I’ve been teasing references to this for a while now, but it is now finally official, the website of Typophilia, my print publisher in France, is now live. It has been fun working with them behind the scenes to translate all of my books and publish them for French audiences, since January. They really get my vision of using AI to critique (and satirize) AI, and society’s relationship with technology more broadly. The print versions of the books are really well designed to capture the pulp sci fi serial feel I have been emulating, and are going to look sharp in print.
We’re starting with French version of The Quatria Conspiracy as book #0 because it is effectively the origin for a lot of what followed in the later AI Lore Books series. English readers can still purchase ebook versions on Gumroad (not sold anywhere else), but no print yet.
As we get rolling, I will try to go back through and write a “Notes on” piece for each volume, as I found the process of writing those – which I only commenced maybe half or two thirds of the way in – really helpful for my own reflection if nothing else. I don’t want to give away all the whatzits in each volume, because it’s best if readers form their own conclusions about what’s going on. But it’s fun to be able to give selective sign posts along the way.
Anyway, big thank you and congratulations to everyone at Typophilia, and looking forward to where we can take this adventure together!
I couldn’t stop with these the other day – that is, until I was rate-limited by Dalle. I swear, I don’t even know why I pay for these tools anymore that don’t let me do what I want or need when I want or need it. But complaining aside, these fake Amazon product images (archived) are nothing short of incredible. I’d love to see an entire coffee-table book of these…
Click the link above for the full image set. Here are some samples:
These images so perfectly encapsulate so many of my… feelings, it’s amazing. Check out the full image set linked above.
Got some incredible results out of Dalle tonight, which I compiled into into an Imgur post here (archived). I asked Dalle to depict product images from Amazon with incomprehensible, unnecessary and other just generally bad ideas.
Couple highlights here, but click link above for the full set:
Looking through that set, I honestly can’t tell a lot of these aren’t real, because Amazon is such a wasteland of pseudo-English words and cheap crap, it’s more real than reality, it’s hyperreality from a parallel hell dimension that undulates at a quantum level orthogonally intersecting and de-intersecting our reality continuously…
As a bit of a rant: I’ve consistently experienced a really annoying behavior using Dalle, which I pay a monthly fee to use. It goes like this: just when I’m having really good image results, going on an incredible streak of basically perfect images accurately and creatively reflecting my inner vision, and I’m getting into that kind of “flow state” that is so essentially to good deep artistic exploration and creation, I start getting rate limited. Which puts a dent in that buzz, and basically in short order puts an end to whatever winning streak I was on.
As an artist trying to use this product to make art, and paying for it, the system needs to get out of my way and do the things I’m paying it to do, not try to break my balls when I’m on a roll.
There’s an underlying drawing I did of the subject from memory based on other studies I did by hand. I took this and projected the photo of the drawing onto my canvas:
It’s not an incredible drawing but was good enough to get the shapes in. But It didn’t end up seeming right and I painted over it a good bit, and sort of fragmented the features in a pseudo-neo cubist inspired thing. But didn’t end up liking that enough, so took a gamble on another projected image, one made by Dalle while trying to get it to reproduce something in the style of the original Hygeia museum piece.
This is my second time using AI in conjunction with a physical painting. But the last one was a reference image that I just based my own drawing off of freehand. This is the first time trying to overlay directly onto the canvas via tracing off a projection.
It’s gotten me thinking lots of crazy thoughts about how to potentially integrate AI tools into actual physical painting (and other art-making). Like what if I could hook my projector up to a generative AI which is being periodically fed webcam images of the latest state of my IRL canvas. And then it could automatically or when I ask it, suggest next brushstrokes or propose visual alterations, styles, directions I might explore. And these would be projected as overlaid suggestions on my canvas, which I could then “accept” or reject or whatever by painting them in myself in my own way.
It would be something like a camera lucida with an AI in the loop:
This train of thought sent me down a deep deep rabbit hole about early and possibly secret use of optics my artists going back to the 1400’s possibly, according to the Hockney-Falco thesis. You can see a great BBC documentary on Hockney’s theories, and he’s got a book about it I haven’t read called Secret Knowledge. Here’s a Youtube embed:
Another related one that’s worth watching is Tim’s Vermeer which goes on a similar track of trying to prove Vermeer used a similar method with mirrors and something something. Pretty fascinating all around.
I found there’s a business trying to market the “Vermirror,” or as others have called it more generically, the comparator mirror. From what I can tell, the trick is basically getting a first surface or front surface mirror, which is brighter and reflects on its front face instead of its back face. And it’s held by some kind of rigid arm to keep it in the correct position relative to your work surface and subject. This video of art students using them gives a good idea of how it works:
I’ve currently got on order some bits and bobs that I will finagle together into being something like this. The advantage to using the mirror is that unlike when you project directly onto your canvas, you can still see the colors you’re mixing. They aren’t washed out or modified by the projected image.
Anyway I tried to get Dalle to generate a patent-style drawing of what a contraption like this might look like, where a combination projector & web cam capture images of a canvas, send it for processing, and send back suggested next strokes. It’s a little wonky and disconnected, but it shows some fun relationships nonetheless, and it lets the mind wander a bit looking at it, thinking about the possibilities.
I actually tried getting Dalle to do this task:
Take my painting image as input
Reproduce the image with suggested modifications
But it doesn’t seem able to reproduce an image, let alone modify it.
So then I had the idea of like okay:
From the input image, make a verbal description of what you would change.
It was able to do that no problem.
Then I said, okay take the changes you would make based on your verbal description, and draw them on a new image which can be used as overlay to guide painting in changes on the original image
But nope, that didn’t work. It got stuck in a loop of thinking it was helping me and linking to non-existent Imgur images. So that’s a little disappointing, but I think there’s something here. I just have to figure out the right pathway with the right tools to get to it. And Dalle is probably not the one for this, currently.
I did manage to get one image set out of this when I was asking for overlays for how it would modify the original. It gave me this:
It’s not really what I had in mind by overlay and suggesting brush strokes at a micro-level that is in line with the style of the original input image. But I did notice that when I scaled it and rotated it a little, it’s actually fairly close to many of the major facial landmarks:
Obviously the neck and ear arrangements are different, but there’s a lot of match here, even though I don’t agree at all with the stylistic direction. But also that’s kind of the point of a collaboration too, that you both bring in completely different ideas and references and impulses. So maybe there is value to exploring in this part of the liminal latent/real image space…
The film is a depressing attempt to reduce genius to a trick. […]
The technology Jenison relies on can replicate art, but it does so synthetically, with no understanding of art’s inner life. The “Vermeer” it spits out is a stillborn simulacrum.
Love it or leave it, but we live in a world where the simulation in many cases is more “real” in some aspects than the so-called Real. And this notion that studying how this might work is somehow “cheating” or a “trick” itself to me completely misses the boat on what art is: it’s artifice upon artifice, and somehow through that, finding authenticity despite everything.
“Switzerland-based startup FinalSpark claims to have built a unique computer processor made from 16 mini brains made from human brain tissue, Tom’s Hardware reports — and they are positioning this “living computer” as an alternative to silicon-based computing.
And now, other researchers can remotely access the startup’s biocomputer, the Neuroplatform, to conduct studies on, say, artificial intelligence, which typically requires enormous resources.
One of the biggest advantages of biological computing is that neurons compute information with much less energy than digital computers,” FinalSpark scientist and strategic advisor Ewelina Kurtys wrote in a company blog post earlier this month. “It is estimated that living neurons can use over 1 million times less energy than the current digital processors we use.”
First of all, I have pretty much an entire book about this exact concept, which I refer to as “vat bundles” and which is discussed extensively in The Abomination Crisis (quote below). This is one of the luxuries that comes with having put out so many books, is eventually you have covered a broad range of stuff, and you can do exactly this and say, Oh, yeah, I have a book about that…
“They were termed “vat-bundles” to avoid legal complications with regards to the grey areas around cloning, reproductive, and human rights. Given that they were literally bundles of nerves grown in a vat solution – which could either live there for an indeterminate period in that form, or be inserted into biological or cybernetic organisms – the naming stuck in popular use.”
There’s also a theme/story device I use in a number of the AI Lore books, especially the Topia Books, where people can temporarily or permanently have their personalities taken over and controlled remotely in a kind of overwrite mode. In the books, there are references to being able to watch movies or play games somehow internally during overwrite sessions, while your body is put through random tasks by the AI systems which control society.
I’d always assumed I guess that what the AIs did with your body was mostly “physbod” tasks (physical body or ‘real’ work), but the item about FinalSpark’s supposed real life vat-bundles makes me think that maybe also the AIs during these sessions use the human brains as distributed biological processing nodes – sort of a human cloud server writ large. Makes sense if you think about it…
In other words, the decisions made by big AI industry players impact everyone. Right now, though, those who lead AI companies are pretty much the only ones making those choices.
This piece by Matt Weber is one of the more thoughtful reactions I’ve seen so far to my work using AI as an artistic tool like any other, with both strengths and many many limitations. It’s interesting to me because it’s mentioned they found my work organically via a directory of bloggers that I added myself to. And not because like most people who found it because of a news article or an (angry) social media post. So this read of it all seems to be much more in tune with my own actual thinking on these issues, which is a nice change of pace.
Speaking of potential subliminal harms in the EU related to AI (/s), I’m pleased to make the teaser soft launch announcement that the full set of AI Lore books, and the three other books I wrote prior to that (121 titles in total) are being translated and published in France in a small printed format (about the size of a cell phone). I’m starting to get early proofs back, and the quality looks amazing. These are gonna be beautiful, fun, pulpy little AI books in a speculative fiction genre all their own. We’ll have more news and an opportunity to order online direct from the publisher in the coming weeks. Super exciting & stay tuned!
I’m both interested in and puzzling over this clause in Article 5(a) of the EU AI Act:
(a) the placing on the market, putting into service or use of an AI system that deploys subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness in order to materially distort a person’s behaviour in a manner that causes or is likely to cause that person or another person physical or psychological harm;
This is both a potentially deep wording and also one which is potentially very fluffy and so not concrete that it might be a practical impossibility to effectively enforce it.
What the heck does “beyond a person’s consciousness” even mean?
Also there is such a broad spectrum of technologies which already “materially distort a person’s behavior” that we need to look much more carefully and closely at which of those and precisely how they bring people to especially psychological harm.
I would argue, for example, that opening up Youtube on a smart tv already aims entirely to materially distort a person’s behavior by bringing you a bunch of recommended videos to watch. It might be theoretically to your benefit because you went there to watch videos, but I’ve seen user behavior in kids especially where they turn on the tv with the idea “let’s watch ___” (such and such show or film) but then when Youtube opens, their original intention is diverted to something that Youtube instead has decided they should watch.
It might be a right or wrong recommended video, but that’s beside the point. The point is the fracturing and fragmentation of the original human intent which caused the person to engage with the system in the first place. I would personally argue this is over the long term and extremely dangerous and damaging UX pattern to normalize, as it essentially subjugates the human will to the algorithmic.
YouTube uses, no doubt, machine learning at least if not “AI” (whatever that even means anymore). So it could conceivably be covered under the Act – except is this UX pattern “beyond a person’s consciousness” or not? It’s highly unclear. It’s not exactly “subliminal” in the way I think most of us mean it – like hidden messages in the videos or something. But I think this pattern does sort of slip through the cracks in such a way that most people might not realize it that if their original intention was materially distorted by making use of the system.
Anyway, this is just one of many extremely confusing parts of the AI Act that I wrote about in my last post, and I’ll try to continue dissecting here as time permits between many other projects.
I’ve been having a devil of a time figuring which version of the EU’s recently passed Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is the final one. So I wrote to the European Commission Library, figuring they could help me if anyone could. They replied that this link below is the official final version. I thought I would do the favor to anyone else looking to get this into Google search results. Here is the full title of the Act and a link to it:
I’ll save more detailed commentary for another time, but I have to say I’m actually a bit disappointed reading it, because… it makes little sense to me. I was a huge fan of GDPR – that one really clicked for me. I liked their other album, DSA (Digital Services Act), though I think much of it may prove to be unworkable in practice. But the AI Act, I’m struggling to follow it, because it seems like they don’t really know what the thing is that they are trying to regulate. So they have taken one concept of “high risk” and very loosely organized it, and then penciled in a bunch of other sketches in the margins, and called it a day.
I guess this might be less of a big deal if it only affected the EU, but one big issue I see with these kinds of regs getting passed is that they other countries or actors say, “Well, look how good the EU did – they passed a whole act!” But probably a lot of the people who reference how great this act is have not actually read it in any detail. I don’t find it to be that good, and I’m not sure at the end of the day how much it’s going to protect against abuses of these technologies. I guess we’ll see. I’m not going to hold my breath about any of these laws holding back the tide in any kind of meaningful way though. Companies know enough to just route around these kinds of blockages in a global market.
