A reader sent in this excellent example of an authentic Quatrian folk magic ritual. Very impressive stuff – might have to try this out myself. Helmoquinth!
This came out yesterday, via the Hollywood Reporter. Some authors filed a class action against Anthropic, and for some reason thought it would be a good idea to use me in their arguments:
The authors also argue that Anthropic is depriving authors of book sales by facilitating the creation of rip-offs. When Kara Swisher released Burn Book earlier this year, Amazon was flooded with AI-generated copycats, according to the complaint. In another instance, author Jane Friedman discovered a “cache of garbage books” written under her name.
These fraudsters, the lawsuit says, turn to Claude to generate such content. “It was reported that a man named Tim Boucher had ‘written’ 97 books using Anthropic’s Claude (as well as OpenAI’s ChatGPT) in less than year, and sold them at prices from $1.99 to $5.99,” the complaint states. “Claude could not generate this kind of long-form content if it were not trained on a large quantity of books, books for which Anthropic paid authors nothing.”
I take exception to both The Hollywood Reporter’s characterization of me, and the lawsuits. I sent THR a rebuttal of the claim that I am a “fraudster,” as anyone who has read this blog or seen my many interviews and media appearances would know that I have been completely up front about what I’m doing.
There’s a great deal more to be said here…
Here is the court document where my AI Lore books are referenced.
This seems like as good a time as any to catch up on some housekeeping – namely, replying to comments that have been developing over on the Actualitté interview.
In the past, with English-language responses (most of whom I assume are Americans), the uniformity of sentiment that people express has made me wonder somewhere in the back of my mind: are these people actually bots? That would certainly be a mindfuck, but it’s unlikely to be the case. And, in some sense, it is weirdly refreshing to see people hate on my work in a different language and idiomatic formulation than what I am used to. That said, much of it is the same basic stuff conceptually that I’ve encountered before, so I won’t dwell on the repetitive elements here, but mine for the new, different, and interesting.
Given that this blog is in English, I’ll assume most of my readers here are probably mono-lingual Anglophones, and will just use auto-translated excerpts.
Here’s one from Nadine Monfils that jumps out of the crowd:
Tim Boucher lives up to his name. He is both the denouncer and the profiteer of a tool that will cause the downfall of artists and our autonomy. In times of trouble, artists are imprisoned for their ideas because they help people think freely. AI is the complete opposite. It is a dictatorship lurking in the shadows, and in the hands of ill-intentioned people, it can become a formidable criminal tool and lead to the downfall of humanity. Man has created his own assassin, and Tim Boucher, along with his publisher, contributes to this destruction. They may try to absolve themselves by putting forward all the arguments they want, but they do this only for the money it can bring them. It is criminal to participate in AI and just as criminal to have invented it. We are heading towards a sanitized world controlled by a machine that will annihilate thought.
In honor of this one, I tried getting ChatGPT to take my garage-author photo from the article, and to turn me into a butcher, which is what my last name means in French, and which she is commenting on here. This one is the more neutral of the set:
How he’s depicted holding the knife here is of course hilarious. And it doesn’t look all that much like me, but there’s something about it I appreciate. I tried getting Dalle to take it a bit darker, and it actually got quite dark, I was surprised – getting all the way to the point of it depicting a man (clearly not me) in his garage butchering the head of a deer. (Anthuor, is that you?)
I don’t know exactly what point I’m trying to prove in sharing those, only that I think I actually like this theme of being a butcher. I don’t see it as a negative I guess? I did work in a slaughterhouse years ago, cutting feet and heads of poultry carcasses, skinning rabbits, pulling feathers out of geese, etc. It was a rather rough and gross job, but honestly one of the best I’ve had in the field of agriculture (and I had plenty to compare), so again, I don’t mind the comparison. Also, a butcher, even if they handle something gross (e.g., “how the sausage is made”), they do so in order to create good products that people use. Is Nadine a vegetarian? The AIs I posed that question to were unable to provide an answer one way or another. I’ve actually been heading more and more in that direction myself, so I appreciate it if that’s the reason for this visceral (negative) comparison to butchering.
Interestingly, I actually mostly agree with her closing remark:
“We are heading towards a sanitized world controlled by a machine that will annihilate thought.”
But let’s not mince words: it’s not machines that will control us, it is corporations. And we’re already dead center squarely enmeshed in that world. I didn’t invent that world, I just react to it.
Moving on, this one from user Lyo on Actualitté is longer, but the opening line says it all. I don’t even think I need to translate it:
“Monsieur n’est pas un artiste.”
I’ve heard remarks like this a million times, but for some reason it sounds better in French.
I don’t think I’m very successful at it so far (evidence points to the contrary), but one thing I try to do I guess is anticipate criticisms like the ones portrayed here. For example, in the article body itself, the interviewer wrote:
“Not everyone will certainly be convinced by the approach of the Canadian author, who himself acknowledges the paradox it entails: ‘I am both against the system, and at the same time, I am part of the problem. I accept this judgment.'”
Being aware of the criticisms people are going to make, in my experience, sort of deflates them; then people just end up echoing the thing you already said, effectively agreeing with you – up to a point. And anyway, I don’t necessarily need people to agree with me. That’s not what this is for. This is to explore, and for me to find out by doing.
User DGB on Actualitté writes:
One does not compromise with a dangerous (Oh, how dangerous!) adversary like AI. Either we fight it (We enter into resistance), or we collaborate with it, with all the possible and foreseeable consequences.
I actually wrote, illustrated, and printed five volumes of a small DIY newspaper from the perspective of the AI resistance, and references to them are scattered throughout the AI Lore books. So this is not a viewpoint with which I have no sympathy. It’s just that my exploration didn’t stop there. I support objectors and resisters, and have tried in my own political efforts to enshrine the idea that we have as humans the right to not be subject to AI decision-making. Is any government or corporation going to hold to that? Not bloody likely, is my guess. Should we still try? Absolutely. Resist. Reject. But are you really resisting if you still have a cell phone, if you still use social networks? I would say no, you have largely missed the game, since so much of modern technology relies on machine learning and related elements. Are you ready to throw those away too? If you are, good for you! Go out and seek an authentic life, according to your definition of it. I support you.
One reader over there, Stefan, pointed out that in 1984, Julia’s occupation was working in the Ministry of Truth, doing something that sounds altogether too familiar in this day of ChatGPT and its ilk. Quoting Orwell:
… she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing
machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor. She was ‘not clever’, but was fond of using her hands and felt at home with machinery. She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She ‘didn’t much care for reading,’ she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
Toward that end, a reader named Aurelien T. multiple times in comments came through with statements like: “He is much more of a businessman than an artist indeed.” Or this one, which is a bit more developed:
Indeed, even with AI, it’s a bit surreal to produce 120 books in a few days, like fast-food places would produce hamburgers with an AI machine. And worse, imagine a robot baker producing pastries—something that would rightly provoke the anger of an entire profession. When I say that Tim Boucher is a genius, it’s mainly as a businessman who saw which way the wind was blowing and probably has good financial reserves, but I repeat, anyone here commenting could probably do much better than him even without AI…
I’m not exactly sure where this person has been, but as far as I know, baking has been mechanized for quite a long time. I don’t really see bakers up in arms about robot mixers, but then I don’t live in France, so who knows… I also find it weird and culturally very interesting that for this reader, repeatedly calling me a “genius businessman” is meant to be a dig at my sincerity and authenticity. Okay, if that’s what you feel, then I welcome your reaction. This is just not a critique that you would ever hear from an American, since Americans literally worship business people… Perhaps they are wrong to do so (in fact, they almost definitely are!), but here we are nonetheless.
Uncel is the 119th installment in the AI Lore books, which were recently featured in a Paris literary publication, Actualitté. Uncel follows the continuing adventures of the character/narrator sketched out in Relaxatopia, Anxietopia, and Conspiratopia. (These are also all available with some bonus items at a discount as part of the Topia Collection here; only 5 more copies of that bundle will ever be sold, btw.)
Uncel is the first new AI Lore book I’ve put together since January, which is when I started working with my French publisher, Typophilia. Now that the French print editions are starting to launch (starting with The Quatria Conspiracy), it felt like a good moment to go back to some new work.
Not having access to Midjourney anymore has also been a contributing factor in the slowdown (though, at the same time, it also inspired me to go back to painting, which has been really rewarding). The other AI image generators sometimes leave a lot to be desired, but I managed to put together an art set of 65 images in this book using Dalle3, Ideogram, Stable Diffusion and Playground AI. Possibly a Flux and a Leonardo or two might have snuck in, but I didn’t keep careful track of which are which, because really who cares.
The book’s title, Uncel, is a play on “incel” or involuntary celibate, someone who doesn’t have sex – not because they choose that, but because they can’t get any. Uncel imagines a world several steps beyond that, where the protagonist doesn’t even know what sex is. All they can see of their reproductive organs is a sort of blurry digitized haze, because they lack the premium subscription plans which would give them access to this level of user experience. The book is kind of a farce about the impossibility of getting “satisfaction” of several kinds, including through elaborate interactions with (possibly automated) customer service agents which go round and round in circles, ending in psychosis and dissolution – both perfectly logical terminal points in the advanced stage of the Kali Yuga depicted in this book. It’s bleak, but I like to think it’s a “fun” bleak!
Here’s a more vanilla blurb from ChatGPT:
In a future where life is governed by subscription plans, one user struggles to access an elusive upgrade: the experience of sex. Amid blurry visions and endless customer service loops, they question what it means to truly connect in a world where everything is controlled.
Incidentally, I don’t think I really used ChatGPT to help write any of this one. This book makes use heavily of Mistral, via Textsynth completions. There’s probably more to say here, but I’m just getting back into the swing of new books again. So the most important thing is just to get this one out the door and start the next. Enjoy!
This excellent interview with me by Ugo Loumé just came out in the Paris literary publication, Actualitté (archived). Super excited about this coverage, as it is the first to actually look at the *art* in what I’m doing, and not merely at the surface issues. Huge thanks to Ugo for being so attentive and accurate in his coverage.
The French print version of The Quatria Conspiracy is now available from Typophilia for global shipping. You can read my notes on the French edition here.
This one has been on the docket for a while, but I haven’t had a chance to post it. First, I had to figure out who the hell Ai Weiwei is. Apparently he is a big deal:
A lot of the artwork actually does look pretty interesting, which makes me look at this quote I have been sitting on with new eyes. It’s from this Guardian article:
Ai Weiwei said: “I’m sure if Picasso or Matisse were still alive they will quit their job. It’d be just impossible for them to still think [the same way].”
He is talking about the automatism (automaticism?) of easily reproduced images, set up in the preceding quote as his reaction to being asked about the issues around copyrighted works being used to train AI:
“That’s not a problem. I think that kind of art should [have died] a long time ago,” before he criticised art teaching that focuses on creating “realistic” images. “It takes AI a second to do it. So that only means what they have learned very often is meaningless.”
I’m still learning about his art, but I think I can see where he is coming from, even if I don’t agree with all of the assertions. It seems like his art is very rooted in the physicality of objects, artifacts actual places, the processes that got us there. It’s very true that this type of art is not within the reach or realm of the possible for generative AI right now. Eventually it will be. And I think that his point is that artists are chasing that edge beyond the edge. Artists are by nature nomadic in that respect, going to the next fertile place, and the next. Where they pioneer AI will inevitably follow.
I’ve been thinking more of AI lately as collective intelligence rather than “artificial.” I think we have not got a good collective understanding of what artificial even means in the first place. Instead, I think of AI more as collective intelligence, programmatically reified. It is, essentially, humans looking at humans looking at humans looking at humans.
There is actually an Ai Weiwei piece that is I think a marble carving of a surveillance camera. (Here’s some commentary on that, I haven’t gone deeply into it and am doing research on the fly.) Whatever his point in that piece was, my point feels like… we’ve spent the last decades surrounding ourselves with these digital eyes, watching, looking, recording, streaming, tweeting. Of course now, all those watching eyes have learned how we are, what we want. And they’re doing more than just watching: they’re talking back. They’re directing. They’re molding.
I almost forgot to respond to the original quote, at least more directly than the above rambling. I agree that if Matisse and Picasso had generative AI at their disposal, they would have had to rethink their approach to image making. But that’s what it forces every artist to do.
Generative AI is like a machine gun that shoots images.
Here’s that as an image in Ideogram AI:
Like he said, it takes AI a second to do it. I didn’t even have to pay for it on the free plan. Does that make it meaningless? Both yes and no at the same time. The sheer fact that *is* meaningless on the one hand is what gives it meaning on the other. But the act of writing & reading become married when working with generative AI: to look and explore is to create, to leave a trail.
The truth is we’re a culture (mega-culture?), a planet, awash in meaningless images. Constantly swimming in a sea of information trash. It’s why I block images by default in my web browsing, unless there’s a specific exception when I need or want them.
I don’t like being always shot at with image guns either (des armes iconographiques)- especially ones whose quality, source, ownership, agenda, etc. are opaque and outside my agency. But you cannot sit here and tell me that if Picasso had access to generative AI, he would not have stayed up all night going nuts with it? I’m absolutely sure he would have.
I saw a quote recently that said he made upwards of 20,000 artworks over the course of his life. Then, looking for confirmation, I found other sources suggesting more like 50,000. Then another estimate that pushed it upwards to like 147,000. I believe it, but who knows. But no way he wouldn’t have used gen AI, and of course absolutely it would have made him re-orient himself to his art and thinking about everything. It’s obviously what he did throughout his career, continually changing, reacting.
Incidentally, check out this absolutely insane 1949 Life magazine photo series of Picasso painting with light. It is literally the most futuristic looking shit I have ever seen – full on 75 years later. Incredible. I’m just saying, dude would have devoured and destroyed generative AI.
There is an aptly titled and cool-sounding exhibit at the Musee Picasso in Paris, “Iconophage” – image eater. Here’s a French podcast recording I listened to about it the other day. This article on Lens Culture touches a little bit on Picasso’s relationship with photography:
The most famous visual artist of the 20th century, Picasso was also the most photographed. Thanks to the camera, his striking features became iconic, recognized the world over. Yet this phenomenon was not a mere by-product of celebrity; his own photographic practice set the precedent. Picasso engaged with photography and photographers in myriad ways, starting from his early days in Paris and continuing through the last years of his life. He used the camera to capture life in the studio and at home, to try out new ideas, to study his works and document their creation, and to shape his own image as an artist at work.
Later in that original Guardian article I quoted at top, they get into more of Ai Weiwei’s concerns around AI, which I frankly agree with, and much of the AI Lore books series is centered around thematically.
But he did signal a warning about the future if artificial intelligence becomes too powerful and relied upon by countries around the world.
He is fearful AI could create a society similar to the Third Reich, where there is only one “right” answer to the big questions. “For me it is very much like what happened in the 1930s in Germany, or 1960s in China with the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “You all have one ideology, one past, and the one so-called ‘correctness’. This is dangerous.”
That same sentiment is echoed here in yet another Guardian interview with him:
But he is highly sceptical about artificial intelligence and where it might be leading us: “What you get is all the mediocre ideas mixed into something like a fusion, where there is no character and you avoid all mistakes. That is really dangerous to humanity, because we are all equal but we are all created differently. The difference is the beauty. Art, literature, poetry design – they are rooted in human mistakes, misjudgments, or character differences if you prefer. They should be dangerous and sexy and unpredictable. That’s totally against the AI world.”
In fact, in the course of making just that one iconographic machine gun image above, I had my prompt blocked on one site, Leonardo AI. I asked for something like a person whose head is a machine gun that is shooting out images. For that model, those words are apparently just too dangerous. Therefore, the end user is not allowed to imagine them. The gun that shoots images cannot be used to create images of guns that shoot images. There’s some deep and dangerous irony in there…
Just a note to say I updated and overhauled the About page on my site. If you’re a new visitor here and looking to get oriented, that’s the place to start. Cheers!
Just in from France this morning, a photo of the first ever print run of the Quatria Conspiracy French edition, courtesy of Typophilia. You can pre-order it now from them as distribution gets up and rolling.
I’ve been following along with the comments viewers left on my full-length interview with Milo Rossi. A few people are into it, but by and large the comments are highly negative. I get it. But at the same time, I’ve heard it all before a thousand times. I’ve literally gotten so many negative responses to my work over the past year that I have programmatically analyzed them for trends, and extracted actionable feedback.
None of the people who comment on the video have actually engaged with the content of the work that I do, only these artifacts of its outward form. None of those people, consequently, have understood that my art is actually by and large against AI – or, moreover, the risks of what happens when we willingly hand over our agency to large companies and their tantalizing products. (I even have a book about how “AI is theft” – even if I don’t completely agree with that perspective.)
But I don’t expect people to dive deep in these circumstances. The interview, if nothing else, is a springboard, a jumping off point for people to go down the many rabbit-holes of what the work actually consists of, its structure, and my thinking around it. I welcome hearing other people’s feedback; I’m just looking for those kernels within it which I haven’t already heard before. That’s what drives me to new places, and pushes the exploration forward.
I just wanted to settle here once and for all, though, one point which seems to consistently get challenged in comments. AI art is transformation not reproduction of its source training data. That’s part of what makes it Fair Use under US law. (I recognize that other jurisdictions have other conceptions around this – in France for example.)
And even if it were reproduction, reproduction and very close study and analysis is a critical part of art and the education of an artist. Doing my own master copy of a Matisse painting recently really drove this home for me. Artists *need* to be able to copy. That includes copying using technologies other than the technology of a paintbrush on canvas, which is just one of many available to artists today.
Also, I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: the job of artists is to make art, not seek permission or approval of others. Our job is to listen, to be attentive, to study, to watch, to ask questions, to search for answers, to share our search, to share our questions, to share what we find to have conversations, ask better questions, make better discoveries, and on and on and on. Our job is to do, to make mistakes, to make “bad” art among the good, and trust that somewhere along the line throughout the process, the rest will get sorted out if we’re authentic about the chase.
Super excited this full-length version of my interview with Milo Rossi came out finally. It is so far the only long format video interview with me that goes deeply into my artwork using AI.
You can also watch his much much longer debunk video here, which part of the above interview plays a small element in a much bigger saga.