Radical Reads

I’ve been working on AI fiction since 2017 when I wrote my first “algo-story” for Wired. What I’ve come to realize, especially since getting access to Transformer-based text generation, is that what we’re dealing with here is really a new medium. I think creative AI is roughly where film was when the Lumiere brothers showed clips of trains arriving in stations and crowds jumped out of the way. The field is wide open. I think there’s going to be a lot of beauty to come out of this.

A few months ago, I received access to the Cohere API (Cohere is a Radical Ventures portfolio company), which allows for sophisticated, nimble manipulations of Natural Language Processing. Through Cohere, I was able to create algorithms derived from various styles. These included Thomas Browne, Eileen Chang, Dickens, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Hemingway and others, including anthologies of love stories and Chinese nature poetry. I then took those algorithms and had them write sentences and paragraphs for me on selected themes: a marketplace, love at first sight, a life played out after falling in love. The ones I liked I kept. The ones I didn’t I threw out. Then I took the passages those algorithms had provided and input them to Sudowrite, the stochastic writing tool.

To generate Autotuned Love Story I had to develop a separate artistic practice around the technology. The love story below is my attempt to develop an idealized love story out of all the love stories that I have admired. It exists on the line between art and criticism. Autotuned Love Story certainly isn’t mine. I built it but it’s not my love story. It’s the love story of the machines interacting with all the love stories I have loved. I confess that I find it eerie; there is something true and moving in it that I recognize but which I also can’t place.

The rain in the market smelled like rusting metal and wet stones. The stallholders had no real need to sell nor did they care much for their customers. There was a cookery demonstration. There was a magician. There was a video games stall. There was a beauty parlour. The rain was like a mist at first, fine and barely noticeable, but not long after the streets were flowing with a torrent of mud and water.

Among huddles of people, they met in a stall that sold umbrellas. The eyes of one were large and green, soft and milky. The other’s eyes were like iced coffee.

Shyness came upon them at once. Shyness and fear. A butcher’s boy, with a beautiful nose, stood beside a post, making grimaces at a plan that was chalked out on the top of it. A ragged little boy, barefooted, and with his face smeared with blood, from having just grazed his nose against the corner of a post, began playing at marbles with other boys of his own size. Their smiles were interminable, wavering and forgetful, and it seemed as though they could not control their lips, that they smiled against their will while they thought of something else.

–Alone?

–Yes.

The rain became like a dirty great mop being wrung out above their heads. The market became more uneasy, and gave place to a sea of noises that on both sides added to the general clamour. The crowd began to press in on them, to snatch at their coats, to groan, to criticize and to complain of cold and hunger, of want of clean clothes, of lack of decent shelter. The rain was unremitting—just like the flow of people, the flow of traffic, the flow of tired animals. The crowd erupted and all at once it seemed that there were too many people.

When the crowd closed up again, the two were separated from one another. The rain died down and the market was now very different. They looked for each other like lost children in a train station. It was a different kind of a market, darker, older, dingier, more chaotic. The pavement was covered with mud and mire and straw and dung.

They met by accident, which is only a way of saying that we have not looked for something before it comes forward, that they were both in the world and the world is small.

They never met again, or maybe they did.

Maybe, at first, they had the same delight in touching, in meeting, in forming, in blurring, in drawing out. They had secrets, and they shared those secrets. As one’s hands rolled over the other, they lay as still as fish. It seemed to both of them that they could not live in the old way; they could not go on living as though there were nothing new in their lives. They had to settle down together somewhere, to live for themselves, alone, to have their own home, where they would be their own masters. They went abroad, changed their lives. One was a manager of a railway branch line. The other became a teacher in a school. And the large study in which they spent their evenings was so full of pictures and flowers that it was difficult to move about without upsetting something. Pictures of all sorts, landscapes in water-colour, engravings after the old masters, and the albums filled with the photographs of relatives, friends, and children, were scattered everywhere about the bookcases, on the tables, on the chairs. Love is like money: the kind you have and do not want to lose, the kind you lose and treasure. The thought of death, which had moved them so profoundly, no longer caused in either the former fear and remorse, a sound that lost its echo in the endless, sad retreat, a phantom of caresses down hallways empty and forsaken.

Maybe they lived that life. Maybe they didn’t. But in the market, among the detritus, the splintered edges, they had once found each other, and found each other and lost each other again. They had said only that, yes, they were alone.

The rain had smelled like sodden horses and rusting metal and wet stones.