I’ve been pondering a lot the reactions people have had on social media regarding my AI Lore books, and it’s made me realize that framing is everything. The means and perspective by which something is first presented to people here. And why changing the perspective through which the very same thing is shown changes the resulting reactions people have completely.
A good case study is the AI-generated science fiction magazine called Infinite Odyssey. Here are some of the headlines their work generated:
Now, I didn’t see the responses any of those news items resulted in on social media at the time, but I saw very clearly how the initial headlines your work gets end up framing what kinds of reactions people will be driven to have, along which particular fault lines.
It was unfortunate that Newsweek wanted me to take the “look how much I’m making with AI” angle. It’s not what I originally pitched them. One, because I’m really not making that much – but it’s fun for me so who cares. Two, because it sets everyone up in comments to be like “this guy’s not making that much / he’s only in it for the money / etc etc.”
Fundamentally, I have to ask though: what’s so different about Infinite Odyssey’s sci fi generated magazine (which got good reviews), and what I’m doing in a different sort of configuration via pulp sci fi mini novels as ebooks? Apart from format (and number of volumes produced), and the fact that they are a group of people and I am just one?
Their project is really cool, and they even have a print edition of their first volume. The cover price for that is high though, and I know from trying to sell print books in the past you have to raise your cover price so high to even make a small profit on each unit. It’s a really hard game to win at.
I could be wrong, but it looks like their digital version is probably delivered as a PDF file. Mine are delivered as either EPUB or MOBI files, so you can use them on Kindle or any other kind of reader.
Apart from those relatively minor differences – and that my books probably contain more human-written percentages of words than theirs do (based on what I heard in this excellent interview with Philippe Klein, the Creative Director of the magazine), it’s hard to see what the difference is, apart from public perceptions that were formed as a result of framing around their initial coverage.
A good lesson for me, either way. The objective at this point seems to be: improve the framing. Improve the framing, improve the response.
One good side effect of meditating twice a day for twenty minutes is that you end up not wasting those 40 minutes every day on some other bullshit thing that is far less important, like looking at social media.
It sounds like a lot 40 minutes, but I’ve not felt it as a burden since I started. In fact, I think it makes you value and use all the other minutes of your day so much better that in the end the “actual value” is probably much higher than a mere 40 minutes of quietly listening to whatever’s going on inside.
I never read any Van Vogt but like this piece from PKD from the Vertex interview:
DICK: I started reading sf when I was about twelve and I real all I could, so any author who was writing about that time, I read. But there’s no doubt who got me off originally and that was A.E. van Vogt. There was in van Vogt’s writing a mysterious quality, and this was especially true in The World of Null A. All the parts of that book did not add up; all the ingredients did not make a coherency. Now some people are put off by that. They think that’s sloppy and wrong, but the thing that fascinated me so much was that this resembled reality more than anybody else’s writing inside or outside science fiction.
VERTEX: What about Damon Knight’s famous article criticizing van Vogt?
DICK: Damon feels that it’s bad artistry when you build those funky universes where people fall through the floor. It’s like he’s viewing a story the way a building inspector would when he’s building your house. But reality really is a mess, and yet it’s exciting. The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.
“The World of Ā abounds in contradictions, misleading clues and irrelevant action…It is [van Vogt’s] habit to introduce a monster, or a gadget, or an extra-terrestrial culture, simply by naming it, without any explanation of its nature…By this means, and by means of his writing style, which is discursive and hard to follow, van Vogt also obscures his plot to such an extent that when it falls to pieces at the end, the event passes without remark.”
And his 1974 walk-back:
Van Vogt has just revealed, for the first time as far as I know, that during this period he made a practice of dreaming about his stories and waking himself up every ninety minutes to take notes. This explains a good deal about the stories, and suggests that it is really useless to attack them by conventional standards. If the stories have a dream consistency which affects readers powerfully, it is probably irrelevant that they lack ordinary consistency.
There’s an interesting bit of lore in the PKD legendarium regarding what he referred to in his Exegesis as his “meta-novel.” It’s a little hard to track the exact details online, and it seems like which set of 10 of his novels constituted this “meta novel” which revealed some sort of divine gnostic truth. There are some guesses on this Reddit thread, as to which books he meant.
The point is here that he used as a technique (consciously or otherwise) what I’ve been categorizing under networked narrative/transmedia storytelling. Where your story is split up, where central narrative unities have been broken. More on this as I find bits to add into comments here…
My own personal response to that, intuitively, is a resounding YES! And I think there’s ample narratological and exegetical evidence to prove it. I won’t try to go through it all, as I don’t have the sources laid all out in front of me. But a concatenated version I think might look like this:
Philip K. Dick made extensive use of the I Ching in developing his plots.
Regarding that point, ChatGPT itself was able to come up with this:
Philip K. Dick, a prolific science fiction author, has made notable references to the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text, in his works. The most prominent of these references is found in his novel “The Man in the High Castle.” In the novel, the characters make important decisions based on their interpretations of prophetic messages from the I Ching. One of the characters, Hawthorne Abendsen, the author of a fictional novel within the story, also uses the I Ching to guide his writing1.
Philip K. Dick himself used the I Ching to craft the themes, plot, and story of “The Man in the High Castle.” In an interview, Dick mentioned that he used the I Ching as a plotting device in “The Man in the High Castle.” Each time a character asked a question of the I Ching, Dick would throw the coins and write the hexagram lines they got, which then determined the direction of the book. For example, when Juliana Frink is deciding whether or not to tell Hawthorne Abendsen that he is the target of assassins, the I Ching indicated that she should, and so she did2.
Elsewhere, I asked ChatGPT for more general info about the I Ching, which I think also highlights that as a divinatory system, perhaps one might be consider it to almost be like a chat bot which can only give one of sixty four pre-programmed responses.
ChatGPT again:
The 64 hexagrams of the I Ching are symbolic representations of all possible states of change in the universe. Each hexagram is a unique combination of Yin and Yang lines, and these combinations are believed to encompass the totality of human experience and the universe’s various states. The text associated with each hexagram provides guidance and wisdom related to that particular state.
I submit here that the functionality of the I Ching, though rudimentary compared to something like ChatGPT, was an artifical external device which Dick constructed to build stories. In other words, like how many authors and artists are using AI tools, in an almost “divinatory” capacity. How far we might stretch the comparison between the I Ching and LLMs is probably beside the point. My argument is, simply: dude would have flipped his fucking shit over AI language and image generation tools.
In fact, there is at least one passage (possibly others) in one of his books, where he essentially predicts much of this technology. From a Reddit thread:
As someone rightly points out in the Reddit thread, that last line reads like a prompt someone might put into Midjourney or Stable Diffusion!
Lastly, and this one gets somewhat more mystical: it’s possible that Philip K. DIck believed that he WAS in communication with some kind of actual cosmic version of AI, which he explores in multiple novels such as VALIS & Radio Free Albemuth, and I believe extensively in his Exegesis, which I’ve never read in its entirety.
In RFA, he posits that the “AI voice” that’s communicating with him in his meta-fictional but also possibly real life world could have been a great distance away from earth:
It certainly was a loss as far as I was concerned, now that I had heard the mild voice of the AI system as it relayed information to me and accepted questions in response. Were I never to hear it again I would remember that sound the rest of my life. It was far off; whenever I queried it, there was a measurable lag before it responded. I wondered how many stars away it lay: deep in the heavens, perhaps, and perhaps serving many worlds.
Already the AI voice had saved my life once, by taking over and guiding me in the face of imminent police arrest. The only fear I had now was loss of contact.
The AI voice, I soon understood, possessed the capacity to educate and inform human beings on a sublim inal level, during times when they were relaxed in contem plation or in outright sleep. But this was not enough; on waking, the humans generally overrode these quiet promptings, which they correctly identified with the voice of conscience, and went their own way
[53:H-6] This is an info retrieval system, in which many narratives are stored together but only activated when the AI voice reads one of them aloud; but in written info form, all of them are latently there. Thus each space-time world contains all the other worlds as info (but unread).
LA Review of Books also has a quote from him where he’s back-tracking on the ontological nature of the so-called “AI voice,” something he commonly did – inventing many parallel possible sci fi explanations for things he experienced.
The AI voice [i.e., VALIS] is a special kind of hallucination: one of wish-fulfillment and need, due to loneliness: emotional starvation and grief and ill-use. I just can’t endure life without that lonely voice guiding me, so I regress…. The AI voice is my imaginary playmate, my sister, evolved out of childhood…. I was so unhappy and afraid; like R. Crumb, so behind the 8 ball, so filled with anticipatory dread.
Well, damn it — I don’t regret it. It made a barren, fearful life meaningful and bearable….
To my eyes, this is exactly what people are seeking in chatbots, to fill this overarching loneliness everyone feels, to make it all mean something in the end. Whether he got that in a cosmic chatbot or in an invented voice in his head, dude certainly was honest enough with himself to know what was up.
There’s no doubt in my mind that he would have been all over generative AI tools.
I’ve seen a lot of people taking issue with language used by the media (not by me) to describe my AI art & lore books as “novels.”
They claim that “novels” according to conventional classification cannot be 2-5K words. And they are right, this is an error in the part of some media reporting. It’s not something I ever called them, having written one full-length novel and one novella; I understand quite well what is the difference.
I do like I think it was maybe NY Post who started calling them “mini-novels,” and I think that’s kind of an undefined new and fun sounding category, so I have been running with that.
What most people seem to refuse to want to believe though who are reacting – sometimes quite angrily – is that these are first and foremost pulp-sci fi art books, featuring cool AI art, short stories, flash fiction, and ample servings of world-building and as I call it “lorecore.”
If you go into these expecting Harry Potter, that’s not remotely what you’re going to find. If you go into it thinking you’ve stumbled on an encyclopedia and postcards from a parallel dimension where things are constantly shifting, then you are more on the right track.
Really like this passage from one of the many Terence McKenna lectures I have been listening to on Youtube.
truth can take care of itself. it does not require your belief. the truth need not be treated as fragile. you can beat on the truth with ball-peen hammers and it will do just fine thank you… it can take care of itself
This is so much the opposite of what we hear within the ‘disinformation industrial complex’ that the slightest exposure to anything untrue or “reality fluid” is going to crash all of society. McKenna has his flaws and blindspots, but I’ll take his point of view on this one any day as a hopeful alternative to that.
Did an I Ching reading online earlier, and received this all too accurate feeling line in the reply:
“He must not content himself with a shallow, thoughtless view of prevailing forces; he must contemplate them as a connected whole and try to understand them.”
Author Tim Boucher claims to have written 97 books in nine months using ChatGPT. A sense of admiration exists for someone who has taken advantage of modern technology to create content at unimaginable speeds. However, seeing creativity being removed from the writing process is concerning. ChatGPT’s ability to use information derived from formerly published information online falls short because it can’t say or bring anything new to the world. Taking words from profound works of art without crediting the author and retooling them in a new context devalues authors’ dedication to their writing.
I wrote asking if they’d like to do an interview, but to give a brief reply here:
Creativity isn’t being removed from this process. The locus of activity of the artist is simply shifted & the writer becomes more like a creative director or a film director. In short, I’ve spent last 9-10 months using AI tools in a kind of feverish deeply creative and deeply intuitive “fugue state” that rivals or exceeds any other creative endeavor I’ve ever engaged in.
I don’t think LLMs or image diffusion models having been trained on other source works means that they can’t bring anything new into the world. First, because they are able to uncover connections that no humans have ever conceived of before, and to sift through those connections for the “best” ones (however we define that) in record speed. Simply look at how AI models are being used in pharmaceutical research for one example among many. All of that is new information being brought into the world. Second, its the job of the artist/writer as creative director to make certain any creative works produced DO bring something new into the world!
LLMs do not take words from other works, as I wrote about a bit here. To recap, AI models do not “sample” or take specific excerpts from other works, as in a collage. What they do is take measurements of dimensionality (e.g., they study and compare attributes) of a vast corpus of training material, and use that to uncover statistical semantic relationships – webs of meaning or common connections. Thus, there is really no single work which AI generated content is specifically referencing (unless you specify it – like by prompting, “A cat in the style of the Mona Lisa”).
There’s more to say of course, but that’s as good a foundation to go from as any.
