Artificial Reality

After a run of lengthy, detailed posts, I was going to give it a miss today. I certainly don't have the mental energy to take on any of the bigger ideas floating around in the back of my brain, like those mythical posts about swearing in lyrics or Bringback Culture. Stuff like that requires actual reseach!

I was going to do a music post for the very good reason I love doing them and I was in the mood but I did one less than a week ago and anyway, I don't have a particular peg to hang one on just now. Not that that would normally stop me. And I only just posted about TV, so that's out, too.

There's a post to be written about how I keep wishlisting games on Steam based on demos I've played but when the games release I never buy them. As of now, I have fifteen titles on my list, ten of which came from demos; seven of them have released and all of those have review ratings ranging from Positive to Overwhelmingly Positive and yet I haven't bought a single one.

Before I write that post, though, I'd probably need to work out why I'm doing it and I have a worrying suspicion the real reason is simply that I'm too mean to pay for them. I'm so used to getting games for free, I'm finding it very hard to get my wallet out for anything. Is that really something I want to own up to in public?

Speaking of free games, I could post about Noah's Heart again. I still have plenty to say. That's always dangerous, though. I started yesterday's post intending to take a few minutes just putting up a few pictures of my parking space but my enthusiasm ran away with me as usual and I ended up spending most of the afternoon writing about something completely different.

Then there's the AI stuff. I would love to dig deeper into it but once again it's going to take time and thought to come up with something worth posting. I spent half an hour futzing about with GPT-3 this afternoon, trying to get it to give me viable suggestions for band names or even point me to low-view-count videos on YouTube but the results were neither helpful nor amusing. 

What about something new? I keep meaning to start posting about books - it's weird that I don't already, given I never go a single day without reading one - but somehow it always feels just a little too much like work. 

And now I've had an idea! I knew if I just kept typing something would come to me. I'm going to leave all the preamble in so you can admire my process!

It's not entirely irrelevant, either. The idea I just had ties some of this stuff together. It involves books and music and making out celebrities said things they never did, which is one of the many things people worry about when they hear about the sort of stuff AIs get up to.

Let me explain. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for something to read. Like most compulsive readers, I have a large stack of books I've been meaning to get around to, although the longer any book stays there, the less likely that is to happen.

Still, sometimes there's just nothing else to hand and one of them gets its chance. This time it was James Franco's Palo Alto. Yes, it's also a movie. I know that now.

I knew Franco's name but I didn't know why I knew it. I only found out later it was because he's a fairly famous actor, although as far as I can tell, I've never seen him in anything. It's probably just as well. If I'd known he'd played Harry Osborne in the Toby Maguire Spiderman movies or voiced "the Druggie" in Sausage Party, would that have colored my view of his writing, or even made me think twice about reading him at all?

We'll never know. Luckily, I just plowed straight into the book, a collection of linked short stories set in the eponymous Californian city. The prose is bitter and checked. The subject matter is sad-tough-sad. The characters are brittle, damaged and wasted. The tone is bleak, verging on nihilistic. I loved it.

It reminded me very much of the infamous River's Edge, an entry in Keanu Reeves filmography no-one seems to want to remember now he's officially the Nicest Guy in Hollywood. Crispin Glover starred alongside him in that one and there's some obvious overlap there, too...

When I'd finished the book I wondered if the author had written anything else so I looked him up and that's when I found out who he was and also why we haven't heard much from him until lately. Having read Palo Alto, I can't say much of that surprises me. 

Stepping carefully around the "should we still read, let alone enjoy, the work?" arguments, here's the thing I discovered that really made me think. Not that Franco has a close, personal relationship with Lana del Rey, which you might have thought I would have known but which was news to me. I don't deal much with the celebrity lives of musicians I admire. I just listen to the music, mostly.

No, the thing that fascinated me wasn't the idea that James Franco used to hang out with Lana at Coney Island (Okay, alright, that does fascinate me a little...) but that he'd planned to write a book about her in which Lana would be quoted as though she'd spoken to him, when in fact he'd made up everything she said. Which, of course, is exactly what AIs do, if you ask them nicely.

The book was due to be published back in 2017 and apparently Lana was fine with it. As you'll already know if you followed the link two paragraphs back, it was going to be called Flip Side and it was going to be a conversation between James and Lana, only Lana wouldn't be there, only James, saying all the words.

In the interview he does the same thing, There's one James Franco interviewing another. He's pretty rough on himself, too: "So you just played her? As if it were an acting part? That’s a little fucked up." 

It is, though, isn't it? As James says, "But people will still think it’s her talking." Yes, they will. But it isn't. It's James. And David Shields. 

Wait, what? Who's he? "David Shields is a guy who deals in high impact, autobiographical essays. I was very influenced by his book Reality Hunger, which makes arguments for a move away from fiction to creative non-fiction, and for the free appropriation of others’ texts in one’s own."

"Creative non-fiction", eh? Isn't that what we used to call "fiction"? But it does look like an interesting read. Maybe I should get one of the AIs to precis it for me. It'll be even more creative that way, won't it? And shorter, which I imagine will be better.

In the end the book didn't get published. As lanadelrey.fandom.com says "The reason of cancellation is unknown as neither of the authors said anything about the book and its future." And if you can't trust a fan site, who can you trust?

All of which just goes to show that you don't need artificial intelligence to fuck with reality. You just need some nerve. As for the people who didn't say the things you said they said, well they don't get a say, either way. 

I guess the courts might but by then it'll all be too late. As Shields himself apparently says in Reality Hunger, always assuming we can trust Wikipedia, which everyone knows we always can, "Anything processed by memory is fiction".

Ain't that the truth?