Funny how some things slip through the cracks until you notice them only much later… Apparently I was directly referenced in Sam Altman’s Questions for the Record, which were written responses following his US Senate testimony, dated here June 22, 2023. I’ll excerpt the whole section:
[QUESTION]
1. Training data is crucial to foundational models like GPT-4, where content such as news, art, music, and research papers are used to create and refine AI systems, largely material aggregated from the internet. This content represents the labor, livelihoods, and careers of artists, experts, journalists, and scientists. How should we make sure AI systems respect, acknowledge, and compensate the labor of individuals whose work is used to train AI models?
[REPLY]
Ensuring that the creator economy continues to be vibrant is an important priority for OpenAI. Writers, artists, composers and other creators have contributed immeasurably to societies throughout the history of civilization, and they are a vital part of American society and the American economy today. OpenAI is actively engaged in discussions with a wide variety of creators and content owners, geared toward finding mutually beneficial opportunities for creators and technology providers. Those discussions include a recognition by all parties that the technology is still in a nascent stage, and many creators continue to experiment with AI tools to assist in their creation of new works. A few examples:
Karen Cheng, an artist who uses OpenAI’s image generation tool to prompt the AI system to generate creative imagery overlaid to the rhythm of music in the background, created this DALL-E “music video.
Tim Boucher, a science fiction writer, has used a combination of AI tools to write a series of books in a volume driven format that previously would not have been possible.
Paul McCartney is using AI to create a final Beatles album.
Well, I’m at least impressed here that I upstaged McCartney somehow. And I appreciate this phrasing of a “volume driven format” instead of the less friendly “cheap book content” phrase included in the authors’ lawsuit against Anthropic.
However, I can confirm that when they say, “OpenAI is actively engaged in discussions with a wide variety of creators,” that so far I have not been one of them. I wouldn’t mind being one, though, I suppose. I am literally using their products at least a dozen times per day… If you’re reading, shoot me an email!
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.
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.
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.”
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…
I’ve been following along with the comments viewers left on my full-length interview with Milo Rossi. A few people are into it, but by and large the comments are highly negative. I get it. But at the same time, I’ve heard it all before a thousand times. I’ve literally gotten so many negative responses to my work over the past year that I have programmatically analyzed them for trends, and extracted actionable feedback.
None of the people who comment on the video have actually engaged with the content of the work that I do, only these artifacts of its outward form. None of those people, consequently, have understood that my art is actually by and large against AI – or, moreover, the risks of what happens when we willingly hand over our agency to large companies and their tantalizing products. (I even have a book about how “AI is theft” – even if I don’t completely agree with that perspective.)
But I don’t expect people to dive deep in these circumstances. The interview, if nothing else, is a springboard, a jumping off point for people to go down the many rabbit-holes of what the work actually consists of, its structure, and my thinking around it. I welcome hearing other people’s feedback; I’m just looking for those kernels within it which I haven’t already heard before. That’s what drives me to new places, and pushes the exploration forward.
I just wanted to settle here once and for all, though, one point which seems to consistently get challenged in comments. AI art is transformation not reproduction of its source training data. That’s part of what makes it Fair Use under US law. (I recognize that other jurisdictions have other conceptions around this – in France for example.)
And even if it were reproduction, reproduction and very close study and analysis is a critical part of art and the education of an artist. Doing my own master copy of a Matisse painting recently really drove this home for me. Artists *need* to be able to copy. That includes copying using technologies other than the technology of a paintbrush on canvas, which is just one of many available to artists today.
Also, I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: the job of artists is to make art, not seek permission or approval of others. Our job is to listen, to be attentive, to study, to watch, to ask questions, to search for answers, to share our search, to share our questions, to share what we find to have conversations, ask better questions, make better discoveries, and on and on and on. Our job is to do, to make mistakes, to make “bad” art among the good, and trust that somewhere along the line throughout the process, the rest will get sorted out if we’re authentic about the chase.
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 250 year old quote seems entirely relevant to today’s debates around AI art, via Wikipedia page on Eclecticism in Art:
In the 18th century, Sir Joshua Reynolds, head of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, was one of the most influential advocates of eclecticism. In the sixth of his famous academical Discourses (1774), he wrote that the painter may use the work of the ancients as a “magazine of common property, always open to the public, whence every man has a right to take what materials he pleases” (Reynolds 1775, 26).
I was just looking around for examples of famous conspiracy theories that originated in Quebec. I believe that Project Blue Beam is likely to be one, in that Serge Monast seems to have been its inventor/discoverer (depending on your point of view). I didn’t find anything terribly new or interesting, so I asked Perplexity, which at first gave some really general results pulled from news sources of occurrences of conspiracy theory + Quebec in body text.
Then I started asking it about Blue Beam, and then finally about the Quatria Theory, since – technically – it largely originated in Quebec. I asked Perplexity in such a way that was pretty leading, something to the effect of “Didn’t the Quatria Theory originate in Quebec too?”
And it spit out this nicely polished LLM hallucination that I just adore:
You’re correct, the Quatria Theory or Quatria Conspiracy also originated in Quebec. Here are the key details about this conspiracy theory:
The Quatria Theory/Conspiracy
The Quatria Theory/Conspiracy is a Quebec-based conspiracy theory that claims the Earth is actually made up of four spheres or realms instead of just one. It was first proposed in the 1990s by Yvon Boudreau, a Quebec author and conspiracy theorist. According to Boudreau’s writings, the four realms are:
The physical/material realm we inhabit
An antimatter realm
A realm of pure energy
A realm of pure thought/consciousness
Boudreau claimed these four realms coexist and interact, with the higher realms able to influence and control the lower, material realm through psychic powers and advanced technology unknown to most humans. The theory alleges that a secret society of powerful individuals has knowledge of and access to these higher realms, allowing them to manipulate world events through mind control, weather manipulation, and other paranormal means in pursuit of a New World Order agenda.
While never gaining mainstream acceptance, the Quatria Theory found a following in some New Age and conspiracy circles in Quebec in the 1990s and 2000s. It blended ideas from quantum physics, ancient mythology, and various conspiracy theories about secret societies like the Illuminati. However, the theory has been widely dismissed by the scientific community as pseudoscience lacking any empirical evidence.
Critics have labeled it a complicated fantasy concocted to give a veneer of plausibility to long-standing conspiracy narratives about powerful cabals controlling humanity. So in summary, while not as well-known as theories like Project Blue Beam, the Quatria Conspiracy was another notable conspiracy originating from Quebec that attempted to merge fringe science, mysticism, and New World Order paranoia into an overarching narrative. Its creator Yvon Boudreau was an influential conspiracy theorist in the Quebec conspiracy milieu.
Reading this confused even me (a good sign), I was for a second like, wait, it’s actually Yvon Boudreau who invented this in the 90s?? I literally googled it just to make sure haha. But how can I know Google isn’t lying to me too? Top of the line AI technology, right here! What a cool future…
The book is 96 pages in A6 format (about the size of a cell phone, give or take – I wouldn’t know cause I don’t have one). From the publisher’s website:
Synopsis
Au cœur de notre passé lointain, enfoui sous les strates du temps, se cache un secret extraordinaire : l’existence d’une civilisation maritime oubliée, Quatria. Originaire d’un Antarctique paradisiaque, jadis havre de paix verdoyant, les énigmatiques quatriens dominaient les technologies de l’énergie cymatique et du voyage dimensionnel. Vivant en symbiose avec l’ensemble du vivant, ils ont bâti une société harmonieuse, jusqu’à ce qu’une série de cataclysmes planétaires d’ampleur inouïe vienne fragiliser leur civilisation, puis l’anéantir. Leur existence, dissimulée avec soin au cours des millénaires, est aujourd’hui révélée au grand jour pour la première fois, dévoilant un pan oublié de l’histoire de l’humanité.
Note de l’éditeur
Les Livres Mobiles sont une offre spéciale des éditions Typophilia, qui explorent les limites de la narration et de l’hyperréalité en utilisant conjointement les intelligences artificielles génératives et la créativité humaine. Dans le confort d’un petit livre de la taille de votre téléphone portable, voyez-les comme des livres anti-numériques.
It’s fun to see this come to fruition as I wrote this book some three years ago or so, before I started seriously exploring how I could integrate AI into my writing. That was a practice & also technology that would only mature about a year later when I started the AI Lore books in earnest.
So, technically, the original version of this book has no AI-assisted writing, which is another reason why it is numbered as #0 in this series. It’s the precursor which paints in broad strokes on the canvas of the mind using as colors other popular conspiracy theories, and dribs and drabs of legends and “cool ideas” picked up from here and there, and glued together into the Frankenstein monster that is the Quatria Conspiracy.
Much of it revolves around something I’ve been calling the Quatria Theory, which I made numerous weird bad AI videos for over the past few years, and here is just one short one to kick off the conversation:
The Quatria Theory posits, in short, that a prehistoric lost seafaring culture spread all around the globe from its base in Antarctica millions of years ago when it was a green paradise near the Equator.
Sounds far fetched? Well, enough people seem to have taken it to be true that multiple media outlets have taken it upon themselves to fact-check that related AI-images I made in this vein (for subsequent books) were not in fact depicting this very same lost civilization. OR WERE THEY AND IT’S ALL A BIG COVER UP??
Those are exactly the kinds of sometimes serious sometimes stupid rabbitholes that this book and the series where I used AI to elaborate on a lot of what started in this book pushes the reader into. It’s… not intended to be super serious writing. It is trashy, pulpy, throwaway, and fun in the way those things can be fun.
The original English version exists still as an ebook only. There are no images included in that version (though I might do an update sometime), but the French print-only version does have images. I’m not sure offhand how many, but I would call it a “copious” quantity. Many of the images are very pulp inspired. Like this example that I love:
These were all done in Dalle, asking for images in pulp sci fi styles. And it really nails some of them. The art in this book stylistically is really different than in most of the later volumes, which are generally more in the photographic direction (though not all). And that’s fine, because each book is its own reflection of conditions of its making. They are in a way their own meta-historical documents.
If I’m being totally honest though, the true origin of The Quatria Conspiracy is actually my first (only) full-length conventionally-written (no AI) novel, The Lost Direction. That book is epic fantasy, heavy on the world-building, makes use of frame stories to tell many smaller character’s tales throughout. Not many people read it. Not all the ones that did liked it.
In any event, the Quatria Conspiracy takes the more fictionally-framed elements of the novel, and re-casts them as quasi/pseudo-historical “non-fiction” – largely invented, cobbled together with other “real” conspiracy theories, and again heavy heavy dose of world-building. Some would say too much. In fact, there’s no plot. It literally, as they say in the Literary Review of Canada article linked above, “reads like a textbook.” This time intentionally. This time leaning into the very opposite of the writers’ dictum that one must “show don’t tell.” This book tells, but now it has some fun pictures to do the showing too. And they really help set the mood in the French version. It’s great. I have a strong feeling it’s going to be a fun little book to hold in your hand, and like, read under the covers with a flashlight.
There’s probably a great deal more to say about this book, and some of the origins of the idea of Quatria and its major personages and metadivinities in the Early Clues, LLC oeuvre… but I’ll save that all for another time.
Somehow this October 2023 reference to my work by Authors Alliance (who I spoke with once by Zoom and liked!) slipped through the cracks until today, so saving for the archives here:
Tim Boucher, a science fiction writer and artist, has used generative AI to create a series of nearly 100 science fiction books. He has experimented with different forms of “collaboration” with generative AI systems—from using them for ideation to using them to produce first drafts, to using them for late-stage editing. He has also used generative AI systems to produce text he uses as speech for characters in his works which are themselves AI entities. Boucher does not see his works as prototypical novels with a conventional narrative arc, but as nonlinear works with “interlocking pieces,” or “slice of life stories,” which lend themselves to the sometimes fragmented and dreamlike nature of generative AI systems’ outputs.
That’s a very stylistically accurate description of my work, I think.
And later:
Tim Boucher also uses generative AI systems to produce images that accompany his stories. While Boucher is a graphic artist himself, he has said that the time and cost involved in creating these illustrations by hand would severely limit the amount of time he could spend writing, and would make his project too cost-prohibitive.
I’ve been teasing references to this for a while now, but it is now finally official, the website of Typophilia, my print publisher in France, is now live. It has been fun working with them behind the scenes to translate all of my books and publish them for French audiences, since January. They really get my vision of using AI to critique (and satirize) AI, and society’s relationship with technology more broadly. The print versions of the books are really well designed to capture the pulp sci fi serial feel I have been emulating, and are going to look sharp in print.
We’re starting with French version of The Quatria Conspiracy as book #0 because it is effectively the origin for a lot of what followed in the later AI Lore Books series. English readers can still purchase ebook versions on Gumroad (not sold anywhere else), but no print yet.
As we get rolling, I will try to go back through and write a “Notes on” piece for each volume, as I found the process of writing those – which I only commenced maybe half or two thirds of the way in – really helpful for my own reflection if nothing else. I don’t want to give away all the whatzits in each volume, because it’s best if readers form their own conclusions about what’s going on. But it’s fun to be able to give selective sign posts along the way.
Anyway, big thank you and congratulations to everyone at Typophilia, and looking forward to where we can take this adventure together!
