Category: Other Page 57 of 177

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about, what fundamentally is “dystopian,” and one possible idea I’ve landed on is that it has to do with the accumulation of errors within a society. Wrongs that are not righted. Mistakes never corrected. And that large scale anti-phenomenon just building and building, cascading on to the next set of mistakes and shortcomings and little gaps and big imperfections. And that lack, wanting, wrongness, getting passed along, hand to hand, mouth to ear, heart to heart.

Dystopia is distinct from post-apocalypse as a genre, because the system might be permanently broken, but it never ends. It cannot end. It is what is, and whatever will be. There is no hope of change, only surrender, or brief flashes of resistance leading never to overthrow, never to real change. The wheel grinds on and on and on.

It’s interesting seeing conversations develop around my AI lore books, on Newsweek, Reddit, and elsewhere. There seems to be a general malaise about the approach I’m taking, which I can empathize with. But in fact for me, the approach itself IS a central component of the greater story I feel I’m telling, and a participant in, LARPing.

Dystopia is the product, I guess you could say here.

As a writer and artist first and foremost, I can certainly feel myself falling into the vast abyss and chasm and chaos of technology and of society mediated through technology. Only seeing each other through these small strange mirrors, addicted to the sounds of notifications. Dystopia resonates with us because we’re already living in a time which shares all its characteristics, no matter what side of the spectrum you sit politically.

I’ve always liked this quote from Philip K. Dick, from VALIS, that “the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.” I don’t consider my work divinely inspired, but all true art is a striving towards a something. I do see my work as giving a place within something that’s considered by many to be a “trash stratum” of art, things that tread the line between the uncanny valley and the reality-fluid, things where AIs were incorporated intentionally in a dystopian way to comment about the reality of our current and our coming dystopia. (Probably the best more conventional entry point into that part of my fictional multiverse would be Conspiratopia., btw)

It’s this that I’m seeing left out in the reactions to the Newsweek piece. But it’s the story only I can tell, I suppose…

When should I reveal that my Newsweek article was partly written by ChatGPT? Perhaps about 60%? But ChatGPT wrote it using my human-written inputs from an old Medium article on a very similar topic I posted last year.

So what percent does that make human-written, and what percent AI-generated? These things rapidly become hard to parse when you start layering and iterating like that.

Stephen Marche’s piece in the Atlantic about AI writing being like hip hop is a very good one, probably the best I’ve seen on the topic of AI-assisted writing, becomes it comes from a place of experience. He actually published a book using a combination of AI tools, as chronicled by Wired, and NYT, among others. There are a number of elements in his piece worth sampling here, in fact.

So little of how we talk about AI actually comes from the experience of using it. Almost every essay or op-ed you read follows the same trajectory: I used ChatGPT to do a thing, and from that thing, I can predict catastrophic X or industry-altering Y. Like the camera, the full consequences of this technology will be worked out over a great deal of time by a great number of talents responding to a great number of developments. But at the time of writing, almost all the conversation surrounding generative AI is imaginary, rooted not in the use of the tool but in extrapolated visions.

This is extremely relevant in AI reporting. I spoke with an editor once who informed me that “we don’t need to know how it works to write about it.” I guess that’s one way to do things when you’re dealing with a lot of volume, but it’s not the kind of analysis that I find very engaging. I much prefer Marche’s “f**k around and find out” method from the Atlantic piece.

Here he talks about how you still have to know something to use AI content generation tools well:

You need more understanding of literary style, not less. The closest analogue to this process is hip-hop. To make hip-hop, you don’t need to know how to play the drums, but you do need to be able to reference the entire history of beats and hooks. Every producer becomes an archive; the greater their knowledge and the more coherent their understanding, the better the resulting work. The creator of meaningful literary AI art will be, in effect, a literary curator.

Marche’s own AI book experiment, Death of an Author, is a shout-out to Roland Barthe’s conception of the death of the author, in that authorial intent no longer drives the show under the shadow of postmodernism. Barthes wrote:

“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing
a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-
God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none’ of them original, blend and clash. The text
is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”

Barthes also had this idea of the “scriptor” replacing the author, but I digress (read more at the link above).

To get back to Marche on creativity:

The traditional values of creative composition were entirely alive during my process. That should come as no surprise. The transition from painting to photography required a complete reevaluation of the nature of visual creativity, but the value of understanding form and color, of framing, of the ability to recognize the transience of emotion across a face or a landscape—the need to understand the materials of production and the power of your subjects—stayed. None of that is going away. None of it will ever go away.

I’ve myself noticed a kind of acceleration of my creative and mental processes, and my ability to more clearly communicate complex narrative elements both in text, and writing, and in combinations of the two. Using AI has, effectively, made me a better artist producing & evaluating things on an entirely other level than I was before. And it hasn’t, say, stopped me from breaking out my sketchbook and drawing, or what have you. I can do any of those other expressions of art any time I want to. AI art isn’t some monster stealing things from me. Or, in my opinion, from other people – though I respect that opinions differ on this topic.

On the contrary, I’ve been able to bring incredible light to dark places in my subconscious through using AI tools, & managed to make loose imaginings into tangible things I can share with others. Yesterday, I input the text of an almost 80K word book, my first novel (“hand” written), The Lost Direction, into Claude by Anthropic. Claude’s context window is supposed to top out somewhere around 75K words (100,000 tokens is what I’ve read – whatever that means in ordinary human reality…). In a few hours – though its responses times were SUUUPER slow in yesterday’s experiment for each query – I was able to output over a dozen short stories of decent quality that are spin-off tales about different characters and situations from the original novel.

It lets me make my imaginary worlds that much richer. It’s a force multiplier, and I have gone from being a foot-soldier to being the commander of allied forces. That is for me the scale of advancement that these technologies, properly understood & rightly applied, can bring.

Also from Marche’s piece:

If you make bad art with a new tool, you just haven’t figured out how to use the tool yet. Also, tools are just tools…

Anyway, I’ll close with that. (for now)

So far, the Midjourney image set imagining American conservatives fleeing to Russia is doing better than expected on Reddit.

I’ve noticed r/midjourney has a somewhat confusing rule around political content which reads:

4) No extraneous political discussion. Political images are okay, as long as they don’t fall under rules 2 and 3 (don’t be an edgelord or post anything agains MJ’s TOS). Discussion however will be moderated at our discretion.

Rule 3 regards NSFW content, which this is not. Rule 2 is also somewhat vague, like so many community-enforced rules on Reddit:

Don’t be a jerk. Be kind and respectful to each other. Don’t post inflammatory or edgelord posts– aka lets try and avoid toxicity. This will be enforced at moderators discretion.

I personally don’t think this post contains “toxicity” but perhaps it could be considered “edgelord.” Anyway, it wasn’t intended in a mean spirit; it was a genuine exploration of an alternative reality that is already being reported on in the news.

I get why people might not want to be constantly confronted with political content, but that is also the world we live in. Literally everything is political.

I’ve also seen extraordinarily vague “official” rules from the Midjourney bot in Discord, which include prohibitions against things such as:

Imagery that might be considered culturally insensitive

Sadly, Midjourney’s proposed “solution” to these extraordinarily complex speech issues is “let’s throw AI at it” – multiple layers of AI, without any human intervention. That is wrong.

Personally, I think political image-making is one of the most interesting and exciting uses of Midjourney, though I agree that image makers ought to be considerate and careful about what they produce and how it is distributed. But it’s not something which is going away, and we need to learn how to live with it.

I found recently an old interview with psychonaut Terence McKenna, part of which I thought neatly meshes with generative AI & what he claimed was a natural process of increasing complexity & novelty within the universe. I think his schtick on this starts at around 29:46 in the video, the timestamp is queued up below (but I recommend the whole video):

Via the transcript on YT:

what is man’s purpose to advance and preserve novelty. you know this is an ethical position it means you don’t replace rainforests with pastures you don’t censor books you don’t lean on people who make gender choices different from yours. no, the purpose of of being a human is to complexify reality. even more, to hand on a more diverse more complicated more multifaceted

He picks up the thread again later on, around 53:33:

as we go forward and the novelty continues to climax… well novelty is not necessarily good or nice novelty is complex that’s what it is and so I see really a concatenation of tendencies and forces. here at the end it’s only going to get weirder the level of contradiction is going to rise excruciatingly even beyond the excruciatingly present levels of contradiction.

so I think it’s just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder and finally it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is. and at that point novelty Theory can come out of the woods because eventually people are going to say what the hell is going on it’s just too nuts it’s not enough to say it’s nuts you have to explain why…

I’ve tried to say something similar in my piece about using hyperreality as a new framework for multidimensional analysis of information artifacts, rather than simply trying to hammer them into “real” or “fake” – definitions will become increasingly convoluted as these technologies expand and what is “reality” in a technologically-mediated world becomes even further diluted.

Anyway, maybe this is all just apologia on my part for trolling, but I’m excited to re-discover this aspect of McKenna’s work, because it feels to some extent emotionally true, and is the first rationale I’ve landed on which actually offers some strange glimmer even of hope in this world of mixed up generative AI.