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1 the Road
English & French text
Ross Goodwin est un développeur d'Intelligences Artificielles (IA) parmi les plus réputés. Auprès de Google, il est une figure centrale de la recherche fondamentale en nouvelles technologies. Dans ce contexte, il a créé et entrainé AI Wordcar, un réseau de neurones artificiels qu'il a installé dans une Cadillac aux côtés de nombreux appareils d'enregistrement (son, vidéo, GPS…). Ensemble, ils se sont lancés dans un road trip américain, sur l'itinéraire de Jack Kerouac pour Sur la route, laissant AI Wordcar écrire et décrire toutes ses perceptions numériques dans un long poème en prose. AI Wordcar offre ainsi le premier véritable livre écrit par une IA, qui nous happe dès la première phrase, au moment où le voyage commence : It was seven minutes to ten o'clock in the morning, and it was the only good thing that had happened. Enraciné dans les traditions de la littérature américaine, du journalisme gonzo et de la recherche en Intelligence Artificielle, cet ouvrage impose une réflexion neuve sur la place et l'autorité de l'auteur à l'ère des machines.
Ross Goodwin est un développeur d'Intelligences Artificielles (IA) parmi les plus réputés. Auprès de Google, il est une figure centrale de la recherche fondamentale en nouvelles technologies. Dans ce contexte, il a créé et entrainé AI Wordcar, un réseau de neurones artificiels qu'il a installé dans une Cadillac aux côtés de nombreux appareils d'enregistrement (son, vidéo, GPS…). Ensemble, ils se sont lancés dans un road trip américain, sur l'itinéraire de Jack Kerouac pour Sur la route, laissant AI Wordcar écrire et décrire toutes ses perceptions numériques dans un long poème en prose. AI Wordcar offre ainsi le premier véritable livre écrit par une IA, qui nous happe dès la première phrase, au moment où le voyage commence : It was seven minutes to ten o'clock in the morning, and it was the only good thing that had happened. Enraciné dans les traditions de la littérature américaine, du journalisme gonzo et de la recherche en Intelligence Artificielle, cet ouvrage impose une réflexion neuve sur la place et l'autorité de l'auteur à l'ère des machines.
- GenresArtificial Intelligence
160 pages, Hardcover
First published August 20, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 30, 2019
AI generated text on a roadtrip across the USA, with some intro / setup text at the beginning (in french and english) for context.
Monochromatic dithered images along the trip accompany the main body, which mostly comes across as discontinuous chunks of text; at times rather poetic, though the whole is not more than the sum of its parts, in this case.
"It was nine seventeen in the morning, and the house was heavy" was a strong opening, and there were other phrases I found quite emotive, such as
"The smoke begins to swing, and the sky is warm and sweet"
and
"The bridge was a constant sign of space"
Many sections reused the idea of starting the sentence with the time, or if not that then the item driven past or just the coordinates to 6 decimal places, with frequent repetition not adding anything.
One of the paragraphs that hung together quite cohesively was this mid-story highlight:
"The sky is dark; a distant red willow sweater is snapped to the floor and disappears. The engines threaten to spill and slowly turn the sun. Brown leaves on trees were still in the air and the stars stood out darkly in the sky. The stars were still in the sky."
Monochromatic dithered images along the trip accompany the main body, which mostly comes across as discontinuous chunks of text; at times rather poetic, though the whole is not more than the sum of its parts, in this case.
"It was nine seventeen in the morning, and the house was heavy" was a strong opening, and there were other phrases I found quite emotive, such as
"The smoke begins to swing, and the sky is warm and sweet"
and
"The bridge was a constant sign of space"
Many sections reused the idea of starting the sentence with the time, or if not that then the item driven past or just the coordinates to 6 decimal places, with frequent repetition not adding anything.
One of the paragraphs that hung together quite cohesively was this mid-story highlight:
"The sky is dark; a distant red willow sweater is snapped to the floor and disappears. The engines threaten to spill and slowly turn the sun. Brown leaves on trees were still in the air and the stars stood out darkly in the sky. The stars were still in the sky."
February 14, 2020
"Hallucination is the technical term for the activity of a machine learning system when it generates content." – Ross Goodwin. And that's kind of what 1 the Road feels like.
The Atlantic reviewed this book of "poetry," written by artificial intelligence on a road trip that followed a route Ken Kesey had taken. The opening lines it shared piqued my interest: "It was nine seventeen in the morning, and the house was heavy." It was a phrase itself heavy with meaning, and I wanted more. It reminded me of the spontaneous phrases lurking in the magnetic poetry kit that used to live on my refrigerator. But instead of the lovely words I had to play with, this AI author could draw only on data from a camera outside the car, a microphone inside the car, a clock, and GPS. The end result is wild – sometimes obsessive (fixated on the time) and often bleak (strip mall businesses at every turn), yet occasionally a phrase catches something so well it feels intentional. But of course, all the meaning comes from me since the author is a machine. Fascinating.
5 stars for the novelty and for the questions raised.
The Atlantic reviewed this book of "poetry," written by artificial intelligence on a road trip that followed a route Ken Kesey had taken. The opening lines it shared piqued my interest: "It was nine seventeen in the morning, and the house was heavy." It was a phrase itself heavy with meaning, and I wanted more. It reminded me of the spontaneous phrases lurking in the magnetic poetry kit that used to live on my refrigerator. But instead of the lovely words I had to play with, this AI author could draw only on data from a camera outside the car, a microphone inside the car, a clock, and GPS. The end result is wild – sometimes obsessive (fixated on the time) and often bleak (strip mall businesses at every turn), yet occasionally a phrase catches something so well it feels intentional. But of course, all the meaning comes from me since the author is a machine. Fascinating.
5 stars for the novelty and for the questions raised.
June 7, 2021
Lejos del nivel alcanzado por mi microondas en El Quijote 3: ¡sabrosura! pero un millón de veces mejor que la puta basura de Kerouac.
February 13, 2019
Can AI art? That’s what “writer of writer” Ross Goodwin sets out to answer when he straps a series of sensors, databases, and friends into a car to recreate Kerouac’s New York-to-New Orleans road trip. This book is the product of that trip: an AI’s first go at trying to to interpret the road trip around it in the form of some kind of narrative.
Does it work? Mostly so, depending on your expectation of the outcome. As an experiment, Goodwin and his fellow riders certainly find value in the machine’s ASCII utterances, which are collected here in the book in chronological fashion. This is, after all, an experiment conducted by a couple of millennial hipster machine learning enthusiasts with all those stereotypes entail. And it ends up being an interesting one.
The narrative itself is less storyful and more poetic, however. The AI forms it’s passages from obvious sources of data: GPS coordinates, the Foursquare API, and a clock, which insufferably labels paragraphs minute by minute with time stamps in a writing convention that makes it immediately obvious you’re reading a machine, one that is compelled to relay the hard numbers of its situation in every instance.
It’s the combination of all this data and the choices the AI makes in relating the data that creates incredibly interesting, somewhat existential results. The reader constantly has to ask themselves why they’re reading a particular passage a certain way: was it because the machine just observed a color differentiation from a sunset or was it because of something else? Some of these existential passages provoke a difficult reckoning in what truly constitutes consciousness, in that at times, you feel that you could be reading poetry from a human author.
This observation of the man in god’s machine (or vice versus depending on your point of view or your politics) creates a delightfully interesting debate on the intersection of art and technology. If we compare this work to the works of human authors and find commonality, what actually are we as humans? As AI evolves, is it possible for this stunted work of art to evolve as well, perhaps into something more coherent or narratively captivating? What does that then say about we humans and the authors we enjoy when the machines we build replicate our art? Heady stuff, man.
Goodwin calls this a work of “gonzo work of art”, but I’m not sure I totally agree. That term evokes something different than the emergence you witness while reading this book. He does cite Thompson and Kerouac as primary artistic influences in the conception of this initiative, so I understand the comparison. However I think the result of this experiment - the AI’s work itself - requires new or different words to adequately pass description, and I’m not sure what those are. I appreciate Goodwin and his fellow passenger, Kenrick McDowell, writing introductions to the work to raise questions about the work itself and what it may mean for culture. McDowell, it should be known, represents the Google Art + Culture Initiative that funded Godwin’s experiment. So...what does Google have to gain from this?
There are some heartbreaking passages in this thing that I will return to time and again, existential lines evocative of a David Lynch movie. Overall, however, I am more interested in the debate created about this work, and I look forward to seeing and hearing more discussion about it in the future.
For future readers, I do recommend the book as a possible glimpse into the poetry of the future and a sign of the times, in This, Our Digital Nightmare.
Does it work? Mostly so, depending on your expectation of the outcome. As an experiment, Goodwin and his fellow riders certainly find value in the machine’s ASCII utterances, which are collected here in the book in chronological fashion. This is, after all, an experiment conducted by a couple of millennial hipster machine learning enthusiasts with all those stereotypes entail. And it ends up being an interesting one.
The narrative itself is less storyful and more poetic, however. The AI forms it’s passages from obvious sources of data: GPS coordinates, the Foursquare API, and a clock, which insufferably labels paragraphs minute by minute with time stamps in a writing convention that makes it immediately obvious you’re reading a machine, one that is compelled to relay the hard numbers of its situation in every instance.
It’s the combination of all this data and the choices the AI makes in relating the data that creates incredibly interesting, somewhat existential results. The reader constantly has to ask themselves why they’re reading a particular passage a certain way: was it because the machine just observed a color differentiation from a sunset or was it because of something else? Some of these existential passages provoke a difficult reckoning in what truly constitutes consciousness, in that at times, you feel that you could be reading poetry from a human author.
This observation of the man in god’s machine (or vice versus depending on your point of view or your politics) creates a delightfully interesting debate on the intersection of art and technology. If we compare this work to the works of human authors and find commonality, what actually are we as humans? As AI evolves, is it possible for this stunted work of art to evolve as well, perhaps into something more coherent or narratively captivating? What does that then say about we humans and the authors we enjoy when the machines we build replicate our art? Heady stuff, man.
Goodwin calls this a work of “gonzo work of art”, but I’m not sure I totally agree. That term evokes something different than the emergence you witness while reading this book. He does cite Thompson and Kerouac as primary artistic influences in the conception of this initiative, so I understand the comparison. However I think the result of this experiment - the AI’s work itself - requires new or different words to adequately pass description, and I’m not sure what those are. I appreciate Goodwin and his fellow passenger, Kenrick McDowell, writing introductions to the work to raise questions about the work itself and what it may mean for culture. McDowell, it should be known, represents the Google Art + Culture Initiative that funded Godwin’s experiment. So...what does Google have to gain from this?
There are some heartbreaking passages in this thing that I will return to time and again, existential lines evocative of a David Lynch movie. Overall, however, I am more interested in the debate created about this work, and I look forward to seeing and hearing more discussion about it in the future.
For future readers, I do recommend the book as a possible glimpse into the poetry of the future and a sign of the times, in This, Our Digital Nightmare.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews