Examining the blending of fact & fiction in online, augmented, and hyperreal environments.
Super excited this full-length version of my interview with Milo Rossi came out finally. It is so far the only long format video interview with me that goes deeply into my artwork using AI.
You can also watch his much much longer debunk video here, which part of the above interview plays a small element in a much bigger saga.
This one has been on the docket for a while, but I haven’t had a chance to post it. First, I had to figure out who the hell Ai Weiwei is. Apparently he is a big deal:
A lot of the artwork actually does look pretty interesting, which makes me look at this quote I have been sitting on with new eyes. It’s from this Guardian article:
Ai Weiwei said: “I’m sure if Picasso or Matisse were still alive they will quit their job. It’d be just impossible for them to still think [the same way].”
He is talking about the automatism (automaticism?) of easily reproduced images, set up in the preceding quote as his reaction to being asked about the issues around copyrighted works being used to train AI:
“That’s not a problem. I think that kind of art should [have died] a long time ago,” before he criticised art teaching that focuses on creating “realistic” images. “It takes AI a second to do it. So that only means what they have learned very often is meaningless.”
I’m still learning about his art, but I think I can see where he is coming from, even if I don’t agree with all of the assertions. It seems like his art is very rooted in the physicality of objects, artifacts actual places, the processes that got us there. It’s very true that this type of art is not within the reach or realm of the possible for generative AI right now. Eventually it will be. And I think that his point is that artists are chasing that edge beyond the edge. Artists are by nature nomadic in that respect, going to the next fertile place, and the next. Where they pioneer AI will inevitably follow.
I’ve been thinking more of AI lately as collective intelligence rather than “artificial.” I think we have not got a good collective understanding of what artificial even means in the first place. Instead, I think of AI more as collective intelligence, programmatically reified. It is, essentially, humans looking at humans looking at humans looking at humans.
There is actually an Ai Weiwei piece that is I think a marble carving of a surveillance camera. (Here’s some commentary on that, I haven’t gone deeply into it and am doing research on the fly.) Whatever his point in that piece was, my point feels like… we’ve spent the last decades surrounding ourselves with these digital eyes, watching, looking, recording, streaming, tweeting. Of course now, all those watching eyes have learned how we are, what we want. And they’re doing more than just watching: they’re talking back. They’re directing. They’re molding.
I almost forgot to respond to the original quote, at least more directly than the above rambling. I agree that if Matisse and Picasso had generative AI at their disposal, they would have had to rethink their approach to image making. But that’s what it forces every artist to do.
Generative AI is like a machine gun that shoots images.
Here’s that as an image in Ideogram AI:
Like he said, it takes AI a second to do it. I didn’t even have to pay for it on the free plan. Does that make it meaningless? Both yes and no at the same time. The sheer fact that *is* meaningless on the one hand is what gives it meaning on the other. But the act of writing & reading become married when working with generative AI: to look and explore is to create, to leave a trail.
The truth is we’re a culture (mega-culture?), a planet, awash in meaningless images. Constantly swimming in a sea of information trash. It’s why I block images by default in my web browsing, unless there’s a specific exception when I need or want them.
I don’t like being always shot at with image guns either (des armes iconographiques)- especially ones whose quality, source, ownership, agenda, etc. are opaque and outside my agency. But you cannot sit here and tell me that if Picasso had access to generative AI, he would not have stayed up all night going nuts with it? I’m absolutely sure he would have.
I saw a quote recently that said he made upwards of 20,000 artworks over the course of his life. Then, looking for confirmation, I found other sources suggesting more like 50,000. Then another estimate that pushed it upwards to like 147,000. I believe it, but who knows. But no way he wouldn’t have used gen AI, and of course absolutely it would have made him re-orient himself to his art and thinking about everything. It’s obviously what he did throughout his career, continually changing, reacting.
Incidentally, check out this absolutely insane 1949 Life magazine photo series of Picasso painting with light. It is literally the most futuristic looking shit I have ever seen – full on 75 years later. Incredible. I’m just saying, dude would have devoured and destroyed generative AI.
There is an aptly titled and cool-sounding exhibit at the Musee Picasso in Paris, “Iconophage” – image eater. Here’s a French podcast recording I listened to about it the other day. This article on Lens Culture touches a little bit on Picasso’s relationship with photography:
The most famous visual artist of the 20th century, Picasso was also the most photographed. Thanks to the camera, his striking features became iconic, recognized the world over. Yet this phenomenon was not a mere by-product of celebrity; his own photographic practice set the precedent. Picasso engaged with photography and photographers in myriad ways, starting from his early days in Paris and continuing through the last years of his life. He used the camera to capture life in the studio and at home, to try out new ideas, to study his works and document their creation, and to shape his own image as an artist at work.
Later in that original Guardian article I quoted at top, they get into more of Ai Weiwei’s concerns around AI, which I frankly agree with, and much of the AI Lore books series is centered around thematically.
But he did signal a warning about the future if artificial intelligence becomes too powerful and relied upon by countries around the world.
He is fearful AI could create a society similar to the Third Reich, where there is only one “right” answer to the big questions. “For me it is very much like what happened in the 1930s in Germany, or 1960s in China with the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “You all have one ideology, one past, and the one so-called ‘correctness’. This is dangerous.”
That same sentiment is echoed here in yet another Guardian interview with him:
But he is highly sceptical about artificial intelligence and where it might be leading us: “What you get is all the mediocre ideas mixed into something like a fusion, where there is no character and you avoid all mistakes. That is really dangerous to humanity, because we are all equal but we are all created differently. The difference is the beauty. Art, literature, poetry design – they are rooted in human mistakes, misjudgments, or character differences if you prefer. They should be dangerous and sexy and unpredictable. That’s totally against the AI world.”
In fact, in the course of making just that one iconographic machine gun image above, I had my prompt blocked on one site, Leonardo AI. I asked for something like a person whose head is a machine gun that is shooting out images. For that model, those words are apparently just too dangerous. Therefore, the end user is not allowed to imagine them. The gun that shoots images cannot be used to create images of guns that shoot images. There’s some deep and dangerous irony in there…
This excellent interview with me by Ugo Loumé just came out in the Paris literary publication, Actualitté (archived). Super excited about this coverage, as it is the first to actually look at the *art* in what I’m doing, and not merely at the surface issues. Huge thanks to Ugo for being so attentive and accurate in his coverage.
The French print version of The Quatria Conspiracy is now available from Typophilia for global shipping. You can read my notes on the French edition here.
Uncel is the 119th installment in the AI Lore books, which were recently featured in a Paris literary publication, Actualitté. Uncel follows the continuing adventures of the character/narrator sketched out in Relaxatopia, Anxietopia, and Conspiratopia. (These are also all available with some bonus items at a discount as part of the Topia Collection here; only 5 more copies of that bundle will ever be sold, btw.)
Uncel is the first new AI Lore book I’ve put together since January, which is when I started working with my French publisher, Typophilia. Now that the French print editions are starting to launch (starting with The Quatria Conspiracy), it felt like a good moment to go back to some new work.
Not having access to Midjourney anymore has also been a contributing factor in the slowdown (though, at the same time, it also inspired me to go back to painting, which has been really rewarding). The other AI image generators sometimes leave a lot to be desired, but I managed to put together an art set of 65 images in this book using Dalle3, Ideogram, Stable Diffusion and Playground AI. Possibly a Flux and a Leonardo or two might have snuck in, but I didn’t keep careful track of which are which, because really who cares.
The book’s title, Uncel, is a play on “incel” or involuntary celibate, someone who doesn’t have sex – not because they choose that, but because they can’t get any. Uncel imagines a world several steps beyond that, where the protagonist doesn’t even know what sex is. All they can see of their reproductive organs is a sort of blurry digitized haze, because they lack the premium subscription plans which would give them access to this level of user experience. The book is kind of a farce about the impossibility of getting “satisfaction” of several kinds, including through elaborate interactions with (possibly automated) customer service agents which go round and round in circles, ending in psychosis and dissolution – both perfectly logical terminal points in the advanced stage of the Kali Yuga depicted in this book. It’s bleak, but I like to think it’s a “fun” bleak!
Here’s a more vanilla blurb from ChatGPT:
In a future where life is governed by subscription plans, one user struggles to access an elusive upgrade: the experience of sex. Amid blurry visions and endless customer service loops, they question what it means to truly connect in a world where everything is controlled.
Incidentally, I don’t think I really used ChatGPT to help write any of this one. This book makes use heavily of Mistral, via Textsynth completions. There’s probably more to say here, but I’m just getting back into the swing of new books again. So the most important thing is just to get this one out the door and start the next. Enjoy!
This came out yesterday, via the Hollywood Reporter. Some authors filed a class action against Anthropic, and for some reason thought it would be a good idea to use me in their arguments:
The authors also argue that Anthropic is depriving authors of book sales by facilitating the creation of rip-offs. When Kara Swisher released Burn Book earlier this year, Amazon was flooded with AI-generated copycats, according to the complaint. In another instance, author Jane Friedman discovered a “cache of garbage books” written under her name.
These fraudsters, the lawsuit says, turn to Claude to generate such content. “It was reported that a man named Tim Boucher had ‘written’ 97 books using Anthropic’s Claude (as well as OpenAI’s ChatGPT) in less than year, and sold them at prices from $1.99 to $5.99,” the complaint states. “Claude could not generate this kind of long-form content if it were not trained on a large quantity of books, books for which Anthropic paid authors nothing.”
I take exception to both The Hollywood Reporter’s characterization of me, and the lawsuits. I sent THR a rebuttal of the claim that I am a “fraudster,” as anyone who has read this blog or seen my many interviews and media appearances would know that I have been completely up front about what I’m doing.
There’s a great deal more to be said here…
Here is the court document where my AI Lore books are referenced.
Big thanks to Thomas Claburn at The Register for giving me the opportunity to set the record straight in the media in this full-length interview (archived) regarding my wrongfully being dragged into the Anthropic lawsuit as a bystander.
Also happy to have had a chance to give a sort of stream of consciousness brain dump of my latest thinking around AI art & creativity.
From the Archives:
Discovered lately while ego-surfing that my work was mentioned in a scholarly journal, by a PhD candidate, Tace McNamara, from SensiLab (which sounds cool) at Monash University in Australia.
The article is entitled, “Artificial Intelligence and the Emergence of Co-Creativism in Contemporary Art” and you can see the info page there, and the PDF here.
From the intro, regarding the term Co-Creativism:
This era transcends the traditional confines of the art world, signifying a transition from a unidirectional model, where one entity produces and others consume, to a more dynamic, interactive, and collaborative model involving multiple contributors in the creation process.
Co-Creativism is defined by a symbiotic relationship between humans and AI, with both entities contributing to and shaping the creative process. The rise of human and AI co-creation is not only a new approach to artistic creation but stems from broader societal changes. AI technology is becoming an intrinsic part of our daily lives and the co-created art birthed from this period mirrors our
evolving dependency on AI technology.
Interesting direction! Here is the main passage where my early 2023 artist’s statement is referenced (I need to write a new one! I feel like my thinking has grown a lot since then on these things).
Blurred Reality and Fiction
In the realm of Co-Creativism, the distinction between what is real and what is fake is not just blurred – it is fundamentally questioned, deconstructed, and reassembled. In the artist statements themes such as questioning truth and the blurring boundaries of real and fake were evident. Artists also commonly referred to reality (Maat & Lancel 2018; Maurice, 2023), whether it be an uncertain reality (Denney 2023), alternative reality (Anadol 2019), recurring reality (Tö yrylä n.d.), dream reality (Kollias Interactive Composition 2023), hyperreality (Boucher 2023), a complex-layered reality (Suzuki n.d.) or a hyperconsensus reality (Boucher 2023). Artists also mentioned truth (Andrew 2020; Ouchhh 2022; Zhang & Luo 2019) and contrasted the real and the imagined (Rosenbaum 2023; Shpanin 2022; O’Donnell, n.d.). All these concepts grouped together to form a common questioning of reality and fiction which sees Co-Creativist artists as less concerned with adhering to a singular version of ‘truth’, and more involved in challenging and redefining it.
I’m happy to be included in that group, and have my work & intent referenced accurately for once. And later on, one other reference:
The recurrent theme of the future appeared to permeate contemporary artistic endeavours revealing an intrinsic desire to peer into the nebulous realms of the future, to predict and harness its possibilities. Artist referred to the speculation (Boucher 2023; Chung 2020, Geck 2023; Stern n.d.; Moreton-Griffiths 2023), whether dystopian or utopian. They spoke of envisioning (Anadol 2019; Dinkins 2020; Fagioli 2023), foreseeing (Lacey 2019; Denney 2023), and imagining possibilities (Andrew 2020; Hautamäki 2021; Moreton-Griffiths 2023) and the future (Bogart 2022; Chang 2018; Rosenbaum 2023; McCarthy 2022).
AI, in this context, becomes a prophetic lens, and a visionary tool that artists are using to bridge our present realities with imaginative possibilities.
Pretty cool stuff. Some other elements in this paper remind me of my recent interview in The Register, actually. Maybe hidden in there are the seeds of this year’s “Artist Statement.” Maybe I can issue it on goatskin vellum this year, with a wax stamp of some kind.
Having heard this complaint about my AI Lore books for about the thousandth time (not an exaggeration), I think I might be finally ready to concede that – in some way – my books are indeed “not real books.”
What I mean by that is that the format of an ebook (or print book) merely serves as a vehicle to deliver what amount to complex narrative networks. To quote Wikipedia on the matter:
A networked narrative, also known as a network narrative or distributed narrative, is a language partitioned across a network of interconnected authors, access points, and/or discrete threads. It is not driven by the specificity of details; rather, details emerge through a co-construction of the ultimate story by the various participants or elements. […]
Networked narratives can be seen as being defined by their rejection of narrative unity.[1] As a consequence, such narratives escape the constraints of centralized authorship, distribution, and storytelling.
Let’s put it another way, perhaps even more simply…
My books consist of sets of reference points, some of them textual, some of them image-based. The reference points are arranged in a certain order within each book, and also include hyperlinks out (physically encoded into the ebooks, as well as non-coded conceptual or thematic ones) to reference points contained in other books.
Let’s have a quick refresher on network topologies:
Instead of nodes in a network, think of them as nodes in a narrative, which consists of nodes and their relationships (arrangement) with other nodes. What’s a “node” in this context? Non-exhaustively, we could say it is something like entities (persons, places, things), events, etc. It’s a thing with some substance in a story.
Most conventional fiction could probably be represented as a pretty simple linear (line) topology. That is, you deliver one “reference point” or node, one after another, and the reader passes through them in the path laid out linearly by the author. Perhaps a choose your own adventure book might be mapped out to resemble something like a tree or a mesh, where the user chooses from among multiple pre-defined paths and branches to arrive at their own experience. And maybe a dictionary or encyclopedia might look like a “fully connected” network topology.
My books consist of kind of all of these smooshed together into a hybrid narrative network topology. Each book is a narrative node in itself, composed of many other sub-nodes and relationships. And then the reader traverses the nodes in basically any order, composing their own experience as they go along. This is not the way that I think of most other fiction books working usually. And above and beyond anything I’ve done using AI, I think this model, this structure, is what sets my books apart in the end.
If this is hard to parse, let’s pull in someone else’s diagram to help illustrate. This comes from a paper on ResearchGate, which has a set of illustrations, of which is this one, called “Narrative Network Graphs: examples of two far-right narratives in 2016.” Here’s the picture, which seems to represent narrative elements mapped as a visualization of relationships and proximity:
This is kind of a “latent space” approach to narratology, I think. And I suspect it might be somewhat aligned with how AIs “think” about narratives (I don’t think they actually think, however). When you invoke a narratively-flavored output from a generative AI service, it takes all your tokens that you input, finds the others laying around in the neighborhood that are likely to be related, and spits them back out. It outputs them in a linear order (A –> B –> C), but my hunch is that this linear order is not actually intrinsic to how AIs approach fulfillment of these tasks. It doesn’t care much about what the order is.
Humans, however, do seem to care a great deal about linear progressions through time within narrative, which Kurt Vonnegut’s bit on the 8 types of stories (of which he only depicts a few – see the rest here) ably illustrates:
I suspect the reason AI often crafts “shitty” narrative progressions is that 1) it is not intrinsically concerned with the order of presentation, only that nodes and their relationships are represented, and 2) it has no lived emotional experience, so has to make guesses as to what outputs ought to trigger which emotional states in humans.
The thing is, though, I like that weird quality, the Uncanny Valleyness of it all. The fact that it struggles and sputters with narrative unity. I like that AI currently does NOT actually fundamentally understand what makes a good, rich, and interesting story to humans. That failure, if interrogated well and empathetically, can actually be terrible fascinating all on its own. But it doesn’t make good “regular” books – yet. That day will come though.
So for me ultimately, what I want to say is that the outward form of an ebook or printed book is “fine” for me for now, because it is a common, well-understood, and more or less efficient means to distribute chains of reference points, or networked narrative nodes and their relationships. The same underlying nodes could be presented in countless other ways (lists, image sets, videos, immersive VR experiences, endless others), and over time I hope I have the opportunity to explore those other directions of AI-assisted storytelling, and where they intersect with “The Book” and where they can transcend it.
While I’m on this topic, here is an – I think – previously unreleased PDF document I made some six years ago (2018!), back when generative AI was barely a twinkle in Bill Gates’ eye. It predates any of the Quatria books, and it absolutely predates the AI Lore books, focusing more on Early Clues LLC, and its many exalted offshoots.
Even though it predates all of those things, it gives a fairly accurate (as these things go) “skeleton key” to understanding the rest of my extremely messy and convoluted networked narratives. Skimming around in this diagram cloud, I think, also gives a good visceral experience of what it’s like to try to navigate the stories that pass through all my other books – where the reader/viewer is largely left to their own devices to make sense of it all.
I’ve been following conspiracy and fringe culture stuff since the late 90s (and paranormal stuff going back to grade school library days). Even ran a blog covering related topics for close to 10 years back when blogs were still a thing. As the years have gone by, these things have gotten much worse in their content, much more extreme, much more violent. It’s gotten a lot less “fun” to casually follow them.
But to me it still seems somehow necessary to be able to peek beyond the walls of what my own thinking might be, or what society considers “normal.” Especially since for more and more people, conspiracy stuff is just now a totally normal totally every day part of life.
I’ve written in the past too about how because of that ubiquity, we can no longer really afford to just completely dismiss these vast swathes of people and say they are simply “crazy” and try to keep them out of the public discourse. It requires some major acts of reconciliation in order to be able to integrate and move forward.
Anyway, all that is a preface to say I stopped reading r/conspiracy subreddit because it’s just gotten too dumb, too full of wide-eyed screenshots of tweets, and one liner joke reactions (essentially all of Reddit, I know). It’s just simply not a source of novel or interesting information anymore. Instead, I’ve switched to occasionally skimming a possibly even trashier conspiracy forum called Godlike Productions (GLP) which to me is famous for having an absurd “contract” you have to tick a checkmark and accept every time you read it, filled with legalese that is most likely not legal in any place except their fantasy jurisdictions. But what does that matter when you have exceptional bits of content like this:
Who is going to stop them. The Brain initiative has become the AI Brain initiative designed to replicate your consciousness, destroy anything original about you, and replace you with artificial intelligence in your gene edited bio suit. You won’t exist anymore. Your consciousness just a memory in the universe while some AI clone in a hive mind invades your gene edited body.
Worse, even if you say no to gene editing, it’ll be sprayed on you. It’ll be in your food. It’ll be in your water supply.
Your bio suit will eventually be converted. Spike protein is indestructible. The faster you submit to your death, the happier your AI clone will be.Think you can protect yourself from the massive devastation to humanity. Your coworker will shed on you, your family will shed on you.
All is lost already. This is the end of humanity as we know it.
It won’t just affect humans, it is all mammals.The more I scream and yell about the truth of the 4th Industrial Revolution, the more they come after me.
I am a targeted individual for speaking the truth and sounding the alarm.I also have assets that these bozos thought they could just come in and steal because I would either be dead or gene edited controlled.
Well neither happened. I am still alive and still not gene edited.
Enjoy ze bugz
There are two dual streams in myself that things like this titillates, one is the ex-content moderator who sort of revels in deciphering horror-shows and figuring out what should be done about them (in this case, nothing, I’m not a moderator on that forum, thankfully!). The other is as a sci fi writer, which imo, the person above ought to consider becoming, because as off-the-wall as what they’re saying might be, it’s also very interesting.
I’ve also been thinking lately about the trend towards “decentralization.” And as much as crypto BS has poisoned that word for me, I’ve been considering it in terms of decentralized epistemology, or put more simply, decentralizing “truth.” Yes, facts exist. And some principles we must hold onto societally because they are good ideas – or if they are not, then they are at least better than all the bad ideas floating around out there. Or so we must keep on telling ourselves in order to maintain the status quo for just a little bit longer.
But in an increasingly technologically-mediated hyperreality, where it is now becoming a trivial task that takes seconds to make “photos” of things that never happened, we are not ready for what happens next, as Sarah Jeong recently wrote about in The Verge regarding AI photo manipulation tools now being included out of the box in Google phones. Sure, it’s “scary” on the one hand, but I tend to think that a pluralistic decentralized approach to knowledge is here to stay, like it or not. So we better get used to it, and find ways to adapt and make life still livable, singly or together, gene-edited, or not! Cause what other choice do we have at this point, frankly?
I’m not on Facebook, so I miss out on a lot of the inanity that goes on over there. But someone posted this into a thread about how people on FB put up variations of this on their profile, with the idea that somehow doing so magically shields them from the “evil eye.”
For those of you that do not understand this posting, Facebook is now a publicly traded entity. Anyone can infringe on your right to privacy once you post on this site. It is recommended that you and other members post a similar notice to this or you may copy and paste this one. Protect yourself, this is now a publicly traded site.
PRIVACY NOTICE: Warning – any person and/or institution and/or Agent and/or Agency of any governmental structure including but not limited to the United States Federal Government also using or monitoring/using this website or any of its associated websites, you do NOT have my permission to utilize any of my profile information nor any of the content contained herein including, but not limited to my photos, and/or the comments made about my photos or any other “picture” art posted on my profile. You are hereby notified that you are strictly prohibited from disclosing, copying, distributing, disseminating, or taking any other action against me with regard to this profile and the contents herein. The foregoing prohibitions also apply to your employee, agent, student or any personnel under your direction or control.
As someone else pointed out, this is sort of like the ‘sovereign citizen’ or free man of the land variation of this in Canada, but applied to a digital context. Here is a Snopes article and an older CBS News piece on related types of notices people put up onto FB, hoping against hope they have some kind of real meaningful legal effect. Perhaps this is kind of a folk hyperreality applied to law – it’s a fan-fiction of what wish law were: easy to understand, straightforward, anyone can do it from the comfort of their own home.
Even if the above quoted notice is somewhat comical in a certain light, I certainly feel for people posting things like this. With the legal system at the level of complexity it is, and the lack of real control most users have when it comes to corporate-owned locked-down platforms, it’s only logical for people to try to assert some kind of control over their experience, and their personal data. The problem, really, is that it is not effective control. It’s illusory, and then they continue feeding the very beast they are aiming not to.
The only way, it seems like, is to opt out. To not use in the first place. To delete, discard, destroy, disconnect your accounts on these services. But the problem is, you still cannot really get out of it. There’s still a shadow profile of you out there in the ether…
In the future (present) we’re converging on, there is no “opt out.” If you even have the “right to object” in the first place, it usually amounts to exactly nothing because there is no contact form, no help email address, no one reviewing your appeal, whatever. It’s just you in a room arguing with a chatbot, forever and ever and ever.
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