I wrote recently about coding an app using ChatGPT w/ the GPT-4 model. It’s a utility I’m calling EncycGen, which generates encyclopedia style entries via the OpenAI API.

Here are two recent books I wrote using this app. It’s buggy, the software, but it works in a rough and tumble “good enough” kind of way for my purposes.

First is Tales from the Mechanical Forest, part of the “Tales” series.

It elaborates on a story in one of the first four issues (I forget which, offhand) of the print paper The Algorithm, which ultimately was the genesis for these AI lore books (or one of them, anyway). In this world, there are huge mechanical trees which suck carbon out of the air more effectively than “real” trees. This one is based on actual projects people are undertaking even today IRL. The whole thing sounds so dystopian, it blows my mind!

And here’s the next book made with EncycGen, and a couple of other tools, including running those outputs back through GPT-4 for clean-up and normalization. This one is called Tales of Shelvin Parz.

Shelvin Parz today is but a little known ancient Quatrian magician, but in his time was one of the best known figures in all of that land. You can read a bit more about Shelvin Parz here.

The Shelvin Parz book marks a milestone in the AI lore book series: it is #75!

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