Tim Boucher

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Series: AI Page 33 of 43

Thinking through the implications of AI technology on society and human creativity

Nevermades

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On 4 October 2024

In Other

“Nevermades” are a conceptual evolution of Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades,” pushing the boundaries of authenticity and creation even further into the digital realm. While Duchamp recontextualized everyday objects as art by simply selecting them, nevermades are works that were never physically created at all. These virtual fabrications exist purely as digital constructs, challenging the traditional notions of art’s materiality and the value placed on physical objects. In the spirit of Duchamp’s radical rethinking of what constitutes art, nevermades extend this challenge into the hyperreal world of AI and virtual spaces, where the line between what is real and what is imagined is blurred.

A neo-Dada or Dada revivalist approach underpins the nevermades concept, embracing absurdity, irony, and a critique of established artistic hierarchies. Just as Dadaists questioned the seriousness of the art world and the meaning of art itself, nevermades reflect a similar skepticism in today’s digital-first environment. By creating entirely fictional works and exhibitions, artists of this movement expose the fragility of art’s status symbols—galleries, objects, and authenticity—highlighting how easily they can be fabricated or stripped of meaning in the digital age.

—ChatGPT

Quoting Jason Allen on AI-Generated Art

By

On 7 October 2024

In Other

More on Allen’s case against the US Copyright Office here.

Originality, Skill & Judgement in Copyright Filing by CIPPIC Against Suryast

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On 10 October 2024

In Other

So without rehashing all the details, there is a non-profit in Canada called CIPPIC, whose work I respect, and who has provided me with assistance in the past on an unrelated matter. CIPPIC does good public interest work at the intersection of law and technology.

They recently submitted a filing in federal court in Canada (a few months ago now) to ask for the correction of a copyright registration which was automatically granted by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) to a lawyer from India who used a style-transfer AI program to apply a Van Gogh Starry-Night-esque effect to an original photo they themselves took. As explained on Baker Botts site, and I believe quoting how the board of the US Copyright Office decided after the same person attempted to secure copyright in the US previous to Canada:

The Board explained:

“As Mr. Sahni admits, he provided three inputs to RAGHAV: a base image, a style image, and a ‘variable value determining the amount of style transfer.’ Sahni AI Description at 11. Because Mr. Sahni only provided these three inputs to RAHGAV, the RAGHAV app, not Mr. Sahni, was responsible for determining how to interpolate the base and style images in accordance with the style transfer value … Mr. Sahni did not control where [the Works] elements would be placed, whether they would appear in the output, and what colors would be applied to them—RAGHAV did.” (Office Letter p. 7)

Accordingly, the Board determined that the derivative work authorship was not the result of a human. Therefore, the Work was not registerable.

The Baker Botts site also shows the base image, the style image, and the output image. Sadly, the output image is not, in my opinion as a visual artist, actually any “good.” But that’s beside the point here.

This article on Norton Rose Fulbright gives a bit more context on Suryast and CIPPIC’s opposition to the copyright registration for the work, as filed with CIPO. Some snipped quotes for length:

The copyright registration lists RAGHAV Artificial Intelligence Painting App (RAGHAV) and Mr. Ankit Sahni as co-authors.

CIPPIC’s application challenges the copyright registration for Suryast and seeks expungement of the copyright, or in the alternative, removal of RAGHAV as a co-author. CIPPIC makes two main arguments: 1) Suryast does not meet the originality requirement for copyright; and 2) an AI system cannot be an “author” under the Copyright Act.

[…] However, CIPPIC submits that merely providing the inputs was a purely mechanical process and no human skill or judgment was used to produce Suryast. CIPPIC further contends that “author” in the Copyright Act only refers to a natural person (i.e., “human being”), and an AI system cannot exercise the common intent required for joint authorship.

My understanding, based on this York University Osgoode School of Law piece is that the actual Copyright Act of Canada does not explicitly define original/originality as concepts.

The question of what constitutes “original expression” in a work, though, required an answer from the Supreme Court, given that the Copyright Act does not itself define the terms (nor the term “original” by itself). As every student of copyright in this country also learns, in CCH, Chief Justice McLachlin wrote that:

“What is required to attract copyright protection in the expression of an idea is an exercise of skill and judgment.”

CIPPIC’s filing against the Suryast registration can be read in its entirety here. This is the most relevant part, though it is short and easy reading overall, so I recommend checking it out if interested:

  1. CIPPIC raises two alternative grounds for rectification:
    a. the image lacks originality and so does not enjoy copyright at all; and
    b. alternatively, a non-human cannot be an author under the Act.
    i. The image is unoriginal
  2. The Suryast Registration should be expunged in its entirety pursuant to subsection 57(4)(b) of the Act because the image ought not to have been accepted
    for registration at all: the Respondent has obtained a copyright registration in connection with an image in which copyright cannot subsist because it lacks
    originality.
  3. The Respondent did not contribute sufficient skill and judgment in generating the image Suryast to warrant subsistence of copyright. The Respondent generated
    the image through a purely mechanical exercise of data entry and algorithmic luck; its production is the result of no exercise of human skill or judgment.

That wording seems to refer back to the CCH case mentioned above.

Without having read or carefully studied all of the Copyright Act, I would have to agree that the computer program used to produce the image should not have been listed as a co-author, and the filing should be amended for that reason.

For transparency, I registered my AI Lore Books series with CIPO, but I registered the whole thing in my name alone, despite having used AI tools to produce elements of the contents.

But I think I disagree with CIPPIC’s assertion that no human skill or judgement was involved in producing this image. It’s probably useful here to go back to the longer quote from the full text of the CCH decision:

By skill, I mean the use of one’s knowledge, developed aptitude or practised ability in producing the work. By judgment, I mean the use of one’s capacity for discernment or ability to form an opinion or evaluation by comparing different possible options in producing the work. This exercise of skill and judgment will necessarily involve intellectual effort. The exercise of skill and judgment required to produce the work must not be so trivial that it could be characterized as a purely mechanical exercise. For example, any skill and judgment that might be involved in simply changing the font of a work to produce “another” work would be too trivial to merit copyright protection as an “original” work.

So:

Skill = developed aptitude, practiced ability.

Judgement = capacity for discernment, ability to form an opinion, evaluation by comparing different possible options.

I’ve seen mentioned in multiple places now that Sahni submitted at the USCO’s request a 17-page document detailing how he created the image and the technology involved. But I’m not able to currently locate it myself, though I’d like to see what it includes.

I’m going to go out on a limb here though and say that despite my not really “liking” the results of the style transfer, CIPPIC hasn’t made in that document much of any real case to explain why Suryast fails to demonstrate skill and judgement. They merely state that it is so by calling what Sahni did a “mechanical process.” But I would argue that what Sahni did rises well above the example cited in the CCH decision of simply changing a font.

Simply to know about AI/ML and style transfer on the part of the image’s (human) creator is the first demonstration that skill, aptitude, and ability may have significantly come into play in the image’s generation.

Without knowing the exact details of Sahni’s 17-page document detailing the creation of the image, it’s difficult to identify just how much skill and judgement was involved, but it seems to have absolutely been more than zero. According to this article, Sahni was the funder of the RAGHAV app which was built by an engineer named Raghav Gupta:

RAGHAV stands for robust artificially intelligent graphics and art visualizer, and is named after Raghav Gupta, a machine learning engineer who developed the app in 2019 in a funded project for Sahni.

An article on Holland & Knight adds a bit more from the USCO Suryast paper:

Footnotes 5 and 6 in the SURYAST decision discuss the lack of detailed evidence in the record as to how RAGHAV was designed and by whom (although RAGHAV was named for the engineer who developed the app for Mr. Sahni, Raghav Gupta). The Copyright Office, however, only had the vague description that RAGHAV was trained on a dataset of 14 million base images, called ImageNet, and then on another dataset of “content and style” images.

[…] If Mr. Sahni had designed RAGHAV and carefully selected its training materials, would that (in combination with taking the original photograph and selecting the style applied) constitute enough “creative control” for Mr. Sahni to assert authorship in the modification?

If the USCO is claiming they don’t have all the details about the RAGHAV software, then it makes me wonder what the contents of this mysteriously missing 17-page document actually were?

Regardless, even without that, it’s clear that judgement was involved, first in selection of the base and style image, and then in the decision of how much style to be transferred. All three of those components of the decision would have required the ability to form an opinion (“this is a good image to use”), and evaluate through comparison possible input images, style transfer settings to apply, and outputs received.

Never mind, of course, if Sahni did indeed hire someone to build this system for him based on criteria which he in part defined: all of which involved extraordinary skill and judgement to be applied.

So in conclusion, I would have to reiterate that I agree AI tools should not be listed on copyright registrations in Canada as co-authors because they do not constitute persons. But CIPPIC hasn’t proved – nor has anyone else so far to my satisfaction – that this work isn’t “original” under Canadian copyright law in that it lacks all skill and judgement, and is merely a mechanical process. As someone who uses AI tools constantly for creative work, it’s easy to say that framing of them doesn’t match the reality of using them: it’s a constant minefield, a battle, a struggle of skill and judgement, selection and direction, and so much more.

If for some weird reason this is interesting to people, then my longer submission to the USCO & CIPO public consultations on generative AI and copyright may also be. And I still think the current UK system for copyright of computer-generated works makes a lot more sense:

“The “author” of a “computer-generated work” (CGW) is defined as “the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken”. Protection lasts for 50 years from the date the work is made.”

My recent experiments with creating machines for the purposes of drawing has also made me fundamentally question the validity of the underlying assumptions of dismissing something based on it being the result of “merely mechanical” processes. The fact is that artists and creators can and do routinely manipulate mechanical processes in order to express a creative vision. And I’ll say it again: simply choosing one tool over another in order to express that creative vision shouldn’t invalidate it magically, when it would have been perfectly legitimate and accepted in another tool or media.

Curatorial Statement: “Organic Data Weaving”

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On 12 October 2024

In Other

Tim Boucher’s “Organic Data Weaving” seamlessly merges the organic vitality of nature with the abstract logic of digital hyperreality. Woven willow sculptures, embodying the natural profusion of growth, stand alongside AI-generated projections that evolve across the gallery walls. The dynamic interplay between the physicality of willow forms and the insubstantiality of digital projections invites viewers to contemplate the convergence of artificial and organic intelligence.

The woven willow structures reflect the interconnectedness of data networks, echoing the visual representations of data relationships in the projected images. The sculptures’ interlocking patterns and dynamic curves mirror the fluid and shifting nature of data itself, presenting a dialogue between natural growth and the abstract forms of digital information. By juxtaposing these tangible and intangible elements, “Organic Data Weaving” reveals the complex, evolving narrative of our relationship with technology, nature, and the blurred boundaries of hyperreality.

That’s a curatorial statement I had ChatGPT help me write for a recent project of mine, an exploration of what woven willow sculptural forms juxtaposed with AI projected lights and imagery might look like. Photos from the “exhibit” are here.

I’ll pull out a few of my favorites to highlight below.

Without any more context or knowledge about the origins of these images, I would personally be hard-pressed to not take them at face value and believe they were actually cool sculptures which exist somewhere, or did at one time.

But in actual fact, they are nevermades which exist in a hyperreality adjacent to ours. They are aspirational image explorations on a theme, some using Dalle, some Ideogram AI. They are part of a larger experiment in misinformation as art.

But these raise a million other important questions for me as an artist. Namely, if I could essentially simulate a lifetime’s worth of artistic achievements in an evening, and get basically high-quality gallery photos of them as though they were real physical things, where does that leave us existentially relative to actual real physical things? Where does that leave us relative to a lifetime’s worth of artistic achievements?

In a world increasingly centered on the cult of the Almighty Image, and the Almighty Image is continuously exposed as a liar on its own altar at every turn, how are we to proceed?

I saw “real” photos from an art gallery setting in London earlier, and thought to myself, some of these look less high-quality than what I was able to generate with AI. They look literally better than the real thing…

I think that’s hyperreality, is getting sucked down that wormhole, and it’s exactly where we’re stuck now collectively and individually.

Charlie Warzel’s piece in The Atlantic on hurricane disinfo goes down a parallel path in a somewhat different direction, interesting at least here though with our current one:

What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political.

Hyperreality stands out to me as a relevant and still potentially useful analytical framework that is wider and not so fraught, and which can encompass this idea of the “artist as propagandist” who creates unreal things in order to change or influence real things.

Also from Warzel’s piece:

But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

Interestingly, in other contexts outside of conspiracy fear-mongering, we often refer to be people who can cling to an alternative vision of reality in the face of overwhelming opposition “visionaries,” and we culturally usually cheer them on as they succeed in implementing that vision in actual reality. Unfortunately, an exceedingly great number of such “visionaries” in our day and age have been subsumed by vanity and wealth, and where they might have been or might believe themselves to be luminaries, emit only a kind of sticky darkness…

To me these willow-works, both my IRL ones and my ORL (outside real life?) hyperreal ones, play somewhere in a space that lays orthogonally in opposition to all that. Willow to me is profusion, proof of abundant life, of generous, ridiculously abundant and productive life, of reified embodied living sunlight. The reality of that when you feel it in your hands shatters all false darknesses, and returns us somehow deeply, instinctually, ancestrally, immediately back in tune with the Overwave, the wave from which all other waves are born…

Artist As Propagandist: Exploring Parallel Realities With AI

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On 15 October 2024

In Other

Misinformation and art intersect to explore and navigate the confusion between reality and fiction that typifies our times in the work of net artist Tim Boucher.

In works that run the gamut from books and hand-printed samizdat zines to the use of generative AI for video, text, and image-making, Boucher’s work uses hyperreality to delve into the murky shadows of the Uncanny Valley, evoking a weird, sometimes disorienting feeling of surfing the very edge of the collapse of meaning. Weaving together real and invented, human and AI elements to seamlessly blur the lines between them, Boucher exploits this chaos to create new semiotic spaces for radical meaning-making. Structurally, the work appropriates, satirizes, and detourns the forms and tropes of conspiracy theory, re-imagining them as a new form of art, and igniting them with the fuel of runaway AI.

While the contents of conspiracy theories often tend toward the ghoulish, harmful, or just plain wrong, they are inherently postmodern, acting as a vehicle for questioning established truths and power relationships—an activity which serves an important social function, if in many cases misguided in its ultimate application. Conspiracy theorists reject grand “official” narratives and instead create their own ad hoc temporary webs of meaning, challenging the legitimacy of the structures we rely on and deep beliefs previously taken for granted. The work asks big questions about whether there could be a way for art to reclaim this function of social critique that conspiracy theories currently embody in the popular consciousness, redirecting it towards more fruitful and creative ends?

The artist’s professional background in content moderation and censorship informs the work, at times borrowing from disinformation techniques observed in the field by state actors, repurposed as storytelling tools in open-ended creative networked narratives, and SEO manipulations to show how easily depictions of “reality” can be twisted and propagated. Misinformation is used here by the artist openly—not to deceive, but to reveal how fragile our systems for defining truth really are. The works expose how the artist’s role as propagandist, deploying “weaponized” artifacts to attempt to subversively actualize or undermine real or potential current or future states.

As a satirist working with the mode of the conspiracy theorist, the artist knowingly inhabits and exaggerates the conspiratorial narrative forms they aim to critique, imploding them from within. As the Onion’s amicus brief on parody put it, “Parodists intentionally inhabit the rhetorical form of their target in order to exaggerate or implode it”—a technique central to this practice.

Inspired by Dada absurdity, the artist’s ‘Nevermades’—collections of AI-generated artworks appearing to involve famous museums and galleries—extend Duchamp’s readymades concept into the post-truth, remote-first digital age, challenging the idea that authenticity requires physical presence – or even actual existence in the first place. These imagined or “aspirational” artworks (like flooding the Guggenheim Museum, and filling it with willow trees and beavers) comment on the art world’s status symbols—galleries, exhibitions, facades and physical artifacts—that can now be artificially fabricated at scale, significantly challenging their value in an online world dominated by images.

The use of AI serves to heighten the inherent tensions in the work. AI is used consciously as both a force that flattens expression into sameness and conformity and as a tool to rebel against the algorithmic culture of likes, shares, and validation – by exploiting and exposing the outliers, anomalies, errors, and vulnerabilities of these technologies. By transparently incorporating AI, the work proudly wears the use of these technologies as a kind of “scarlet letter,” confronting head-on the stigma against its use in creative sectors, and reimagining it as a vehicle and medium all its own for artistic exploration. At the same time, it shines a light on the absurdities and limitations of these technologies, and holds a mirror up to our own evolving reactions to them.

Ultimately, this metamodernist body of work oscillates between the deadly serious and the dangerously stupid and absurd, revealing the fragile and easily manipulated nature of our information systems and the social and political systems which rely on them. The work encourages the audience to consider conspiracy theory as an unrecognized folk art form—provocative and dangerous, to be sure, but one in many ways much like any art or cultural movement that questions authority. It disrupts the established order, challenges accepted facts, and compels us to face the instability of the narratives we hold onto, and, in its best form, opens up the space for change how things are today into how they could be, how we would likek them to be.

AI, misinformation, conspiracy, and hyperreality converge here to ask a simple but potent question: what is real, and who gets to decide?

I am an artist using AI…

By

On 15 October 2024

In Other

Thought I would put together some relevant recent statements I’ve worked on as an artist using AI.

Content Moderation Art Show in San Francisco

By

On 18 October 2024

In Other

Here’s a piece on a new hyperreality art show I worked on, virtually, in San Francisco. It’s part of my Nevermades series, and here’s a link to a longer recent artist statement. More images from the show at the link:

For now, this exhibit only exists in latent space, but it seems like something that ought to be actualized, as a content moderation based art exhibit could be really interesting! There’s a deep vein of cultural experience that human moderators – and “AI trainers” who may end up doing similar work – have experienced that has been largely overlooked by broader society that is worth exploring.

Notes on Smash That Like Button

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On 19 October 2024

In Other

Smash That Like Button is officially the 121st volume of the AI Lore books series, or unofficially number 124 of the bigger series which includes the non-AI books.

I’ve wanted to do a book by this title for ages and finally did it. I used Mistral 7B for most of it (which I used as completions for my own seed texts via TextSynth playground), with an ending via Llama to mix things up, and an intro by ChatGPT. This is more or less the same tech combo I’ve used on the text side for the past few books. It’s good enough, but I think I’m reaching the end of what I can get from Mistral using it that way. It gets repetitively psychotic after a certain point (or, maybe that’s just me?).

Something I dove more into here that I maybe only touched on obliquely at points in other books is sort of me as the writer voice talking into the completions text box on TextSynth, trying to direct its output at points verbally, even though it’s not a chatbot and cannot really understand or speak back to you used in this formulation (I don’t think, anyway). I feel like the way its included in this already surreal piece adds even more grit to the texture (like mixing sand in paint, as some of the early Cubists did). I haven’t seen anyone else experiment with this facet of AI writing before, and I think there’s a lot of interesting potential there stylistically. I have other ideas of where to take that mode of writing in the future.

Here’s the image preview:

Much but not all of the image content is by Ideogram, a few Playgrounds, a few Leonardos, a few Dalles. Some of the art references other projects I’ve been discussing lately on this blog.

I don’t have a ton more to say on it, except to highlight how much I absolutely despise people asking me to like, subscribe, and follow. I think that kind of algorithm-chasing behavior leads only to madness at worst and unhappiness for certain. It’s time to tear all that shit down and start anew.

Biobots: An Art Exploration of Low Tech Human Powered Robots

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On 21 October 2024

In Other

Biobots is the latest name I have come up with to house the art explorations I am doing around building IRL drawing machines of the low tech and human (or nature) powered variety.

The first one I did used a little motor and battery. The second was a pulley system rigged up to control a gondola with a marker taped onto it to be able to drawing lines on the wall. It worked, but imprecisely. This is my third iteration, tentatively titled “Gondolier” since that word describes the human oar-bearer who directs the flow of action on the river.

Apologies for the shitty photos, but I have a small studio space:

So the device functions by the user standing in the middle, and rotating the wood dials clockwise or counter-clockwise. The dials are glued to toothed timing pulleys, which engage with a mating toothed timing belt. So as each dial turns independently or manually synchronized, it causes the gondola to move around (itself weighted with batteries), and an acrylic paint marker is duct-taped to the bottom.

Here is the close up of the v2 version of the dial-pulley mechanisms:

Wood dowels are 8mm, as are the bores of the timing pulleys, so they had to be filed down and sanded out a little to allow for free spinning. There was a failed earlier prototype of this I won’t go into, but suffice it to say having good quality dials securely connected to the pulleys is essential to having this be a fun and fluid experience to use.

An early stage of the initial test:

While I think the motorized and electronic controlled wall plotter stuff is interesting, I’ve learned something about myself, that I don’t enjoy tinkering with coding stuff (Arduino, etc) more than absolute minimum, but I love tinkering with physical stuff.

So my theory behind all this is, why not take things that are commonly robotic, and sort of rip out the robot part, and replace it with a human processor, a human being? In effect, a biobot?

Turns out, of course, like everything, that “biobot” is a term already in common use, but it’s meaning is incredible, and strangely complementary thematically to the ideaspace I am trying to explore with this series. I blogged about them previously as xenobots & anthrobots, but biobots also speak to this “third state” that is supposedly emergent for some kinds of cells in some conditions after the death of the host organism. Popular Mechanics quote:

Unlike some cells such as tumors or organoids that continually divide after death, these xenobots took on new behaviors beyond their biological roles. Studies have also found this ability in human lung cells, creating anthrobots capable of self-assembling and moving around.

I think this makes “biobiots” an acceptable area of overlap thematically with the project I’m undertaking (Freudian slip), in that it speaks to breaking the duality between accepted positions of “life” versus “death” or “good” versus “bad” or “human” versus “technology,” and moving beyond all that to a third state where new behaviors and ways of being become possible, self-assembling, and autonomously moving around and having this new kind of life which serves purposes we’re only just beginning to understand.

This was an important solution, a hole drilled through the dowels once they were mounted on the wall to prevent the dial-pulley assembling from traveling off the dowel. Then a nail slotted in holds it in place:

It might not be evident in these pictures (or in person) what’s going on with the plastic bags, but they contain dead batteries as weights, where it actually ended up being easy to find three sets of approximately the same weight batteries to put into each bag as resistance and into the gondola itself.

In future versions, I will cuteify those into some other form (maybe small vertical willow baskets?), but for this solidly working prototype, it’s “good enough.”

Here’s the first finished painting in this series, all done entirely using the Gondolier drawing device and paint markers taped to the bottom.

I’m really excited about the level of control I could get out of it after some initial experimentation and learning. I haven’t processed my videos yet, but the motion is very smooth and satisfying to use. It could probably be “better” somehow but there’s a lot of experimenting left to do here to know in which specific directions to take it next to find its best form. It’s wonderful and raw feeling right now though just like this in person. A video won’t express that anyway.

The only current drawback is that the dials are mounted fairly high up, above shoulder level, and somewhat far apart. I’m still adjusting as to what is actually the maximum usable drawing space, and the relative dimensions of the arrangement, this is just what presented itself in the moment. After a few hours of playing with it though, it’s absolutely tiring to use with your arms up in the air for a long time. In shorter stints (an hour or 2 maybe) it is highly usable and enjoyable.

I found my next project last night in the biobots series, a combination of these two, a syringe-driven hydraulic robotic arm, but as a SCARA arm capable of drawing on a table. So the control system from the first video used to replace the electronics and motor in the second:

I also happened to finally fall down the Theo Jansen Strandbeest rabbit hole last night while investigating mechanical linkages, and this video interview of him is the best one I’ve seen so far. The Strandbeests totally seem to be “biobots” to me, as they have behaviors of their own, powered by natural forces (wind) and responding to different kinds of stimulus, like walking into the ocean, or bumping into something with its feeler. Incredible:

The only thing I don’t like about these is they are made of plastic, but having seen his method for assembling them using heat to form custom joints, I can see why it is desirable for his application. I’m left wondering though, what kinds of biobots could be made out of locally-grown willow branches?

Here are some AI visualizations within that space to spark the imagination in that direction:

The last bit that has been on my mind here is thinking about “robots” that might pass through the legendary Butlerian Jihad of the Dune universe, where all thinking machines were destroyed and outlawed, to be replaced by human calculators, mentats, etc. And how these biobotic “robots” I’m exploring seem like they could pass by without arousing the ire of the Butlerian Jihad authorities… plus, these kinds of devices would survive an EMP blast, since they have no electronics at all.

Interestingly, as I was writing this, I asked ChatGPT for the relevant quotes from Dune’s Orange Catholic Bible, which I believe to be canonically is:

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

However, ChatGPT then came up with its own plausible other quote:

“Man’s flesh is his own; the maker has given it form, and man’s spirit is free.”

Totally non-canonical, but fits the style and themes to some degree. As I understand it, Herbert didn’t leave us the complete text of the Orange Catholic Bible, so… you never know! Also this neatly illustrates why we might not actually want to over-rely on thinking machines either…

Welcome Hongs Lab Visitors

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On 22 October 2024

In Other

Hello to the visitors coming from the Hongs Lab article about authors using AI to produce new creative works. I don’t have any stats or tracking on my site, but noticed an increase in free book downloads, so went searching and found that page.

I don’t read Korean, but used Google Translate to help. ChatGPT tells me the author’s name is Hong Soon-seong, and that they are a “South Korean author, AI personal consultant, and productivity expert.” (Hopefully those details are correct and not a hallucination!)

Incidentally, I don’t think people appreciate enough how much AI can facilitate cross-cultural and translinguistic communication. It’s a major help.

Anyway, new visitors might appreciate these recent pieces of English news coverage:

And I’ve been exploring artistic ideas around creativity and AI lately here:

Newest pulp sci-fi AI assisted books:

If you had to start anywhere though, I would start with this bundle of books:

The free sample ebooks are also a good place to start, offering a kind of survey of the AI-assisted world-building that I have been working on.

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