Series: AI Page 8 of 43

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

Baofa, Generative AI Artist

On 20 May 2023

Sometimes when undertaking art projects that are very big or take a long time, it can be useful to take up a new artist moniker specific to that project. Something to dump all the psychological contents of the process into, a container, an entity which can become itself an egregore, an invocation. And which, when you’re finished, you can leave behind.

I had such a name like that come to me the other day during meditation. That’s a topic I intend to write about it in its own right in more detail (meditation is its own kind of hyperreality), but suffice it to say sometimes in the meditative process, things seem to arise all on their own, through some deeply intuitive process which is for the most part opaque.

The name that popped into my mind was ‘Baofa,’ which I sat weighing in contemplation for some time, and it stuck with me. I thought it had kind of a cool, singular quality to it, like “Madonna.”

On ending the session, I started querying different sources online to see if it was really a thing, and found that apparently this word has a meaning in Mandarin Chinese, and its characters are 暴发. Google Translate seems to confirm the translation there… Though the primary translation appears to be “outbreak,” the secondary ones listed there are: get rich quick, suddenly become important, suddenly become rich.

I didn’t undertake my generative AI art projects in order to become “rich,” but given the headline Newsweek wanted me to write an article for, and other comments received in response to that piece, I think it’s only too funny and ironically fitting in the end I guess to adopt, essentially, “get rich quick” as a name.

I don’t know Mandarin Chinese, nor have any connection to that culture personally. I don’t know if somehow my subconscious mind tapped into some store of universal human knowledge to taunt me with silly name-calling, but I guess I don’t necessarily rule it out either.

Interestingly, I’ve been looking around for comprehensive lists or even references to generative AI artists by name, and they are hard to come by. Who are the artists working in this space? By what names are they going & why?

Notes on The Octave of Time

By Tim B.

On 21 May 2023

In Other

The Octave of Time is book #99 in the AI Lore books series, by Lost Books, Canadian AI publisher.

The text was is all human-generated, and was written chronologically as a sequel to The Lost Direction. However, due to circumstances, the book was unfinished, with only maybe a third or half of the full tale being told here, of the settling of the island of Ovarion, after the collapse of Quatria back into the Hypogeum.

This book features a returning cast that includes Tob Gobble, among many others. It also references quite a lot the House of Life (though the volume titled that was only written much later).

All the images are done in Midjourney. This was interesting for example with depicting recurring characters like Tob Gobble, who takes on many new and surprising faces within this volume. And MJ had a completely terrible time trying to depict the half horse/half rabbit creatures known as goleks. (There is one of these books that has some awesome pics of goleks, but I can’t remember offhand which one it is anymore!)

Here’s the preview of the interior art:

One thing I love about doing images in this style is that because of the “dvd screengrab” style I use on many of them, I’m left with the impression of there being a movie/movies here that “must have” existed, and the memories of which are nearly at the tip of my tongue… and that’s an incredible feeling; plus this feeling of being able to like “open rooms into my subconscious” and let others peer inside.

By the way, here is the original reference to the concept of the Octaves of Time, as described originally in the Lost Direction.

When Benda upset this natural way of things by mortally wounding Jan Re, he incurred both a blood debt to support Jan Re’s family, but also a ritual debt, for having changed the pitch of the tones which make up the Octave of Time. The cycles performed in Quatrian Society under the priests of the Hypergeic Temple Mount had as their intended function the harmonization of these Octaves in the present moment with the mythic and historical root tones (which were one in the same in this society).

This was not, to those people, idle speculation, or merely a symbolic conception of time as cyclical. This was, in a society still wedded to the Hypogeic powers, a concrete experience of how the present could impact the past. Thus atonement was also attunement, a continual re-tuning of the very stuff of existence.

Response to NY Post Reader Comments

By Tim B.

On 22 May 2023

In Other

When I was in art school (for one year, before dropping out), my friend and I had a tried and proven theory about how to make art pieces that were impressive: either make it really big, or make a lot of them.

I employed this technique in creating the AI Lore books, in this case making a lot of them, which is the primary thing people seem to be reacting to in the Business Insider and New York Post coverage.

A number of readers on the original NY Post article and the accompanying official tweet thread are trotting out the “quality not quantity” argument, which is fine. But the point I think, partly, of AI is that it enables you to augment and scale your creative output. And if you tune your approach to accord with the strengths of the tools, you actually don’t end up sacrificing much by way of quality. You simply have to play to the strengths of the technology.

More broadly, all those armchair critics are missing the biggest, most important lesson in all of this, and it took me a few years to understand this as a writer: you don’t get coverage as a nobody for simply writing a book. Absolutely nobody cares, because even without AI, there’s just simply too much stuff on the internet & too many books to ever read. It’s nobody’s fault & I don’t “blame” prolific writers; it’s just a consequence of the ease and proliferation of content in our online world today.

So how do you get coverage as a writer then? By doing something ELSE that is newsworthy. Literally everybody wrote a book. Very few people wrote a hundred. And even fewer people used AI to do it, and AI is still in its “hot” stage. So instead of “guy writes book” as a headline (not very exciting), I’m offering the much juicier story of “guy writes 100 books, using AI.” Now it’s something that’s (1) timely and ‘of the moment’, and (2) invites strong emotional reactions, such as “This guy sucks!” or “I’m never reading these books!” or “This guy’s ruining publishing for the rest of us whiners!” Something like that. There’s room for everybody to put their two cents into the bucket here.

Isn’t it bad to get a bunch of “bad” comments like that though? Sure? But also, not really? Because I think (A) nobody reads comments anymore, and (B) everybody recognizes that we’re all unhappy assholes, and we take it out on each other in comments. So it ends up being a shrug if “Facebook uncle” gets mad about what I did – he ends up just feeding the hype cycle in the end. Counter-engagement is still engagement.

The most important thing that’s happened here then is: I’m getting a bunch of coverage, and because of how a lot of journalists seem to just want to report on what other people are already reporting about, there’s a snowball effect occurring, where it’s getting to be more and more.

And most notably, now, people are calling me a “sci fi author” in articles, instead of just a “man” or a “guy.” I went from being a nobody, to being a somebody, to being a “sci fi author” who is getting international coverage – all with no agent, publicist, publishing house, etc. (I’m also owning SEO in Google News for “AI author” and “AI books,” which will lead to further opportunities for me as this space grows.)

I think that’s pretty damn good, even though it took me about 3 years of solid effort to get here with my writing, and a loooot of trial and error. So, in the end, I don’t really care that much if grumpy Facebook uncle says what I’m doing isn’t good, without ever having actually looked at it, or thought about it deeply, or understanding that, yes, this is a hack to get media attention & it worked!

And add on top of that that my production & storytelling process are fun as hell, and I’m making sales – albeit still small. Also, on top of the top of that: people are buying my non-AI books as well, further proving the excellence of this entire gambit.

Nothing to “worry about”

By Tim B.

On 23 May 2023

In Other

One trope I’ve seen in the endless parade of repetitive “original” comments about coverage of my books is the idea that somehow someone else’s perceived failure or success is something people should or should not “worry about.”

As Futurism’s subtitle teased:

Human writers probably shouldn’t be too concerned… yet.

And as someone equally clever on Reddit said:

I don’t think any real writers have anything to worry about, besides being buried under all the shit.

Given that I am not prone to being someone who is overly stressed about what random people are doing or not doing on the internet, this sentiment is hard for me to fathom. If anything, I suffer from an excess of intrinsic motivation, which apparently is what it takes to break through the wall of monotony that is public opinion to do something new and different.

AI Tools Made Me A Better Writer

By Tim B.

On 25 May 2023

In Other

I know the popular fantasy is that writers who use AI are not “real writers” because they don’t do any “actual work” themselves. This is just so big & wrong of an idea that it is difficult to refute head-on. In fact, I don’t expect any of the people who think that to ever change their minds because of anything I say. So this isn’t for them; it’s for me.

Anyway, it’ll have to suffice to say that, again, my experience has been exactly the opposite of what everyone says about writing with AI. Apart from accelerating my output, the sheer act of producing, checking, and editing such a large quantity of text makes you – wait for it – exponentially better as a writer. It trains you to think in not just words & sentences, but in movable blocks of ideas that can be shifted around, re-purposed, etc. etc. I’m at the point of like, who cares where the actual words come from, so long as they get my text where I want it to go?

Partnership on AI could be more inclusive

By Tim B.

On 25 May 2023

In Other

Within the past few months, a non-profit called Partnership for AI (PAI, for short), released a document entitled “Responsible Practices for Synthetic Media,” which I read with interest. I then submitted to them a sample implementation of their recommendations within the context of a fictional blogging service, to engage with them and other interested parties about how these principles might be deployed at the level of actual products.

I wrote them a few times, actually, expressing my interest. I’m not completely a nobody; I’ve worked for 8 years in online Trust & Safety, and published nearly 100 AI-assisted books that have received international coverage in the media. I never heard back from anyone I reached out to about chatting more.

Eventually after maybe 6 weeks or something, I got added to a newsletter, the first edition of which included what appeared to be a polite brush-off text, including:

We are currently working with existing collaborators on the next phase of the Framework launch and developing a process for an open call for additional Framework supporters.

We will share more information about joining the Framework in the near future. In the meantime, we will keep you updated as we collect insights on how organizations are using the Framework as well as on PAI’s synthetic media work more broadly.

Then I waited another month to get another newsletter, which seemed delighted to inform me that they had held a big meeting with a bunch of important “experts” (of which I was not included nor invited), and that this esteemed group had made a bunch of new vague recommendations that I could read if I wanted to. Something to the effect of:

In this update, we share more about our latest initiative to develop safety protocols for large-scale AI, including top three insights from the kickoff of a multistakeholder dialogue on these protocols at a workshop co-hosted with IBM. Below you can find links to the Version 0 of the Protocols as well as recommendations and open questions from our recent workshop.

I don’t want to blast or alienate anybody, but for a group which includes “partnership” in its title, this is a kind of staid and somewhat boring response to the work and excitement I tried to share with them as an interested & expert third party potential collaborator.

Their email went on to explain:

The meeting convened 40 experts from across industry, academia, and civil society, including representatives from 12 industry model providers. Discussions included lightning talks from model providers who shared insights on their organization’s deployment decisions and challenges, followed by group work…

To me, as a let’s say “AI practitioner,” what this all says is that… we asked a bunch of “experts” who have a vested financial interest in a particular outcome (aka our “partners”), and we excluded anybody who isn’t important enough, or who is not actually… you know.. using the tools.

I know this kind of meeting does not come from a bad place; it is all incredibly well-intentioned, I have no doubt. But I think it is indicative of the state of the industry, and illustrative of the dangers of ONLY allowing companies, a handful of non-profits, and other assorted grab bag “civil society” people to basically… decide things which will impact all of humanity by influencing the direction of regulations and norms in business.

I find it a travesty that other types of potential contributors are summarily excluded from this kinds of convocations; and I think it is a practice that needs to be thoroughly re-evaluated and changed. Because AI is a huge, frickin enormously consequential development for humanity. And we can’t just keep replicating the same old broken patterns that we have always perpetuated, and expect them to yield new, different, or interesting results. From where I’m standing, this looks like more of the same old establishment jockeying and ‘inside baseball.’ Not a true partnership of the kind that we need to face these enormous issues uncovered by AI.

Notes on The Second Octave

By Tim B.

On 28 May 2023

In Other

The Second Octave is book #100 of the AI Lore books series, as chronicled by the New York Post.

It fits in the mode of a collection of flash fiction pieces that extend on stories begun in The Octave of Time, which itself was “hand-written” (without AI assistance on text). By contrast, this volume, The Second Octave, consists mostly of AI-generated text from Anthropic’s Claude.

In a way, this book is also a continuation of Tales from the House of Life, in that the same technique was employed, and many of the same characters appear in both (semi-canonically). The technique was ingesting a longer work (for House of Life the source text was The Lost Direction), and then using the AI to generate more or less in-world stories based on that text.

I have one more human-written source text I will try this technique on, Conspiratopia, for a volume I’m expecting to call Return to Conspiratopia. The tone and style of that book are very “special” though, so I have my doubts as to whether or not AIs will in fact be able to do it justice.

Here’s the preview art for Second Octave:

I’m supposing I will do eight octaves in all for this series, where I will iteratively read back in the two prior texts to generate the third, and so on.

Notes on The Jellyfish War

By Tim B.

On 29 May 2023

In Other

The Jellyfish War is book #101 in the AI Lore books series. It was an accidental offshoot of another side project, which it is not yet time to reveal publicly.

Mainly, it was based on the discovery that pictures of jellyfish in NYC looked really frickin’ cool, and that I wanted to see more of them. It wasn’t long before a story concept unfolded, explaining the how and why that jellyfish had come to inhabit New York along with everyone else – namely that there was a massive invasion – and they won. And NYC was determined for whatever reason to be the place where the new human + jelly society would be pioneered.

Images are all Midjourney. Text started in an old tool I coded, running text-davinci-003 from OpenAI, which I eventually dumped into Claude to clean up and smooth out the tone, plus generate a few flash fiction pieces set in this world to round out all the world-building.

Here’s the art preview:

This book pairs especially well with Celestial Cephalopods, as they deal in a somewhat similar sort of parallel reality oceanic fantasy.

My books are actually anti-AI

By Tim B.

On 30 May 2023

In Other

One thing that I’ve noticed just about everyone who has taken a look at and dismissed my work out of turn has actually missed (because they didn’t actually read the books before deciding):

My AI Lore books do not glamorize AI; my books are anti-AI.

This might be hard to swallow for those who merely formed an impression by looking at the headline, or seeing someone else’s angry tweet chewing me out.

Yes, I use AI tools to help produce my storytelling. And people are upset about that because reasons. But it’s worth pointing out that the stories that I tell talk about human failure and the accumulation of mistakes, errors and unkindnesses (my working definition of dystopia). The failures which eventually lead us into the waiting arms of supposedly “intelligent” AI who basically never has our best interests at heart.

Because it has no heart. In my books, AIs don’t even believe humans are sentient. So looking out for our interests is little more than a passing curiosity.

I know it sounds like a contradiction to use AI to make stories telling us in its own voice, warning us about the dangers of the technology itself. But that is what makes my books “Art” (AIrt) and not just a curious commercial venture with so far small but steady returns.

Art doesn’t have to answer your questions. It doesn’t owe you that. Art makes you ask the questions though; art causes you to have the reactions, gives you the space and the ammunition to have them.

In some sense, what I did here was prompt the collective human AI (supported by the algorithms of socio-technical platforms and media distribution ecosystems), by giving it the text of my Newsweek article, and spit out the “top 1000 most likely human reactions.”

And everyone came along and crowd-sourced the hell of that.

Anyway, I forgot midway through where I was going with all of this. Maybe nowhere. Maybe I already got there. That’s blogging. /shrug

Here are some example AI Lore books that demonstrate a stronger anti-AI narrative (in case you don’t happen to believe this is central to my books):

Towards a ‘Generativist’ Art movement

By Tim B.

On 30 May 2023

In Other

I’ve been trying for a while now to find a word that encapsulates what is happening now with arts, culture, music, entertainment, literature as a result of generative AI. And the word I have finally landed on is Generativist.

The word already has a sort of meaning by way of linguistics, in generative grammar, which is something I don’t admittedly know much more about than skimming a few web pages. GPT-4 provided me with this very compessed explanation:

Generative grammar, proposed by Noam Chomsky, suggests that humans have an innate ability to understand and use language based on a “universal grammar” hard-wired into the brain. This theory posits that a finite set of grammatical rules can generate an infinite number of sentences. Essentially, it’s an explanation for how we rapidly learn and use complex language systems, and how we can understand and produce sentences we’ve never heard before.

So anyway, I tried taking some ideas I had been writing along the veins of what a “Generativist” art movement might look like, which embraces AI technologies as co-creative partners that can lift up the human creative spirit, and which ultimately also spring from it as a kind of fulfillment of one form of it. Here is a sort of sketch I wrote out on paper, which I then fed back into GPT-4:

Humans, as living things, are generative beings.

We make, because life makes.

We make art,

We make AI,

as an extension of life’s own making.

We make our imaginations

into solid places others can go,

into shared hallucinations

given tangible reality.

We no longer have to be alone in our dreams

unless we wish to be…

in order to seek the solace and refuge

of solitary silence

and the space to create anew

from the decaying forms of the old

And here is the draft text that I pulled out after several iterations with ChatGPT, suggesting what kinds of principles a Generativist Manifesto might contain, while preserving some of my poetic language above:

Innate Generativity: We, humans, as living things are generative beings. We make because life makes. We make art, we make AI, as an extension of life’s own making. This inherent capacity to create is universal and generative systems provide a means to explore and harness it.

Universal Structures: We assert the existence of universal structures and patterns underlying all forms of art, akin to the universal grammar of language. These structures are the framework of our making, the bones of our shared hallucinations given tangible reality.

Generative Systems as Tools: We regard generative systems as tools that can expand the creative capacities of the human mind, not as replacements for human creativity. They are the mechanisms through which we make our imaginations into solid places others can go.

Infinite Creativity from Finite Means: We believe in the potential of generating infinite artistic expressions from finite creative rules and structures. Like language that spins infinite sentences from finite grammatical rules, so do we spin infinite dreams from the loom of life.

Language and Art: We acknowledge the close relationship between language and art, between the word spoken and the image conjured. Through generative processes, we explore this relationship further, creating both linguistic and non-linguistic works.

The Space of Solitary Silence: We recognize the importance of solitude, the necessity of a space to create anew from the decaying forms of the old. In the quiet, we find the freedom to dream, and in our dreams, the seeds of new realities.

Critical Engagement with Technology: While we embrace the use of generative systems, we also critically engage with them. We reflect on the assumptions and biases that may be built into these systems and how they may impact the dreams we bring to life.

It’s a little wooden maybe in its language, but it touches on a lot of good core components that I wanted to preserve in a more raw form before trying to work on in more finished versions. I think it needs to work in still some of the conceptions around hyperreality & reality fluid, the uncanny valley, plus putting authorship & ownership into kind of a backseat role… Probably a few other odds & ends like that to incorporate here, but good enough base to share & move forward.