#generative content

As generative AI spreads throughout publishing like a virus, Amazon is modifying how authors and other creators can use its Kindle self-publishing platform.

Amazon announced that it is "lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations" that users can add to the Kindle Direct Publishing platform daily to three, "in order to help protect against abuse," and it's possible that the number might be lowered again.

So now you can only write and publish three (3) Kindle books per day, folks.

When mega-corporations that otherwise exhibit no ethics begin to act against AI-generated content, you know things are getting bad.

Remember how in 2005, people used to fuck around with a little chatbot called Cleverbot? Her responses were wooden, her tonal awareness was all over the map; she was easy to turn into an abusive shithead or to coax into agreeing with points of view that you couldn't realistically defend; and she notably couldn't handle a convo with another robot.

Now, we've got AI renditions of Werner Herzog and Slavoj Zizek going on endless tirades about the meaning of aesthetics and the underpinnings of their work in the empty void of a permanent exhibition space online, called The Infinite Conversation. While the semantics always break down if you really pay attention; things make sense on a sentence-per-sentence basis, and you see both AIs politely arguing and defending opposing viewpoints.

It used to be the best text-to-speech generator was what you heard on Emergency Alert System drills, and now we've got games like The Finals, that outsource the vocal underpinnings of their rapidly-changing game structure to AI, to avoid having to constantly re-hire the same voice actors to provide color commentary for game modes that might not exist six months down the line.

The kicker is their responses are eerily lifelike, with pauses, chuckles, scoffs, changes in emphasis that fit with events in a given match - and there's none of the choppiness you'd associate to text-to-speech à la Microsoft Sam.

We're just concluding our fall "Writing in (& about) the Age of Artificial Intelligence" workshop at Ad Astra headquarters (critique weekend is coming up!), and one of the participants shared this in our Discord. So naturally we have to share it with you, too, because relevant.

Artist and media critic Alan Warburton has released a brilliant new documentary about the evolution and state of artificial intelligence and its impact on creators, The Wizard of AI.

"I would say 99% of it was made using generative artificial intelligence tools," the 43-year-old filmmaker told The Guardian. Could his 20-minute film be the world’s first AI-generated documentary?

"I’m taking a leaf out of the AI hype playbook there," he admits with a laugh. "In truth, there is never going to be a first truly AI-generated documentary, because it always will involve labor of some kind. Labor is what makes it watchable."

The film does a fantastic job of sharing what he calls "wonder-panic" through its very existence.

One take-away after watching:

If AI has already "created" more images than humans have, shouldn't there be less to fear about their stealing human art? Surely they've polluted their own fishing waters, so to speak, so will AI "art" become increasingly inbred and thus (hopefully) irrelevant to the creative world?

We'll have to wait to see, because surely AI trainers at working hard at this problem, and big IP owners like Disney are, too. So perhaps it'll only be small artists who remain at risk of their work being stolen to train AI generators.

Warburton wrote the script, and says AI text generation lags far behind imagery. So at least there's that. For now.

Perhaps the most powerful part of the film is the closing "In Memoriam" section, listing all the creatives who didn't contribute to making it because AI took their jobs:

We strongly recommend everyone check this out, especially creatives, to get a glimpse at the state of AI in our daily lives:

It seems like very few big art accounts participate in neither.

Now that generative content is even worse than NFT's, I am on the team, all human artists are better to support than copyright-wrecking robots. I'll now support an artist who was suckered into NFT's.

The person depicted above is the victim of this AR murder mystery card game...BUT she's not real and is actually one of the many faces generated from thispersondoesnotexist.com

I really wanted to experiment with different generative ways of making content. Partially because I didn't have the means/time to produce, hire actors, and create alot bespoke content when there were so many possibilities a variables for card combinations