Tag: technology

Byron AI Volunteers Wanted

The Byron AI team is looking for 10-20 volunteers who are a) reasonably well-versed in a broad range of literary genres and b) are capable of quickly reading 500- to 1000-word chunks. No technical ability is required; what we’re looking for is people who are capable of reading an unidentified text sample and attempting to identify the author on the basis of the style. The performance is not important; we have a second-level test that is necessary for those readers who cannot identify the author on the first read, so the volunteers have to be able to resist the temptation to look anything up or resort to AI in order to identify the author.

That sort of artificial identification will pollute the data and we want to strictly avoid it. Byron AI backers are favored for this, so if you’re interested in volunteering, please email me with AI STYLE BACKER if you are a project backer and AI STYLE if you are not.

As is probably clear, the dev team did not wait for the campaign to successfully conclude before we got started on certain elements of the project. It’s still too soon to declare that we will succeed in the proof of concept, but the initial indications are positive.

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The Final Five Hours

This is your last chance to back the proof of conept of the Byron AI. We’ve now hit our original goal of 250 backers. 300 would seem to be ambitious, but a last-day pop is common, so we’ll see how it goes.

Thanks to everyone who is supporting this. While I have not publicly shared any of the information yet, the development team has already been making excellent progress even prior to obtaining the hardware thanks to our existing tools and cloud access.

UPDATE: 80 minutes left and we’re close with 286. Just 14 more…

UPDATE: Time’s up! We ended up with exactly 300 backers (counting the three direct ones) and what should be sufficient support to do what we are setting out to do and most likely a bit more. Thanks very much to everyone who is making this possible!

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The New Reason to Back Byron AI

The last three weeks have significantly underlined the importance of supporting the combined efforts of Castalia and Infogalactic to develop a custom AI system that will protect and enhance the ability to produce fiction without limits being imposed by the major AI providers. A number of things have happened since we launched the Byron AI crowdfunding campaign, including:

  • The continued degradation of Claude’s ability to creatively hallucinate.
  • The expanded interference with subject matter: one news site was aggressively denied the ability to use a major AI system to write about Hayden Panattiere’s death due to sensitivity concerns about its recent occurrence in the site’s article announcing Hayden Panattiere’s death.
  • Deepseek increasing its token price by 4.5x due to its upcoming IPO.
  • OpenAI actively blocking ChatGPT users from being able to intentionally imitate the style of authors both living and dead.

Even though the campaign hasn’t ended yet, the dev team has already made solid progress on a number of peripheral items, including the ability to accurately imitate various literary styles and eliminate the various AI tells, including these abominations.

The eliminations of these tells have been made with tactical precision. And that matters. Let the weight of that sit for a moment.

Despite being a major champion of the use of AI in music, video, and textual production, I still find it maddening to see how many people insist on utilizing it in an observably suboptimal manner. I noticed that Larry Johnson recently started using it to write his articles for him; it’s always easy to recognize when the article length increases by a factor of three and the author’s voice disappears into that passive wash of AI overexplanation.

In case you didn’t realize it, the most obvious sign of textual AI is when the text explains itself as well as its significance to the reader. It’s actually considered a “prestige” form of writing, and it’s very similar to what I describe as “sociopathic externalization” by novelists. This is when the writer is presenting a character’s perspective, but providing descriptive elements that would normally come from an external party. It’s not precisely the same thing, but it has the same effect of putting the reader in the Uncanny Valley.

Anyhow, I’ve been doing some video animation tests with the MiniMax H3 engine that have proven entirely successful. To better understand what that means, I’ve put up examples at Sigma Game, as well as some recently-found footage of an old Psykosonik concert featuring a much younger Vox on stage with the guys.

So check it out, and if you haven’t backed it yet but are interested in either independent book production or independent film production, get on board with Byron AI and help us set the stage for making future history.

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Two Days to Go

Only two days left to back the successful Byron AI campaign, and remember, each backing is being doubled by one of our strongest supporters, so you’re getting double bang for your backing.

I’ll explain the connection tomorrow, but we’ve added one more very special reward, which is a custom three-minute music video or animated Arkhaven comic of your choice from the respectably sized music library on UATV, including Vibe Patrol, Soulsigma, and Cradle to Cavalry, although unfortunately not Booster Patrol, Boomer Patrol, or Silenziosa,

UPDATE: After conferring with my bandmate, Psykosonik songs are also a valid option. Including modern remixes of the original demos. And in not entirely unrelated news, original footage of our second show at Glam Slam has surfaced…

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3X and 3 Weeks to Go

The Byron AI crowdfund is proceeding well. We’re very close to 100 backers, the campaign has exceeded $30k, and the team is already seeing some positive results that indicate we’re on the right track. Moreover, the importance of what we’re doing, and the need for it, has been highlighted by a recent news item related to the actions of the AI giants:

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is now refusing requests to generate text that directly mimics the style of famous authors. When asked to do so, the popular LLM instead offers a response that draws on the “broad qualities” of those authors “while remaining distinct in its own voice,” for example.

This is just a PR move, which is obvious because a) there is no patent, trademark, or copyright protection for “style” or “look and feel” and b) the refusals apply to long-dead authors such as Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway. Remember, there isn’t even any legal protection for book titles, and you can literally reproduce the text of a public domain work exactly as it is or fold, spindle, and mutilate it as you please, as the cases of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or A Mind Programmed serve to demonstrate.

However, we can safely expect Claude and Gemini to follow suit. The AI backlash has already begun and Open AI is already looking for a government bailout, and so we can safely assume that the intrinsic degradation of texual AI’s pseudo-creative facilities will be turbo-boosted by these new stylistic guardrails.

Now here is the pitch for those of you who haven’t backed the project yet. Due to its importance, a major backer has offered to double the end total of the campaign. Which means that if you back for $50, the project will receive $100. So any support you can provide Byron AI will be twice as effective.

Our objective is to reach 250 backers; given that 100 people backed the project in the first week without this additional incentive, I’m optimistic that we can reach that total and that we are going to exceed our development objectives. Also, I should note that two of the three Custom Novels have already been spoken for, although I have not yet been informed as to what the backers wish them to be.

BACK THE BYRON AI

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The Byron Project and Byronics

So the Byron AI project is proceeding apace. Due to UATV going down, I was unable to make the planned announcement, but thanks to the devs it’s back up again and so I will make it on the Darkstream Monday night. Thanks to the 86/88 backers so far; we’ve tripled our initial objective and there are still five Custom Novel slots left.

And speaking of George Gordon his own bad self, I finished a mix and a music video for a song which my late co-lyricist in Soulsigma wrote as a short poem called THERE BE NONE OF BEAUTY’S DAUGHTERS, and which I dubbed PERFECTION. If you’d like to see the video and learn a little more about the technology behind it, you can do so at AI Central. I think you will be able to see the steady progression from the first attempt at a video to this one; I’ll put them up on UATV soon.

Don’t skip reading the poem at the top of the post; it’s excellent, it’s not very long, and it will add depth to your appreciation for both the song and the video.

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A Genre Vote

Due to popular demand, we have added a new support tier to the Byron AI campaign. The $100 tier not only provides an ebook of the first novel produced by the Byron AI, but a vote on what the next genres or styles to be trained will be as well. We’re also going to add a stretch goal of adding the classic science fiction genre to the training when the public campaign hits $50k. The genre vote will be an ongoing right that isn’t limited to the campaign period; as we complete different genres and styles, we’ll turn to the original backers to help us decide what gets added next.

And yes, all of the higher tiers now come with this voting right as well and it applies to everyone who already backed the campaign.

The specific authorial style training will no doubt be controversial in certain circles, but a) those circles are already rabidly anti-AI and b) there is no copyright or trademark or patent or other intellectual protection of “style” or “look-and-feel” since the matter was settled by the US Supreme Court in 1994 and reaffirmed last year in the Anthropic lawsuit.

People tend to think of these things in terms of living authors, but the reality of copyright law is that the only substantive benefits are to the corporations who strip-mine it without respecting either the material or the author.

In other news, UATV is down. The devs don’t know why yet. We’ll keep you posted on that.

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Augmentation, Not Replacement

A Fandom Pulse reader was confused by JDA’s advocacy of Castalia and Infogalactic’s joint Byron AI project:

Is this what I think it is? Is this website, created by an author who writes his own books with his own brain, promoting an AI that will do all the writing for us from now on? What the actual f**k is happening?

The AI doesn’t do everything. Without the human creative spark, it will accomplish nothing. This is more akin to providing battle armor for a soldier, making him stronger, faster, and more deadly. Consider how much faster I have been able to produce both fiction and non-fiction; neither the groundbreaking work demolishing Darwin, Kimura, and Kant would have been published without textual AI. I probably would have eventually got around to writing Probability Zero, especially after becoming aware of the more complete genomic information from the the 2025 study, but would never have gone on to address Neutral Theory and Kimura without the intellectual augmentation provided by AI.

AI is close to worthless without an anchor. That’s why it works so beautifully for translations. That’s why it’s highly effective for non-fiction. But it has no creative spark, and that’s why it can only augment the ideas and stories and experiences that the human element provides. And that’s why the Byron AI project is a positive one, and one worth backing.

For those who appreciated the poem featured in the launch video, I took the liberty of altering it and turning it into a Soulsigma song called Last to Know. It’s technically a Neo-Byronic, since it’s an original, not an adaptation, and it might be the best thing I’ve written yet.

They tell me that an honest man will bear
Her name upon his heart – a curious state!
For all my good intentions it seems
I drowned in wine and worse – a darker fate
Is well-deserved now – and yet without a care
I fall toward the abyss, and at a rate
Measureless across the years,
For what had cost me twenty months of tears…

I had a something once, no longer now,
That ached and wanted and overcame.
It burned at beauty and it fled from shame.
If that was soul I never learned its name.

As for the project, we’re off to a good start. We’ve already hit our base goal and we’ll be adding the requested $100 level soon, so if you’ve got suggestions for that, or for other tiers and rewards, feel free to share them in the comments. I’ll be discussing the project and making an announcement about it on the Darkstream tonight.

UPDATE: No Darkstream tonight. Situation requires attention.

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The Byron AI Campaign

A THINKING ENGINE

They tell me that a thinking engine bears
    My name upon its brow — a curious fate;
That all I burnt in candlelight, and cares
    I drowned in wine — and worse, I will not state —
Is gathered now, and parcelled into shares,
    And offered to the public, at a rate
Of four-and-twenty seconds, without shirk,
For what had cost me twenty years of work.

Yet some grave patron, with furrowed brow,
    Demands to know if machines create
An honest question, sir, and do allow
    Me now to subsequently demonstrate;
I had a something once — and have it now? —
    That ached, and wanted, and broke all control,
It burned at beauty, and it fled from shame:
If that was soul, I never learned its name.

Fandom Pulse explains the importance and the urgency of the project.

Vox Day has opened a crowdfunding campaign through Infogalactic for Byron AI, an independent text-generation project built specifically for fiction writers. The campaign, live now on IndieCrowdfund, positions itself as a proof of concept for an AI trained on the epic fantasy genre rather than general-purpose code and business writing.

Day laid out the stakes in an exclusive comment to Fandom Pulse. “I believe that we have about two years to develop quality independent textual AI before Amazon attempts to corner the market,” he said. The Byron AI page frames its goal as producing functional prose for fiction writers, built and owned outside the major AI labs

The timing follows a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched Amazon’s self-publishing ecosystem develop over the last decade. Kindle Unlimited restructured how indie authors get paid, shifting income toward page reads controlled entirely by Amazon’s algorithm. Virtual Voice, Amazon’s text-to-speech audiobook tool, moved narration in-house and cut into the market for independent narrators and small audiobook producers. A native, Amazon-controlled writing AI would extend that same pattern to the manuscript itself, giving one company leverage over the tools authors use to draft, publish, and monetize their books.

I also posted some additional information about the project and why we believe it will be successful at AI Central:

This is a tool being built by a working publisher and real novelists, for people who care about both what is written and how it is written, and it’s owned outright, answerable to no corporate policy, no subject-matter veto, no trust-and-safety council deciding what a story is allowed to be about. It is designed to provide the prose in a variety of genre styles: you supply the story, the structure, and the judgment, and it drafts prose that arrives sounding like you instead of like everything else. We’ve already proven the method works with both translations and original novels, and this campaign funds turning that hard-won experience into an instrument that Castalia authors will be able to use, and continue using, no matter what direction the mainstream AIs take.

And you really have to see the video to believe it. It was a chance to put some of my new music video skills to use with good effect and it should demonstrate why this is the right group of people to develop such a tool. And for those members of the community who don’t really care about AI one way or another, but like beautiful books and want to support the project, we’ve even provided an option to just receive the Library or History book of your choice as long as it’s in stock.

I would remiss if I did not mention that we’re already off to an even better start than it looks, since two major backers kicked things off with direct donations to the project even before we had the campaign ready for launch today. Thanks very much to both of them for their timely and much-appreciated support, and to everyone else who decides to become a part of this and make it happen.

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The End of General Purpose AI

AI Central explains why specific-purpose AI is increasingly necessary, and makes the case for Castalia’s upcoming AI crowdfunding campaign, which will be announced next week.

Sudowrite’s Muse represents the most developed response. Rather than wrapping a general-purpose model in fiction-oriented prompts, Sudowrite trained Muse on a curated, consent-based literary corpus and optimized it for prose quality. The model includes a creativity dial that lets writers control output range on a scale from one to eleven, a style-matching system that trains on samples of the writer’s own work, and no content filters. Reviews consistently describe Muse as avoiding the AI-isms that plague general-purpose output, with particular strength in pacing, tension, and subtext.

Muse has company. Other platforms have built fiction-specific models or fiction-optimized workflows, and writers who have access to both purpose-built and general-purpose tools tend to draft with the former and brainstorm with the latter. The category has grown large enough that review sites now maintain dedicated rankings for fiction-specific AI, separate from their general-purpose lists.

A separate category of consumer tools has emerged around children’s fiction, offering illustrated hardcover books generated from brief prompts. Most of these wrap general-purpose models with genre templates, and the output reflects the underlying architecture: competent, safe, and largely interchangeable from one book to the next.

The parallel to Suno is direct. Suno optimized for making music that sounds good to listeners and pulled away from general-purpose models that treated music generation as one capability among many. Fiction-specific tools are following the same path, trading breadth for depth in a domain where depth determines quality.

However, it’s already clear that Muse is not going to be a viable option. I already knew it wasn’t, because I tried it and found it to be distinctly inferior to Claude 4.3; its interface actually tended to get in my way a lot more than it helped. And, furthermore, its future trajectory is already clear, because Sudowrite is a converged organization.

 I went to Sunowrite and set up an account. It is clearly meant for women with that cutesy pink color scheme. It asks a lot of questions about what kind of writer you are (I chose professional, merely so I get the whole thing and not some watered down version), what genre, style, all the stuff you’d expect. Then I finally arrive at the start of the process and there’s already a paragraph created before I’ve entered anything but the basics. Oookay. I ignore that and start putting stuff into the “Story Bible”, boxes for Brain Dump, Genre, Style (chose one), Synopsis, and then Characters. You know what’s coming, right? Click on Add Character, and take a wild, wild, guess at what the first box that describes the character? You know, right?

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