factory, and The Multibeast, it jumps around a lot and includes a sort of general stream of consciousness vibe. Unlike those two, it is more coherent in terms of an identifiable narrative frame, though it’s exploration of that is non-linear.

Paradise Point, as you can see by the cover, is a mushroom book. It is about and inspired by the phenomenon known as microdosing. There is lots more to say on that, but the premise of the book is twofold: that AIs somehow learned to microdose electricity, which lead to something something consciousness. And then that they turn everyone on to microdosing, like all of humanity. And they get everyone’s doses and everything perfectly dialed in, and then suddenly…. the world just changes, and everything gets put into perspective. People are able to reliably and consistently reach their own “paradise point.”

I’ll come back to this topic, as I have to run, but here’s the preview art in the meantime.

This book also mentions ‘The Artilect’ (the topic of one of the next volumes of its own) which is a mysterious artifact which appears in the sky everywhere at once, and descends to Earth, triggering the growth of a strange new life form, an entire new kingdom of life, called Symbioflores, which exhibit traits of mushrooms, plants, and unknown/alien biology. The AIs synthesize a drug from this called Soma, like in Orwell’s Brave New World, which is what they use to microdose everyone.