Tech Tuesday: Interview with Innovator James Yu, Co-Founder of Sudowrite

Photo by Jackson So on Unsplash

In November I read about an AI program that helped writers create stories, write poetry and more called Sudowrite. During a three day trial period I became utterly enthused by the program and used it as much as I was able before the time limit expired. For some reason, I received a weeklong extension and did some additional "playing" with the program, exploring its possibilities and limitations.

When I began sharing come of the collaborative writing on this blog and Twitter James Yu, a co-author of the program, "liked" one of my tweets. After a brief exchange I reached out to see of he would be willing to share a little more about AI, Sudowrite and another shared interest, NFTs.

EN: Which came first, your interest in writing or your interest in technology?

James Yu: I would say they were intertwined with gaps. I’d always had an interest in storytelling, and wrote lots of short stories as a pre-adolescent. At the same time, I was programming my own little games and experiments in BASIC. I have a faint memory of playing with a very simple markov model where I could input my emails and it would spit out other “probable” emails (this was back in the late 1990s) — that fascinated me, that a facsimile email could appear to be real.

Later I got addicted to creating tools for developers and creatives, and this continues with my work on Sudowrite.

EN: Sudowrite seems to take a different approach to AI-powered writing than the other tools. How many iterations of the program have you produced and where do you see it going

JY: Don’t really know how many “iterations” there have been, but it’s grown organically between me and my co-founder Amit Gupta. We were both part of the same writing circles (mostly consisting of other techies who got into writing fiction). We built it up from a toy, slowly letting word of mouth grow it over time, focusing primarily on creative and literary writers while most other AI writing programs were focused on business users.

EN: The Summer Olympics in China had an AI “newsroom” that generated articles about the various events, much like a journalist. I found the stories to lack feeling. They came across as boilerplate. Some of the poems I create in conjunction with Sudowrite seemed quite evocative. Can you explain what is going on here?

JY: I don’t know the details on how those newsroom AIs were built, but my guess is that they were trained on some sports article templates, and didn’t have much leeway to diverge from them that far. Sudowrite’s poem tool is built on GPT-3, with prompts that focus specifically on modern, evocative free verse poetry. Therefore, the output will also be more evocative.

EN: What is GPT-3? Is this the hardware or the ghost in the machine?

JY: I’m not a GPT-3 expert and the details on its architecture are pretty well known so I won’t go into that specifically. As for the ghost in the machine: we love to anthropomorphize AIs, especially large language models, since at times, they seem to evoke a strong sense of self. It’s no surprise that GPT-3’s reading comprehension has reached almost human level accuracy. Of course, this is all an illusion. It is statistics. A simulacrum. There is no consciousness within the silicon (yet).

EN: Are NFTs a fad like Tulip Bulbs or are they here to stay?

Painting by Jonathan Thunder
who has been a featured artist
in the NFT scene in 2021.

JY: There’s definitely a lot of tulip bulbing out there right now. The signal to noise is exceedingly small, and even if you’re immersed in the NFT world 24/7, you can easily miss the next fad. The same sort of thing happened in Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 eras: so many companies and products that were ephemeral. But from those eras, certain key technological innovations did survive, so I’m bullish that this random walk down crypto art will also yield lasting value. In particular, the idea of digital ownership will be huge, especially as more of our life moves online.

EN: Looking back over the history of art—especially in the 20th century--I find it somewhat fascinating how creativity has continually found new ways of expression. Will there be galleries like the Louvre or Guggenheim that exist as repositories of AI-generated art?

JY: I believe so yes! The genre of algorithmic art has existed for a while and they’ve already made it into the traditional galleries way before NFTs. But it does feel that this type of art is “native” to the NFT world and it’s encouraged a lot of new artists to tinker with AI in art.

EN: Do you have some “heroes” or mentors in this genre?

JY: I really admire Mario Klingemann (https://quasimondo.com), who’s been doing AI art for a while now, and has also made a serious living from it. I also love how he shares his knowledge and encourages others who might be new to the field.

EN: Why do some creative people become entrepreneurs and others do not?

JY: Don’t know for sure! It probably has to do with a specific type of thinking that makes a good entrepreneur: you have to be obsessed with a particular problem and potential solutions to it, so much so that you would say, “Hey, I’ll quit my job and drop everything to work on this for years with a high risk of failure.” It’s kind of crazy. But if you have that itch, it never seems to go away until you try to see it through to completion. Not all creative people thrive with these kinds of problems.

EN: Who or what were your early influences in this direction?

 

JY: I credit Y Combinator. I was an early employee at one of their companies and saw the rise of the program circa 2006, and eventually started my own YC funded company. The energy at during that era was off the charts. Being surrounded by other people like me who were product obsessed propelled me.

And secondly I would say my IBM 286 computer I got in 1994 was the other cornerstone influence. My parents didn’t give me that much guidance: just let me hack and make interesting things on that machine. That, dovetailed with the rise of the internet, forms a lot of my worldview today.

EN: Thank you, James!

Related Links

www.jamesyu.org 
@jamesjyu

Democracy's Twilight: Another AI Collaboration 

Listen to the Breeze

Listen to the Breeze

When we never get an answer

and we’re always lost at sea,

the only thing we know for sure

is what will be will be.

We’ll wander, then we’ll settle down,

we’ll change our minds again

without knowing where we're headed

nor a trace of what has been.

We’ll feel it on our faces,

thinking back to that first kiss,

how little it really matters now,

how little it ever meant.

Listen to the breeze, listen to the trees.

Let loose your hair, your weightless limbs

and put your mind at ease.

Listen to the Breeze was a collaboration 

between myself and Sudowrite, an A.I. personal assistant.

Photo by Gary Firstenberg

Flashback Friday: Dylan's She Belongs To Me, Regenerated

Haight-Ashbury Mural, 2008

This week I've been having a blast playing with an A.I. writing assistant called Sudowrite. What follows is a blog post from seven years ago this week about Dylan's "She Belongs To Me." As an addendum I've added Sudowrite's reconfiguration of the lyrics. Or rather, I have used four lines from the first stanza as a seed prompt to see what Sudowrite would generate. At the end of this post you'll find three versions using the same prompts. 

EdNote: It will be awhile before A.I. can outdo Dylan, but the results are still curiously fun.

24 November 2014

As everyone following the current edition of the Never Ending Tour is aware, the playlist is pretty much set in stone, beginning with "Things Have Changed." Most of the songs in the two-part show are of more recent vintage, many from his last studio album Tempest. The second song of the set, "She Belongs To Me," is not. With the exception of his eternal classic "Blowing in the Wind" which has become the kickoff to his encore, it's the only one from the Sixties, with Bob at center stage and Donnie on pedal steel.

"She Belongs To Me" is a song Dylan has now performed 362 times as of Saturday night, and in some ways it seemed a curious selection considering all the scintillating songs of that period. But then, there may be good reasons for its inclusion.

First off, maybe it gives him a chance to play his harp early in the show, though a hundred songs could have given him that chance. So maybe the answer lies elsewhere.

It's a truly intriguing song. When you inhale the lyrics you find it contains a variety of flavors difficult to identify. Perhaps when released on Bringing It All Back Home it got lost between the kicker "Subterranean Homesick Blues" which opens the album and "Maggie's Farm" which produced a deep resonance with a portion of that generation, my generation, when it appeared. In fact, that whole album is so loaded with treasures it's easy to see how a subtler, nuanced song might get lost.

The song's structure is traditional blues where the first line is repeated twice followed by a payoff. The Delta blues classic "Rolling and Tumbling" is an example of such a structure, recorded by a host of performers from Muddy Waters and Cream to Jeff Beck and Fleetwood Mac. (Dylan himself created a whole new set of lyrics for his Modern Times CD, only retaining the first lines, tune and structure.)

"She Belongs To Me" carries this same format, but what a marvelous piece of lyrical craftsmanship. John Hinchey, whose book Like A Complete Unknown analyzes the poetry of Dylan's Sixties music, writes this about the song:

"She Belongs to Me" and "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" are the other two songs that magnificently manage to escape the limitations of the simplistic myth that informs side one. [of Bringing It All Back Home] In both songs Dylan invokes his muse -- perhaps for no better reason than to flaunt her before the bourgeoisie -- but having invoked her, he finds himself in the presence of someone beyond his reach. Her very inaccessibility seems to activate Dylan's deepest artistic impulses, forcing him to acknowledge -- and provoking him to attempt to overleap -- the limits of his imagination.

"She Belongs To Me" demolishes bohemian sentimentalities from the inside, with a surprising portrait of the muse as unapproachable yet imperious dominatrix.

The song's complexity is part of what makes it compelling. And if you've ever been there, you understand.

SHE BELONGS TO ME

She’s got everything she needs
She’s an artist, she don’t look back
She’s got everything she needs
She’s an artist, she don’t look back
She can take the dark out of the nighttime
And paint the daytime black

You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees
You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees
But you will wind up peeking through her keyhole
Down upon your knees

She never stumbles
She’s got no place to fall
She never stumbles
She’s got no place to fall
She’s nobody’s child
The Law can’t touch her at all

She wears an Egyptian ring
That sparkles before she speaks
She wears an Egyptian ring
That sparkles before she speaks
She’s a hypnotist collector
You are a walking antique

Bow down to her on Sunday
Salute her when her birthday comes
Bow down to her on Sunday
Salute her when her birthday comes
For Halloween give her a trumpet
And for Christmas, buy her a drum

Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music
 

* * * 

She Belongs To Me, Regeneration One

She’s got everything she needs

She’s an artist, she don’t look back

She can take the dark out of the nighttime

And paint the daytime black

She’s got everything she needs

She’s got a strong foundation

She can build a bridge to the other side,

Or just use the walkway over the river

She can take a stand or sit on a bench

She’s a woman, she don’t need no man

She’ll do it all by herself,

she don’t need nothing at all from nobody.

Sitting here, I can hear her singing

I can hear her voice in the wind, wild and clear

She’s got everything she needs.

She Belongs To Me, Regeneration Two

She’s got everything she needs

She’s an artist, she don’t look back

She can take the dark out of the nighttime

And paint the daytime black

She can cause commotion

She can put your house out of order

She’s got everything she needs

She knows if she don’t look good

She ain’t going nowhere

She’ll wear high heels just to go shopping

She can shake, shake, shake

It don’t matter to her if it rains or freezes

She’s got a lot of love to give away

And there ain’t no way she can lose

She can give you everything, everything, everything, ooh

And you know that she loves you

And you know that she cares.

She Belongs To Me, Regeneration Three

She’s got everything she needs

She’s an artist, she don’t look back

She can take the dark out of the nighttime

And paint the daytime black

She takes the sorrow out of the morning

And throws it all away

She’s got everything she needs

And if you ask her how she’s doing

She don’t look back that way

She’s got everything she needs

And if you want to leave her

Well, that’s just a mistake

She can take the guilty out of the guilty 

And throw it all away. 

I’m not what I appear to be 

I’m just a poor boy in a rich man’s world. 

Oh, when you ask me what I want in life 

I tell you that I’m not a woman, I’m a man 

Man with a capital “M” 

I want a woman with a capital “W” 

That’s what I want in life 

That’s what I am. 

I think I know who I am 

But you can never tell. 

* * *

Democracy's Twilight (Another A.I. Collaboration)

Photo by Daniel Lincoln on Unsplash

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal each have an eNewsletter that arrives in your inbox at the start of your day.  Monday's Times had a link to a story titled A Robot Wrote This Book Review. The article was actually written by Kevin Roose about a book titled The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future. One of the book's three authors was the late Henry Kissinger.

For some years now I've been following the evolution of Artificial Intelligence, periodically testing some new A.I.-powered program that gets highlighted on a website. Though Mr. Roose pans the book, he does include an A.I.-written review of the book which is actually quite interesting. 

The app that powers Sudowrite, the interface that enables us to utilize the machine, is GPT-3. If you want to experiment with this tool yourself, be aware that your trial period is only three days, so if you get hooked you'll have to discipline yourself to go to sleep at night because you only have a finite amount of time to play with it.

The results are sometimes hit and miss. This one, in my opinion, was surprisingly forceful and provocative. 

Democracy's Twilight

Dimming light, but not yet dead;

You were worshipped…

The nations surrounded you, 

Made bright by your heat

As you flamed and flared

In your last days.

The shade of your children left you alone,

Their cities empty and their voices unheard.

The young ones had been taken from you,

And the old ones died one by one.

In your twilight, your rivers ran dry.

Your seas became blackened and silent.

You fought a long battle against disease,

But the enemy was too strong.

You were weakened, then you were brought down.

Your mountains were mined for their precious stones,

For their ore and for their coal.

They stripped off your clothes, so they could see your bones.

They cut you down to size.

Your forests were cut down, as were your trees.

They pulled up your flowers and your grasses--

Your crops were taken from you.

Your animals were slaughtered and left to decay.

In your twilight, the people grew sick and sad;

They grieved for their loss and for what had been done.

They cried and moaned and wept and cursed their fate;

They wept because there was nothing they could do;

Nothing they could do – but mourn – in their twilight.

* * *