Tilted Sands

This project is unfinished and will remain that way. There are bugs. Not all endings are implemented. The ending tracker doesn't work. Images are broken. Nothing will be fixed. I am releasing what's here as is.

Please read below if you want to know why.

Tilted Sands is a project I started back when AI Dungeon first came out--the very early version you had to run in a Google colabs notebook. Sometime in late 2018, I think? I was a contributor at Botnik Studios at the time and I was delighted by AI Dungeon, but I knew it would never be a truly satisfying choose your own adventure generator on its own. I would argue that the modern AI Dungeon 2 and NovelAI don't fully function as such even now. That's not how AI works. It has to be guided heavily, the product has to be sculpted by human hands. 

Anyway,  it inspired me to use Transformer--a GPT2 predictive text writing tool--to craft a more coherent and polished but still silly and definitely AI-flavored CYOA experience. It was an ambitious project, but I was experienced with writing what I like to call "cyborg" pieces--meaning the finished product is, in a way, made by both an AI/algorithm/other bot AND a human writer. Something strange and wonderful that could not have been made by the bot alone, nor by the human writer alone. Algorithms can surprise us and trigger our creative human minds to move in directions we never would've thought to go in otherwise. To me, that's what actual AI art is: a human engaging in a creative activity like writing in a way that also includes utilizing an algorithm of some sort. The results are always fascinating, strangely insightful, and sometimes beautiful.

I worked on Tilted Sands off-and-on for a couple years, and then the entire AI landscape changed practically overnight with DALL-E and ChatGPT. And I soon realized that I cannot continue working on this project. Mainstream, corporate AI is disgustingly unethical and I don't want the predictive text writing I used to enjoy so much to be associated with "AI art". It's not. Before DALL-E and ChatGPT, there were artists and writers who made art by utilizing algorithms, neural networks, etc. Some things were perhaps in an ethical or legal grey area, but people actually did care about that. I remember discussing "would it be ethical to scrape [x]?" with other writers, and sharing databases of things like commercial advertising scripts and public domain content. I liked using mismatched databases to write things, like a corpus of tech product reviews that I used to write a song. The line between transformative art and fair use vs theft was constantly on all of our minds, because we were artists ourselves.

All of the artists and writers I knew in those days who made "cyborg art" have stopped by now. Including me.

But I poured a lot of love and thought and energy into this silly little project, and the thought of leaving it to rot on my hard drive hurt too much. It's not done, but there's a lot there--over 14,000 words, multiple endings and game over scenarios. I had so much fun with it and I wanted to complete it, but I can't. I don't want it to be associated in any way with the current "AI art" scene. It's not.

Please consider this my love letter to what technology-augmented art used to be, and what AI art could have been.

I know I'm not the only one mourning this brief but intense period from about 2014-2019 in which human creativity and developing AI technology combined organically to create an array of beautiful, stupid, silly, terrible, wonderful works of art. If you're also feeling sad and nostalgic about it, I hope you find this silly game enjoyable even in its unfinished state.

In conclusion:

Fuck capitalism, fuck what is currently called AI art, fuck ChatGPT, fuck every company taking advantage of artists and writers and other creative types by using AI.