Art In Aspic

If AI comes to dominate the artistic fields as it seems to be doing, from whence will come new styles?

AI does nothing but regurgitate existing content. It forms a word and image salad from piles of harvested content and then spits out replies synthesized from that content. As far as I can tell, it seems to suggest that our current art will be preserved in aspic if the artists turn to AI as their content creator.

My old, Southern man and his cat series are essentially all the same. Here's today's rendering.

I could request it as an oil painting or line drawing or even anime, but it would all be drawn from existing content. How would a new style arise?

Further, if what you want isn't represented in sufficient quantities in it training data, you're out of luck. The frogmouth helmet was a style of helmet used in 15th and 16th century tournament jousting. It looked like this.

Because the frogmouth helmet was so niche, there aren't many of them represented in artwork. Here's what Gemini thought was a frogmouth helmet.

The dude looks like a duck. Ridiculous.

If I can't teach it how to render a frogmouth helmet, for which pictures exist, how am I going to get it to help me develop a new style? If independent, non-AI artists get priced out of the market, isn't art, whether it's prose or poetry or music or images or video, going to be fixed for all time?

Aiming At Whites, Hitting Blacks

Coming home from Mobile recently, I got routed through Charlotte. Charlotte is about 34% black. In cities with that kind of demographics, the airport employees are typically black. In Mobile, which is 50% black, all of the employees of both the airport proper and the tenant businesses are black. I could be off by one or two, but I can't recall more than a handful of non-blacks.

At CLT, it was 50-50 black and Hispanic. I didn't have time for a full statistical data collection walk, but I saw a good amount of two concourses and noted something interesting. There was very little racial mingling in the tenant businesses. The employees were either Hispanic or black.

In the businesses where the employees were Hispanic, behind the counter they mostly spoke Spanish to each other.

Of the more than 50% of American, black high school graduates who are not proficient at English, about 0.1% of them speak Spanish. That's close enough to zero to be zero.

All of those young black adults are effectively locked out of the airport jobs where the other employees are Hispanic.

Here are the demographics of Charlotte over time.

The Democrats are on the record as having opened the border in order to make whites a minority in the US. They are only incommoding whites politically. In terms of job opportunities, they are hitting blacks square in the chest.

And So It Begins

Almost all of this is mine. ChatGPT helped me clean up a sentence or two, but this is almost all me.

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Cat’s headache had gotten worse through the night. Now, with sunrise coming to the bayou, his vision had become a bit blurry from the pain. His shoulder hurt dully from where he’d been burned, but worst of all was his side where the man had stabbed him with a needle. That burned like fire. Like his head, it had gotten worse.

Through a slight haze, he saw the General lying on his side amidst the wreckage in the living room, panting. Cat knew his breathing too well to think he was asleep.

“How are you doing, Beau?”

“Woof,” replied the basset hound. The words sounded in Cat’s head in a rich, baritone voice. “My head feels like it’s about to collapse. The place where the bad men stabbed me with that needle is absolutely on fire.”

“Mine, too,” replied Cat.

Earlier, about fifteen minutes after the changes, the surprise had worn off. The talking without sound. The sharper edges of the world simply were. Things were different now, and that was that—no more remarkable than water being wet or the sun being bright. The men and their needles had done this.

Those men were dead. The gators had seen to that. Cat felt smug satisfaction recalling the explosion in the men’s boat, the splashes and screams.

Cat limped over to where General Beauregard lay on his side. He could hear the General whimpering slightly. This was the first time Cat had ever heard the General complain. The General simply didn’t do that. 

Cat set to work cleaning the General’s side where the needle had gone in. General Beauregard barked loudly and angrily at him as soon as his tongue touched the spot. Cat involuntarily leaped back. Beauregard had never barked at him like that.

“Sorry, Beau,” said Cat. “I won’t touch that again.”

“Sorry, Cat. I didn’t mean that.”

“I know. Don’t worry about it.”

Cat moved on to one of the scrapes on General Beauregard’s shoulder and got to work, his raspy, little tongue moving along the basset hound’s fur in a rhythm that calmed them both.

Bobby and Basil were still in their bedrooms, sleeping off their drinking. 

“When Bobby comes out, we’re going to be in trouble,” said General Beauregard. “He’s going to think we did all of this.”

Cat didn’t care. Bobby and Basil would yell and wave their hands and a few hours later, dinner would come. Nothing serious ever came of the men’s anger. It simply wasn’t worth paying attention to their yelling.

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Beau. It won’t take them long to see the bow of the sunken skiff. The guys are pretty smart. They’ll figure out what happened,” replied Cat.

Why Bother Coming Here At All?

If the illegal alien Somalis in Minnesota are just as American as you or I the moment they step off the plane, why do they need to step off the plane at all? Why aren't the Somalis in Somalia just as American as the rest of us? Dittos for the Hondurans who walked across the southern border. Same for the Haitians the Biden Administration flew into the country.

Maybe we could send them all Social Security cards now and just cut out the middle man.

It seems kind of unfair to make them go to all that trouble.

A Few AI Use Cases

I'm a heavy user of AI (read: ChatGPT) and I thought it might be interesting to lay out a couple of recent use cases. I'm at the Mobile airport right now with a 3 hour delay thanks to Global Warming Climate Change a normal January cold snap, so I figured I might as well do something productive with my time.

Landscape Design

I found a good property on this trip. It's on the river proper with a great view, has half an acre of flat land, the house is well-constructed, laid out nicely and raised well off the ground and out of flood risk, the dock's piers are solid. Like most houses along the river, it's been an heirloom property. This one has been in its current family since 1970. For the last decade or so, it's been a party house. No one has lived there full time, it's just been used for weekend getaways and entertaining.

As a result, the thing is in desperate need of maintenance and a face lift. All of the outbuildings including the pier need to be torn out and rebuilt. There are tree stumps leftover from hurricanes that need to be removed. And so on and so forth. I showed a picture of the place to AI and asked for a ruthless analysis of its curb appeal. Here's what I got.

This house has zero emotional pull. It doesn’t say welcome, river life, or Southern charm. It says “county permit approved” and then stops trying. Right now it feels more like an elevated FEMA prototype than a place anyone would want to arrive at.

I think AI hit the mark on this one.

We worked together for a bit on the landscape design and ended up with this.

Same place, new paint, an entry stairway and some raised beds. The shack on the right gets torn down and removed.

That's got a completely different feel. I like it a lot. More to the point, I understand the ideas behind it. I learned from the project and saw how a few simple architectural elements pull you in and also ground the property rather than allowing it to float in the air on its pilings.

AI also recommended that I disperse my cayenne and tobacco throughout the raised beds as accent plants. I hadn't thought of that. I was going to plant them in regimented rows, but now I see that I can get just as many if I disperse them throughout the property and I won't end up with the farmer's look.

Travel Diet

This was a short, solo trip, so while I stayed at a VRBO place and cooked my own food, this time I didn't buy fruits and vegetables. It was just too much hassle and typically they come in too great a quantity. Not much common sense there, I know.

With a bit of idle time on my hands, I pulled out my phone and had a chat with AI about it. A few hours later, I had bought singles of apples, bananas, a single stalk of broccoli, a small container of blueberries and a small container of cherry tomatoes. When I combined this with the cheese, fish, steak and rice I already had, AI informed me that the only thing missing was nuts, preferably almonds or pecans.

I usually do buy some fruits and veggies, but I'd always guessed about the right combinations to give a broad spectrum of nutrients. I felt good after the chat with AI and the shopping, both physically and intellectually.

Technology On Travel

Finally, there are the IT topics. I'm quite capable of doing these things on my own, but they aren't second nature to me any more, so it helped to have AI around to give me advice. I brought along my own WiFi router, a Raspberry PI and a SONOS Roam. I hooked the router into the house's router and I had preset it to my home router's ID and password. It got itself on the Internet through the house router and my phone, SONOS and laptop all thought they were at home and required no setup at all. The Pi needed a little coaxing and that's where AI came in handy. Rather than looking up the Linux commands myself, I just cut pasted AI's suggestions into my Telnet prompt and voila! success.

I haven't tried this yet, but it dawned on me that I could download the manual from my drone, feed it into AI and then use that particular chat session to ask it individual questions like how to download the videos and images quickly and easily. Yes, I could read the manual, but really, who does that sort of thing any more?

Anywho, that's just a smattering of what I'm doing with it these days in addition to writing comic romance adventure fiction. Just wanted to share.

Of Drones And Canals

Wife kitteh bought me a drone for Christmas because she knows of my pathological fondness for perspective river photos and videos. I'm in God's Country right now, looking at vacation properties again and had a chance to play with my new toy over one of the canals off the Fish River.

Enjoy.

Pro Tip: Watch it on YouTube. It's in High Res and benefits from that platform.

Writing Fiction With ChatGPT Circa January 2026

I had to put that date modifier in the title because AI is changing so fast.

My last post, long-winded as it was, definitely TL;DR material, was almost entirely written by AI (read: ChatGPT). It was the culmination of more than a year of working with AI to develop the main characters of stories I will never write.

I use AI for all kinds of things. In the case of that story snippet, I was comparing a couple of Alabama properties we're thinking of buying. One is on the Fish River proper and has a breathtaking view, complete with sunrises perfectly made for coffee and meditation.

Boom.

It's on a tiny lot, 6000 square feet, and is a small house with no outbuildings. Still, it's a lovely place to have as a sanctuary.

The other house is upriver with more than an acre of land and a 17x20 workshop already built.

Navigable water, but no sunrises or sunsets.

I've been having prolonged conversations with AI about this project at the same time as I've been working on my Bobby Lee Bond stories. The topics intertwine as the boys - Bobby Lee and Basil, freelance superspies in their late 50s - live on the Fish River.

After AI and I decided the upstream property with the land and the workshop were perfect for us, I asked it to write a scene where the guys have just come back from a mission and Basil is on the dock in the backyard, smoking his pipe, drinking his gin and tonic and talking, as he always does when he's alone, to Cat. The dog and the cat are both telepathic and intelligent, which is revealed in the first chapter of the first story, but no one knows. They can't read minds, but they can "talk" to each other. When Basil talks to Cat, he thinks he's talking to an ordinary cat who has no idea what he is saying.

The stories are comic first, romantic second and adventure third.

What I was trying to share with that long-winded excerpt was how AI was able to bring my characters into a real estate decision discussion and give me an emotional feel for life in that house through my fiction.

As Andrew Klavan says, good art reveals Truths about life. As I've played with AI writing fiction, I've learned a lot about people, the world and life in general. It has done what Andrew would have expected - led me to pull threads about the various Truths I'm trying to express, leading me to change the way I think about many of them.

As Tim commented:

The individual sentences are fair, but does tend to drag on and meander about. It is possible to have too much atmosphere, and this is almost nothing but mood-setting. There are bits and hints of some kind of substance, but nothing actually comes into focus. In particular, the bit at the end where it implies that the cat and the dog conspired to do. . . something? To someone? . . . just feels like it is hanging around without any kind of payoff.

Tim, as usual, was spot on. That was precisely what it was. It was atmosphere brought to life by fictional people I loved.

Tacitus noted that the ancient German tribes discussed important decisions first sober and then drunk to see if the two methods converged on a solution. That concept has merit. In this case, I first analyzed the financial and daily routine aspects of these properties. Then I put my characters in them to see what they would do.

I got the same result.

Basil sat in a chair at the far edge of the dock platform, legs crossed with careful precision, glass sweating faintly in his hand. The gin and tonic caught what little light remained, the lime a pale green coin at the bottom. He lifted the glass, sniffed, and nodded. Acceptable. Not club quality, but then again, Alabama had surprised him before.

Cat crouched near the edge, forepaws tucked neatly beneath his chest, tail wrapped tight. His eyes tracked the bank with surgical focus. Something small rustled in the undergrowth. A frog, perhaps. Or something foolish enough to believe dusk offered concealment.

“It does rather creep up on you,” Basil said, not looking at Cat. “This place. You expect… I don’t know… banjos, possibly a man named Earl shouting at machinery. Instead, you get this.”

TL;DR Section

AI didn't hit a home run with that meandering excerpt. It missed several important details, a couple of which I will describe here.

First, Basil imports his gin and gets exactly what he wants, Monkey 47, which he pairs with Fever Tree Mediterranean tonic. The guys have an impeccably-stocked bar, so Basil sniffing about his gin didn't work.

Second is a particularly small nit to pick, but it bugged me. Unless it's winter, Cat would never be tucked in like a loaf. He'd be sprawled on the dock. Cats are thermometers and when it's hot they sprawl.

Third, in the following paragraph, Basil comes across as a browbeaten, upper-class Brit who escaped family oppression.

“Here,” Basil went on, “no one expects anything of you. No lineage. No portraits glaring from oak-paneled walls asking why you haven’t died gloriously yet.” He glanced down at Cat. “Rather freeing, wouldn’t you say?”

That was completely backwards. Basil is indeed from royal blood, but he is a true believer. He fully and proudly lives up to the ancient expectations of being a peer.

I noticed those mistakes at first, but didn't change them. I just liked the flow of the thing. Yes, as Tim said, it meandered terribly, but to me, it was like eating a particularly well-made meal. You don't fuss if the thing was preceded by water crackers and a shrimp and crab dip nor do you complain if the dessert is sweet potato pie with bourbon whipped cream. When it's something you love, prolonging it isn't a bad thing.

I love these characters and even when AI gets them wrong in some way, I thoroughly enjoy spending time with them. It's kind of like the way I feel when I reread the Narnia series for the 73rd time. 

That's all I really wanted to share with that excerpt. It made me happy and that seemed as good a reason to post it as any.