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I have a gallery again.

It would be so easy to say ‘I can’t tell you what that means to me’ but part of my thing is that I do tell you what things mean to me, all the time, so I’m going to try.

mcahogarth.org

Let me start by telling you about the original Stardancer gallery, which many of you remember and an even larger number of you weren’t around for. Because in an era before big sites like DeviantArt, when personal websites were still linked by webrings and coded by hand, I had a website that used a database to show visitors not only the latest thing I’d uploaded, but the comments left by dozens of people on that offering.

It’s so hard to explain how crazy that was. There were no Wordpress packages, no visual editors, no gallery plugins. There was no user validation by Google or Apple, no social media, no expectation of interaction or community. Everything had to be coded by hand and installed by someone who wasn’t afraid of a UNIX command line. And from 1999 until mid-2012, the Stardancer gallery served, on average, 5 pieces of art a week, with over 175,000 words of commentary from me, for thirteen years, and those pieces accrued between 5 to 40 comments from visitors. When it finally went down, there were 2906 distinct pieces of art in the database, and of those 253 had multiple versions—I uploaded them as I worked on them with commentary on each stage. Some of those pieces had 9-10+ stages where you could watch me wrestling with them (complete with titles like “OMG Ugly Stage” and “needs a background”).

For context, 175,000 words is probably about 700 tightly-packed paperback pages. That’s how much commentary I wrote. And that’s not including 1993 keywords and 60 projects I was tagging everything with.

I wanted that gallery so I could share my art with all of you. But it was also functioning as an organizational layer for me. When I was trying to remember a story, a character name, a forgotten piece of art I wanted to finish, I would search my own gallery. It was my backup brain, and my sketchbook index, and it kept me focused. It even had basic project management tools, since each of those 60 projects had a status: complete, in progress, ongoing, on hold, trunked.

The sunsetting of the original site was inevitable. You can’t run software with visions of enterprise-level functionality on a friend’s personal computer. But I was in the very unusual position of having started out with a system custom-built for my idiosyncrasies, and nothing on the market was good enough. I kept poking and not loving any of my choices. Host all my artwork on some aggregate gallery site or shoehorn it into a cookie-cutter Content Management System? No thank you. So I never replaced Stardancer, and for fourteen years, I’ve been running without that second-brain infrastructure.

And now, I have it again.

Now I can think ‘what was that thing I said about that one character in that one sketchbook?’ and search and find it. I can mutter, “Where is all the Ai-Naidari language work” and pull up the notebook. I can think ‘Didn’t I want to finish that picture of the dala fox? What sketchbook is that in?’ and I know.

I know!

And unlike the first gallery, this one can have everything in every sketchbook. Because I streamlined the parts I hate (editing, watermarking, uploading, making thumbnails, importing into the database) and left myself only the parts I enjoy (writing comments and tagging). And while some of the original Stardancer’s features aren’t online yet, like multiple versions of the same image, they’re designed and in the queue… and this version can have cool new features, like user favorites, and requests from users who love something and want me to finish it.

I’m so forgetful. I keep trying to explain to people how much of a cheesecloth my brain is with just about everything. Without rigorous documentation, lists, and notebooks, I would be completely useless. Art is one of those places I document my thoughts and keep myself pointed in the right direction. The fourteen years I didn’t have a gallery are literally gone in my brain, artistically. I have to dig up the physical books and thumb through them to remember anything about them. So I think you can imagine my relief that this is now available… not just for you to enjoy. But for my sake, to keep myself from vanishing because I am no longer observing myself.

Right now the new gallery has 2644 images across the 42 sketchbooks (and one unfinished language notebook) I’ve scanned and uploaded… of the nearly 200 I have. I’m only just getting started. I am crazy excited, I can’t even tell you.

I have a gallery again.

I have a gallery again!

mcahogarth.org

Anyway, this is the part where I talk about how you can enjoy the gallery:

• If you make a free account, you can favorite things, make requests, and view 50 images a month at full size.

• If you’re paying here on Locals, you get unlimited access to everything in the gallery via a seasonal access code, and every three months I pin the new one to the top of the feed.

• If you prefer to buy a single year-long pass, I’ve got you covered on the shopify store here: $65 lets you fire and forget for twelve months, if like me you hate subscriptions. That's here: https://studiomcah.com/products/the-stardancer-gallery-one-year-pass

Every subscription and purchase helps keep the gallery open and supports our free users, so thank you so much for chipping in!

What can I say? Welcome home, my friends. Welcome back!

Over the weekend, I read a book that I’m 95% sure was AI-written. I’ve listened to people talk about how it’s done: you brainstorm characters and a plot with AI, prompt it for an outline, adjust the outline, prompt it to create character and setting guides… attach all that to your project, then tell it to write the first chapter. You adjust the chapter, add it to the project, then tell it to write the second, etc, until you get to the end. Then you tidy the whole thing and publish. The "rapid release" people either love this (because you can release a book in a day or two and do it again immediately) or hate it (because they can't keep up with people using this strategy with unaugmented human brains). But it's clearly a thing that's happening, and few people who do it are admitting it.

Reasons I thought this book was AI:

• Every chapter ends with a weird wrap-up style: “Main Character had accomplished XY and Z. Tomorrow, he’d have to tackle AB and C. But for today: job well done.” And I do mean every chapter. At first I thought ‘maybe the author’s serializing this and needs to remind readers about what just happened” but when it’s doing overviews of what happens in the chapter at the end, it’s weird.

• All the places give you a “movie set” feeling of being wooden facades. Like… ‘there’s a baker. He makes bread.’ Nothing else. Only bread is mentioned. Not even the kind of bread. There’s a weird lack of specificity to everything. The baker always has a ‘basket of bread’. Or occasionally, a basket of pastries. (No word on what kind.) Likewise, there is a blacksmith. We know he can make hammers, because the apprentice made one. But that’s it. No idea what else the blacksmith does for the town.

• Then there’s suddenly spates of specificity. “I have these exotic spices that sound like a list generated for game inventory.” These specific things are never mentioned again.

• The technobabble sounds like stuff Claude gives me as placeholders. “Mana structure efficiency at 45%. Suboptimal but holding.”

• Similarly there are some odd verbal tics that repeat throughout the text, and they are suspiciously clever ones, like analogies that rely on an abstract and a concrete noun: “It tasted of cinnamon and regret.” “The tavern smelled of old ale and worry.” Even the title uses this phrasing. Authors can have verbal tics, of course, but I associate a lot of these with AI.

• The supporting characters do the exact same things, as if they’re programmed NPCs. Celebrating an achievement? ‘We go to this exact same tavern, every time.’  Checking up on the main character? “You need food and rest.” (I can’t count the number of times this character suggested everyone have food and rest, in exactly those words. No variation.)

• This one is hard to describe, but the characters have believable backstories that suggest depth, but these backstories do not inform how they interact with other characters. The nemesis becomes the protagonist’s friend based on a single interaction, and this backstory, while mentioned in subsequent chapters, causes no friction, for instance. It’s as if every character was created in isolation and the author can’t figure out how to make them combine.

Could this all be the work of an inexperienced author? Sure. But that tells me that we have trained AI to work off story templates that inexperienced authors also rely on. If you have decades of “write to market” advice that treat books as widgets with “story beats” and “character arcs” that can be abstracted into formulas, you shouldn’t be surprised when books start to sound alike. They already were, prior to AI, it’s just that AI makes creating them faster.

Did people like the AI-generated book? Well, it has over a hundred reviews and a 4.5 star average rating, and even on Goodreads, it's doing well, so the answer is: “Yes, it’s good enough.” Did the author confess to AI-writing it? No. Maybe he didn’t! But my guess is that he did.

Do I care about this? Not really. I didn’t enjoy reading it because it gave me the same feeling social media scrolling does, that I’ve eaten empty calorie food that’s programming my brain to repeat basic and uncreative patterns. But humans have always riffed off bad things to make better things and I can totally see someone using AI to generate a draft like this, and then completely overhauling it into something enjoyable.

I don’t write like this because I’m weird. I am constitutionally incapable of the ‘write to market’ formulaic approach (which is why I’m not on a yacht sailing to my property on the Riviera). Even my attempts at romance and litrpg novels veer off into directions that make them too odd (yes, I managed to make both these genres unprofitable). But I’m one of those capital-A artists that indies like to sneer at, and I’m happy that way. I can’t even do that right: I’m an Arteeste who doesn’t care if you’re using AI!

My audience was always going to be the weirdos who want to learn my conlangs and vanish into alien cultures so completely they leave no traces. That's you all! You're awesome.

But yeah, AI-written books. You might have already read one and not realized it. The name of this one, if you want to check it out, is below, and yes I paywalled it because I don't want to bother with drama.