There's a 1985* sci-fi short story I once read by M.A. Foster called “Entertainment” that predicts what will happen in an increasingly AI-generated art world. I can't find any excerpts or summaries of it online, but what I recall is:
In the future, humans can prompt machines to create any art -- e.g., "What would a collaboration between early-era Peter Gabriel and late-era Beethoven look like, with a music video directed by Werner Herzog?" (That's a made up example, but someone originally gave me the story because Peter Gabriel and early Genesis are actually referred to in the text, and I was at the height of my fandom. XD ) An AI then comes up with a bunch of different examples, and the human who gave the prompt chooses the one(s) they like best. They then release the creation to the broader world, and people make micropayments to stream it. Everyone competes for attention, hoping to go viral or at least make a decent living.
(There's a dystopian aspect, where if you don't make enough money and your balance drops below zero, you disappear back into the human factory to get remade. Also, people don't have sex in person -- they pay each other for the rights to their likeness, and they have sex with simulated versions of one another. All of which is rather interesting, but not as directly relevant to the point I'm making here.)
M.A. Foster did an impressive job foreseeing a bunch of aspects of modern AI and online culture (especially keeping in mind that there was no Web or social media or digital streaming or online micropayments at the time this was written). And it’s becoming easy to imagine that we may reach a point where many of the story’s predictions about art come true, as well.
Currently, you can give increasingly complex prompts and get AIs to respond with something that makes sense and seems like a valid reply. Newer AIs often create text and images that are both exciting and terrifying due to what feels like a sudden potential to blend in with or replace human output. Fandom, along with everyone else, is unnerved. After all, will we still need fan creators in a world where we can prompt AIs to do this?
(source)
Or this?
(source)
Or when AI can even take the prompt “Professor Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr kissing next to a conflagration” and output this?
(source)
Okay, there’s definitely still some funkiness going on there with some body parts; cherik fanartists can still obviously do better, for the moment. And more generally, AI output is still frequently goofy, full of embellishments and fabrications, literally tasteless, and/or flat-out wrong – but we can see so many promises of how good it will get. And we can imagine how AI output will increasingly be incorporated into transformative fandom and shipping culture.
But all of the above examples illustrate another thing that M.A. Foster got right: If you want AI to produce something really interesting and compelling, it's important to have a human come up with a good prompt and then select the best output.
This isn’t new; for years, we have been living in an increasingly curatorial world. For instance, with stock photos of nearly everything, and digitized versions available of much of the world's art and photography, and endless hours of new YouTube & TikTok videos uploaded to the web every passing minute, it's much easier these days to create new images or videos or other visual works without being an artist. But building a compelling visual work based on others' images -- a mood board, edit, collage, fanvid, etc. -- still benefits enormously from being driven by a human with a particular sense of style and particular goals in mind. And the more that any human wants to see something that is different from the most common or most popular images that already exist, the more likely they are either going to have to create it themselves – or at least push the AI really hard in that direction via increasingly specific prompts and feedback. (None of these roles are unique to online culture, either – art commissioners have historically prompted things, and art collectors and museums have curated them -- but these days we all have access to a much wider world of online works, and we all curate our own tumblrs and pinterest boards and so forth, even if we don't explicitly create curatorial works for fandom.)
The thing I found most unrealistic about "Entertainment" was that people weren’t tempted to try their own hand at creating art; it was a purely remix + curation culture. In reality, even if AIs get really excellent at creation, so good that their fic and art are as good as your favorite fan creators’ work, I don't think they're ever going to suppress our own creative urges. We live in a world where there are already 313 Dean/Castiel high school AU hurt/comfort fics – and yet people were still inspired to write/update two more this week. People are not going to stop creating new fanworks just because the AIs are increasingly able to join in and create more. And, for some time yet, humans are still going to lead the way in creating new canons with compelling stories and characters, which machines will then learn from and remix. (That is another thing that human artists have also always done -- drawing inspiration from and remixing one another's art -- and something that fandom in particular is pretty great at.)
TL;DR human contributions to fandom will still be very important for fandom for the foreseeable future. Even if the internet -- and now AI -- have helped us shift from spending more time as solo creators to also having increasingly active roles as prompters and curators.
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This post was partly inspired by @fansplaining 's latest discussion of AI & recent fandom panic, "Artificial Fandom Intelligence", as well as @cfiesler 's post, "Elon Musk did not create an AI trained on your fanfiction." They also addressed other issues that fans are worried about, like the idea of AIs and their creators getting credit and/or monetary reward for new fanworks trained on existing human-generated fanworks. If you've read other good meta about any aspect of fandom & AI, I'd love pointers -- please feel free to share in the notes!
*At least, it was collected in a 1985 anthology called Owl Time; I’m not sure when/where it was originally published.
For every action, there’s a reaction.
Or in my case, a consequence.
One night.
One party.
One girl.
One time.
One unforeseen tragedy.
Two shattered hearts.
Two lives changed forever.
*Not recommended for readers under the age of 18 due to language and sexual situations.
Standalone in a series.
Review:
Life has a way of throwing a wrench in your plans and nobody knows that more than…
Title: Mackenzie Series: Heritage Bay Series Author: MA Foster Genre: NA Romance (Stand alone) Release Date: April 6, 2018
For every action, there’s a reaction. Or in my case, a consequence. One night. One party. One girl. One time. One unforeseen tragedy. Two shattered hearts. Two lives changed forever.
*Not recommended for readers under the age of 18 due to language, sexual…
If you're a science fiction or fantasy reader, you probably know the work of Michael Whelan, who has done cover illustration for the genre since at least the 1970s. He has a Tumblr now (I'm not sure if he curates it himself or if someone else does, but it's his work entirely, no reblogs), which I've been following since I came across it. Last week, there was a post that reminded me of a book I hadn't read, the third of a trilogy. It also reminded me that I have an omnibus of all three books that was published a few years ago:
The Gameplayers of Zan
The Warriors of Dawn
The Day of the Klesh
These books were published between 1975 and 1979 and went out of print by 1985. My dad owned the individual paperbacks, published by DAW; two of them had Whelan covers, but I don't think the first one did. The Warriors of Dawn was actually the first book; The Gameplayers is a prequel, written later but set earlier; The Day of the Klesh is the book I never got around to reading.
So I decided to read the trilogy again, including the final novel. Now, I was nine years old when Warriors was published. I probably read it for the first time between the ages of nine and twelves. I was a very precocious reader, and my parents put few restrictions on what I was allowed to read. We didn't have the Internet in those days, my summer children; all we had were the books kept behind the bed, or hidden under the couch. So my dad had no qualms about letting me read a science fiction novel centered on a romantic relationship that contained non-explicit sex.
From a 21st-century perspective, there's a lot to criticize about The Warriors of Dawn. It's a far far distant future where humans live on dozens of planets, yet everyone is white and heterosexual and women are still in many ways subordinate to men. Most of the dialogue sounds like 19th-century Germans philosophers having a drunken debate that's been translated by Google and somebody who reads first-year German. Most of the actual science is handwaved, except for the physics of the planet Dawn, which like the planet Uranus has a north pole tilted toward its primary star. The protagonist, a young trader named Han Keeling, is a fairly ordinary guy who has important relationships with not one but two extraordinary women.
And yet. There is so much stuff in this book that seeded what I still read and write today. The central concern of the series is the Ler, a genetically engineered species of humans. The scientists who created them were hoping to build a super-race that could breed with and improve Homo sapiens; what they got instead was a Homo novus, different but not necessarily better, and not cross-fertile with H. sapiens. That was generations ago, in the background; since then, humans and ler have each gone their own way, colonizing planets, becoming strangers to one another.
Han is paired with a young ler woman named Liszendir who is a highly skilled martial artist. Almost from the first page, he is assessing her as a sexual being and telling himself they won't have a relationship, which of course they do (and this novel should be tagged "Slow Burn" at AO3). You see, the ler differ from humans most in the matter of sexuality. They hit puberty around ten years of age, but they don't become fertile until around age thirty, so they have literally twenty years of sex without fear of conception. On the other hand, they also have a highly structured marriage/family system and the pressure of a fertile period when conception is possible and sex becomes imperative. So while Han and Liszendir do the do, they know from the start that a long-term commitment is not possible.
So in this novel we have a secondary species with lots of sex, a four-person marriage (that predates Le Guin's concept of sedoretu, which works quite differently), an invented language, gender shenanigans (ler males and females are much more similar than human males and females; the men can lactate, and both sexes lose fertility and sex drive around age sixty), fuck or die (Liszendir's oncoming fertility), and a romantic relationship that culminates in Han and Liszendir helping one another find permanent commitments (Han with a human girl, Liszendir in a ler "braid" or marriage). All of which is still utterly my jam. There are passages of this book that I have memorized, for heaven's sake. And a lot of them are from those scenes in the isolated cabin that I was way too young to read when I first did. Ah, my fucked-up youth--the Episcopal Church, the theatre, and Dad's sci fi books.
For every action, there’s a reaction.
Or in my case, a consequence.
One night.
One party.
One girl.
One unforeseen tragedy.
Two shattered hearts.
Two lives changed forever.
Add Mackenzie to Goodreads HERE
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