Category: Other Page 78 of 177

France 24 Follow-Up

On 4 January 2023

France 24 recently published a piece about certain claims circulating online that there are pyramids and a lost civilization that was re-discovered in Antarctica. It’s an interesting piece, and worth a read, and the fact-checker responsible did a decent job with assembling the pieces of the puzzle as presented.

There are some elements which got left on the cutting room floor though, that in my mind are worth retaining in some form, if not in the primary reporting on it. That’s a good use for blogs, in my opinion.

I’ll excerpt the ones below that to me had the most important concepts in them, which may not have been covered in the finished piece.

FRANCE 24: How did the idea of this project come to you ?

My prediction is that AI-generated content will soon make up the vast majority of content on the web. I’ve seen that platforms, non-profits, and government organizations that many of their efforts around media literacy and counter-disinformation/counter-radicalization move quite slowly and use very conventional approaches to educating audiences. They tend to focus only on fact-checking and debunking, but in my experience, that approach does little to reach audiences who would most benefit from it. Because many of those people are skeptical of mainstream news and fact-checking, so sometimes those efforts backfire and only ever reach people who already understand the problem.

As an artist, I’m able to experiment outside of the constraints of what those organizations can do or are willing to do, and reach people directly where they are consuming this type of content.

Which behaviors or reflections do you aim to encourage with these publications?

I want to pique people’s curiosity, and encourage people to be suspicious. It is intended to be provocative. I want them to look at the AI-generated material that I create, and identify what about it seems off or wrong for them, and then have them share that with one another in an open and honest discussion, and explain their reasoning to other people. Many times these messages have a more profound impact when they are delivered by one’s peers or community than they would from an external authority figure.

Which advice would you give for anyone to detect AI-generated content in general ?

This technology is moving so fast that any general advice I could give about detecting AI-generated content is either only going to apply in very narrow cases where a specific tool(s) is being used, or it will only be meaningful advice for a very short period of time until the tools reach their next iteration. For example, some AI image generators still have a very difficult time depicting human hands correctly, but as you can see online, people are working round the clock to improve them. Within a year or two, all of those indicators will either change to something else, or they will go away altogether, and much of the AI-generated content will become indistinguishable from the real thing.

I would say in general that your best bet is always going to be classic detection methods: does an image or other artifact appear “too good to be true?” Then chances are, it probably is not true. Doing reverse image searches is also still a useful method to uncover the original source of something you find on social media. Though, that said, it is also trivial to create a false trail of provenance for an image, so that it seems to have come from a real person, when in fact it was generated.

What do you think about these publications that use your content? Did you expect these pictures to be used to spread disinformation ? Was it what you expected / what you wanted or do you consider it more like a collateral damage?

There is a branch of medicine called nuclear medicine, or radioisotope scanning, that is relevant here. In it, a small amount of a radioactive substance, called a radioisotope, is introduced into the body. The radioisotope emits radiation that can be detected by special cameras or scanners, which produce images of the inside of the body. These images can be used to trace the path of the radioisotope and identify any abnormalities or problems.

I see other people using the content that I create in much the same way: where the images and stories I create are like the radioisotopes, and when they get picked up by other people in an information ecosystem, we can use them as a way of tracking how and where these things propagate online. We can see the paths they take, and even the way the artifacts mutate through re-transmission – such as them getting cropped by other people, or the original disclaimers about the presence of AI-generated content being removed.

All of these activities by other people interacting with the content become an important part of the story of the information, what it does, and how it functions structurally.

Concretely, how do you expect your publications to raise awareness about disinformation?

One thing I see in the subcultures around conspiracy theories is that, while those groups are usually highly skeptical of information coming from mainstream media, they sometimes are not critical at all of much more questionable information sources. This opens those audiences up to a great deal of manipulation and propaganda by any number of state, political, or other actors, so long as the content matches the preconceived notions, ideology, or emotions of the target audience.

By sharing the kinds of artifacts I’m creating, I hope to find another pathway, one that might be able to playfully trigger or provoke the critical faculties of those audiences, so that they understand just how easy and widespread this type of manipulation can be, and how to guard against it.

I also want to start mentally preparing people for what happens when much more skilled and better funded actors start using these tools to manipulate at scale. I’ve only spent a few hundred dollars generating images for 50 books. What happens when someone invests millions of dollars into AI-generated disinformation? We simply won’t be able to fact-check all of it.

We need to help train peoples’ discernment and agency to find the truth for themselves. And we need to find creative and interesting ways to reach people where they are, and understand what motivates them to seek out this type of content, instead of just calling them “crazy” and writing them off forever. We can’t afford to leave vast segments of the population behind, just because we think the things they believe might be wrong. We need to find ways for all of us to be able to move forward together, by talking out loud about the things that matter most to us

The Dream Books (so far)

By Tim B.

On 1 January 2023

In Other

Having reached now 49 titles, you start to be able to easily pull out sets of connected books. The connections can be based on many things but this set all are inspired by dreams:

Luddite AI

By Tim B.

On 1 January 2023

In Other

I’m still crunching through some other quotes on the matter, but wanted to save Cory Doctorow’s bit about automation being uplifting from here:

“But automation isn’t solely disempowering: it also lifts people up. Today, thanks to automated machining tools like CNC mills, someone with very little training can do a lot of fine machining for themselves, without having to bother a skilled machinist. Democratizing access to the means of production isn’t intrinsically anti-labor – it’s only bad for workers when the bounty of automation is disproportionally allocated to a small number of capital owners, and not workers.”

I don’t see why this same thing doesn’t potentially apply to AI generated content.

Telling is fine

By Tim B.

On 1 January 2023

In Other

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a writer, it’s that all the supposedly true writing axioms like “show don’t tell” – and nearly all other official writing “advice” people like to spew on each other (see also: “write what you know,” etc.) is basically bunk. You can and should write how you want, how you’re moved to. If that’s by showing, fine. If that’s by telling, also fine. The secret “they” don’t want you to know is that *everything works* if you make it work.

On “Dangerous” fictions

By Tim B.

On 28 December 2022

In Other

Found this piece from July 2022 by Cory Doctorow, where he talks about an author who was apparently a protege of Philip K. Dick’s who I never heard of – Tim Powers.

In it, he brings up an oft-repeated trope regarding “dangerous” fictions, a pet topic of mine:

“The Powers method is the conspiracist’s method. The difference is, Powers knows he’s making it up, and doesn’t pretend otherwise when he presents it to us. […]

The difference between the Powers method and Qanon, then, is knowing when you’re making stuff up and not getting high on your own supply. Powers certainly knows the difference, which is why he’s a literary treasure and a creative genius and not one of history’s great monsters.”

As popular as this type of argument is (and Douglas Rushkoff trots out something similar here and here), I personally find it to be overly simplistic and a bit passé.

First of all, I would argue that all writers – by necessity – must get “high on their own supply” in order to create (semi) coherent imaginal worlds and bring them to fruition for others to enjoy. Looking sternly at you here, Tolkien. In fact, perhaps the writers who get highest on their own supply are in some cases the best…

Second, no one arguing in favor of this all of nothing position (fiction must be fiction must be fiction) seems to have taken into account the unreliable narrator phenomenon in fiction.

Wikipedia calls it a narrator whose credibility is compromised:

“Sometimes the narrator’s unreliability is made immediately evident. For instance, a story may open with the narrator making a plainly false or delusional claim or admitting to being severely mentally ill, or the story itself may have a frame in which the narrator appears as a character, with clues to the character’s unreliability. A more dramatic use of the device delays the revelation until near the story’s end. In some cases, the reader discovers that in the foregoing narrative, the narrator had concealed or greatly misrepresented vital pieces of information. Such a twist ending forces readers to reconsider their point of view and experience of the story. In some cases the narrator’s unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving readers to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.”

My point is that the un/reliability of the “narrator” can extend all the way out through to the writer themself. (And what if the reader turns out to be unreliable?)

Can we ever really know for certain if a writer “believed” that thing x that they wrote was wholly fictional, wholly non-fictional, or some weird blend of the two? Do we need to ask writers to make a map of which elements of a story are which? Isn’t that in some sense giving them more power than they deserve?

Moreover, if the author is an unreliable narrator (and to some extent every subjective human viewpoint is always an unreliable narrator to some degree), how can we ever trust them to disclose to us responsibly whether or not they are indeed unreliable? Short answer is: we can’t. Not really.

This is one of those “turtles all the way down” arguments, in which (absent other compelling secondary evidence) it may be difficult or sometimes impossible to strike ground truth.

All of this boils down for me to the underlying argument of whether one must label fictional works as fiction, and if not doing so is somehow “dangerous.”

The Onion’s Amicus Brief earlier this year why parody and satire should not be required to be overtly labelled – because if robs these millennia-old art forms of their structural efficacy, their punch as it were.

Wikipedia’s Fiction entry’s history section is sadly quite scant about the details. A couple of other sources point to more specifically the 12th century in Europe (though likely it goes back farther). One source whose credibility I have no concept of states:

“In the Middle Ages, books were perceived as exclusive and authoritative. People automatically assumed that whatever was written in a book had to be true,” says Professor Lars Boje…

It’s an interesting idea, that structurally the phenomenon of the book was so rare and complex that by virtue of its existence alone, it was conceived of as containing truth.

“

Up until the High Middle Ages in the 12th century, books were surrounded by grave seriousness.

The average person only ever saw books in church, where the priest read from the Bible. Because of this, the written word was generally associated with truth.”

That article alludes to an invisible “fiction contract” between writer and reader, which didn’t emerge as a defined genre distinction until perhaps the 19th century. They do posit a transition point through in the 12th, but don’t back it up by any evidence therein of a “fiction contract.”

“The first straightforward work of fiction was written in the 1170s by the Frenchman Chrétien de Troyes. The book, a story about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, became immensely popular.”

HistoryToday.com – another site whose credibility I cannot account for – seems to agree with pinpointing that genre of Arthurian romance as being linked to the rise of fiction, though pushes it back a few years to 1155, with Wace’s translation of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. The whole piece is an excellent read, so I won’t rehash it here, but quote:

“This is the literary paradigm which gives us the novel: access to the unknowable inner lives of others, moving through a world in which their interior experience is as significant as their exterior action.”

They suggest that fiction – in some form like we might recognize it today – had precursor conditions culturally that had to be met before it could arise, namely that the inner lives of people mattered as much as their outward action.

“It need hardly be said that the society which believes such things, which accedes to – and celebrates – the notion that the inner lives of others are a matter of significance, is a profoundly different society from one that does not. There is an immediately ethical dimension to these developments: once literature is engaged in the (necessarily fictional) representation of interior, individuated selves, who interact with other interior, individuated selves, then moral agency appears in a new light. It is only in the extension of narrative into the unknowable – the minds of others – that a culture engages with the moral responsibility of one individual toward another, rather than with each individual’s separate (and identical) responsibilities to God, or to a king.”

It’s interesting also here to note that, A) the King Arthur stories did not originate with Chretien de Troyes or Geoffrey of Monmouth, and B) many people ever since still believe them to be true today to some extent.

Leaving that all aside, one might also ask regarding my own work, well isn’t this all just a convoluted apologia for the type of writing I’m doing? Absolutely, and why not articulate my purpose. You can choose to believe me or decide that I am an unreliable narrator. It’s up to you. I respect your agency, but I also want to play on both the reader’s and the author’s (myself) expectations about genres and categories. These are books which take place squarely in the hyperreal after all, the Uncanny Valley. They intentionally invite these questions, ask you to suspend your disbelief, and then cunningly deconstruct it, only to reconstruct it and smash it again later – and only if you’re listening.

Further, as artists I believe our role and purpose is to some extent to befuddle convention, and ask questions that have no easy answers. Yes, this will cause some uneasiness, especially among those accustomed to putting everything into little boxes, whose contents never bleed or across. Some people might even worry if it’s “dangerous” to believe in things that aren’t factual. Is it? I think the answer is sometimes, and it depends. But it largely depends on your agency as the reader, and what you do with it in real life.

Consider the case of this purveyor of tall tales, Randy Cramer, who claims with a straight face to have spent 17 years on the Planet Mars fighting alien threats to Earth.

He is the very definition of the unreliable narrator, whose labels of fact of fiction likely do not accord with consensus reality on many major points.

The video below is a good, if a bit annoying, take-down of many of Cramer’s claims, though unfortunately I think leans rather too heavily on deconstructing his body language, when his words alone are damning enough (btw, looks like the George Noory footage comes from an interview he did for his show Beyond Belief):

The question remains: is this an example of a “dangerous” fiction?

To understand that, I tend to think in terms of risk analysis, in which we might try to estimate:

The specific harm(s)
Their likelihood of occurring
Their severity

One definition of harm traces back to Feinberg, and is something like wrongful setbacks of interest. A Stanford philosophy site further elucidates, quoting Feinberg:

Feinberg’s defines harm as “those states of set-back interest that are the consequence of wrongful acts or omissions by others” (Feinberg 1984)

Is saying you spent 17 years on Mars a “wrongful act or omission?” Perhaps. But as the Stanford article points out, actually defining what is or isn’t in someone’s interests is incredibly squishy.

In Cramer’s case, perhaps it is willfully and wrongfully deceptive to say the things he is saying. Do we have a moral or legal responsibility to always tell the truth? What about when that prevarication leads to financial loss in others?

In Cramer’s case, according to the second video linked above, he does seem to ask people for money – both in funding creation of a supposedly holographic bio-medical bed which can regrow limbs, and in the form of online psionics courses and one-on-one consultations.

But is it wrongful if the buyers/donators have agency, and the ability to reasonably evaluate his claims on their own?

Wikipedia’s common-language definition of fraud seems like it could apply here:

“…fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right.”

Is Cramer a fraud? Is he a liar? I wondered here if Cramer might have a defamation case against the YouTube author referenced above, who calls him a pathological liar. But last time I checked, truth is an absolute defense against defamation claims. That is, the commonly accepted truth we agree on as a society – more or less – is that Mars is uninhabited, and there is no Secret Space program, etc. So if it went to court, it seems like the defamation claim would not have a leg to stand on.

Of course, it’s *possible* it’s all truth, and what we call consensus reality is based on a massive set of lies itself that is very different from ‘actual’ reality. But that’s not how courts work.

What if Cramer included disclaimers like you might see on tarot card boxes, or other similar novelty items, “For entertainment purposes only?” It depends what authority we’re trying to appeal to here: a court of law, the court of public opinion, or one reader’s experience of a particular work. Each of those might see the matter in a different light, depending on their viewpoint.

In my case, I include disclaimers regarding the inclusion of AI generated elements. I leave it up to the reader to try to determine A) which parts, and B) what the implications of AI content even are. Should they be trusted?

My position, and the one which I espouse throughout, is that – for now – AI is an unreliable narrator. Making it about on par with human authors in that regard. Are the fictions it produces “dangerous?” Must we label them “fictions” and point a damning finger at their non-human source?

In some ways, my books are both an indictment of and celebration of AI authorial tools, and even full-on AI authorship (which I think we’re some ways away from still). To know their dangers, we must probe them, and expose them thoughtfully. We must see them as they are – as both authors and readers – warts and all. And decide what we will do with the risks and harms they may pose, and how we can balance all that with an enduring belief and valorisation of human agency.

Because if we can’t trust people to make up their own minds about things they read, we run the real risk of one of the biggest and most dangerous fictions of all – that we would be better off relying on someone else to tell us what’s ‘safe’ and therefore good, and trust them implicitly to keep away anything deemed ‘dangerous’ by the authority in whom we have invested this awesome power.

Old English poetry (quote)

By Tim B.

On 28 December 2022

In Other

Source:

“The writing of fiction depends upon the idea that individuals’ emotional, inner lives, not just their actions, are important for their own sake. This is not an idea which has currency in all places and times; it is contingent on particular social conditions. Anglo-Saxon literature reflects a society in which the individual was subordinated to more important ideals, in both practical and abstract ways: the warrior in the shield-wall, who gives his life in the service of his lord and the defence of his people; the martyr’s self-sacrifice for his faith, or the saint’s self-denial for his; the hero’s selfless bravery against the monstrous incursions which threaten his lord’s hall. In Old English poetry, to be an individual, cut off from these collective bonds, is to be lost.”

That seems like as good an explanation (or better) as any I’ve seen to explain how lost we all seem to be today… Is there a way to recapture that without having to subordinate ourselves to a king, whether earthly or heavenly?

All the Lost Books of Quatria (as of 23 Dec 2022)

By Tim B.

On 23 December 2022

In Other

The AI books are getting out of hand. Published #47 this morning.

That one’s not a Quatria-related book, but I wanted to make a running list of the ones that are, presented in chronological order of their writing (narratively they don’t follow any particular order).

Many other books in the set touch on fundamentally Quatrian themes, but above are the ones that are overtly set in that corner of the latent space. I put in parentheses the ones which to me are carrying some of the minor/less canonical aspects of this narrative, but are directly tied to it in either case.

For me as a world-builder, this is a great way of writing, because I can carve off specific aspects of the universe/multiverse, without having to try to wrangle everything into a single narrative. It’s very freeing, and I think gives the reader a lot of room to explore and make their own sense of it all.

Art school

By Tim B.

On 23 December 2022

In Other

As an art school drop-out, this quote about AI art models from illustrator James Gurney (Dinotopia) hits home:

“How do you run an art school when the students can solve any assignment with the push of a button?”

Thanks to ChatGPT this problem doesn’t apply merely to art schools, but more broadly to all education.

Art school is a particularly good test-bed though, because “art” can mean so very much. Honestly, I’d love to see art schools directly address this exact question. Art is so so much bigger than “making a picture.”

To me, the “problem” is not that much different than what artists encounter when they need to collaborate with other artists, which is especially apparent in theatre (where I worked for some 6 years). Only there the problem is somewhat clearer, since the issue is not merely about pressing a button and having a result, but working with a partner who is in control of the result (which, to be fair, Gurney addresses working with AI tools as partners). How do you exist as an artist when you have to rely on another person to produce a result?

Obviously, relying on another human being vs. relying on a computer for a result are two qualitatively different things. But perhaps that distinction won’t last all that long at the current rate of progress.

One thing I saw in art school that was never really overtly addressed anywhere was this underlying notion of the artist as the pinnacle of the rugged individualist. Artists seeking their own style, their own self-expression, their own fame, etc. Perhaps you might engage in the occasional collaborative or group project, but the focus is very much you you you.

Perhaps this is linked somewhat to fears that some artists seem to be facing around AI tools, that they feel there is a diminishing of the you you you of the rugged individualist artist with their own “unique” style etc. etc. A dawning recognition that, hey, we’re all basically doing more or less the same shit in more or less the same mass cultural context. That we’re even – gasp – by and large interchangeable.

For me, that’s not scary. That’s a relief. It means that to some extent I can shelve myself & my baggage as primary concerns, and merely execute within a cultural context as one of many exemplars. This accords more with past artistic traditions (I’m thinking medieval art esp.), where an artist was recognized as a link in the chain of tradition passed down through the culture. It wasn’t necessarily desirable in those traditions for artists to have their own unique style, so much as to transmit the style carried by the tradition.

Anyway, I don’t have all the answers, just lots of thoughts…

ChatGPT conspiracy disclaimers

By Tim B.

On 21 December 2022

In Other

Am asking ChatGPT for some help researching Project Blue Beam, and keep seeing it say variations of this:

“It is important to remember that conspiracy theories like Project Blue Beam are not based on verifiable facts and should not be taken seriously.”

I think this approach to “safety” is well-meaning, but potentially misguided. Shouldn’t we take conspiracy theories seriously when they have real-world implications? That seems like a no-brainer. Not taking them seriously is what leads to things like armed insurrections.

I’m not sure what would be the “right” answer to give here, but this to me doesn’t instinctively feel like the one that will persuade people to suddenly give up their views.

For me, there are shades of the below video concept here, of chastising users in a way that is probably unhelpful:

Not hiring artists

By Tim B.

On 18 December 2022

In Other

One of the major tropes I’ve seen around generative AI art is that it is already or going to soon take jobs away from artists.

I suppose it may be true in certain circumstances, but for my use it is simply not so. That is, I would never be able to afford hiring dozens of artists to produce hundreds of images to use in ebooks. It’s not a question of whether or not I respect the work/effort/learning etc of artists, because I am one. I just don’t have that kind of money for fun small side projects, nor do I have the managerial capacity to organize all the work of others that would require. So it’s not like, okay I have $50K to spend on art, that I am now not spending.

If anything, the only artist I am potentially replacing is myself, because in all likelihood, I would be the one executing on a small fraction of the image ideas that I have. And if I was lucky and had a ton of free time to commit, I might be able to push out say six decent quality images for a book in a few weeks. And that would still be an accomplishment. But with these tools, I can blast out ideas and images that allow me to construct my interior worlds externally. I can achieve things an order of complexity greater than what I could by hand. And that is exciting as shit, whether or not other people are happy about it.