Lots of media coverage lately, so wanted to put together a sort of skeleton key for new visitors to get acquainted. Really, these are some trails for people who want to rabbit hole. Buckle up.

1. Start here: About page.
2. French language:
   • Actualitté interview (Paris)
   • Bruno Guglielminetti interview (Montreal)
   • My printed AI books with Typophilia (France)
3. Otherwise, my Newsweek article is what started all the fuss in the first place. It’s the editors that wanted me to do an article about the sales and numbers of it all, but that is kind of the least interesting part of this project for me.
4. What is “this project?” It is my AI Lore books, which combine human and AI contributions for a uniquely weird effect, which is enhanced by the disjointed serial fiction format, where the volumes reference one another in a kind of accretionary world-building stew. They are set in a sort of pulp sci-fi universe which is collapsing in on itself with paranoia, a little bit like Philip K. Dick, but not really at all.
5. I also have two print books I wrote prior to that in English, The Lost Direction (epic fantasy, long and boring – some might say), and Conspiratopia (short and funny, set in the mold of a utopian satire but with a very smart internet guy). Reading both of those is really kind of necessary if you want to get all the deep references of the later AI books, many of which continue those narratives in other weird directions. You can also grab the ebooks here: Lost Direction, Conspiratopia.
6. This video interview with Milo Rossi does the best job of situating the books themselves within the larger artistic context of which I am operating.
7. This is a funny (to me) faux-interview that I did in early 2023 using a preset AI voice from Eleven Labs. I wrote the questions then ad-libed the answers and spliced it all together.
8. This 2021 interview with David Farrier is also a good testament to how long I’ve been experimenting in this space and how my thinking has evolved (in truth, it goes back to more like 2014, give or take – in other ways, a lot longer).
9. An even older 2020 interview about the Quatria Theory, which became the lynchpin of many of the AI Lore books much later on.
10. I did a couple panels or webinars about generative AI, art & creativity, copyright, etc. Those are especially good because they include other talented artists working in this space, as well as people working in adjacent legal domains.
11. I used to work as a content moderator for a major web platform, and the experience has deeply informed my artwork. I’ve also worked in countering disinformation, including with machine learning.
12. I’ve been interested in the paranormal since I was a kid, and conspiracy theories as a curiosity since I was a teenager. I ran a blog on those topics and other fringe & alternative culture stuff between about 2003 and 2011 or so. Having all that background knowledge helped a lot in my job later on in life. But I took that blog offline because I grew out of it, and didn’t want to be constrained by carrying that past work on with me too closely, and being unable to let it go. You can find it on archive.org if you know where to look.
13. There are a bunch of interesting thematically-linked articles if you click on the series at the top of this blog, especially AI and Hyperreality. Those posts kind of show in real time my thought processes in making these books and this artwork.
14. The Conspiracy series is kind of my cathartic unwinding in the aftermath of being a content moderator, and me taking what I saw as far as fragmentary narrative methods used by disinformation operators, and tried to detourne those for the purposes of hyperreality storytelling. The objective of those pieces is sort of to overwhelm the reader/viewer with bullshit – I think they’re successful in that!
15. And the Fakes are parallel video and other experiments to make my imaginary worlds feel more “real” but they are simultaneously also parodies of “real” conspiracy theories & online cultures. Where to drawn the line? I say let the reader decide. Those posts and videos laid the groundwork thematically for a lot of what would later become the AI Lore books.
16. Here’s another related deep background project, where I hired people on Fiverr to pretend to be characters in my imaginary world, where they were humans catching computer viruses (another theme later continued in the AI Lore books & Conspiratopia)
17. The deepest background of all though, with maybe the most rabbity of all rabbitholes herein contained, would have to be Early Clues LLC. Unfortunately, no one can simply be told what Early Clues is. You’ll have to find your own way through it.
18. As far as my favorite titles in the AI Lore books series. Difficult to even narrow it down this much out of 122 total volumes:
    • Mysterious Antarctica: Far and away the best seller, but was one of the earliest titles, so many others vastly surpass it in contents and quality.
    • The Abomination Crisis: Aome pivotal world-building lore in this one.
    • Mysterious Tob Gobble: Because Tob.
    • Inside Princeps: Perhaps not the best book, but some of the concepts in this one I constantly am mentally referring back to.
    • The First Days of Panic: One of my all-around favs, after I started to really understand the tools and the form I was working with. Originally based on a real dream I had years back.
    • Inside the Hypogeum: Again, possibly not the best text ever, but one of the most fundamental constructs of the Quatria mythos.
    • Garamarcagon: One of the most “artistic” of the earlier books, also based on a dream I had at that time. Being able to use AI to illuminate and expand around dream contents is amazing.
    • The Gestalt Minds: More pivotal world-building lore.
    • The Survivors: Unique in that it’s mostly, I think, a collection of old pre-AI short stories, but set in a similar sort of world.
    • The Island of Deception: Pivotal Quatrian lore.
    • Mysterious Timehunters: Some pretty cool art in this one iirc. Also related to Early Clues mythos.
    • The Yellow City: Quatrian-adjacent, spooky-cool vibes for me.
    • The Turgoshi Megasphere: I remember this one being really cool but haven’t re-read any of them lately.
    • The Jealous Human: I think this one is a “must” to understand the world and themes around the AI-takeover lore stuff.
    • The Cant of the Everwhen Gods: This one had some cool stuff exploring the weird way AIs use language.
    • Das Machina: Another absolute must, talks about the anti-AI resistance.
    • Inside Information Control: Pivotal world-building, spooky-cool dystopia.
    • The Fire Behind The Sky: I have the feeling this one was weird and cool but it’s hard to identify why exactly in retrospect, since I haven’t read them again lately.
    • The Exempt: A mostly human-written short story about a worker who files the paperwork to be allowed to kill their boss.
    • Beyond the Service Area: I remember this one being cool, partly noteworthy because I think some of the first uses of Dalle3 via Bing UI, before you could access it in ChatGPT.
    • The Circle of Sages: Pivotal world-building lore. I started using Midjourney around this time I think.
    • Repermanent: A resurrected unfinished novella from years ago, which I dusted off, and filled in the missing parts with a few layers of AI “goop.”
    • Shadows of Evil: Weird dystopian muppet-style image set.
    • Occupy AI: This one is probably a must, especially for the Resistance-curious.
    • The Return of the Magicians: Absolute must for fans of Quatria lore.
    • The Plastic Prison: Some of the more beautiful Midjourney images I’ve seen of people “wrapped in plastic” visually, and in the text.
    • The Banned Prompt: A must, theme of being censored automatically by AIs.
    • The Politeness Protocols: A must, dystopian hyper-controlling AI society rules. Pairs well with the last two titles also.
    • The Octave of Time: A must, all-human text, with AI images. Not yet finished sequel to The Lost Direction, my first “normal” novel.
    • The Song Drive: A must, imagines Quatrian space-faring technology where they use massive musical instruments to cymatically travel through the vastness of space.
    • Deliriant: Happens in a very similar space narratively to the Song Drive.
    • The Dissolving Factory, The Multi-Beast, Paradise Point & The Artilect: All sort of fit together stylistically and thematically. All very weird and surrealist texts. Very difficult to describe.
    • Hortus Conclusus: A must, from the first few sessions using Dalle3 in ChatGPT, right at the beginning when you could get 4 image results at once, before it got nerfed. Story re-imagines much of the prior background about the AIs, kind of in a way similar to how Highlander 2 (I think?) suddenly introduced this stupid idea that they were actually from outer space? Like that, but less annoying than that, I should say. More of a left turn on some prior presentations of the storylines.
    • Anxietopia: Possibly one of my “perfect” AI books, in that it seamlessly harmonizes my human writing with the gen AI contributions, supported by some incredible artwork, and continues the “super smart conspiracy dude” narrator voice from Conspiratopia, which is one of my favorites.
19. Also, with the books, you can really start anywhere, and just follow the chains of connections and links you find in each volume pointing out to the others. There’s no right or wrong pathway through this landscape.

Anyway, I hope this helps. I know this is a lot to absorb and it dissolves a lot of conceptual and genre boundaries, so take your time and let it all sink in. Cheers!

Just took this very accurate highly realistic and grammatically correct photo of myself to accompany the Bloomberg Law coverage.

Last week, a reference to my work was included in the court filing for a proposed class action lawsuit against Anthropic AI, the company that makes Claude – an AI with which I’ve had an on-again/off-again love/hate relationship over the past year or so while working on my AI Lore books.

The case is titled Bartz et al v. Anthropic PBC, Case Number 3:24-CV-05417. Even though I am not actually a party to the case, the lawyers for the Plaintiffs for some reason saw fit to include me in an attempt to “prove” what I think is a fairly thin and not well supported rhetorical point.

It is my position that the statements included about my work in this filing are at turns false and misleading, and grossly mischaracterize what I’m actually doing as an artist who uses AI to realize their creative vision.

Consequently, this morning I am sending by registered mail a letter to Judge Alsup who is presiding over the proposed class action lawsuit. I am requesting that my letter and corrections regarding this mischaracterization be added to the public record of the court’s docket for the case in order to clear my good name. I also notified the lawyers for the Plaintiffs yesterday of their apparent failure to perform adequate diligence in a signed pleading, and shared both documents with a few members of the press.

I am sharing the letter to Judge Alsup here publicly for future reference [PDF], and to encourage other artists experimenting with AI to push back on all the insults and outrage that is getting flung around about these things online. Artists need to be free to explore and innovate and express themselves without fear of inappropriate and unnecessary reprisals.

As far as I’m concerned, what I’ve done and continue to do with generative AI tools is entirely non-controversial: I’ve merely used these tools as they were designed and offered to the public. No more, no less. Doing that, and being enthusiastic about finding a way to build the future we actually want – with or without AI tools – does not legitimize me as a target in my opinion.

If you’re a journalist looking for a quote or interview on this topic, you can email me through the contact form at the bottom of this page.

73

VA2SFX

This is a topic that is covered in one of my fictional newspapers, so I couldn’t resist putting these together when both headlines appeared in my morning news feed:

And