Author’s note

My new short story was com­mis­sioned by Google and pro­duced using a new AI-powered editor called Word­craft. Titled Author’s Note, it is pre­sented along­side new sto­ries from sev­eral other very impres­sive writers.

I’ll say more about this project below, but first, I want to present the com­plete list of sto­ries I’ve pub­lished in the past year:

• Elyse Flayme and the Final Flood, for MIT Tech­nology Review

• Harriet Amber in the Conan Arcade, for Com­mer­cial Type

• Author’s Note, for Google

There’s also the new edi­tions of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book­store and Sourdough, both with their pre­quel sto­ries. All in all, a pretty solid set of offerings!

While I’m men­tioning those new edi­tions, the ones with bonus material, I want to apol­o­gize for being so parochial in their promotion. “Hooray, Sourdough’s pre­quel story is now available!” announces Sloan — in his newsletter received by many thou­sands of people out­side the U.S. to whom it is not, in fact, available.

The U.S. edi­tions, and my rela­tion­ship with my U.S. publisher, are so front-and-center for me that it’s easy to forget about the global picture; but I really shouldn’t, and, in the future, I won’t.

Onward, to my … 

Notes on writing with Google’s AI

I’m going to dive into some detail here; it’s prob­ably not for everyone, so if this sub­ject doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip mer­rily ahead.

There is a ton of con­text about the overall Word­craft project on the web­site; I really encourage anyone inter­ested in the inter­sec­tion of AI and art to spend some time exploring. These tech­nolo­gies are now mature enough that we can begin to move from spec­u­lating about their uses to … actually using them! And not only to make cool demos, but to do real work.

That last part, the “real work”, is impor­tant to me. I am done, personally, with the genre of “I see what you did there”—of making things that are note­worthy pri­marily for their appli­ca­tion of a frothy new tech­nology. That’s really saying some­thing, because I have made a LOT of things like that! I spent sev­eral years engaged in AI writing explo­rations of my own, almost entirely in this spirit.

Approaching this project, I felt com­mitted to writing a story that could stand on its own; a story that achieved the same things I want ANY of my sto­ries to achieve; a story to which the response might be not, “I see what you did there”, but: “I loved this!”

Whether I succeeded, you can judge for yourself. For my part, I’d hap­pily have pub­lished this story on my web­site, or dis­trib­uted it as a zine, with no men­tion of AI tools at all.

Okay, but what about those AI tools?

Over on the web­site, you can see some screenshots of the Word­craft editor and read more about its affordances. It oper­ates basi­cally like a super-upgraded ver­sion of my AI text com­ple­tion plugin from way back in 2016. Every­thing about it is much more capable, but the work­flow is the same. You can, at any point, ask the AI to gen­erate new text, and when it does, its sug­ges­tions reflect the sur­rounding draft.

The Word­craft team didn’t require or even sug­gest that my story be written in any par­tic­ular way, or that it con­tain any par­tic­ular frac­tion of AI-gen­erated text. My brief was: write what you want to write, the way you want to write it.

Okay, then! After noodling for a while, I decided I’d try to write some kind of locked-room mystery, because (a) it’s a genre I enjoy, that (b) I’ve never tried before, and (c) I liked the idea of giving the AI the role of the detec­tive — perhaps chal­lenging it to “deduce” things based on clues in the text. In my imagination, this would be really fun! I would, in a sense, play the criminal, while the AI would play the stolid but savvy detec­tive, and if its reac­tions were a little weird, well, that might be even better … 

It didn’t work at all. Absolute crash and burn. I had over­es­ti­mated the model’s powers. Para­graphs into my nascent mystery, it had no idea what was happening; or at least, not enough of an idea to “participate” in any mean­ingful way. It knew I was writing a mystery; it reached for the appro­priate terms and tropes; but that wasn’t any­where close to being sufficient.

So I retreated, a bit dejected. I kept a log of my expe­ri­ences, for the ben­efit of the Word­craft team. A few notes from that log made their way into the team’s paper, which I think is a qui­etly path­breaking contribution: an almost ethno­graphic study of real writers doing real work with this real AI tool. Hype, this ain’t! The Word­craft team has demon­strated clear-eyed courage in syn­the­sizing and pre­senting our expe­ri­ences, many of which con­tain some ver­sion of my own retreat and dejection.

For a couple of weeks, I thought about other genres. On a medium-long drive, an opening line occurred to me. Beside a pool in Fresno, a story took shape. Then, I cracked it, by estab­lishing a fenced-in space for the AI to con­tribute what it could.

This AI, like many of its predecessors, is very good at “riffing”: given an example, it can gen­erate lots more, often with impres­sive fidelity to genre and vibe. This new story called for a litany of grisly deaths, so, I asked the AI to dream up grisly deaths. I asked it, also, to tell me the names of the dead: char­ac­ters from a fan­tasy saga, cliched in the best pos­sible way. Red meat! This assignment, it could handle.

Now, when you read the story, you’ll know that the litany of deaths is mostly the work of the AI. I prompted and prodded; I curated and edited; I smoothed and re-arranged. But “Captain Cirrus, tram­pled by a hippopotamus”? That’s 21st-century tech­nology in its fullest bloom bringing you that!

Three thoughts, to close.

First, I’m very impressed by the Word­craft team. Daphne Ippolito, Ann Yuan, Andy Coenen, Sehmon Burnam, and their col­leagues engi­neered an impres­sive, provoca­tive writing tool, but/and, more impor­tantly, they inves­ti­gated its use with sen­si­tivity and courage. This puts them leagues ahead of nearly everyone else out there ped­dling AI tools. (Indeed, I wish I’d been this cir­cum­spect back when I was yakking about my own AI writing explo­rations, sev­eral years ago.)

Second, I’m proud of my story! I love its George R. R. Martin-alike narrator; I love its vil­lain and his scheme. And, yes, I love the deaths, con­jured glee­fully by a com­puter that’s read it all.

But, third: I have to report that the AI did not make a useful or pleasant writing partner. Even a state-of-the-art lan­guage model cannot presently “under­stand” what a fic­tion writer is trying to accom­plish in an evolving draft. That’s not unreasonable; often, the writer doesn’t know exactly what they’re trying to accom­plish! Often, they are writing to find out.

Will the AI get there, someday? Will I be able to recruit my detec­tive at last? I under­stand very well the cur­rent pace of improve­ment in this field, and even so … I don’t see it coming any­time soon.

There’s more than a little meta-textuality in Author’s Note; it is surely no coin­ci­dence that the assistant, in the end, gets dunked in the pool.

I don’t think I’ve ever written about my theory of short sto­ries, even though I talk about it a lot. It’s very simple: I think all good short sto­ries are, in one way or another, about death. That’s not true of novels; good novels can be about lots of things. But a good short story is always basi­cally a memento mori.

This is one of the rea­sons Bullet in the Brain is the best short story.

I won’t defend my theory — it is silly, and I cannot be bothered — but, for my part, I really do believe it.

Remember, I come by my interest in AI honestly; I’ve been thinking about this stuff since 1996. Here’s the title card for my “documentary” on AI, pro­duced at Troy Athens High School using a VHS editing rig:

View the whole thing on YouTube, if you dare!

Disintegration to discoverability

A few notes and links — not too many this time.

Where Twitter’s dis­in­te­gra­tion is concerned, I stand by my pre­vious assessment.

“It was ter­ribly cre­ative and demanding, because you’re making design deci­sions at every moment. So it was high design.” Who wouldn’t want to crawl under­neath a table and work on this? Fabulous.

Here is some very nice banjo-playing by Rob Stenson, who I know mainly as the cre­ator of Coldtype, a library that powers cool text ani­ma­tions.

Here is the moon, “melting” behind the pres­sure waves blasting out the end of a rocket. Here, the effect is win­ningly explained by Scott Manley.

Here’s a beau­tiful paean to a Studio Ghibli-adjacent movie I’d never heard about, from the great Ani­ma­tion Obses­sive newsletter. They are really doing some­thing unique and valu­able over there.

The movie, Princess Arete, is available to watch for free in many regions until December 2. Here’s the clip that Ani­ma­tion Obses­sive shared:

Guillermo del Toro, as ever an evan­ge­list for imperfection:

“I wanted to return the con­trols of ani­ma­tion to the animators, and treat [the animators] as actors,” del Toro said. He encour­aged his team to make “failed acts”—the tiny stum­bles and imper­fec­tions that make a per­for­mance by a live actor feel real — and resist what he called the “codification of ani­ma­tion into a ‘cool’ lan­guage that is almost like emojis.”

The best.

I thought I knew things about distribution

I am not really involved in the video game industry, but I’m nev­er­the­less an avid reader of the GameDis­cov­erCo newsletter by Simon Car­less, because I find his lens so inspiring.

Simon doesn’t write about pro­gram­ming games; he doesn’t write about playing them. He writes about the space in between. How does a person FIND a video game? What makes them decide to pur­chase and play it? What buttons, levers, and warp zones influ­ence that process?

“Discoverability” is a good 21st-century word. Most of the dig­ital dreams of my cohort, the par­ti­sans of the open web, ran aground on this reality. It’s not enough to make some­thing and post it online; you must also inject it into some channel that will carry it to people. The web itself doesn’t do that; you need an extra layer, some reser­voir of atten­tion and/or curiosity, whether it’s Google, the blo­gos­phere (RIP), Stum­ble­Upon (RIP), Twitter (RIP) … hmm, there seem to be a lot of dead chan­nels out here.

Back in the 2000s, I thought I knew things about dis­tri­b­u­tion, about atten­tion and networks — but I didn’t really.

It was, honestly, the expe­ri­ence of pub­lishing a book with FSG that showed me what dis­tri­b­u­tion really looks like, and taught me that you just cannot be starting from scratch every time. You need supply chains — not only (or even pri­marily) physical, but com­mer­cial and intellectual. Emotional, even.

There is dis­cov­er­ability in books, though of course it’s totally dif­ferent from dis­cov­er­ability in games. Dif­ferent storefronts, dif­ferent algo­rithms, dif­ferent tastemakers. I’d like to think this newsletter con­tributes to book dis­cov­er­ability, in a small way, from time to time.

I’d say most people in both industries, even the pro­fes­sionals, muddle through dis­cov­er­ability, hoping for the best, some­times get­ting it. There are new kinds of pro­fes­sionals else­where who won’t take any chances. The crass video pro­ducers who avidly game YouTube’s algorithm, surfing its sub­tlest con­tours to mil­lions of views — oof, they know dis­cov­er­ability.

What I admire about Simon Car­less is that he knows it, too, but he is never crass, not for a second. His raison d’être is the sup­port of interesting, inde­pen­dent video games. He crunches the num­bers and mon­i­tors the algo­rithms on behalf of, no kidding, art.

There really ought to be a dis­cov­er­ability newsletter of this quality for every medium, in every marketplace.

This is my season for driving, as I haul tons of olives from grove to mill for Fat Gold, the small olive oil com­pany I help operate. I cover a lot of ground — it’s a real Cal­i­fornia odyssey, every year — and I’m grateful for the opportunity. It’s good thinking time (you should see my voice-to-text notes, dozens every day) and there’s always some­thing new to see.

This year, I have observed

• the great ful­fill­ment cen­ters along­side I-5 near Tracy, lit up at night like enor­mous alien depots, each of them a quarter-mile on each side, easy. This is the cold-pulsing heart of com­merce for the whole Bay Area; it doesn’t look like much.

• a gravel quarry with a wind tur­bine spin­ning over­head and sil­very lights winking along the var­ious chutes and con­veyor belts, and the gravel itself piled in shadow below. An appealing indus­trial silhouette.

• an orchard uprooted, the trees all laid down on their sides to dry for a year, now being fed into an enor­mous chipper. The process con­tinued for sev­eral days, and each day, when I passed, there were fewer trees, until finally they were gone, replaced by an empty field dotted with a few tow­ering heaps of bright wood chips. (I am 95% cer­tain this field will now be planted with almond trees.)

• the Cal­i­fornia Aqueduct, the arti­fi­cial river that car­ries melt­water from the Sierra Nevada to Southern Cal­i­fornia. Dri­ving around, I found myself crossing and re-crossing it all along its course. Each and every time, it impressed: easily 100 feet wide, formidable, inex­haustible (or so it appears), the water black-blue under the winter sun.

In the couple of days I waited to send this newsletter, the rain arrived. Clouds came scud­ding in from the west, won­derful scratchy tufts. Every­where I drove, I could see a sheet of gray out one eye and a patch of blue out another; the rain never fell where there wasn’t sun shining at the same time. That’s rainbow weather, of course, and they floated all over, not full arcs but little scraps of refracted color pinned to the air. On Monday, I expe­ri­enced one of my nicest Cal­i­fornia days ever in my eigh­teen years living here, as I trun­dled along, water above and water below, gog­gling at the show.

From the San Joaquin Valley,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter on December 7. Before then, you’ll receive my annual gift guide, some­time in late November.

November 2022