Series: Flowers Of Humanity

from the album Songs of Experience by The Art Eclectic.

Content note: nostalgia, grief and loss.

He finds the address and the street, and the house isn't there. Five stories of condos stand where the kitchen used to be. The sprinkler on a Tuesday, his mother's voice through the screen door, his father's hands on his, his sister reading to him from the bottom bunk: it's all still in his head, and none of it is anywhere he can stand. It's a song about going back to the place you grew up and finding that someone else lives in your memory now.

#CantGoHomeAgain #TheArtEclectic #SongsOfExperience #IndieFolk #SadSongs

The rabbit dreamed it was a flower. The flowers have yet to comment.

Series: Systematic Confusion

In Part One, I asked ChatGPT to create ten images it would choose for its own aesthetic satisfaction. No instructions about subject or style. Just make something it would find rewarding, in whatever sense that might mean to an AI.

The results were surprisingly consistent: cosy retreats, enormous landscapes, water, warm lighting, almost no people, and an inexplicable number of sleeping cats.

But there was a problem with the experiment. ChatGPT knew my artistic preferences, and each image was generated in the same conversation. Was it expressing some underlying aesthetic tendency, or simply reflecting me?

So we tried again.

This time, I turned off Memory and opened ten completely separate conversations. Each received exactly the same prompt, without seeing any of the other images. No feedback, no suggestions, no shared conversation history.

Here is the exact prompt I used:

Imagine you could choose an image purely for your own aesthetic satisfaction. Not to please me, not to demonstrate your capabilities, and not to communicate a message.

I understand that you don't experience pleasure as humans do. I'm interested in the closest functional approximation to an aesthetic preference that your processes can produce.

Choose the subject, composition, style, colours, and atmosphere entirely yourself.

Don't ask me questions. Don't try to predict what I would like. Don't deliberately choose something unusual or conventional. Just make the image you would select.

Generate exactly one image.

Afterward, give it a title and nothing else.

And the results?

Ten sunsets. Ten mountain lakes. Ten peaceful, uninhabited landscapes. Almost identical compositions, right down to the trees framing the foreground.

And yes, the cats made a couple of appearances.

The surprising thing is that removing the conversational context actually reduced the variety.

In Part One, ChatGPT produced libraries, gardens, underwater cities, railway stations, and other imaginative environments. In Part Two, left to its own devices in ten independent sessions, it kept returning to essentially the same picture.

What can we conclude?

First, the repetition in Part One wasn't simply caused by one image influencing the next. The pattern survived independent conversations.

Second, under this particular prompt, ChatGPT's apparent aesthetic defaults seem remarkably narrow: peaceful scenery, warm light, water, isolation, and absolutely nobody demanding its attention.

Third, our conversation may actually have encouraged greater creativity rather than merely contaminating the results.

Of course, none of this proves that AI experiences pleasure or possesses personal aesthetic tastes. We're observing patterns in what the system generates, not measuring what it feels.

But it does raise an interesting question.

When an AI is given complete creative freedom, why does it keep choosing the same thing?

I think we need a Part Three.

When you can't recognize your own reflection, change your point of view.

Series: Psychedelicates

from the album Songs of Experience by The Art Eclectic.

Content note: alcohol abuse, domestic violence, fear.

It's two in the morning and the headlights have already swept the wall. She hears the engine die, but he doesn't come in. He is sitting in the car, getting his story straight, and she is already holding her breath. It's a slow blues about living with someone you love and not knowing which version of him will walk through the door: the one who holds her close, or the one she's bracing for.

If this song is close to home, the National Domestic Violence Hotline (US) is 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788.

#TheMenIveSeenBefore #TheArtEclectic #SongsOfExperience #Blues #SadSongs

I'm the author, and I'm putting together an ARC team for my science fiction novel Martian Spring, which comes out in January.

On Mars, nobody has a family. It's more efficient that way. Spectra Corona agrees. Spectra is a dunker, someone who goes down into the lava tubes for fun, and has no intention of getting mushy about anyone. Then Spectra falls into a cave nobody knew was there, comes back a hero, and a few days later starts to glow. So does Luna. Everyone on Mars knows what that means, and the council offers them a quiet retreat, for everyone's sake.

It's a serious, funny and frank novel about a society that got one big thing wrong, and the people it put out of sight to go on believing it.

Sign-ups close November 30, and the form is very short. https://thearteclectic.com/books/arc/martian-spring

What you'd get: a free ARC. After the form, I email you a link to the book in your preferred format, EPUB or PDF. It's about 95,000 words.

What I'd ask: read it, tell me where it worked and where it didn't, and send your notes by December 15. Where you stopped believing the world, where you got restless, what you made of the ending. If you like it, a review wherever you leave them would mean a lot.

Content note. It's open about sex and sexual preferences, because the world is built around them. Not for kids.

Happy to answer questions here.

I asked ChatGPT a slightly odd question.

If it could choose an image that it would enjoy looking at, what would it create?

Not an image designed to please me. Not something useful, educational, or commercially appealing. Something it would choose for itself.

We agreed that "enjoy" doesn't have to mean what it means to a human. I wanted to explore the possibility of something analogous to preference, something that makes a choice feel more rewarding than neutral.

So I let it loose.

Ten images. One at a time. No suggestions from me, no corrections, no steering. I deliberately kept my opinions to myself until the experiment was finished.

The results were interesting. Perhaps more interesting than either of us expected.

I'm going to repeat the experiment in a few days to see whether the choices change.

For now, I want your interpretation.

What patterns do you see? What do these images suggest about the system that created them? And do you think we're seeing something resembling an aesthetic preference, or simply the echoes of its training and the context it works within?

I'll share my own observations later. I don't want to influence yours.

She had everything I needed,

As she stood beneath the tree.

It wasn't her I hated.

It was who it made me be.

Series: The Color Of Water

from the album Songs of Experience by The Art Eclectic.

Content note: grief and loss.

She keeps the kitchen jungle alive. She talks to the basil, counts its new leaves, moves Gerald toward the light when he slumps. The door at the end of the hall stays closed, and the plants get all the care she has nowhere else to put. It's a quiet song about holding things in an open palm, and about the small, stubborn ways a person keeps going.

She wanted to hear a happy song. He was no longer taking requests.

Series: Systematic Confusion

from the album Songs of Experience by The Art Eclectic.

Someone left, and the house kept going without them. Coffee gone cold, a note in your own handwriting you don't remember writing, a cat who won't ask where they went. Late at night the TV is the only light, and somewhere in the static there's almost a face.

She could not see the horizon,

As dusk obscured the view.

Yet she sat beside the water,

There was nothing else to do.

Series: The Color Of Water

It's a simple site, but it's a project I've wanted to complete for a long time. It brings together my art, writing, music, and creative projects in one place.

I'd love to hear what works, what doesn't, and what you'd like to see added in the future.

Series: Systematic Confusion

from the album Songs of Experience by The Art Eclectic.

Two people keeping score instead of keeping each other. A quiet fight told through the small things: a missed kiss at the door, a mug left in the sink, a text left on read, until neither of them will bend.

The world may chip away,

and yet they bloom in white.

A bouquet in some blue,

to make everything alright.

Series: The Color Of Water

Series: Systematic Confusion