A really nice article came out last week about my own and some other authors like Stephen Marche’s efforts to explore the boundaries of AI-assisted fiction. It’s by Vikram Nijhawan of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and is titled, Writers Test the Future of Fiction With AI. It’s actually the most even-handed and accurate telling so far in the media of my overall personal tale with the AI Lore books series.
Despite Newsweek wanting me to focus on the money aspect, it’s really not about that – and I’m not making all that much for time spent. But the point is the time spent is worth a lot more than money to me, engaging with and understanding AI tools, how they work, what they can and can’t do, and what they teach me about myself, and the explorations they enable of shared creative worlds.
People seem to think virtual reality is linked somehow to immersive headsets or whatever, but virtual reality is ideas. It is listening to other voices, understanding other stories and entertaining other possible – or impossible viewpoints – just for a little while. The work of it is a pleasure, it expands us both as reader and as “writer.”
I don’t care if people think of me as an “author” or if they want to take shots at how bad my sales are, or fifty other things. Those things are incidental to the dedication to the Creative Act, in the Rick Rubin sense, that doing these books has taken, and continues to take. It’s provided a tangible framework for so many things, feelings, hunches, hauntings of intuition, imagination, that have dogged at me for ten, fifteen, twenty years, more… this incredible way of painting with other possible futures, pasts, presents….
If what Jaron Lanier says is true, that critics are actually optimists because they say “this could be better,” then the same must be true of dystopian “authors,” that we are secretly utopian, because we too say through fiction “this could be better.”
By invoking in the first place the Torment Nexus, sci-fi authors help identify the contours of it – yes, enabling in many cases it to come into our reality – but then also forging in the same breath the spirit and tools to resist it, contain it, use it, and expose Torment as just one branch of the larger Nexus we’re all ride or dieing on.
As to arguments that only one kind of writing (or one kind of art) is “valid,” I don’t hold with any of those schools of thought. You can do anything amazing with any medium or media mixed together. I’ve been getting into basketmaking with natural materials (which, incidentally, is a craft that I’ve read – but yet to verify – cannot be done through automation, so far; interesting as hell but a divergence from the main course of this present wordstream).
That’s just an example. I know my baskets aren’t amazing. The point is the making, the trying, the doing, the repetition, improvement, improvisation, the pure act of discovery, of uncovering, of making manifest, making real. Producing. I like producing. I like constantly working on something, and have found a good match with my way of working to this idea of releasing in installments, as volumes, as incremental iterations on ideas, of endless interconnections.
I think the metaphor of the death of the author is apt, as I think we’re moving in a direction where the act of reading becomes a means of and extension of the readers’ own expression, not just their understanding or its impact on them. But as participant collaborators. Many worlds, many authors. With AI tools, other places, other destinations become visible, if only through far off glimpses today, if only through a glass darkly.
And obviously, if sci fi in many ways brought us AI in its current unfolding today, I find it weird and confusing that so many people would have such negative reactions on social media (perhaps there in lies the true problem) against using AI to help push the boundaries of what sci-fi even is…
Anyway, lots of digressing here, but Vikram’s article gave me a lot of jumping off points.
Got the proof back for my experimental AI Kid’s book, called WRONG SCIENCE!, which is intended to show basically that AIs cannot be trusted to young children.
It follows the formula where on each page, a digital or robot assistant is pontificating (hallucinating) a counter-factual scientific claim to a bunch of kids, who are yelling “WRONG!” at the robot.
Sometimes the images get a little mixed up as to who is saying that the claim is wrong, but it gets the job done in a pinch.
There are around twenty pages, and it was written and illustrated with help from Dalle3/ChatGPT 4, and then printed as a one-off using Walmart Photo Center. The print size I think is 4×4 inches or thereabouts. Small and fun, but the binding quality leaves something to be desired.
I did another one that I haven’t put up here samples of yet that used another Canadian photo book printer as a one-off also, and the quality is much better. But the price per unit including shipping on these would be prohibitive to make it really saleable to the public at large, in my opinion. Which is why I’m just sharing it as samples here for right now.
In addition to wanting to prepare kids for the Butlerian Jihad (a la Dune) I made it because I wanted to turn on its head a lot of the criticism I saw of people who made kids’ books using AI in the past, which I thought was kind of unnecessary and over the top against, when in actuality its pretty amazing what you can do with it, and how well kids respond.
At the same time, I think us surrendering our truth-telling and sense-making abilities to for profit AI corporations without even so much as a batted eyelash is probably a huge mistake for humanity that we seem to be blithely in the process of making as we rush to integrate AI into every little facet of everything, and beg for machines that can distinguish fact and fiction for us so we don’t have to be bothered while we continue to slurp down Netflix fare and gargle in the sewer of Dead Twitter. I, like all critics, believe there has got to be a better way…
I also think a lot of the “controversy” over AI Safety is overblown & misplaced and would be much more accurately labelled as AI Insecurity than anything else. And a lot of people talk about the need to teach “literacy” around AI to the next generation, but I’ve seen precious few concrete examples of how do we actually put that into practice. Here’s a very flawed but very fun first stab from me.
I think I got onto this train of thought specifically by this amazing Nautilus article about plant cognition. It starts here, but there are multiple relevant bits that I won’t paste all in here for time’s sake:
“We need to get away from thinking of ourselves as machines,” Barrett says. “That metaphor is getting in the way of understanding living, wild cognition.”
Instead, Barrett and Calvo draw from a set of ideas referred to as “4E cognitive science,” an umbrella term for a bunch of theories that all happen to start with the letter “E.” Embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition—what they have in common (besides “E”s) is a rejection of cognition as a purely brainbound affair. Calvo is also inspired by a fifth “E”: ecological psychology, a kindred spirit to the canonical four. It’s a theory of how we perceive without using internal representations.
I actually clipped more of it with additional commentary here. But I’ll dump one other bit of baggage before lift-off:
“The mistake was to think that cognition was in the head,” Calvo says. “It belongs to the relationship between the organism and its environment.”
I’ve seen a variety of different words for the mysterious fifth and sixth “E’s” in 4E/5E/6E cognition: ecological, emotional/affective, maybe “exaptive“? I’m not sure I understand how people use exaptive in that sense, and I prefer as the quasi-canonical base set of 6E the following:
Embodied
Embedded
Enactive
Extended
Ecological
Emotional/Affective
I had as a hypothesis that these 6E elements of cognition might have in them a good basis for ethics, and perhaps some clarity around the quagmire that is AI ethics.
I’m too lazy to do it all myself, so I had ChatGPT 4 help flesh out that argument, reproduced below:
Embodied : The embodied aspect acknowledges that our physical bodies and sensory experiences are integral to cognitive processes. Ethical considerations arise as individuals recognize and empathize with the physical and emotional states of others. This recognition can lead to moral values centered around physical well-being and respect for bodily autonomy.
Embedded: Embedded cognition emphasizes the influence of social and cultural contexts on our thinking. Ethics emerge as individuals navigate and contribute to the societal norms and values of their communities. This context shapes notions of right and wrong, justice, and communal responsibilities.
Enactive: Enactive cognition focuses on the dynamic interactions between an individual and their environment. This interaction leads to ethical considerations about how one’s actions affect the world and others. It underscores the responsibility of individuals to consider the consequences of their actions in the social and physical environment.
Extended: Extended cognition involves external tools and systems in cognitive processes. Ethical issues arise regarding the use and impact of technology, information access, and the distribution of cognitive labor. Questions about data privacy, intellectual property, and the equitable distribution of cognitive enhancements are pertinent.
Ecological: Ecological cognition integrates the broader biological and physical contexts in cognition. This perspective leads to ethical considerations about environmental stewardship, sustainability, and the human impact on ecosystems. It encourages a sense of responsibility for the planet and its diverse life forms.
Emotional/Affective: Emotional or affective components of cognition highlight how emotions are integral to cognitive processes. Ethics arise from understanding and managing emotions, both personal and in others. This includes considerations of empathy, emotional intelligence, and the moral implications of actions that affect the emotional states of others.
Those are fine, but I think their one around “extended” is the least strong. I guess I’m simplifying extended to be less about technology systems, but as simply knowledge sharing. Communicating with others, storing information, sharing experience – or not.
The rest of what I see here seems to revolve around reciprocity strongly, namely that one is an embodied entity in a world where actions have consequences, and you can suffer the consequences of others actions as well. Namely, the Golden Rule applies.
One thing I don’t like in 6E that is squiggly is that in attempting (probably correctly) to be neutral in describing the phenomena at issue, it does not minimally require that the embodiment be biological. It can be robot, or a distributed sensor network, etc.
Analytically, that makes sense. But my bias as a biological being is towards biological life, and living biological intelligence, mind, and cognition. So for me, I would draw a line in the sand (recognizing that as tides shift, it may get washed away) at something maybe you could stupidly call 6E-BR. Or biologically-rooted as a baseline requirement to include in discussions of 6E cognition.
Generally the 5th E seems to be Ecological, which correctly suggests that whether you yourself are biologically embodied, or otherwise, you exist in a world of other entities which are. For my purposes then, I might personally insert as an update to the “Fifth E” that it become Eco-Biological, highlighting the links to and importance of living biological things in all cognition. Here’s an improved detail on that from CG:
Eco-Biological Cognition: This term emphasizes that cognition is not only shaped by the immediate ecological context (as in Ecological Cognition) but is also deeply rooted in biological processes unique to living organisms. It highlights that cognition in biological entities is intrinsically connected to their life processes, cellular and molecular biology, and the ecological niches they inhabit.
So, following on my train of thought as to the basis of ethics being tied up in 6E and reciprocity, I asked CG to identify the areas where current AI fails (this one didn’t include the BR criteria). It churned out:
Embodied: AI lacks a physical body and sensory experiences in the human sense. While robots can have a form of embodiment, they do not experience the world as living organisms do. The subjective, bodily experience integral to human cognition is beyond AI’s capability.
Embedded: AI systems can process and respond to cultural and social data but do not inherently understand or participate in human culture or society as living beings do. They lack genuine social intuition and the deeply ingrained understanding that comes from being a part of a culture or society.
Enactive: AI can interact with the environment in a limited way, usually through pre-programmed responses or learned behaviors. However, they do not possess the dynamic, autonomous interaction with the environment characteristic of living beings. Their ability to enact cognition through physical interaction is limited.
Extended: AI systems can integrate external tools and systems effectively. This is an area where AI excels, extending its computational abilities through networks, databases, and other digital infrastructures.
Ecological: AI does not have an inherent understanding of ecological systems or a natural context. While it can process ecological data and assist in ecological modeling, it does not have an intrinsic connection to or understanding of natural ecosystems.
Emotional/Affective: AI lacks genuine emotional experiences and the subjective quality of affective states. While AI can simulate emotional responses and recognize human emotions to some extent, it does not experience emotions itself.
So, it seems that AI systems, when attempting to apply ethical or “safety” decisions rely solely on extended cognition – e.g., information that was shared with them. They don’t have access to and cannot understand the bio-physical roots of ethics in the other 5Es, the E’s that are all of primary importance to us in our direct lived experience.
AIs then acting under supposed “ethical” guidelines are little more than tone-deaf low-dimensional simulations, like drawings in medieval bestiaries, clearly made by artists who had never once laid eyes on the animal in question and wouldn’t know them by sight if it bit them on the ether. We should not call that “ethics” at all, imho.
Best I could get ^ out of Dalle on short notice for that visual reference, but you get the idea…
Anyway, the re-centering on biologically rooted life as critical to an amended 6E cognition seems worth it to me as a humanist, who thinks there is “something special” about us as people that is worth protecting and uplifting, even if mostly we just fuck it all up IRL. We can’t expect to get anywhere either if we don’t first tend to cleaning our own house…
If its only in the “extended cognition” category that AIs potentially excel, we should not I think then get too caught up in believing that AI is anything close to “alive,” when it fails in so many fronts that are so tied up in definitions of life.
I had old CG run links between 6E cognition, its concept of mind, and definitions of life, and its results are good, if a bit repetitive of the key points (like much of this post, I suppose):
Mind as a Dynamic, Interactive Process:
6E cognition views the mind not as a static entity but as a dynamic process deeply integrated with the body (embodied), environment (embedded), and actions (enactive).
This perspective aligns with broader definitions of life, which often emphasize dynamic processes, adaptability, and interaction with the environment.
Embodiment and Biological Basis of Mind and Life:
Both mind and life are fundamentally connected to physical, biological processes. The embodied aspect of cognition emphasizes this connection, highlighting the role of bodily experiences in shaping mental processes.
The definition of life typically includes biological processes and physical embodiment, reinforcing the link between the mind’s cognitive processes and the broader characteristics of living organisms.
Embedded and Ecological Aspects: Interaction with Environment:
The embedded and ecological aspects of 6E cognition focus on the mind’s interaction with social and environmental contexts.
Life is also defined by its interaction with and adaptation to the environment. Living organisms, including humans, are not isolated but are part of larger ecological systems.
Enactive and Extended Aspects: Mind Beyond the Brain:
Enactive and extended cognition propose that the mind extends beyond the brain, incorporating interactions with the external world and use of tools.
This perspective resonates with the concept of life as a system extending beyond individual organisms, involving interactions with and adaptations to external stimuli and tools.
Emotional/Affective Cognition: Sentience and Conscious Experience:
The emotional/affective aspect acknowledges the role of emotions in cognition, integral to the conscious experience.
Sentience and the ability to experience emotions are often considered key aspects of life, particularly in the context of higher organisms.
Life as a System of Adaptive, Interconnected Processes:
The definition of life usually includes the ability to grow, reproduce, respond to stimuli, and adapt. These processes are echoed in the principles of 6E cognition, which view cognitive processes as adaptive, responsive, and interconnected with the physical and social environment.
So if AI fails on much of these criteria for “life-i-ness,” where one might wonder does this feeling of aliveness come from experientially when one is using it? It comes from us. It is our own aliveness that we are experiencing, reflected back to us through this tool that extends our cognition, and allows us to find, create, and share knowledge. It’s alive-ishness is not encompassed in or enclosed in its GPUs or its programming – it’s enclosed in ours. And ours is enclosed in ecology and encased in biology, and that is something beautiful, special, magical, important, and worthy always of uplift and protection over and above the passing needs of our tools and toolsellers.
Digression upon digression, so sue me. But another avenue I got down when trying to hammer out the details about biological rootedness, what that CG gave me some other concepts which are also useful for exploring a multi-level cognition that goes beyone the 6E’s, and includes potentially:
Physically Situated Cognition: Instead of “embodied”, use the term “physically situated” to emphasize that cognition is influenced by the physical form and capabilities of an entity, whether biological or artificial. This term can encompass both living organisms and AI systems or robots, recognizing that their physical form – body or hardware – plays a crucial role in how they process information and interact with the world.
Materially Influenced Cognition: Another alternative could be “materially influenced cognition”, which underscores that the material makeup (biological or synthetic) of the entity influences its cognitive processes.
Form-Dependent Cognition: This term would highlight that cognition depends on the form of the entity, whether it is a biological organism or a machine. It acknowledges that the structure, capabilities, and limitations of the physical form, whether made of flesh or metal, shape the cognitive processes.
Biologically Rooted Cognition: This term emphasizes that cognition is intrinsically linked to biological processes and structures. It highlights that the cognitive capabilities and experiences are fundamentally tied to living, organic systems. This term would specifically exclude non-biological systems, focusing on the unique aspects of cognition that arise from biological life forms.
Evolutionarily Shaped Cognition: This term reflects the idea that cognitive processes are not just embodied in a physical form, but are also the result of evolutionary processes specific to biological organisms. It acknowledges that cognition in living beings has been shaped by natural selection, adapting to environmental challenges and opportunities over vast timescales. This aspect would explicitly recognize the role of biological evolution in forming the cognitive abilities and predispositions of living organisms, distinguishing them from artificial systems like robots or AI.
After that we finally landed on Eco-Biological as more encompassing, but I find interesting the distinction here between Biologically Rooted & Evolutionarily Shaped, especially if we start getting into blending machines and biological components. If you grow meat in a lab, it’s biologically rooted, but is it evolutionarily shaped? Perhaps in its genetic antecedents, but depending on the chimera’s current shape, we might be far from anything resembling ‘Natural Selection’ at this point. Or, similarly, and AI system might have evolutionary aspects, but not be necessarily biologically-rooted, as Butler warned about in the 1800s.
Anyway, I think those are all the bases I wanted to cover: Mind extends beyond the physical brain. Humans are not machines. Let’s prioritize living biology and participatory ecology over flat lifeless definitions and conceptions of technology and existence that would have us all become like machines ourselves or cogs in someone else’s.
Relying on a few unaccountable corporate actors for core infrastructure is a problem for democracy, culture, and individual and collective agency. Without significant intervention, the AI market will only end up rewarding and entrenching the very same companies that reaped the profits of the invasive surveillance business model that has powered the commercial internet, often at the expense of the public.
This is essentially the “Four Providers” throughline in my AI Lore books. With the assumption/projection that AI companies will one day in the not too distant future take over the functions previously reserved to government, in the face of epic climate collapse. Perhaps still in the realm of sci-fi, but the seeds of such a possible future at times feel quite palpable and spooky…
As according to ChatGPT, which I am grilling on intertextuality, the internet, and gen AI (hint: it’s intertextuality all the way down!):
The selection and interpretation of AI-generated content can also be a creative and authorial act. The curator or interpreter plays a role in deciding which outputs are meaningful or relevant, and how they should be presented or understood.
As much as I think it’s a fun sort of thing to explore within the context of dystopian fantasy, I’m not really into the whole let’s pretend it’s real “existential risk” fantasy football around AI. That’s because I’m not that worried about runaway AIs going rogue. I’m more afraid of AI companies simply accruing too much power and it becoming less and less possible to unwind it. It’s part of what drove me to writing the AI TOS.
I am very much on the “public option” team when it comes to AI development, which is why I appreciated most of the points in this Bruce Schneier article about AI & Trust:
And we need one final thing: public AI models. These are systems built by academia, or non-profit groups, or government itself, that can be owned and run by individuals.
The term “public model” has been thrown around a lot in the AI world, so it’s worth detailing what this means. It’s not a corporate AI model that the public is free to use. It’s not a corporate AI model that the government has licensed. It’s not even an open-source model that the public is free to examine and modify.
A public model is a model built by the public for the public. It requires political accountability, not just market accountability. This means openness and transparency paired with a responsiveness to public demands. It should also be available for anyone to build on top of. This means universal access.
What Schneier describes is the basis for what the most recently published AI Lore book, The Continuity Codex, is all about: libraries around the world band together to form a truly public option AI based on all their collections. And for their troubles, they are bombed into non-existence by the newly re-elected psychoticratic Hyperion Storm.
And it is for that reason that I do differ on the viability of this way of thinking, from Schneier’s piece:
…the point of government is to create social trust.
While I think there’s a role to play for governments in public AI options, if history has taught us anything, it is that rich guys buying a platform can destroy it overnight, and the same is true for hostile actors suddenly taking over, gutting, perverting or otherwise terminally weakening government institutions.
So while “creating social trust” makes sense from a default-good rational actor point of view, we should not assume that the mechanisms intended to do that will not be subverted in the future, and be put to far worse ends, creating a dark reflection of something that can no longer be considered “trust.”
To the extent a government improves the overall trust in society, it succeeds. And to the extent a government doesn’t, it fails.
Tell that to Hyperion Storm!
Which is not to knock Schneier’s primary point: that public options (plural) are needed – they absolutely urgently are. We just need to be careful too what kinds of swords we hand governments in this situation as well. If we’re potentially making a category error thinking of AIs/corporations as “friends” because of their relationality as modes of interactions, we might also be making a grave error thinking that because governments have been trustworthy more or less so far, that they will continue to be… Signs around the world seem to indicate the contrary, and I’m becoming more and more nervous about the speed and suddenness of rate of decay.
Which is not to say the League of Earth Libraries should not build the Continuity Codex! It absolutely must! There isn’t a minute to waste! As the motto of the Inter-Library Intelligence Network (clandestine branch of the LEL) famous say: Scientia omnia vincit!
The word “wex” is a neologism but an Early Clues, LLC oldie dating back to at least 2014, and making another appearance according to casual Gimgle web searches in 2015’s Reading From the Book of Anthuor. I’m not sure I’d categorize either of those texts as “canonical” to Early Clues, but that itself is a hard thing to define that I won’t get bogged down in right now.
Though neither EC reference is completely comprehensible, they do offer insights into the evolution of the concept though, in that we see both a symbolic identification of the wex as being part of the Quatrian meta-divinity Matarax’s fabled web, but also cryptic statements such as the following:
RELATIONAL WEXES ARE THE LINKS BETWEEN COMPONENTS IN A FIELD.
So it seems clear that in my own imaginarium at least, wex has for some time – as a variant of “web” – indicated the connections, links, and relationships between things. A web of connections, often external.
That’s a long convoluted lead up to saying that I had this epiphany last week while working on a flat reed basket that has to do with the web and intertextuality. How the entire nature of the web is one vast intertextual fabric… where each “text” (to use the term expansively in a post-modernisty way) is shaped by and in turn shapes other texts to which it is linked.
There’s a quote/concept/paraphrase I first encountered via Cory Doctorow’s work, but which apparently dates to 2018 & Tom Eastman, that the web is basically just five giant websites, each one containing screenshots of the other four. Texts referencing other texts, passed back and forth, ad infinitum. From which, somehow, meaning is somehow woven, though that meaning may be highly variable depending on the viewer and their point of view, cultural context, and frame of references.
I guess I’d always thought prior to that about the web in terms of documents. Accounts. Feeds. Posts. The language of web publishing, and later social media. But I’d always thought of those artifacts, those things posted and accounts doing the posting as somehow discrete and separate analytical units. Yes, a user might have many posts on a topic. Or a document might explicitly hyperlink out to others. But it never struck me with such profundity that the web is one vast intertextual thing…
Where things reference other things – or are blocked from doing so by things like logins and paywalls. Gates (and gatekeepers) of all kinds and toll booth after toll booth erected on the information superhighway. Each with their hand out, asking for ransom to explore and find out more.
Wexes, then, become a kind of short had for this intertextuality, this deep inter-linking and cultural cross-referencing, this enmeshing and embedding holistically in socio-technical contexts… it’s a weave. That’s what struck me. It’s all woven together. Narratives. SEO. Propaganda. Fiction. Conspiracy theories. Hyperreality. History. Wexwork. An attempt to manipulate the warp and the weft, to pull things into or out of awareness and consequently existence and memory…
Generative AI too, it struck me, is entirely intertextual. Training data literally composed of other texts, analyzed for connections, boiled down into a slurry which can shoot or spew out new combinations from it. Deeply atomically interwoven intertextuality going in the direction of but perhaps even past Jaron Lanier’s call for a ‘Talmudic’ AI, where different and concordant opinions from a multiplicity of sources are discoverable and discussable… An intentionally intertextual AI, not unlike what I described in my fictional Continuity Codex, composed of all the knowledge of all the world’s libraries, accessible via thumb drive.
Anyway, these are big thoughts, which I guess is why it’s taken close to 10 years to understand what I have been just intuitively feeling out the shape of with my fingers in a dark underground chamber previous to this, and why being able to bring it into light – up out of the Hypogeum, if you will – feels so significant…
Anxietopia is the 119th volume in the AI Lore Books series. It is in many ways sort of a shorter spiritual successor of Conspiratopia, the book that started much of this worldbuilding in the first place. They at least exist in the same imagined universe, where inscrutable AIs run people through bizarre scams and experiments and social control games to shape human society into some ideal-to-AIs outcome.
In this one, a user of the WorryWatts system has a chaotic falling out with consensus reality when his personal stress energy harvesting system goes haywire.
One thing that the current batch of LLMs especially suck at is tight control and sudden flips and dips in tone, nested, double, and triple meanings, until you don’t know which end is up anymore. That kind of weirdness has been bred out of all the commercial ones at least. You can get it with some of the free ones occasionally if the stars and nebulous spirits are aligned while you feed it material for completions. But for the kinds of high-wire twists and turns in tones and registers that I consider intrinsic to the Conspiratopia style, it’s just not possible to pack all those punches into largely AI-driven text, so a lot of this is heavily human-first, with strong hands on changes where its human second.
There’s a certain amount of VOMISA style semantic drift and deformation, which is a topic I want to get into separately another time, but it’s more dialed down and readable for the most part, with a more or less discernible narrative storyline, and even dare I say an ending, which is rare for these. Albeit it is very open-ended nonetheless. I liked what someone said once long ago about my original blog incarnation, something about my writing to the effect of “he doesn’t make it easy on the reader” – and I hope that is true, and mostly in the right cases still, in these current AI-enabled explorations and world-building thunks.
Preview art for this one below. There are a lot of advertising style images in this volume, which feels like it amplifies and offsets the crazed narrator vibe that permeates through the rest as their reality breaks down, yet marketing slogans remain.
In many ways, I would have liked to have had the time to go through and spend as much time exploring this pocket-universe of Anxietopia, as I did its forebear, which took about six weeks to write, and is about five or six times the length of this one. But there are a lot of things I’m juggling, and projects I’m getting out the door all at once right now.
Nothing precludes me from one day coming back to this or any of my AI Lore volumes, and making them better, longer, a different form or direction, etc. I doubt I will, but it’s always a door I leave open in my mind, that in the future, these will take different forms than they take now. That this is still just the earliest stages of this new intertextual hyperreal narrative mode emerging… using and subverting the old forms while the new are born…
This book tells the story of an anchorite monk in medieval times who witnesses a strange meteorite fall from the sky, and retrieves it, only to discover that it is able to communicate with him. He believes it to be the Voice of God, and he dutifully transcribes its teachings first into a magical manuscript, or grimoire, called The Calculnomicon (see: Lovecraft’s Necronomicon). And then later, he uses its teachings to build a powerful primitive computing device called the Spirit Computer (loosely inspired by the Antikythera Mechanism), which includes a viewer called the Hagioscope, through which he believes he can see the Eye of God.
It happens often enough that the idea for one of these books is first formulated when a title pops into my head. In this case, it was the phrase “spirit computer,” which subsequently sprouted into a more complex idea as it gathered steam and linked up with other concepts. There are antecedent ideas from other volumes which fed into this one, such as those found in The Artilect, and I believe also in The Survivors, where advanced AIs in the future send back small computing devices into the past which grant enormous wisdom to their finders. The present volume rehashes some of those ideas, but reformulates the origins to be wrapped up in a far future event called the Hologram Wars, and the explosion of a literal “time bomb” that leaves hyperdense intelligent matter fragments scattered across past and future time periods.
The art in this one is noteworthy in part because much of it made use of Midjourney’s relatively recent style tuner (which I wish had better UX, but hey) in order to get some faux-medieval art vibes, which I think came out pretty good and sometimes fairly believable overall. There are also some Dalle3 contributions in this one as well. Here is the preview art:
There’s more to say about this, as there is with every volume, but that’s the major stuff off the top of my head. It has been a whirlwind last few weeks finishing off this one, Anxietopia, another kid’s book, a new basket, and issue number 5 of a rebooted homebrew underground newspaper I started in 2022 called The Algorithm, which I have hand-printed in the past exclusively for close friends, but which I may experiment with offering for sale as a physical edition through Gumroad as well after the holiday.
I hit this barrier using Claude earlier, which I haven’t been using that much anymore these days because the results are overly sensitive in the wrong directions, and feel prohibitive towards creative use cases. I think I might be done using that product.
I’m working on a small hyperreality project where I’m trying to develop digital assets for an 80s hair band that may or may not have existed, and asked Claude for write a chorus for an 80s hair metal power ballad and gave it a title. It replied:
Unfortunately I cannot reproduce full copyrighted song lyrics. However, here is a summary of the type of chorus I might write for an 80s hair metal power ballad called [REDACTED]:
It then went on to write a bloviated description of how it *might* actually perform the task, were it not overly sensitive to you know, actually doing it. I scolded it for scolding me over a fictional song, and it replied:
You’re absolutely right, my apologies. Since [REDACTED] is a made up song title, I should have felt more comfortable flexing my creative muscles. Here’s an original chorus I might write for that 80s hair metal power ballad:
I know Claude 2 was a big milestone for Anthropic to release, but I’ve personally seen significant and tiresome drop-off in output quality due to it being overly restrictive about entirely legal content. I think we’re going to have to look in another direction for AI safety systems that are still functional and usable to actual humans.
And, you know, that don’t write shitty generic song lyrics…
