Nope. It’s an image I found on Reddit. Though thinking about it makes me curious about making something similar, but I know I’d have to start with a taxidermied tortoise, because doing that shit to a living tortoise would kill it, and I draw the line at cruelty towards any living vertebrates.

(May 13, 2023 at 10:43 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote: Nope. It’s an image I found on Reddit. Though thinking about it makes me curious about making something similar, but I know I’d have to start with a taxidermied tortoise, because doing that shit to a living tortoise would kill it, and I draw the line at cruelty towards any living vertebrates.

There was a store downtown here that had a realistic plastic turtle, about 2 feet across. I seriously considered getting it and adding all the jewels and gold leaf, according to the detailed description in the book. Eventually I realized that it was a pretty crazy fantasy to spend that much money on. 

I wonder if some more enthusiastic fan somewhere has actually done it.

I’d probably find some costume jewelry or maybe some cheaper versions of the jewels listed, either lookalikes, synthetics, or just smaller stones.

(May 13, 2023 at 11:25 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote: I’d probably find some costume jewelry or maybe some cheaper versions of the jewels listed, either lookalikes, synthetics, or just smaller stones.

You know it occurs to me now... 

The advice I got from the AI is quite cleaned-up, sort of made safe for the consumer. You are right to point out that Des Esseintes doesn't mind when he kills the turtle. And at the beginning of the book he pretty much ruins a young man's life -- just for fun -- by paying for him to develop all kind of expensive habits and then suddenly cutting him off, so the guy turns to crime. The Decadence in the book is much more than the luxury hedonism recommended by the AI.

The AI has pretty much made it safe for bourgeois aspirations -- if you make enough money you can buy this lifestyle and feel good about it. It ends up being compatible with Gwyneth Paltrow's lifestyle brand. The moral issues and the edginess involved in a full-on commitment to certain special pleasures are ignored. 

It reminds me of the modern US brand of Satanism. Huysmans' Satanism, in Là-Bas, involved serious crime. Plus of course they actually believed in Satan, so they thought they were risking their immortal souls. In America these days it's all cos-play. 

One time I read an American "sequel" to Histoire d'O. It so completely missed the point of the original that I couldn't believe it. It was all good clean fun, with a little consensual SM play, and safe words, and everyone wearing white tennis shoes and going out for a beer together afterwards. Least sexy thing I ever read. 

Anyway, it seems clear that the AI is going to reinforce the Bourgeois Neoliberal morality of its programmers.

(May 14, 2023 at 3:24 am)emjay Wrote: I actually know what you're talking about there (which is rare ) having at least watched the film, if not read the book.

Each to their own of course, but personally I don't care if this thing is highly curated/censored, and not 'edgy', since I'm primarily using it as something like a talking encyclopaedia, in which case I am generally looking for the conventional wisdom. But of course I understand your use case is completely different, so I understand your frustrations as well. I do agree it's a bit of a shame if it means it's missing the essence of some of these 'edgy' books. But since from its perspective it doesn't figuratively 'know' if it's reading fiction or fact, art or opinion - since the training data is ultimately just a massive list of words/word-parts - I still think the censorship is probably a wise trade-off to prevent it becoming a 'shitbot'.

I will say though, it is opening me up to your kind of way of thinking as well, though probably in ways you wouldn't necessarily approve of in that I've asked it to write several poems, many of which I've found pretty meaningful and beautiful, but I'm guessing that from your perspective you'd still see that as a negative? Ie thinking that on-demand AI-generated art lacks some essential human element that the AI can't or won't capture, the desire/passion that's gone into it etc (if I've understood what you were trying to say before)? While I understand that, I'm still personally appreciating this bottom-up approach to art; and am happy enough if it's able to capture the exact feeling I want it to portray, and happier still to see its many interpretations.

At the very least, I think it will be a stepping-stone into the art/literature world, not just in seeing how you literate-types are using it, but also just the 'inter-mixture' of synthetic and real that it represents, as well as the ability to use it for comparison, collation etc of perspectives.

If you're getting results from the AI that work for you, I would never speak against that. I agree that watching how it expresses and organizes things is fascinating and could be very helpful. A clear articulation of even our most common thoughts is a pleasure to read. "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." 

I think where it differs from human literature is in the range of its possibilities for expression. A whole lot of art is based in irony of various kinds. William Blake's poems, for example, are almost all written in the voice of a character who isn't Blake. We are to see through the character's expression to a further meaning which fits in which Blake's own system. 

Dorian Gray is meant to be a very appealing character, in a lot of ways, and when I was young I thought of him as a kind of aspiration. At the same time, he's horrible. So there is that double or triple layer in books -- they are not just a simple statement of events but a challenge, a puzzle, a lasting unresolvable image. 

Currently I'm reading Nabokov's Lolita with a group of older Japanese ladies. Nabokov is in some ways an heir of Oscar Wilde since he believes that the quality of a book is not in its morality but in its beauty. And as we read it there is a constant tension between the extreme beauty of the book's writing vs. the extreme evil of its main character (the man who rapes Lolita). The whole book is told in the man's voice, and he attempts to justify himself or somehow persuade us that his love should make him forgivable. But even as he tells it, the reader can see through what's going on and understand a lot more than he tells us. Just in this it is an incredible literary performance -- the book tells us things that its narrator would never say. And on top of this there are all kinds of puns, word games, and references which I don't think an AI could ever manage. 

So this is what I think makes literature different from what an AI can do, at least for the foreseeable future. An AI might generate a sequel to Harry Potter or some other kids' book that works on a simple level, but good literature does way more than that.