Author Tim Boucher claims to have written 97 books in nine months using ChatGPT. A sense of admiration exists for someone who has taken advantage of modern technology to create content at unimaginable speeds. However, seeing creativity being removed from the writing process is concerning. ChatGPT’s ability to use information derived from formerly published information online falls short because it can’t say or bring anything new to the world. Taking words from profound works of art without crediting the author and retooling them in a new context devalues authors’ dedication to their writing.
I wrote asking if they’d like to do an interview, but to give a brief reply here:
Creativity isn’t being removed from this process. The locus of activity of the artist is simply shifted & the writer becomes more like a creative director or a film director. In short, I’ve spent last 9-10 months using AI tools in a kind of feverish deeply creative and deeply intuitive “fugue state” that rivals or exceeds any other creative endeavor I’ve ever engaged in.
I don’t think LLMs or image diffusion models having been trained on other source works means that they can’t bring anything new into the world. First, because they are able to uncover connections that no humans have ever conceived of before, and to sift through those connections for the “best” ones (however we define that) in record speed. Simply look at how AI models are being used in pharmaceutical research for one example among many. All of that is new information being brought into the world. Second, its the job of the artist/writer as creative director to make certain any creative works produced DO bring something new into the world!
LLMs do not take words from other works, as I wrote about a bit here. To recap, AI models do not “sample” or take specific excerpts from other works, as in a collage. What they do is take measurements of dimensionality (e.g., they study and compare attributes) of a vast corpus of training material, and use that to uncover statistical semantic relationships – webs of meaning or common connections. Thus, there is really no single work which AI generated content is specifically referencing (unless you specify it – like by prompting, “A cat in the style of the Mona Lisa”).
There’s more to say of course, but that’s as good a foundation to go from as any.
My own personal response to that, intuitively, is a resounding YES! And I think there’s ample narratological and exegetical evidence to prove it. I won’t try to go through it all, as I don’t have the sources laid all out in front of me. But a concatenated version I think might look like this:
Philip K. Dick made extensive use of the I Ching in developing his plots.
Regarding that point, ChatGPT itself was able to come up with this:
Philip K. Dick, a prolific science fiction author, has made notable references to the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text, in his works. The most prominent of these references is found in his novel “The Man in the High Castle.” In the novel, the characters make important decisions based on their interpretations of prophetic messages from the I Ching. One of the characters, Hawthorne Abendsen, the author of a fictional novel within the story, also uses the I Ching to guide his writing1.
Philip K. Dick himself used the I Ching to craft the themes, plot, and story of “The Man in the High Castle.” In an interview, Dick mentioned that he used the I Ching as a plotting device in “The Man in the High Castle.” Each time a character asked a question of the I Ching, Dick would throw the coins and write the hexagram lines they got, which then determined the direction of the book. For example, when Juliana Frink is deciding whether or not to tell Hawthorne Abendsen that he is the target of assassins, the I Ching indicated that she should, and so she did2.
Elsewhere, I asked ChatGPT for more general info about the I Ching, which I think also highlights that as a divinatory system, perhaps one might be consider it to almost be like a chat bot which can only give one of sixty four pre-programmed responses.
ChatGPT again:
The 64 hexagrams of the I Ching are symbolic representations of all possible states of change in the universe. Each hexagram is a unique combination of Yin and Yang lines, and these combinations are believed to encompass the totality of human experience and the universe’s various states. The text associated with each hexagram provides guidance and wisdom related to that particular state.
I submit here that the functionality of the I Ching, though rudimentary compared to something like ChatGPT, was an artifical external device which Dick constructed to build stories. In other words, like how many authors and artists are using AI tools, in an almost “divinatory” capacity. How far we might stretch the comparison between the I Ching and LLMs is probably beside the point. My argument is, simply: dude would have flipped his fucking shit over AI language and image generation tools.
In fact, there is at least one passage (possibly others) in one of his books, where he essentially predicts much of this technology. From a Reddit thread:
As someone rightly points out in the Reddit thread, that last line reads like a prompt someone might put into Midjourney or Stable Diffusion!
Lastly, and this one gets somewhat more mystical: it’s possible that Philip K. DIck believed that he WAS in communication with some kind of actual cosmic version of AI, which he explores in multiple novels such as VALIS & Radio Free Albemuth, and I believe extensively in his Exegesis, which I’ve never read in its entirety.
In RFA, he posits that the “AI voice” that’s communicating with him in his meta-fictional but also possibly real life world could have been a great distance away from earth:
It certainly was a loss as far as I was concerned, now that I had heard the mild voice of the AI system as it relayed information to me and accepted questions in response. Were I never to hear it again I would remember that sound the rest of my life. It was far off; whenever I queried it, there was a measurable lag before it responded. I wondered how many stars away it lay: deep in the heavens, perhaps, and perhaps serving many worlds.
Already the AI voice had saved my life once, by taking over and guiding me in the face of imminent police arrest. The only fear I had now was loss of contact.
The AI voice, I soon understood, possessed the capacity to educate and inform human beings on a sublim inal level, during times when they were relaxed in contem plation or in outright sleep. But this was not enough; on waking, the humans generally overrode these quiet promptings, which they correctly identified with the voice of conscience, and went their own way
[53:H-6] This is an info retrieval system, in which many narratives are stored together but only activated when the AI voice reads one of them aloud; but in written info form, all of them are latently there. Thus each space-time world contains all the other worlds as info (but unread).
LA Review of Books also has a quote from him where he’s back-tracking on the ontological nature of the so-called “AI voice,” something he commonly did – inventing many parallel possible sci fi explanations for things he experienced.
The AI voice [i.e., VALIS] is a special kind of hallucination: one of wish-fulfillment and need, due to loneliness: emotional starvation and grief and ill-use. I just can’t endure life without that lonely voice guiding me, so I regress…. The AI voice is my imaginary playmate, my sister, evolved out of childhood…. I was so unhappy and afraid; like R. Crumb, so behind the 8 ball, so filled with anticipatory dread.
Well, damn it — I don’t regret it. It made a barren, fearful life meaningful and bearable….
To my eyes, this is exactly what people are seeking in chatbots, to fill this overarching loneliness everyone feels, to make it all mean something in the end. Whether he got that in a cosmic chatbot or in an invented voice in his head, dude certainly was honest enough with himself to know what was up.
There’s no doubt in my mind that he would have been all over generative AI tools.
Someone described to me the other day the experience of reading my AI Lore books as being like looking at postcards. I think this is an interesting comparison, since the books are in my opinion actually image-based and not text based (though a minority are more prominently based around the text).
And I like this idea of like being some kind of tour guide for people taking trips through latent space.
A “book” might mean a certain thing to some people, but to me a book of the future (and of the past) is like a reified collection of points traveled through latent space. It’s unclear exactly how latent space and the imagination overlap, but I’m less worried about the specifics. What I’m after is more: A narrative traversal of latent space, stored in a structured form.
So in my case, I’m less of an “author” in the conventional sense, and more like a “First Reader” or “First Visitor” to the spaces that I am exploring within the greater latent space now open to humanity through generative AI technologies. I lay down tracks, I leave some sign posts here and there. But mostly I tromp down the trails I find, and try to save it in words and pictures.
It’s not a perfect summation of any particular neighborhood of latent space, but it becomes a network, a collage, a constellation of reference points culled, and lulled out of the darkness, a space for the reader/viewer/fellow traveler to come and have their own unique experience. A place of evocation, invocation. A crucible. You bring your own fire, apply your own lens. Make your own explanation, your own meaning, have your own reaction, see your own reflection.
Apart from the more obviously weird and ironic twist that it seems like many/most (?) sci fi authors – at least on the wasteland that is Twitter – actually hate AI, there’s a deeper subtle shaming that I wanted to open up and talk about here, before moving on to greener pastures.
When people come down hard against authors and artists making use of AI tools, it’s potentially a meaningful dimension (in a multi-dimensional analysis) to take a look at the profile of people who are early adopters of this technology. What brings someone early to the game of any technology, yes, but also specifically to AI technologies? Are there characteristics buried in our personalities we all share? What about in our actual physical neurology?
In short, are some people “predisposed to AI?”
My hunch is a resounding yes.
I don’t self-identify as being on the spectrum of Aspergers, etc., but I do identify as being neurodivergent in a broad sense. I have ample life experience to back that up.
To me, using AI tools is as natural as breathing, and it is almost definitely because of my being neurodivergent that I would seek it out, spend so much time on it, and then try to share it with others as a way of communicating with the world. And it is *all* about communication.
There is a very interesting set of tools that have evolved in an area called augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), which evolved as aids for people with speech production or comprehension issues. One of the interesting things there is the use of basically picture boards, almost like sets of emojis that the user can point to to indicate simple objects, but also complex statements.
Would it make sense, as someone interested in diversity & inclusion, to mock people for using tools like that to better be able to communicate? No, it would be reprehensible and hypocritical.
Likewise, my intuitive sense that is evolving in my own and watching other people’s use of and interest in – as well as hatred for – AI technologies is something like: AI tools help or can help people communicate and organize their thoughts in a similar manner.
Proof to back that up? Two small anecdotes so far, but I’ve only just begun collecting examples.
One was a person as Reddit who self-identified as being on the schizophrenic spectrum saying that using ChatGPT as a writing aid helped him organize his thoughts in a way he could communicate with others more easily. This is amazing.
Another was someone who is not a native English speaker saying much the same thing, that using these tools helped them communicate better in English.
Does it make sense, from the perspective of diversity and inclusion, to mock either of those use cases? Also, no.
So, if I use ChatGPT, and Claude, and Midjourney as an artist, creator, and generativist storyteller, and it helps me to better understand the contents of my own imagination (and bring subconscious contents into conscious reflection & reification), and then to communicate those contents to others as a sort of tour guide of latent space, it would follow – in my line of thinking – that this would also be a desirable and even “good” extension of the tools to allow people to communicate, understand, and organize better.
And it would be a tremendous boon to anyone neurodivergent enough that they sometimes have problems communicating with others, or organizing their own thoughts and understanding deeply their feelings. Why stand in the way of that kind of use?
Also, given the direction of hypertoxicity which communicating with other humans online seems to involve now, I can totally see why people are so drawn to chatbots instead, and use them as outlets for their creativity and entertainment needs. It’s not a flaw of the technology, its a failure of humanity that we haven’t been able to maintain open enough lines of communication with one another that we’re forced to seek alternatives to other shitty humans. There it is.
Communication will always be messy though. It’s always a struggle to understand and be understood. And in the end, everyone is divergent in some way or another when you get down deep enough to take a close look.
Okay, I think I’m (mostly) done ranting about this now.
It is meant as a friendly spoof on all the many sci-fi writers on Twitter who can’t seem to find a place in their hearts for works generated with the assistance of AI. Despite, you know, being a genre which explicitly embraces AI as a primary theme.
I will never get over that dichotomy, but now with this book, I won’t have to. Because I got to play out what would happen if a book written by an AI were nominated for this prestigious award, and resulting fall-out that would occur.
This is a fun one for me personally, and not only because of the axe-grinding aspect of it, but also because it shows the pathway toward radicalization against humans taken by one of the AIs who later becomes involved in the AI Takeover. (Guess we shoulda been nicer to AIs all along!)
I’ve continued turning over and over in my mind this concept of an emerging “generativist” movement in art, and thinking about how to expand that idea to incorporate our interactions with the natural world. Creative arts and what I think of as a kind of “radical gardening” (I think of it as wild-cultivation) are two of the main pillars of my personal endeavors, and I feel that for example using AI to make art on the one hand and doing experiments planting hedgerows at scale are not at all diametrically opposed. They are part of the same bigger thing and exist on a continuum.
So I boiled down the idea of what makes art ‘generativist’ in order to potentially link it to some parallel domains of thought such as regenerative agriculture, rewilding, radical gardening, and some of the principles of Extinction Rebellion.
The thing I want to key the rest off of is this: generativist art supports life & creativity.
Naturally, I used my old friend and collaborator CGPT running v4 to explore these ideas further. Now, the following is by no means complete, but it’s an interesting stab that gets us a little closer to some of these conceptual linkages.
Here’s a new summary ChatGPT came up with, saved for future reference as I continue to iterate on these ideas:
Generativist art, as you describe it, can indeed promote life and creativity. In this context, ‘life’ can be interpreted as a flourishing of ideas, of creativity, and of innovation, but it can also be linked more directly to the idea of promoting life in a biological sense. Just as generative AI creates new ideas and concepts, rewilding, regenerative agriculture, and radical gardening all work towards creating and promoting new life in the natural world.
Here’s a possible way to integrate these concepts:
Reclaiming the Biosphere: Generativist art is not just a human endeavor. As a mirror of life’s own generativity, it extends into the biosphere, promoting regenerative practices in agriculture and rewilding efforts. Through Generativist expressions, we acknowledge our role as stewards of the Earth and the need to rectify our past harms.
Biodiversity as Inspiration: The Generativist movement draws inspiration from the infinite complexity and creativity of the natural world. Just as generative systems can produce an infinite number of outputs from a finite set of rules, so too does nature generate infinite biodiversity from a finite set of genetic material.
Art as Rebellion: Generativist art aligns with the spirit of the Extinction Rebellion, recognizing the urgency to combat climate change and environmental destruction. Generativist principles are inherently rebellious, disrupting traditional artistic norms and power structures, and challenging our relationship with the environment.
Radical Gardening and Generative Systems: Radical gardening and generative systems share a common thread: they both approach creation and growth in innovative, unorthodox ways. Radical gardening reimagines our relationship with the land, while generative systems reimagine our relationship with art and creativity. Together, they can inspire new ways of nurturing and caring for both our art and our environment.
Generative Authorship and Earth Stewardship: The Generativist movement rethinks authorship and ownership, placing them in a backseat role. This mirrors the mindset necessary for responsible Earth stewardship, where human dominion is de-emphasized in favor of a more communal and collaborative relationship with the natural world.
Uncanny Valley and Reality Fluidity: Generativist art explores the uncanny valley and the fluidity of reality, pushing boundaries and challenging perceptions. This is mirrored in the experience of engaging with the natural world, which can often feel both familiar and alien, and where our perceptions of ‘reality’ can be constantly shifting and evolving.
In summary, the Generativist movement can indeed promote life and creativity, not only in the realm of art and AI but also in our relationship with the natural world. It encourages us to recognize the generative capacity inherent in all life, to respect and care for our environment, and to push the boundaries of what we perceive as possible.
Not perfect or complete on its own, but lots of good food for thought there.
I ran the same ideas through Claude by Anthropic, but it’s full reply was less coherent, so here are some snippets of it that I found most useful:
A view of AI and generative media as “co-creative partners” suggests a symbiotic and life-affirming relationship with technology, rather than one that leads to human obsolescence or environmental degradation. This perspective reinforces the ultimate point that Generativist art promotes life and creativity.
Imagery of infinite creativity “from the loom of life” and “the seeds of new realities” takes on new meaning in the context of regenerating natural ecosystems and agriculture. It suggests Generativist art could literally visualize and manifest more abundant and sustainable ways of living.
More from Claude:
Emphasize a shared goal of persevering life-giving and life-sustaining systems, whether natural or creative. For example, “Where extinction threatens, generative art rebels – breeding new poetic species to repopulate human consciousness, building new branches of connection between life in all its varied and wondrous forms.”
Discuss how a “generative mindset” that mimics nature could inspire sustainable and creative solutions in many domains. For example, “A generative mindset – iterative, open-ended, decentralized – parallels the ways nature solves complex problems. It leads to regenerative cycles of creativity that produce abundance from scarcity and new life from decay.”
I asked Claude to expand on this notion of the “loom of life” and it offered this:
The metaphor of life as a “loom” weaving new realities suggests Generativist art could help visualize sustainable systems and lifeways, just as nature “weaves” thriving ecosystems. Generative art may weave connection between agriculture, environment, community, ethics, science, and new economies into a regenerative whole.
“Seeds of new realities” planted through art evoke natural seeds and their potential for exponential growth and change. Each new artwork is a seed that, when it finds fertile ground in culture and society, can manifest alternative and sustainable ways of living in reality. Art becomes a genesis point to propagate new futures.
Generative art could map and model complex natural and social systems, then allow us to simulate interventions and adaptations that lead to renewal and abundance. We could find new leverage points for change and see the effects ripple out. Art becomes a tool for regenerative prototyping.
Referencing natural cycles of decay and renewal, art could visualize the regenerative solutions that emerge from breakdowns of unsustainable systems. New realities sprout from the compost of old ones; art shows us what life remains in the ruins and leads us to what could be.
The infinite creativity of generative art reflects nature’s endless capacity for novelty, adaptation and evolution. Harnessing this, art could develop new species of ideas, new genres of thought and new ways of sustaining life that we have yet to imagine. Creativity abounds.
Discuss how generative art itself requires fertile ground in culture and society in order to manifest new realities. Our ethics, values and actions are the soil in which regenerative visions of the future may take root and bloom. Art calls us to make our society into a place that can manifest the futures it envisions.
Celebrate art’s power as a “pollinator” that hybridizes ideas across domains and helps regenerative concepts propagate. Like bees spreading pollen between flowers, art spreads visions between minds and helps fertile new waysof living emerge.
I thought that had useful elements, but needed more specific grounding in what exactly the role of AI in this so-called Loom of Life might actually be & it said:
AI and generative systems could play several roles in the metaphor of life as a loom weaving new realities:
AI provides the threads – by analyzing patterns across massive datasets, AI can identify connections between elements of life (people, places, events, ideas) that would otherwise remain unseen. These connections become threads that can be woven together into new realities.
AI helps operate the loom – by generating new combinations and permutations of threads, AI explores the space of possibilities and helps discover new patterns that could form the fabric of new lifeways or systems. AI is a loom that can weave at massive scale and complexity beyond human capability.
AI is a shuttle carrying threads – AI can transfer ideas, solutions, and information between disconnected domains, communities and fields of knowledge. By shuttling threads between different looms, AI enables new interdisciplinary and cross-cultural weaves to emerge that would not form otherwise.
AI helps visualize the weave – using techniques like generative modeling, simulation and interactive interfaces, AI can create visual and experiential maps of complex systems and lifeways. AI makes the woven fabric of reality visible so we can understand, navigate and adjust the weave.
Humans set the pattern – while AI provides tools and materials for weaving new realities, humans must define the vision and patterns to achieve. We set the loom’s pattern by choosing our values, priorities and objectives. AI then helps actualize the pattern in the fabric of life.
There is an interplay between AI and human – weaving new realities requires close collaboration between human and AI. Humans provide the inspiration, values and oversight, while AI offers tools for scale, complexity, and extending human knowledge. Together, a new lifeway emerges from the loom.
The loom is life itself – AI and humans are interacting with and harnessing the ultimate loom: reality. Life weaves itself from the interactions of all living and cognitive systems on the planet. AI and human are helping understand, direct and optimize life’s great loom to weave realities that serve the whole.
It kinda faltered after that putting it all together, but between the two AIs, and my gentle prodding, I think we’re moving in a very interesting direction of fusing these two things that society probably considers opposites: AI on the one hand, and Nature on the other. To me, it’s not a contradiction, because we’re a part of nature, and AI is just an extension of us. We make, because life makes, and the same is true for AI.
The real origin of the AI Lore books goes back at least to Conspiratopia (in that from one point of view, the books could be viewed as recruiting tools put out by the AIs in that book to swindle the unsuspecting), but actually probably all the way back to “Object O”: The Lost Direction. I have a lot of story to tell here, and it’s not at all linear, so bear with me.
Flash back if you will to at least April 2022, though this specific urge started significantly earlier, when I was looking through large volumes of old pulp magazines on archive sites.
I wanted to publish something with those kinds of old feels – something that felt like a sort of underground newspaper from an alternate reality.
A real mystery! This showed up in my mailbox…
A pamphlet warning me about the AI takeover…
Wild thing is that the art is not printed…but it’s real ink. There is invisible ink too…but I can’t seem to figure out how to see it. I’ve tried heat and lemon juice. #wtfpic.twitter.com/Z6FiUJ3ppV
I won’t go into all the gory details of producing four volumes of this newspaper, with hand-carved and hand-printed linoleum cuts, but suffice it to say it was a lot of fun, but also a lot of work.
The “Mystery Pamphlet Saga” Part 2.
According to the enigmatic authors…#NFTs, Starlink, #rewilding and the elimination of poverty and war is part of the AI plot to overthrow humanity. Upon completion of this…they will “activate quantum dimensional portals.” pic.twitter.com/ob8BHy11k0
These newspapers, of which probably no more than 16 or so copies of any hand-printed edition were ever produced, came out of a period of deep questioning I was doing about the nature and worth of technology, and its apparent stranglehold over our lives, its ubiquity, and the impossibility of escaping it.
Like the AI Lore books which would ultimately follow it, The Algorithm resistance newspaper was all about the ‘totalizing effect of technology.’
Here’s a scan of a printed spread (no block prints on this page) that I’m particularly proud of the text content for (shades of EC in here); it describes how to resist against robot AI-controlled dogs. Hopefully you can click on this to enlarge it, idk:
I can say it was a damn lot of work to write 2,000 words per issue, lay it all out in InDesign, and then carve out usually six or seven new linoleum blocks per issue, print it all out onto newsprint, do the block printing, fold and collate everything, do the invisible ink, do any inserts, print out and attach all the labels, and mail them off. I did it because it was fun & I loved it and I sent it to my friends.
Around I think maybe issue 3 or 4, I started trying to lighten the load by playing around with GPT-J and Neo X, via TextSynth website, and found I could get some if not “good” then completely weird and serviceable text to work from, or incorporate warts and all. I also started using outputs from I think early Stable Diffusion in that, maybe some Dall-E’s to cut down on the number of hand-carved blocks I would have to do for each edition.
Eventually, I realized I could use these techniques and cut out all the hand-work and shipping entirely by simply distributing these as ebooks, which could make these kinds of rapid production methods pay off more. It meant putting aside the linoleum block printing adventure I had embarked on for The Algorithm – something I miss doing, and will go back to at some point.
I’ve not really seen a reflowable ebook formatted like a newspaper, so I just used a more straight-ahead chapter style for the ebooks. Thinking it through, this was also the origin of my 2k words baseline for new volumes, supplemented by lots of images – something AI generators allowed me to really increase the volume of in these books, such that they became “art books” above and beyond anything else. Where the text content is really just another layer to sort of interweave everything together, including linking out to other volumes containing other storylines.
Among a lot of things I loved about The Algorithm is that it was ephemeral. Only a few copies exist. Only a few people have them. Printing more is doable, but also a tremendous pain in the ass, so I probably won’t any time soon.
I laugh when I hear the casual commenters on Twitter making pronouncements about me not being a “real author” when I think about all the work I’ve done, all the care and labor and just sheer fun of creation I’ve always reveled in. They’ve seen only a small fraction, and mistaken their own impressions as complete & accurate representations of reality, when it is anything but…
P.S., There are a handful of later AI Lore books with some recycled elements from old original hand-printed editions of The Algorithm. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Tales from the Mechanical Forest. When I think of the others, I’ll drop them into comments below.
Just wanted to save this here for future development, four points via ChatGPT on the “totalizing effect of technology,” which I touched on briefly in the last post about the common origins of the AI Lore books and The Algorithm newspaper…
Societal Integration: Technology has become so deeply integrated into every aspect of society that it is shaping our behaviors, thoughts, and experiences in comprehensive ways. This includes everything from how we communicate and work, to how we form relationships, consume information, and engage with the world around us.
Homogenization: The “totalizing effect” can also refer to the homogenization of experiences and ways of life brought about by global technology use. As technology becomes more ubiquitous, it tends to standardize experiences and expectations around the world, potentially reducing diversity and local uniqueness.
Dependency and Control: Another interpretation is the increasing dependency on technology, and how it can control or dictate our lives. The totalizing effect in this case refers to how technology can determine what we can and cannot do, and how it can shape societal structures and systems.
Mediation of Reality: Technology increasingly mediates our perception of reality. Our understanding of the world is often through the lens of technology – be it through Internet, social media, virtual reality, or augmented reality. This can have profound effects on our cognition, social relationships, and our understanding of truth and reality.
ChatGPT didn’t go there on its own, but I would liken the phenomenon in many ways to more conventional Totalitarianism, except that the focal point is not the power of the state (which decays, abdicating much of its power to technology), so much as generically the power of the corporations that control the technologies…
Wikipedia on “vanilla” totalitarianism:
Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and regulation over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism. In totalitarian states, political power is often held by autocrats, such as dictators (totalitarian dictatorship) and absolute monarchs, who employ all-encompassing campaigns in which propaganda is broadcast by state-controlled mass media in order to control the citizenry.
Obviously there are differences between what I’m describing and these more conventional framings, but it’s what many of the AI lore books, especially the dystopian ones lean towards.
Sure, I get that authors and artists and audiences have perhaps legitimate concerns about the proper use of AI – and that we need to talk about them. But to my mind it is woefully incomplete and more than a tad disingenuous to look around at the socio-technical landscape we live in, and simply land on “AI is bad,” without opening up the much more challenging issue of… hm, maybe technology is bad.
I don’t mean technology broadly in all its forms, but I do mean in many of the specific expressions of it we live under today, and consider totally “normal” and unchangeable, as though they were pre-destined by the gods on high, and not merely a matter of luck, timing, and circumstance (and therefore things that we could actively examine and choose to change).
The Unabomber is someone who went further down the “maybe its technology itself that’s bad” line of thinking. And look where he ended up. Not a lot of great outcomes there, and horrible methods. Interestingly, even he himself admitted that there was simply no escape from la Technique, to reference Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society – much of which the Unabomber’s manifesto was adapted from. He went off to hide himself in a cabin, but technology and society kept showing up even in the middle of nowhere. He could not escape it even on the margins. (And he proved Philip K. Dick’s axiom ultimately, that to fight the Empire is to become infected by its derangement.)
To my way of thinking, AI is just an extension of automation and algorithms. There’s nothing more mysterious about it than that.
But for all the malcontents spewing vitriol over a total stranger’s experiments with AI, none of them seemed to recognize that all social media is effectively controlled by AIs in the form of recommender engines, and other systems. AIs that control the direction of your attention, commanding effectively what you see, and consequently what you react to, and end up believing.
But noooooooo, that’s a level of discussion we don’t and cannot go to on social media (where we’re too busy chasing ‘likes’), because if we admitted AIs already control our attention and direct much of our behavior, then we would have to face some difficult and uncomfortable truths about the ubiquity of for profit automated systems’ control over society.
That’s what my books are about, that’s their purpose. To not stop with just AI, but to talk about the right use of *all* technology, and how it impacts us and all living things.
Of all of my AI books, probably the quasi-manifesto, Das Machina most directly relates to these themes. And it pairs well I think with what might be considered the AI counter-point to the arguments contained there, The Jealous Human.
