"Writing" a Book with AI- My Forward to Artificial America
Michael Todasco
Visiting Fellow at the James Silberrad Brown Center for Artificial Intelligence at SDSU, AI Writer/Advisor
The AI-written anthology, Artificial America, is now available for sale. It presents fifty-six disparate stories, including tales that are funny, romantic, and often really weird. If you're curious about what an AI-written book is like, I encourage you to pick up a copy. But don't do it for me; all the proceeds for the book go to support Second Harvest Food Bank of Silicon Valley. Kindle copies are just $3.99 in the US. They are also available (for a similar local price) in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Netherlands, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and India.
I'm sharing the forward to the book, the only thing I?actually wrote in Artificial America. It features my thoughts on AI and what it means to "write" an AI book. After that is a chapter list of the book.
Enjoy.
Forward to Artificial America
This is the only part of this book written by a human; a computer wrote everything else.
Even in my craziest fantasies, that was not a sentence I ever thought I would write. My relationship with computers began with an Apple IIc. I would hand-write papers in middle school, type them up, and when done, run something called a “spell check.” It would scour my work and tell me all the things I misspelled (and I was a bad speller!) I remember how much it felt like cheating to use that. We spent all this time learning spelling and vocabulary in school, and with a keystroke, it would tell me how to correct everything I screwed up. Fast forward nearly forty years, and I have published this collection of short stories written by a computer. Spell check seems quaint; this really feels like cheating.
I have been experimenting with AI writing since I started an MFA at Johns Hopkins in 2021. Then, the tools were impressive, but needed a lot of guidance and frequently hit roadblocks. Today, they have vastly improved. Tomorrow, they may just take all of our jobs.
This book was crafted by giving prompts to OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-3 for each US state, territory, and Washington DC. The prompts looked like a Mad-Lib.
Write a <adjective> <genre> short story, approximately 500 words in length. The story should take place in <state or territory>, use appropriate local and cultural references. The story should be true to the genre of <genre>, and read like something published in the <prestigious publication>.
From that, OpenAI produced the stories that follow. I intentionally did not change anything from what the AI provided (every single story could have been improved with some human editing). I did truncate some of the stories if the AI kept dolling on and wouldn't "finish" the story.?This book can serve as a time capsule for the "creativity" of AI machines in early 2023. All of the pictures were generated by the AI Art site, Midjourney, some with "outpainting" help from DALL-E.?
Despite the randomness inherent in large language models, there are some clear patterns in the stories. (A whole lot of stories start with “It was a dark and stormy night in <location>.”) You will see how the AI follows a formula. Human creativity thrives in the ability to deviate from a formula.
Our future will be one intertwined with Artificial Intelligence. We are still in the early days of AI and where this takes us is unknown. But there are two things I believe.
1. Mass use of AI (as it was in this book) needs to be clearly labeled. The AI did most of the storytelling here. I just set it off in a certain direction. To go with that, I am also writing this under a pen name. World, say hello to “Alex Irons.”
2. Personally, I am not comfortable making money off of a project like this. We are not far from content farms churning out thousands of AI-written books that would redirect money from human writers. That will happen regardless of what I do with this publication. So, every dollar I receive for the sales of this book will benefit Second Harvest Food Bank, Silicon Valley. Your choice to purchase this will also help people. This is not a choice I expect all "AI Writers" to make, but one that I feel is right for me.
I would love to hear what you think. Were there stories you really liked? What did you hate? Questions, comments, or feedback, reach out to me at [email protected]. Thank you for purchasing this.
Yours virtually,
Alex Irons
January 10, 2023
Artificial America Chapter List
I build ai agents and workflows for marketers | 100k on TikTok
2 年I need a signed copy!!!
Staff Software Engineer @ PayPal - AI/ML Compute Platform
2 年Awesome work Michael Todasco, you are source of inspiration to many of us. Will definitely get a copy of your book :)