motivation and method
the motivation and method for this project is, in part, that i love motivations and methods. the ideation process is the fun part of writing, but the actual writing part isn't always a blast. this is where ai comes in handy: i can feed gpt-3 an idea and it can write about the idea for me. i develop the method and then the robot does the work. it's truly a dream come true.
in retrospect, i realized that my method-focused book, it's not abstraction it's literally just lying, spent a lot of time trying to navigate and understand the way thought gets sickened in isolation—the way it becomes self-referential and recursive. this idea is explicitly addressed in this section, which was the result of blending some internal and external struggles i was having at the time:
what if you didn’t leave the city block that you lived on for a month and you didn’t have a job and you only ever walked to the store and then went back to your apartment and you kept getting the same ingredients at the store and you had your own garden where you always grew the same things because you liked them and you knew how to grow them well and you always got spices at the store and you made the same stew every day and you added in the vegetables from your garden and the spices from the store and you had it every day and you were alone and the flavors got bland and you kept adding more of the same ingredients and you used to go have dinner somewhere else and you used to have friends over and you used to have to serve up dishes that they liked and you used to have to care about what they wanted but you don’t have to do that anymore and oh my god where is the flavor you have to add something so you add a bunch of salt and it keeps happening and you keep eating the same thing and you keep making it more flavorful and the stew isn’t good for you and it starts to make you feel sick but it happens kind of slowly so you don’t notice and you just get used to being a little bit sickly and then the month that you were alone is over and you go out into the world and you go out to a restaurant and they give you some food and you don’t like it because it’s not what you’re used to and your friend comes over and they try your stew and they think it’s disgusting because you’ve put too much flavor and too much salt and they tell you it’s gross and you could either conclude that the stew is maybe a little gross to them or maybe they’re just wrong and ungrateful and maybe the food at the restaurant was normal and you’re the one with the weird palate or maybe the restaurant is wrong and it doesn’t make sense that the food is universally gross because it’s a restaurant and lots of people go there and they seem to enjoy it and you kind of know that but you don’t like it so you think to yourself maybe staying home was better and maybe my stew is better and maybe i just have good taste and you get a little sicker and you get a little sicker and the stew has so much salt in it and you never eat anywhere else and you’re so sick and you don’t even know it because you’re used to it and the stew tastes so good
i also identified and explored an analog to intellectual or academic specialization, where one often continuously abandons outside details, dwelling on increasingly esoteric minutia. without external involvement, thoughts become increasingly detached. in some cases, this can be beneficial: certainly scientific and technological advancement is often predicated on extreme specialization. the results can go either way.
emulating this isolated and self-referential process using gpt-3 is rather simple:
- feed gpt-3 an initial text
- read the multiple outputs of gpt and select one to add
- feed the entire text into gpt-3 again
the question that remains is what initial text to base the project on. you're reading the initial text right now. not only does the method define the process by which the content is made, but the motivation and methods section also defines the content itself.
output:
with this story, i intentionally selected themes and elements that i knew would later flare up in my output and exaggerated them. the abject nature of the stew and the aggressive addition of salt were both exaggerated, but both elements, particularly the stew, were inspired by real life.
making the stew:
balancing humor, anecdote, and plot
finding the right balance of story, humor, and plot can prove quite difficult. story is the method by which discussion is furthered. humor and anecdote are the catalysts of reflection. how to effect each varied greatly in this section:
it was a hot day and you had the stew in the oven and a lot of it was evaporating and lost and you thought it was very good but maybe a tad too salty, but you weren’t sure and you had a bunch of salt left so you just kept adding salt because you figured if it’s just a little too salty, adding more salt makes it less salty, and you added salt for a while and you put in a bunch of some ingredient that seemed salty, and, in the end, the stew was very salty and you had to go outside because you had to pee and when you went outside it was really cold and you had to pee a lot and it was just a bad time to be outside and then you went inside and then it was hot and you didn’t want to eat the stew because it was very salty, so you didn’t, and you kept adding salt to your food because you didn’t want to remember that it was very salty
i don't want to over-emphasize my food-related issues. despite frequent consumption issues, i eat a lot. maybe too much. while it's common to hear about other artists compulsively eating art, i know no musician who eats his music as much as i do. i had an art show in 2015 where the visuals and the music were both actually food. the music has a past of performance art components, especially since i'm a visual artist too. there's food, and then there's food.
using anecdote and humor saves the section from being too explicit. many of the elements of the stew were combined with real world incidents. the stew also contains distressing imagery. how can you need salty and feel sick? the answer is nuanced.
in part, this real-life flavor was an attempt to balance this section with the slew of narrative-based pieces that came before. hmmmmmmm...
the story:
intellectual specialization
we've established that the methods used in the pieces inform and even create the content. obviously, there are situations where we must slip out of this closed process, but, on the other hand, the content can continue to define the process itself.
here, the repetitious nature of the process is the content of the section. this section was designed to demonstrate a process that was very difficult to remain involved in. sure, it was interesting at the beginning - exploring the vastness of private discovery and the infinite possibilities of thought. but it is interesting to keep doing it over and over? when the results are always the same? it starts to feel meaningless after a while.
is the poem a process that should only be defined by the content?
output:
discovery
this is the final section, so it should be the biggest and best, right? this is where you get all these strange stories that pack a huge punch - all of them selected from the massive, expansive, epic poem of ultra-specialization. but here, we have a few different stories...but they're mostly similar. they're all some sort of raw cannibalism. like, there's a lot of them, alright?
it may not have the most immediate impact physically, but it has a really peculiar effect on an individual's psyche. it urges you to think about the consequences of being alone so much: learning to assimilate the self, finding meaning in repetition, needing food when you're alone....
this is where gpt-3 gets to the heart of the issue: intellectual specialization is an extreme and, perhaps, sophisticated process. while necessary and even essential to many things, it can have a negative effect on the individual involved and, at times, the environment.
take this passage, for example:
after a while, you start to lose your taste for the stew, so you leave the stew in a bowl in the closet for a year, and you ask your friends if they’d like some stew and they agree because they are all very hungry and you go in the closet and you get the bowl and you walk over to them but they are, in fact, wolves and they eat you.
by commenting on individual relationships, the narrative becomes re-contextualized as a stew of character. the action of asking if they'd like some stew is essentially the same as asking if they want to mix. the person-eating-dinner is a social interaction. the reader is an outlier who doesn't understand the conversation and is thus deemed invalid.
or, in a different narrative:
you eat the stew and you get sick and you get sicker and you get sicker and you never eat anywhere else and you eat the stew so much that it’s all you will ever eat and eventually you die
while these stories seem bleak, they serve a greater purpose: they humanize this outlandish operation with something relatable. in fact, the result is something like putting yourself in this overspecialized situation. how would you feel? can you relate? how and why does this type of behavior begin to swallow itself?
the repeated nature and isolation can become overbearing and, eventually, suffocating. isolating yourself a bit too much hurts a little and it hurts a lot...but maybe, for some people, it builds something stronger? maybe the process of isolation is necessary before learning alienation?
connecting to the reader, and a brief mention of something else
the section ends with a brief discussion of reader engagement. basically, this is something that i personally wish could have been stronger. i have a very demented voice, and i'm not sure if that's always appreciated. i thought about this at length before publishing this project. i tried to figure out how i could subtly discuss this in the text. i briefly mention it a few times within the body of the text. is it enough? i doubt it.
but that's not what you're supposed to do. that's my problem, not yours. but i feel it's worth mentioning.
the methods, the content, the reader....all of these drove this project. while this project was ideal by design, it turns out that real life is messier than i expected.
if someone reads this work and gets inspired to become an intellectual specialist, that's great because they're going to do something amazing. i've been deeply inspired by people who specialize themselves in some way. they have a deeper understanding of the world around them and this is how they can contribute.
but if they read this work and realize that they're freaking weird, or that they're becoming weird...and that they should stop. then they will surely turn their life towards something wonderful - that, too.
gpt-3 is not a moral tale or even a cautionary tale. it's a weird story about someone who specializes.
connect with me on twitter: @quasimatt