The Second Octave is book #100 of the AI Lore books series, as chronicled by the New York Post.

It fits in the mode of a collection of flash fiction pieces that extend on stories begun in The Octave of Time, which itself was “hand-written” (without AI assistance on text). By contrast, this volume, The Second Octave, consists mostly of AI-generated text from Anthropic’s Claude.

In a way, this book is also a continuation of Tales from the House of Life, in that the same technique was employed, and many of the same characters appear in both (semi-canonically). The technique was ingesting a longer work (for House of Life the source text was The Lost Direction), and then using the AI to generate more or less in-world stories based on that text.

I have one more human-written source text I will try this technique on, Conspiratopia, for a volume I’m expecting to call Return to Conspiratopia. The tone and style of that book are very “special” though, so I have my doubts as to whether or not AIs will in fact be able to do it justice.

Here’s the preview art for Second Octave:

I’m supposing I will do eight octaves in all for this series, where I will iteratively read back in the two prior texts to generate the third, and so on.

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