When the levy breaks (Santa Cruz, 2023)

Thoughts about bomb cyclones, the tiniest McGirk, the artificial intelligence art revolt, and plans for building a literature object

The “bomb cyclone” is pounding our little burgh. The beach down the street has been swallowed by the sea, and legions of ants are marching up from their lagoon-side lairs to snag themselves in our maple syrup and add a formic acid sizzle to our microwaved snacks. (To concerned parents and relatives reading this: we’ll be fine, the house has survived 70 years of Santa Cruz weather and five generations of McGirks, and the lagoon isn’t fed by the San Lorenzo River, and if we do flood, the Volvo’s gassed up and ready to go.) It is a bit unsettling with a newborn baby so we’re erring on the cautious side when it comes to evacuation.

The Revolt Against Artificial Intelligence

Never mind the rain! Artists are flooding the Internet with crossed-out AI signs. The idea is to garble the databases that artificially intelligent art generators rely on to generate their “art.” I think it’s the first big anti-AI rebellion.

Artificially intelligent art or writing generators work by drawing statistical inferences between images or fragments of speech and are able to generate convincing guesses of what should happen next. The most recent models are uncanny: I generated the images above on Midjourney with a prompt asking for “a citadel made from blue and white porcelain.” Most models are open source, which means you can easily fork them and train them on your own database of material to generate more customized results, and this is what’s causing distress among the for-hire artist community. Custom AIs are generating pornography and big-eyed anime waifus and NFT art, and a lot of these models have become so tuned to a particular aesthetic that they’ll basically generate pastiche of a single artist’s work—without acknowledging them or paying them. So the “real” artists are deliberately poisoning databases and keywords to confound the machines.

Of course, the humans in charge can tweak the parameters to deprecate any unwanted images. (It’s an equation like any other hank of math and you can just subtract what you want from the final result) But I like the rebellion. We can expect to see more of this.

ChatGPT, the latest text generator, is amazing, it can generate working code and is excellent at synthesizing information. Luckily it can’t write about anything new yet, which means it can’t weave a clumsy rain metaphor around a disjointed series of substack updates. Speaking of, the puddles outside are swelling and connecting, like the liquid robot in Terminator 2.

The Literature Object — perhaps a literary use for NFTs

Most AI art models strike me more as a creator tool or a gimmick than a new medium, in that I think of them as closer to a toy than a new medium. The sense I got melting together pictures of angels and royal bedrooms and Audubon prints was that it depended too much on the version of the software you were using. You could see the fingerprints of the program too clearly on the work you made. At the time, OpenAI and its ilk restricted access to the newest models, so it was a bit of an arms race. The anointed few got early access and exhausted the latent space before the rest of us could get our hands on the tools, which suggests I wasn’t pushing the boundaries of what I could do with it. For me, it was more like throwing the I-Ching than designing an image. At the time I thought of it as something like street photography where you’re seizing a moment, but four years later, you can see what people who actually know what they’re doing are capable of making.

The best work uses generative work as a layer in a larger work. I love what Ira Greenberg has been doing combining his own paintings and sketches, for example, or Rafik Anadol’s work. Some of the prompt-based work I’ve seen is like DJing through latent space. I love the work Fabiola Larios and Moises Sanabria have done, for example. Which brings me to my next project, which has nothing to do with AI! Lonely ROCKS will probably go into hibernation for the next couple of months while we figure out some funding, so I’ve decided to work on a book-length interactive piece. I want to incorporate some NFT elements.

So far the only literary NFTs that have got any traction are short prose poems (Charles Simic would kill in the NFT world) but even these seem to rely on the visuals that accompany them more than the writing itself. Longform writing is such a mind meld that it doesn’t really lend itself to paying ten thousand dollars to read it. You put so much work into reading a text that it doesn’t feel as magical as looking at a painting or even a paragraph-long poem that you can swallow up in a single glance does. To me, poems and artworks feel like little gemstones that plopped out of another dimension. Novels don’t.

A long text is like a journey, and the narrator is someone sitting beside you muttering comments, and you wouldn’t want to give them a thousand bucks. But maybe you’d give them some walking around money? Or trade patches at the end of a long bus ride? I’m thinking of rendering what would have been a book about blockchains and cyberpunk expeditions as a series of vignettes you can navigate through, making choices, and having your unique journey generate a souvenir of some sort.

If this sounds interesting to you, leave me a comment, I’d love to collaborate with someone!

Announcing Amihan Teresa McGirk

Speaking of fruitful collaborations, an update: Amihan Teresa McGirk, 7lb 4oz, 21.5” in length has been born, she has a full head of hair and is already smashing through developmental milestones.

We promised not to use the word beautiful around her but that didn’t last her first day on earth.

The delivery wasn’t easy. A gripe about American hospitals: they use COVID-19 to slash services and won’t let you in Labor and Delivery unless you’re 6cm dilated (i.e. quite a bit) otherwise you’ll be turned away. Our hospital was 26 miles away from our home, over the dread CA-17, a winding stretch over the Santa Cruz Mountains into San Jose, which the locals claim to be America’s most deadly. We were admitted at 3 am, and as soon as Erin and the baby were hooked up to monitors and a drip of labor-inducing oxytocin I came down with terrible food poisoning. My symptoms could have been COVID. I passed a PCR test. The nurses deliberated and the hospital director herself kicked me out.

Amihan was born after 19 hours of active labor and 72 hours of contractions. Our lives changed—we barely sleep, and the needs of a tiny creature and her many, many accessories occupy all our time. She’s the fifth generation of McGirk to inhabit the house we’re staying in. The rain has paused, and suddenly the future seems in sharper focus than it once did.