New piece about the AI Lore books just came out in Newsweek. (archived version)
Category: Other Page 58 of 178
The Banned Prompt is number 97 in the AI Lore books series.
It is inspired by Midjourney’s new crappy automated moderation system that is always warning you about such and such innocuous thing being a “banned prompt.” Midjourney’s system uses two layers of AI, the second of which your prompt is sent to after you appeal the ban decision by the lower AI.
As someone who has spent years working on content moderation, I can confidently say that even humans can quite frequently not accurately detect whether a particular piece of content is indeed problematic. I don’t trust AI systems to do it AT ALL. And I think it’s not just a foolish & short-sighted direction that technology is taking, but that with the increasing integration of AI systems into all other technologies, it will prove in fact to be quite dangerous to humanity.
This book explores these concepts through the lens of short fiction, produced using Anthropic’s Claude, like most of the recent books in this series.
I’ll close this post with the image preview for the ebook:
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.
This latest generative image collection is “ripped from the headlines,” as it were – a visualization from an alternate reality where tens of thousands of American conservatives land in Russia to take them up on the offer of resettlement.
I used Midjourney to find out what such an outlandish event might actually look like, were it ever to occur. Full image set here.
Link to full set on Reddit.
This is one of those tangents you end up going down in Midjourney, and just wanted to capture a link to the full set on Imgur here. It depicts Roman Senators dressed in garbage bag togas, and some of the images are quite beautiful I find. There’s something about how Midjourney depicts plasting sheeting that I find very intriguing as a surface and shape definer in AI image generations.
The Plastic Prison is #96 in the AI Lore books series, from Lost Books, a Canadian AI publisher.
This book is the first to use Midjourney’s version 5.1, and describes a near future dystopia where everyone has to wear plastic biohazard suits at all times, just to survive. The art in this book is, in my opinion, pretty incredible. I think it’s partly due to the subject matter being somewhat upsetting, to see people’s bodies inside of plastic bags, and submerged underwater, etc. The images are starkly beautiful and at times scary, and looking at them can make it feel like you’re suffocating (trigger warning). In a good way, if that’s possible…
Thematically, the concept is partly inspired by moving past Covid, partly by the so-called “loneliness epidemic” that is beginning to be recognized, and partly by (also connected to loneliness, I think) people always being on their cell phones, and having a sort of invisible bubble or layer between them and the real world.
Anyway, this book for me reaches some kind of new plateau that I haven’t hit before with any of the others. It’s deeply emotional and vibey. Really happy with it. Feels great to be reaching this level of quality as we near 100 volumes. Many of these images would be impossible (or very difficult and possibly dangerous) to get without AI.
Saw people talking about this on Reddit, but just experienced it for myself, the new apparently AI-based moderation system Midjourney appears to have deployed, that is way too sensitive and overly controlling.
And the messaging is pretty confusing for the notification when you (wrongly) hit a wall trying to do something that was perfectly fine a couple days ago:
Banned prompt detected
Sorry! Our AI moderator thinks this prompt is probably against our community standards.
Please review our current community standards:
ALLOWED
– Any image up to PG-13 rating involving fiction, fantasy, mythology.
– Real images that may be seen as respectful or light-hearted parodies, satire, caricatures
– Imaginary or exaggerated real-life scenarios, including absurd or humorous situations.
NOT ALLOWED
– Disrespectful, harmful, misleading public figures/events portrayals or potential to mislead.
– Hate speech, explicit or real-world violence.
– Nudity or unconsented overtly sexualized public figures.
– Imagery that might be considered culturally insensitive
This AI system isn’t perfect. If you find it rejecting something innocent please press the Notify Developers button and we will review it and try to further improve our performance. Thank you for your help!
I’m really confused about what they mean under allowed, “Real images that may be seen as respectful or light-hearted parodies, satire…”
Aren’t none of these actually “real images?” Aren’t these literally all invented or generated images?
How am I supposed to tell if something “may be seen as” respectful and light-hearted, and is that really a decision that any modern AI you have used seems actually qualified to make?
I’m sorry, but this is extremely broad and poorly worded: “Disrespectful, harmful, misleading public figures/events portrayals or potential to mislead.”
Again, do we want AI to be deciding what’s “disrespectful” to public figures? What about those public figures who act in disrespectful ways towards the public?
Also, under disallowed, they suggest “real-world violence,” but isn’t that again an impossibility, given that these are images that are not real, and do not exist in the “real world?”
Unconsented? Really?
And lastly, “Imagery that might be considered culturally insensitive.” In which culture, to which members of the culture? It would be one thing if, you know, real humans who were actually members of whatever the given culture was were the ones making these decisions. But they’re not; it’s some automated quasi-AI system that basically… has no real grasp of culture or human values. And this is what we want at the helm managing acceptable content decisions?
Not for my monthly subscription fee. Given the quality, in my opinion, is so much higher, I’m willing to ride it out and see if they can improve the sensitivity and appropriateness of these filters in relatively short order. But it’s a disappointing “improvement” for a filtering system which was, in my opinion, previously not actually broken, and which was not overly burdensome of the end user. A swing & a major miss here.
Managed to make a special guest appearance on CNN, via an interview with Donie O’Sullivan about the RNC Midjourney AI advertisement. Here’s the clip:
And while we’re on the topic, here is the parody I made of the RNC “Beat Biden” advertisement about Trump allegedly loving pelicans:
I’ve chronicled their creation here quite a bit without perhaps ever explaining in a straightforward way what I actually mean by AI lore books. Because I’d never quite articulated it to myself before, but ChatGPT helped me bring it home with the text below.
The AI Lore books are a collection of over 100 immersive volumes that meld the creative powers of artificial intelligence with pulp sci-fi, conspiracy fiction, and dystopian fantasy. These books are an entirely unique literary experience, featuring AI-generated images, text, and world-building that transport readers into an ever-evolving, thought-provoking narrative landscape, distributed across many volumes and universes.
The AI Lore books push the boundaries of storytelling, offering an unparalleled exploration of the human imagination and the future of fiction. As the lines between reality and fiction blur thanks to today’s hyperreal technologies, these books challenge our assumptions about the nature of creativity, the role of artificial intelligence in the arts, and the very definition of authorship. (/ChatGPT)
Genesis
Okay, back to me writing… First of all, I’ve always liked lore; I’m a nerd like that. When I wrote my first book, The Lost Direction, I was really into the lore. The book is more of a compendium of lore, set around a frame story – a bit like how the Arabian Nights is presented, or similar story-within-a-story novels. It’s a time-honored convention, though certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, which I respect.
During the pandemic, I had the good fortune to have that book reviewed by the Literary Review of Canada, which is a fairly prestigious print magazine up here. The reviewer was not into what they considered to be an over-reliance on lore. Understandable, but hey. Here are some choice quotes:
…[H]erein lies the challenge: how to balance lore with storytelling. Lore is not story. The task for authors is to take this raw material and fashion it into conflict, character arcs, and thematic exploration. As the video game writer and designer Matthew Colville says, “The work you did on your world, you did that work for you. And no one is going to care about it unless you can contextualize it dramatically. That’s the hard work.” The audience does not owe the creators interest in whatever rich backstory they have conjured for their settings. Readers want what they always want: narrative, character, conflict — the muscle and sinew of all storytelling. In that regard, fantasy is not unique, but this is where many of its authors go astray — they mistake lore for storytelling. Whether it’s from falling in love with their own mythos or from not trusting the reader to intuit backstory, a work fails when it collapses into exposition dumps that overwhelm the progression of the plot. Explanation is not engagement. The Force is an intriguing concept, but audiences fell in love with Star Wars because of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.
I’m not going to say any of that is anything but the truth. People like stories. But some people also like lore. It’s a niche market, and in my opinion the web today basically requires you to find a good niche market to make your splash in. I don’t think the reviewer saw it that way though:
So much time and effort is spent explaining the histories of these various civilizations and the tales of their conflicts and political milieus that the novel never settles into something resembling a compelling story. It reads instead like a textbook.
I’m someone who in my youth spent a great deal of time poring over the “textbooks” documenting the lore and legendarium of fictional worlds like those found in The Lord of the Rings (which my book is most certainly not equivalent to by any stretch of the imagination). While LOTR is a masterpiece, there’s a strong chance that I as a reader actually spent a great deal more time in the lore universe than in the actual book itself. But maybe that’s just me… though my sales seem to suggest otherwise.
Boucher is in gross violation of a classic, albeit overused and oversimplified, maxim: Show, don’t tell. In order to enchant, the author must engage, not explicate.
With the AI Lore books, in some cases I intentionally leaned into the exact inverse of this “age-old” wisdom. I tell. I tell a lot. Many, the majority, of the AI lore books are nothing more and nothing less than massive dumps of exposition, in both text and pictures. The overlap in a non-linear way. Many times there is not really any “story” and there are not any characters.
So if people want you to show not tell, why do so many of my readers come back and buy ten, twenty, or even – in one case more – than thirty volumes?
While I fully respect this reviewer’s opinion of that original novel – which was all “hand-written” (with no AI) – I’ll admit that this review acted as sort of the grain of sand that I pondered for a very long time, and which helped agitate to create the pearls that are the AI Lore books series. They turn completely on its head everything said in this review, and all the conventional wisdom of what a book is, and what even authorship is or is becoming thanks to today’s technologies.
New readers can delve into related topics I explore in my artist’s statement (augmented by ChatGPT, naturally), and this idea of an emerging “reality-fluid” arts movement.