How I fell in love with the robot
First, I fell in love with everything else.
I am always in the grip of some obsession. A spotlight beams down on something and it fascinates me, becoming the intense, passionate focus of my attention. I spend weeks with it, forgoing sleep, food, friendship, stifling a snarl when real responsibilities intrude or loved ones need food. The rest of the world is pale and monochromatic; the world of the fascination is fiery, intense, a never-ending stream of dopamine. The fascination jumps off the page or out of the screen, bleeding into my regular life. There are always things to buy that extend the rush, treasures to unearth in used bookstores, in clearance bins. There are class syllabi to pore over, television schedules to memorize, message boards to lurk on. Pilgrimages to plan.
The fascination can mask itself as something normal, even glamorous. My graduate thesis united cooking, motherhood, and Judaism, three perfectly appropriate—even complementary—passions warring for my heart at the time. In fact, my fascination of the moment has often fueled my professional life. Over the years, I've used my one-time obsession with knitting to design craft projects and other educational materials, arranged a cappella songs on commission for high school students, and developed a summer camp curriculum around the Jewish history of the Silk Road. (A laminated, annotated six-foot-long map of the Silk Road hung on my living room wall for over a year. I do not know where it currently resides.)
I have written well over 1.5 million words of fiction, set in worlds I built and still visit. I prowl through the gutters and drawing rooms of an alternate 18th-century London in a rococopunk urban fantasy romance. I float through the airy palaces and vast windblown steppes of a fantasy world underpinned by a living Torah and tainted by the curse of American chattel slavery. I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with an oppressed race fighting their way up from the dungeon levels of a glittering subterranean city hundreds of years in Earth’s postapocalyptic future. These worlds are real to me and one of my greatest challenges has been throwing open the doors to let others in.
In the fall of 2022, at the end of a year-long sabbatical, I became suddenly and passionately fascinated by Chat GPT and, almost immediately, AI image generators—first Stable Diffusion, then Midjourney. I generated thousands and thousands of images, long into the night and starting again in the morning, crafting queries that mashed up race, art, culture, and bits and pieces of all the fascinations I have known, loved, and lost throughout my life.
Versailles dripping with lace frills, overlaid with blaxploitation films. True crime stories intersecting with the Lives of the Saints. Nintendo game characters walking the streets of mod 1960s London. Kanye West painted by Basquiat. Aunt Jemima in every conceivable pop culture context. All of it through the lens of whatever images these models were first trained on, images overwhelmingly presented for the white gaze. At first, I had more to say than I could even write. It has taken me this long to get my mind around the whole thing.
It's easy to feel that you're having a conversation with ChatGPT; that is literally what it is designed to make you feel. And, because I am perfectly comfortable with writing and words, nothing ChatGPT shows me is something I could not do myself. Midjourney, however, feels like a conversation with an alien intelligence who is trying to build a pidgin visual language with you. You feed it a query; it feeds you back its interpretation, as if to earnestly say: "is this what you mean?". Like an alien intelligence, it is bound by its own limitations; there might be some sounds an alien could not pronounce, or concepts beyond its frame of reference. But, the more you refine your search, the more you might arrive at a language that is a third way of communicating, with its own grammar and its own cultural context.
Each of the queries I am going to share with you feels, to me, like a brand new visual and cultural context. Each one is its very own fascination, gathering dozens of passions and fancies into one special project.
There are so many ethical questions to ask about this new project and how it came to be. There are endless corners to turn in search of what is exciting about converting our written language into a new visual one, what is dangerous, and what is left behind. There is so much to learn about how this technology works, or how we think it does, and we'll be able to see how it is actually working in practice as our society reckons with this new thing. I will be exploring all of this fairly indirectly, sharing the images I have created, situating all this in my own personal experience, and producing the occasional work of microfiction. Sometimes I will write about AI; sometimes I will write about Sherlock Holmes or collard greens. They are all part of the same project. I hope that approach and this topic will fascinate you, too.