Category: Other Page 61 of 178

Repermanent is #88 in the AI lore books series. (I can’t believe we’re almost to 100!) In a very real way, though, this book should actually be first, in order of writing, since the bulk of it was published on my old blog way back in 2008. Fifteen years ago!

I was not careful saving a copy of the complete orginal version (which was unfinished), but fortunately Archive.org had everything but three of the sixteen or so chapters as originally published. So ultimately I ended up sort of re-constructing or reverse-engineering or something from the surviving chapters (ever so slightly edited first) in order to make new ones in ChatGPT, or to lengthen here and there.

It’s still sort of an unfinished or perhaps open-ended narrative with many overlapping strands; I didn’t try to force it into taking any particular shape but tried to follow the spirit of what was there already.

Where I really had fun with it was in the image-making process in Midjourney. There were already call-outs in the original text to a 1950s aesthetic, but with like virtual reality and androids and stuff. So I really went for that look in the accompanying art, and am really happy with the results.

If I remember correctly, a fair amount of the original source material for the book actually came from a dream or series of dreams; my brain has been churning on these subjects for a long time. I feel often like producing these books is like chasing these old dreams (and some new ones), trying to piece together whatever my subconscious was showing me then, or has been since. Feels many times like a Jungian process of active imagination, of amplifying these subconscious bits and bobs, giving them bodies so they can breathe the air and express whatever message it is they are carrying.

One thing I’ve discovered in the land of discovery generative AI tools is that… it’s inherently a voyage of discovery. You might set out for a certain far off land, but find yourself in an unexpected strange country that its obvious is worth exploring more fully.

That process of discovery is inherently non-linear in that it seems to spawn endless side quests. It depends what your immediate goals are, but I’ve found it to be worthwhile to follow down some of these more interesting branching paths, because you end up finding bits and pieces you’ll use along the way later on in your main quest(s).

The last two books, especially are side quests – but that’s part of what’s fun for me about the AI Lore books series, is that they are literally all side quests, and the main quest is just something you assemble as you go along. There’s room for everything because it’s world-building. And then the game becomes merely knitting it into the world…

I finished two new books lately about different AI factions, collectives, polities, etc.

Pictured above is #86 in the AI Lore Books series, the Hyperion Collective, AIs who choose to appear in alien form.

Also recently published is book #85, Tales of the Victoriana Intelligences, who prefer to instantiate among humans as Victiorian humans with pet dinosaurs.

Both of these collections grew organically out of experimentation in Midjourney. After I had a rough idea of their world, I went into Anthropic’s Claude with some guiding text, and had it generate around 20 flash fiction ideas, along with an encyclopedia entry about each group to kick off the story collections. Then I picked the best concepts, and used Claude to write in-world stories that fit into this topic, but also connect to my larger story-multiverse of the AI lore books.

Claude is a fun partner for world-building, especially used in this “slice of life” method of storytelling. Claude’s flash fiction/short stories are actually pretty good. They’re not the best thing ever, but neither is my writing to begin with, so, together we maybe get somewhere better. And Claude’s short stories are better than ones I’ve seen out of ChatGPT, in my opinion.

Some new small collections:

• Putin’s Body Doubles (archive)
• Trump Burning the American Flag (archive)
• Reagan Burning the American Flag (archive)
  • Tangent from Reagan Surrendering USA to Soviets

From a blog post by Bryan Alexander about the same synthography Ars Technica piece I responded to last night…

As with any storytelling project or information technology this art form should also elicit criticism, even hostility. Some will charge users for not making “real” art, since they’re relying on large language models instead of actually drawing images or taking photos themselves. (Cf the critiques of the electric guitar or DJing.) Others will critique the form for complicity with the owners of the technologies and their bad practices: training bots on the work of uncompensated artists, forcing viewers into certain platforms, perhaps arrogating ownership of the results, and so on. Another critique might stem from supporters of other art forms, seeing #AICinema as unfair or illegitimate competition along economic, aesthetic, and/or political grounds. Imagine what might occur when people start making provocative or explicitly political stories.

Anticipating criticism seems wise.

No comment about people making provocative or explicitly political stories. We don’t have to imagine any more. It’s no longer a what if. It’s a what.

This was an off-shoot to following links about synthography, an excellent short piece thinking about tools like Midjourney as “idea cameras.”

Pictures are powerful because they can be shared across time, space, and language barriers. Pictures allow you to travel back in time and see what someone else saw, at that moment, wherever they were.

Photography can capture moments that happened, but synthography is not bound by the limitations of reality. Synthography can capture moments that did not happen and moments that could never happen.

Taking a great photo is about being at the right place, at the right time, and pointing your camera at the right subject, in just the right way.

Taking a great syntho is about stimulating the imagination of the camera. Synthography doesn’t require you to be anywhere or anywhen in particular. The great synthographers will be great storytellers and great poets.

Agree with all of this!

Watching the shape that generative media is taking, it occurs to me that there is emerging a kind of sub-category of journalism which concerns itself with what happens in the unreal world. That is, invented images and entire worlds are becoming things of interest in their own right – not just in terms of a debunk or a fact-check, but because they are note-worthy and interesting in and of themselves.

To me, generative media and the latent space literally is the Metaverse. Like an early alpha version… Okay, maybe I can’t – yet – navigate the latent space using VR goggles and a directional control, but that day is surely coming. And in the meantime, I can use tools like Midjourney to reach into and explore realms which seem to have their own kind of existence and (hyper)reality — and I can bring back treasures from them to share with others, making those Otherworlds more real and accessible from this one.