The Garbage People is lucky number 111 of the AI Lore books series.

It uses Claude and Midjourney to imagine a series of slice of life flash fiction pieces set in a world where AIs have taken over humanity, treating us like little more than trash to be collected and eliminated. Shells of humans become self-assembling cyborgs built out of scraps of scavenged garbage, all under the power of the Control Signal coming from the Circle of Sages. It’s bleak, but I think it’s kinda fun: it’s Bleakcore.

The inspiration behind this one is basically just omnipresent pollution, and that we are fucking destroying a perfectly beautiful planet and natural spaces with all our fucking garbage and bullshit. Maybe we deserve to be taken over by AIs if it means they will reallocate our bodies to resolving the trash epidemic. /s

At 111 books, and having seen the direction of media coverage and popular discourse so far, I’m officially “bored” with AI. I mean, I still like it, I’m totally focused on it. But, I can’t simply keep producing hundreds more volumes like this. I realize there’s no rush, but I’ve also explored so much of these liminal latent spaces of AI models, that there are fewer and fewer surprises for me. And hence it’s all become a bit less interesting, and I’m less driven to produce produce produce.

Still there are some great bits of art and text that come out of them, and I’ll continue to use them in some way. But I think as an artist, I’m starting to reach the outer bounds of what I can really do with them, without their flaws as tools becoming overbearing for what I want to achieve. I’ve been itching to go back to some more “regular” human-mode writing, but I’ve been doing so much of that on my blog, that I’m not sure I have the energy to both blog and fictioning right now. But, I can do what I want. Nobody’s reading any of this anyway… and I’m still having a good time. So fuck it.

The art preview from the book:

Related writing & research