#image generators

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2, and in BLOOMINGTON at MORGENSTERN BOOKS on Apr 4. More tour dates here.

A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and post-docs – for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.

The thing that LLMs have changed in my friend's law school is letters of reference. Historically, students would only ask a prof for a letter of reference if they knew the prof really rated them. Writing a good reference is a ton of work, and that's rather the point: the mere fact that a law prof was willing to write one for you represents a signal about how highly they value you. It's a form of proof of work.

But then came the chatbots and with them, the knowledge that a reference letter could be generated by feeding three bullet points to a chatbot and having it generate five paragraphs of florid nonsense based on those three short sentences. Suddenly, profs were expected to write letters for many, many students – not just the top performers.

Of course, this was also happening at other universities, meaning that when my friend's school opened up for postdocs, they were inundated with letters of reference from profs elsewhere. Naturally, they handled this flood by feeding each letter back into an LLM and asking it to boil it down to three bullet points. No one thinks that these are identical to the three bullet points that were used to generate the letters, but it's close enough, right?

Obviously, this is terrible. At this point, letters of reference might as well consist solely of three bullet-points on letterhead. After all, the entire communicative intent in a chatbot-generated letter is just those three bullets. Everything else is padding, and all it does is dilute the communicative intent of the work. No matter how grammatically correct or even stylistically interesting the AI generated sentences are, they have less communicative freight than the three original bullet points. After all, the AI doesn't know anything about the grad student, so anything it adds to those three bullet points are, by definition, irrelevant to the question of whether they're well suited for a postdoc.

Which brings me to art. As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I've concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist's mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel – a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc – in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numinous, irreducible feeling to manifest in someone else's mind.

Art, in other words, is an act of communication – and there you have the problem with AI art. As a writer, when I write a novel, I make tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of tiny decisions that are in service to this business of causing my big, irreducible, numinous feeling to materialize in your mind. Most of those decisions aren't even conscious, but they are definitely decisions, and I don't make them solely on the basis of probabilistic autocomplete. One of my novels may be good and it may be bad, but one thing is definitely is is rich in communicative intent. Every one of those microdecisions is an expression of artistic intent.

It's all just so. Exhausting. And like. Boring. And frustratingly so! Like, if we're going to expend all of this energy lambasting something, can we not lambast corporate profit structures or, like. The fascists?

What happened to punching nazis, you know? I miss when people really really wanted to punch nazis, often to the point of being a little distressing.

Now everyone is dead set on making sure that AI is scapegoated for every horrible panopticon over-reach AND every independent human actor, as though no one human was involved in the deployment of this technology!

It's enough to make you feel like a fucking lunatic with a conspiracy board, expect it's all just????? Patently obvious and true if you stop frothing about your favourite hate-toy for 10 minutes to consider the facts?

I'm so tired, mate. I'm so fuckin tired.

And I want to be clear, I'm firmly "pro AI" in that the tool has fantastic research and artistic implications! And I am still anti-capitalist because I do not simply concede new technologies to fascists and capitalists just because Elon Musk said so.

I didn't think "Elon Musk said only his little nazi sycophants are allowed to like LLMs" was that compelling, but for some reason every third "leftist" and "progressive" I talk to is gagging to do exactly what Musk says and abandon the development of this tool entirely to his fuckshittery?

Why are we just going along with that????

I'm so fucking.

Another Girl Frame image, this time of my cadre's handler, Prince Charming (and yes, he is a femboy).

Bottom is the finished piece with extensive inpainting and then extensive photoshopping, plus some transparency for fun. Took about 8 hours all told.

Yes, yes, you're very smart and cool and much more impressive an artist than me, and your precious ego need not feel threatened by my work because you exist on a plane far above me in terms of skill, talent, inspiration, and execution. We're all very proud of you.

Anyway, here's a flower for your efforts.

I mean... I get it. The thing is, they kind of do hate money. These people are con men. Money isn't nearly as valuable as capital: as investors and ownership. To OpenAI, allowing porn would tarnish the prestige of the product. It would impact advertiser deals and government contracts, which are worth more than the direct subscriptions that pore would increase.

Porn also isn't a zero dollar investment. It comes with a lot of risks. What if someone generates porn of a politician? A military operative from a country at war? A child actor? What if any of those people then sue for everything the company has, or ever will have?

So, I get it.

But the thing is, that's why these technologies should not be developed by for-profit entities. The obligation to maximize profit means they are incentivized to not have sexual content, along with anything else deemed socially taboo.

This means the technology is artificially restricted in how it is allowed to be developed.

These restrictions would almost certainly still exist if the development of models were made a public work, but the systemic powers demanding these restrictions would have to do so openly and publicly.

It would also mean that there aren't a few thousand competing corporate entities all being staffed by human actors tempted to break laws or do unsafe things to get a development edge.

Ugh.

We're just doing this the wrongest way possible I guess.

Anyway. I understand why openAI isn't allowing porn. They want to be family friendly. For the fascists.

So. You know.

Anonymous Friend: Bumper sticker that says "CLOCKS OUT? COCK'S OUT" with a rooster smoking a cigarette and leaning on an invisible fence sluttily. Me: Sick concept I want a t shirt tbh Anonymous Friend: Better get out your AI image generator, then, huh, bitch?

Y'all know I take requests, right?