A World's Attempts to Understand Itself

On Myth-Making and Manglecore. Also: Norway, Slay The Spire, and 90's Classics

Jay Springett gave a really interesting on myth-making in autonomous worlds:

Myth is the product of a world’s attempts to understand itself.

Particularly, I enjoyed the definitions of plot, story, narrative, and lore.

His definition of myth in autonomous worlds made me actually think about generative AI, particularly in light of Duckrabbit’s expansive article on “manglecore”: AI art with the intention of adjacent possible latent weirdness.

Myth is the product of a world’s attempts to understand itself.

LLM’s condense our world into a model and we use it as a tool to understand the world it is modelled from. In a sense, LLMs is myth, condensed. As Jay puts it: a feature of a world is its boundaries, and thus LLMs can either play it safe, living well within our world (MidJourney aesthetic) or play with this threshold (manglecore):

Art by Kevin Abosch

But all of these moralistic concerns are an aside (not because they’re irrelevant, they’re just not the focus of this essay)—the Midjourney aesthetic is still just artistically boring. GPT-speak is its linguistic analogue, with its sanitized, flavorless, peppy, corporate-speak. Together they are the face and voice of an existence optimized for KPIs and customer retention, and lip-service holistic wellness while we’re at it. They challenge no one, say nothing daring or new, and offer only shallow comforts.

When it fails, we gain insight into ourselves and our world:

But it’s not the mere fact of their shortcomings that make these images interesting. Simple blank screens rendered in error would be much less compelling than pictures of people who look like they were reared in radioactive goo. It’s the fact that where these models fail, they often fail quite weirdly, and in ways that lend broader insight into the world we live in. These failings comprise a set of “anti-virtues”, qualities rendering them useless for practical purposes but all the more valuable for artistic ends. 

Kevin argues that the appeal of manglecore AI comes from its reflection of the time we live in.

And yet while its literal appearance struggles to approximate resemblance to our world, the essence of the manglecore image aptly captures the spirit of our time in its own way through its abject bizarreness. With garbled language and mangled faces, the outputs of the image model manage to portray the discomforting, inexplicable strangeness of life in the modern age.

What I personally find interesting about manglecore is that it’s always surprising. There’s a disconnect and momentary jolt away from reality when your brain habitually jumps to conclusions about what it expects to see, but is then taken for a segway when the details come into view. It’s like walking confidently and suddenly misstepping. Or typoglycemia. It is taht satrnge and wreid peoehnmonn wehre you can read wrdos as a whloe and not lteter by letetr.

In 2020, when GPT-3 came around and prior to most of the modern generative AI visuals (it was only custom GANs back then), I wrote about what it meant to me.

Thus: AI-generated works allow us to contemplate creativity as itself. In that space, the output becomes a way to see chaos without necessarily having a directed hand of intent. It could be garbage, words mashed together that have no meaning, or interesting dialogue between Turing and Shannon about magic. It just is. Somewhere in there is an interesting experience.

Sometimes we come to understand the world not only when it works as expected, but when it fails in unexpected ways.

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Bonus Content!

Been a slow week, recuperating from travel and embedding myself back into postponed admin. A relatively boring week, all things considered. But good boring in the sense that getting a sound good night’s rest is good and boring. :)

Slay The Spire

A genre of gaming that I haven’t nearly delved into deep enough is roguelikes/roguelites. I find the format really interesting and have often wondered why we haven’t really seen this format take off in other media (I think there’s elements here that is transitive to other media besides gaming).

Regardless, if you want a fun deck-building roguelite, do check out Slay The Spire. And yes, I know I’m a bit late on this one, but it’s been truly fun if you haven’t heard of it. Enjoy!

Norway

Norway is a really, really interesting country and this video from Wendover gives a great history on how/why Norway got to where it is. When it found oil, it already had a long history of establishing shared ownership of the country’s resources. It’s brilliant mix of private and public incentive designs is really close to what feels like an optimal design for society: using private incentives for efficient early-stage resource allocation and then eventually putting this back into the public’s hands and retaining domain over the country and its people. The fact that the Norwegian government can only take a small percentage of their sovereign wealth fund every year in case the budget needs it, is just brilliant and smart design.

Unlike the other petrostates, it’s the world’s most democratic country. A total outlier. In the past I’ve wondered why Norway could figure it out, and this video rightfully points to an interesting reason: geography, in some way, is destiny. Through necessity, the people had to focus on collective ownership and cooperation to make do and that’s stayed a core part of their DNA ever since.

Spain Metaverse NFT IP Ruling

The US usually takes the limelight in IP law. A recent court case out of Barcelona argued in favour of the defendant when it was determined that making an NFT derivative/adaptation that’s also ‘lazy minted’ was a non-infringing use.

The physical artworks can be displayed by their owners, this has never been in dispute, so the legal proceedings arose from the question of whether the works can be adapted into digital versions, and whether these could be displayed in a museum in the metaverse, and whether these adaptations could also be minted. The defendants argued that the digital works on display were non-infringing adaptations of the works, and that the NFT versions had not been minted yet. The court agreed with the defendants and declared that there was no copyright infringement.

Really interesting.

Scrolls

You probably heard about it. Using AI, parts of carbonised scrolls from ancient Rome were able to read.

It’s just fun and interesting in all the right ways. Using the future to peer into the past.

Courtesy - You're Not Alone [feat. Erika de Casier & August Rosenbaum]

This has been on repeat this week. What a great remix of a 90s classic. You’re not alone. I’ll wait till the end of time for you.

That’s it for this week friends. Hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset.

Simon