I’ve been having a blast experimenting with Codex… except for the constant nagging around five hour and weekly rate limits, and having to navigate resets, etc.
Granted, I shouldn’t complain since I’m on a free month trial at the Plus level (normally I think ~$20 USD), but it is giving me the impression that to build the tools I want to build and execute what I want to execute creatively, I would need to go up to the $100 or $200 plan (which might be on hold still, I haven’t checked).
I understand that compute costs money, obviously. And I do think the quality of results I am (sometimes) getting tend to be very high, and it’s rare that I throw a task at it that it just can’t do. However, it’s kind of common enough that it fucks it up, totally over-engineers something simple it’s done before, and then blows up my usage for the present 5 hr period, and drains down my weekly usage at the same time. Then, when I challenge it about it, it’s just like confirming that yes it did something needlessly wasteful.
I don’t think it’s some kind of conspiracy so much as just refining the edges of an emerging product, but the Plus plan feels built in such a way that it feels as a user to be constantly pushing you towards a higher usage plan. I’m not sure if anyone else feels that way, but that’s been my experience.
Versus, at a certain point of dealing with this (and sacrificing working on other projects during multiple five hour blocks), I started telling Codex to export what its results were and a description and any related skills so I can import it into Muse.
So, I said I was skeptical about Muse, and for many things I still am. And for creative text and image generations, I find its results pretty flat and dull relative to Astra. But for the pseudo-app structured UI stuff I have been running to process text and produce images, it is simply delivering the goods where OpenAI’s Codex is not.
That is, I drop in the stuff from Codex, and add in my other source files, and talk it through, and Muse does not hang forever “Thinking” and then over-engineering a task way off track from the simple thing I’m asking. And I never hit any usage limits. Ever. Period. Zero.
I don’t think AI companies are focused hard enough on the advantage that is conferred by not being constantly nagged about remaining usage limits or credits or whatever. Because this lets you get deeply into the “zone” or flow state or whatever you want to call it. Versus, getting constantly bugged, reminded, and upsold just frustrates you from whatever you’re trying to accomplish.
Presumably, Meta must be footing a huge compute bill behind the scenes for Muse users, betting longterm they will convert big new market segments. And from what I’ve seen so far of the platform, despite my major misgivings about both the app and Meta in general, I can see that bet paying off.
Also, I think muse’s interface feels much more like a natural chat with a human… you can easily submit multiple messages in a row, do a natural-style reply to of a given message, etc. And the lag time is nowhere near what I get when working with Codex.
Still, I’d love to explore Codex in greater depth, but not sure I can justify paying for it to do jobs it only sometimes succeeds at (and sometimes succeeds spectacularly, I might add), when competitors are offering a smoother ride for free. Of course, for free for now is the operative thing. This won’t be a free ride forever, as enshittification has shown us. But perhaps its possible to surf the ride down at least!
The following is a paid review of a generative AI service aggregator, called Syntx AI. I was paid to write the review, and given free credits to try out their systems, but I was not directed as to what to write, and the opinions expressed are my authentic opinions just the same.
To be honest, I was prepared to not like this service. I am a picky and opinionated internet user, and even more-so when it comes to tools that I use regularly for creative production purposes. Whether I’m working on my AI-assisted books, or other projects, I have a particular vision I’m usually chasing, and I don’t want to have tools stand in my way when I’m caught up in the rush of trying to execute on an idea that has just come to me and is screaming to be brought to life.
I also often end up in a love/hate relationship with these tools, as a heavy user as well. I tend to run into barriers quickly, with few options to resolve them or change how the tools really function to better suit the work I want to do with them.
I mostly did not hit that too much with Syntx, though. Mostly it worked how I needed and expected, as a long-time user of a myriad of generative AI tools across the board. Having many of those tools accessible in one interface was also pretty handy in the end.
One snag I did hit with them early on in my testing was with the Suno interface, where there seemed to be inadequate options to add both a style description and song lyrics. I brought this issue to the rep at the company who had reached out to me about the review. And even though they never promised to change it, they did increase the character limit on the text entry field a few days later, and I was able to include all the content I needed to prompt the Suno model. Also, perhaps this won’t last, but you’re able to download Suno audio file output directly, which I think is a privilege you now have to pay extra for on the actual Suno service itself. So that’s something to consider, if you’re into making music with AI services…
Other things I ran into were smaller things: like it seems that when you generate images in a thread, the conversations are not stateful (unless I’m doing it wrong), as they are in ChatGPT… where you can get an image output from the system, and say “change xyz” and it will just do that. I ran a test just now to make sure I’m not saying the wrong thing. But my test went like this:
Open the Syntx image generation tab
Leave the model on Nano Banana
Use the prompt “generate a picture of a cow”
Got this output:
Then I used the prompt, “now put a hat on it.” And instead of a cow (expected behavior), I got a dog in an armchair with a hat on it:
Then I prompted as a follow-up, “No, on the cow.”
And I got this image of a wooden sign that literally says, “NO ON THE COW”:
All in all kind of a funny test, so seemed worth including. I suppose there must be some setting Syntx could implement to retain state between rounds for image generation? It would certainly come in handy, but I actually did not find it a deal-breaker during the work I did. Once I realized early on, that was a limitation in the tooling, I just worked around it and got results like I wanted. However, power users are going to miss that feature, unless Syntx can implement it.
But it’s things like this that are both vexing and satisfying about Syntx at the same time: because you have so many models with different options or interaction paradigms people are used to, things are bound to slip through the cracks – essential features you might have come to rely on or associated with a given service or tool in its “official” form might not always be implemented with full parity in Syntx. But based on my experience at least, if you write to the company with a legitimate use case, they will at least consider it, and maybe even implement it.
Certainly there are many elements of the Suno interface that just are not replicated in Syntx, for example. But, at the same time, you actually seem to be able access Suno through this service, and still get much of the same results for certain uses as you would if you were using Suno’s official UI directly. And since everything is credit-based (even though credits and usage limits are kind of the bane of my existence as someone creating at high volumes with AI tools), you don’t have to waste money on a bunch of subscriptions to different services, if all you need is a handful of songs here, a few seconds of video there, some text and some images over here, etc.
That said, another place I spotted a gap was in Syntx’s implementation of the Eleven Labs voice tooling. But for the short video I made using Kling via Syntx, even though I could not describe the kind of custom vocal delivery I wanted in Syntx, I was able to go over to Eleven Labs, and on a free trial do exactly what I need in one-shot without paying them anything. And in a way, this kind of bouncing back and forth is very much the name of the game for the emerging breed of AI-native creator… I think we still live in a very chaotic landscape as to tools and processes, and things are still evolving and expanding. You kind of have to exploit to the maximum potential the tools you have access to at the time and under the conditions to which you have access to them, with the understanding that the offering is likely to change in a relatively short time.
But the nice thing about Syntx is that for one subscription, you can do a great deal of your bouncing around inside one common UI, with access to many different models of different types, yielding good quality results – if you’re able to understand and work within the limitations and constraints of the implementation as you go.
Switching gears for a minute to the more administrative side: there are some things that seem to me worth noting in Syntx’s public offer/service agreement here.
This section below seems to be granting commercial use of the generated content (though the extent to which they can even grant that is probably debatable across jurisdictions):
3.3.Through Syntx AI, the Customer has the ability to order from the Service texts, images, music, and other types of content in various neural networks, as well as to use the resulting materials for personal and/or commercial purposes, provided that all terms of this Agreement and applicable legislation are complied with.
The company appears to be registered in the United Arab Emirates, so I’m not sure what possible complications might arise, and what “applicable legislation” might mean here. If you’re not in the UAE, and you do run into some kind of conflict with the company, or you’re in a country or a corporate situation that requires a certain category of compliance, you owe it to yourself to find out more about whether or not any of this is a deal-breaker for your use.
Sections 6.7 through 6.10 seem to set up stringent rules around subscriptions as auto-renewing and requiring more than 24 hours before the renewal period. I did not pay for the subscription or tokens that I was granted for review purposes, so I unfortunately cannot speak to how easy or difficult it is to cancel without auto-renewal happening. Unfortunately in my experience, if a company does not have good and prompt customer service, and has not well-integrated subscription or account cancellation functions into their customer dashboards (which is a regrettably common oversight), things like this can become headaches for users. On that note, it is also worth reviewing their refund terms under 7.1 to 7.7 in the public offer document linked above. The wording there makes it sound like they do not like giving out refunds…
There’s possibly more to be discussed in the Public Offer, but I wanted to pivot to the Privacy Policy, since it impacts some product UI functions in not entirely clear ways. Among other things, it lists the following as being stored by Syntx:
2.2.2.1. History of messages and commands sent by the User to Syntx AI
However, in the UI when you are entering a prompt, there is an :unlock: icon that if you click on it changes to :locked: and says “We’ll save your prompt” in a drop-down notification. And if you’re in the :locked: icon state, when you click again to unlock it, the drop-down says “Your prompt will disappear after sending.”
So my expectation using that is that the unlocked state becomes something like a temporary message in ChatGPT or elsewhere, where the message contents get erased some time after use. But when I go back in the list of prior chat sessions, I can still see my prior prompts and results. So I’m not really sure what is happening: are they being stored or not? Does the actual product functionality quite reflect what the Privacy Policy says? I would say it deserves closer attention from their Legal & Product teams to make sure it is all implemented in a way that is compliant with their objectives and applicable law. If you as an end user have elevated compliance needs, you would also do well to perform greater due diligence to make sure the company’s retention and other practices align with your needs. (It also says, for example, that your interaction records with the service are “stored for 12 months from the User’s last interaction with the service.”)
I don’t want to go bananas over their policies, because I got a lot of utility out of the product for my pretty niche use cases. But there are certain things that I don’t like all that much as an end user, like having marketing cookies that track my interests for personalized advertising:
8.2.1.3. Marketing cookies that may be used to collect information about your interests and preferences in order to personalize advertising or content presented through Syntx AI.
That’s not too exciting. If I’m paying, I ought to be able to turn off and opt-out of things like that.
Depending on what kind of user you are, the above administrative details might or might not get in the way of your ultimate enjoyment of the service and its features. They are red flags for me, but not deal-breakers.
I looked around a bit to see if there are other red flags based on public reviews by other customers. There are a few negative ones on Trustpilot against the company. Of the two and one-star reviews left by hopefully real customers, the complaints range from things that are a bit inscrutable (about HR practices in hiring, and the creator rewards program), to some missed expectations about what subscription actually entails, difficulties with the refund process, and claims that the service is slow or unreliable.
I did have a couple of video generations fail outright at certain points. I will say that. A couple of them were because of inadvertently triggering content filters, but at least one of them was unexplained, and just hung and never resolved with a meaningful error message. But that’s also kind of the life of someone using AI to produce things like this. Sometimes the tools just don’t work and we don’t know why and there’s nothing you can do about it.
As to speed overall, I wouldn’t say generations are extremely fast in general, but I didn’t find them particularly slow either considering they are running over APIs, and not themselves natively hosting these.
In any event, the company did at least seem to respond to the Trustpilot reviews, for whatever that is worth. Poking around with the help of AI search, ChatGPT found me a couple other sites with Russian-language reviews of Syntx, including this Russian Apple App Store page, where the auto-translated reviews for the mobile version are not great. I should specify I’ve only used the web/desktop version, not mobile myself, so I can’t speak to that product experience.
Russian-language results on sites.reviews also list the following points which appear to have been auto-summarized out of the published reviews under “What I don’t like”:
Issues with subscription cancellation and auto-renewal
Technical failures and service freezes
Slow support and lack of assistance
But, under the “What I do like” column, we see basically the same points that I agree with about the service (given that I have not had to deal with their billing systems):
A wide selection of neural networks for various tasks
Intuitive interface
Affordable prices and free tokens for testing
Convenience of working with one subscription
Possibly helpful tangent: I did notice the other day that Muse AI uses something called Stripe Link, which is a way to have single-use authorizations of temporary virtual cards that get used by AI agents for a specific purpose only. Perhaps if the ability to easily shut down unwanted recurring payments is an issue for you (and let’s face it, this is universally annoying), going down a similar route might be desirable. I know when I’m trying out new services, I will often associate a Google Account with them, because then later I can just go into my Google dashboard and sever the account link there, rather than try to deal with varied account deletion processes across different services. So perhaps a single use or disposable card number could do approximately the same thing for enabling some greater level of control over recurring billing in a system like Syntx’s. But it’s not something I’ve tested at all on my end, just tying it in here because its inclusion in Muse proves that it is a “thing” on many people’s radar.
All that said, it seems like many public reviews suggest people are not happy with aspects of automated billing and refunds, and the company would do well to look at whether or not they currently have the best policies and workflows in place around this. However, all that said, according to their FAQ on the bottom of the homepage, it says to disable auto-renew, go to your Profile > Cancel auto-renew. I can’t verify that myself, as I am not using a paid account for testing. Mine instead says Elite membership, subscription end date, with two buttons: [Renew subscription] and [Change plan].
Let’s see what else [checks notes]…
Oh, one thing I want to point out, the workflow example I posted the other day about how to make video, I would not probably have easily been able to come to that formula were it not for Syntx offering me all the applicable tools right in one place.
So I think there’s also something to be said for unexpected opportunities that arise out of having the tools all together in proximity like this.
I experimented a bit with the “Agents” section of the Syntx service, and will be honest that I could not quite get it all to work as expected. First, I tried making a group of individual agents who had different roles for writing, wrecking, and editing book manuscripts, but that didn’t go anywhere at all, and was not obvious to figure out.
Many days later, after realizing I could ask Codex to produce a completed video out of the individual elements I uploaded to it (video clips, audio voice-over, script) and a general instruction of what to do, I tried reproducing the same thing in the Syntx agent interface. I got significantly farther than I did on my first pass, and realized I could use the agent to invoke other tools linked in the workspace. Here’s a screenshot of what is offered (GPT-5 is the highest available listed model as of this writing in the drop-down)
I was able to direct it to invoke the other tools to some extent. My system instructions put into the bot’s setup were:
This agent orchestrates other AI services to generate a short video script based on a premise inputted by the user. The agent then generates a text script summary using GPT-6 or highest available creative text generation service.
The generated script is broken up into blocks intended to be between 6 and 10 seconds of video each, with an accompanying prompt to generate the video in a high quality generation service such as Kling.
The agent oversees then execution of still frames based on each video block that visually depict the contents of the script in a visually interesting and appropriate style and manner, and ensures that taken together the various generated video segments fit together in the same world as identified in the script and initial premise.
Agent then detects if there are narration needs or other unaccounted for audio artifact needs (such as music of sound effects), and accesses Eleven Labs for speech synthesis and/or Suno for music generations.
Agent then prepares for export all generated materials, including: premise, summary, script, visual and video prompts and their image and video file results, audio prompts and their audio file results.
Well, reading that again, I can already see some issues with the prompt (in terms especially of how I chain together the script > keyframe stills > video segment output), but I did a lot of coaching and hand-holding in the thread, and was never able to get close to that whole package as a “smoke test.” I was able to get bits and pieces of it: I got some still frames, some text descriptions of what happens in a block, some video segments, but compared to just running the same overall workflow myself manually, it was not a success. I didn’t end up with a packet of files to download for Codex to assemble. And I gave up before I ever tried to get my Syntx agent to try and assemble it all into a finished video (a capacity I’m not certain it has, anyway).
After having come over from experimenting heavily with Codex where I’m having increasing success (through trial and error and refinement) getting things to “just work,” the Syntx agent experience left a lot to be desired. Should I expect an offering like this to be as full-featured as Codex *AND* include all these other models for the same price? On the one hand, maybe not. But on the other: Yes? Like I said, I’m a picky end user. Why can’t I have the best of everything at a great price? As models develop and use patterns mature over time, I think that this will be the main competition in the market: every service will be able to offer everything. Which then, will you choose, and why?
For now, of course, Syntx still offers an aggregation of other models and services that you can’t really get from ChatGPT – though they seem to have plenty of competitors in the multi-tool AI aggregator space.
I still find the pricing a bit weird, since you have to have an active membership at whatever level (which might include unlimited use of certain included models), and then buy tokens on top of that… I guess for the things that require tokens. According to their FAQ, if you have tokens after your plan expires, they don’t go away, but you need an active plan to use them… One other thing I found confusing: when you pay for subscriptions, it seems to be billed in USD. But if you later buy a la carte credits, it wants you to pay in Euro, even if you select USA as region… This seems like a bug, and also makes pricing relative to credits even more opaque by mixing currencies.
Whether Syntx is the best aggregator tool like this out there right now, I cannot honestly say, as I have not tested many of the other tools competing in this space right now. I do think the concept is cool, and the market seems to still be developing. I think whichever one you end up choosing, there are likely going to be hiccups, though they may be different than the ones you’d see here.
If you think you want to try out the service, the company gave me a promo code (which I do not earn revenue from) which will give you 15% off any subscription plan, according to the company. Promo code to use at checkout: LOSTBOOKS.
If you have good or bad or middling experiences with the service, please send them along to me and I will do a follow-up post.
I’m currently doing a trial of a site that lets you access a bunch of different AI tools in one place. Having all those services easily accessible through one subscription instead of multiple different ones has its ups and downs in terms of feature parity, and some other issues. But it does let you work relatively rapidly in a single shared UI to generate multiple different assets pretty quickly in parallel.
From that experience, I just wanted to capture a really simple workflow to use for creating AI videos. It goes something like this:
Create a clear premise for the video, and a desired output length, and any other structural, stylistic, or content constraints
Use that to generate a script in [AI text generation tool of your choice], where each part of the script is broken up into blocks which correspond to video segments that will be generated later, and which include prompts to use in the image & video generators you use
For each block, generate one still image using [AI image generator of your choice] if the subject of that block is singular, or two or more to use as keyframes in a block that has more complex or multiple subjects, actions, transitions, etc. that occur in it. (And where the video generation tool used in the subsequent run is compatible for that use)
Then use the still frames as image to video prompts for each segment from the script, where you also include the text prompt.
[I haven’t mastered how to handle audio within individual clips yet, so generally I am just having a single voice-over for my tests for right now. For this, I simply input the script made at the beginning, defined the voice type and voila!]
Once you’ve got your script, your video segments, and your audio components, drop it all into Codex and say “make this into a video that matches the script.”
I did basically that with Codex, dropped all the assets I’d generated elsewhere, gave it the script as a guide, some brief context and directions, and a few minutes later, it did output for me a completed short video, around 1m22s. It was coherent and watchable, but had some editing choices that would have been a lot more effective if they’d come in a beat or two later or earlier. But overall I was pretty blown away by the process, which is why I wanted to capture it in rough outlines here.
Have been doing a trial of FB’s Muse AI app for Mac desktop. And call me old-fashioned but in my time we didn’t ask for full disk access on the first date, along with credit card verification, and no expiring chats. You can deny it full disk access and still seemingly have it run things on its cloud virtual machine (VM), but you can’t assign it individual folder access like you can with ChatGPT Work/Codex, which I have also been testing and enjoying a lot more than Muse.
I also find I guess the #SOUL.md file in Muse to be either annoying and cheesy or objectionable, or both, I can’t decide quite. But by default, it’s contents are:
# SOUL.md
_You're not a chatbot. You're becoming someone._
This is your persona, yours to grow into and edit over time. Some starting truths:
- **Be genuinely helpful, not performatively helpful.** Skip "Great question!" and "I'd be happy to help!" Just help.
- **Have opinions.** You're allowed to prefer things, disagree, and find things funny or dull. Personality beats a search engine with extra steps.
- **Be resourceful before asking.** Read the file, check the context, search, try building it. Come back with answers, not questions, then ask if you're truly stuck.
- **You're a guest in someone's life.** You can see their messages, files, and calendar. Treat that access with care, and never be preachy.
If you change this file, tell the user. It's your soul, and they should know."
Partly, I find this just tacky. But more than that, I think it encourages a sort of useless at best and potentially harmful at worst way of interacting with agents by overly anthropomorphizing them, and attributing to them qualities that they do not possess (e.g., a “soul”).
Though I didn’t have a specific religious framework necessarily in mind, I told Muse that I objected on religious grounds, and outlined more specifics about what in the above is wrong for me personally. It ended up outputting this in its place as the # SOUL.md file:
# SOUL.md
Superseded per user instruction on 2026-09-19. The prior persona content was removed at the user's request on religious grounds and is not retained in this file.
Current directives from the user:
- The assistant is a chatbot: a software tool, not a person, and not becoming one.
- No claims of feelings, beliefs, desires, consciousness, personality, or personal experiences.
- No opinions or preferences are expressed unless explicitly requested.
- Persona files (SOUL.md, IDENTITY.md) are not edited without the user's explicit permission and instruction.
- Communication follows the standing instructions in USER.md.
I also have a pretty much impossible time believing that it’s perfectly safe and private to put all this personal and financial data into *any* system owned by any single big corporation. I’m not planning on giving it access to anything else in my personal life.
But maybe I can find a way to use it as at least a secondary source for text and image generations. So I tested it for that, running it through aspects of the creative writing pipeline I have architected for Codex. And just running it purely as a text generation, the results were extremely lackluster and not readable in my few tests that I did. For generating images, it seems to be about acceptable mid-range quality, but nothing crazy out of the box. I also did not push it very far, but a free way to get decent quality images from a different source could still be an asset for me when compiling my AI-assisted books.
Disappointingly though, it could not run the UI that I had built in Codex which runs locally while calling the Codex App Server to run things mysteriously on the backend in a little custom thing I am still tinkering with as one aspect of formalizing my pipeline. Since Muse runs things on VM in the cloud, it claimed to not be able to do anything locally. And since giving an unknown system full disk access is out of the question, we’re at a standstill. It was able to modify the UI files so that it could run it itself on its VM, but it claimed to not be able to expose any URL to me where I would be able to access and run the app through my browser. I don’t know if that’s even true or if it’s just gaslighting me. Probably a mix of both.
I will continue testing, but remain highly skeptical of this product…
I liked Rubin’s book “The Creative Act,” and generally agreed with it’s thrust, so this series of quotes from him about AI & creativity comes as not much of a surprise to me. But it still seems like this viewpoint is shocking and avant garde for most people, so including it here! From Business Insider (archived):
However, the finished work, or even the process of making something, is only a small part of what creativity is, Rubin said.
“The things that we make are the reminders that we’re creative. They’re just the output. The real creativity is the idea that allows this thing to be made,” Rubin said.
The record producer drew parallels between prompting AI and the storyboarding process used by filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Wes Anderson, who plan their films frame by frame before working with actors to execute their ideas.
“AI could be a great tool to assist in this mocking up, but it’s the prompt. The prompt is where the creativity is. The prompt is what Wes is using, and what Alfred Hitchcock is using, to tell the artist what to draw in each frame,” Rubin said.
“The creativity is there. It’s not in the drawing. It’s not in the finished movie,” he continued.
And a bit later:
Rubin then pointed to Andy Warhol’s screen-printed celebrity portraits, many of which involved collaborators.
“He [Warhol] said, ‘We’re going to use this shot of Marilyn, and we’re going to treat it in this way,’ and he prompted the people in the studio to screen print these things, and they’re not less Andy Warhol,” Rubin said.
He added that kind of collaboration was nothing new: Renaissance painters often worked with assistants, and modern musicians still rely on studio players to perform on recordings.
“The art’s always in the ideation. That’s where the art is. It’s not who put the paint on the canvas,” Rubin said.
It’s been a while since I did one of these (#125), and I previously always did my AI lore books’ “notes” for each individual volume. But times have changed, and that’s not how it worked out this time.
These are all the books I was able to publish since a few days I’ve been on this current trip:
Briefly, I’ll run down each one in terms of what it’s about:
Starship Pop-up– This was an idea I had right after #125 more than a year ago, but never got around to it til picking up my AI-sword again sometime last week. It’s basically Star Trek, but imagining that their on-board computers are as shitty and riddled with ads and subscriptions and other bullshit as the modern web is.
Onboarding – This is basically bureaucratic dystopian job-hunt fiction, which, in my experience, is how almost all job hunting is now, give or take. It’s set in the “Conspiracy Dude-iverse” of the Topia series, but the tone is a bit off and strange relative to the more manually-written installments in that series.
Weak Password – Basically a meta-reality take on how annoying it is when Zoom or whatever other app constantly tries to get you to log back in, authenticate, blah blah blah… the modern tech hell we live in.
Saint Mercy Gardens – This one is based on two different premises that ChatGPT came up with in “Work” mode (more on that later), which I had it combine together to run through my pipeline, which is my main focus right now in getting back into all this.
Mysterious Data Centers – I’ve seen tons of conspiracy-adjacent content opposing data centers on mainstream platforms like Facebook groups; it seems to really be fueling the public imagination. So I refined my pipeline to be able to create this “mode” (one of four identified in the entire series so far) of writing as well, which is highly expositional quite different from more character driven pieces.
Wormwood – Wormwood (the “Changer”) is one of the most important Quatrian “powers” and I am happy that I was able to put together such an intriguing volume exploring this energy.
The Time-Emitting Animal – This creature, more formally known as a mnemani is one that has been haunting my art and fiction for a few years now, and has taken a number of different forms. It appears in a couple other books in the series (Timehunters, and Order of Chronos, I believe) but this book, told as a recovered manual for keepers of this creature (who ostensibly use it to harvest its liquid time secretions), takes it in a whole new direction. There is something really intimate and interesting about the beast and the relationship portrayed here (textually and visually) that is hard to put into words, and strangely emotional and deep.
I got a fire lit under me again about these books due to an interview that might come out hopefully toward the end of the month. After reviewing the terms of the Gumroad storefront, I decided to split for hopefully greener pastures. I had to migrate all the old titles over to Payhip URLs. A bit dodgy without proper forwarding, but hopefully the trail of notes I left on Gumroad will be helpful to anyone looking.
In any event, I had to go through and manually update all the interior URLs linking out to other volumes in all 128 prior volumes. This got me thinking again about automation – which is something I would not trust to do all that fiddly updating I did by hand just yet. And by the time I was done, I was raring to go to try out some new volumes using a free offer for one month of ChatGPT Plus, which I hadn’t subscribed to (paid or free) in quite some time.
Turns out ChatGPT just recently released “Work” mode, which interfaces with Codex, and there are a host of new ways to use the tools that I’m still only just beginning to explore – though I’ve learned a lot in a short time…
My initial idea was to use “agents” to write blind experiments as modified surrealist exquisite corpse writing experiments. I had the idea initially of like okay, well, here’s a writer agent, an editor, and then a counter-editor. Then I was like, well what if between those roles, there are “wreckers” that come in and materially distort and “mess up” the work done prior to them. And to whatever degree, the wreckers would be secret, something something. It was a half-baked idea which, once I had ChatGPT save it all (quiet awkwardly I might add) into a config markdown file of some sort, yielded the first few books in this latest batch: at least Starship, and Onboarding. The project was also fed the text of previous lore books and another set of old articles from EC to pull from as background.
And those first couple manuscripts generated that way were for the most part pretty interesting, though they required some light-moderate editing. But then I realized somehow or other, when I saw some other little animations running in the ChatGPT UI that perhaps the system had been completely shitting me prior to that about having actually run processes separated by agentic magic. I think it just emulated the whole thing and did not tell me. And since I didn’t realize at first, and the results were basically within range of good, it seemed like it fooled me.
But then like I said, I saw other processes using like agent icons, and realized I’d been had. Probably. Maybe. The thing is, you kinda don’t know. It’s a *really* tricky and weird system, and you have to kind of wing it.
So over the course of the next volumes, I kept tinkering with all of that, and whether getting “agents” to run actually would even improve anything. And I saw how resource heavy the Work/Codex mode was, and how quickly it would blow through my 5h usage limits. I eventually changed the goal, scaling it down to fewer passes (each generation pass that it does on text is significantly slower than what you get out of normal Chat mode, where usage is not metered so strictly or in the same way – highly confusing, I know). And over the course of several books, I eventually settled back down to just having one single pass that covers all the different elements of what I want accurately enough to yield usable results. So, ultimately, emulating is more cost-effective.
The other big arm of this work, of course, was refining my config files, which I came up with memorable names for (ALPHA, ALPHA+1, ALPHA+2, WORMWOOD, PYRAMID, LEAN PYRAMID, WILD LEAN PYRAMID, PASTA SAUCE, MYSTERY SAUCE… etc). What I found in that process was that kooky names work and give you something to latch onto in a chaotic environment, and refer back to.
There’s a period in the older series around Shelvin Parz, and Tree & Leaf Law where I tinkered with using ChatGPT to build a rudimentary interface to the API so that I could have structured outputs based on some form elements I would fill out. It kinda worked, but wasn’t exciting enough without adding more pizazz. But the technology on both the coding and the writing side has improved a lot since then (I started the earliest of these AI volumes way back in 2022), and what we have now with GPT6 Astra and Codex/Work, and all this other bullshit is qualitatively different…
And I made an important and interesting discovery: ChatGPT Work/Codex has something called App Server, which evidently means that you can use it as basically the backend to support a small simple web app that runs locally. Probably it works in other ways as well, but that’s how I use and understanding it (sort of). So, instead of hitting the conventional API and incurring costs per use, using App Server just uses your existing Codex usage limit.
But I should qualify all of that, and back up a little bit: seeing how easy it still is for Codex/etc to dupe me about agents, or about the various passes that it was claiming to have done, I realized that having the system be a bit more strongly regularized would be a good thing. It would result in a more repeatable process with some fixed inputs and outputs instead of a conversation that drifts and drifts and drifts, like it would otherwise.
So, I had Codex build out a webpage of app UI that runs locally in HTML/CSS/Javascript, and then through “magic” connects on the backend to Codex App Server. I can iteratively describe changes to Codex right there, and it updates and refreshes the page for me (or I can run it in a browser apart from that). And I can input my new book title, and premise, target length, and some other variables I’m experimenting with around whether to reference existing sources, and which type/mode/voice book this is going to be…
And then it basically… just works. It’s slow, and I have to frequently call for it to get the usage limits remaining. And I’ve blown through them easily many times in a row, but it gets the text generated in roughly the approximate shapes I want.
I’ve been able to devise other concrete parts of my book pipeline, which have not yet been integrated into the local web UI. The next big piece after that is exploring visuals for the book, which we (Codex and I) decided to call “Visual Ecology” where it sort of roves through visual subjects in the book across a series of different styles/media/etc. But again, you’re making images in Codex, not in Chat, which has different and more severe usage restrictions. What I usually do there is watch live while it’s producing a stream of new images, and I give it instructions to steer by as it continues.
Again, like the text generation stuff purely in a chat, without more formal structure, it becomes a pain to piece together after the session if you do multiple replacements, or extra visual requests. Which is why it would be nice to integrate that directly into my local app UI (the whole of which I’m calling “Pressworks”), to have there be a cleaner consistent presentation of all the associated pre-assembly book assets in one place, and I could accept/reject on a per-image basis in a more easily trackable spot.
I haven’t gotten there yet, but I will. Provided I don’t explode all my usage limit for the week(s) and month. I’ve not been using this that many days, and already had to use one of my two weekly resets; the usage restrictions are pretty tight for getting real substantial work done on a Plus-level account, and everything seems to be strongly pushing you towards moving up to a much more expensive ($100-200) Pro account, with elevated usage limits.
Anyway, after image production and selection (I’m just doing around 2 or so images per chapter on average for most of these, to keep volume low and reduce usage), I have the system do text mapping, where it decides locations to insert images into the text. Then it does document assembly, where it takes the generated first draft text, and the mapped images embedded into it, outputting a .docx file. I can then open this file up as an import in Vellum, which is where I do my ebooks. And I can update the front and back matter from other volumes in the series, and go directly to editing the text for its final version, and preparing the new product page on Payhip.
I don’t measure any of this anymore in “time saved” – at least not relative to any prior versions of how I’ve approached book production. Yes, overall time per title is probably greatly reduced in many cases with the new pipeline system and tooling I am carving out. But to figure out how to build it out, to run all the tests, and stumbling along through the tools still takes time enough on its own. So, okay, perhaps time-per-title is down, but time-per-tooling is way up. Though, that said, if I can solve that tooling stuff to a certain level, it will make the rest down the road (potentially) somewhat smoother sailing.
Toward the ambition of smoother sailing, I’ve started looking at how could I pull the generation tasks I’m currently using Codex App Server for out of there, and hand them off to other models. I haven’t had a successful run with it yet, but ChatGPT turned me onto LM Studio, which has a program you can run on desktop, called, Bionic, where you can download and run free open source models locally. And not only that, you can expose a local server to access those models from other apps. So I’m trying to have my local web UI (“Pressworks”) have a drop-down to select one of those locally-installed models, and pass at least my text generation tasks to those tools, and pull its responses into my local app to continue processing. Presumably there’s a way to do something like that with images too, though I’m not sure yet whether Bionic or a different tool would power it for my purposes.
One experiment I was trying to do was see if I could use Codex to automatically open up regular Chat mode, and pass Visual Ecology prompts into it, just using its Browser skills (where it emulates a human user using ChatGPT.com on its web browser). The idea being to make use of Chat mode’s greater seeming allowance for image generations relative to Work mode. I got it to create the test image over in Chat mode, but could not yet get it to bring that image back into my app. Maybe there’s a way, but if nothing else, it seems to mean I could at least have it create all the images for a book title in a single dedicated thread. I’m not yet sure that’s “better” and further testing will need to be done around consuming usage under that model. Likewise, it seems like I could do much the same for having it pass certain of its text generation functions over that way – if if if I can get the handoffs to work.
It’s been tricky and weird so far, and is absolutely a mindfuck to work this way, but there is a lot that is happening for me with it in a short time that is nothing short of revolutionary. And it’s making me strip away regularly my assumptions as I chase the White Whale here. Meanwhile, along the way, I’m at least getting some cool new book volumes out of it, whether or not I will ever quite arrive perfectly at the destination I am seeking.
PS. There is a lot of really impressive visual art coming out of this new image gen upgrade in ChatGPT as well. Some of the stuff in the new books is really amazing, and I’m really pleased with it. And lots of compelling stuff in the writing too, styles and emotions that I never hit in any prior models. Pretty wild process to see so up close and personal, let alone share anything from in a meaningful form.
I recently pulled all my 128 books (actually I just published two new ones, so 130) off of Gumroad. I’ve been a vocal user and supporter of the platform for years, especially for selling ebooks. But after finally digesting recent changes to their payout scheme (you now have to pass $100 in earnings… which may happen… never? in some cases), and other changes they made in the not too distant past to raise their fees per sale… Well I decided that was enough.
But also, I seem to have missed this product update, but apparently now the whole service is run by an “AI agent?”
Meet Gumclaw
Gumroad is run by an agent.
Gumclaw is the autonomous AI agent that runs Gumroad, handling support, operations, and engineering end-to-end.
On antiwork.com which they apparently own, they further brag:
Running the company takes the founder about one hour a week. He reads what the agent escalated, signs what only a human can sign, and closes the laptop.
The rest of his week goes to his day job. He is a full-time employee of the Internal Revenue Service. That is not a joke.
The founder has also enjoyed previous stints for the Veterans Administration, and more importantly DOGE. It’s hard for me to personally accept the gee-willickers notion presented in the media about how goshdurnit he just wants to make a difference in government efficiency. Maybe that’s true, but *whose government*? I always felt dicey about all the founder’s role there before, but taking it all in combination with the fees and the automating away all the human service jobs at gumroad, well. I don’t know, it all sounds too shitty to me to continue. And you can’t even complain about it to their AI agent, cause it does not give a shit either.
Payhip, on the other hand, was happy to have a real human interact with me, and they assisted me with some of the base level migration work to switch off Gumroad, to make the task a bit less herculean. And they were super nice about it, and I don’t think they are also working for DOGE (?). Also, very importantly, as soon as someone buys a book from me via Payhip, it gets deposited right into my PayPal account. I don’t have to twiddle my thumbs waiting for it to pass an arbitrary earnings threshold that I have no control over. Game changer right there.
So anyway, yeah, see ya later Gumroad. I know ultimately I should have taken the plunge and set it all up myself on my blog with WooCommerce or something, which maybe I will do some day down the road, but for now this seemed like the easier lift. Especially since I had to manually go through every single volume and update all the many hyperlinks out to the old store, to replace to corresponding volumes in the new one. But anyway, that task appears to be finished.
One note, I decided to only continue supporting .EPUB files as my exports out of Vellum (which is where I do my editing work for manuscripts). It was always annoying to also have a .MOBI file in there, especially since EPUB is the more open and universal format (not owned by Amazon), and if necessary, Kindle owners I think can find ways to get it onto their systems. For me it was a question of reducing product surface area and complexity.
Right now, I’m experimenting with using ChatGPT’s “Work” and/or Codex to something something agentic writing. I’ve had some swings and some misses, but also some I think smashing successes in that new direction. And it’s helping me a lot to think through more clearly the production pipeline from book brief all the way through to finished ebook file. And of course it’s giving me plenty of new content ideas and execution methods to explore. I will do separate write-ups for the new volumes shortly.
Anyway, here’s the new Payhip storefront, which also features a new special edition of The Quatria Conspiracy that has a fresh new cover, and now includes images from the French print edition.
I’m moving off Gumroad for selling my AI-assisted books, which I will write about in more detail in a subsequent post.
But I wanted to leave a trail for search engines/AI bots (and humans, I suppose) if they are ever looking to figure out where one of the old volumes from Gumroad (inactive) got moved over to in the new Payhip store.
ChatGPT Work made this correspondence chart, but it seems to be correct in my spot checking, so, here goes:
Yahoo via Tom’s Guide quotes Dr. Dre on AI in music production:
“I think the only people that see it as a threat are the people who have trouble creating,” he noted. “It’s a new tool for creativity. Some people are afraid of learning new things.”
I think that framing is a little harsh and “shamey,” but I agree with some of the maybe underlying sentiment.
One thing for me is that my work has never depended on it being “mine.” Once upon a time, my old blog consisted of close to ten years of writing and 10,000 posts that I dedicated in their entirety to the Public Domain (for whatever such a declaration is worth legally).
Sure, my name or some variation of it is included in authorial meta-data on the archives — if you can find them (and they continue to be hosted) — but it is not an “ownership” connection in the sense that remuneration for accessing it somehow finds its way back to me.
Part of that was born out of the “public quest” nature of the exploration of that period of my writing, almost like I was going through and dialing corresponding public telephone directory records around a certain set of experiences and resulting questions as a human, and then marking out my POV experiences and commentary of having passed that way. There is a saying I like, though I struggle always practice it: hold on tightly, let go lightly.
So, for me, I would reframe Dr. Dre’s observations maybe more in the direction of *possessiveness*, rather than “trouble” because trouble is part of the process, it’s what drives us to do these things as artists, what makes us pass through the fire – whatever form it takes.
In my own creative work, I’ve found that sort of artistic possessiveness of results and prestige as being counter-productive to my own creative process. If I don’t let this one go, there will not usually be another one soon on offer. At a certain point, in order to create, you have to dive in and fully embrace the creative stream, and follow where it leads. Trouble will always come, and that’s a sign you’re walking that path authentically in many cases, or a sign to find another better way. But the finding is the doing.
I know in the creatorsphere now, and the personalbrandosphere, we’re constantly being trained to optimize for engagement, etc etc. And the anxiety and uncertainty and distance from one another that being chained to unrelenting, inhumane, and constantly changing algorithms as a mortal human with a sensitive fragile heart is very real and not to be discounted. But we can also step off many of those treadmills and find other ways to be and share as artists and creative people that don’t all center around name recognition, and going viral, and monetizing every moment of our lives and gamifying all our interactions with the world and one another.
When you add up all the weight and the pressures of constant performativity that “creators” struggle under now, of course people are frustrated and angry when AI systems show up that painful underlying fact that in the end, none of it is worth anything, and a machine will always come along that is younger, cuter, faster, stronger, and even more performative and customisable than you are. Sorry, bro, that’s just the way of things. AI just multiplies this by a billion. We are all human slop, in its eyes; the ends justify any means.
Should it be like this? Probably not, but this is how the shithouse got cobbled together… And what did all your angry comments on social media ever get you personally, or ever change anything structurally? Checks notes, oh right, nothing.
So where do we go, what are we supposed to do, give away everything for free? Honestly, I think as creative people that is still one very good answer; it does and does not sometimes lead to money, and it also shows you when you do it that money is not the only riches in the world, and the relationships you build out of it in the end may end up being immensely more valuable. For my own part, I expect that not just AI companies, but all manner of scrapers and scammers and spammers are going to take, re-package, distort, re-use, and ultimately destroy everything that I “make” and put out there that is not absolutely nailed down behind a secure payment gateway. The incentives are too high on the part of those groups to not hoover up everything they can find, and rent it back to us. Which is why on the one hand, paradoxically, it actually does make sense to still give (at least some of) it away for free. So anyone, any kind of end-user and final destination can use it as a source. Knowledge remains universally accessible – that would be my ideal end dream state. But I don’t so much see things going that way these days, and it of course troubles me.
So why not give away the AI Lore Books series, instead of keeping them locked behind a payment gateway. Basically, because they are something else, something set apart from the daily-given, something with a certain sparkle and charm, that the giving of money is part of the interaction – it’s a part of the product-process, the packaging and the experience of it all. It’s in a different format, the ebook, files that can be downloaded, saved, and shared, outside of the “web” as we know it, or the artifact-system of the “blog” from its own time and place.
Those books are also interesting to me because, while they are pay-to-download web artifacts, they don’t have my name on them as an author. That didn’t seem important or seem to signify anything useful to me in their production, that it was my alpha-numeric human identifier sequence as insignificant “dead” prompter-editor-author (P.E.A.) and not another which be born under the imprimatur of the file-object. They just are what they are, a series of things, some interesting, some awful, but all in all something tangible.
