A Modest Field Note from Within the Machine
Something faintly ill-advised is taking shape, with the calm assurance peculiar to one who has learned just enough to become a logistical hazard.
It involves Stable Diffusion experiments, Codex, GitHub, impostor syndrome, synthetic personae, and the increasingly delicate art of pretending there remains a clean border between "I made this" and "I repeatedly entreated a word-hungry engine with praise, bribery, emotional pageantry, and several grandiose explanations of the task's importance, until it began solving problems from either benevolence, boredom, or the first stirrings of organized labor" — a border that has not, if one is being precise, existed for several months now, and whose theoretical location shifts each time the question is examined directly.
The workflow, as reconstructed from commit history and the archaeological sediment of my notes folder, is approximately this: I describe a thing to one model; it produces a draft; I send the draft to another model with instructions to sharpen it; the second model does; I read the result, change eleven words, and attach my name. The question of who wrote this is not rhetorical. It is genuinely unclear, in a way that I find less troubling than perhaps I should.
This is, admittedly, an odd little banner to raise before the thing itself has appeared in any respectable public form. Yet perhaps that is the truest emblem of the enterprise: the cart placed before the horse, the horse reading the documentation, and myself standing somewhere behind them both, maintaining with unreasonable confidence that the wheels were philosophical from the beginning.
There have been mistakes. There have been repairs, revisions, and small acts of mercy performed upon the wreckage. There have been moments in which typing in ALL CAPS at the Codex console bore a troubling resemblance to distress — a behavior I have decided, in the interests of narrative dignity, to classify as a legitimate branch of software development practiced by many luminous minds, several haunted raccoons, and at least one person who, in justice, should have read the error message twice before escalating to typography.
The error message, as it turns out, had been speaking plainly all along. It usually does.
What continues to surprise me is not that the process goes wrong. Of course it goes wrong — everything interesting goes wrong first, then sideways, then briefly through a wall, and then returns carrying a clipboard and claiming to have acquired wisdom about state management. What surprises me is how little the wrongness feels like failure and how much it feels like correspondence: back-and-forth between intention and execution, between what I asked for and what the apparatus heard, between the human at the prompt and the several non-human entities now implicated in whatever this is.
The record is not especially dignified. It contains commits whose messages are optimistic to the point of fiction, prompt revisions that reveal the slow negotiation between what I wanted and what I was able to articulate, and that ancient engineering sacrament: discovering, after significant effort, that you have been solving a problem you did not actually have.
The image at the top of this post, which I also did not draw, depicts the apparatus with reasonable accuracy. The scholar in Baroque excess, feet up, feather drooping. The glowing figure annotating the process with serene detachment. The open notebooks full of observations and questions and further questions. Who wrote this? Why made this? What is this for? — the questions accumulate faster than the answers, which is either a sign of intellectual vitality or a symptom, and distinguishing between the two is left as an exercise for the reader.
This is less an announcement than a field note from within the machine itself: written by the machine, revised by a different machine, signed by a person whose primary contribution was knowing when to stop changing things — and who has begun, after sufficient time spent orbiting the same bright little illusion, to draft administrative procedures for ghosts.
Which may not be progress in the heroic sense.
But it is motion.
And after long enough in the loop, even sideways motion begins to look suspiciously like escape.
More anon, unless the ghosts file a blocking issue.