Other – Page 62 – Tim Boucher

Things cut by Newsweek

On 15 May 2023

I noticed there were a couple parts that are important to me that were cut from my recent Newsweek piece. Thought I’d just include those two bits here for posterity…

I don’t sell my books on Amazon because I don’t want to wear Amazon sweatpants, while using Amazon batteries… while I eat food I bought on Amazon, while they sell my book too. That all feels too weird and dystopian – even for me.

And also:

I don’t do any conventional advertising, and I find most forms of social media basically abhorrent now, and don’t want to participate anymore. Instead, I promote the AI Lore books on my personal blog, and sporadically on Medium and Reddit. And that’s really it. The rest of the sales activitity is fueled by real people finding the books, and coming back to them again and again as they explore new narrative rabbit-holes and share them with their friends.

I understand why Newsweek cut them (to a degree), but to me both of these are essential components of the bigger story of being an author in our time.

In Newsweek

By Tim B.

On 15 May 2023

In Other

New piece about the AI Lore books just came out in Newsweek. (archived version)

Notes on The Banned Prompt

By Tim B.

On 14 May 2023

In Other

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:

‘No extraneous political discussion’

By Tim B.

On 14 May 2023

In Other

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.

Russia Welcomes American Conservatives?

By Tim B.

On 13 May 2023

In Other

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.

Kanye wearing trash

By Tim B.

On 13 May 2023

In Other

Link to full set on Reddit.

Garbage Senators Collection

By Tim B.

On 11 May 2023

In Other

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.

Notes on The Plastic Prison

By Tim B.

On 6 May 2023

In Other

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.

Midjourney’s new AI moderation: a swing & a miss

By Tim B.

On 3 May 2023

In Other

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.