Series: Hyperreality Page 7 of 20

When should I reveal that my Newsweek article was partly written by ChatGPT? Perhaps about 60%? But ChatGPT wrote it using my human-written inputs from an old Medium article on a very similar topic I posted last year.

So what percent does that make human-written, and what percent AI-generated? These things rapidly become hard to parse when you start layering and iterating like that.

Stephen Marche’s piece in the Atlantic about AI writing being like hip hop is a very good one, probably the best I’ve seen on the topic of AI-assisted writing, becomes it comes from a place of experience. He actually published a book using a combination of AI tools, as chronicled by Wired, and NYT, among others. There are a number of elements in his piece worth sampling here, in fact.

So little of how we talk about AI actually comes from the experience of using it. Almost every essay or op-ed you read follows the same trajectory: I used ChatGPT to do a thing, and from that thing, I can predict catastrophic X or industry-altering Y. Like the camera, the full consequences of this technology will be worked out over a great deal of time by a great number of talents responding to a great number of developments. But at the time of writing, almost all the conversation surrounding generative AI is imaginary, rooted not in the use of the tool but in extrapolated visions.

This is extremely relevant in AI reporting. I spoke with an editor once who informed me that “we don’t need to know how it works to write about it.” I guess that’s one way to do things when you’re dealing with a lot of volume, but it’s not the kind of analysis that I find very engaging. I much prefer Marche’s “f**k around and find out” method from the Atlantic piece.

Here he talks about how you still have to know something to use AI content generation tools well:

You need more understanding of literary style, not less. The closest analogue to this process is hip-hop. To make hip-hop, you don’t need to know how to play the drums, but you do need to be able to reference the entire history of beats and hooks. Every producer becomes an archive; the greater their knowledge and the more coherent their understanding, the better the resulting work. The creator of meaningful literary AI art will be, in effect, a literary curator.

Marche’s own AI book experiment, Death of an Author, is a shout-out to Roland Barthe’s conception of the death of the author, in that authorial intent no longer drives the show under the shadow of postmodernism. Barthes wrote:

“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing
a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-
God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none’ of them original, blend and clash. The text
is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”

Barthes also had this idea of the “scriptor” replacing the author, but I digress (read more at the link above).

To get back to Marche on creativity:

The traditional values of creative composition were entirely alive during my process. That should come as no surprise. The transition from painting to photography required a complete reevaluation of the nature of visual creativity, but the value of understanding form and color, of framing, of the ability to recognize the transience of emotion across a face or a landscape—the need to understand the materials of production and the power of your subjects—stayed. None of that is going away. None of it will ever go away.

I’ve myself noticed a kind of acceleration of my creative and mental processes, and my ability to more clearly communicate complex narrative elements both in text, and writing, and in combinations of the two. Using AI has, effectively, made me a better artist producing & evaluating things on an entirely other level than I was before. And it hasn’t, say, stopped me from breaking out my sketchbook and drawing, or what have you. I can do any of those other expressions of art any time I want to. AI art isn’t some monster stealing things from me. Or, in my opinion, from other people – though I respect that opinions differ on this topic.

On the contrary, I’ve been able to bring incredible light to dark places in my subconscious through using AI tools, & managed to make loose imaginings into tangible things I can share with others. Yesterday, I input the text of an almost 80K word book, my first novel (“hand” written), The Lost Direction, into Claude by Anthropic. Claude’s context window is supposed to top out somewhere around 75K words (100,000 tokens is what I’ve read – whatever that means in ordinary human reality…). In a few hours – though its responses times were SUUUPER slow in yesterday’s experiment for each query – I was able to output over a dozen short stories of decent quality that are spin-off tales about different characters and situations from the original novel.

It lets me make my imaginary worlds that much richer. It’s a force multiplier, and I have gone from being a foot-soldier to being the commander of allied forces. That is for me the scale of advancement that these technologies, properly understood & rightly applied, can bring.

Also from Marche’s piece:

If you make bad art with a new tool, you just haven’t figured out how to use the tool yet. Also, tools are just tools…

Anyway, I’ll close with that. (for now)

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about, what fundamentally is “dystopian,” and one possible idea I’ve landed on is that it has to do with the accumulation of errors within a society. Wrongs that are not righted. Mistakes never corrected. And that large scale anti-phenomenon just building and building, cascading on to the next set of mistakes and shortcomings and little gaps and big imperfections. And that lack, wanting, wrongness, getting passed along, hand to hand, mouth to ear, heart to heart.

Dystopia is distinct from post-apocalypse as a genre, because the system might be permanently broken, but it never ends. It cannot end. It is what is, and whatever will be. There is no hope of change, only surrender, or brief flashes of resistance leading never to overthrow, never to real change. The wheel grinds on and on and on.

It’s interesting seeing conversations develop around my AI lore books, on Newsweek, Reddit, and elsewhere. There seems to be a general malaise about the approach I’m taking, which I can empathize with. But in fact for me, the approach itself IS a central component of the greater story I feel I’m telling, and a participant in, LARPing.

Dystopia is the product, I guess you could say here.

As a writer and artist first and foremost, I can certainly feel myself falling into the vast abyss and chasm and chaos of technology and of society mediated through technology. Only seeing each other through these small strange mirrors, addicted to the sounds of notifications. Dystopia resonates with us because we’re already living in a time which shares all its characteristics, no matter what side of the spectrum you sit politically.

I’ve always liked this quote from Philip K. Dick, from VALIS, that “the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.” I don’t consider my work divinely inspired, but all true art is a striving towards a something. I do see my work as giving a place within something that’s considered by many to be a “trash stratum” of art, things that tread the line between the uncanny valley and the reality-fluid, things where AIs were incorporated intentionally in a dystopian way to comment about the reality of our current and our coming dystopia. (Probably the best more conventional entry point into that part of my fictional multiverse would be Conspiratopia., btw)

It’s this that I’m seeing left out in the reactions to the Newsweek piece. But it’s the story only I can tell, I suppose…

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?

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.

Enjoying this editorial cartoon & commentary by Phie Wei in the Scot Scoop regarding my AI lore books. Wei writes:

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.

Among the hundreds of people bad-mouthing my use of AI to write over 100 sci fi books (which I never claimed to be “novels,” btw) on Twitter, I did see one person raise the more interesting to me question of: would Philip K. Dick have used AI to write, had he had it available to him as we do today?

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 writing​¹​.

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 did​²​.

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

In fact, he gets even closer to describing “latent space” in his Exegesis here:

  [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.

Nominated for a Hugo is book #103 in the AI Lore books series.

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!)

Is it really just that easy to get ChatGPT to say basically anything you want, and make up alternative realities – just like that?

All signs point to yes!