https://siobhanof.itch.io/10-maxims-for-guiding-shy-reluctant-unruly-ai 

https://siobhanof.itch.io/infinity-1

https://siobhanof.itch.io/infinite-eddies

Ten Maxims for Guiding Shy, Reluctant or Unruly Artificial Intelligence

Infinity+1

Infinite Eddies

Three experiments with computational text and images. Each affords distinct opportunities to discuss questions raised by predictive text and image generating AI, affect in interactive design, and emergent modalities of presence and aura across co-created content. Inspired by a Write with Laila Workshop run by Char Putney and Martin Pilchmair in 2022, Ten Maxims for Guiding Shy, Reluctant or Unruly Artificial Intelligence, experiments with a “personalized AI,” a bespoke “brain" of selected full works as the source for the 10 Maxims. The paired images were co-created with Midjourney v.3 from the AI generated prompts and the interactive work, built in Twine’'s Chapbook storyformat, teases out the affective dimension of the interplay of text and image. My ongoing digital storytelling memory project, Infinity+1, was launched Sept. 2022 as an experiment with the aesthetic and affective possibilities of the interactive story-game engine, Twine. This project interweaves stories and voices from across generations, pairing short texts with images co-created with Midjourney, an AI image generator. The project’s genesis began in hearing my father’s fluid movements through time and place in his last months with age-related memory loss and early dementia. Working with the affordances of interactive media, Infinity+1 evokes a sense of the multivocality of identity, personhood, and memory, and the associative movement between persons, places, stories, and interactions. The overall design of the project’s narrative and branching paths developed in response to unruly and compelling images unexpected from the prompts. The third project, Infinite Eddies (2023 underway) explores the affective dimension of Midjourney’s generative AI mediating one source photograph of my father and myself. Prompts recontextualize our mediated image in other places, times, narrative realms, and visual aesthetics, yet across the set the configuration of our bodies, our expressions, remain constants. I theorize this manifest recurrence as an affective element in the visual evocation of a relationship, expressed in myriad variations and mutations of proximity and arrangement. Playing with prompts to influence the computational temperature of output images, this recurrent, mutable element troubles Benjamin’s formulation of the aura of the original work of art, conjuring instead an aura of affect in social relation and physical configuration, retained across an expanding set of images that are not photographs. The aggregate effect is of eddies or ripples around the source photo, the unseen pebble dropped in a virtual pool. The spectrum of centripetal elements and patterns and centrifugal outliers open questions as to the extent of the data set determining the temperature of generated images, the parameters defining alignment (Christian) in the “magecraft of prompting” manifest in a spectrum of results from “Maximum Obedience” to “Maximum Surprise” (Kelly).

Link coming.

Siobhan O’Flynn is Director, Canadian Studies Program, University of Toronto. Over two decades of academic and professional consulting inform her research/creation in digital storytelling with expertise in interactive, participatory, transmedia, augmented reality and virtual reality projects via her company NarrativeNow. Her current interactive works explore the expressive and unruly potential of AI image and text generators for elegy, memory, and recursive storytelling. Her current monograph in progress, Mapping Digital Narrativity: Design, Practice, Theory, will be published by Routledge Press.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility [First Version].” Translated by Michael W. Jennings. Grey Room, no. 39, 2010, pp. 11–38. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27809424. Accessed 23 Jan. 2023.

Christian, Brian. The Alignment Problem:  Machine Learning and Human Values. 2020.

Kelly, Kevin. “Picture Limitless Creativity at Your Fingertips.” Wired Magazine. Nov. 17, 2022. https://www.wired.com/story/picture-limitless-creativity-ai-image-generators/

Putney, Char, and Martin Pilchair. Write with Laika. https://www.writewithlaika.com/