(2022-11-10) Sloan Authors Note

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

There is a ton of con­text about the over­all Word­craft project on the web­site; I really encour­age any­one inter­ested in the inter­sec­tion of AI and art to spend a bit of time reading.

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

Over on the web­site, you can see some screenshots of the Word­craft edi­tor and read more about its affordances. It oper­ates basi­cally like a super-upgraded ver­sion of my AI text com­ple­tion plugin from way back in 2016.

After noodling for a while, I decided I’d try to write some kind of locked-room mystery, because (a) it’s a genre I enjoy, that (b) I’ve never tried before, and (c) I liked the idea of giv­ing the AI the role of the detective — perhaps chal­leng­ing it to “deduce” things based on clues in the text.

It didn’t work at all. Absolute crash and burn. I had over­es­ti­mated the model’s pow­ers.

For a cou­ple of weeks, I thought about other genres

*estab­lish­ing a fenced-in space for the AI to con­tribute what it could.

This AI, like many of its predecessors, is very good at “riffing”: given an example, it can gen­er­ate lots more, often with impres­sive fidelity to genre and vibe*

My story called for a litany of grisly deaths, so, I asked the AI to dream up grisly deaths. I asked it, also, to tell me the names of the dead

Three thoughts, to close.

First, I’m impressed as hell by the Word­craft team

Second, I’m proud of my story!

But, third: I have to report that the AI did not make a use­ful or pleas­ant writing partner

I don’t think I’ve ever writ­ten about my the­ory of short stories, even though I talk about it a lot. It’s very simple: I think all good short sto­ries are, in one way or another, about death

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

I thought I knew things about distribution

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

He writes about the space in between. How does a per­son FIND a video game? What makes them decide to pur­chase and play it? What buttons, levers, and warp zones influ­ence that process?

“Discoverability” is a good 21st-cen­tury word. Most of the dig­i­tal dreams of my cohort, the par­ti­sans of the open web, ran aground on this reality

you need an extra layer, some reser­voir of atten­tion and/or curiosity, whether it’s Google, the blo­gosphere (RIP), Stum­ble­Upon (RIP), Twit­ter (RIP) … hmm, there seem to be a lot of dead chan­nels out here. (aggregator)

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

It was, honestly, the expe­ri­ence of pub­lish­ing a book with FSG that showed me what dis­tri­b­u­tion really looks like, and taught me that you just can­not be start­ing from scratch every time

I’d say most peo­ple in both industries, even the professionals, mud­dle through discoverability, hop­ing for the best, some­times get­ting it.

What I like about Simon is that he knows it, too, but he is never crass, not for a second. His rai­son d’être is the sup­port of inter­esting, inde­pen­dent video games

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