Category: Other Page 66 of 177

The Zalachete Fairy is the 72nd book in the AI lore series, by Canadian AI publisher, Lost Books. It’s the first book in this series to use GPT-4, which was released publicly yesterday.

I used both GPT-3 and 3.5 extensively and penned many books in this series using those models. I can confidently say after comparing the experience and results given me by this model that GPT-4 is radically better at working as a writing partner – at least for the style of writing that I do, heavy on the exposition & lore. I previously did not think that ChatGPT Plus was worth the $20 a month, but I have changed my mind now that this includes priority access to 4.

The way I started using it is by introducing that we will work on fictional world building in a sci fi setting. I have it disable personal pronouns (and call itself “the model”) as well as apologies and disclaimers before I begin (though these seem possibly to be less problematic in this version). Then I give it a book title, tell it I want the format to be fictional encyclopedia entries, and then give it a summary.

In exchange, the model spit out for me five or six 1-2 paragraph encyclopedia entries, which were all reasonably good. Then I went through each entry, and told it to expand the entry, and add in some fact or twist I wanted it to incorporate. It did a great job with those, and I found the generated text to be much more creative, interesting, and far less repetitive than using a similar method in prior models would have yielded.

Then I had it just generate titles for five new entries, and had it expand each of those based on my instructions. I added a very small amount of extra stuff (mainly cross-references to other books) manually, did my usual thing with images from PlaygroundAI.com, and that was it.

I’ve found in the past that with ChatGPT I could produce lets say, around 2K mostly usable words in about an hour. In last night’s first try, I surpassed about 3.6K words of much higher quality and greater coherence in a little under 45 minutes. This is a major leap forward merely on the volume side, but add to that the increase in quality, and this is a major deal.

The book itself tells the story of a mysterious figure in ancient myth and legend which “some people” believe may have been an ancient artificially intelligence which arose spontaneously in nature. The name actually came from a dream just before waking, which left me with no other details of the story. With that simple premise of ancient AI, the actual today AI of GPT-4 had little problem turning it into a pretty entertaining little read.

Following up on some of the open questions from my previous post, I found an official-looking IPTC blog post describing these new parameters for digitalSourceType.

They explicitly call out not using the term deepfake here, which I agree with:

It is important to note that we are only describing the way a media object has been created: we are not making any statements about the intent of the user (or the machine) in creating the content. So we deliberately don’t have a term “deepfake”, but we do have “trainedAlgorithmicMedia” which would be the term used to describe a piece of content that was created by an AI algorithm such as a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN).

Its interesting this distinction they are making between trainedAlgorithmicMedia and algorithmicMedia, which they describe as:

Media created purely by an algorithm not based on any sampled training data, e.g. an image created by software using a mathematical formula

Generative AI images are trained though, so we’ll go back to that category here. They include a more detailed set of examples here than in that other schema page previously linked to:

Term ID	trainedAlgorithmicMedia
Term name	Trained algorithmic media
Term description	Digital media created algorithmically using a model derived from sampled content
Examples	* Image based on deep learning from a series of reference examples * A “speech-to-speech” generated audio or “deepfake” video using a combination of a real actor and an AI model * “Text-to-image” using a text input to feed an algorithm that creates a synthetic image

So based on that, the current breed of generative AI tools like Stable Diffusion, Dall-E, Midjourney all appear to cleanly fall under, “‘Text-to-image’ using a text input to feed an algorithm that creates a synthetic image.”

I’m only just beginning to wrap my mind around C2PA, but I reached out to them to help make sense of their fairly complex standard and try to understand how it can accommodate sites and services which produce AI-generated artifacts like images especially (or text or video).

From what I understand, C2PA is sort of a collection of metadata about the origins of a piece of media (apart from a watermark – it’s a different approach). It seems to be aimed at proactive disclosure about provenance, which corresponds well with a certain strain of thinking in generative AI, that it is potentially good and desirable to have the ability to (and option to decide whether to) effectively disclose the presence of synthetic media in a responsible way.

Anyway, someone there wrote back and pointed me to something called digitalSourceType in the spec. This apparently comes from a body called the IPTC, or the International Press Telecommunications Council, which Wikipedia says is involved with:

IPTC aims at simplifying the distribution of information. To achieve this technical standards are developed to improve the management and exchange of information between content providers, intermediaries and consumers. IPTC is committed to open standards and makes all standards freely available to its members and the wider community.

There is a detailed description of digitalSourceType here, and the different possible values it can take. I’m also seeing used in that document a short form which appears to be: digsrctype.

A few of these possible values are of greatest interest to me for the purposes of both generative AI, but also more broadly for hyperreality as a mixed media art form.

• digitalArt: Media created by a human using digital tools
• virtualRecording: Live recording of virtual event based on synthetic and optionally captured elements
• compositeSynthetic: Mix or composite of several elements, at least one of which is synthetic
• trainedAlgorithmicMedia: Digital media created algorithmically using a model derived from sampled content

There are some other ones, but probably the last is most accurate for generative AI images. Though I question whether an artist creating images with Stable Diffusion couldn’t also realistically use the label digitalArt? I’m not sure how fixed/narrow these definitions are supposed to be. Presumably, the best thing to do would be at the point of image creation, to enable the user to choose which source type setting to apply to any images created by tools which comply with this emerging standard.

I haven’t confirmed yet but so far have the impression the above mostly applies to still images? Not sure if it covers video too, and whether there is another category which would be a match for AI-generated & AI-assisted text, but I will investigate further.

I think the main innovation I’ve made with my AI lore books is not the use of AI at all, but the structure & arrangement of the narrative, spread across many volumes in a non-linear web of cross-references. (a.k.a., a networked narrative)

In plain terms, I scatter links to other books throughout the text, so that the story is networked across many volumes. As a result, the buyer behavior that I’ve seen repeated with some frequency is that people click through these links to other parts of the story that interest them, and they end up buying multiple volumes. If it goes really well, they come back again later and buy another batch, and sometimes even another.

AI didn’t help me do that at all. You could do that same distributed narrative structure without using AI at all. And you could do it in any genre. The thing AI has helped me to do though is produce a larger quantity of text in a shorter amount of time. So that enables me to put out many more individual volumes, all of which cross-link out to others.

I think one of my favorite things about the “riff” style of blogging is that pushing things out as blog posts, even when somewhat incomplete, lets you sort of amass a pile or chains of thought which you can then string together and toy with various configurations of over time as you develop the ideas and their relationships over time in subsequent iterations.

I’ve never really found another form of writing that let me do in such a “thinking out loud” process and format, and I’m happy to be able to unwind in this manner some of big thoughts I’ve been having, even if in the moment the individual pieces don’t always make sense in isolation. I’ve learned to trust that over time, they will either all work themselves out, or they will fade away.

Stapling together a few loose odds and ends here… I enjoyed this article about “atoms or bits” on The Point Mag, but in particular this line jumped out at me for the current context:

If the digital world really is overtaking our physical world, we must be willing to revisit how the physical world is governed.

This all reminds me somehow of the term anthropocene, which M-W has a short & handy definition for:

the period of time during which human activities have had an environmental impact on the Earth regarded as constituting a distinct geological age…

Following on earlier discussions about the so-called “reality-based community” of GWB era, also from that era is Stephen Colbert’s coinage of truthiness (which accords very well with hyperreality):

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the President [George W. Bush] because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?

There’s something in all this for me about… the rise of human activity overtaking something something…

I’ll continue to drill down on what I mean by that something something now that I captured these three things in one place to vibrate together.

Have been thinking about how the web accelerated the ascendancy of what’s called the speech act, or the illocutionary act, or a “performative utterance.” In original narrow usage, those terms mean something like can be gleaned from these examples:

• “I do” – as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony.
• “I name this ship the ‘Queen Elizabeth'”
• “I give and bequeath my watch to my brother” – as occurring in a will
• “I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow”

While the things we say online might not always have the binding impact of, for example, a contract, they do cause real social and often other consequences (professional, for example).

So where a speech act in the past might have been limited to certain narrow formal constraints, because of the persistence of speech online, their use is now near universal.

But IRL-offline, just saying something and actually doing something are different things. Both might have consequences, but they are not the same when they occur in real space as when they occur in hyperreal spaces of social media, where thousands or potentially millions can see it.

Anyway, this is just a building block… will continue teasing out the strand I’m interested in here little by little.

The Exempt is the 71st book in the AI lore series.

It is set in the same world as Conspiratopia, but perhaps a few years later, as it references the Fall and the global AI takeover, which hasn’t happened yet in the original Conspiratopia timeline.

This book differs from most of the other AI lore books, as it is largely narrative-driven, not just expository lore. It expands on the ideas I was writing about recently opting out from society, from laws, etc. It imagines a world where the ruling AIs don’t actually believe in human sentience, so it’s of little interest to them when humans commit heinous acts, so long as they don’t disrupt the allocations of resources and personnel that make up the system. The book opens with the main character filing official paperwork for an exemption or a permit to be allowed to commit murder, by killing his boss…