Here come the machines

Now this is interesting. The Last Screenwriter is a movie made from a script written by ChatGPT-4. I'd like to tell you more, but knee-jerk hysteria (or so we're told) meant that the planned screening in London was cancelled. Too bad, as the filmmakers explain on their website that it was made as a non-profit experiment.

I'm curious about the use of generative AI in writing, art, and other fields. I suspect it won't lead to mass unemployment but instead will be a useful tool that creatives will collaborate with to improve their work -- much as desktop publishing has led to an explosion in the number of books. Hmm, given the quality of books these days maybe that's not such a great example.

Some people gripe (well, scream) that AI is stealing from existing authors and artists. Mostly that's a misunderstanding of how the models are trained. Yes, they look at millions of images to learn the way a picture is put together. Contrary to the belief of the pitchfork-bearers heading up to the baron's castle, the generative AI models don't record each individual image and reproduce it. It's more like how human artists and writers learn their craft.

For example, when I was a kid I'd often notice that my favourite comic book artists were having their panels "borrowed" by less well-known artists. The character poses you'd see in British comics in the early '70s (strips such as The Steel Claw in Valiant) had appeared in US comic books a few months earlier. But even among those Marvel & DC artists there was cross-pollination. Barry Windsor Smith famously started out drawing Jack Kirby pastiches and later went Pre-Raphaelite. Dan Adkins was famous for lifting poses from other artists. Writers too: H.P. Lovecraft began by imitating the style of Lord Dunsany. Dunsany was influenced by the King James Bible. Robert Bloch started out copying Lovecraft, and so the cycle continued. 

In the comics I made at school I emulated the art styles of Bernie Wrightson and Barry Windsor Smith; when I wrote my early stories I was following patterns picked up from Robert E Howard, Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, August Derleth, and others. This is how we've always learned -- and it's a much more targeted kind of swiping than the generative AI is doing. The AIs don't play favourites, which is why (now that you can no longer specify "in the style of" in the prompts) their art output tends to look like the soulless photorealistic fantasy paintings you see on DeviantArt.

I've talked before about using AI for artwork in gamebooks and RPGs. It's a good fallback for game designers who have no art budget. The snag is, people lose their shit when you so much as mention it. I've hired human artists whenever possible -- most recently Inigo Hartas for my Jewelspider roleplaying game. Of course you get a better result that way, but most independently published books don't even make enough to pay the author's phone bill. The option is often either AI art or no art -- or else public domain art like the William Harvey illustrations I used in the new print edition of Once Upon A Time In Arabia. Nobody was happy with those. (You can get a copy with Russ Nicholson's artwork on DriveThruRPG.) Another option is to use AI to enhance the writer's own sketches, which may be the best way to get the authentic imagery that the writer had in mind.

In any case, I'd like to see The Last Screenwriter because this is the future and we may as well start getting to grips with it. Smashing the looms never works.

A noose of light

I probably don’t have to declare at this stage that I’m kind of an admirer of Russ Nicholson’s artwork. I’ve wanted his illustrations in my books since way back in 1984, when I had to track him down to Papua New Guinea to get him to supply the drawings for Eye of the Dragon.

And everybody knows that as far as the Fabled Lands series is concerned, Russ is “the third author” (it’s like being the Fifth Beatle, only with less hair). His imagination made it real, gave it substance, and that’s not just my and Jamie’s opinion – just look at how the apps drew on his original art.

Likewise Leo Hartas, not just an artist who is brilliant at conveying charm in his quirkily imaginative scenes, but one of my closest friends and, of course, my creative partner on projects like Mirabilis.

As I was lucky enough to get these guys as the illustrators of my Virtual Reality books in the mid-90s, you can bet that I wanted to retain their illustrations in the new incarnation of those books under the Critical IF imprint. And yet, Once Upon A Time In Arabia (the book formerly known as Twist of Fate) does not feature Russ’s great pictures, instead relying for visual embellishment on the more obscure (these days) William Harvey. No, not the blood guy.

I am very conscious that gamebooks are all about the nostalgia. Switching things around is as welcome to most gamebook aficionados as a bacon sarnie to a Salafi. So why the change?

To explain that, first I must ask you to cast your mind back – or, indeed, just click the link – to the announcement that Fabled Lands LLP would be partnering with Osprey Books to bring back Virtual Reality in digital format. Because the original plan to do them in HTML5 was deemed too expensive, we decided to go with EPUB3 format, which we thought would be cheaper. (It wasn’t, but that’s a detail.)

It soon turned out that we wouldn’t be able to have much interior artwork in any EPUB3 versions. As in, no art at all once you were past the prologue. So each book was to have two or three black and white illustrations. These were not by Russ or Leo and I wasn’t involved in commissioning them. No big deal, I thought, as I could still use the original artwork in the print editions. Then it turned out there were to be no print editions after all, only the ebooks.

Dry your tears. For various reasons, the planned partnership was abandoned and the ebooks canned. Still, we had the books all edited and ready to go – and Createspace makes it very easy to publish paperbacks and distribute them via Amazon. So, after quickly striking agreements with Russ and Leo, we were back in business.

Except… These are pictures you don’t want to mess up. Only sharp high-resolution images would do. I finally got the best quality my scanner is capable of by razor-blading copies of the VR books to pieces and scanning at 600 dpi. It worked out fine for Heart of Ice, Necklace of Skulls and Down Among the Dead Men. The snag is that I had no spare copy of Twist of Fate (I hope you’ll forgive me not wanting to mutilate the only one I had left) and it would cost $150 to buy a spare on Amazon. Hence the decision was taken to resort to the illustrations of Mr Harvey, which had the benefit of being (a) specifically drawn for the Arabian Nights and (b) out of copyright for seventy-seven years. Oh, and pretty good. Not Russ or Leo quality, but evocative enough.

As Scheherazade’s beleaguered heroes are fond of saying, God alone is all-powerful. OK then. But I managed three out of four, and I can live with that.