As a writer, educator, reluctant businessperson, and lifelong sci-fi lover, I’m interested in AI across a number of dimensions. In addition to regular use in my freelance business work (where AI is already normalized as a part of daily work), my personal exploration involves using Claude and other AI tools to understand their creative limits and abilities (while hopefully doing something useful or interesting). Below you’ll find an ongoing list of things I’m messing around with to varying degrees of success. At heart of this inquiry is the question: does this technology offer a way to unlock personal creativity by reducing the gap between idea and actuality for anything that can be made digitally?
Microsites
I’ve produced (too?) many websites in my years as a digital producer. The prospect of automating this labor via robot is one of the most direct collisions of sci-fi and everyday reality that interests me. These are experiments using Claude to write, design, and code interactive sites around topics I find interesting and think might be useful. As ever, the LLMs’ writing voice is…not great reading.
Our historical moment isn’t a total shock; many artists, working across film, art, music, and theater went before us and imagined the future. This project uses AI to make an argument about the stories that lead to—and might help us navigate—the (often dystopian) sci-fi reality we find ourselves in.
The truth of story’s reality-making function is tangible in the current AI debate(s). This site maps the competing narratives shaping how people think about AI and AGI. I hope a general audience can start to see how part of our current crisis is the way stories compete to shape how we think, perceive, and then—act. (<--that em-dash is wholly brought to you by me, a human. RIP em dashes, we hardly knew you.)
What comes next? Stories can help us develop the capacities we need to navigate our historical moment. This site starts curating media that might be a kind of curriculum in metamodernity. Why? We need more people to move past the shortcomings of post-modernism and into the next stage of psychological development. Among the critical functions of art in society is its ability to help human beings grow and develop their hearts and minds.
Writing Tools
In the course of writing, I have often found myself wishing I had a handy tool for [some mundane writerly task goes here]. Below you’ll find tools I asked AI to build as a support for my own (laboriously human) writing process. I also have some tools planned that would be generators for other already established experimental methods just because I’m a nerd for things like this and want it to be part of what I’m in conversation with.
Paste in lines of poetry and get stress marks over every syllable. Built on the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary with heuristic fallbacks for words it doesn’t know, it makes meter visible while you revise.
AI Writing & Creativity
My first encounters with AI-human writing were Vauhini Vara’s poignant Ghosts and Botnik Studios surreal (and occasionally hilarious) Harry Potter and the Portrait of what Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash. Since then I’ve added Sheila Heti’s AI chatbot piece, According to Alice to my list of go-tos when discussing work that’s seriously engaging this question. Below you’ll find projects with varying level of human input, aimed at getting something creatively useful out of increasingly “coherent” LLMs.
A prose sequence written with a process I called “generalized experimental method 1,” or GEM1, which uses several prompts meant to subvert the push of LLMs toward coherence. This stems from the shift in weirdness we saw in earlier models like GPT3 toward the higher coherence of later LLMs (read: that very recognizable and grating AI voice we all know by now). The text loops and archives its own phrases, which leads to some interesting drift, surreality, moments I think are genuinely interesting as writing, etc. I have only done the barest bit of formatting and light editing of things like punctuation in a couple places. All else was generated and coded by Claude.
Starting with a well-known koan “Who drags this corpse around?” I’m working through some ideas about how adaptive texts are a genre AI might uniquely enable, starting with generation and decay as formal, codable parts of a digital text. This isn’t AI itself aside from the initial generation; the decay is all rules-based coded by Claude but not adaptive yet. This project required A LOT of QA and tweaking by me. While not something I made, it does represent a big dose of human creative direction toward something that felt at least shareable if not all that successful.
Taking some inspiration from my interest in etymology, linguistic invention, and fantasy & sci-fi worldbuilding (in which new names, aka primordial magic, are a feature of the world—grok anyone?), I asked Claude if it could create a new language that might reflect in some way what the experience of a machine intelligence might be like. End Goal: AI language > audio artifact of it being spoken. Phonology, lexicon, and grammar designed for what everyday syntax drops.