Notes A short story I wrote that ended up being what I wrote about for Nanowrimo 2022
Prologue
The palm trees swayed powerfully in the blue-black darkness. At their base, illuminated by the dull blue glow of a laptop screen, a young mans face hunched forwards, looking intently into the screen. You might think he was reading a crystal ball, attempting to dive the future out of shifting fates and destinies.
His eyes were still for at moments, only to race over unseen words and ideas. His body was hunched, rigid, and still as a shadow. Excepting, in rapid bursts of movement, his fingers, exploding onto the keyboard
Until, finally, with a single slash of the return key, his figure relaxed backwards in a sigh. For moment, you might have seen him smile in the blue glow. All at once, that moment ended his unseen fingers spastically folded the laptop closed, the only light remaining the golden glow of the kitchen through a sliding glass door.
The glass door slid open and shut, and soon the kitchen light went off. The palm trees continued to dance in the wind, barely visible in the roaring darkness.
Chapter Zero: Three Friends
“Okay,” said Victor, palms flat on the table. “I’d like to start with the why.”
“Money,” declared Randall in mock-arrogance, and the other two laughed. “Or fame,” he added as an afterthought.
Victor’s hands searched for the dry erase marker.
“Well as long as we’re in that neighborhood, we might as well consider making the world a better place” Gil pronounced.
“The world…a better…place…” Victor murmured, writing at eye level in black ink at eye. They all looked at the worlds for a moment. Victor turned back to them.
“Knowledge?” he ventured.
“Knowledge,” the two other men said, nodding, and Victor record the words on the whiteboard.
“Just, I mean it’s under the umbrella of making the world a better place—”
“That’s long. Can we shorten that?” Victor said.
“Muh twab…”
“Mwabip.” R said. “MWABP, lowercase a. Drop the t.”
“Nice,” Victor said.
“What I was saying was, happiness. Or joy. You know? Distinct from the relief of suffering, or more opportunities just. More joy,” continued Gil.
“Yeah that’s more specific,” Victor agreed, “I guess I can add suffering up there too — relieving it. And death. Less death, less suffering.”
The board now read as follow:
- Money
- Fame
- Knowledge
- Mwabip
- More Joy
- Less Suffering
- Less Death
“That’s the long and short of it I guess.”
“The stuff that matters, I guess? There is something, some je ne sais quoi.”
“Art,” Victor said. “It can probably do all of the following —”
“Except death,” Gil.
“Yeah, except Death, yet it doesn’t have to do those things. To be art.”
“Art,” repeated Randall.
“Sure,” said Gil. “I mean literature, music, yeah. They sometimes cause suffering. Art often is informative but no, you’re right, it doesn’t have to be.”
“Cool. That’s just seven things to pick from.”
Gil made those performatively loud stretching noises he always made when standing up (or sitting down), while Charlie stayed put, staring at the ceiling with with inscrutable smile. Victor was already in the kitchen, switching the stove on.
“Coffee?” he asked the room, recieving two positive replies.
“Embrace change and it will embrace you.”
— Juuka Aalho, co-author Aum Golly, the first book of AI poetry
“Sandwich truck.”
“Platypus milk.”
“Dear god, do they produce it?”
“They’re mammals. I think.”
“Some way to reform city planning. Just, tearing up asphalt, converting traffic to bikes.”
“Riiight, like that would work. In this country?”
“Hey I thought this was supposed to be open minded! But no, probably not in this country. We could start somewhere else. In Europe maybe.”
“Aren’t they already doing that kind of thing in Europe?”
“Brain computer interface. That’s gotta be the place to be.”
“Yeah but if Elon Musk is already doing it, isn’t it already kind of too mainstream for us to get in on?”
“Sort of but also, I think no. Like, just because we think someone is already doing something doesn’t mean we should just assume that’s it. People tried to fly for a long ass time, but the wright brothers didn’t just go ‘oh well, someone has already tried that’. They thought about it as individuals and gave it their best shot.”
“Okay, write it down. It’s like the equivalent of running straight down the field, but I guess when there’s an opening it’s worth it.”
“Unlimited covid tests, like a subscription model.”
“Oh yeah, write that down. Who knows how long we’ll be stuck with this shit.”
“What about like, a pay per article model for journalism. Like, I’m always running into these things on some other new platform, the Wall Street Journal or Forbes or something and I’m like, look I’d get a subscription if I read this all the time, but I don’t. And even if I did, there will always be one more site. So I thought like, what if you had to pay something really small, 60 cents, for an article. It added up to a bill, and you paid the bill at the end of the month. You could afford to attract some of the best journalists out there. ”
“Shek, the amusement park.”
“Um I was sharing a serious idea. Also, isn’t that a copyright violation?”
“Okay, shronkland.”
“Shronkland!**”
“Wow, offbrand shrek amusement park. I love it.”
“*Geh ow uh ma swamp”.
The three of them were stuck on this for a while.
“Settlers of Cataan, but there are mortals, and then there are gods. Different gameplay for each. If it’s successfully, we can develop it for a videogame console.”
“Oh wow. Asymettrical gameplay.”
“A social media app —”
This was met by groans.
“Stay with me! A social media app that’s entirely on like, a google maps type of thing.”
“Dude, didn’t you already try that?”
Victor looked down in shame.
“We need something fresh,” said Randall, leaning forward. His eyes gleaming. “Something new, big, crazy, totally outside of the boundaries of reality. Unlike anything ever done before!”
There was a pause.
“Onion cake. Shronkland could have onion cake?”
“Try that again.”
“NFTs. They are very much in right now, and kind of like, a frontier.”
“Yeah I did want to talk about those.”
“Actually, I’ve been thinking about those,” said Gil, his expression as if he might have a royal flush but he was in the process of working it out. “NFT, GPT-3, and Roald Dahl.”
“The guy who wrote Matilda?”
“GPT what?”
“It’s a,” Victor laughed, “Amazingly advanced language AI, programs like these are called natural language processing programs, or algorhithms, I don’t know which, and it’s pretty big in the tech scene right now.”
“Dahl wrote a lot of stuff. Matilda, The Big Friendly Giant, the Twits, and a load of short stories. He had this one short story called, give me one second.” Gil looked it up on his phone. “The Great Automatic Grammatizer.”
Gil looked at the other two then repeated himself. They still looked at him blankly.
“So it’s about this writer, bored of writing the same shitty fiction for a magazine every week, says it’s so easy a robot could do it, so, he makes a robot. Uses all that stuff, all the formulas that have been created, and he takes a shot at it. Dahl doesn’t mention the three act structure or Joseph Campbell’s hero of a thousand faces or like, Jung, but it sort of makes sense. Of course, he published this story in…1982. So.”
“And you think GPT-3 could do it? I mean, I know we had the little tangent about Elon Musk and um neural interfaces or whatever but, surely this has been tried.”
“Also”, Victor pointed out, “Isn’t this sort of, you know, shitty? Like, who wants a computer writing our stories? That would put some of our favorite people out of work and, like, why? Why do it even? I mean we could make money on it I guess but at a pretty great cost.”
“Well I don’t think that’s the way to think about it at all. I don’t want to put writers out of a job either. I’m more interested in just creating more writing, more stories. And by more I don’t mean more I mean reaching new frontiers. Humans can imagine all sorts of incredible things, but maybe there’s some limit there. Could we cross it?”
“Hmm. Like, could we give a computer an opportunity to blow our minds. An outlet to introduce the human world to things we could never have thought of.”
“Yeah! In a way, it’s sort of passing the buck. We’d still be trying to come up with the next big idea, it’s just that we’d actually be creating a program that did us for us. In the greatest format the world has ever seen, the novel.”
“Not the movie? Musical? Opera? Graphic Novel? First Person Shooter?”
“Okay yeah, I don’t know what the greatest format for ideas is but come one, Novel is close enough. And those other things wouldn’t work with GPT-3.”
“But we haven’t talked about the NFT part.”
“Right. Yeah I was hoping you could help me with that Victor. I know they’re big, and this seems compatible somehow but I don’t really understand them.”
Victor gave it some thought. “Yeah.” He said. “I think they could work.”
The other two looked at him expectantly.
“Well,” he began. “We can go into NFTs in more detail later — and, to be honest, I only know like 5% of what there is to know, but it is a starting point. The headline of them is really that now, digital property can be owned as well. Data, can be owned. If it is digitizeable, you can give it an owner. Whereas this used to kind of be impossible. Like, it is just so easy to copy and distribute digital files that it wasn’t really possible until NFTs. So I’m thinking, you can purchase a story. You can do whatever you want with it. Publish it, whatever. But it gets generated as soon as you buy it. By GPT-3. Maybe you see, like, the first chapter. To see the rest, you need to buy it, and then you get access to the whole story.”
“Okay but. I’d guess people are already doing this.”
And they were.
An hour later, Gil had to physically stop Viktor from pouring a 4th cup of coffee, but ended up drinking it himself, making it his 3rd. Randall was literally banging his head against a wall, but lightly, and mostly for attention.
“There’s gotta be an angle on this,” Randall moaned.
“Are we still on his?” Victor said too loudly. “I was really into —”
“Randall, are you—”
“Get your swimsuits on! It’s time for a creativity swim,” Randall exclaimed officiously, jumping up and raising hisarms in manic glee. It was too late to stop him.
“We shall know no defeat!” he screamed moments later from the other room as Victor and Gil looked at each other.
Not wanting to be last to the water, the other two raced into their suits and in moment they were racing down the beach.
“As the water hits you,” yelled Randall over his shoulder, doing his best to be heard of the roar of the wind. “Let yourself dive into the idea!”
“The gpt3 thing?” yelled Gil back.
“Yeah!” said Randall, prompty tripping in the sand and getting a mouthful of sand, only to immediately get back up.
“I admire your spirit!” said Victor as Randall did his best to run through his coughs.
The water approached quickly, looking very gold, but the four man-boys met it with yells conjured from the very bottom of their lungs as they were enveloped, headlong, into an oncoming wave that towered several feet above them. Their forward moment halted and they were swallowed.
Victor popped up first, the Randall.
“Damn that feels nice,” Victor said, pushing his long hair out of his eyes.
Randall was preoccupied with getting the last of the sand out of his mouth.
Gil took was taking a few moments longer than expected to emerge.
Then, in a fountain of oceanic froth, he exploded out of the water.
“I got it!” Gil sputtered immediately. He was looking somewhat alien with his familiar glasses not on his face, blonde hair foamy with the sea. His glasses were with one hand as he pointed them into guns like a hollywood executive. “Here’s what we’ll do.” He said confidently, and the other two listened. Gil was a pretty even-keeled guy. They had never seen him quite so electric.
So he told them, and they listened. And that’s what they did.
“With Aum Golly I ended up creating multiple versions with different prompts. I discarded whole poems altogether, instead of editing them. For us humans, reading is faster than writing. That’s why we’re more efficient curators than creators.""
- Juuka Aalho, co-author of Aum Golly, the first book of AI poetry ever published
Chapter One: The Last Zephyr
The Oracle sat on a throne of rags, mattresses and tattered grocery bags, brown with silt.
A woman approached, stopping a respectful distance away. She had been walking for two days without sleep. Behind her, there were hundreds of others who had done the same.
“Hello my child,” said The Oracle, her weathered face lined with age, the desert winds, or both. “You have arrived at salvation. Unburden yourself.”
And the weary traveler fell to her knees and wept.
“How are the interns doing?” asked Gil, walking down one of the hallways in the office in a well-fitting suit.
“They’re excited. Very hungry. Doing some amazing stuff,” Victor said. “I gotta review their edits to the algorythm. Catch you on the beach at 3?”
“You betcha,” Gil said in his best fake Minnesota accent, making Victor laugh before he got into the lab, greeted by the interns and launching right into the new strategy.
As Gil made it towards the front door of the building, he swung by Randall’s office, who seemed to be finishing a phone call.
“A new chapter in the paradigm of storytelling, no those were your words from the hackathon Mr. Gaiman. No, thank you. Of course! Well as long as you share some tips on the way through the movie adaptation process. Say hi to Amanda for me.”
“How is the man?” asked Gil as Randall put down the phone. They’d gotten an old-school landline just for kicks, connected to the hotspot ironically enough, and Randall couldn’t get enough of it so they let him keep it in his office. He was also picking it up and slamming it down.
“Oh you know, he always talks like he’s narrating a book. I mean, I would just like to talk to the real guy under there some day, but hey, I can’t complain.” said Randall, spinning sideways in his chair.
“See you at 3?” Gil checked.
“For sure. I’m wrapping up some calls with the rest of the board just to check that our runway is secure but I think we’re in good shape,” Randall beamed. “We have plenty of room to lift this thing off all the way.”
“And you saw the article in the New Yorker right?”
“Oh shit, we made it in the New Yorker, right?” Randall said incredulously. “Oh damn I have to get what’s his name from wired on the phone — they are going to hate that the New Yorker decided to cover us before them.”
“Keep killin it,” said Gil with an internal smile, and he swept off into the hallway. His friends were getting business done swimmingly and he had a few things to finish up himself.
somewhere over the hill
where the moon was bright
to the tune of the yodel
he sang all night
and he died
he said:
“This is how I want to die
This is how I want to die”
_– from “The Yodeler’s Last Yodel” by Chuck Pyle, published in Aum Golly, the first book of AI poetry ever published _
The Boldest Cheaters” By Gloria Wang Is unabashedly starting an AI publishing house a reckless thing to do, or a brave one? That seems to be the central theme of the uproar within the writing and AI communities these week, in response to Yodelhaus’s deluge of content on their website YODELBOT. What sets them apart from the first generation of experimental AI-fueled stories is that they seem to be seriously competing for readerships, or at least in carving out their own special niche from that of what I have been check-mated into terming more “traditional” ones.
The stange pattern that seems to be playing out on internet forums, articles, and conversations on various internet platforms is that publically, very few public figures are doing anything short of accusing YODELBOT of launching a full-on assault of the literary art, and even the essence of that uniquely human ritual of storytelling.
Any yet, curiously enough, these attacks seem to subsist of accusations of principle, rather than content. Nobody is saying that these are not good stories. The numbers tell their own story - everyone is reading these. It’s still a little bit to early to tell if it is only to educate and arm themselves against their enemy, out of sheer curiosity at the novely of it all, or because they are genuinely enjoying the reading material. YODELBOT is recieving more than two hundred million visits a day just a couple months after its launch. That is serious traffic. They do not seem to be cashing in on advertising, but that if they were that is some serious capital.
Meanwhile, out of the outage and vitriol, a small but firm group of quieter voices is beginning emerge. Joan Killawea is a writer and journalist who has written extensively about her experiments in submitting to her real, entirely human-written work to publishing houses under the pretext that the content was written by AI and being presented with deals from well-regarded publishers like Penguin on the grounds that she did not disclose her work was written by an AI. She also documented the reverse of this situation with video, in which she coathored several novel-length peices of work using AI but did not disclose this to publishers, who were more than willing to accept that work.
Joan and her work suggest that although a crows of artists, early adaptors, techies, bloggers and literary pioneers are exploring this frontiere with full transparency, many others are simply adding these tools to their workshop and never disclosing that their work is written mostly or entirely by comuter programs.
In this light, Yodelhaus is neither the villain nor the hero, but more like a warrior among scientists. For some reason, no other publishing haus - excuse me, house - has yet emerged that has forged as bold a path as Yodelhaus, both to declare boldly that it’s stories are entirely written by AI and to not shy away from competing with existing writers and players in the publishing industry.
“You really want to know what I think?” Louie asked.
Remi nodded.
“I think…it’ll never work,” he said, and stopped, hands in his pockets so that he was standing in the snow, on a blanket of pine needles.
The two brothers looked up at the trees, the patterns in their bark. Remi saw a chipmunk pop up from behind a log, totally still but watching them with dark, wide eyes. Remi wanted to look over his brother, but was afraid that if he did, the Chipmunk would dart away, and he wasn’t done staring back.
“But that’s not necessarily not a good reason not to do it.”
“So there’s no reason not to do it?” Remi asked, turning.
“I think the reason not to do it”, said Louie, with a sigh and then a little smile, “Is probably because there’s a chance it will.""
Remi laughed softly, and the two brothers started walking again, following the coast.
“Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.”
Helga had a crab in her office. It lived inside the terrarium that she kept on her desk, and she often asked it questions. It’s name was Mordecai, or morty for short.
“What should I order for lunch morty.” “Why is my code not compiling morty.” “Mordecai, why am I getting paid less than my male peers. Should I negotiate my rate? Is this a sexism thing? I’m relatively sure I’m more proficient than them.”
“Helga, we can hear you,” they would say.
Helga was quite fond of Morty. He had a bright orange body, and crimson claws. He was a vampire crab, and shared his terrarium with some snails, a few moss covered rocks, and several tropical plants that offered all sorts of cover from the occasionally sunny winter day.
The plan was to buy a van, retire early, and drive to Argentina to climb for a few years. Helga was pretty close, but she’d be even closer if it weren’t for this wage gap. She figured she had about five years, but at twenty eight, that would basically be the end of her window of peak physical health. Like, forever. That was it. That’s what was confusing about retirement to her - sacrifice the years of your life when you are at peak health, still a bit starry eyed and full of curiosity and best mental performance of your life, all so that when you are old and close to death you no longer have a job to distract you from your painfully obvious mortality.
Tasha McCouley was almost late, but it was okay. The board meeting rarely started on time anymore. It seemed as if each member was so busy with an explosion of other boards they had joined, side projects, and various engagements, that they were always about two minutes late to start.
It was almost another reason to be on time - it was easier than normal. It also gave her an opportunity to see into the lives of the others on the board.
There was Hampton, who everyone was trying to forgive for working with Oil Industry Futures by creating a program that predicted the effect of geopolitical conflict on energy prices.
There was Samatha Godfrey, who somehow managed to smile at Hampton and say hello except for the fact that she analyzed the energy efficiency of global shipping and found ways to make it more efficient in terms of energy consumption, as well as as a side project that used mapping technology to create “quotes” on the carbon footprint of any given company by analyzing things like their green spaces, Transporation costs, and AC costs based on the square footage of their facilities and the industries they worked in. She was also not on great terms with Lu, who worked on highly adaptive military drone technology but, like Hampton, didn’t really talk about it very much in San Fran.
It was really almost as if each individual had a front to hide their real business, like the Mafia or something. She spread cream cheese onto her bagel meticulously as she watched Marco quiet-shout at someone on the phone outside. His chest would sort of swell up, but then he would speak very quietly into the phone, which he had angled towards his mouth like a breathalyzer. Then he really would start yelling, waving his arms around, clearly not aware that anyone was watching him. This disappointed Tasha on some level. She liked Marco. He was not involved in anything obviously evil. Actually, he was a huge supporter of the arts. A lot of his work actually went towards providing artists with ethically limited tools to allow them to create even more amazing things. Adobe had contracted his organization to work on a tool that was able to remove objects from a video by name or color, for example.
Jorg Pringer walked in as she took her first bite out of her bagel. He sat down and stared blankly at the conference table in front of them, its surface meticulously extracted slab of redwood.
Tasha waited a few minutes as she had learned to do with Jorg. She wasn’t sure if she did it more out of compassion as it seemed to take him a while to transition to new settings, or if she just did it out of curiosity. A part of her certainly wanted to know how long he would simply stare at the surface of the table.
To be fair, she couldn’t entirely blame him. The patterns made by the rings of the tree were exposed at unlikely angles so that they produced a sort of moire, stripes converging to ripples of color.
“Good morning Jorg,” she said pleasantly.
“Oh, good morning Tasha!” Jorg said in his heavy accent, his whole manner lighting up. He pushed his glasses up with a finger and took out a bluetooth earbud.
“How has your morning been?” she asked, deliberately, as if speaking to a friendly dog who seemed to mostly understand what you were saying.
“Actually, uh, excellent. I have been experimenting with the correlation between fricative incidence and sentiment analysis outcomes for adjectives. It’s quite, uh, gratifying. I seem to have found that while a positive correlation of high fricative incidence exists when it comes to adjectives describing positive concepts exists, a much more dramatic correlation exists between abstactness of an adjective and its fricative incidence.”