August 2024, fictionalising records

Video experimentation had stalled conceptually and financially, and the incident generator while technically unstable suggested another possibility. Theres real promise with text-to-speech and with commercial avatar products. Again the cost is too high but because theres a commercial market theres a slightly more robust tool set. Across the wider AI landscape, conversational systems are changing quickly. Iterations of ChatGPT are becoming significantly more capable as coding collaborators, making it possible to prototype software ideas through dialogue rather than formal programming training. This feels like its speeding up.

I've began testing whether generated maritime fragments could be spoken rather than shown. Spoken aloud, even simple generated lines carried authority:

"Motor tanker reported delayed, last position west of Ushant."

Without imagery, ambiguity increases. The listener is gaps themselves. The material feels closer to transmission than narration, theres also this durational aspect that I'm not sure I knew I was interested in. One of the appeals of the ledgers is their sense of permanence and the endlessness of that, it feels like a chant.

I've started early speculative reconstructions of a plausible Torrey Canyon voyage not historically accurate retellings, but fragments that might have existed within shipping communication systems: positional updates, partial reports, procedural language. Among all the frustration of websites and scripting and the endless increasingly co-dependent relationship with chatgpt theres these moments of something like magic, I ask for a reconstructed voyage and one appears. Of course theres no telling it's level of fidelity, instead it's plausible, this is of course worrying.

Audio generation pipelines break frequently. Voice IDs keep changing. File naming systems comes increasingly complex as batches accumulated. Much of the labour involved simply producing repeatable workflows. Theres this craft aspect where you spend all the time preparing and cleaning up - like print making or ceramics, and for weeks the feeling of doing bugger all except the housework of it all.

But the voice does bring presence. And presence in all it's spookiness has that magic fission of emergence.