Is there a there there?

Frameboy is a very clever and appealing demo from World Labs, pur­veyor of 3D “world models”. Good use of skeumorphism — it’s basi­cally impos­sible not to pop at least one “cart” into the little console.

Any­time I wander around one of these on-demand spaces — Google Deep­Mind has its own offering—I am struck by the daz­zling fidelity … and total lack of interest. Within moments, my atten­tion “slides away”, because on some level — possibly animal — I understand there’s nothing impor­tant to look at. Every detail is only and exactly “what you’d expect” from the given envi­ron­mental trope.

It makes me think of a few things. For starters, Max Kreminski’s great paper, The Dearth of the Author:

[ … ] a con­di­tion that arises when AI-based cre­ativity sup­port tools for writing allow users to pro­duce large amounts of text without making a com­men­su­rate number of cre­ative decisions, resulting in output that is sparse in expres­sive intent.

Visu­ally rich but “sparse in expres­sive intent” is exactly how I’d describe the World Labs environments.

It makes me think also of dreams — the way the set­ting of a dream often just rep­re­sents the gestalt, the core vibe, of a real place. You “know” you’re back in high school, but if, upon waking, you had to sketch the scene, there wouldn’t really be any­thing to draw. The most accu­rate depic­tion might simply be the words: “HIGH SCHOOL?!”

Of course, AI almost always makes me think of dreams.

I’m cer­tain there will be ways to pack these on-demand worlds with more cre­ative decisions; one imag­ines the artist of the future wan­dering a World Labs scene under construction, saying, “No, change this lamp. Delete that wall. Let’s put some evoca­tive items on the fridge.” In his latest novel, Ken Liu imag­ines a new medium: vivid shared dreams authored and guided by an “oneirofex” of this kind. This feels totally plau­sible to me, eventually — but we’ve got a long way to go yet.