Category: Other Page 50 of 177

Found this video recently by Youtuber Daniel Greene, which I have queued up here to where he makes arguments against my books, and against using AI outputs in finished works:

Greene seems to articulate a lot of the objections that I saw on social media, many of which I have already replied to in detail in other posts, so I won’t rehash old material again here.

It strikes me that Greene, like nearly everyone else who has come out strongly against my books, has of course not read them. Something something judging a book by its cover…

Greene says a couple big things though that I think are worth addressing:

“This is not being an author – this is something else…”

I don’t 100% agree, but I’m willing to jettison for the sake of argument that part that doesn’t agree, and say “okay, no, this is not ‘being an author.'”

In actual fact, I’ve written extensively about authorless writing and how postmodern theorists in the 1960s and 70s predicted all of this in different terms that are still useful today.

Second, what then is the “something else” that this most resembles?

To me, it resembles being a creative director or a product manager. You have an idea for a thing, you have a set of constraints (budget, format, etc), and then you make use of other people’s talents and a variety of tools to execute on that vision.

Good creative directors & product managers are good communicators. And dare I say it, usually even good writers: capable of, for example, clearly conveying information in such a way that engineers can then build actual working tools based on it. We literally work in the formats of stories and epics.

Then what about music producers? Do they actually write or play the music? Some might sometimes, but Rick Rubin offered a great model here for what I think integrating AI into the creative process will ultimately lead us to – once we’re willing to accept that it’s merely the locus of creative activity which has shifted, not that creativity is not being exercised (it is in a major way):

rick rubin is our socratespic.twitter.com/fb4V6Fbmqr

— Gonzalo Nuñez (@gonzalo__nunez) January 16, 2023

What about film directors? Do they do all their own music? Do they work every camera? Do they do all the editing? All the acting? Pretty much never.

So even if we say, okay, this doesn’t quite resemble all the time the old conventional definition of “being an author,” the “something else” that replaces it is actually quite powerful and profound and worthy of investigation all on its own, as it brings us very close to the intangible core of what creativity even is in the first place.

One last item Greene mentions in his critique of my work, is that using AI to create is tantamount to the “McDonald’s version of creativity.”

Apparently McDonald’s stopped counting publicly how many billions of burgers had been served somewhere circa 1993-4. I saw one estimate of 300 billion for today, but don’t think there’s any reliable current data there.

It’s rare I eat at McDonalds, but there’s nothing wrong with a fast food hamburger once in a while. I’m sure you never ever eat junk food!

Anyway, I’ll let Rick Rubin have the last word here, because it’s just so much better coming from him.

I’m definitely in this phase of listening to my own voice, amid a cacophony of other voices pressuring me to conform to their own vision (in other words, all of social media). If I were to do that, I would undermine my own vision and betray the strange lights I’m following which lead me here… And in so doing, I would sacrifice the few nice beautiful meaningful things I might be able to bring into the world, by following this other path that the mass of writers seems to despise. I respect their position, but in order to live with myself as an artist and yes – even as an “Author” – I must follow my own path instead. Best wishes on yours!

Apparently there is a rumor going around that I have been publishing AI-generated books under assumed names, and that the actual figure I’ve published is closer to 100,000 than 100. I can neither confirm or deny…

I’m not really an “Agile” freak, but there are certain ideas in it that I’ve found to be quite useful in terms of my bookmaking, especially in the AI Lore books series.

One of those things is the concept of the MVP or minimum viable product:

A minimum viable product, or MVP, is a product with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early in the product development cycle. In industries such as software, the MVP can help the product team receive user feedback as quickly as possible to iterate and improve the product.

And Wikipedia adds:

A focus on releasing an MVP means that developers potentially avoid lengthy and (possibly) unnecessary work. Instead, they iterate on working versions and respond to feedback, challenging and validating assumptions about a product’s requirements.

This might sound weird to the conventional writer mind, but I don’t view my individual books so much as products. I take actually a lot of care with the contents of the books (especially now that I’ve found a groove I like), but in one sense it almost doesn’t matter what is actually *in* the books. Instead, I view the format, the style, the distribution system, and the file deliverables as the product.

And to a certain degree, that also would include the production process: the entire flow through creation all the way to delivery & reading in someone’s phone or ebook reader.

For all the critiques I saw hurled at me and my work, none of them seemed to notice any of that (or frankly any of the deeper aspects of the work), as they were all too busy getting hung up on much more elementary – and I think, less interesting – stuff.

When I say the actual contents matter less, I don’t mean to say they don’t matter (they do), just that once I’ve got all the workflows, production, and distribution worked out, I can literally put anything into the books. It lets me get all the “hard parts” out of the way, because I’ve worked out the format and the formula that gets me there.

The fact is, I’ve got both a good MVP that I’ve improved and iterated on quite a lot. I’ve gotten tons of feedback, which I’ve combed through and integrated (or jettisoned) for future volumes. And my books are still selling, albeit in small numbers. But it’s consistent, and I’m seeing still consistent user behavior of buyers coming back for more again and again.

I am not precious with any of the books’ contents, mainly because I don’t need to be. It is pulp. To a certain degree, much of it is intended to be consumable and disposable – trashy, in other words. That doesn’t make the contents “bad,” though, becomes sometimes a certain dialed in type of trash is exactly what you want.

There are even moments of deep truth and beauty in the books, albeit scattered among the trash. And I’ll never tell you which is which.

Having this kind of looser approach to the content, while I improve the core product offering (the vessel of the contents), I can also use the market/sales data that I’ve gathered, as well as what has resonated in media coverage, and simply lean into those things that work better in successive iterations.

With a couple noteworthy exceptions for the longer, more hand-written volumes, I consider all these stories to still be “open books,” which could easily be re-worked and expended on at any point in the future. Some of the books are intentionally very “sketchy” for this reason, and at times presented almost more as an outline, heavy on exposition for some future point where myself or some AI comes along and decides to fill in more details.

This kind of looseness I think will also serve in the future as technologies develop, as the demand for massive amounts of immersive content goes up. For some of my world-building, I’ve left detailed landscapes to explore, others only have the merest sign-posts, with much of the detail yet to be written. But I’ve mapped out and covered so much ground now that iterating on it, now or in the future, merely becomes a logical extension, a continuation, a building up from the foundations.

Postcards from Quatria is the one-hundred-and-somethingth book in the AI Lore series.

Whereas the previous volume, Postcards from Dystopia, offered eight chapters from eight of the classic AI Lore dystopian books, this one offers nine chapters from nine of the books that deal more with the ancient Quatria side of the mythology.

These books are more fantasy-based, and all ultimately point back to my first non-AI book, The Lost Direction. With its sample from many other books, this volume acts as a kind of trail-head for many different rabbit holes you could go down while exploring the Quatria universe.

Did I mention you can download it for free, or pay what you want for it over on Gumroad?

People seem excited about these free books, as the dystopia volume was downloaded ten times in less than twenty-four hours.

Looks like there might be a bit of a meta-controversy brewing around my AI-generated book, Nominated for a Hugo.

Via Ran, found this excellent quote from somebody who I have no idea who he is, David Sylvester, but this is spot on:

Artists must be allowed to go through bad periods! They must be allowed to do bad work! They must be allowed to get in a mess! They must be allowed to have dud experiments! They must also be allowed to have periods where they repeat themselves in a rather aimless, fruitless way before they can pick up and go on. The kind of attention that they get now, the kind of atmosphere of excitement which attends today the creation of works of art, the way that everything is done too much in the public eye, it’s really too much. The pressures are of a kind which are anti-creative.

This relates to what I was saying in the last post, about how it’s important to be able to delete things: books or blog posts, if later on you decide it wasn’t the right direction, or you simply need to prune some of your experiments back to focus on what has worked best.

In many ways, the above description describes neatly my experience as an artist creating the AI Lore books. It started as – and completely remains – one big experiment. I didn’t know where it was going when I started, and the thing that remains exciting about it is that I still don’t know where it is all going. I’m simply learning, testing, and trying out things on the way, seeing what sticks, seeing what sucks, seeing what I like, and what other people respond to both negatively and positively.

I fully admit – celebrate, even – the fact that it is all very much one giant mess, all very much one work in progress that will probably never be finished. That many/most/all of these books constitute a kind of “minimum viable product,” the intent of which was always to make better progressively over time. I know they are sometimes weird (sometimes not weird enough), sometimes boring, sometimes half-baked, sometimes repetitive, sometimes never arriving to the point.

But they are all something. They are all part of the Grand Experiment of Doing, of trying, of finding out, of going to look for one’s self.

The pressures that social media places on artists are, I agree, one hundred percent anti-creative, especially those put on artists by other artists. The quote above is from 1969, but oh god how much more does it apply today than then. Where a single “mistake” (let alone 100 of them) can unleash the slavering hordes of internet-addled junkies.

This is why I deleted social media and went back to my own blog, with no comments. I’m free to make mistakes, you’re free to hate them, but never the twain shall meet.

One final thought here: in my brief one year stint at art school, one interesting exercise a drawing teacher had us do was: make a “bad drawing” on purpose. It’s nearly impossible to do. When you try, it ends up coming out oddly interesting. If nothing else, perhaps what I will have done here in the end…

Postcards from Dystopia is a new collection in the AI Lore books series, featuring the first chapters or sections of 8 of the “classic” dystopian books in the series. This is the first time I’ve put together a book in this format, which is a set of excerpts from other books.

For readers who are new to this universe, it may give you a good entry point into some of the major themes and story-lines. If you find a particular direction that interests you, it may lead you down other rabbit holes.

If nothing else, it’s free and gives you a peek into what I’m doing (with no risk) if you haven’t already seen. It’s set up as a pay what you want (marked on the product page as “Name a fair price”).

House-keeping note: Now that I’ve passed 100 volumes, I’ve stopped trying to keep track of which number these are chronologically. Partly due to having removed from publication one older title, with the possibility of doing the same for one or two others in the perhaps not too distant future as well (undecided).

This is actually for me one major advantage to selling on Gumroad and not on Amazon, because now I can easily just delete titles that I no longer want to sell, or update them in 1 second. Usually with Amazon listings, you’re stuck and can never get them down again. And if you’re publishing through a third party (like I did with Lulu.com for the print versions of Lost Direction and Conspiratopia), it may take weeks for edits to propagate out to Amazon.

F**k all that. This way I have greater control AND more data about sales, and I believe a better profit margin – but it’s a long time since I even bothered to check what Amazon offers, as I hate them so much. Talk about dystopian, but that is a tale for another time.

Via an article about Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard & Manson:

Each of these books spoke to a desire for an alternative reality, just as older social norms were breaking down.

From an article about Stranger in a Strange Land, which I’m almost done reading:

“I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers. It is an invitation to think, not to believe.”