About

Artist, Bookmaker & AI Activist, specializing in questionable alternative hyperrealities and, occasionally, their discernment.

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Check out MY AI books

Bio:

Tim Boucher explores the convergence of artificial intelligence and human creativity in literature. Resulting from experimental collaborations with AI tools, his books blur the lines between human and machine, reality and fiction, and challenge conventional notions of authorship and narrative unity.

Boucher’s professional background in content moderation, disinformation, and tech policy informs the deep critique of society’s over-reliance on technology that suffuses his books. He lives in Quebec, Canada on a small willow farm where he makes baskets and practices green woodworking.

Hi, my name is Tim. Here are some things about me:

I don’t believe in “write what you know;” I write to find out…
I’ve produced over 100 books using AI image and text generation tools.
I was on CNN (twice if you count my art) to talk about AI art & online Trust & Safety.
Also had this piece on my books published by Newsweek, which was further covered by Business Insider & New York Post, and dozens of other sources around the globe.
I only sell my books on Gumroad, not Amazon. Amazon has too much power over publishing (especially indie), and the increasing hegemony of the big four or five publishers makes the professional publishing industry not worth defending, in my opinion. Power to the small! We can find new – and old – ways of publishing.
Happy to announce that all of my books are now being translated and published in print editions in France.
You can download a couple of the books for free if you want to see samples of what they are like. Each of those is an anthology containing first chapters from other volumes. They are a few months old now (in some cases years) and don’t reflect any of the latest work, though.
Here’s my artist’s statement (2023 – I need to write a new one) which outlines what my work is all about and why, and some thoughts on ‘reality-fluid’ art. (This podcast I made with an AI interviewer is also a good overview of how I think about my art.)
Here’s one of the clearest, most even-handed media pieces about my work from a Columbia Journalism Grad School student. Funny that journalism students often end up doing it better than professionals!
I’m getting more and more interested in a text-only modern web browser, and am experimenting with blocking (most) videos and images on the web. It feels much calmer. Here’s a related piece about how I use screens.
Got very into this idea of the AI-assisted Hypercanvas as an art medium, and also hyperdimensional storytelling using hypercanvases.
Some further thoughts on AI’s role in art, creativity, and originality, as it seems to be an ongoing topic of interest for people.
I laid out a case here for why we should be including artists in high level policy discussions about AI.
Despite using generative AI to make art and books, I’m actually deeply interested in technologies that only Do One Thing, or DOT, as I call it.
I drafted a submission to the US Copyright Office & Canada’s public consultation on generative AI & copyright, in which I describe my work as a creative practitioner using AI, and argue that creators ought to be able to copyright AI-assisted works, and that training on copyrighted data sets is generally fair use. I also think we should develop extremely high quality entirely opt-in data sets that reward all contributors, not just those who contributed data, but those who curate, clean, moderate, etc. Here’s the accompanying press release.
I wrote a Digital Terms of Service for AI Providers in Canada and sent it out to all the federal political parties. Here’s my press release and more notes about why I did it, and some news coverage on the topic.
Here is another more general press release about my AI Lore books.
Also check out: How content moderation informs my artwork & more detailed experiences being a moderator.
I’m increasingly under the impression that AI-generated “ethics” and many AI-based content moderation systems are potentially bigger “existential” risks to humanity than the ones that get far more press. I’m skeptical we can have “safe” AI systems under for-profit models in that they seem like they will all be fundamentally driven by the profit motive & perpetuate these the inherent inequalities of these systems.
Most people haven’t dug deep enough to understand that my work actually comes from a place of profound unease about technology and its place in our lives (I use AI to critique AI). My personal & professional work has all been about attempting to find that right relationship, and often failing… But there is value in the grand experiment.
There are too many things to explain in a short space, so this is as good a place as any for newcomers to start understanding my work (though its a few months old now). You will find tons of rabbit holes to follow from there. You could also just skim the home page of this blog for the latest, which is probably better and hopefully more developed thinking anyway.
Some open-ended thoughts about how I use AI, and ethics, and how we might usefully apply hyperreality as an analytical framework to grapple with related problems.
Here’s a bit more recent piece on why I still use generative AI as an artist, despite knowing there are many problems with the technology.
I’ve been doing design explorations for a handheld Midjourney controller and more broadly for navigating any high-dimensional latent space. (See also)
Also have been trying to articulate what a “Generativist” art movement might consist of.
I got into meditation a few months back and it has really helped me. Here’s what I do.
I’m not on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube (though I do watch it a lot), Tiktok, or Linkedin. I happily haven’t had a cell phone for well over a decade.
I still like Reddit (old Reddit, anyway), and that’s saying a lot because I hate social media apart from that. I’m not planning on joining Mastodon.
I stopped writing elsewhere on the web, because nothing else ever got better than good old-fashioned self-hosted blogging, so now I’m concentrating on that again (and writing short books using AI).
I still use WordPress for blogging because old habits die hard, even though I recognize it is bloated and weird. Blogging for me let’s me get back to expressing my true voice, instead of competing for likes & shouting at people on social media. (I like Jaron Lanier’s idea of “Go where you are kindest,” so for me that’s blogging.)
I use Fraidycat RSS reader as my personal home page now and I love it. So much better than getting recommended reams of junk by social media platform feeds.
I reply to things I find online in my blog posts, like in the “old days,” but don’t have comments (or tracking, or stats) on my blog. I find it is freeing and lets me write again finally in my own authentic voice. (If you want to reply privately to something I wrote, send an email. Or if you want to reply publicly, post on your blog, and send me a link, and I’ll post a reply here. That used to work great 20 years ago, tbh, back before spammers killed pingbacks & trackbacks…)
To contact me: I still like email. You can reach out via the form at the bottom of this page.

(“Hello” page inspired by Alastair Johnston)

Bio:

Hi, my name is Tim. Here are some things about me:

Selected Press:

Interviews & podcasts with me:

Books: