AI and Art: What Goes In Is What Comes Out, At Most

John Winkelman

Back in January, I participated on two AI Art-themed panels panels at ConFusion 2023. I discussed these panel briefly in my ConFusion 2023 follow-up post, but I wanted to add some thoughts here, specifically around ChatGPT and the use of computer generated content in the context of writing.

When it comes to ChatGPT creating content, whether that content be fiction or nonfiction, it does what all of these tools do: remixes previously existing content. I make no claims about whether the thing created by an algorithm is “art” or “creative” or even “new,” but what the new content does not do is transcend its input.

ChatGPT and similar tools are trained by scanning and (hopefully) contextualizing all of the text on the internet. While ChatGPT has (or had) safeguards in place to counter the large amount of hate speech endemic to the modern internet, it still has literally centuries or even millennia of content in its input stream. A great deal of that content is regressive or even revanchist by today’s sensibilities.

And since these machine learning tools can not imagine the new, they will continue to remix the old. Even as new, human-created works become available, this new data is miniscule compared to the vast troves of work on which these tools have already been trained. And a sizeable portion of the new inputs from these tools will be previous output from the same tools, resulting in a sort of solipsism which quickly becomes untethered from any human creativity or input, thus making a large portion of the output of those tools useless except as a point of curiosity.

Additionally, here are a few points of reference:

  1. That which is called “AI” in these contexts is not artificial intelligence as it is generally understood, but is variously either neural networks, the output of machine learning tools, pattern-matching algorithms, or (usually) some combination of the three, and in all cases the output is the result of running these tools against input which was generated, overwhelmingly but not exclusively, by humans.
  2. The landscape of AI-generated art, which includes text, music, and visual arts, is rapidly evolving.
  3. Opinions on the use of AI in the arts, as well as the effects of AI generators upon the profession and livelihood of artists, are wide and varied, and continue to evolve and gain nuance.

Some more links on this general topic:

February 2023 Books and Reading Notes

John Winkelman

February was a good book month. Three of the five arrivals were from Kickstarters, and two of those were from Kickstarters over two years old. The rest were new purchases. Reading-wise, my reading list for the year caught up with my acquisition list, and I expect it to stay that way for the rest of the year, unless I either get sick of reading (not likely to happen) or I indulge in some serious emotional-support book buying.

Acquisitions

Book which arrived in the month of February 2023

  1. Jaymee Goh (editor), Don’t Touch That – A Sci-Fi & Fantasy Parenting Anthology [2023.02.04] – This one was a long time coming. I backed it back in July 2020, and of course COVID continued to happen, so the production of this anthology was, well, fraught. But it is finally here, and it is beautiful!
  2. Red Pine (translator), Dancing with the Dead – The Essential Red Pine Translations (Copper Canyon Press) [2023.02.09] – This is a reward from a recent Kickstarter run by Copper Canyon. I have been a fan of Bill Porter, and of Copper Canyon, for decades, and this is a beautiful volume.
  3. Julie Nováková, Lucas K. Law, Susan Forest (editors), Life Beyond Us (Laksa Media Groups) [2023.02.18] – Another long-delayed, eagerly-anticipated, and joyously received Kickstarter reward. I backed this book in April of 2021, and it arrived on a beautiful, unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon. I am very much looking forward to diving into this one.
  4. Jordan Kurella, When I Was Lost (Trepidation Publishing) [2023.02.22] – I met Jordan at ConFusion 2023, where he and I and my partner Zyra hung out at the bar, talking and enjoying being back at the convention. I thought his name looked familiar, and it turns out he has a story in an anthology (A Punk Rock Future) I picked up a couple of years ago because another friend had a story in it. Small world!
  5. Jordan Kurella, I Never Liked You Anyway (Lethe Press) [2023.02.27] – Another of Kurella’s works, this one a short novel, which is already near the top of my TBR pile.

Reading List

Books and Journals I Read In the Month of February 2023

Books and Journals

  1. Marlon James, Moon Witch, Spider King [2023.02.17]
  2. Catherine Stein, The Courtesan and Mr. Hyde [2023.02.20]
  3. Hieu Minh Nguyen, Not Here [2023.02.21]
  4. Jason Gillikin (editor), Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  5. The Lakeshore Review #1 [2023.02.24]
  6. The Lakeshore Review #2 [2023.02.26]
  7. Valérie Mréjen (Katie Shireen Assef, translator), Black Forest [2023.02.27]

Short Prose

  1. Colleen Alles, “Visitor’s Pass”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  2. Tiffany Amo, “Sea of Diamonds”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  3. Allison Hawkins, “Penelope Butterfield’s Comprehensive Guide to Self-Annihilation”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  4. Robert Charles Kubiak, “Christmas Play”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  5. Morris Lincoln, “Conversion Therapy”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  6. Melanie Meyer, “Half the Kingdom”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  7. Andrew Ronzino, “Acquired Taste”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  8. Andrew Ronzino, “The Last Day”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  9. D.L. Rosa, “Edward”, Surface Reflections [2023.02.22]
  10. Colleen Alles, “The Only Private Place”, The Lakeshore Review #1 [2023.02.23]
  11. Dominic Bryan, “The Lies You Tell Yourself”, The Lakeshore Review #1 [2023.02.23]
  12. Maggie Hill, “Only the Drunk Can Sleep”, The Lakeshore Review #1 [2023.02.23]
  13. Jonathan Lindberg, “Star Man”, The Lakeshore Review #1 [2023.02.24]
  14. Julia Poole, “Coming Clean”, The Lakeshore Review #1 [2023.02.24]
  15. Phillip Sterling, “Last Resort”, The Lakeshore Review #1 [2023.02.24]
  16. Laura Cody, “Either One Step Forward, or Two Steps Back”, The Lakeshore Review #2 [2023.03.24]
  17. Byron Spooner, “Elvis Walks the Earth”, The Lakeshore Review #2 [2023.02.26]
  18. Susan Weinstein, “Sweet Halloween”, The Lakeshore Review #2 [2023.02.26]
  19. Wally Wood, “Dropout”, The Lakeshore Review #2 [2023.02.26]

IWSG, March 2023: I Wish I’d Written That

John Winkelman

The past month was kind of hectic due to a new project at work coinciding with my girlfriend and I, after three years, finally contracting COVID. It wasn’t serious for either of us, thanks to both of us being fully vaccinated and boosted, but it was a boring two and a half weeks of being stuck in the house waiting for the home and PCR tests to come up negative.

Fortunately, we had the cats to keep us entertained.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for March 2023 is: Have you ever read a line in novel or a clever plot twist that caused you to have author envy?

Well, I mean, YES!!!!!!! All the time. Almost every book I read has a turn of phrase, a scene, a twist, or something like that, which makes me say, “Well, dang! I wish I wrote that.”

The first one that comes to mind is a scene from Neil Gaiman‘s most excellent American Gods. One of the characters, let’s call him “MS,” is killed, and a few of the other characters hold a sort of wake for him, trading stories back and forth. After a little while MS is there, laughing along with the other characters and adding his own comments to the stories. It is handled so subtly that I had to go back and check that I was reading what I thought I was reading. The scene was so well written that there was no sense of disconnect, just a realization that “Well of course MS is going to show up at his own wake. That’s the kind of person [sic] he is!”

This description does scant justice to the scene.

Another is Mary Oliver‘s poem “The Poet Goes to Indiana” from her collection Why I Wake Early. In particular, this section:

…and there was once, oh wonderful,
a new horse in the pasture,
a tall, slim being-a neighbor was keeping her there—
and she put her face against my face,
put her muzzle, her nostrils, soft as violets,
against my mouth and my nose, and breathed me,
to see who I was…

Remarkable! In the fifth line, “soft as velvet” would have worked, but it would have been mundane. Ordinary. There are a million things as soft as velvet. But soft as violets? That is something unique, and enduring.

I could go on and on. Almost everything I read has at least one sentence which is noteworthy (and hopefully more than one, but not always). The moments of awe and revelation are infrequent, and valuable in their rarity.

(Also rare, fortunately, are the lines, plot twists, and scenes which make me think, “Thank the heavens I didn’t write that.” Uncommon but not unknown.)

I will repeat one of my guiding principles, as related by author Karen Lord: “Read well.” Reading well is as much a skill as writing well.

 

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January 2023 Books and Reading Notes

John Winkelman

Starting in 2023 I am combining my annual book acquisition list and my monthly readings lists into a single monthly post. Ideally my rate of reading will be greater than my rate of book acquisition. This month, however, I went to ConFusion, and while I did not grab as many books as I usually do, I still picked up four new titles.

Acquisitions

Acquisitions for the month of January 2023

  1. Hieu Minh Nguyen, Not Here (Coffee House Press) [2023.01.08] – I picked up Not Here on a whim, during a visit to Books & Mortar.
  2. Adrain Collins and Mike Myers (editors), The King Must Fall (Grimdark Magazine) [2023.01.10] – This is from a Kickstarter.
  3. Sheree Renée Thomas (editor), Sorghum and Spear (Outland Entertainment) [2023.01.12] – This is from a Kickstarter
  4. Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #46 [2023.01.16] – Published by the excellent Small Beer Press.
  5. Catherine Stein, Eden’s Voice (self-published) [2023.01.21] – Acquired from the author at ConFusion 2023
  6. Catherine Stein, The Courtesan and Mr. Hyde (self-published) [2023.01.21] – Acquired from the author at ConFusion 2023
  7. Rami Ungar, The Pure World Comes (self-published) [2023.01.21] – Acquired from the author at ConFusion 2023
  8. Todd Sanders (editor), The Librarian (Air and Nothingness Press) [2023.01.21] – Acquired from one of the authors, Storm Michael Humbert, at ConFusion 2023.
  9. Shalash the Iraqi (Luke Leafgren, translator), Shalash the Iraqi (And Other Stories) [2023.01.24] – This is an arrival from my subscription to And Other Stories
  10. Johanna Hedva, Your Love Is Not Good (And Other Stories) [2023.01.24] – This is from my subscription to the catalog of And Other Stories.

Reading List

Books and Journals I read in January 2023

Books and Journals

  1. Dreamforge #1 [2023.01.02]
  2. Poetry [2023.01.03]
  3. Nicole Sealey, Ordinary Beast [2023.01.04]
  4. Kathe Koja, Velocities [2023.01.12]
  5. Ananda Devi (Jeffery Zuckerman, translator), Eve Out of Her Ruins [2023.01.15]
  6. Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel (Jethro Soutar, translator), The Gurugu Pledge [2023.01.23]
  7. Ho Sok Fong (Natascha Bruce, translator), Lake Like a Mirror [2023.01.31]

Short Prose

  1. Sarena Ulibarri, “The Spiral Ranch”, Dreamforge #1 [2023.01.01]
  2. Terra LeMay, “Glass Roses”, Dreamforge #1 [2023.01.01]
  3. Barbara Barnett, “Z-Spot”, Dreamforge #1 [2023.01.01]
  4. Steven Brust and Skyler White, “Smith’s Point”, Dreamforge #1 [2023.01.02]
  5. Kathe Koja, “At Eventide”, Velocities [2023.01.05]
  6. Kathe Koja, “Baby”, Velocities [2023.01.06]
  7. Kathe Koja, “Velocity”, Velocities [2023.01.06]
  8. Kathe Koja, “Clubs”, Velocities [2023.01.08]
  9. Kathe Koja, “Urb Civ”, Velocities [2023.01.08]
  10. Kathe Koja, “Fireflies”, Velocities [2023.01.09]
  11. Kathe Koja, “Coyote Pass”, Velocities [2023.01.09]
  12. Kathe Koja, “Road Trip”, Velocities [2023.01.10]
  13. Kathe Koja, “Toujours”, Velocities [2023.01.10]
  14. Kathe Koja, “Far and Wee”, Velocities [2023.01.11]
  15. Kathe Koja, “The Marble Lily”, Velocities [2023.01.11]
  16. Kathe Koja, “La Reine D’Enfer”, Velocities [2023.01.12]
  17. Jim C. Hines, “144th Contact” (Patreon story) [2023.01.12]
  18. Kathe Koja, “Pas De Deux”, Velocities [2023.01.12]
  19. Ho Sok Fong, “The Wall”, Lake Like a Mirror [2023.01.25]
  20. Ho Sok Fong, “Radio Drama”, Lake Like a Mirror [2023.01.26]
  21. Ho Sok Fong, “Lake Like a Mirror”, Lake Like a Mirror [2023.01.28]
  22. Ho Sok Fong, “The Chest”, Lake Like a Mirror [2023.01.29]
  23. Ho Sok Fong, “Summer Tornado”, Lake Like a Mirror [2023.01.29]
  24. Ho Sok Fong, “Aminah”, Lake Like a Mirror [2023.01.29]
  25. Ho Sok Fong, “Wind through the Pineapple Leaves, through the Frangipani”, Lake Like a Mirror [2023.01.29]
  26. Ho Sok Fong, “October”, Lake Like a Mirror [2023.01.30]
  27. Ho Sok Fong, “March in a Small Town”, Lake Like a Mirror [2023.01.31]

IWSG, February 2023: Indie Book Covers

John Winkelman

Lindemayer system experiment

Happy February, O my pixel pushers and ink rearrangers!  And for those who observe the Lunar New Year, happy Year of the Water Rabbit! I am feeling re-energized after a weekend at ConFusion 2023 where I volunteered to help run the ‘con, participated on a couple of panels, and hung out with and talked to many many many great writers and artists. ConFusion is my favorite event, and a great way to start the year.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for February 2023 is:

If you are an Indie author, do you make your own covers or purchase them? If you publish trad, how much input do you have about what goes on your cover?

I have played around with making covers for a couple of chapbooks, but never for an actual book, on account of I don’t have any actual books for which to create or commission cover art.

That being said, were I to commission a cover, I would make sure it was created by a human artist, with minimal or no use of any of the AI [sic] image generators (Midjourney, DALL-E 2, etc.) which have been recently in the news for, among other things, copyright infringement of the artwork on which the image generator’s base neural network was trained. Call me old-fashioned, but any art I pay for will be created by actual artist. And I say that as someone who has played around with generative art for over two decades.

More information on this issue here:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/16/23557098/generative-ai-art-copyright-legal-lawsuit-stable-diffusion-midjourney-deviantart
https://www.polygon.com/23558946/ai-art-lawsuit-stability-stable-diffusion-deviantart-midjourney
https://petapixel.com/2022/12/21/midjourny-founder-admits-to-using-a-hundred-million-images-without-consent/
https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/news/midjourney-founder-basically-admits-to-copyright-breaching-and-artists-are-angry

Speaking of computer-generated art, I created the above image with my Lindenmayer System Explorer. If you want to duplicate this and play around with it, enter the following bolded text into the “import/export” field, click “Import Data”, then click “render.”

{“iterations”:”4″,”lineLength”:”4″,”initialAngle”:”270″,”angle”:”30″,”angleTaper”:”0″,”lineWidth”:”2″,”lineScale”:”1″,”lineTaper”:”-1″,”lineColors”:”222222,000099,990000,999900″,”backgroundColor”:”000000″,”axiom”:”[F]+[F]+[F]+[F]+[F]+[F]+[F]+[F]+[F]+[F]+[F]+[F]+”,”grammar”:”F:[FF[F+F]F]F!fF[F-F]”}

Happy writing, everyone!

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Thoughts on ConFusion 2023

John Winkelman

My badge and ribbons from ConFusion 2023

Last weekend I attended ConFusion 2023 with my partner Zyra, from Thursday morning through Sunday afternoon. This was my ninth ConFusion, and Zyra’s second. Her first experience was last year, still in the middle of the pandemic. 2022 was not, through no fault of their own, the best year in ConFusion’s history by a long shot. Fortunately 2023 was much improved, and though still small by the standards of many of the previous years, it was a lot of fun and felt like the ConFusions of old.

This year I volunteered as part of the Operations team and as a general dogsbody, taking care of those things which needed taking care of and lifting heavy things, as well as sitting at the Ops table in the early morning hours of Saturday and Sunday. I am used to waking up at 5:00 to feed the cats, work out, and write, so waking up at 5:00 to sit at a table in a mostly-empty hallway was not difficult, except when it came to staying awake.

I participated on two panels this year, “What do Trends in Artificial Intelligence Generated Art and Writing Mean for Artists and Authors?” on  Saturday with Jason Sanford, Rick Lieder, and Bill Higgins, and “Creativity in the Age of AI” on Sunday with Jason Sanford, Rick Lieder, and John Scalzi. I moderated the first, and Jason moderated the second. I had a great time on these panels, and will be posting about the content therein over the next couple of weeks.

The best part of conferences, of course, is the people. I spent most of my non-panel, non-Ops time hanging out in the bar area, talking to many wonderful people, and this experience filled my heart to near-bursting! Over the course of the long weekend, I spent time talking to, among others, Dave Palmer, Kathe Koja, Jason Sanford, Patrick Tomlinson, Maurice Broaddus, Rick Lieder, Jordan Kurella, ZigZag Claybourne, Saladin Ahmad, Catherine Stein, Rami Ungar, and Storm Michael Humbert. Many of these people I already knew, and the rest I met for the first time this past weekend. In both cases, my life was enriched by their presence.

I also spent a lot of time hanging out with the members of the ConFusion ConCom, talking about the history of ConFusion, the day-to-day tasks, the unexpected issues when working with hotels and bars, and the scores of other details which must be dealt with as they arise. These were fascinating discussions and only increased my respect for the volunteers who run fan conventions of all sorts.

So what’s next? At the moment I plan to be more involved with the next ConFusion in January 2024. That means that, after a few weeks off for rest and recovery, I will be sitting in on meetings with the ConCom and figuring out where I may be of the most assistance. And I am very much looking forward to this experience. ConFusion is one of my favorite events of the year, and I am happy – nay, eager – to contribute to its continued success in any way I can.

And before I forget, I treated myself to a new fountain pen, courtesy of Brad, the Pen Guy. It is beautiful to see, and a joy to write with.

The Books of ConFusion 2023

John Winkelman

Books signed at ConFusion 2023

The above is the collection of books which I was fortunate enough to have signed by their respective authors at ConFusion 2023.

First up are Zoe’s Tale, The End of All Things, and The Last Colony by John Scalzi. I picked these books up over the past several years, and finally brought them with me to ConFusion to be signed.

I picked up The Pure World Comes by Rami Ungar when a dapper gentleman in a top hat asked me “Do you like horror?” as I was browsing the tables in Artist’s Alley during some down time. Rami and I talked for a hot minute about self publishing and horror, and I walked away with a new book.

Dark Factory and Velocities by Kathe Koja, I picked up back in December, expressly to get them signed during the convention.

On Saturday afternoon, and I stopped in to Catherine Stein‘s “Author Meet and Greet” event, and ended up purchasing Eden’s Voice and The Courtesan and Mr. Hyde, which are period romances in the steampunk and gas-lamp fantasy genres. I generally don’t read romance novels, but I love the myriad *punk subgenres so this might be an inroad into a genre in which I am woefully uninformed. And we discovered that we have a friend in common, in West Michigan author Jean Davis, who Catherine knows through the self-publishing and local/regional book event scenes.

On the bottom right is The Librarian, an anthology published by Air and Nothingness Press, which was funded through a 2022 Kickstarter campaign. One of the authors, Storm Michael Humbert, was in one of the author meet-and-greets, with a table of anthologies in which he has stories.

All in all, ConFusion 2023 was an excellent venue for picking up new books, and I am proud that I kept it to only four books purchased throughout the long weekend, as I have a shelf full of books which have been signed at ConFusions past, which I have not yet read. New books shall be my reward for reading old books.

One of these years it will be me sitting at a table behind a pile of books on which are printed the words “By John Winkelman.”

IWSG, January 2023: The Word of the Year

John Winkelman

Poe (left) and Pepper eyeballing each other

The week before Christmas I was struck down by the flu. I worked from home for that week, and just when I started to feel better the Great Christmas Blizzard of 2022 covered West Michigan with a ridiculous amount of snow. Throughout these two weeks of isolation, Poe and Pepper (pictured above) were a wonderful source of amusement and affection for Zyra and I.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for January 2023 is:

Do you have a word of the year? Is there one word that sums up what you need to work on or change in the coming year?

For this year, I think my word will be Attentiveness. That point where attention meets engagement. I had little enough of either over the past (checks notes) five years, since I went on hiatus from Caffeinated Press at the beginning of 2018. The last three years have been a fugue of reacting to or recovering from outside world events. Now that we are through the holidays and already the daylight hours are growing noticeably longer, I feel a renewed energy.

Attentiveness, to me, means not just noticing the parts of my life which need attention, but then doing something about it. Whether it be my relationship with my partner, my health, the martial arts class, my family, my writing, our house, or anything else in my life, I think I am ready to re-enter the world and take care of the things which need taking care of.

 

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Happy New Year, etc.

John Winkelman

New arrivals in the week of December 25, 2022

Welcome to 2023! 2022 was overall a good year, but also exhausting, and so I am kind of happy to see it in the rearview mirror.

Two book arrived here at the house in the last week of the year. On the left is the January 2023 issue of Poetry, which  came as something of a surprise, as I thought my subscription ended with the previous issue. I guess I was mistaken.

On the right is Apex Magazine 2021, the printed collection of the stories which appeared in the electronic editions of Apex Magazine, from their successful Kickstarter. This book has the honor of being the last book to enter the Library at Winkelman Abbey in 2022, in that it arrived in the afternoon of December 31. Excellent timing!

In reading news, I made some progress through the first issue of the new incarnation of Dreamforge, but my brain is so fried from *gestures at everything* that I couldn’t motivate myself to do much more than watch The Blacklist and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and play Stardew Valley.

In writing news, there is no writing news.

Starting in the new year, I will combine the “books I acquired” weekly posts with the “stuff I read” monthly posts, so now everything will be monthly. I plan to still do weekly (-ish) posts, but they will be both general and topical, and no longer exclusively about book stuff.

Happy New Year, everyone!

December 2022 Reading List

John Winkelman

What I Read in December 2022

This was another great month for reading, though the list is short. But such is necessarily the case for Dostoevsky December.

And this rounds out the list for the year. 120 books or journals, and 252 pieces of short prose. Not bad at all.

Books and Journals

  1. Fyodor Dostoevsky (Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear, translators), Crime and Punishment [2022.12.18]
  2. Poetry #221.3 [2022.12.19]
  3. The Paris Review #242 [2022.12.21]

Short Prose

  1. Avigayl Sharp, “Uncontrollable, Irrelevant”, The Paris Review #242 [2022.12.19]
  2. Addie E. Citchens, “A Good Samaritan”, The Paris Review #242 [2022.12.19]
  3. Mieko Kanai (Polly Barton, translator), “Tap Water”, The Paris Review #242 [2022.12.20]
  4. Sophie Madeline Dess, “Zalmanovs”, The Paris Review #242 [2022.12.21]
  5. Tom Drury, “Where Does This Live?”, The Paris Review #242 [2022.12.21]
  6. Isabella Hammad, “Gertrude”, The Paris Review #242 [2022.12.21]
  7. Lauren C. Teffeau, “Sing! & Remember”, Dreamforge #1 [2022.12.24]
  8. Jane Lindskold, “Born From Memory”, Dreamforge #1 [2022.12.24]
  9. Jean Martin, “I Am Not As Young As I Was”, Dreamforge #1 [2022.12.29]
  10. Paul Dellinger, “Con Man”, Dreamforge #1 [2022.12.29]
  11. Chris Sumberg, “Anthropomorphile”, Dreamforge #1 [2022.12.29]
  12. Scot Noel, “Walker in Leaves”, Dreamforge #1 [2022.12.29]
  13. Dr. Eric Leif Davin, “The Prophetic Vision of Stephen Vincent Benet”, Dreamforge #1 [2022.12.30]
  14. Tom Sheehan, “The Old Man Who Hid Music”, Dreamforge #1 [2022.12.30]