Super AIs, coming to a domain near you soon!

 

Been thinking about AI lately. The new(ish) generation of ‘generative’ bots can create human-level text or images. They acquire expertise by reading a huge amount of text, or viewing a stupendous amount of images (billions of pics/pages, internet-scale datasets) and learning to generate new content consistent with the patterns they discover.

Once trained, a simple text prompt can ask the AI to compose text, or draw an image, based on the theme. Here is the AI GPT3 summarising my books:

“In Singularity’s Children, a gripping Techno-Thriller with a Science Fiction soul, the world is on the brink of collapse due to debt, wars, and inequality. Keith, Niato, and Stella are all caught up in this dystopian future, struggling to survive and to find meaning in an increasingly post-human world. With looming threats of war, plague, and collapse, can they make a difference? Find out in this vivid world-building story that will keep you on the edge of your seat.”

 

Here is a scene from Saloa (Image is a collaboration btwn my photoshop skills and the AI Dali2). It is based on the prompt:
 
“a sleek futuristic Zepplin flying above a white futuristic city partially hidden in a green lush rainforest from above.”

AI is able to use the same technique to ‘spot patterns’ in any sufficiently large data sets, for example, genomes. Here is a first step in that direction:
https://phys.org/news/2022-12-aging-driven-unbalanced-genes-ai.html

Pretty soon, confronted by a sticky kitchen floor, I’m going to be able to prompt GenomeGen3:

“Clone me a little helper. A friendly miniature mammoth with blue fur, a mop for a trunk, and a domestic hygiene fixation.”

This is what a Singularity feels like!

the Recluse



I’m in Turkey attempting to get some serious writing done on the current work in progress.
Ensconced in self-imposed isolation—


If I wander too far an enormous inflatable lobster drags me back to the keyboard. (I have noticed that the watchers can’t seem to tell the difference between productive writing and wasting time in photoshop.)


I am making all books stand alone for a while, they will be all set in the same universe [The Plurality] but do not need to be consumed in any fixed order. The working title for this one is Holocene. Assigning a genre is going to be tough, it’s morphed into a Hard Science Fiction, paleo-punk, ‘who-done-it?’

The pic is probably a spoiler, but you won’t be able to work it out anyway… 😘

Live Novel Writing

 

The Worldbuilding for my ‘Plurality’ universe is growing with each new book. I use a Knowledgebase while I am writing to keep track of names, technology, locations, etc.

In the past, many readers had requested a Glossary and Dramatis Personæ so I decided a while ago to make the full knowledge base available in the ‘Member Zone‘.

Lately, things were getting a little out of control, so I just spent a few hours tidying things up and adding tags etc. The interface is not ideal, a user cannot filter by tags, so I have made some links here that will take you directly to a full list of articles according to the tags below:

Singularity’s Children

Saloa

The Plurality

Anthropocene — Anthropocene is the working title of my new book. I would consider anything in this section a **SPOILER** at this point, but if you want to watch the articles accumulate as a sort of ‘live view’ of the novel writing process—while not getting anything but oblique glimpses of the narrative itself—please be my guest! 🙂