I’m leaving Slack, so I have been leaning heavily on ChatGPT to help me set up possible open source alternatives like Rocket Chat :thumbsdown: and Matrix :thumbshalfwayup:. I’m not much of a Terminal wizard, but from this experience having ChatGPT guide me through using the command line, I’ve learned a lot. One of the things I’ve learned is you basically always get stuck – eventually – down one or several blind alleys when explicitly following its instructions. And then it just runs you down them again and again (but still did better than Gemini in the one time I tried it for an intractable Matrix Synapse server settings issue).
Anyway, that’s why I’m quoting this Dave Winer bit here, cause I’m apparently not the only one:
As a programming partner, ChatGPT is encyclopedic but is not good at strategy. It will drive you down blind alleys. It’s also really irritating that it rewrites your code to conform to its standards. And it has a terrible memory. Forgets things you told it specifically not to forget. It does not keep promises.
Also, because it does not suffer from human impatience, it has no problem telling you to repeat the same 5-6 checks again and again, no matter how many times you say it didn’t work and yes you already triple checked that config file in nano. Frustration, in a way, is actually valuable. It tells you when things really aren’t working and make you question whether it’s actually valuable as a human to continue down a given path. But you can’t rely on the program itself to bring that kind of guidance to you – you have to rely on your human faculty of annoyance. Which, the more I think about it, might somehow be connected to intuition: knowing when to fold and try something else.
Still though, I would not have ever learned so much so quickly about the command line without ChatGPT backing me up. And, of course, if the programs I am trying to run were not so finicky and buggy. I finally got Matrix up and running (accessing via Element), but never did sort out the correct subdomain issue I messed around with solving forever and ever. And who the hell knows if my m.room.retention settings are going to be honored. At least it will be encrypted if it’s not deleted in a purge job eventually (though hard deletion is always best policy for stale data, imo)…
I’ve been following with great interest the current “flap” around drones/orbs/UAPs being sighted in both the night sky and broad daylight around the United States and the world. A lot more to say there, obviously, but one experiment I did was trying to get OpenAI’s generative AI video tool Sora to create “convincing” fakes in this genre which would cleanly match what we’re seeing from users on the street.
I uploaded about a dozen or so video results to Imgur, which you can see at the link as they can’t be embedded easily here.
These videos end up being interesting in their own right, and even – dare I say – “artistic” at times. But what I found is they look pretty much nothing like the videos we’re seeing uploaded regularly to platforms like Reddit & TikTok, etc. Doesn’t necessarily mean nobody is using gen AI to enhance (or even generate) some of the effects we’re seeing in these videos, but if they’re doing it, I have yet to see one that could be easily explained away as “Oh, that’s just AI.”
Mysterious Plasmoids is the 124th installment in the AI Lore Books series. It is the first book I’ve done in the “Mysterious…” series in quite some time, and is another ‘ripped from the headlines’ hot take on what is happening with the drone/orb situation that is supposedly happening globally (I’ve not seen any anomalies first hand, myself). It also continues in another thematic subset of my books that relate to various aspects of UAP/UFO phenomena. This one heavily references other books in that cluster, if non-linearly.
There’s a vivid dream description of mine which fellow blogger Ran Prieur documented way back in 2005 here. In it I dreamt of a hyper-nationalist/fascist future US where police sirens played the song “America, the Beautiful,” and aliens had invaded in the United States… Excerpt below:
New York City had been divided into northern and southern zones, via a gigantic wall and forcefield. The southern half still had people living and working in it. But the northern half was completely off-limits. The official story was that aliens (space, not illegal) had taken over the northern half of the city, and the rest of the United States northward.
We knew, however, that this officially story was largely a fabrication. But that was all we knew. We had to roam about the lower half of the city, trying to find a passage to the north. And we had to do so without arousing any suspicions, which was an extremely difficult task. No one in the city would answer questions or help us.
And the police presence was total. You had to keep moving at all times. Any group of people who were stopping to talk or otherwise congregate was quickly spotted and broken up by patrolling police. […]
The police also had flying discs which they sent out after you. They were autonomous electronic devices which hovered and would track you as you ran. Once they were within range, they would fire an electric bolt at you to incapacitate you until officers arrived. The discs were called “temperplexes,” and they were all apparently controlled by larger motherships which flew higher and basically looked like UFO’s.
I actually continued that dream and spun out more variations using AI and published it in an earlier volume called, The First Days of Panic. That book, however, takes it visually in a much more fascist police drone direction (which, hell, I wouldn’t rule out just yet), whereas this book more explores the notion of plasmoids as heretofore unrecognized forms of life, which have interacted with us in myriad ways throughout history and prehistory: something more like John Keel’s ultraterrestrials. Are we living in the timeline now of that dream? Maybe?
Whatever the true nature of the “real” drones/orbs/plasmoids/UFO/UAP stuff that is or isn’t going on in our skies is, I think, a little besides the point; the point is the search itself. The point is the looking, and trying to understand all possibilities, and fit the best bets that seem to match evidence from reality itself.
Or, you know, in this case, hyperreality. Images in this one were mostly made with Ideogram and Recraft, with some dabbling in Grok’s image gen, and screegrabs from Sora videos, plus some remove tool in Adobe Lightroom. Text is majority ChatGPT with many human edits and improvements, told in alternating chapters between “first person” accounts, and quasi scholarly essays. Art preview below:
I might experiment in a subsequent volume with trying to embed animated gifs or even short videos from Sora if I can get the technology working adequately to share them. Ebooks don’t seem well-suited to that kind of thing, due to file sizes, though. So we will see what’s actually still feasible.
Well, I took that device, and fabricated using a Wen scroll saw and Dremel tool and some experimentation a set of handles to drive the syringe actuators, to be able to more smoothly control the drawing motion. I’m calling them ohara style controllers because I think the will-scarlet >> scarlett-ohara semantic bridge made some sort of intuitive sense, with shades of thematic connection maybe to… flying and O’Hare International Airport? I don’t know – I only work here. I’m just making this shit up on the fly, and trying to keep it all straight in my head.
The ohara controllers anyway came out great, you can see the video sample of the motion and some other images over on this Imgur gallery. Here’s a closeup of the controllers – hopefully Butlerian Jihad-safe:
This is a couple years old, but seems very cool, from Elephant Robotics:
It’s a two-handed controller exoskeleton that can be paired with robotic arm elements. Watching this has got me thinking: couldn’t I make a low tech version of a wearable two-handed controller that works without any electronics? Like maybe something with some crazy configuration of pulleys, cords, rods, (syringe hydraulics?) etc… hooked up on the other end to a drawing mechanism that can execute the translated movements?
This article pretty much makes no sense, from the Guardian on Jeff Koons. First it quotes him as saying:
“I wouldn’t – for my own base work – be looking at AI to be developing my work.”
And then it turns around and quotes him saying exactly the opposite:
“I do not work with AI at this time directly other than to produce options. Here’s this table: could I see this table in a wood? And then, could I see this shape in, you know, a marble? I’d like to see it in reflected steel. Only in that scenario. I’ve been using AI as a tool, not as an agent.”
That’s… nonsense?
I don’t actually give much of a shit if Jeff Koons’ work isn’t physically made by him, but by employees and interns working on his behalf. I actually think that’s a historically coherent modality for productive workshops, which I went into a bit more here, and quoted someone from a random thread on Reddit:
To give you a wider explanation, artists worked as traders running workshops as a business. They would hire employees, assistants, and trainees, just like, say, modern plumbers.
So I’m personally fine with that, even if I think that Koons art is pretty much ugly and lifeless. I just think it’s a stupid claim to say you don’t use AI except for… all the times you do during the process.
A reader sent me the following question, and gave me permission to post it and reply publicly here.
I found your Newsweek article from 2023, and it eventually led me here. I recently finished a 131,000-word manuscript using ChatGPT as a collaborator. While it’s not at a releasable quality yet, I’ve seen how AI can enhance creativity when paired with significant input.
I’m now breaking that manuscript into an into triloigy of 80,000-85,000 words for each book My process involves using AI to fill in smaller details while I focus on the larger creative elements. The result feels unique even compared to over 300 sci-fi books I’ve read.
I see a fair amount of backlash AI-generated work has.
Given your experience, I’d love your perspective: • How do you handle criticism or backlash toward AI-assisted writing? • Do you recommend addressing it directly, or letting the work speak for itself? • Is using a pen name a good strategy, or does transparency have more value in this space?
AI is allowing me to channel creativity I wouldn’t have been able to do so otherwise. I have no idea where this will take me. Your thought would mean a lot as I continue this journey.
So I should preface this by saying I’m probably a very hard-headed person, or else the torrents of shame and hatred people have tried to rain down on me for doing what I am artistically would be maybe a bit too much to handle. Second, I also spent many years working in content moderation, and handling complaints for a platform. This habituated me to dealing with “anger at scale” and seeing philosophically but also very concretely how, no matter what happens in the world, and where you’re sitting in relation to it, there is no shortage of unhappy people who will come in and shit all over it. This is just what people do, and the world we live in. Everybody’s mad because everything sucks, and I’m obviously no different.
So I guess you could say I’ve had a lot of training and conditioning in dealing with this sort of vitriol. To the point where I pretty much don’t take any of it seriously anymore, and years ago gave up being the guy whose job is to try to somehow sort out and make sense of everyone else’s anger and frustrations. It’s just not my responsibility anymore – and it once was, so I know concretely and cleanly the difference, which might be harder to sort out if you’re new to this kind of extremely strong reaction what you’re describing is likely to engender.
So, more specifically, one concrete way I handle criticism is by not posting on social media accounts. If something of mine comes up on one of those networks, I might pop in as a guest and see what I can of the comments to understand what people are saying, and what their perspectives are, but I never try to engage people on those platforms, because it’s just not worth it. Angry people always feel they are right and justified in their anger. And they are emboldened when others do the same, so you can’t win in the places they congregate, imo. That’s why instead, I just write what I write here on my blog. Sometimes I respond to things I find elsewhere, but there are no comments here, so people can’t come here and dogpile me, and I am able to think in peace. People can, of course, follow links to email me directly. But I’ve never had a single person sit down to write me a thoughtful email that was angry or even a critique. Everyone who emails is curious and interested, so I take those kinds of communications to be much more important and valuable because they are person to person, and they are not social performance designed to enrage and attract likes.
I tend to address the criticisms directly when they seem interesting or spark a new way of thinking about these issues. And I agree there are issues with these technologies, a great many of them, and have spent a huge amount of time talking about them on my blog, in panel discussions, interviews, podcasts, etc. So yes, I think – for me, anyway – addressing them directly is important and necessary, and helps frame the conversation in better directions, even if these blog posts don’t garner likes on social media.
As to pen names, I think it depends on what your personal preferences and tolerances to criticism are. Because of my prior work handling complaints, moderating content, working in privacy/data protection, I didn’t put photos or video of myself online for years and years, and was extremely protective of my identity. Because I knew what kinds of horrible things people are capable of online. But then, eventually, I had the chance to talk about what I was doing, and if you want to play ball in the media, you have to use your face and your name, pretty much. Maybe there’s a way to get press anonymously or pseudonymously, but I think it be more difficult and greatly reduced compared to what I’ve been able to do by exposing myself and my person. I think also there’s something to be said for not being cowed, not being shamed or shouted down from the raging mobs, and simply being like, yeah, this is me, this is an art experiment I’m doing, etc. I’m not forcing anybody to like it, but I’m being true to my part of the dance, following my inspiration, battle testing the tools, finding the good and bad in all of it, and just sharing and being upfront about it.
That said, using another identity as a shield can be a very very good thing psychologically, and for other practical reasons. One benefit can be that it gives you a kind of mental distance – almost a ‘plausible deniability’ – for when the angry hordes come for you (and they will if you’re upfront about what you’re doing). This helps you to see that the people are reacting to the front you’re putting up about what you’re doing, and lets you get less hung up on reacting to like, oh they’re reacting to ME!! and they hate ME!! Like, okay, sure, they might “hate you” in the way that internet people hate everything, all the time, for any or no reason. But the people who complain most about my work haven’t read any of it, haven’t really read any of my articles or blog posts in any depth, haven’t listened meaningfully to my podcast or panel appearances, and haven’t actually engaged with anything I’m saying. They’re generally just reacting to a headline, and – dare I say – repeating popular talking points they heard elsewhere about why “AI bad” and how I’m just another example of ____[thing they already hate].
So, anyway, I don’t know if this is inspiring or even helpful or not, but it’s at least a true accounting of my experience. Your mileage, as ever, may vary.
Anyone else have any questions, feel free to email me, and assuming that’s okay with you, please provide permission to use the text of your email publicly. I will redact any personally identifying information from the text of your inquiry.
My mind has been coming back again and again to this idea of making a fully manually-operated version of the Elephant Robotics exoskeleton for use as a drawing tool. I got one step closer to actualizing that a few days ago when I finished this very “minimum viable product” version of one type of gripper/grabber mechanism I am calling the grabbit-1.
I have a couple videos of it in operation at the Imgur link here. Here’s a static image:
I was dimly aware that cable controls were a thing you can do for mechanical puppetry, by way of this very retro video series on that topic:
But, like many four dimensional movements, this operation I found extremely difficult to understand without actually building a prototype. (Also see this other more contemporary example of someone using clear tubing and wire for a cable controlled puppet.)
Now, obviously I’m a long way off from the Elephant Robotics exoskeleton model here, but you have to start somewhere when you’re carving up complex physical problems like this. So understanding simply how grabbers/grippers worked seemed like a good enough place to start…
I often do these like chaotic jags through hyperspace when I’m figuring out a problem like this, usually through combinations of high speed skimming across tons of YouTube videos and image searches and asking ChatGPT for the names of things or principles that seem relevant. I end up with tons of good reference materials very chaotically organized though, and thought I’d want through some of them here for my own understanding if nothing else.
I actually found this one late in the process, but it is very helpful in demonstrating disassembly and functioning of one of those gripper dealies you might see senior citizens use, and which are actually surprisingly precise if you’ve ever used one:
There is something called Bowden cables, which are what makes the brakes on bikes work that is at play here, and in a very rudimentary way in my Grabbit-1 prototype. Where a cable or wire is inside of a length of tubing, and when one end of the wire is pulled (or pushed), that movement/force is transmitted through to the other end. It’s like if you connected two pieces together by a rigid rod, except its malleable, and the tubing lets you potentially put a bunch of these kinds of control cables together for different sets of discrete or connected movements. (Also see this guy’s interesting uses of Bowden cables in some kind of marble mechanism.) But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I wish they showed the other end of the cables controlling that motion, but I suppose it must be something like the frames with rings in the retro mechanical puppetry video above.
I also realized during this process that, as cool as it is to make hands that move in a lifelike way, depending on what I ultimately decide the exoskeleton project requires, I might or might not even need them. In one sense, a robotic human-ish hand is not really the ideal mechanism to hold a drawing device… Simply clipping a paint marker or whatever onto an arm or stylus or something is in many ways easier and a more reliable – but also somewhat less “awesome” looking than the above video, or this one which rules:
This is basically the same principle for cable controls, and the cables run through eyelets instead of tubing, and then they actuate levers linked to the larger arm joints. Here’s another video showing more or less the same setup in a different configuration. (This Instructable to build giant wooden hands is somewhat similar and has some close up photos. And this one is crazy in that it translates the hand motion down to a tiny scale articulated hand that has very creepy cool vibes.)
The basic grabber mechanism also appears in another important medical context: prosthetics for amputees. Some good example videos of how that works for body-controlled grippers:
I found out through that avenue of research that there are (at least) two types of gripper mechanisms like this, what’s called Voluntary Open (VO) and Voluntary Closed (VC). In voluntary open mechanisms, my understanding is they are in a default closed position and you need to exert effort which opens the mechanism. Voluntary closed is the opposite: they are default open and when effort is applied, they close. And then in either type, springs return the mechanism to its original state/position when the cable pressure is released.
This diagram helps somewhat:
As many diagrams, photos, and videos that I checked though, I couldn’t viscerally understand how these things function until I actually built it and tried it out and saw what happened.
For my design, you can see two videos at the original Imgur link at top of post, one where the Grabbit-1 functions normally (open by default, Voluntary Closed), and then another one where based on that prosthetic video above, I put a rubber band around the gripper, so that it would automatically be closed as its default, and actuating the little white knob (a cabinet handle repurposed) would make it open (e.g., Voluntary Open).
Now I get it after building it, which is what’s so valuable about doing these rudimentary exercises. Once I can feel how each thing functions in real space, and in comparison to my body, and to the finished art pieces that I produce with them, then I’m able to really fully absorb it, move onto the next, and eventually combine them all together in novel combinations (I haven’t even gotten to gears yet!).
Couple other things worth throwing in here at the end of this largely non-linear rant: there’s a type of arm in robotics referred to as the continuum or snake-arm which moves like a snake or robot trunk or tentacle.
Bear in mind, you can build one of these continuum robots like this which operates only mechanically, meaning no motors or electronics. It’s all just based on manipulating tension on cables. Here’s another one with less complex controller, and consequent less range of motion, but with wood parts:
I find all of this shit endlessly fascinating, and feel like this is such a healthy obsession to have and explore to its fullest as I continue building robots that can survive the coming Butlerian Jihad. Honestly, I’m having a lot more fun with this lately than with regular old boring generative AI. This all feels so much more basic and fundamental, and yet, speaks to many of the same questions in the end, but with the pieces on the board re-arranged in different configurations that throw new light – for me anyway – on the whole conflagration of issues around automation and extension technologies. A great deal more to say on that another day.
Also here is the very much obligatory Star Wars Luke’s robotic replacement hand video to end on:
Accidentally discovered something very interesting while messing around with the Photoshop remove tool, which on certain settings uses generative AI to replace out whatever you select with it.
In this case, was just playing around removing stuff from a photo of our living room, and saw that the tool was inventing paintings or posters that don’t exist:
That one in the corner, I zoomed in on and went through a few AI upscalers with and got this altogether vague still “detail” shot of:
It’s not on its own the greatest image ever seen, but there’s something spooky about how it looks and its ultimate provenance as an AI re-inventing my physical surroundings… almost has a ‘paranormal’ quality to me somehow. I had the idea of like, could I take these AI-imagined figments, and then do like I did with my Matisse copy and make human-done reproductions? Either as faithfully as possible to the original, or else with some enhancements by the human artist?
Here are some other examples. This photo was from about halfway through last year, and represented all the paintings I’d done lately (minus two in another room).
The funny part is, this original real photograph had a couple gaps where there was empty wall space. So I went in to those two areas (marked with arrows in image above) and used the Remove tool in Photoshop on them, and it invented these two other paintings that it thinks look natural there.
Eerily, the one on the left actually shares a lot of characteristics with a paintings which I did end up doing later on, this one, the Head of Hygiea:
Photoshop got the color scheme more or less exactly right, a good bit of the overall “vibe” but it just wasn’t able to see into the subject matter. But otherwise, I’d almost call that “prescient.”
Here’s one last one for the road, two paintings in storage in my small basement studio from over a decade ago (depicted at bottom half of image below). And alongside you can see the progressively extended painting that the Photoshop Remove tool created over a few rounds of trying.
The forms and mark-making on these AI-interpolations don’t quite ring true with my actual painted works, and they aren’t quite snazzy enough yet for me to simply want to replicate them manually. But these are just early accidents and experiments. There is much hyperspatial painting to be explored and uncovered here still.
Well, okay, there are two upgrades here, one is putting those plastic eyes onto the grabbit claw. The second is putting a flapping wing mechanism, cable-controlled, connected to a little hook at the bottom which is used to actuate the wings. The video linked above shows the best overview of how the mechanism is constructed.
I went through a lot of YouTube vids at high speed to figure out how to get the motion that I wanted, and I finally found it in this video of a scale model of Da Vinci’s ornithopter. (Or zoom in for a close up here.)
I haven’t been able to find a good reference from Leonardo’s actual drawings to verify this as a match, but the mechanism works – even if mine is extremely quick and janky, like all the rest of these experiments while I learn how the mechanisms work, and how to piece them together without too much expense or hassle.
I had intended for mine to actually send the wire to the back with the handle of the mouth wire too, but it wasn’t working with the tubing that I had, and preferred to get something simpler that works in all cases instead. And the action of this one as it is with the wings feels good in the hands.
