I finished two new books lately about different AI factions, collectives, polities, etc.

Pictured above is #86 in the AI Lore Books series, the Hyperion Collective, AIs who choose to appear in alien form.

Also recently published is book #85, Tales of the Victoriana Intelligences, who prefer to instantiate among humans as Victiorian humans with pet dinosaurs.

Both of these collections grew organically out of experimentation in Midjourney. After I had a rough idea of their world, I went into Anthropic’s Claude with some guiding text, and had it generate around 20 flash fiction ideas, along with an encyclopedia entry about each group to kick off the story collections. Then I picked the best concepts, and used Claude to write in-world stories that fit into this topic, but also connect to my larger story-multiverse of the AI lore books.

Claude is a fun partner for world-building, especially used in this “slice of life” method of storytelling. Claude’s flash fiction/short stories are actually pretty good. They’re not the best thing ever, but neither is my writing to begin with, so, together we maybe get somewhere better. And Claude’s short stories are better than ones I’ve seen out of ChatGPT, in my opinion.

Related writing & research