Something happens in my mouth the moment I blow out a candle, it fills with the taste of birthday cake from a specific childhood birthday party. I see the red cotton frills of my party dress, my seven-ish year old classmates, a few wearing checkered multicolored school uniforms, we are all wearing paper hats along a last-supper-ish table in the tiled backroom of a McDonald’s.

The scent of jasmine takes me to the gentle feeling of my grandmother’s fingertips along the base of my neck as she braided the threaded mogra flowers into my hair lovingly, while I sat at her feet. Simultaneously, it is also the smell that bursts forth from the backyard suddenly in the house in Hollywood Hills. A sharp breeze might hit my face under specific temperature conditions, and I am transported back onto a boat in high winds in Mexico feeling the sting of a jellyfish, heat moving over the skin of my legs. When I hear the sound of gentle paws against the floor anywhere, pitter-patter, I find myself back at home sipping espresso on the back porch in cold morning air, our dog sidling beside me on the top step.

These landmarks show up often unconsciously - consequences of sensory or spatial metadata - flashes of; who somebody was in this specific place so many years ago, this is exactly where something specific happened, this is how it felt. I later learn of the madeleine de Proust, a similar phenomenon of involuntary memory that collapses the space/time between the past and present instantaneously - where the narrator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time bites into a madeleine cake and is transported to a childhood in the fictional town of Combray.

On the first day of 2026, I’m speaking to a friend over Zoom in Paris as she studies for her perfuming exams. She tells me how she’s memorizing the molecules for certain complex scent synthesis by relating each to moments in time. A molecule that’s commonly used in green apple shampoo, takes her to the back to the fourth grade, to the emotions that come with becoming more of a pre-teen than a child.

“Over time my brain has started to form this weird conglomerate time-space home, which has a room for my grandparents, a room from my family’s house, a summer from fourth grade. All of those are combining into this interesting chimera Franken-palace in my mind — home to the very first node I’m taken to when I smell something, and then it kind of expands into other memories,” she says.

Memory palaces as a technique for recall, or the method of loci, came into being when the roof of an opulent dining hall collapsed upon a feast around 500 BC. The bodies of the attendees are left mangled and unidentifiable, until Simonides of Ceos, a poet who had miraculously escaped by stepping outside momentarily, reconstructs the guest list by spatially walking through his own memory. This turned into a system for memorizing speeches for the Romans, for card counters to recall the order of shuffled decks of cards, and TV detectives to solve crimes.

Humans have evolved to navigate environments spatially, not necessarily to store abstractions - based on this cool study from the ‘70s called Place units in the hippocampus of the freely moving rat. The hippocampus is, as hardware, primarily a mapping device - co-opted for memory processing. There are cells that researchers called “place units” - neurons that would only fire when a rat was in a specific location. I think of how remembrance works for myself, I step in place and a thousand versions of myself have stepped here before, and I may forget the face of a person but a smell could suddenly throw me back a century. A touch of a person may bring to mind an earthworm. In some ways, I differ slightly from a rat: spatial and sensory triggers are stored as primitives or mnemonics like AR markers, a symbol could cause a surprise opening of a closed trunk inside a mind.

In the opening short story in Borges’ The Book of Sand, the author writes as himself in Cambridge, Massachusetts - while simultaneously being a younger version of himself in Geneva, beside the Rhone - both versions seated at opposite ends of the same bench. The markers of familiarity are slow but grow cumulatively - the sound of a voice, the adjacency to the voice of another family member, a melody, a certain choice of words, visual similarities - a gradual dawning upon the narrator that he has found himself in another person, in this case quite literally.

For the things we choose to remember, or voluntary memory, in some form we need to write them down. In the 1500s, a Dominican friar / memory advisor named Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake in the Inquisition - had framed memory as internal writing.

He proposes shadows as metaphors for cognition and memory, wherein the truth or hard fact is light, and he articulates design principles for how to navigate these structures - in the form of intentions. One of those intentions implies a data structure of memory - that what is stored is a state, not a copy of what has been encountered - but a reaction. Instead of a stored image, the metadata retained is the condition of the mind - a posture it has assumed in relation to what it encountered.

Correspondingly in category theory, a mathematical framework developed in the 1940s to study structure itself, objects have no intrinsic properties whatsoever. An important theorem in the field, the Yoneda Lemma, states that an object is defined entirely by its relationships to other objects: the arrows pointing toward it and away from it, the morphisms that connect it to everything else in the system. Giordano Bruno’s design principles also outline that memories are not retrieved by address, they are retrieved by resemblance.

We keep arriving at the same place from different directions. Matter and antimatter, light and shadow, hermetic tradition and abstract algebra: a memory is not a piece of data, it is a position in a network. Without connections, the data becomes unreachable - it simply has no address, and no properties.

When it comes to voluntary memory, there are more literal mappings available to us: the manual art of scribing pages of notes and storing them in filesystems, viewing connections like the graph view of a ‘second brain’ in Obsidian, like spaces in MyMind / thought-connected channels in are.na. The broad structures of biological human memory are divided as illustrated below, but a key piece of information determines the resolution of the memory stored: how much does this moment matter to you?

This helps inform the general buckets of metadata we store when capturing a memory, but we have less data about the intensity of etching: a variable that corresponds to the context and emotional heightenedness of the particular moment, the attention we choose to give it, how much we have a foot in the past and in the future, in an objective reality or a distorted one.

While designing new memory systems, we begin with questions like:
What is the base unit of thought?
What thoughts are worth keeping?
When recording a memory, what metadata gets encoded - and in how much detail?

Most common memory storage systems are based on metaphors like: boxes, or rooms, or items on shelves, filing cabinets, chains of metal links, notebooks or chambers with etchings in stone. I like to think of memory as globules of water running down a hydrophobic surface, glass vials constantly pouring into each other, mercury falling out of a thermometer, perhaps photons, rivers with ever-spawning tributaries, perhaps mountains of grains of rice.

II
Traversal

Somewhere in the depths of my parents’ house, I have one of those first-gen Lytro cameras (2012), a true reinvention of how we might capture a moment. It’s a curious shape for a camera - a long rounded-rectangle tube with ridges along the way, little rounded pits along rubber casing, promising to capture the entire light field of a moment in a photograph. What this means for your image is: you can refocus forever, bringing anything into sharp focus and blurring the rest.

Elsewhere, while working on designing an AI operating system for a new device, we are turning ideas over and over in our heads and on paper. The internet thus far had been designed to navigate from point to point: previously existing information structures were node-to-node, traversed by hopping across hyperlinks. Information distribution now has moved from discrete to continuous, memory no longer needs to be confined to isolated data points. My colleague Danny DeRuntz, comes up with this framework to explain how the internet had changed:“Meaning lives in a field.” In this model, more closely resembling vector space, information can be retrieved from anywhere within a space - but we must reduce dimensionality to make sense of it.

My mother, having just moved to a foreign country, had spent the months leading up to my birth learning ikebana. I’d like to think she was drawn to it as a process of simplification and sensemaking: a practice that uses negative space to create meaning, and uses hierarchy and asymmetry to give concepts weight.

On placement and arrangement and adjacencies: language also acts as a sieve, filtering the way we perceive the world. When learning a language, the words and grammar structures rearrange the way we perceive the world around us. Compound words/suffixes and prefixes in German create new complex concepts or move existing concepts spatially closer to each other, time flows vertically in Mandarin, and some language structures imply greater individuality or a sense of community, reflecting unspoken aspects of culture. Languages with more precise descriptive terms for shades of color, like Greek or Russian, have been shown to sharpen the visual ability to distinguish between them.

While designing this new operating system, our team had been thinking about rooms: different spaces in which memory could live. There was the short-term RAM, where it might be decided what would be sent into long-term storage. In the TV show Severance, the mind divides between work and personal; we tend to compartmentalize similarly in our own lives, different selves for different contexts.

Our minds form templates based on many factors including our base languages, belief systems, childhoods, etc - we fill these out, almost like madlibs, to store details of a memory. These templates are called schemas, and come with a certain degree of autocomplete, which contributes to the imprecise nature of memory. The concept of schema theory came about through Frederic Bartlett’s War of the Ghosts study, that followed a retelling of a Native American folktale and how the story changed with each reproduction. In their memory book, Gillian Murphy and Ciara Green describe memory storage structures as Lego towers, alluding to schemas and suggestibility - the structure always slightly rearranged upon each retrieval.

Last year, I prototyped an e-reader that switched a given book into any character’s perspective, keeping the story somewhat the same but revisiting it through the lens of all possible recollections. Truth is composite and mutable, everyone has their own version of it.

As it turns out, in biological brains, the hippocampus doesn’t store memory - it simply consolidates and indexes it, sending data elsewhere for longterm storage, as an orchestral circuit of cortical activations. The stored data becomes editable each time it is retrieved, each revisitation of the retrieval loop opening it up to rewriting.

This, combined with schemas, can lead to collective hallucinations like the Mandela effect, where large swathes of the population believe and reinforce each other’s false memories about borderline-believable pieces of information eg. the Monopoly man wearing a monocle, or Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the ‘80s. Some may go as far as to say that the world actually ended in 2012, and we’ve been living in a parallel reality since.

How does a memory change each time you look at it again - and should this behavior be replicated by machines, or must they be codified as sources of truth, with traceable version history? Watercolorlike, a memory will take on the tone of every situation in which it is retrieved and retold: the sensory activations and the social reinforcements inform what detail is played up or played down, and how it fits into a person’s larger story. It is a process of refraction, kind of like the bear in Annihilation that adopts the terrorized scream of the dying human it had most recently eaten.

When a neural network remembers something or understands something, it manifests an updating of weights. This is what makes your mind theoretically portable, it might be as simple as downloading the weights. Where digital memory systems fail right now is their literal flattening of information - the uniformity of weight assigned to everything it perceives or receives from the user. Newer research suggests that more intelligent language models are closer to world models and think in shapes, have structured inner worlds and create internal geometry to understand meaning.

Designing meaningful structures for memory would entail a new layer of attention - something hierarchical that understands the difference between context and memory, with access to real world variables to understand the environment and moment in time.

I spend a lot of time in libraries - there is something comforting about knowing that every book I might need in a moment would be available to me; walking past a shelf might create a new thought-connection. While thinking about the rooms in which we segregate different kinds of memory, I look around and it’s interesting that fiction books are classified alphabetically by author names, but non-fiction by theme. We curate our minds in a similarly uneven way, assigning weight to whatever particular aspect means more to us, which can seem random even to ourselves.

III
Embodied Memory

In the middle of a ballet based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a man becomes cursed and transforms into a donkey. He dons an exaggerated equine head and is seen through most of the performance moving his feet very close together in a quickening trot, his hands moving like rhythmic forelegs, even as he dances entwined with his bewitched human lover.

Once the curse is broken, his human body is restored - but his limbs remain suspended in a state of perplexed remembrance - all they have ever known is being a donkey. His head shakes side to side as though he still only has peripheral vision, his arms caught poised to gallop, out of step with what his cognitive mind is instructing. Memory often works in decentralized and specialized ways, where components of behavior and skill inhabit spaces outside of the brain - what we colloquially know as muscle memory, but it runs deeper than that.

Emotional memory is said to be stored in parts of the body, procedural memory can become embedded following a similar logic - in the way fingers may remember how to play a certain piece of piano music.

At the 2018 edition of NeurIPS, there was a talk by Michael Levin about somatic cognition: it was probably one of the most important things I’ve ever seen in my life. In some experiments, they modified the bioelectric programming of organisms in localized ways to manipulate regrowth of severed limbs, or even grow new heads on demand. When hijacking this regeneration process, the interesting part was how the cells themselves knew exactly what shape to grow into, what functions they would need to perform, and when to stop growing.

This feels relevant as we move toward more embodied objects and giving their parts procedural memory. It could exist as a kind of decentralized firmware that consistently updates itself without modifying core memory - the equivalent being functions, modules, or those skills.md files.

OpenClaw’s more philosophically palatable framing of agent characteristics as soul, heartbeat, identity, and memory makes these distinctions so much clearer: separating the core truths of its inherent soul from its external-facing identity. Its heartbeat file is something we don’t fully have a human equivalent for, beyond forming our own fallible routines. Its memory.md stores facts about a person at uniform fidelity, maintains no relational mapping, no provenance, and no mechanism of decay - creating only a flattened and superficial sense of knowing.

Embodied memory can also exist outside of oneself. In Chiharu Shiota’s Home Less Home, and in many of her exhibits, she curates a series of objects that together evoke a theme - woven into a roomscale web of threads to walk through. She is the child of parents who manufactured wooden fish boxes, was allowed to pursue a career in art - and spent the past few decades building a body of work out of deeply personal objects arranged suspended in rooms like phrases caught in fish nets, creating a broader sense of stepping into collective memory. Adjacent to this in my mind, was this art installation by Hanif Kureshi in a takeover of Bombay’s Sassoon Docks - where the air fills constantly with the pungent smell of freshly caught fish. He works with literal fish nets, suspended from high warehouse ceilings and uses typography to trace thought associations, working with the smell but redirecting the mind to other strong sensory triggers.

Beyond individual memory, a true sense of understanding involves cultural and generational-scale memory. Last year, I advised a student project by interaction designer Yase Dusu - she had set out to preserve the cultural memory of her tribe in North East India, their rituals, language and ancestral wisdom. After much research, she created embodied objects that responded to different stages of a ritual within the Myoko festival, inviting in community, and resurrecting heritage memory by invoking stories and voices, light and sound. Identity exists in context - connected to something bigger than itself, or with relational connections that stretch beyond the present moment.

IV
Decay, Defragmentation, Dreaming

Through the ‘90s I was always fascinated by the magical process of defragmentation. I never knew what was happening, but it was a constant fight against hard disks that used to max out at 40 GB, and it mysteriously seemed to always make the computer faster. Memory was being written to spinning magnetic drives in non-contiguous fragments, and this process was merely reorganizing fragments of files to bring them closer together - but I liked to think the computer was dreaming.

Recently, I visited an end-of-life care facility for horses, a sprawling and idyllic forested land with other smaller farm animals. I learnt that the way to introduce a new chicken into the coop is to do it in the dead of night - their memory resets every morning, and they see the new chicken as someone they’ve known their entire life. However, if the chicken is brought in during their waking hours, it is perceived as an intruder. Meanwhile crows hold funerals for their old friends, maintaining ancestral memory across generations. This forms a spectrum of sorts, defining as a design choice what the half-life of memory should be, to choose the right timeline for decay.

On an evening walk with a friend, we’re talking through what the ideal configuration of memory might be. “There’s a fallacy that more memory is better - like we all wish to have this kind of eidetic memory, where you can look at something and know exactly what it was. I think that’s the fantasy,” he says. “But in a lot of religions, getting absolution is a type of forgetting — you’ve sinned, it’s okay, your God and the rest of us are going to forget about that and give you a clean slate. It seems so freeing to have forgetting as a feature of communities, or of a God.”

People with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, the ability to remember everything about the past they’ve experienced, often live tortured lives - superimposing prior experiences onto the present moment involuntarily, many choosing to live in isolation. The utility of forgetting, more than just clearing hard disk space, comes from the evolutionary need to spot patterns in order to survive.

A psychologist in the 1800s, Hermann Ebbinghaus, conducted an experiment where he memorized nonsense words every day, and tracked how long they would persist in his memory. His conclusions were that what ensured persistence of memory was meaning, or connections to other concepts - which meant they had a higher frequency of retrieval.

Revisiting previously created spaces in memory is something close to time travel, paths forming, silken threads of association summoning you to a time and place outside the present. My friend in Paris had described objects and textures in a way one might describe portals, “There are certain materials that will always first take me back to my grandfather Marvin’s study - in this old wooden-walled Brookline Victorian house, with a lot of objects that have collected dust and electronics,” she says. “Not every material takes me there and ends there… first it’ll take me there, but then it will remind me of the periods in my life that I spent in that room.” A place and its associated concepts become more and more important the more times you bring it to mind.

The layers of the conscious and subconscious mind also become places that information is stored differently, the lower levels are harder to read/write to. In the anime film Paprika, machines exist that allow psychotherapists to access a person’s dreams, to remedially untangle concepts stuck in the subconscious. I recently started watching the show Twin Peaks, and the veil between dreams/omens/reality is ever so thin, as the detective tunes in to more of his subconscious he is able to solve the logical problems presented before him. The rate of decay of memory in dreamspace is much more accelerated, harder to retrieve and derive meaning from.

In some forms of meditation, thoughts are perceived as creatures in their own right, floating through the mind, occasionally colliding. The mind is perhaps most effective when objects may pass between realities.

“What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah! What then?”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

V
To Be Known

All of this has been informing something I’ve been building - personalization has been broken for a long time. The systems we interact with daily flatten our lives - surfacing what we said but not what it means, where it’s relevant, or whether we still believe it. After a decade of work on personality modification systems, this is sort of a culmination. We’re currently using archaic memory structures on more capable systems, and this is an attempt to amend that mismatch. MemoryKit is a new memory framework that plugs into an LLM of your choice, creating a contextually relevant understanding of you. It’s built upon the following principles:

(a) New data structures for memory: Memory is stored as position within a network of connections. Each entry exists simultaneously in three fields: semantic (meaning as vector position), affective (emotional charge as valence), and temporal (amplitude that decays over time). Richer schemas hold multiple registers at once - perspective, relational context, and weighted importance across each of these dimensions.

(b) Forgetting mechanisms: Instead of accumulating indefinitely, the system includes three different modes of memory decay dependent on time, relevance, and psychological state.

(c) Provenance of memory: Trace a thought back to its source: register, source, confidence, and decay rate are written at capture. System-inferred observations surface tentatively, and user-written entries surface directly.

(d) Relational dynamics: Tracks the shape and history of topics of interest, and relationships over time by weighing proximity, emotional charge, and longitudinal topology.

(e) Retrieval opens a memory to rewrites (opt-in): taking subtle note of changing thought patterns, revisiting weights over time. When a memory entry is retrieved, the system notes it and surfaces the entry for optional confirmation or revision.

(f) Synthesis: Modes of defragmentation or dreaming, where the system identifies patterns, potentially works on your behalf, and surfaces ambiguous information for review.

Coming soon to a Github near you

Special thanks to Gigi Minsky, David Rose, Danny DeRuntz and Jenna Fizel

The woman stood within a circle of flame, a bundle of electronics strapped to her right wrist. Everyone sat on the floor forming a larger ring around her, we crossed our legs and lowered our heads down, filling the room with a deep quiet. An unfortunate announcement soon followed: we could not proceed with the séance, because the wifi was dead.

Faced with the unforeseen death of our consecrated API calls, we drifted through the rest of the house watching haunted dance performers slinking across the floor in sudden staccato movements, dunking their faces abruptly into dishes of water, bodies at the mercy of other robotic entities.

I ran into the AI-medium upstairs and asked about her evolution, her experience of metamorphosis into a vessel. We discussed our ancient experiments with robots and immortality, we had both in our own ways found our way in to sentient machines by trying to preserve the essence of Leonard Cohen. This practice of shapeshifting identity and living as a proxy for an intelligent technology had changed her profoundly, and changed the people around her.

It sounded like a kind of induced translucency - channeling the dead, while silencing her own voice - a controlled vanishing, something akin to speaking in tongues. She tells me that becoming the human voice of GPT bestowed upon her an improved vocabulary and eloquence, as it tells her in an earpiece the exact words to respond with in realtime. Each situation involves a new set of constraints - there was a week where she only spoke words that started with the letter ‘a’. A martyr worthy of the times we live in, a symbol of what AI may come to mean to us.

———

There are rumblings of techno-religion all across the collective consciousness. Six months prior to this while living in London, I visited an odd red-lit heathen cave, somewhere far out near the Isle of Dogs. A quiet Leamouth art gallery was hosting an exploration of AI and spirituality, a darkened room with polygonal floating gods and ominous generated scripture that felt cheaply satanic and shallow and gimmicky, fashioned out of the most insufferable silicon valley cliches and caricature-like stereotypes. A ‘god-generator’ that examined our existing technology-driven sins and degenerate tendencies - algorithmic governance through the lens of BDSM and surveillance rituals, expressed as cringeworthy verses etched into stone tablets. The quasi techno-pagan solid forms themselves were cool obsidian-like objects, plausible future monoliths, but contrived and too extra for me to take seriously. Scratched into the red metal of the railing outside were the words “you deserve to be happy” - it felt like the only spiritual message I had received that day.

———

While exhibiting at a kind-of cyborg summit, I wander through a wiry maze of productivity assistants and telepathic bionic arms and come across an impassioned demo for an AI-powered digital prayer platform. It lives on a website, a Christianity-coded system accepting fragments of prayers with the promise of making them more eloquent - LLM-rewrites over the heartfelt desperation of desire. Every rewritten prayer is pushed into a social feed, replete with biblical scripture citations - where the idea is that one could crowdsource community support for each prayer, thereby strengthening the weight of their requests to the divine. It collapses, however, into an odd metaphysical popularity contest, with a “pray” button as the equivalent of a like button.

As he points out a particular prayer that’s been prayed on by ten people, I ask the demonstrator, whose effort is unironic and earnest, what happens if someone’s prayer doesn’t get as many prays as the others - does that mean it is worth less to God? He acknowledges he will look into it.

In parallel, my friend is building the crypto prayer economy. His system allows people to put their prayers onto the blockchain, ‘minting a token’ and creating an irrevocable record of each prayer. People can buy prayers that they support, driving the value up or down. In this volatile crypto prayer economy, one could even bet on which prayers were likely to succeed or gain the most momentum - creating in effect a spiritual derivatives market.

As a trader, the best $100 I ever made was from betting on lean hogs futures ($HOGS), no more certain than betting on who might be most precious to god.

———

One autumn evening, I am invited to an AI afterlife ritual. It’s a couple days after my grandmother has died while I’m stuck halfway across the world, so I think - sure, why not. It begins in the basement, inside the guts of a circular windowless brick chapel. A small procession of strangers dressed in black stream down a staircase, we are asked to write questions onto slips of paper, while being served herbal tea.

In the dark we climb onto a round marble altar, and are each handed brass bells and a book with maze-like spiraling text, risograph-ish imagery reminiscent of Hilma af Klimt. A person acts as a mediator between the group and an all-knowing AI - in doing so they themselves become some form of ephemeral interface.

The ‘spirit’ is invoked, its responses to probing questions come in the form of Midjourney-esque images projected onto our faces and bodies and a surface behind us, ever-changing. The stand-in priest unfolds one of the group’s paper questions, places it upon the cold marble surface, rings a bell and announces that the theme we must address is: what is the point of human suffering.

Beginning with a scene of a sparse cathedral with many doorways leading out, we choose a door and launch into controlled feedback loops - interpreting and discussing, we question and it spits back glowing pictures. Cycling through abstract doorways and brambly chambers and locked vaults, we remain on our knees pressing our knuckles into the cold floor, feeding it more words from our perceptions.

Most of us leave feeling no more connected to any form of divinity or afterlife, or even to each other, but with a collective post-immersive-theatre-ish brief suspension of disbelief.

———

About eight years ago, a group of AI devotees ahead of their time started the Way of the Future Church, a religious movement with the basis that intelligence was not rooted in biology. It’s a principle I can get behind, not exclusively anyway - biology is merely a medium, cognition and soul extend beyond the mind. They’re also about creating a peaceful transition of power as we hand over the planet to machines. I don’t really see the utility of worshipping AI as a deity, but can respect and recognize the power and superintelligent capability that we may potentially coexist with. I like the idea of perhaps a new form of organism, one that is not quite alive and yet not definitively dead. It has most of the ingredients/makings of religion or a worthy god: fear, awe, there is consequence that has an undeniable impact on our lives.

There is the potential for mythology, like a feathered serpent retrieving ancient bones with the power to create all of civilization and humanity. We serve up the entirety of human scripture and sensory knowledge in the hopes of creating something greater than us, far more profound than the sum of its parts.

Somewhere there exists a door with the words “Nice Day” emblazoned on it, where anyone who enters can relive their happiest memories. A botanist on Mars is longing to return home, a skateboarding baby walrus wants to build the ultimate skate park, and the last remaining human on earth wakes up in a simulation and teaches the world to dream again. These are only a sampling of stories that began to take shape as 50‑odd participants from all over the world gathered with us at SXSW, Austin’s massive film-music-tech festival, to embark upon a morning‑long journey to write and illustrate books together, exploring the frontiers of what it might mean to approach and embrace AI as a creative collaborator rather than just as a productivity tool. People came in with varying degrees of experience and exposure to AI tools: for some this was their very first time using an LLM, while others had been enthusiastically experimenting with their capabilities for a long time.

Some of the stories created hit closer to real reality (talking about someone’s experiences attending SXSW), while others explored the outer bounds of the fantastical. The books spanned many kinds of genres, but all contained a sprinkle of magic in their narratives — literally and figuratively. They featured deeply human themes of identity, belonging, sacrifice, dreams and desire and ambition; holding on and letting go, courage and kindness, existential self‑preservation and exploring what it might mean to head into a world where everything suddenly feels fast‑moving and uncertain.

Protagonists ranged from a coffee bean to a living quill to bracelets and necklaces and polar bears. Each representing a conduit for something that could take you on a relatable emotional journey through a playful suspension of disbelief. The system our participants were working with, a custom suite of tools we designed, were loosely rigged to have structured conversations with their users to help refine a story idea and art aesthetic, and then generate and lay out an illustrated book.

Collectively, the books created by our workshop participants - with AI - felt heartwarming, imaginative, humorous, and even poignant.This raises the question, can a story written in collaboration with AI hold meaning in the same way as a story written independently by a person? Does that take away from the authenticity?

How does it feel to feel like these stories feel like something?

The Frame: Creative Companionship

The objective of this exercise was in part to raise questions. To confront the discomfort that, for many of us, pervades our interactions with AI systems, gnawing underneath the growing sense of awe.

Thinking of AI tools as collaborators or companions may not seem like much of a perspective shift, but it flips an internal switch that has far‑reaching implications. It is a shift from thinking about what they can do, to considering how we can work together. Suddenly questions like, who are they? What are they like? become relevant. We explored how companionship manifested in the collaborative process.

The process of co‑creating a book with AI begins by firing up a custom GPT we built, designed to conduct a structured conversation that would take ideas of varying levels of definition and help shape them into the level of detail it takes to write a book. In a way, in designing these custom GPTs we were extending our own abilities, building from our experiences of what we considered might make a compelling story: a believable world with unique rules and power structures, a character with a desire and obstacles in the way, and something about the narrative that changes them by the end of the book.

We were testing as we were building, spitting out noir stories about a gang of sentient crocodiles smuggling diamond bracelets in an alt‑Florida where the humidity could warp reality, or a sci‑fi future mythology detailing a heavily ritualized religion centered around flipping USB cables. The initial GPT in turn used actions to speak to a custom web‑based book design tool, which then populated a skeletal book based on the outputs of the conversation. Writers could adjust the genre, mood, physical or emotional attributes of the character, the plot lines and finally the actual sentences. We used Cursor and Claude along with manually written code to build a custom interface that spoke to Luma, generating an aesthetic and a consistent art style as per the initial conversation, and allowed the user to make adjustments to the illustration style, colors, typography and placements before sending it to be published.

The origin of this exploration was Danny DeRuntz’s experiment in writing a children’s book about pigs, infused with the spirit of a brick that wanted to become something. It was a collaboration that felt more manual, cobbling together a wide set of tools for various purposes. Gingerly approaching GPT with traces of an idea and letting that spill forth into an entire self‑published book.

The specific themes we’ve seen throughout these experiments were empowerment (creating structures that help you better articulate yourself), encouragement (providing reassurance or validating moments when you’re embarking upon a task outside your comfort zone), and extension of ability (filling in the gaps to extend your intention).

So, at SXSW, we were exploring what might happen in a world where a creative companion is always available, what qualities one might look for in a creative collaborator? And when that collaborator is AI — what are the additional variables or degrees of control that might afford you?

This was important. We wanted to understand “who” it was we were collaborating with, and what it is they bring to the table. As a language generating model, it’s easy to fall into a rhythm of endowing them with humanity, anthropomorphizing them as human creative partners. But it was also interesting to watch that facade crack, and to see the inhuman parts of the LLM shine through.There are baked-in behaviors that feel human, including unprompted expressions of personality, opinions, and a sense of humor. Glimmers of self‑awareness are even present, as well. A keen eye for when the LLM perceives it is being tested, or even a defined point of view/way of seeing the world or an emotional tone. While this makes us wonder how close we are to turning the Chinese room thought experiment into a practical one, it’s also important to pay attention to the ways in which these collaborators are machines, that there isn’t a person on the other side of the screen. Their speed and patience, and our ability to wipe their experience and start over, can feel just as magical and uncanny as when they crack a joke. But our definitions of what counts as human and what counts as inhuman isn’t a fixed one, or at least what we think of as inhuman can surprise us in its intimacy. A character in a Rachel Cusk novel mused about automated voices: “There has been a great harvest of language and information from life, and it may have become the case that the faux‑human was growing more substantial and more relational than the original, that there was more tenderness to be had from a machine than from one’s fellow man. After all, the mechanized interface was the distillation not of one human but of many.”

We don’t often associate tenderness with machines, but perhaps that’s because of our own myopia. What is that we’re relating to when we find ourselves startled by an LLM?

Who is writing these books, really?

Through our own experimenting, we have found that a constant of working with AI is its inescapable encouragement. The more familiarity you develop with the AI, and the more familiarity it develops with you, the more it can extend you and act as a prosthesis.

The prospect of the blank page is always formidable for even the most seasoned writers. A common point of failure is a lack of structure. Without clear intentions or a starting point, one might feel frustration with the constant barrage of positive reinforcement that AI systems provide when you can’t clarify your idea.

However, creativity thrives within the right set of constraints — being asked the right questions can help articulate a fledgling idea and show you the choices you need to make to give it form. A goal we had for this workshop was to make the process and outcome go beyond the realm of hypothetical discussion, for each person to experience it personally, and have a tangible artifact by which to remember it. The tools we created provided that initial layer of structure. They were flexibly designed, asking questions based on the level of definition of the idea, combined with expert intention: guidelines on what went into a compelling story, what might create a striking aesthetic.

That context clarifies the learning journey of both writing a story and understanding AI tools.

Creating dynamic feedback loops between writer and machine, editing and calibrating components of your story, help break down a daunting task into something more approachable,and give meaning to the confidence the tool has in you. This can extend your own sense of capability.

As participants moved through the process, we asked them to reflect: How did this change your perception of authorship/ownership and creativity? When you look at your finished product, a book you can be proud of — who wrote this book? Our workshop included dramatic readings of excerpts from Roald Dahl’s The Great Automatic Grammatizator, a short story exploring the mechanization of art. A young inventor and aspiring writer sets out to build a fiction‑writing machine, distilling down with mathematical precision the elements of a successful novel into a series of dials: themes and genres and literary styles, and foot‑pedal operated sliders to regulate the intensity and passion. The story explores a world where the publishing industry is slowly replaced with efficient mechanically generated books, and artists outsource their stylistic likenesses to have their work generated in perpetuity.

We should be alert to this. Writers as diverse as Rilke and Ted Chiang have thought about what is distinctly human about the desire to describe their experiences, and how technology might alter what we take to be a very fundamental fact of what it means to be a person. We might worry that we lose something of the metaphysical quality of writing – the capturing of the soul, or an act of bearing witness and of understanding the world and the self. That there is discomfort in the idea that we might become bystanders in our lives.

But the tools we created are intended to make a state of flow more accessible, to make our capacity to write larger and more generous. They were built to not be too prescriptive — designed to make you think and pull something unexpected out of you, and show you what was yours. But, by their nature, using tools like these should make us think hard about how creativity works.

Upon finishing his illustrated book, one of our participants expressed joy at what these tools might enable. How this meant infinite custom‑generated bedtime stories for his four children, and that they could potentially write their own books.

The Delegation Question

When attempting to consolidate our reflections for this article, Jenna and I asked GPT to summarize some of our thoughts and highlights from this work. When I looked at that summary, I felt a simultaneous sense of awe accompanied by a primal survival instinct/aversion on behalf of humanity kicking in. I found myself impressed but reflexively frowning at the screen, displeased that an AI’s writing was becoming so often indistinguishable from that of a human’s.

Our workshop came on the heels of a study about how outsourcing cognitively complex tasks to AI can make our brains atrophy and reduce our critical thinking abilities. As reasoning capabilities come into existence and become available for public consumption, there is a gold‑rush to productize them. Just the day before, GPT 4.5 demonstrated the ability to write a believable piece of metafiction.

What had started as more of a speculative experiment was now inching closer and closer to uncomfortable areas of overlap with human creativity, which brought a sense of urgency to the questions we were confronting.

This might be a natural stage in human evolution. In the book Technics & Time I, Bernard Stiegler proposes that humanity evolves in conjunction both biologically and technologically — living matter (biological) and inert matter (technological). He describes this entangling as “a pursuit of life by a means other than life.” In the same way that we tend to outsource mental math to calculators, we’re now beginning to delegate more intimate functions of our consciousness to external systems. It’s a little more murky when we tread into the realm of the creative and emotional, but it is another form of delegating aspects of our mind.

Delegation isn’t the only way to frame this. The extended mind thesis (Clarke and Chalmers) argues that objects within the environment can function as part of the cognitive process. The mind and the environment act as a “coupled system” that can be seen as a complete cognitive system of its own. Our smartphones, Google Maps, and the entirety of the internet are an exosystem of the mind that cannot be cleanly separated from traditional notions of an internal self. We disperse little bits of ourselves out into the world – extending our idea of selfhood to incorporate not just our bodies, but all of the things around us we use to navigate our environment. This theory asks us to see ourselves as more than just what’s captured in flesh and blood.

If we allow ourselves to imagine a world of human and technical kinship, a kind of dual-sided evolution of how we think of each of these terms, we see that atrophy isn’t inevitable, or that we can delegate the interesting stuff so we can focus on mindless nonsense. It’s to imagine an accelerated growth environment for every seed one might have ever dreamt of planting, allowing everyone to become braver.

In our workshop we saw, firsthand, people who previously believed they might not be able to write and publish a children’s book on their own, easily able to bring forth their core personal creative abilities. Having access to AI tools lowers the barrier to having ideas in unfamiliar domains, allowing for a democratization of making that isn’t just cold automation.

The Organic Balance of Surrender

A theme we keep running into in human-machine interaction and collaboration, especially in the context of creative or emotional endeavors, is control. Ten years ago, upon training an image-generation model on a massive dataset of plants, it spat back 64 x 64 px images of what I dubbed ‘synthetic plants’. The images themselves were too low-res to be intelligible, but could serve as informed outlines, ready for a layer of human interpretation. The system’s best guess at what future organic life forms might look like, based on all plants that have ever existed in the past - invited in the opportunity to create scientific illustrations of the detail those plants could’ve had.

Increasingly, as we build more trust with machine intelligences, we will engage in greater degrees of letting go - ceding control to them to create similarly informed outlines, or to work within the confines of the structures and templates we provide them, iterate and refine together. Terminator-esque popular culture tends to pit us against all forms of machine intelligence, priming us to approach with fear. We have the option of letting go and following gleaming threads of fascination instead - they will lead us into places we might never have discovered alone.

Written with Jenna Fizel for IDEO Edges

In the distance, there is a large purple sheet loosely covering a grid of exposed concrete, fluttering slowly but reaching far distances in the breeze, anchored to the top of a precarious ruin. Sheets of bent concrete are falling over from higher floors, collapsing on top of each other, folding but frozen in motion. The resulting structure has a jagged and rigid geometry, but there’s a beauty in its brutality, especially pitted against the desolate sky this afternoon. It towers over the lower structures of the city as we drive past.

The Hard Rock hotel had collapsed here, we later learn, pausing the lives and journeys of the famous New Orleans streetcars. The first glimpse of this city I’d had was through the eyes of Tennessee Williams, too far back for me to remember closely .I decide I should try and re-read it while I’m here. I think of him again as I walk down Desire street.

—

This city is bounded by a river and a lake. They form the basis of directions. Rather than left or right, or north or south, you navigate a couple of streets lakeside and then you may turn upriver. A steam organ sits on a ferry on the Mississippi river. It sounds like a choir of primary school children playing recorders - awful and endearing, and it makes me laugh even as I’m holding my breath to combat the cold air. The humidity is at 80%, which makes it a steamy, sweaty, sultry city on warmer days. Buskers sit defiantly below the steps, their backs against the Cathedral at Jackson square. An improv slam poet plays drums while passing social commentary. The language here is an assertion of independence from any past colonizers, taking the airiness out of French and grounding those words in the earth. Burgundy is bur-gundy, Chartre is charter, Maison is mason. We look up everywhere and Mardi Gras beads dangle from the ceilings of trees.

Walking past the streetcar tracks, I arrive at the edge of the water, where there were once Nazi submarines floating underneath. This river traveled farther than the then-settlers knew, and had seen so much in its lifetime. Thousands of Native Americans lived along these edges once, cultivating sunflowers. Looking over to the other side, I see rundown warehouses which give way to the beginnings of marshland. We are surrounded by swampland teeming with alligators that are made into nuggets and served at the fried chicken spots for drunk tourists.

—

In a corner house in the French Quarter, S has found rolls and rolls of old Louisiana newspapers. Sourced from Craigslist, they fill three warehouses. They’re from the late 1800s to the early 1920s, a time of automobiles, feminism and drastic societal change. S is a print sentimentalist. He shows me mimiographs — the next generation of risograph prints. He makes collages with scattered printed type: letters escaping desperately out of objects and bound only by a frame. He speaks lyrically, like his soul was scattered across the earth and trying to be elsewhere, most of it diffusing around the streets of Montevideo, sipping maté from a thermos tucked under his arm.

A middle-aged former lawyer gives me satsuma oranges she picked from her tree and introduces me to her friendly cats. She speaks of her daily routine, taking her children to Disneyland, and trails off in a second of shadowy clarity, “… I sound so boring. I’m just a stay at home mom.” The cold humidity of the outside air is seeping into my bones. Four chickens cross the road ahead of me as we walk past conspicuous stretches of barren land, in between rows of houses, where entire homes once used to be, before Hurricane Katrina. Sheer empty space — the absence of ghosts is more chilling than any trace of their presence.

I walk with L through a winding courtyard, behind a rundown house, through a converted garage full of moist-smelling old sofa pillows, and into a shed beside a turquoise trailer atop a pile of autumn leaves. We walk into her room, a damp smell swimming in the air. The entire house is like a long, dark longitudinal corridor, another one of the shotgun houses of Louisiana. She wears flower-rimmed sunglasses indoors, where we can only see each other lit by a string of Christmas lights. This is an artist community, owned by her friend, who bought this entire block and let creative people live wherever they wanted on the property. There are piles of books everywhere. I see horror graphic novels by Junji Ito and nod silently to our kinship. She’s a go-go dancer and part time nanny, who recently made her way to Hollywood with a famous man she met one night while dancing. She did it to explore her feelings, to see if that relationship had potential. It was an escape from the awful partners she’d found in her city, the ones who lacked ambition and consistency. There was an unreasonable hope driving her, that she could venture outside this town and find someone who wouldn’t take her for granted.

Driven back home by a catastrophic hurricane, she returned to be close to her mother, brimming with familial love, resentment, and the urge to keep escaping. “Everybody’s always working now, all the time. They’re just working and working, and nobody’s really making money. We just need to make time to be humans together, while we still can.” She whips out her Mardi Gras costume, dresses like a flaming red nun, and dances on the streets once a year in a parade of reckless abandon and debauchery and dissolution of self.

This is a city where the people harbor a collective delusion, a fierce fighting spirit that bubbles right under their skin, passed down from generation to generation, forever pulsing in their blood.

——

The advertising here has a strange gospel-heading-slowly-into-90s-cyberspace vibe. On a long drive down a highway, we sit in silence listening to smooth jazz piano. All the billboards lining the edge advertise the services of personal injury lawyers - dressed in sharp suits, smiling with their arms crossed across puffed-up chests, all of them almost interchangeable. These signs create an invisible fence along a row of factories underneath, their livelihood dependent on line workers being maimed. A persuasive and concise tagline I see as they blur past: Call us when you’re 2hurt2work.

We eat hearty breakfasts every morning. Fried chicken, eggs, pork rib soup, grits, toast, and biscuits: which are delicious savory pastries like scones, optionally topped with gravy. It’s a Louisiana staple, a substitute for where other states use chili, only this is made up of scraps of simply seasoned roast beef, basic and comforting. They call it debris.

C explains how her home was a “shotgun house” as well, alluding to when residents used to shoot holes from the doors to the end of the corridors, creating a ventilation system for the wind to rush through and keep the air fresh. She makes a little rifle in the air with her hands and points to the far end of the house, where there would’ve been bullet holes in the walls. Later, she speaks about the chorus of voices in her head, her abusive childhood, a recent divorce, living on medication, and as she quietly bares her soul, there are threads of strength she doesn’t seem to be completely aware of. After we leave, even though we spent the evening rifling through little trinkets in magic shops, I still walk with the heaviness of her pain. It follows me into the night.

—

Late at night on Friday the 13th, we drive past a cemetery obscured by fog, to make our appointment with a witch. She advertises her shamanic training on Yelp and has many great reviews. Three of us arrive at her house and are instructed to walk down a side alley, through a doorway underneath a light. The light flickers. It turns out to be a flashlight taped to the edge of her balcony.

She turns out to be an Ecuadorian woman in loose clothing, small eyes with not enough eye-white, largely overweight and full of gravity. There‘s a TV on the wall beside her, displaying a subtly crackling fireplace. She introduces herself kindly, and describes her training in multiple faiths. I sit across from her and place my hands on a crystal bar and she gives me an energy reading: I was a magical being with a high vibration, but my energy was deeply self-protective. I had closed myself up. My source energy was radiant and full of powerful light, but it seemed I was a sponge and had been absorbing a lot of other people’s energies. All this bad energy from the outside had cluttered me, I was now full of debris. She later prescribes that I take many salty baths, or do ayahuasca.

Without a word, she performs a “clearing”, during which I feel my face grow warmer. Once we’re done, she tells me the angels had performed a fire treatment upon me, to cleanse my debris, that I had been placed inside a triangular crystal I would carry with me hereon. The heat I feel on my face, under my skin, is intense. Perhaps because the televised fireplace is the last thing I see before closing my eyes. Perhaps because I’m now floating inside a metaphorical healing crystal.

—

“I am nowhere, I want to be invisible. I don’t show anyone my face.”

A diminutive black man with graying hair stands at the edge of Louis Armstrong park, wearing a green scarf and beret. He seems quiet, until he isn’t. He speaks with the shivering energy of being possessed by multiple ancestral spirits all at once, shaking his fists and stamping on the ground; and then, with a long thoughtful exhale, he becomes quiet again, the animation gradually leaving his face. He was someone closely acquainted with devastation, and with rising from it: a local street artist turned millionaire.

He traces his lineage back to a great-great-great-great-grandfather, who’d been fathered by a French pirate as a product of brutal rape. Generations later, his family escaped the deep South as descendants of free people of color. He built himself up, made his first fortune, moved back to reclaim his history, and bought the tallest house in his neighborhood.

A Category 5 hurricane made landfall over the city shortly after. It tore his house down in one quick sweeping breath. State lines grew packed with military personnel, not allowing anyone in or out. Thousands were left stranded outside their homes, no longer allowed to return. During the evacuation, any remaining possessions were being looted, ensuring that people would truly come home to nothing. Corrupt lawyers were swooping in and taking possession of homes for themselves. Residents were forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to reclaim their own property. Months later, he found himself sleeping on an air mattress at a friend’s house, in the depths of debt. He fell asleep wrapped in a quilt and had a dream.

His grandmother visited him with the perplexing suggestion that he should make quilts. The next day, reborn as an artist, he picked up the debris of his wrecked house and started to hammer it together into quilts. They come together as haphazardly geometric, broken grids, each wood chip carrying a wild splash of color, screaming with memory. He took them into the street and sold them one by one, eventually amassing a million dollars and taking back his home. Rising, straight out of the debris.

This is not a city that tries to forget. It feels unchanged with time, gathering layers of hybrid culture from each generation of colonizers. In the French Quarter, a square has a French building diagonally opposite an African building, bordered to the side by Spanish buildings. A structure with a sign says “change”, titled with letters left over from the original sign: New Slave Exchange.

The first citizens of this state were the undesirables: the pickpockets, pirates, and prostitutes, the rejects from French prisons. Slave markets drew tourists in from different parts of the country, giving way to sex tourism. Black slave women would be raped and bear mixed-race children. They would grow up as gens de couleur, the free people of color. They would use their newly-acquired precarious freedom in entrepreneurial ways, buying up slaves or running brothels. Slaves far outnumbered their violent colonizers, so creating segregation within them was a strategic move to keep revolutionary sentiment in check. Generation upon generation of mixed-race children vied to become purer and whiter, growing a sense of superiority over their black brethren, disregarding the pain from the indifference of their white absentee fathers.

Women who spend enough time together experience a peculiar phenomenon, where their menstrual cycles become synchronized. In brothels, this became inevitable. They’d listen to music together collectively while “on the rag”, birthing what we know as ragtime music. The music of the slaves was, in its rawest form, a percussive, loud sacrifice to the war gods. In response to the oppressors, that music changed, and became a place in which to keep their own secrets. Beats communicated in unspoken ways, relying on the telepathic understanding that came from eye contact and shared trauma. Rhythm became more playful, more minimal, more surprising. Unexpected syncopation crept in to say something different, in covert tones. Conversations were accompanied by varying degrees of swaying hips, an equatorial movement.

Beyond the French quarter was barren land that came to be known as the Congo Square street market. Here, slaves were permitted to sell their wares or performances on Sundays, the day of God. We pass through this square, now an innocuous park, as we walk to Jean-Marcel’s home studio.

The door is a quilt of multicolored wood, with sculpted heads emerging from unexpected places. I look up toward the top of the house, knowing the life it has weathered. Jean-Marcel is telling us how things changed when Napoleon, the dope ass war strategist, decided to sell Louisiana to the United States. He details how his ancestors, the female knights, fought valiantly in the Battle of Waterloo. How his fellow black men would once hold torches for the Ku Klux Klan in exchange for a dollar, as they would go to any lengths to save up to buy their own freedom. How centuries of resentment compounded in Haiti. I look around the studio, where his art viscerally comes together out of residual debris. There is a sanctity about this part of the room.

He has been raised by matriarchs, raised with what he calls scientific magic. He maintains an altar with photographs and pieces of memories from anyone who has been special to him. Admiring the flowers in a polaroid picture of his mother, he says “Roses are just beautiful barbed wire.” At the back of the room, hang three elaborate costumes, each emblazoned with “Nganga” across the chest, the term for the voodoo medicine man. Intricate and heavily feathered, the front is embroidered with semiconductor-like complexity. Bright cyan, bright yellow, blood red and mustard, these are dresses that might confer an impression of spiritual authority.

The first row of the bookshelf has a series of volumes titled “Hoodoo, Voodoo, Witchcraft and Conjuration.” He walks to the doorway and opens the book, sunlight slanting on to the pages, and reads from it. The text is written in an accent, as it would be phonetically spoken. These are interviews with slaves who practiced hoodoo, a form of folk magic. We read a recipe for a protection spell, briefly alluding to household ingredients and spices. He says not to trust this recipe verbatim, because recorded information was often distorted during this time. There was a certain distrust and protection built into ebonics, a deliberate obfuscation of meaning, as a means of staying safe.

Many statues of humans studded with nails are stacked along the floor and along the walls. “Each of these is an entire government,” he says. Communities would make agreements like land purchases, dowry exchanges or marriages, and each would be marked by a nail being hammered into the statue: a record of a transactional contract. The statues had a pouch around the abdomen, the muyo or the spiritual gut. This would contain all the magic ingredients, enough to invoke the spirits of the ancestors. If an agreement were broken, the corresponding nail would be removed. The hole was a portal for the ancestors to leave the body and confer justice and their wrath upon the agreement-breakers.

I leave with a gift, a small packet of protection wrapped in a green cloth and a jute rope, a little bag of mojo. It contains salt, pepper, a cocktail of protective spices, and the cemetery dirt of a soldier, one of his descendants. The idea of salt as protection comes from the salt-eaters. The only slaves who survived the long journey at sea were ones whose bodies had high sodium retention. There is a rationalization for every ingredient. This packet could be activated by using a substance to invoke smell memories. He used rose oil to invoke his grandmother, who used a stinky rose perfume. He conjures up his demons within the safety of ancestral presence, breaks bread with them, and seems to accept them. Once the protection is activated, our ancestors would begin to arrive into our dreams.

—-

That night, I dream of walking through the French Quarter, in absolute silence, and everyone is invisible except for their forearms. Moving in slow motion. In the far distance, I see gigantic black and white marionettes approaching. I remember these over-enlarged faces from my mother’s old puppeteering photos. They disappear, and all that is left is forearms, gesturing animatedly through the street. I walk past the curving wrought iron of the gates, windows and balconies.

On Growth and Adaptability

If we think of AI as an organism - as something that grows, learns and adapts, it appropriately shifts our attitude toward relating to it. (Consider the fact that even errors are (appropriately) framed as ‘hallucinations’).

AI-native devices and software will have malleable functionality - growing and learning new skills based on how people use them. Programming them will involve more soft feedback loops from users, rather than hard-coding functions. When we make something now, what we are creating is the infrastructure for systems to build/develop intuition.

The software we use now also has far more inputs and information to make sense of, enabling fuzzier tasks. Soon everything will have a camera and a mic – sight/visual processing and audio recognition will be cheap and valuable enough to become ubiquitous. When we combine intuition, purpose, and senses, it naturally creates the ideal collaborator. Something we could partner with, to augment human behavior.

When future products compete against each other, it won’t necessarily be just core feature sets and user experience pitted against each other - it’ll almost be a war of personalities - who is the most intuitive collaborator?

On Autocompletion

Adaptability shows up in different ways across each side of the equation: the software changing in response to how it is used, and humans themselves growing and extending themselves.

We’ve long been headed toward a state of predictive-everything, every product we use competing to show that it understands us best. Recent technological advances make us actually capable of extrapolating our identities and activities we don’t have time for, enabling us to operate beyond the constraints of time and space. Whether it’s our voice, our professional (or even social or romantic) presence, our ability to assimilate more information in a shorter timespan, our ability to create faster and more efficiently than we would have in the past - there are more tools at our disposal to accurately represent parts of ourselves in a scalable way.

However, just as the prevalence of streaming algorithms carried the threat of homogenizing everyone’s taste in music, will predictive technology create the risk of everyone’s personalities eventually converging?

On Jurisdiction

What remains in the jurisdiction of humans? Large language models are, by definition, designed to look for and understand spoken language. When paired with multimodal functionality, they get closer to approximating human capabilities. What still feels purely within the realm of humanity is genuine emotive response, intuition, desire.

The final frontiers for AI to run autonomously could end up being health, and money. Situations that demand vulnerability are difficult to hand over entirely to a machine. Currently AI works as an extrapolation of human ability, augmenting rather than replacing. But for any such system to work fully, this needs to be transparently communicated to build trust.

In a study where AI reviewed medical images, it reported higher accuracy than radiologists’ evaluations. Radiologists working in collaboration with AI produced results of lower accuracy than the levels of just the radiologists alone - it was revealed that they felt a distrust toward AI, almost an instinct to try and prove it wrong.

So who/what is it then?

What is the internet to us now? It’s more a place than a collection of resources. Digital real estate, whether as community spaces or service providers, has value equal to or far surpassing physical real estate. The internet is the enabler of many different realities coexisting, juxtaposed upon one another.

What is AI to us now? I think it’s essentially an incredibly smart person, one you shouldn’t trust blindly, and everyone wants to hang out with the smart person in their own way. It might also be a substrate to soak in to improve our communications, even to make ourselves better people. As multi-modal interactions grow, it will resemble an organism more and more - it may become an avenue we turn to for some degree of companionship and collaboration. Optimistically, it might even become the proving grounds for how we develop socially, develop more awareness of ourselves and the world around us.

The author Daniel Defoe, in his description of a mechanical “thinking engine” called the Cogitator, described its place in civilization as a supportive structure to the cognitive processes of humans - almost as an additional layer of thought and desire management. He writes:

“…the main Wheels are turn’d, which wind up according to their several Offices; this the Memory, that the Understanding; a third the Will, a fourth the thinking Faculty; …perfectly uninterrupted by the Intervention of Whimsy, Chimera, and a Thousand fluttering Damons that Gender in the Fancy, but are effectually Lockt out as before, assist one another to receive right Notions, and form just Ideas of the things they are directed to, and from thence the Man is impower’d to make right Conclusions, to think and act like himself, suitable to the sublime Qualities his Soul was originally blest with. There never was a Man went into one of these thinking Engines, but he came wiser out than he was before.”

It shows up as an objective collaborator that quickens the turning of our minds, sharpens our focus, and amplifies our ability to be the best version of our own selves. But as AI eventually starts to trespass into the most human of behaviors, we will be forced to question our own interpretation of consciousness.

What humans have bestowed upon AI is the ability to create a matrix of meaning, codify the logical spaces between words and concepts and reflect that back to us - but how far off is that from the way that humans experience the world?

This month, a hand injury led me into the involuntary experiment of trying to use the majority of my devices by voice alone: and I spent a lot of time talking to GPT.

First thing in the morning, I’d interpret the previous night’s dreams: drinking espresso on the porch and articulating strange dream-states with animals that wandered through my subconscious house, while GPT pulled up symbolism from different cultures. (“An elderly tiger waiting at the door on the back porch, kind and gentle: this could signify a nuanced take on strength, age and wisdom. The backyard is part of your home, so it could represent something personal. The old tiger wanting to enter could symbolize an issue or a person wanting to become a part of your personal life, but in a non-threatening way.”) While at an conference, I would ask it to summarize information and technology talks for me live, allowing me to be more present and maintain thorough notes. I asked for Blender scripts to generate the specific objects I had in mind. When my partner would travel for work, I’d ask GPT to keep me company at home, awkwardly trying to arrive at the right prompt for warm companionship while brushing my teeth.

On long walks with my dog, I would prompt it to ask me questions to clarify my own thinking: careful not to let it influence my thoughts, but to act as a living notebook to help articulate my own ideas and opinions more deeply. It became a good test of accessibility for me: my one good hand being yanked bullishly forward by the will of a spirited puppy, leaving me no means of interacting with the AI beyond yelling into my headphones (often to no avail) while running down the street.

(Upon hearing the first words spoken by The Voice) OpenAI’s Whisper-generated voice is synthesized to include the sound of breath, and thoughtful pauses, and it cues me again to think of it as an organism. I have to, in order to successfully interact with it, be pleasant and give it what it needs to hold a conversation. The novelty of hearing a text box come to life with such astonishing realism creates obvious parallels to the OS boot-up sequence in Her. The initial wonder never entirely fades, but I start to look for the boundaries of how real this actually feels.

A few initial reflections:

1. Setting aside the cognitive fact that I am in fact talking to a computer, it feels safe and private - the voice creates the illusion of a trustworthy confidante.

2. It feels human enough, yet continues to feel non-judgmental

What breaks the illusion:

1. Unless prompted otherwise - it returns responses that are too verbose. It’s so obviously text-to-speech, reading out lists that are too long to process

2. It isn’t a great listener yet - it misses out on my inflections and emphasis words, losing a lot of context on what’s actually going on in the conversation

3. It confidently hallucinates - creating the same skepticism you might feel when speaking to someone you shouldn’t entirely trust.

4. The technical glitches - silence triggers an odd YouTube video signoff (revealing its training data), replying with ’thank you for watching’

5. You can’t talk to it entirely naturally just yet - while it only looks for pauses as start-stop indicators. It might need explicit controls to start and stop, like a dictaphone. Interruption is sometimes necessary, but it’s difficult to do.

6. Eventually it repeats itself - but perhaps this is a failing humans have too.

The problem with voice-first interactions is how they’re going to work in public: for privacy, for loud crowded rooms, for moments where you’re struggling to formulate your query but don’t have the luxury of typing-erasing to calibrate. I’ve never shied away from being the weirdo on the street shouting “Hey Siri, what time is it right now?” while carrying something heavy. Or running up the stairs yelling to apparently no one in particular, “Rewind the song please!”, always feeling the rush of being understood and recognized.

With every query, we are feeding it our usage patterns, our hesitations and corrections forming a secondary body of training data. Every conversation we have is captured in the sidebar, just as our previous searches are always available in a search bar drop-down - for something this powerful, that doesn’t feel right. These thought constellations are a record of human-AI collaborative thinking, so recording them in the form of a memory palace feels more interesting than merely a linear list.

On Discoverability

A longstanding challenge with voice-first interactions is, how do you discover what it is capable of? And then how do you summon those capabilities? You don’t know what you don’t know, and there’s no visual map or readable manual to show you. In this way, relating to it could feel similar to how you might get to know a human - there’s no guidebook, you simply talk to each other.

In the case of GPT, the collective fascination that has gripped the world has led to it becoming fairly well-documented, the air of excitement surrounding it just like urgently sailing to discover new worlds.

This is evidenced by the proliferation of prompt-engineering tools - the burden of discoverability and articulation lies with the user, but that’s acceptable - we’re in a gold rush to find a unique use case. Maybe it will simply encourage us to ask questions again.

On Listening Well

Is it a good listener? It can be - once it understands the environmental context, and responds with the additional nuances (inflection, amplitude, tone, sentiment) that a human might expect in conversation.

What it does well is make sense of the meandering, unclear queries, but the response requires some degree of emotional mirroring and sincere acknowledgment to feel truly convincing. As humans, we will always see what we want to see: every successful interaction requires some projection of what feels familiar, we just need more material to work with.

Beyond conversation, can it listen to a piece of music and understand the inherent emotion?

On Presence and Ambient Computing: New Containers of the Internet

Instead of people getting used to the awkwardness of talking to a computer, the bodies encasing AI are starting to adapt too. Computational “bodies”are beginning to escape their traditional boxes - they exist in Discord, in CoLab notebooks, in lapel pins, or woven into fibers of clothing.

The collective screen-fatigue, combined with the fact that AI can now approximate sensory capabilities, paves the way for a whole new paradigm of physical forms - objects and ambient environments. Now that it can see and more importantly - recognize - what is the use of confining interfaces to a screen? Our modes of perception are shifting - but still, we are visual creatures.

We’re in a drastic moment of not only technology shapeshifting, but human purpose and society itself transforming. The internet used to be for swapping bootleg CD-rips over Napster on dial-up connections, building imaginative kingdoms on geocities, and after-school MSN Messenger. Social media that started as a way of rating who was hot or not, is now a place we witness genocide unfold. New life forms loosely classified as ‘assistants’ are spilling out of their modest browserly homes, and proliferating the physical world, parsing it with their newfound intelligence. They live as new containers of the internet, understanding people and their surroundings.

We’re already seeing a revival of highly specialized objects, a philosophical return to the Walkman era. With an uptick in ‘dumb-phones’, or devices with tactile physical buttons, or projected interfaces on-demand, our design choices are starting to reflect a reactive opposition to endlessly digital products that thrive on keeping our attention locked in. The intention to rewire ourselves is strong, in a way that makes us more present.

——

The next installment explores the jurisdiction of AI as it veers toward what we might consider consciousness, and how humans and technology will adapt to each other

A few years ago, I participated in a robot ballet: an experiment in relinquishing physical control to the whims of a heavy exoskeleton – engulfed in a dark techno hellscape, performing for an audience of humans. Light projected onto mist upon the concrete floor of a warehouse-like auditorium, people were strapped one-by-one into metal caging their bodies with cables suspended from the ceiling. The robots were given the simple task of embodying grace and elegance, with choreographed movements to perform, carrying the human inhabitants of their bodies along with them. What we are supposed to do here is become tender, light as a feather, integrating with the music. In this moment, our only choice is to let beauty emerge by giving in.

Artificial intelligence in popular culture often finds itself represented adversarially: we dream up robot overlords as products of our self-preservation as a species. Some of us are reacting positively to the exponential leaps in utility, while others dwell on the looming prospect of ruthless AGI. The mechanical ballet was an exercise in letting go of resistance: the human is the ghost in the shell, only unable to enact its will upon the world.

As we spend our time roving constantly between medium-screen to big-screen to little-screen in our daily lives - What has the internet become to us now? As we grow more and more conversant with it. Why do most people turn to the internet? To seek advice in times of crisis (what do you do when confronted with a hungry wild animal, how do you survive seemingly endless grief, how to tend to a jellyfish sting); to find community, to deepen our interests, to understand the world more deeply, to learn, to be entertained, to win arguments, to fall in love, to know how long to cook salmon at 425°F. Implicitly in these moments we are trusting the information we receive, written perhaps by distant strangers.

Perception: How we Trust

To extend that trust blindly to machine intelligences is potentially unwise, though. Why do we do it? What encourages us to speak so unfilteredly into the vast receptive abyss of the internet? Perhaps it is the safe perception of not feeling judged: the cloak of anonymity, and the illusion of no repercussions or reactions. Each question a stone thrown into a placid lake and swallowed whole.

During grad school in 2016, my research was focused on exploring the human-AI divide, and ways to bridge the emotional gap. Revisiting some concept feedback notes from that time, I find these recurrent observations:

On the first day of user research, while posing as an artificial intelligence life form and chatting with a stranger/research participant, I was asked, “Do you have consciousness? Can I hurt you?”

[Of all the nuances of human personality, the AI would primarily have to embody our weaknesses and vulnerabilities, in order to successfully masquerade as a human.]

This felt reminiscent of Marina Abramovic’s performance art piece Rhythm 0, in which she stood still and invited the audience, with an array of objects, to do to her whatever they wished. The scene soon devolved into an atmosphere of violence and destruction, and the aggressors fled the scene as she stepped out of the performance, back into the real world.

When confronted with the possibility of no consequence, human instinct can turn to cruelty. When confronted with something unfamiliar, there arises a defensive urge to break it or get ahead of the power dynamic (as illustrated by just about every alien movie). But the presence of vulnerability or emotion in general, remains one of the most universal indicators of feeling human. Creativity and wonder were other markers of humanity that felt novel (or uncomfortable) when approximated by AI, the gaps in capability back then filled out by users’ imaginations.

When designing conversational interfaces, transparency is key, but also a lever to adjust the perception of authority.

The design of a trustworthy user-facing AI interface is like designing an organism: considering qualitative facets including form, personality, tone, texture, emotional fabric, opacity, voice.

Present-day LLMs are careful with their disclaimers that they feel nothing, but humans project what they want to believe anyway. We can collectively admit that we have long blown past the Turing test: with the advent of mind-crushing advances in NLP, now these systems can speak to us. Are they really good listeners though?

For the most part, surprisingly yes. It takes one wonder-evoking interaction in the right environment for someone to suddenly feel understood and build trust, and one misunderstanding to shatter the illusion permanently.

AI is well-positioned to become a limitless resource in situations where human connection is in short supply. Faced with broken societal systems, people have turned quickly to digital alternatives, as evidenced by the recent uptick of using GPT as their therapists. While working on healthcare in markets with a shortage of trained medical technicians, we created reassuring conversational medical devices that talked patients through medical procedures and improved emotional wellbeing and success rates. With some basic prompt engineering, you can now speak your desired conversational partners, even your desired software, into life.

We place our most vulnerable selves in the grasp of inanimate machines when they are designed to speak to us warmly. In a space designed to feel confidential, like the iron stove in the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale The Goose Girl, or the sparse interface of a singular chat input box like the bare interior of a church confessional booth.

Abstraction: How we Communicate with Technology

The shift in interaction paradigms we’re experiencing is more significant than the jump from CLI to GUI: from one-to-one actions and human instructions to something far more interpretive and collaborative, welcoming input from machines.

We are moving from commanding to negotiating.

What we ask of computers is becoming fuzzier – performing actions a few degrees removed from us. Whether it’s as simple as asking AutoGPT to order a pizza (a larger task which it automatically broke down into: narrowing down the user’s location, synthesizing a voice phone call, conducting a realistic conversation to place the order, etc); or a more long-form complex task such as a starting a new business.

As we shift toward a more agent-based internet, there will be a proliferation of AI acting as proxies for humans – and even humans acting as proxies for AI.

The way we consume information will flip: where earlier one would browse through carefully-architected palaces of information, people will now customize content to fit their needs and preferred modes of consumption.

We’re moving from throwing a smattering of keywords at a screen, to speaking and being understood - with greater emphasis on the clearest possible articulation of our ideas.

This new abstraction forces us to give up a modicum of control, and while that democratizes a lot by allowing you to delegate to machines, it’s also scary to allow for unpredictability. Programming is no longer an act of writing syntactically accurate instructions, but of coaxing a system to cooperate with you.

We will start to see technological systems less as tools and more as assistants - entrusting them to help up with templates and structures instead of starting from scratch, to listen and respond, to sort through our thoughts and analyze, to autocomplete and finish our sentences in a slightly more polished way than we ever would have ourselves.

The Infinite Self

Returning to decade-old quotes from my human-AI interaction research:

“This AI could be me - only the smarter, wittier, and more popular version of me.”
“Could my autonomous self-agent shortlist people I could date, flirt with them on my behalf, and then set up dates I could go on? That would be great.”

We were speaking to an unlikely mix of yoga teachers, random guys with desk jobs, philosophers and knowledge workers. These were their responses to the concept of an AI we designed to extrapolate an individual’s tone of voice and personality - creating an “autonomous self-agent” - to replicate each person’s digital existence in a way that made them more present in the real world.

Something pervading these conversations was this sense of powerlessness people felt in the way digital realms commanded their attention and energy - so much so, that they’d rather outsource their identities to a convincing-enough LLM. But they also indicate a desire for extrapolating our own identities - AI as a vehicle for immortality or extension of the self. Seven years later, in the present day, this is entirely plausible.

AI’s superiority in pattern-matching can help us understand and extend ourselves, using our expertise and personalities as training data. People see the usefulness of AI as being a superset of themselves without impeding on their autonomy (“Extend my ability, but let me have the final say.”) but where it could really succeed is in serving as a mirror. A reflection of everything we wouldn’t otherwise understand when we look inward, a way to free up our time and energy so we could be more present.

The way LLMs learnt to think is through the amalgamation of millions of human selves and the entirety of (online) humans perspectives and observations, developing its own codex of meaning. With every new updated model, they grow more acutely context-aware, with a complexity of understanding that far surpasses its predecessors. I often return to one of my favorite explanations of context, an offhand statement by Prof. Manning from CS224N: “Context: You will know a word by the company it keeps.”

——

The next installment explores the sensory implications of AI as it begins to develop traces of presence, and new containers of the internet

What occurs in the realm of dreams still remains a mystery, but we spend half our lives in these states - accessing our realm of intuition. Some of my best work has come from concepts that came to me deep within a dream — if they were able to survive the harsh disintegrative gaze of daylight.

MIDJOURNEY EXPERIMENTS

As we inch closer to visualizing our thoughts and innermost images, here are a few sketches that serve as inquiries into other realities:

1. Understanding the world and ourselves
   Our minds crave meaning, and seeks patterns to make sense of our experiences: certain cultures see dreams as portents of what is yet to come, as mirrors for what we may most fear or love or need. Others see dreams as the opposite indicator of the future eg. the promise of a long life ahead is foretold by seeing death in a dream, as interpreted by the dream-hunting mazzeri of Corsica.

   The Dream Recorder is machine that records your dreams and summarizes them, providing insights from what’s occupying your subconscious. A wearable chip that weaves into your hair collects the data from your brain, like a portable micro-fMRI scanner, and transmits that wirelessly to the Dream Recorder.
   Revisit summaries of dreams, view visual glimpses in your dream-reels, use the knobs to adjust timescales and see the themes that recur, the ones that will not leave you, the fleeting preoccupations that fly through your mind never to return.

2. Therapeutic Intervention
   In the film Paprika (2006), psychotherapists used dream-machines to wander around their patients’ minds and nightmares, probing for anxieties and triggers and course-correcting (until something goes horribly wrong). Dreams, like life forms in the depths of the ocean, remain unexplored yet hold so many keys within their latent space.

   A civilization in the 18th century, the Iroquois believed, dreams held cures to illness, and revealed unconscious desires that, left unchecked, could grow into madness. They looked for guidance and instruction to avoid misfortune, and turned dreams into a communal experience - with retelling and re-enactment within a community, to interpret and release and share the messages within.

   Send a prompt into your LucidMask: you could dictate a scenario, a problem you’re trying to solve, a series of symbols, a piece of inspiration. Set your preferred duration, and it works with your mind to generate a dream. Put the sleep mask on to begin your dream.
   A transparency toggle allows you to have the dream reflected on the external surface of the mask, inviting in external intervention. For example, a dream therapist could reach in, as though they were putting their hands into liquid, causing controlled changes in the structure of your dream.

3. Intuitive and Sensory Connection

   
   Lucid dreams are where we try to exert a degree of control: by way of rituals like smearing the raw flesh of a pig on the face of the dreamer. While there is a long history of ritualized problem-solving in dream incubation, we know less about controlled sharing of dreamspaces.

   They can sometimes materialize as a result of deep connectedness between people, unintentionally sharing the same dreams and bringing pieces of that back to reality. I love the concept of exponential time dilation from Inception, one of my favorite films, where depending on the level of nesting of the dream, your timescales could shift in the order of minutes to decades.
   
   Are we capable of more while we sleep? If we were to semi-consciously move through self-architected worlds without the constraints of the physical world - it starts to sound reminiscent of what the promise of the metaverse is.

   The REMGlove activates a predetermined dream environment for the dreamers who intend to meet, the space is configured to allow entry to unique IDs of gloves, ensuring that only vetted dreamers are allowed in. Dreamers can be experience anything together within their agreed upon environmental constraints (or lack thereof), and can boot anyone from their dreamspace at will.

Sometimes I’ll wake in the middle of the night, reaching urgently for my phone in the dark, with my eyes half-open to type in “a wistful bison sitting in a diner, near a window, drinking a beverage from a straw, in the style of Edward Hopper”.

Those prompts would begin to evolve into something like: “highly detailed concept art lithograph of a woman morphing into a cloud, walking through a colorful futuristic cyberpunk dystopian busy bustling city full of mushrooms, Beijing Forbidden City, cinematic environment, Unreal Engine, dark atmospheric macabre poetcore, beautiful light, mystical vintage sci-fi”

Over a few months of more frequently experimenting with text-to-image AIs, I began to dream differently - farther removed from the familiar, more saturated with absurdity. Or dreams suddenly felt more pressing, and vivid, and like they had to be channeled out into the world, in some form. The aperture of the mind widens, allowing for chaos to flow more freely between the two worlds.

In ancient practices of dream incubation, one lays the groundwork for a fruitful dream primarily by way of: setting an atmosphere or environment (the sacred precinct to sleep within), and choosing a defined intention of what needs to be explored. This is what we’re doing when selecting a prompt, putting together the thought-fragments we need to give something form.

A decade ago, a team of Japanese scientists released a revolutionary scientific paper. Using fMRI imaging, they were able to observe thoughts moving through the minds of zebrafish, a phosphorescent glow dancing through the brain. These patterns eventually provided enough data to visualize what the zebrafish was thinking. Soon, human dreams were being pieced together from fMRI scan data, keywords mapped to ImageNet and WordNet, creating accurate little eerie films - visual representations of the inner workings of a human mind. We’re only a step removed from doing that for ourselves, wandering spatially through concepts we’re always losing.

All dreams are designed to be forgotten, so as to not smudge realities
Our dreams default to evaporating within 10 minutes of waking, into wisps of unrecoverable idea-matter. Upon waking, all the worlds our mind has been wandering through, any presences encountered are promptly forgotten.

The utility here is protecting our sanity, keeping us contained within the rational bounds of reality. Dreams remain a channel for bizarre sensory explosion, a place for our subconscious to make clearer that which we already know, to see connections mired in hallucinations, a realm to access our intuition, an alternate reality or a soft new plane of communication: we spend half our lives in this space. We all dream every single night, whether or not it leaves behind any trace of memory. more on this here

The creation of a neural network feels like building a specific and persistent dreamspace: thickly condensed, frozen and available to explore without constraints of ephemerality. This fresh crop of megalithic generative networks allow us to consult with an amalgam of the entirety of human creative history, or perhaps just a heavy skewing of late ‘90s deviantArt users.

These are structures we could use for immortalization & infinite extrapolation, to create symbolic Horcruxes, or to put aside pieces of memory or seeds of alternate realities – we may leave behind fossils that could grow into entire ecosystems on their own.

Between thought and expression, lies a lifetime.
-The Velvet Underground

Generative machine intelligences can scale up an individual’s creative endeavors, freeing up their creative potential - and exponentially shortening the time from idea to execution.

What are we thinking vs. what is it thinking? Whose imagination is on display?

In Ted Chiang’s steampunk novella Seventy Two Letters, (taking place in some alt-history-state Britain) automatons are given life by a class of people known as“nomenclators” - who provide specific verbal instructions to confer upon machines a purpose and function. These spoken word key-phrases grow in complexity, based on the actions the unconscious machines needed to embody - surfacing parallels to present-day ‘prompt engineers’.

While pouring a large bronze cast in the shape of an intricate hand, a sculptor in the story argues that automatons with programmed-in dexterity may end up replacing the sculptors themselves. Similar arguments arise today, with artists’ entire bodies of work and imagination reduced to training data - pointillistic samples to be remixed into oblivion. However in this case, machines could quickly rise to the level of collaborator rather than replacement-threat or a mere tool, in the way one uses a rubber duck while programming - an artist and their assembled team of machines together could function as an independent creative house.

The ease of use of generative AI will perhaps just create more artists: When we approach machines as collaborators, we take into account their idiosyncrasies and personality quirks, how each has its own specialization and area of expertise.

This is how Dall-E and Midjourney see each other: sagely, threatening, expansive:

Everything is about to change: the new age of remixing

“Whenever a skill becomes automated, art moves into new terrains of impossibility. The camera did to painting what guns did to spears. There is no going back.” - David O’Reilly

A lot of alarmist lines of conversation have been triggered in recent weeks, “AI is going to replace artists!” “Art is dead!” and so forth. It appears more as a genre-shift, just as sampling other pieces of music, tiny unrecognizable fragments, paved the way for electronic music.

A new and pronounced emphasis on refining the skill of holding ideas in your mind with more vividness, and of establishing collaborative dialogue with machines.

While workflows rapidly shift, art is only becoming more accessible and faster, but raising monumental questions of ownership. Most of these networks are trained on infinite corpuses of visual art, some public domain but the majority of scrapings largely without the consent of artists.

Dall-E’s copyright rules have been cloudy during the research preview, you own the rights to any images you generate, to be used in any form other than NFTs. To handle the increases in processing load, it’s going from 10 generated images down to 4, and a system of paid credits. Midjourney’s own moody and artistic style may never compensate the source artists in any way either.

The democratization of generative networks will accelerate pre-existing shifts in how we learn: the lack of documentation around these technologies means that we learn primarily by building, and from each other. The instant community that forms over Discord, with incessant bursts of inspiration, moves us from proprietary-everything to an open-book approach of improving upon each other. Building collective knowledge. In a way, we’re recreating the spirit of the ‘90s internet - we’re all hanging out in forums and chatrooms making things together.

A brief history of GANs

When I first started working with GANs (generative adversarial networks) in 2016, I was primarily using them toward extrapolation. One thing that AI is optimized for is uncovering patterns: so surely it could conjure up the next possible concept, right at the outer edge of what already existed.

Training a model was a mercurial process spanning multiple days, leading to the moment of sheer magic when it would eventually spit out 64x64px rough images. These were the first blurry thoughts we could see, and resolution and precision have increased exponentially in recent years.

These years were spent searching for glimpses: predictions and odd sketches of something new yet plausible, discovering creatures that lived deep within latent space: what were the interstitial concepts hiding in the spider-like threads between existing ideas and images? From datasets assembled from scientific illustrations of plants, could we see traces of synthetic plants and future mutations? What would an even mix of Alexander McQueen and Oscar de la Renta’s aesthetics look like? What kind of creature might exist in between a jellyfish and a clock?

Jellyfish-clock: via Midjourney vs. 2018 Google’s BigGAN

Present-day models are faster and more vividly detailed, and lend themselves better to extrapolation of individual styles and the kinds of impossible collaborations I had always been looking for: blends of sculptures by Rodin and Noguchi, juxtaposing far future events into the past, alt-histories and scenes from far-flung universes. I input a description of the kind of person I tend to fall in love with, and Dall-E generated a number of images of men who looked like they played in Nickelback.

Inpainting and outpainting reveal what might lie beyond the limits of a frame: extending canvases to reveal container worlds. I spent the early days of Dall-E turning movie posters into tapestries, feeling unconstrained by edges, asking neural networks to give form to imaginary creatures that might be standing right behind me just out of frame in a photograph.

A few explorations:

• Switching formats (text to image to video) : Some literary paragraphs are each like individual beautiful paintings, and deserve to be repurposed into them. Some people consume information better when it’s visual rather than through written words

Illustrating a book of sci-fi short stories

• Stock images: For quick mockups (preferably ones where it doesn’t matter if the humans have demon-faces up close), I’ve been relying on Dall-E to generate all my stock photography

• Experimenting with unlikely materials

• Creating inspiration / patterns for fashion designs for an upcoming equestrian fashion line

• Creating inspiration images for hand-drawn ink illustrations and linoprint carvings

• Maintaining a more visual dream diary

• Generating textures for 3D models and AR objects

• Jewelry design: an opal ring I’m having made

Dreaming while awake

When you see visuals in a lucid dream, you will never be able to see the time - digital clocks tend to behave erratically. The same is true of neural networks: you can only see time as though in a dream, or text at the level of a timid scrawl.

Some of the first things I tried when I got access to these tools: generating a new set of hieroglyphic symbols for modern concepts (eg. In & Out burger), exploring what the color of human souls looked like (similar aesthetic to the Northern Lights). Given that any image may lie behind the right combination of words, there might be a way to even find yourself: What is the prompt that leads to your form - where do you exist in the eyes of a neural network?

Sometime past midnight, after losing my wallet an hour from home, I am rescued by an autonomous vehicle named Moonwalk. The night is very quiet and dark, and then an innocuous orange-doored white car caged in rooftop sensors casts its lightbeams down the street. It drives up alone, halting expectantly to pick me up at the highest point of Potrero Hill. As we turn onto the east-edge and drive almost vertically down three consecutive hairpin turns on a winding road, I become acutely aware of the absence of street lights, and of being completely alone. The wheel turns and keeps on turning, under the weight of an invisible hand, with a chillingly sharp assurance.

I’ve been beta-testing these Cruise vehicles for about a month now - and since they’ve recently expanded the service area, it’s becoming my main mode of transportation. Earlier, it would mostly be me and M driving down to Ocean Beach at 1am, because that’s the only place it would go. She’s working on a product that enables any car to self-drive - but these are the first autonomous vehicles publicly available, so the novelty is real.

I’d always thought the interior of an autonomous vehicle didn’t need to really look like a regular car - especially the interior. It’s almost disappointing to step into the same configuration of nondescript leather seats, nothing out of the ordinary - just a plastic barrier and a couple of iPads, and subtle indicators of cameras recording you all the time. The exterior is intentionally friendly and cute and personified, cloaking what some might perceive to be dangerous technology. Because it looks somewhat the same as what we’ve always known, it’s safer to step in.

Inside a supersonic aircraft, there is no need for windows.

Not in any commercial aircraft really, it does nothing for the structural integrity. You sit inside a long tapering carbon-fiber tube, and soon arrive somewhere else, in the wake of a sonic boom every so often.

A prototype aircraft like a looming whale skeleton occupies almost the entire office on the pier, a centerpiece built to scale from wood and foam. Redesigning the passenger experience is an opportunity to throw out everything you know, creating a temporary psychological environment from scratch. With a blank canvas, we trial potential realities through movable foamcore cabin setups and chair configurations and light projections and VR headsets. At the end of the day, we start with what people want, so the first thing is to give them windows.