Embracing AI: A Creative Pivot

In March of 2023, I took a significant turn away from my usual novel and screenwriting projects to immerse myself in the world of AI. Followers from the past year will recall my deep dive into this burgeoning technology. Despite initial skepticism, I was ready for a change and fully embraced AI.

Admittedly, I'm somewhat disappointed for not accomplishing more writing during these ten months of AI exploration. It was a deliberate choice, one I don't regret. Why? This journey has equipped me with invaluable insights, streamlining my story development and writing process more than ever before. It's also opened doors to diverse storytelling formats beyond traditional books or screenplays, my mainstay for over two decades.

Reflecting on my journey, I acknowledge my role in not reaching a wider audience. I've often sidestepped advice, pursuing story ideas perhaps too avant-garde for their time. My penchant for complex anthologies or multi-decade-spanning epics has been a hallmark, yet simpler stories often faced feedback that dampened my enthusiasm.

The truth is, the main obstacle to my writing goals has been, more often than not, myself. There's a certain comfort in avoiding the pressures of success, in continually creating new material without the rigorous public scrutiny I once endured.

Since 2012, my focus has been on publishing books and collaborating on screenplays. This decade-long process has been fulfilling. Last summer, a new collaborative screenplay emerged, based on a TV series I created. It's this series I'm preparing to pitch this year. Originally, I planned to pitch four TV series, but that never materialized for various reasons.

Now, my plans have evolved. From the original four, only two remain. The other two? They're taking new shapes, thanks to AI. One is morphing into a two-part illustrated novel series, the other into a digital comic, eventually culminating in a graphic novel.

If 2023 was the year of the AI pivot where I learned all that I could about the tech, 2024 is the year of implementing that knowledge. The illustrated novel and graphic novel projects are ambitious, with uncertain timelines, especially as I juggle pitching TV series and writing new stories. Last year's singular project focus has left me eager to leverage AI in crafting stories from the ground up.

AI has its critics, some outright rejecting its role in the creative process or questioning the authenticity of AI-assisted writers. I see this as fear and ignorance. The stories I craft, AI-assisted or not, remain fundamentally mine. AI simply offers efficiency and new dimensions, like imagery.

My fascination with interactive storytelling goes back to childhood "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Cinemas have experimented with immersive experiences like "Smell-O-Vision," "InterFilm," and haptic seats that sync with on-screen action. We're inching closer to technologies like Star Trek's Holodeck and lightweight Augmented Reality devices, offering fully immersive, customizable experiences. Gaming is already pioneering this narrative freedom.

I've always considered myself a worldbuilder first. This mindset might explain my gravitation towards intricate, fictional universes under extreme conditions. Perhaps in another life, I would have been a game developer. And who knows? That might still be in the cards. As I contemplate diving into interactive story creation, I anticipate a deep dive into game development research.

This newfound realm of possibilities is a direct result of my ten-month AI exploration. Had I not ventured down this path, I'd still be fixated on the four original TV series and a novel concept that has been gathering dust for five years. Not now. Now with the help of AI, I'm playing biodigital jazz, man.

Goals for 2024

This Thursday is a big day for me – the illustrated version of "Michaelmas" is hitting the shelves. It's been a wild ten months, diving deep into the world of AI and AI Art. I've been watching, amazed, as folks churn out these incredible AI images online. I've even posted a few of my own creations over the past ten months. It's kind of crazy, how so many of those creators are getting paid by X/Twitter for their posts, thanks to their Blue Check status. 

Me? I've thought about it a good bit. I'm still plugging away on the platform, despite all the drama there the past year plus. Sure, I've thought about shelling out for that Blue Check. Maybe then my tweets wouldn't feel like they're getting lost in the void. But there's this nagging part of me that's not quite on board with some of the stuff Elon Musk says – some of it really doesn't sit right with me. Yet, if I started boycotting every product whose CEO I disagree with, I'd probably have to go live in the woods.

In the meantime, I'm pivoting to a few other projects that have been on the back burner. I've been so caught up in the constant stream of new AI info that my writing has taken a bit of a backseat. But no more. This year, I'm diving back in.

Here's what's on my plate for 2024:

A Graphic Novel – or at least, a series of digital comic episodes that'll add up to one. I've played around with enough AI art tools that I believe I can pull this off. Fingers crossed because this is something I have always wanted to do. 

Pitching a pre-AI TV series – kind of a last hurrah before I start implementing AI as an assistant in the majority of my storytelling work.

Keeping up with AI Video tech – so I'm ready to jump in once it's good enough for TV or movie material. There are some pretty amazing shorts out there, but we're not quite at full-length quality yet. I anticipate that by the summer we may be able to get up to 10-20 seconds of stable video that most people will not know is AI and it will change everything about entertainment. 

Getting back to the writing grind – I've got a bunch of AI-assisted script ideas that have been marinating over the past year, and it's time to get them on paper.

Continuing my AI education – the more I know, the better I'll be at weaving it into my work and maybe even running my own show someday.

It's a lot, but hey, who knows what this year will bring? I'm setting my sights high – higher than ever before. Maybe it's time to bite the bullet and get that Blue Check after all. If I do, it'll be because I'm ready to hit the ground running, monetizing my work from day one.

Here's to a year of big tech, big politics, and even bigger goals. Let's see what we can make happen, shall we?

Illustrated Michaelmas: A Journey to Incorporate AI Generated Images (Pre-order Now/ Available 1/18/24)

When Open AI announced that they were going to incorporate Dall-E 3 into ChatGPT-4 back in late September, I was in the process of learning about Midjourney. I had seen several people use Midjourney to create images for Graphic Novels and I saw how I could do the same. The thought of having ChatGPT-4 and a solid image generator like Dall-E 3 had me rethink things and roll with Open AI. 

I didn't get access until the second week in October, but once I did I was in love. Like Midjourney, I was receiving four images at a time. You could have ChatGPT-4 help you create the prompt or provide it with the exact prompt you wanted it to send to Dall-E3. I knew within the first week that it was all I would need to start adding images to my written work. 

Within two weeks I was cranking out all kinds of images and I felt supercharged just like when I first started using ChatGPT-4 in Spring. However, by the end of October, Open AI started messing around with things. The next thing I knew I was no longer able to use seeds to try and maintain consistency and they had reduced the image output from four images to one. They had kneecapped me literally as I was starting work on creating images for Michaelmas. 

I felt betrayed and let them know about it. I was still able to create some images but now it was a trickle and the capped messages meant that once I started being able to create the images I needed I had to wait a few hours before I could start creating more images. 

Open AI then decided to do another update to their models before making things right with Dall-E 3. We got the GPTs, which are really cool but even to this day you can only get one image at a time with the main model. You can use the Dall-E 3 GPT that they released which provides you two images at a time, but now this new ChatGPT-4 Turbo model is not quite as intuitive as the older model. It often makes you explain things more than once to get "Turbo" to do what in the past only took one try. And the message cap is even lower now because everyone thinks they are going to create a money-making GPT. So much so that Open AI had to cut off new registrations because they were stressing the servers. 

Yet, I kept at it with Open AI even though I was only receiving one or two images at a time and all the other frustrations. Then they fired Sam and then rehired him during a crazy weekend which made me question my decision to roll with Open AI to create my artwork. Thank goodness for Microsoft Copilot, which over the past few weeks has become a reliable fallback option to the unstable chaotic mess going on with Open AI. This is a bit ironic considering Copilot is ChatGPT-4 Turbo with Dall-E 3 and provides four images at a time just like Open AI did when they first released that model in October. 

Two things suck about creating with Copilot: You can only get the images in square format, and I need them in portrait format. Also, you cannot receive Seeds or Gen Ids for the images you create. This makes it more difficult to create consistent characters. 

Why did I mention all of that, because all of that crap has slowed down my work on creating images to a crawl over the past month and a half. Had Open AI not messed around with a good thing I would be further ahead of where I am now and may have been able to release the illustrated version of Michaelmas before the new year and possibly make some money during the holiday season. 

Do I wish I had stuck with Midjourney or switched to a different AI Generator like Leonardo AI instead of rolling with Open AI through the chaos of the past few months? It's not like people are begging for new material from me like I'm George R. R. Martin, but I would like to move on to working on my first Graphic Novel once I have released the Illustrated version of Michaelmas. Will I stick with Dall-E 3 as my main image generator beyond Michaelmas? I am weighing up my options, and there are a number of them. 

I am grateful for what I have learned this year about Gen AI. Though I have dropped the ball on my writing to do so. My reasoning was that once I incorporate AI into my workflow I can write at least twice as much as I had been able to before my introduction to Gen AI. Hopefully, that will be true but I need to get back into the flow.

Over the past few years, I have been setting these deadlines to achieve certain goals and I have been falling short far too often. The three TV Series I had been working on to pitch are a perfect example. That kept getting dragged out until this Spring when the WGA went on strike and I decided to focus on Gen AI to transform those stories into graphic novels. Maybe the goals I am setting are too unrealistic. I've always been self-motivated to create so I can't complain about not having fans hounding me for my next story. Who knows what that pressure would do to me anyway. 

While it kills me to not have all of the images ready to go before Christmas, I do have a load of other images that I want to start sharing. Most of September and October were spent learning about Midjourney and Dall-E 3 by creating all kinds of different images. I wanted to understand how these images were created and learn the different styles I could use. While I settled on a more historical look for the images I also wanted to experiment and made an effort to avoid focusing on Michaelmas images until November. By that point, Dall-E 3 was only doing one image at a time and I was fuming mad over that. And then literally the weekend before I was to start on Michaelmas images Dall-E 3 decided to again change a major part of how users communicate with it, removing the ability to use parameters like seeds, which threw me into a tizzy. So from the very moment I wanted to start creating Michaelmas images with Dall-E 3 all my research went out the window. 

Eventually, they got their act together after I lost a week plus because of the Gen ID implementation nonsense, where you could only use Gen IDs instead of Seeds. I love Open AI but they are frustrating as hell sometimes. We are all trying to learn how to use these awesome tools they have created and then they go and change it every other week in ways that are beyond frustrating. 

That said, it's amazing how lifelike images have become. Dall-E 3 is okay with lifelike close-ups whereas Midjourney, Adobe Firefly 2, Leonardo, and others are actually a bit better. Since the images I am creating are meant to look like they were taken back in the day I am more concerned with prompt adherence than lifelike images. Dall-E 3 excels at a lot of things that others don't come close to. 

The image at the top of this page was one of the first Michaelmas-themed images I created. At the time, colorful paintings similar to those from that period really appealed to me. For the first few weeks, I was creating similar images with loads of color that looked like they could have been hanging in a museum. 

If you want to create amazing images using AI, I would strongly advise following people on Twitter/X who constantly upload images and the Prompts they use to create them. There is so much to learn there. I have gone through and bookmarked thousands of tweets and made documents based on those that I really like. Much of the work I have done over the past few months was inspired by what others were doing. And there are some amazing AI Artists out there and you can learn a hell of a lot by simply following them and what they do. 

It has taken the better part of a year to get comfortable working with AI. I am nowhere near where I want to be but I am further along than most. The new year will be interesting. I definitely feel I have begun to adapt to this new world we are entering, which was one of the reasons I invested so much time into learning about everything I could about AI over the past nine months. 

As far as Michaelmas, I have gone ahead and set a release date of January 18th for the Illustrated version. Which gives me one month to finish things up. While I had hoped to have it ready in time for Christmas, you can go ahead and preorder your digital copy on Amazon. Amazon.com: Michaelmas (Illustrated Edition) eBook : Pitters, Aaron 

The paperback version will also be available on the 18th as well. If they allow me to do a preorder I will provide that link as well. Keep an eye out for more Michaelmas-themed and non-Michaelmas images between now and then as I want to start sharing more of my AI-assisted work over the next few weeks. Here is an example of another Michaelmas-themed image that will not be in the book. 

2024 will undoubtedly be a memorable year for a lot of reasons. I am looking forward to the new year and I can't wait to show you even more of what I've been working on. Until then, I hope you all have a Happy Holidays, a Merry Christmas, and a Happy And Healthy New Year. Thanks for reading!