Sora is putting me in the generative multiverse.

I am wearing a neural band on my wrist to wave my arm and zoom in to take pictures of trees.
I am performing magic tricks in front of the New York Jets and turning cards into footballs.
I am lost in a book about changing narratives where I may be a character, or maybe not at all.

Some of these are semi-true, and in fact all of them are true. The Intertwixt Number 6 is here, and life is getting weirder every day.

My week started with reviewing Meta’s longer-battery-life Ray-Ban smart glasses, and it’s ended with field tests of the also-new, display-enabled and neural wristband-controlled Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. And in the middle, I signed up for the new Sora app made by OpenAI and started generating deepfakes of myself doing whatever I could dream of.

And throughout, I’ve been reading Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler.

I’ve been a traveler, through tech’s evolutions and graspings and budding shifts. I’m in the living test. My life’s being augmented, and overlaid, and my senses mapped. My outer self is being virtualized. And we’re all wondering where our sense of personal truth and identity is being preserved, if it is at all.

With a Neural Band on. I have glasses gestures around town.

If a glasses-wearing man

I’ll probably think about this week for a while, but I’ve found it particularly strange to be wandering around my town, living with glasses that let me conjure up little moments as I seem to be just a person, standing for some reason and fidgeting my fingers a bit, staring off a tiny bit. 

At home, my wife no longer knows if I’m talking to her, or to someone on my glasses, or if that someone is real or an AI personality I’m engaging. 

These glasses don’t work with my own prescription yet, so I’m wearing contact lenses to test them. And because I have such bad eyes that need progressive lenses that contacts can’t provide, I can’t read while wearing the contacts to test the glasses. It’s a Twilight Zone tradeoff that I willingly adopt because of course I want to live with these glasses and see what they’re like. It’s my life, my job. 

But these glasses, and the neural band in particular, feel like strange ambient wizardry when they work. Other times they feel oddly disconnected from the flow of my life. Contextual AI is Meta’s goal, as I said two Intertwixts ago. Right now these feel like the framework of an idea that still needs building out. Will Meta connect to apps and services on our phones fast enough, and fitness watches too? Google and Apple are coming in heavy.

I’m being swallowed by a fish in Sora. Or “I” am.

If an AI-generated me

And at night, in quiet moments, I’m asking Sora to conjure new 10-second generated videos of myself doing things. Magic tricks for the New York Jets. Flying down a fish’s mouth into another universe. Doing improv in a post-apocalyptic forest. Doing a AI-generated review for smartglasses.

The results pop up and I share them around. Some people don’t know they’re fake. Other people lol and move on. Others are bothered by all the AI slop spam. My kids think they’re funny. My wife is getting annoyed. I look sort of real, sometimes deadeyed, often fatter, weirdly convincing. 

To use the app, I scanned my face first: head up, down, side to side, I recited a few numbers. Feelings of Bladerunner. Or, setting up Apple Vision Pro realistic-looking Personas. Virtualizing myself has become a process I’ve gotten used to.

Sora can generate you, basically in any way you’d like as far as I can gather. Everything everywhere all at once, ten seconds at a time.

I can’t stop making slop of myself. It’s addictive. I find them oddly wonderful and terrible. I already wrote and staged a play on these concerns, about battling with generative AI versions of my own life versus the ones I want to tell, called Scott Stein’s Last Play. That battle is eternal, ongoing. My own personal narrative feels on the verge of being simulated. And in five years, or even a year, how much of me will be able to be iterated in any direction, like a multiverse of madness, thanks to all of these power-sucking AI magic tricks?

If on a winter’s night

I have old friends from college that I do a book club with on Google Meet, where we read fun challenging things and discuss them seasonally. The one this time was Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, a book I thought I read before. Or owned. But I couldn’t find my book, maybe I gave it away. I bought it again. And the book, as I read it, wasn’t what I remembered it to be.

This is actually the plot of If on a winter’s night, too, to a degree. A book that keeps changing. A journey of immersion meant for You, the second-person-narrated subject, who may not be you at all. Of course it’s not you. After all, I don’t even know who you are. But maybe I do. I mean, I can look at the subscriber list. I could guess. I could imagine who you are. Make an imagined memory in my head, like an AI-generated 10-second meme.

Calvino was also part of the Oulipo, a literary group I’ve been obsessed with for years. The “workshop for potential literature,” essentially, a “knitting circle” that would gather and explore new ways of algorithmically generating new types of literature. Like improv, or AI.

Winter’s night has parts that feel very adjacent to AI. It literally talks about computers being able to conjure or simulate books in the style of authors, or finishing fragments of text. This sounds familiar, no? It was written in 1979. What would Calvino think now?

And the book, it is a maze. You get lost in it. It keeps losing the thread, and so do you, the you that’s not you. Anything seems possible, in a text that’s paradoxically fixed in time to the page. But in my case, a Kindle generating text onto particles of e-ink. I trust the Kindle’s doing it right. Otherwise maybe I’m reading some other book, one that’s not Calvino at all.

It’s time to tangle, now. This uncertainty of truth, of narrative, a hunger and fear of possibility, these are the underthemes of our current lives. An unraveling. A wrestling. A sense of friction, between agency and loss of control. Where do I choose what to do, and what’s being chosen for me? Am I living a life guided by AI – in glasses, in generated solutions to suggested paths, like the muddy journey through a literary forest like Calvino, toyed with and also presented with ideas to inspire and frighten?

Other things I wrote this week:

So ends The Intertwixt, volume 6. Thanks for reading. I’ll have more thoughts next week, and as always, there’s always an ever-changing world to explore. I need to see One Battle After Another one of these days.

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