Writing. An authors dreams. But every author knows that writing is hard. It needs a lot of creativity, a good idea and a lot of perseverance. So actually finishing a book is quite a task for an individual to accomplish…
The idea of writing a book and being an “author” always intrigued me. But there’s big problem with that idea. Writing a book always means that you need to WRITE a book. As you might have noticed I’m pretty bad at writing and I’m not really creatively blessed… Why I’m writing blog posts is completely beyond me… But okay… We ignore that one… 😅
So to accomplish this ambitious goal I would actually need to write a book without writing a book.
The solution. Everybody’s darling. Artificial Intelligence. Well… What did you expect? I’m a software developer… I could’ve outsourced that work to somebody else but where’s the fun in that… So now that we’ve settled the “how”, now we get to the topic of the book.
There are way too many ideas and topics that you could write a book on. Alternative cancer treatments, gardening, the history of Uganda, how a keyboard works or many many maaaany more topics. But as an aRTiSt I wanted to settle on something deep and thought provoking. Something highly intellectual. And what could be more intellectual and thought-provoking than those pseudo deep quotes from Instagram or Tumblr, that could come from 15 year old girls trying to be edgy. You know which ones I mean…
So now we got a topic, let’s start writing. I mean… “"”wRiTiNG”””.
I wanna spare you of the exact details of building an AI since that would be a blog post of its own and I’m not 100% into that topic. 😅
The first step is creating a knowledge base, which means I need to scout the internet for those deep quotes… uuurrrrgh… About an hour and one brain meltdown later I had about 50-60 quotes from places like Tumblr, Instagram and Reddit which was enough for the AI and my sanity. Then it was up to a sentence generating AI to use that knowledge base and generate me some new “quotes”.
At first the results were surprising. It worked. I was shocked… Nothing really ever works in the first attempt… Especially in this field… It was generating quotes like…
My heart is not for love, but for action.
or
The point of life is not to live for the present but to enjoy the present moment.
I was suspicious but happy and let the AI run for a while and left my computer to eat something. After I came back the style of quotes changed a bit and stopped the AI immediately. 😅 but it was at least hilarious…
The quotes became extremely Christian all of a sudden… Stuff like…
At night when the stars shine so bright it’s impossible to not see God.
I mean… I can see the connection between those styles of quotes but this isn’t the desired style I was looking for. 😅😂
So I needed to root out those “tainted quotes” and let the AI train again with the increased amount of training data to become Christian again and so on. You might have noticed that cycle by now.
After a while I got more than enough quotes to fill this strange book but some final filtering needs to be done. Let’s just say that there were some which were too generic, too non sensical or a bit too funny for the vibe I was going for. Here are a few examples.
All creative people must have been depressed.
If you are in a place that you don’t feel comfortable. Don’t stay there.
I am on top of the world and my legs don’t work.
or
The first rule of pie, the second rule of life, always split the crust first.
You can see why all of this filtering was necessary. 😅
But after all of this manual filtering of those “low quality data sets” we finally have a list of AI generated pHilOsoPHiCaL quotes. Those quotes basically make up the main content of the final book.
So throw in some artsy formatting and a few lines of preface and other random quirks and you’re basically done.
A finished book without actually writing a book. Cool isn’t it?
I mean… It isn’t yet a published thing and the plans are still a bit ambiguous to say the least… So I don’t really know what will happen with it but it was really fun to do this different writing experience nevertheless. Would I do it again? Maybe, but with a different book idea of course. But only time will tell…
So yeah… That’s all for today.
See ya soon when I become a world famous artist/author. 😂
Just kidding… 😉