Quick link to the NY Post’s piece on my AI Lore books (and archived), will add more detail later on when I have a chance.
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Got some quotes good published in this Brodsky article over on Lifewire about the difficulties of using conventional copyright-detection tools with AI generated content.
Also got a little additional re-reporting about my AI Lore books here on The Register. Fun times!
Baofa ftw!
One thing that nobody has really honed in on in any of the coverage about my AI Lore books is that my real innovation here is not necessarily the written text at all, but the fact that I have managed to find a way to monetize AI image sets, by embedding them in the narrative context of ebooks.
There has been some conversations around the hashtag “AI cinema,” which using the style of cinematic stills to tell visual stories, but usually those don’t include text, and so far I’ve never seen any that have found a way to monetize.
In fact, I have seen very few examples of people monetizing the output of AI image generators, with maybe the exception of people doing kids’ books with them, which I think is a perfectly valid use (though not one I’m terribly interested in replicating, personally).
Anyway, I think this is fertile ground, so just wanted to highlight it as a theme for future consideration & even product development.
This set is pretty funny, I think, though your mileage may vary (I found the ones where the babies came out looking unhappy were not so funny). Inspired by the viral Midjourney images of babies parachuting.
Delighted with this good neutral coverage in Business Insider by Beatrice Nolan, regarding my now 99 books generated with help from AI. The author did a good job contextualizing my efforts within the broader scope of what is happening with AI books.
- More info on my AI lore books
- Browse the entire collection on Gumroad
The Octave of Time is book #99 in the AI Lore books series, by Lost Books, Canadian AI publisher.
The text was is all human-generated, and was written chronologically as a sequel to The Lost Direction. However, due to circumstances, the book was unfinished, with only maybe a third or half of the full tale being told here, of the settling of the island of Ovarion, after the collapse of Quatria back into the Hypogeum.
This book features a returning cast that includes Tob Gobble, among many others. It also references quite a lot the House of Life (though the volume titled that was only written much later).
All the images are done in Midjourney. This was interesting for example with depicting recurring characters like Tob Gobble, who takes on many new and surprising faces within this volume. And MJ had a completely terrible time trying to depict the half horse/half rabbit creatures known as goleks. (There is one of these books that has some awesome pics of goleks, but I can’t remember offhand which one it is anymore!)
Here’s the preview of the interior art:
One thing I love about doing images in this style is that because of the “dvd screengrab” style I use on many of them, I’m left with the impression of there being a movie/movies here that “must have” existed, and the memories of which are nearly at the tip of my tongue… and that’s an incredible feeling; plus this feeling of being able to like “open rooms into my subconscious” and let others peer inside.
By the way, here is the original reference to the concept of the Octaves of Time, as described originally in the Lost Direction.
When Benda upset this natural way of things by mortally wounding Jan Re, he incurred both a blood debt to support Jan Re’s family, but also a ritual debt, for having changed the pitch of the tones which make up the Octave of Time. The cycles performed in Quatrian Society under the priests of the Hypergeic Temple Mount had as their intended function the harmonization of these Octaves in the present moment with the mythic and historical root tones (which were one in the same in this society).
This was not, to those people, idle speculation, or merely a symbolic conception of time as cyclical. This was, in a society still wedded to the Hypogeic powers, a concrete experience of how the present could impact the past. Thus atonement was also attunement, a continual re-tuning of the very stuff of existence.
I’m kind of an asshole about privacy. Which is why when GDPR came out, I was all over it. It’s not perfect by any means as regulation (let alone enforcement), but it’s a strong step in the right direction.
Which is why it annoys me so much when companies don’t follow it. Even though I’m not an EU resident/citizen, I’m a stickler for it, because for the most part, the principles enshrined in it also just make good product sense.
One of the articles I often come back to is Art. 25, Data Protect by Design & By Default, one of whose clauses reads:
“In particular, such measures shall ensure that by default personal data are not made accessible without the individual’s intervention to an indefinite number of natural persons.”
For context: Midjourney has presently three paid tiers, at $10, $30, and $60 per month. It is only at the highest paid tier ($60/mo), that Midjourney offers what they call “Stealth image generation.” Unless you pay $60/mo, and also actively turn on ‘stealth mode,’ all images that you create using the service will be automatically made public in their member galleries (accessible to an indefinite number of persons), and in a section of their site where users rank pairs of images to help train their AI models.
Also, it’s worth noting that the default generation behavior – if you’re using the public Discord (I use my own private server, partly for this reason), all your images are shared in a terrible mess with everyone else’s generations. I’ve seen rationale from the CEO claiming that the reason for this is acceleration that occurs, synergy between many people’s prompts, etc. I guess that’s fine, but I think it breaks GDPR.
From the FAQ on Midjourney’s logged in account page:
“We are building an open-by-default community focused on collective exploration and fun. If you have a need to opt-out of this and be private-by-default you can subscribe to the $60/mo pro plan and activate stealth generation with the
/stealthcommand.”
As a privacy professional with certifications in GDPR compliance, I find this pretty abhorrent as a practice. If privacy is indeed a human right (I believe it is), then it is reprehensible to only offer it for sale to those willing and able to pay the highest price for it.
Hence, I took my frustration on this matter to multiple Data Protection Authorities in the EU, after receiving no response from Midjourney staff about any of this over several months.
Two issues: as a non-EU person, I don’t really have standing to file a complaint insofar as it impacts me personally. So I filed it as a “request to investigate,” and gave them all the necessary information.
Second, it seems like the DPAs are extremely slow, bureaucratic, and ineffective as enforcement bodies. I could be wrong, but this isn’t my first rodeo, and I’ve seen how brush-offs work in the past. I sent my complaint out to email addresses I found for about 7 or so DPAs in different countries, and nearly half of them were bounced. I noticed also France’s CNIL doesn’t even have an email address… wtf?
Anyway, if you’re at all concerned about these issues, and not into letting tech companies get a free pass because they are Americans and think global laws don’t apply to them (or ought not), AND you’re an EU resident or citizen, I would strongly encourage you to find the DPA in your country and file complaints against Midjourney so that they – and all the others – end this gross practice of selling privacy.
Just wanted to post finally this Midjourney image set I did of ballet dancers underwater and/or “wrapped in plastic.”
Here’s the full set.
Here’s a sample image:
These images are a secondary offshoot that arose while making the book The Plastic Prison, which itself is one of my favorite most evocative books I’ve done. Wrapping people plastic and putting them underwater, etc. is one of the amazing things you can do with Midjourney: putting them into situations that would be deadly or difficult/impossible to photograph safely.
These images just blow my mind. Here’s one more for the road (btw the full set has 99 images).
Learning how media coverage works over the past few years, and especially lately has been… interesting. Authors do not have an easy road of promoting their works. Literally every person on planet earth has written a fantasy novel, and it’s basically impossible to get press about it. Unless you’re already known with a well-developed following.
So I did what anybody would do in a situation like that, I used generative AI to write 100 books, and suddenly (I won’t give away all my secrets) people started to notice. Combined with other elements, like viral gen AI images on social media, and an expertise in content moderation and disinformation, the endeavor started to seem newsworthy. But it was a long uphill slog getting there.
Eventually, you reach a point where the fact that you got coverage is the thing that becomes newsworthy. I got onto Newsweek because I got onto CNN. I got onto Futurism because I got onto Newsweek, and the circle goes on and on.
So where to next? I realize there is still a story central to this whole operation which has not yet been adequately told. My story. Not just the punchline or the gimmick or whatever, but the human path that brought me here.
It all starts with content moderation; perhaps the best coverage of that actually happened quite some time ago, via David Farrier’s long-ish interview with me, archived here. But that was in a different era, before this current batch of tools hit, and before AI really exploded onto the scene…
Anyway, in an effort to have a chance to further tell that story in the media, I put out this press release a few days ago, and I’m planning to go into greater depths about the roots of my work in the… shall we say, terrors… of the world of content moderation, and how it took me a long time – maybe three years (?) to nearly or almost fully recover from its effects. I’ll of course in the interim use this blog as a sounding board as I figure out how best to tell that final story, the story of me.
Sometimes when undertaking art projects that are very big or take a long time, it can be useful to take up a new artist moniker specific to that project. Something to dump all the psychological contents of the process into, a container, an entity which can become itself an egregore, an invocation. And which, when you’re finished, you can leave behind.
I had such a name like that come to me the other day during meditation. That’s a topic I intend to write about it in its own right in more detail (meditation is its own kind of hyperreality), but suffice it to say sometimes in the meditative process, things seem to arise all on their own, through some deeply intuitive process which is for the most part opaque.
The name that popped into my mind was ‘Baofa,’ which I sat weighing in contemplation for some time, and it stuck with me. I thought it had kind of a cool, singular quality to it, like “Madonna.”
On ending the session, I started querying different sources online to see if it was really a thing, and found that apparently this word has a meaning in Mandarin Chinese, and its characters are 暴发. Google Translate seems to confirm the translation there… Though the primary translation appears to be “outbreak,” the secondary ones listed there are: get rich quick, suddenly become important, suddenly become rich.
I didn’t undertake my generative AI art projects in order to become “rich,” but given the headline Newsweek wanted me to write an article for, and other comments received in response to that piece, I think it’s only too funny and ironically fitting in the end I guess to adopt, essentially, “get rich quick” as a name.
I don’t know Mandarin Chinese, nor have any connection to that culture personally. I don’t know if somehow my subconscious mind tapped into some store of universal human knowledge to taunt me with silly name-calling, but I guess I don’t necessarily rule it out either.
Interestingly, I’ve been looking around for comprehensive lists or even references to generative AI artists by name, and they are hard to come by. Who are the artists working in this space? By what names are they going & why?