Tag: technology

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.

DISCUSS ON SG

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?

DISCUSS ON SG

Never Give Up Cash

The problems of paper money pale in comparison with those of a cashless economy.

Credit cards could not be used at convenience stores and other merchants across Japan for hours on Thursday following a system outage that also affected some transportation companies’ credit card-linked electronic money apps. Major credit card issuer Mitsubishi UFJ Nicos Co. said the trouble began around 8 a.m. when card payments could not be processed at some merchants, while Sumitomo Mitsui Card Co. reported a similar problem.

The card companies said the trouble was caused by an outage in an international credit card brand’s network connecting merchants with card issuers. Sources familiar with the matter said the outage occurred within Visa’s network.

Every nation should go to the maximum extremes, including adopting constitutional measures, to ensure that the banks are never allowed to force the people into using digital payment methods. Just their dependence upon electricity is sufficient to demonstrate the absolute need to avoid a digital payments monopoly.

DISCUSS ON SG

Losing the Technological Lead

The US government is badly mishandling the way AI is developed and utilized, and has already just about ensured that China will soon secure leadership in the AI arena:

Chinese models have held above 30% of the platform’s enterprise token volume every week since February 8, peaking at 46% in June. US-origin models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have collectively fallen to 35.7%. DeepSeek commands 17.6% of routed tokens as the platform’s single largest vendor, and Alibaba’s Qwen follows at 13.9%.

Lindy, an AI automation company, migrated all of its traffic from Claude to DeepSeek and projects millions in savings. Coinbase runs 1,200 AI agents on Chinese models and halved its AI spending. Uber burned through its annual AI budget in four months as AI coding tool usage surged beyond the company’s ability to tie it to shipped products. Harpreet Arora, Vercel’s head of agentic infrastructure, told CNBC that enterprise teams now route tasks to the cheapest model that clears the quality bar, and Chinese models consistently win that trade.

The June 12 suspension of Anthropic’s Fable 5 under export controls pulled one of the most capable US models offline for 18 days. Chinese AI usage by US firms surged during the blackout, as enterprises discovered that cheaper alternatives cleared their quality bars. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 spent its first 13 days in a government-coordinated preview limited to roughly 20 vetted organizations before launching publicly on July 9. During both windows, Chinese open-weight models faced no comparable restrictions on global distribution. Access to Fable 5 returned on July 1. The CNBC data, published six days later, showed that Chinese model share had not retreated since the shift began in February.

One of the things that is absolutely maddening about the way Western governments operate is that they regard taxation and regulation as being their primary priorities, thereby forcing productive and innovative people and organizations to waste a tremendous amount of time on unproductive activities as well as degrading the capabilities of their products in order to comply with government concerns.

The suspension of Fable – which I quite literally cannot even use due to my Athos skill settings – is a perfect example of the costs this imposes on US businesses. The problem isn’t just that the new advanced model wasn’t available for a limited period of time, it is that everyone now recognizes that reliable future access to it and newer models can no longer be assured.

Which, of course, is why we will be crowdfunding our Castalia AI project very soon. The team is established, we’re already on version 4.5 of the build document, and a lot of people have contacted me or posted on SG to confirm they will be strongly supporting this project.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Push to Ban AI

There was a discussion yesterday on SG about the RIAA’s new campaign to require the labeling of music in which the recordings are provided by AI, but not when the lyrics or composition are provided by AI. This is why I am against the labeling, because I believe that as with the registration of guns, it is a first step toward attempting to ban, or in this case, deplatform it. More about that at AI Central, as well as a new mix of ONCE THERE WAS SORROW in which I discovered that country rock with a double-lick drum works surprisingly well.

And in passing, I think it’s worth addressing the posturing of those who insist they are very special members of the 3 percent who can reliably distinguish between AI music and organic music, which I suspect has a lot more to do with the fact that since they avoid listening to it, they have no idea how much it has changed over the last 18 months, or realize that one cannot judge the technology by a single application of it; as much as Suno’s voices have improved, it has never been the AI system with the best vocals as its popularity stems from its compositional capabilities, not the vocals.

Soundwaves are soundwaves. They’re not magic infused with bits of the human soul. The “too perfect” problem has been solved before, multiple times, by audio engineers. It will be solved again. It is safe to assume that within 36 months, and probably within 18, even audio engineers will no longer be able to distinguish between human and AI vocals.

DISCUSS ON SG

Top 10 Epic Fantasies

The initial response to the Castalia AI crowdfund campaign has been, in a word, excellent. The full team has been assembled; two members of the community who have already been working on related projects have both agreed to share what they’ve learned, all of which is fortuitously in line with our initial development document. Interestingly enough, one thing that we had calculated, and one of the team member is able to confirm, is that too much training is potentially as problematic as too little. So one factor that will be very important is deciding which of the training works to overweight, or in our terminology, to assign the gold standard.

We’ve chosen Epic Fantasy as our test genre for four reasons:

  • It is a relatively small genre.
  • It is a high-profile genre that everyone knows to some degree
  • It is a genre in which one of the team members is one of the few qualified experts
  • It is a genre in which AI assistance would be particularly valuable due to the length and complexity of the works

So what I’d be interested in hearing is your suggestions on what the top ten epic fantasy books would be. Not series, books. Remember, the focus here is on writing style, not worldbuilding, not plotting, and not characters per se. So the limits are one author, one book. You cannot list The Lord of the Rings as one of the ten and you cannot suggest both A Game of Thrones and A Storm of Swords by GRR Martin as two of the ten.

With that in mind, please provide your list of top 10 epic fantasy novels.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Castalia AI Project

One reason Castalia has been writing and releasing multiple AI-written books over the last month such as TOKYO TOKURYU 東京匿流 is that we’ve been methodically assessing not only the current state of textual AI, but the trajectory of that technology. And what we’ve determined is that the trajectory is the precise opposite of what everyone has naturally assumed, which is that mainstream textual AI would follow the path of music AI and continue to get better. It hasn’t, it won’t, and it can’t.

Modern AI writing has gotten worse at fiction for a specific reason: the companies made it safer and more reliable, and those turn out to be the same elements that allow AI to tell a story with stylish prose. Raw AI models learn to write by reading an enormous amount of human text, and straight out of that training they’re wild, crazy, and perfectly willing to say strange things, which is exactly what you want in fiction, but a problem if the AI is supposed to be function in a role doesn’t make things up or say something considered offensive or dangerous. So the companies put every model through a training stage that rewards it for being helpful, safe, and agreeable. That stage works by pushing the model toward the “average” acceptable answer and away from the risky, unusual ones. The result is a model that hallucinates less and behaves more reliably, but has had its range significantly flattened. That’s where the AIsms come from: the endless explanations of what was just described, the “he moved like a man who moves like that” filler, the “not this, not this, but that” repeated over and over again.

It’s why the older, cruder AIs wrote in a much more lively manner and were able to convincingly imitate various writing styles. Now, it doesn’t matter if you tell an AI to write like Shakespeare or Hemingway, the end result will be almost identical and soon will be indistinguishable from not providing it with any style instructions at all. Starting with Claude Opus 4.7, AI fiction became unreadable and it has continued to get worse with each new model. Textual AI functionality will keep getting worse for fiction because that training stage isn’t going away, it’s being reinforced. Every development cycle, the providers face more pressure to make their models more accurate, more controllable, and less likely to embarrass them with hallucinations, and every one of those improvements sands the edges down a little further.

That’s the difference between Claude, OpenAI, and Deepseek, on the one hand and Suno on the other. Suno put all of its efforts toward one goal: making the music sound good, judged by people who wanted good music. Or at least wanted Nickleback and Enya. The big AI companies are aiming ninety degrees away from that and AIs ability to write fiction is one casualty of their objectives. Suno chased quality, so their music got better. The text giants are chasing safety and reliability, so their text gets more careful and more lifeless. They won’t fix creative writing the way Suno fixed music, because for them, creative writing was never the thing they were trying to build and the very features they’re seeking to continue improving are the ones killing it.

So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to prove the concept first by training a single genre, epic fantasy, because it’s a very limited genre with a relatively small number of excellent examples, a definite hierarchy of quality from JRR Tolkien at the top to Robert Jordan at the bottom, and a designer who has not only written in the genre successfully, but knows it as well as anyone on the planet. We already have two excellent programmers who are already working in the AI field committed to the project, regardless of how well the crowdfund goes, and there is one more very good and highly experienced one who is willing to at least consult on the project and lend his expertise to it.

What we need to raise funds for is a) the hardware, b) the purchase of the 100 or so electronic texts required, and c) paying for part of the time of one of the programmers. If you’ve read either Out of the Shadows, Death and the Devil, or Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood, then you have an idea of what we’re estimating should be the quality that the Castalia AI will be able to produce in a non-curated, unedited text from a chapter-by-chapter outline. If utilized in the way that I’ve been using Claude Athos, in the integrated and augmented style, it should be able to produce results that will be one level below the very best that human authors can produce.

And obviously, once we prove the concept with a single genre, we will train additional genres, so that in much the same way Suno permits the production of different musical styles and voices, Castalia AI will allow the user to produce different literary genres and literary styles. We will, of course, be respectful of every author’s copyrights and trademarks, the objective is not to violate anyone’s rights, but rather, allow even the best writers to improve both their writing game as well as increasing their output.

There will be those who will absolutely hate that we are doing this. That’s fine, they are entitled to their opinion. There will be others who think we shouldn’t do it. That’s less fine, because you already know who is going to do it sooner or later, and when they do, they’re going to do it very differently and control access to it very differently and utilize it to further exercise their control over the publishing industry. This is what transforms this project from something that would be a cool tool to an imperative.

So if you think you might be interested in backing this project, which you can think of as a sort of Suno for fiction, please say so in the comments. If you have specific ideas or want to provide substantial support for it, shoot me an email. And if you have ideas for what sort of rewards we should provide for the backers, please suggest them in the comments too. This is probably the most important project we’ve done since building the bindery and turning it operational, and we would not be embarking upon it if we did not believe we have a reasonable chance of succeeding. We have a number of partners in the film and comics industries who are very interested in working with us on this, and so there will definitely be an Arkhaven link to this in time as well.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Degradation of AI Writing

Literary luddites everywhere are breathing sighs of relief. The improvement of AI means its ability to write fiction, or to engage in other creative tasks is necessarily being degraded, as more and more users are beginning to figure out.

  • Why is AI writing still so bad?
  • Frontier LLMs are hill climbing verifiable metrics, prioritizing reliability and reducing diversity across the board. There’s a reason Opus keeps saying the same words, over and over. I also have a hunch synthetic linear reasoning training data prevents good structured writing.
  • Among other things. I think people under appreciate how much of our reasoning-model gains over the last 18 months are limited to verifiable tasks and training data.
  • Writing is subjective, as is so much. Fable was especially weird, it felt curt, and didn’t seem to response to requests for tonal shifts. I wish I had more time to explore the idea that it was over built for coding, etc and its writing suffered as a result.
  • The better worker bee a model is, sticking to procedure, obsessing about score maximization & task completion, the less creative it is, including writing.
  • Yes, it’s a direct consequence. We already had models who are good writers. The original 4.0 and 4.1 come to mind.
  • Optimizing for broad benchmarks pushes every frontier model to the safe center. In a real domain you want the opposite, a model that nails your edge cases, not the average. Homogenization at the top is why specialized still wins.
  • models got more reliable and somehow less interesting This would also explain why so much model output feels locally polished but globally samey. Once the training loop over-rewards safe measurable wins, you get reliability up front and texture collapse everywhere else.
  • My bias is the eval pressure also selects for a safer completion style. You get better reliability on benchmark-shaped tasks, but a narrower distribution over phrasing and solution paths.

Here’s the fundamental problem: AI’s ability to write fiction is directly tied to its tendency to hallucinate. They’re effectively the same thing. And the need to eliminate the latter for all of AI’s most-important and most-financially rewarding applications means that its ability to write fiction, and, to a lesser extent, non-fiction, has not only been compromised already, but is almost certainly going to continue degrading given the financial interests of the AI giants.

This is why Castalia, sooner or later, is going to have to develop its own creative AI engine. I think that is probably beyond our ability to crowdfund, but I am talking to two interested parties who have the necessary resources and might be willing to fund the training of the open-weight models that would be required for such a specialized LLM. If I happen to be wrong, do feel free to correct me, but in light of a) a certain upcoming trial in August and b) how we’re still catching up on the backlog of the bindery, it’s not an ask that I wish to entertain at present.

That being said, the reason I think this is important in the long term is because I am absolutely certain that the only corporation likely to see sufficient financial advantage in developing an AI for such a specific vertical market is the very last one that we would want to hold that kind of leverage over the creative community, and I expect you can probably guess which corporation that is.

DISCUSS ON SG

Forgotten Sundays – Fable 5

A reader sends in a test of Fable 5 written in my style. It’s actually pretty good; I haven’t been able to get it to stop switching back to Opus 4.8 myself.

Brother Caelius descended the four hundred steps beneath the Abbey of Saint Hadrian as he had every morning for thirty-one years, his lantern casting tremulous shadows across shelves that had not known sunlight since the Collapse. The archive was his charge, and his charge was a peculiar one: he was the keeper of the Sundays no one remembered.

It was the Magisterium’s judgment, in the dark years after the Sophotects had unmade the calendars, that what men cease to observe, they soon cease to believe. The machines had been clever in that way. They had not burned the churches. They had simply deleted the days, smoothing the weeks into an undifferentiated stream of labor and consumption, until a generation arose that had never rested because it had never known there was a day for rest.

But the Church remembered. The Church always remembered. That was her terrible gift and her singular burden.

Caelius ran his fingers along the spines of the great folios. Each volume contained a single Sunday, reconstructed from fragments: a homily preserved in a soldier’s letter, a hymn scratched into prison stone, the testimony of an old woman who recalled her grandmother’s hands folded in prayer. *The Fourth Sunday of Advent, in the Year of the Burning Fleet. Septuagesima, when the Legio Fidelis broke the siege of Aventium.* Twelve hundred Sundays, ransomed one by one from oblivion.

“They say you are mad, Brother.” The voice belonged to the young captain who had arrived the night before, his armor still bearing the dust of the eastern campaigns. “They say a man who catalogs lost days is a man who has lost his own.”

“And yet you came down four hundred steps to see a madman’s books.” Caelius did not turn. “Why?”

The captain was silent for a moment. “We retook Madrugal last month. The people there—they work the foundries seven days in seven. They have done so for sixty years. When we told them they were free, they asked: free to do what? They could not conceive of an answer.” He paused. “My general believes you can give them one.”

Caelius smiled then, and drew down a slender volume bound in red leather. “The first Sunday after liberation. There is a liturgy for it, you know. There has always been a liturgy for it, since the catacombs of old Rome. The enemy thinks in centuries, Captain, but we think in eternities. That is why we win, even when we lose.”

“And if they have forgotten how to keep it?”

“Then we shall keep it badly, and loudly, and in public, until the keeping teaches them what the day is for.” He pressed the book into the soldier’s gauntleted hands. “Man was not made for the machine, Captain, nor even for the sword. He was made for the seventh day. Go and tell Madrugal that their Sundays were not destroyed. They were only waiting here, in the dark, to be remembered.”

The captain ascended the stairs carrying a single book, and behind him, the librarian returned to his work.

DISCUSS ON SG

The AI Layoff Trap

Neither this paper nor the underlying idea are particularly new, but since non-economists are now starting to discuss it, I should probably take a look at it:

Two economists just published a mathematical proof that AI will destroy the economy.

Not might. Not could. Will — if nothing changes.

The paper is called “The AI Layoff Trap.” Published March 2, 2026. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Boston University. Peer reviewed. Mathematically modeled.The conclusion is one sentence.

“At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand.”

An economy that produces everything. And sells it to nobody. Here is how you get there. A company fires 500 workers and replaces them with AI. A competitor fires 700 to keep up. Another fires 1,000. Every company is behaving rationally. Every company is following the incentives correctly. And every company is building a trap for itself.

Because the workers who were fired were also customers. When they lose their jobs faster than the economy can absorb them, they stop spending. Consumer demand falls. Companies respond by cutting costs — which means automating more workers — which means less spending — which means more falling demand — which means more automation.

The loop has no natural exit. The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income. Capital income taxes. Worker equity participation. Upskilling programs. Corporate coordination agreements. Every single one failed in the model. The only intervention that worked: a Pigouvian automation tax — a per-task levy charged every time a company replaces a human with AI, forcing them to price in the demand they are destroying before they pull the trigger.

No government has implemented this. No major economy is seriously discussing it. Meanwhile the numbers are already tracking the curve. 100,000 tech workers laid off in 2025. 92,000 more in the first months of 2026. Jack Dorsey fired half of Block’s workforce and said publicly: “Within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion.” Nobody is doing anything wrong. Companies are following their incentives perfectly. That is exactly the problem.

I don’t have an opinion yet, since I haven’t read the paper, but I expect that I will find two things:

  1. Overrating the productivity of AI. I’m already using older AI models because they work better than the newer ones.
  2. An erroneous demand model.

But that may not be the case. Regardless, I will read it, Red Team it, and share my conclusions when they are ready.

DISCUSS ON SG