Smash That Like Button is officially the 121st volume of the AI Lore books series, or unofficially number 124 of the bigger series which includes the non-AI books.

I’ve wanted to do a book by this title for ages and finally did it. I used Mistral 7B for most of it (which I used as completions for my own seed texts via TextSynth playground), with an ending via Llama to mix things up, and an intro by ChatGPT. This is more or less the same tech combo I’ve used on the text side for the past few books. It’s good enough, but I think I’m reaching the end of what I can get from Mistral using it that way. It gets repetitively psychotic after a certain point (or, maybe that’s just me?).

Something I dove more into here that I maybe only touched on obliquely at points in other books is sort of me as the writer voice talking into the completions text box on TextSynth, trying to direct its output at points verbally, even though it’s not a chatbot and cannot really understand or speak back to you used in this formulation (I don’t think, anyway). I feel like the way its included in this already surreal piece adds even more grit to the texture (like mixing sand in paint, as some of the early Cubists did). I haven’t seen anyone else experiment with this facet of AI writing before, and I think there’s a lot of interesting potential there stylistically. I have other ideas of where to take that mode of writing in the future.

Here’s the image preview:

Much but not all of the image content is by Ideogram, a few Playgrounds, a few Leonardos, a few Dalles. Some of the art references other projects I’ve been discussing lately on this blog.

I don’t have a ton more to say on it, except to highlight how much I absolutely despise people asking me to like, subscribe, and follow. I think that kind of algorithm-chasing behavior leads only to madness at worst and unhappiness for certain. It’s time to tear all that shit down and start anew.

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