Lore Machine
I can’t shake the feeling that everything is about to be artificially intelligent. It’s a wonderful and terrifying sensation. So much new right now; so much impending upheaval.
Tim Urban depicted this tumultuous near-future state with a set of graphics for his epic two-parter The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence. In panel 1, he sketched the way most of us think about our own relationship with the future, that we’re on some gradual innovation curve gliding smoothly into an unknown but not so drastically different tomorrow. Panel 2 illustrates the acceleration rate of AI-powered innovation none of us expect. Panel 3 dissects that delta.
In other words, in order to think about the future you need to imagine things moving way (way) faster than they do now. Ray Kurzweil calls this phenomenon the Law of Accelerating Returns. Due in large part to the explosion in AI, he believes the 21st century will achieve ~1,000 times the progress of the 20th century. Now here’s the scary part: Because we have nothing in our past to compare this to, we remain woefully underprepared for this future.
The question then becomes: how do you keep up? In the last 5 years, a pantheon of commentary has emerged, aimed at chronicling AI’s impact on everything from MLB pitching stats to Harley-Davidson dealership sales. The most balanced accounts weigh both the possibilities and the drawbacks of a future in which our species can summon the psycho-quantum horsepower of AI to wield god-like powers over everything in our domain, simply with the push of a button.
Armed with all these investigations, hot takes and analyses, there still seems to be a lag. The technology is moving faster than the popular documentation. A particularly under-explored impact zone of AI is storytelling itself.
Annnnd, behold Lore Machine.
Lore Machine explores the increasingly uni-circular Venn Diagram of AI and stories. How will AI alter the process of making a piece of art, producing a film or writing a book? These are incredibly fraught questions. An example perhaps…
The other day, I found this piece by data scientist Piero Paialunga in which he trains a neural network to write a “Stephen King-like text.” I jumped in on the instructional, hammering away at lines of Python. My motivation was cranked to 11. I felt this sense of awesome power. In the time that it took to download 13.6 megabytes, I had summoned sixteen of King’s seminal works. Two hours later, my machine could replicate his style. I used it to write a “Stephen King-like” book. It performed the task in a matter of minutes. As a fly-by-night coder, I was stoked! As a lifelong writer, I was horrified. What had I done?? Had I just committed intellectual grand larceny? This wasn’t writing!
The writing I know is an arduous exercise. To get a vision out into the world, writers vex and pound their desks and pull their hair out. King destroyed his health so humanity could have his particular brand of creepiness. Yet here I was, tapping out some syntactically anemic lines of code to conjure up a purportedly original novel.
When I was finished, I immediately deleted the output. The only thing that felt more empty than my Powerbook’s trash bin was my soul. Yet! Even in this spiritually vanquished state, there was something salvageable about the experience. I just couldn’t put my finger on what.
Lore Machine aims to find that what, that path to a future in which AI is not a creative dead-end, but a more expansive design surface upon which to build better stories.
To do so, Lore Machine will employe a range of formats:
Interviews with engineers and artists who are incorporating these new technologies thoughtfully into their processes.
Original stories that harness the power of AI in interesting, provocative and most importantly additive ways.
Galleries showcasing extraordinary new works of art.
and DIY Guides providing an exploded view on projects, so you can drop the tech into your own stories.
Over the course of time, Lore Machine will evolve from a newsletter documenting the most powerful technology of our time, to a hyperstructure that commissions original works, creates useful software and ultimately helps artists and organizations build better stories.
Lore Machine is a project from Pentagraph. You can find out more about Pentagraph…
Here - pentagraph.xyz
Here - Twitter
And here - Substack