Notes on The Dissolving Factory

The Dissolving Factory is book #112 in the AI Lore Books series. This volume purports to be the recovered work of a 1920’s surrealist poet and artist – or perhaps a collective of artists – named VOMISA, which was recently re-discovered and is the first re-publication of that work … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 8 months ago

Notes on Mirror City

Mirror City is the 110th installment of the AI Lore books, which have received international news coverage around the globe for being one of the first and largest AI-assisted pulp sci fi world-building projects on the planet. The original inspiration for this book comes from Step … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 9 months ago

AI-Generated “Ethics” Is Vastly More Dangerous Than Generation of Merely Inaccurate Information

I offer the following conversation I had with Anthropic’s Claude, v2, as a follow-on exploration of and rebuttal to the support response provided to me by the company about Claude’s (in)ability to learn within a single conversation. I want to preface this unedited conversation by … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 9 months ago

Anthropic’s Response Regarding Claude’s Ability to Learn & Modify It’s Own Behavior Within & Across Conversations

Regarding Claude’s overwhelming ethical shortcomings and inconsistencies, I wrote to Anthropic to ask them for clarification how their AI system “learns” within single conversations and across multiple conversations. A support agent from Anthropic replied (I’m only quoting the re … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 9 months ago

Reply to David Olive on AI Originality

Quoting Olive from this June 15, 2023 article about AI regulation: Among the first things you notice about a well-written AI-generated text, for instance — a term paper, a short story, a news report — is that it does not contain a single original thought. This to me sounds like a … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 9 months ago

Notes on The Politeness Protocols

The Politeness Protocols is the 100-and-something-th installment in the celebrated AI Lore books series, by Lost Books, a Canadian AI publisher. This book imagines a what if scenario for society where the AIs who are handed the reins of governance of all human society are as absu … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 9 months ago

Free Book: Postcards from Quatria

Postcards from Quatria is the one-hundred-and-somethingth book in the AI Lore series. Whereas the previous volume, Postcards from Dystopia, offered eight chapters from eight of the classic AI Lore dystopian books, this one offers nine chapters from nine of the books that deal mor … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 10 months ago

Towards a ‘Generativist’ Art movement

I’ve been trying for a while now to find a word that encapsulates what is happening now with arts, culture, music, entertainment, literature as a result of generative AI. And the word I have finally landed on is Generativist. The word already has a sort of meaning by way of lingu … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 10 months ago

Why I filed a GDPR complaint against Midjourney

I’m kind of an asshole about privacy. Which is why when GDPR came out, I was all over it. It’s not perfect by any means as regulation (let alone enforcement), but it’s a strong step in the right direction. Which is why it annoys me so much when companies don’t follow it. Even tho … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 11 months ago

Plastic Underwater Ballet (Image Set)

Just wanted to post finally this Midjourney image set I did of ballet dancers underwater and/or “wrapped in plastic.” Here’s the full set. Here’s a sample image: These images are a secondary offshoot that arose while making the book The Plastic Prison, which itself is one of my f … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 11 months ago

Focusing on character next

Learning how media coverage works over the past few years, and especially lately has been… interesting. Authors do not have an easy road of promoting their works. Literally every person on planet earth has written a fantasy novel, and it’s basically impossible to get press about … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 11 months ago

Responding to Newsweek comments, part 1

I’m following with some interest – and more than a little humor – the comments as they unfold on the Newsweek article about my AI Lore books. I’ll start off by saying I’m just not that interested in the copyright/plagiarism conversations around AI art & text. My philosophy here i … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 11 months ago

“Some of my best friends are pelicans”

New Trump pelican image set (Midjourney v5) | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 12 months ago

Midjourney bans prompts around Xi Jinping

I’ve become a massive user & mostly fan of Midjourney, starting with this latest v5. It’s actually been only a handful of times that I’ve encountered their keyword filtering in the wild, and it has been overall pretty mild and mostly silly. For example things like butt and bathin … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 1 year ago

Notes on Inside the Dark Pyramid

Inside the Dark Pyramid is book number 81 in the AI Lore Books series by Lost Books, a Canadian AI publisher. This book was written using the EncycGen app I wrote in ChatGPT v4 (though my app is still powered by text-davinci-003). And then supplemented with some other chapters wr … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 1 year ago

Lanier: Responsibility to sanity

Pretty good, though short & sort of unfocused article about Jaron Lanier’s hot take on AI causing mass insanity more so than killing us outright. Happen to agree with that & just wanted to capture this quote for future reference. Lanier says the more sophisticated technology beco … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 1 year ago

Two Books I Made Using the App I Coded in GPT-4

I wrote recently about coding an app using ChatGPT w/ the GPT-4 model. It’s a utility I’m calling EncycGen, which generates encyclopedia style entries via the OpenAI API. Here are two recent books I wrote using this app. It’s buggy, the software, but it works in a rough and tumbl … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 1 year ago

Dear Microsoft, enough with the rewards garbage

I’m loving the Bing image creator’s output quality (some people are claiming it uses the new Dall-E experimental update, but I have not yet confirmed that with a solid source). Sadly the “boosts” system is a swing and a miss. Mainly because once you use your ten free generations, … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 1 year ago

AI *must* be open-source

Incoming hot take on this Verge article about someone from OpenAI saying they were “wrong” about being open before: When asked why OpenAI changed its approach to sharing its research, Sutskever replied simply, “We were wrong. Flat out, we were wrong. If you believe, as we do, tha … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 1 year ago

Distributed story structure

I think the main innovation I’ve made with my AI lore books is not the use of AI at all, but the structure & arrangement of the narrative, spread across many volumes in a non-linear web of cross-references. (a.k.a., a networked narrative) In plain terms, I scatter links to other … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 1 year ago

Notes on The Exempt

The Exempt is the 71st book in the AI lore series. It is set in the same world as Conspiratopia, but perhaps a few years later, as it references the Fall and the global AI takeover, which hasn’t happened yet in the original Conspiratopia timeline. This book differs from most of t … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 1 year ago

Intent is often not knowable

As someone who has spent a lot of time in the trenches having to analyze content for moderation purposes, I can confidently say that you can rarely truly determine intent. It’s often murky, especially when you enter into the realm of satire, trolling, disinformation, etc. That’s … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 1 year ago

‘Sociotechnic’ as a role

Recently, while researching emerging standards around ML model cards, I landed on a documentation page over at Huggingface with a word I’d never heard before: sociotechnic. They refer to this as being one of the essential roles to help fill out certain aspects of a model card. Fo … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 1 year ago

Dialogic storytelling

Wanted to continue expanding on ideas from this post about the act of reading & writing becoming merged through the experience of generative AI tools. While poking around on the topic, I discovered that dialogic reading is a term that is used (under the larger umbrella of dialogi … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 1 year ago

Micro-Standards in AI

My hunch is that AI technology is developing too rapidly, and in too many different ways, that trying to have a single set of industry standards is going to be extremely tough sell. Maybe that’s always been the case, but the problem feels amplified in AI. There are too many diffe … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 1 year ago

Two new AI content standards proposals

Just wanted to track these two proposals together in one place for safe-keeping: | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 1 year ago

Loss of Control in Tech

I’ve noticed a shitty tech trend, now that I’ve been alive for enough decades to see several generations of technology come and go: that is, the loss of control over basic functions to the end user. Think about it. Tape decks used to have something like: ▶️ ⏸️ ⏹️ ⏺️ ⏩ ⏪ ⏏️ Some f … | Continue reading


@timboucher.ca | 1 year ago