Nice article about AI Lore books in Columbia Grad. School of Journalism publication

A really nice article came out last week about my own and some other authors like Stephen Marche’s efforts to explore the boundaries of AI-assisted fiction. It’s by Vikram Nijhawan of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and is titled, Writers Test the Future of Fiction With AI. It’s actually the most even-handed and accurate telling so far in the media of my overall personal tale with the AI Lore books series.

Despite Newsweek wanting me to focus on the money aspect, it’s really not about that – and I’m not making all that much for time spent. But the point is the time spent is worth a lot more than money to me, engaging with and understanding AI tools, how they work, what they can and can’t do, and what they teach me about myself, and the explorations they enable of shared creative worlds.

People seem to think virtual reality is linked somehow to immersive headsets or whatever, but virtual reality is ideas. It is listening to other voices, understanding other stories and entertaining other possible – or impossible viewpoints – just for a little while. The work of it is a pleasure, it expands us both as reader and as “writer.”

I don’t care if people think of me as an “author” or if they want to take shots at how bad my sales are, or fifty other things. Those things are incidental to the dedication to the Creative Act, in the Rick Rubin sense, that doing these books has taken, and continues to take. It’s provided a tangible framework for so many things, feelings, hunches, hauntings of intuition, imagination, that have dogged at me for ten, fifteen, twenty years, more… this incredible way of painting with other possible futures, pasts, presents….

If what Jaron Lanier says is true, that critics are actually optimists because they say “this could be better,” then the same must be true of dystopian “authors,” that we are secretly utopian, because we too say through fiction “this could be better.”

By invoking in the first place the Torment Nexus, sci-fi authors help identify the contours of it – yes, enabling in many cases it to come into our reality – but then also forging in the same breath the spirit and tools to resist it, contain it, use it, and expose Torment as just one branch of the larger Nexus we’re all ride or dieing on.

As to arguments that only one kind of writing (or one kind of art) is “valid,” I don’t hold with any of those schools of thought. You can do anything amazing with any medium or media mixed together. I’ve been getting into basketmaking with natural materials (which, incidentally, is a craft that I’ve read – but yet to verify – cannot be done through automation, so far; interesting as hell but a divergence from the main course of this present wordstream).

That’s just an example. I know my baskets aren’t amazing. The point is the making, the trying, the doing, the repetition, improvement, improvisation, the pure act of discovery, of uncovering, of making manifest, making real. Producing. I like producing. I like constantly working on something, and have found a good match with my way of working to this idea of releasing in installments, as volumes, as incremental iterations on ideas, of endless interconnections.

I think the metaphor of the death of the author is apt, as I think we’re moving in a direction where the act of reading becomes a means of and extension of the readers’ own expression, not just their understanding or its impact on them. But as participant collaborators. Many worlds, many authors. With AI tools, other places, other destinations become visible, if only through far off glimpses today, if only through a glass darkly.

And obviously, if sci fi in many ways brought us AI in its current unfolding today, I find it weird and confusing that so many people would have such negative reactions on social media (perhaps there in lies the true problem) against using AI to help push the boundaries of what sci-fi even is…

Anyway, lots of digressing here, but Vikram’s article gave me a lot of jumping off points.