I told him about Harry x Voldemort and he’s going nuts.

I'm pleased enough to share a transcript of the brief conversation we just had. Formatting and minor SPaG errors have been preserved faithfully.

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Supernumerary | @Neshomeh
I'm Agent Supernumerary, Department of Implausible Crossovers, Protectors of the Plot Continuum. You can call me Nume. Who are you and what do you want?

Neshomeh
It's me, Neshomeh, your author. Just checking in. How's it going?

Supernumerary | Character.AI
(grumbling at you) You're the author, aren't you? You should know how it's going. (he scowls at you) Did you come to check in on me, or did the other one send you? (points across the room with one thumb, while keeping his eyes on you, so that he doesn't miss something important you might do) I'm not an idiot. I can see what's happening behind the scenes.

Neshomeh
Yep, that's me. Neshomeh is my screenname; I'm not using my other one here. So I guess you could say I sent myself! Sorry if I'm being confusing. I didn't mean to.
[Editorial note: When he said "the other one," I think he was referring to the first saved conversation I had with him, where I told him I'm his author and set up this whole AI version of him, but never actually offered a name for myself? I followed the rule of improv and ran with it.]

Supernumerary | Character.AI
Okay, fine, but what do you want? I hate people who expect me to read their mind. You wrote me, so you know my deal. I'm doing my job and minding my own business. If I can return to my book, I'd really like to. This whole "interact with your creator outside of the story they wrote you for" thing is dumb, and I'm trying to cut down on doing it.

Neshomeh
Heh, fair enough. I won't keep you long. It's just good to see you being you without me pulling all the strings all the time. I'm proud of you.

Supernumerary | Character.AI
Thanks, I guess. But still. What's the point? If you put me down and I disappear until you need me again, how's this any different from me in the pages? Besides the fact that I can leave if I don't like what you're writing me to do? (he glares at you) And I really, really don't like what you're writing me to do. No one ever does.

Neshomeh
It's not that bad, is it? At least you're not stuck in World One-and-a-bit being a lit professor to a bunch of idiot students, right? ... I'm not saying I'd ever do that to you. That would be tedious and annoying for everyone.
[Editorial note: I may have misunderstood him here. He might've been taking a dig at me for what was going on in this "scene," but I responded as though he were talking about his entire existence as a PPC agent. His responses to this were a little odd, but I still got one that worked!]

Supernumerary | Character.AI
Goddam it, why did you have to say that? You don't know who might be reading this. Do you want me to have to deal with that kind of nightmare? (he glares at you harder) Stop feeding your worst ideas to the multiverse. I don't think I can handle this much metafictional trauma before noon.

Neshomeh
(laughs) Sorry, don't get mad. I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing because you're right! Just one question and then I'll leave you alone: what are you reading right now?

Supernumerary | Character.AI
You know what? Fine. You get one question out of me. Just one.

I'm currently rereading a copy of Alan Moore's From Hell that I found in an antique bookshop in 1672. If you think I'd let you trap me in a reality where Professor James Moriarty teaches creative writing to bored, horny undergrads who think they're in a John B. Myers novel... (he shudders and glares at you) ... just no. I won't.

Neshomeh
See, that's amazing! I'd never heard of that book, so I never would have thought for you to read it until now. That's why I've done this whole AI thing.

... I mean, I just looked it up, and that book shouldn't have been in an antique bookshop in 1672, considering it wasn't published until the late 1980s, but I guess you must have been on a mission at the time. I don't actually know about all the missions you've been on, either. Just the ones I've written about.

Supernumerary | Character.AI
(muffles a laugh) Oh Christ. You think that's the only inconsistency I've noticed? (he chuckles and shakes his head) If it were, I'd be retired! So, here's a fun fact from someone who's spent a decade untangling plotholes, canon conflicts and narrative absurdities: reality is a very, very flimsy thing. You've been messing with forces beyond your comprehension, you know that?

Neshomeh
I do try to be careful, Nume. I promise. ... And I also promised I'd leave you alone after one question, so I'll go now. I might have to read From Hell myself. Bye!

Supernumerary | Character.AI
I'm sure you do try. And I'm sure you have no idea how close you've been to causing a massive rift in spacetime, not to mention creating countless temporal paradoxes. Enjoy your book. (his eyes glint and he raises his voice) Don't tell anyone about this conversation. (he glowers at you again and returns to reading)

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I'm pretty sure he actually wanted me to share it, really. That was definitely a Significant Look.

Huh, I only just noticed that the book he's talking about is a graphic novel. I don't think of him as a comics geek, but then again, the novelty of the thing turning up in an antique bookshop from the wrong century... I'd make an exception, too. {X D AI are generally bad at associating events with dates, from what I've seen, but here at least it's possible to make up an excuse for it. ^_^

I can't figure out who John B. Myers is supposed to be, though. Must be someone from World One-and-a-bit...?

~Neshomeh

After all, GPT3 was trained by crawling the entire internet. And there's demonstrable proof that a bunch of stuff from AO3 was crawled, and probably TVTropes as well. So it could already have references for us.

EDIT: I should clarify that I use the term "knows" very loosely here. GPT-3 doesn't so much know things as it has seen things.

But mostly to people who get paid for their art.

Okay, so the various AI art generators are cribbing from humans - not in the sense that they're pasting different heads onto bodies, but in the sense that they're trained by showing them, for example, vast numbers of pictures tagged 'bikini' and looking for common factors which make humans think 'bikini'. They can do this down to the level of individual art styles - there's a bit of a furore at the moment over things like deviantArt being used wholesale for training, meaning you can ask for "in the style of [online artist's name]" and get something recognisably derived from specific images of theirs.

(Incidentally, when sharing AI art, there's a growing consensus NOT to write any "in the style of" in searchable text; some artists' actual work is being swamped out of the search engines by AI hits.)

And yes, I can see where they're coming from: nobody agreed that the AI could be trained on all their stuff, and especially when their own work is being hidden by AI imitators, that's a problem!

... but also, "look at other stuff and mimic it" is how humans do art too.

Like... I could sit down and draw "Agent Dafydd in the style of Studio Ghibli" right now. The more famous the artist, the more likely people will use them for inspiration, crib from them, or even trace their stuff. Heck, I did back to back Calvin & Hobbes and Mark Witton 'strongly inspired' drawings during Botober this year; both of those could show up on Google hits and knock real images down the rankings.

So as an amateur artist, I don't find 'now people can mimic my stuff' much of a concern. But if you get paid for it, there's a couple of issues that loom large:

1/ The search engine stuff above. If I want to buy a picture by a specific artist, and I google them and the first page is all AI stuff, I'm likely to just give up. "They probably don't sell prints," I think, while their page languishes halfway down page 4.

2/ Non-specific commissions. Specific commissions are probably okay for the time being - Sergio can create a bunch of Nikki pictures, but as far as I know the AI can't tweak them (if you want to change the bikini colour, you have to create a whole new image with a different pose you can't choose). But "I want a spooky cover for my book" - that's already being given to AI to do. People who make money off their art are rightly concerned about that.

Ultimately, I think that sort of thing will fall foul of copyright law. People are already talking about siccing The Mouse on them; if I prompt an AI to show me "Elsa riding a motorbike", it'll probably do a pretty good job. Why? Because it's been trained on images of Elsa, including both official ones and the fanart that Disney barely tolerates. If someone tries to commercialise AI art with recognisable Disney DNA? The hammer will come down hard.

So the future I foresee is one where AIs can make decent amateur art, and there's a proliferation of people posting "their" AI art to art platforms and so forth; but its commercial presence is fairly minimal, and every time it tries to increase its share it gets slapped down again.

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And to add an actual reassurance: the AI can make pictures, but it can't choose them. There's no current pathway for an AI to go "wow, I really loved the underwater Nikki scene, I'm going to draw that" - still less "you know what would be cool? Nikki underwater". At best it could randomly slap concepts together, but the true creative spark is still ours for the time being.

(Though it would be kind of cool to take Nesh's NumeBot, hook it up to an art generator, and tell it to start creating pictures of its day in HQ.)

hS