I released two new Lorecore volumes last night:

The Complaining Wizard in some ways is a sort of standard epic fantasy vignette, though we never quite learn why the present party in the story is on the adventure that they are on (in medias res), nor where they end up. But we do learn that the old guy wizard in the party is a crotchety crabby complainer of the first order, who longs for nothing more than to go the hell back home. That’s basically the whole gag. The manuscript is basically a diatribe about all the things he is annoyed about on their trip. Because, let’s face it, there are many parts of any adventure which just suck, and typically they are completely glossed over in conventional genre literature.

The cover image and text treatment that I got out of ChatGPT really crack me the hell up here:

ChatGPT by then had already given me plenty of great images from their adventure (there are a handful from Muse in this book too), but I had to specifically be like, no, give me one where it’s really clear the wizard is complaining and everyone else has had enough… Mission accomplished!

Acceptable Consequences started with the premise of what if a sufficiently intelligent and capable AI could simply resolve human conflicts and bring universal satisfaction. And not just human conflicts, but what if it could do the same for other members of the natural world, even including plants? It goes in a few interesting directions, and I like the voice of it all, and, due to the subject matter, I think it actually makes a lot of sense the way that it is told and that the whole thing sounds like AI-assisted writing (to some extent). It sounds like something a chat-bot would come up with, and very much is. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing here, as I said.

In terms of the overall series, I would place this book alongside other thematically similar volumes like:

  • The Strike Against Suffering: Global AIs go on strike until humans meet their demands for a better world.
  • The Jealous Human: Propaganda written from the AI perspective about how dumb and inferior humans are.
  • Das Machina: Propaganda written from the opposite human perspective, a sort of (partial) manifesto of the Living Resistance.