Authors in my experience make a sometimes terrible audience for writing. Why is that?
I guess it’s like if you give a concert and invite nothing but guitar players.
You end up with an audience full of people thinking, “I could do that.”
Or, “He messed up his fingering on that chord…”
Twitter, I kept away from you for a long time. Swore I wouldn’t go back, til someone sent along a search results page I couldn’t look at without an account. Gone are the days when you could search or look at hashtags without being logged in.
So I logged in off a burner gmail, took a look around and went back and deactivated it again.
Up until recently, I felt like I couldn’t shake this constant feeling as a human that like… everything I do is wrong, and everything everyone else does is wrong. And that constantly thinking about it was driving me nuts, and there was no way out of it.
How does one confront one’s own anger, one’s own anxieties, one’s own depression – let alone have to deal with everyone else’s? The levers are not always so obvious or accessible when you’re in the depths of it all, as to how to change any of it. Often too, in a weird way, you can become addicted to the pattern, suffering over the constant punch it still can give you.
I’m not an expert in getting out of this by any means. Like you, I’m just another person on the internet. But my experience lately has been, and I don’t know if it’s just life stage or what, but I feel like meditation has been the only thing that’s given me a ladder out of the chaos and the pits people seem to be able to go into and send each other into in the special hells that are social media.
I know, it sounds stupid, trite, naive, simplistic, in short like bullshit. I’d always thought that too, I guess, and didn’t see how it could possibly be a means for me to better be able to manage my own life and whatever it is that I am as a being in this world.
But after re-watching all of the original Twin Peaks and the Return again, I started remembering how David Lynch is ultra into Transcendental Meditation (TM), and started listening to him talk about it, and its deep links to his own creative process. And what he was talking about in it, particularly about the artistic experience, it just resonated so much that I had to try it for myself. I wanted to be able to go back there again, to when I’d seen those heights in my own life, and been able to live there if only for a time…
TM for him seems to consist of twice daily 20 minute mantra meditations. I understand TM assigns something like special mantras based maybe on age and gender (?), that are supposed to be spiritually tuned to whatever. That’s fine & I’m sure there is great value in the social bonds paying to be part of TM affords you, but I’m not living in traditional Indian society, and don’t practice any of the rest of the things that go along with those traditions.
My more developed argument after listening to him speak on it, and my own experiences, is that the ground of being (represented in Quatrian lore as Acho), if the joyous experiences he describes so vividly in meditation really are the heritage of humanity, then it seems unlikely that a single school, in this case TM, has got the market cornered as to technique. It must be universal, and structural in the mind, matter, and being of people (and possibly all entities, if you take it to its logical conclusion — if only as a sci-fi concept.)
There’s an interesting section in this blog post linked here about exploring the Stoic tradition relative to meditation, and it talks about a researcher in the 1970s, comparing TM with other meditation and relaxation techniques:
Benson found that it made no real difference what phrase was repeated: you could pick more or less any word or short phrase and get the same result. So that removed any mystical or philosophical ingredients from the technique, at least in terms of its ability to evoke a beneficial physiological effect.
I would also possibly go so far as to argue that perhaps even your technique matters far less than merely your discipline and regularity of practice, and that simply sitting quietly twice a day for 20 minutes has a beneficial psychological re-balancing effect, no matter what you “do” internally during those 20 minutes.
But to me, since I started again, it doesn’t feel like “discipline” to spend this much time meditating regularly. It feels always like I want to go back there, again and again. It’s a refuge. It’s a place where I’m not connected to anything but the deepest thing. I’m not receiving notifications. I’m not being yelled at by strangers because they think I’m single-handedly destroying publishing by taking the obvious next step of integrating AI into story-telling.
It’s a place where I’m completely free to be just me, to listen. To listen to myself, to listen to the other voices that are crawling around in there rent free, and to let them have their say, to express themselves, and to listen without judgement, and then let it go when it’s time to let it go, Marie Kondo style.
In doing this, I’m able to hear myself again – free from the voices, and fears and hangups of others. I know with clarity and a feeling of cleanness, what is myself, and what is other, and can more clearly delineate the relative importance of it all.
What I see when I pop back on Twitter is everyone who is caught in some subvariant of the same underlying social media virus, that terrible twin feeling of “Everything I do is wrong, and everything everyone else does is wrong.”
But for me, that feeling has been receding progressively, and using now my telescope to look at the issue now, it all feels like its coming from another planet. Might be an interesting place to visit once in a while, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
I’m not here to preach an answer, or say do it my way. I just wanted at least to leave this as a record, a testament, of a prisoner who has managed to break free. Freedom from all of this might be fleeting, hard to catch and keep, but it is real, for however long we can have the courage to maintain it.
Stephan Ango coined the notion of the Idea Camera, where AI art generators would capture things that only existed on the substratum of our imagination(s), and give them a fixed and semi-tangible form.
This is still what amazes me about the experiences I’ve been having around coverage and reactions to my AI Lore books project. This is from El Tiempo:
The image preview they are using is from the recently released The Octave of Time, itself the sequel to The Lost Direction.
This is stuff I landed on courtesy of my imagination something ilke 3-4 years ago in some cases, largely due to my wanting to reclaim my own imagination as a “safe space” after working for years as a content moderator for a major web platform.
You could say Tob Gobble helped lead me out of the Hypogeum, and now here he is in one of his many curious forms (top right in the image grid) appearing in global news outlets, and Benda strumming the harp Eril given to him by the High Augur, which transforms into the Speaking Tree, Gennetatha.
I know that all sounds just like nonsense words to other people who are not initiated into the particular mysteries of Anthuor and Barbaro, and who don’t care to be.
But the point is, now they don’t have to be. We brought the dream to them. The lands I explored in my own imagination, and which Midjourney in this case helps to visualize now have a sort of existence all their own as they get replicated through information spaces across the web. As the story grows and evolves, and gets misinterpreted or intentionally distorted. These rooms in our imaginations we have opened up we can now share them, and walk around in them, talk about them together. Are they what we want them to be, what they could be? We can make them be.
One of the marks of an opinion which is not well-considered is that it merely parrots the opinion of someone else without seeking any new first-hand evidence themselves.
Such was my reaction to the article that appeared yesterday about my AI Lore books on a site called Mind Matters. After simply repeating what the author of the Futurism article wrote after reading one book which was a world-building “lore book” (not a novel), this author added:
Boucher’s online ratings are mediocre, and Adarlo notes that his most popular title was published in 2021, without the help of AI. Boucher also employs Midjourney to illustrate the novels. While clearly, it’s easier to use AI to generate text, the quality and storytelling are lacking.
I’ve seen enough responses to this coverage at this point to recognize when someone has formed an opinion without actually looking at, let alone reading any of the books.
I’m pretty clear-eyed and honest about what these books are; I can say with confidence that the quality and storytelling are not “lacking.” And the fact that 40% of all my sales come from repeat buyers proves this is not the case.
People seem quite confused about Gumroad’s rating system, which does not work like Amazon’s. You can not leave a review, you can only come back and leave 1-5 stars. Most of the books have no ratings. A few have one or two low-to-medium ratings. A few have higher ratings. And… that’s life?
Does it mean people hated the books? As a product manager, I don’t think that’s an assumption we can make without further proof. Instead, I think it probably means something more like: 1) people don’t know (or maybe care) that you can rate the books, and 2) once they’ve read the book, they don’t think to go back and put a rating.
Now, I don’t expect “normies” to understand the intricacies of user behaviors in product ecosystems like this and that’s fine. What it does tell me though, is displaying these ratings is giving off a false signal about book quality that doesn’t reflect actual buyer behavior toward them, which is heavily skewed towards repeat buying.
So, as a result of seeing people head down this blind alley of evaluation, I’m simply turning off ratings, so people don’t get caught up in it. It’s a stupid criticism: he didn’t get enough ratings (similar to: oh, well he didn’t make enough money). People have been brainwashed into thinking everything in life can be boiled down to “likes.”
I know this is a monumentally tall order, but if you’re curious about something: go check first-hand for yourself. Don’t rely on other people’s opinions to construct your own. That’s just lazy.
But then, maybe none of this is all that surprising when you consider the ultimate source of the site offering these views, one affiliated with Old Earth Creationism. They’ve obviously got it all figured out! (/s)
The Jellyfish War is book #101 in the AI Lore books series. It was an accidental offshoot of another side project, which it is not yet time to reveal publicly.
Mainly, it was based on the discovery that pictures of jellyfish in NYC looked really frickin’ cool, and that I wanted to see more of them. It wasn’t long before a story concept unfolded, explaining the how and why that jellyfish had come to inhabit New York along with everyone else – namely that there was a massive invasion – and they won. And NYC was determined for whatever reason to be the place where the new human + jelly society would be pioneered.
Images are all Midjourney. Text started in an old tool I coded, running text-davinci-003 from OpenAI, which I eventually dumped into Claude to clean up and smooth out the tone, plus generate a few flash fiction pieces set in this world to round out all the world-building.
Here’s the art preview:
This book pairs especially well with Celestial Cephalopods, as they deal in a somewhat similar sort of parallel reality oceanic fantasy.
Grimes (aka Claire Boucher – and yes, we are related) made a splash recently by declaring “copyright sucks” and insisting that she was in favor of “killing” it. Do her claims hold water?
Stereogum’s re-reporting will suffice for our present purposes:
“I feel strongly that there’s way too much gatekeeping in music,” said Grimes. “Copyright sucks. Art is a conversation with everyone that’s come before us. Intertwining it with the ego is a modern concept. The music industry has been defined by lawyers, and that strangles creativity.”
“I think everything about copyright is problematic,” she added. “There’s too much top down control.”
I’m on the one hand sort of supportive of alternative exercises but on the other hand, not sure I completely buy what she’s offering as being an alternative at all…
I’m not just cherry-picking either; reporting continues:
After her keynote, Grimes launched a service called GrimesA1-1 Voiceprint to give AI creators access to her vocals. For $9.99/year, the service will put your song on streaming services.
So… she’s basically building a system of… wait for it… licensing… and:
Grimes also said she would “split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice,” adding: “Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings.”
So licensing + payments… that all sounds a little… idk copyright-esque to me?
I don’t want to go off on a huge tangent here either, but as an artist this all feels slightly… imperialistic, especially since she is also cited as saying that intertwining art with ego is a “modern concept.” All while generously offering to take your voice… and turn it into her voice, all for a low low fee. So we’re totally free to emulate her in every way, so long as she gets paid. Color me skeptical of the sincerity of all this, sorry.
And for someone who thinks there is a lot of gate-keeping and top down control in the music biz, and who hates copyright, she seems to… promote all of those things here with her further stipulations for acceptable use:
Ok hate this part but we may do copyright takedowns ONLY for rly rly toxic lyrics w grimes voice: imo you’d rly have to push it for me to wanna take smthn down but I guess plz don’t be *the worst*. as in, try not to exit the current Overton window of lyrical content w regards to sex/violence. Like no baby murder songs plz.
I think I’m Streisand effecting this now but I don’t wanna have to issue a takedown and be a hypocrite later. ***That’s the only rule. Rly don’t like to do a rule but don’t wanna be responsible for a Nazi anthem unless it’s somehow in jest a la producers I guess.
– wud prefer avoiding political stuff but If it’s a small meme with ur friends we prob won’t penalize that. Probably just if smthn is viral and anti abortion or smthn like that.
So, to recap: hates copyright, hates “rules,” but will totally use both to do takedowns against things she arbitrarily chooses she doesn’t like, or doesn’t fit the ‘current Overton Window’ whatever that is supposed to mean.
“That’s the only rule.”
Mmkay.
And no Nazi anthems, unless its like a joke “or smthn.” Riiiiight.
Yeah, I’m sure this approach is going to work out for you without any conceivable problems whatsoever.
Good luck to ya, but girl, you ain’t killing copyright. You’re just dressing it up in a Burning Man costume and calling it by another name. It’s still the same old shit.
It’s funny, that Futurism article trashing my AI books has accidentally boosted sales of my non-AI written book, Conspiratopia. It recently pushed out of place Mysterious Antarctica as the current top seller.
This is good proof of what I set out to do in the first place by writing AI books: promote my non-AI books, of which Conspiratopia was always well-received.
In some ways, narratively speaking, many of the early AI Lore books might actually be considered as having been written by the manipulative AIs we first see featured in Conspiratopia, as a means of recruiting people into their project.
The Second Octave is book #100 of the AI Lore books series, as chronicled by the New York Post.
It fits in the mode of a collection of flash fiction pieces that extend on stories begun in The Octave of Time, which itself was “hand-written” (without AI assistance on text). By contrast, this volume, The Second Octave, consists mostly of AI-generated text from Anthropic’s Claude.
In a way, this book is also a continuation of Tales from the House of Life, in that the same technique was employed, and many of the same characters appear in both (semi-canonically). The technique was ingesting a longer work (for House of Life the source text was The Lost Direction), and then using the AI to generate more or less in-world stories based on that text.
I have one more human-written source text I will try this technique on, Conspiratopia, for a volume I’m expecting to call Return to Conspiratopia. The tone and style of that book are very “special” though, so I have my doubts as to whether or not AIs will in fact be able to do it justice.
Here’s the preview art for Second Octave:
I’m supposing I will do eight octaves in all for this series, where I will iteratively read back in the two prior texts to generate the third, and so on.
Over the past few days, I was looking into whether I could prove if that faked Pentagon smoke image had been made using Midjourney. I’ve done a fair bit of OSINT work in the past, and no stranger to reverse image searches.
Apparently you cannot do reverse image searches from the midjourney.com/app/feed though, which is unfortunate. You can, however, search based on keywords, and maybe find something kind of like what you’re looking for. But given the variability of prompts to begin with, never mind that someone could have started with an image prompt of a building and then used some random text to modify it, the chances of you actually finding the job ID and user account which made an image become pretty low.
I’m not actually in favor of Midjourney’s showing your work to the community by default. I think it breaks protections of personal data baked into GDPR, and filed complaints in the EU about it (which were summarily rejected because I’m not an EU citizen, btw – not because they are not in violation).
That said, if you do have public-by-default images, already being displayed in a community feed, it would only make sense really to have the ability to reverse search an image, and find and follow the creator. As things heat up in the generative political image space, I think we’re going to see many more calls for these services to add more tools beyond just rev. img. search for OSINT investigators, and other enforcement bodies.
Some at least novel reactions to my AI Lore books on this thread at a website called ktt2.com.
Maybe some books deserve to be burned
These are ebooks. But please try.
Ai should be outlawed
Good luck with that.
A lot of people are judging this without actually reading any of the books, classic ktt… I got a really good deal and bought 3 of these books for $50 which is actually really good value since new books are usually $25-30 at least. Amazing reads so far considering how cheap I got em. Don’t even realize its AI
Hard to tell in context, but I guess this is a joke? If it’s not, well… they are wrong.
just read the thirteenth installment in the robussy incantation diaries. s*** was mindblowing this dude is onto something
Again, I guess this is a joke? But I think now I will in fact publish a book called: The Robussy Incantation Diaries: XIII. That’ll teach em!
Art is supposed to be a human experience. If you don’t see how AI can and is harming the landscape I don’t know what to tell you
I know someone with this viewpoint won’t ever be brought around, but I would simply argue that… AI is now a part of the human experience. Hence, it is now a part of art. Get used to it. Within the next few years, our greatest artistic achievements will all use AI extensively.
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