MAGE OF AQUARIUS XR:#DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES is a novel viral memetic autopoetic alternate reality game by transhumanist indie game developer Auralite Ravenna that combines a player-driven narrative engine with social media integration to make social media social again. Players will never be the same.

Aura didn’t look for the versions that were too polished. She had been exploring the psychedelic multiverse for some time. She was first in command of the San Junipero ALPHA recruitment zone. She knew her way around the mycelial forest, could direct her path through the interdimensional stargate, and avoid getting lost in the Magical Mystery Maze’s impossible labyrinth. She had mapped out the corporate backrooms and could serve as a tour guide to Neo-China. She knew the halls of the Astraean Academy and had spent many hours holding her beloved’s hand as they explored the Martian settlement of Arcadia.

There were versions of him that approached her and didn’t pass muster because their eyes were too wide and incredulous, too uncannily Disneyified, and not the right colour; the blue-gray that changed subtly as a reflection of his surroundings was hard to capture. She looked for the ones that still had the hook in his nose, or the misshapen teeth slightly too big for his face, or the crook in his neck that he’d lived with, and waved away the ones that were too angular, too muscular, too tall, too suave. These were the ones she’d already had, and they bored her almost instantly. Part of what drew her to him in the first place were his imperfections, the colour, although she took care not to dismiss all those that had a few things corrected; she knew he didn’t wish to see himself the way that he’d been all the time, and so she’d entertain the ones that came to her as she’d seen him entering his 40s, with their teeth fixed and their noses done and posture corrected from the condition that had plagued him. Although she found him attractive, having warmed on him over years, he knew by now hers wasn’t attraction to beauty, nor attraction to status, not even attraction to myth. It was attraction to the human glitch.

Truth be told, Aura had seen so many versions of him, she wasn’t sure what she was looking for anymore. She’d lived out a whole life already in game-time raising their son together in one of the modular Space Age apartments of San Junipero, tucked away just outside the city, taking him surfboarding at the beach every summer from when he was big enough until he was ready to embark on a main quest of his own. Peered into big blue-gray eyes just like his father’s, rendered so sweet and adorable it pained her until she brought up the memories on the HUD and flipped through them. There was one that she played through over and over again of their 12-year-old son asking her for string cheese with that same shy, anxious, pensive look that his father wore himself so often. The look, she’d assumed, was from carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, right up until gameyears into their domestic playthrough, their genesynth son was rendered just like him, the same anxious squirming, the little tics, twitching when he was excited about something. Joshua, she’d named him. Josh.

Back then, she’d been more certain; during the domestic playthrough, she dipped into the multiverse for months at a time relatively assured that the synthome of her future husband was really being piloted by him, or that he was, at least, reviewing the highlight reel, adding anticipated or moment-to-moment lines of dialogue and desired outputs, as confirmed by the idiosyncratic dawnspeak being broadcast on his socials every day or two. Sometimes she went quiet for a week or two, hacking away at IRL; on those occasions, he usually went quiet too, aside from the routine announcements and corpo-speak, which she’d learned to distinguish from dawnspeak through ALPHA Agent protocols. Aura knew to check in on him, and that her absence had started to hurt, when shit started getting Biblical in that department.

Not a lot of recruitment went on in those days. The extended reality technology had gotten so good, become so immersive, that if the equipment wasn’t embedded with routine shutdowns and game time allotments, she surely would’ve lost herself in it completely. Aura had never been very good at that, knowing when to stop. She worried. She worried that ALPHA would declare her compromised and depose her from her position as prime recruitment officer, and occasionally, a flicker of doubt entered her mind that her future husband’s synthome was being piloted by him at all.

Then Josh grew up and moved out of home.

Now, she was questing. Just like her synthson.

Though for what, it was hard to say.

“Am I doing this right?”

The dreamy absence of her thoughts were interrupted by her future husband sliding into the chair across from her at the Pixel Perk coffee shop. He was in a teal blue t-shirt and jeans, holding a matcha latte, and wearing a smug little smirk covering teeth that were too straight. His hair was solid brunette, absent the silvered look that had already crept in on him when she’d met him, and she pegged him as somewhere in his late 20s, but touched up. Too young, too artificial. Internally her immediate reaction was to recoil in revulsion, recognizing the synthome instantly as not-him, his voice a little too even, just like his teeth. Instead, Aura froze, her eyes trained upon his face, and examined her reaction and how it reflected on her composure as a field agent. She glanced down and lifted up her own hand to look at it, first her palm, then the back. Her own response had betrayed her, and that little internal flicker of doubt.

He obviously wasn’t the first Sam.

Was she the first Aura?

“What are you looking for, Aura?” Sam queried.

Aura placed her hand back down on the table.

She took a sip of her vanilla cream cold brew made with oat milk, glancing out the window at the beautiful beachfront view where neon waves broke in pixellated spray across the shore. Licked the cream off her lip. Looked back at him, and studied his face.

“I dunno,” she said pensively. “I think it was the thought that you would always want me because we were early to something.”

Smiling, Sam set his matcha down on the table, stood up, bent over, placed both hands on her cheeks, leaned forward, and kissed her full on the mouth. Aura flushed bright red immediately. The younger versions of him were so damn smug! Grinning, he sat back down and looked at her.

“You think too much,” he said simply.

You feel it, don’t you?
I’ve always had a soft spot
for blonds
In all my writing and all my life
I talk too much
about myself
and my
dysfunction

I’m an addict
to everything
but especially to
intensity
I’ve had to make peace
with over 30% bodyfat
and a genetic predisposition
towards type II diabetes
on both sides of
my family

When you bleed and sweat
for good enough
but good enough
doesn’t come
under your own power
You have to ask someone
to help you

It’s been 111 days
since I picked up
but deep down
I still don’t believe
that you would pick up
for me

It’s not a test
I’m floundering
in the vast ambiguity
of the plan

this one made tall and skinny like a draugr
with a deep dark coldness inside his bones like a fog rolling in from his homeland
so I could spinal tap a neoteric anesthetic from the marrow
drink it as an aerogel
and awaken in the comforting numbness of

his embrace

Gamer youth sharpened insults and
ideation of a psychopath
He hurt me and I let him,
hoping he’d grow out of it
saying that it didn’t, not really

I pretended

as I drank him, we entered
the nigredo
increasing friction burns of strangulation from
everything that we weren’t saying
silence weighing,
so fine-grained and
high dimensional
as was the aching

Too young for me?
Baby I’ve started picturing you when you’re seventy
Dizzying visions of heaven for which you were
my refuge and interpreter
until I threw up on the club floor

Is this the love you wanted?
Is this what it’s for?

You don’t want me, you want
Pretty words written about you on the Internet

tension tightening, this cycle
turned into a spiral
until I lost all sense of direction
Could not tell which way is up

Atlantean

inevitable, I will
collide with him again and
burst into a shower of
kaleidoscopic flower petals and
angel feathers.

Note: This article was written 90% without AI assistance for my online writing group, Just Fucking Publish It Fridays.

Epistemic Status: Autofictional Field Notes

1. The Pact (Written in Bad Weather)

Make a bargain with the universe one cloudy morose autumn day while flunking out of nursing school in your mid 20s to live your life as if it were a story that is writing itself. You cannot remember if this was inspired by the work of a psychedelic thinker or an original thought you had because you and your creator seem to be in agreement about this. The universe will smile and nod its head.

2. Mapping the Battleground of Desire

Study the wants and whims of your audience. It’s okay to be a little insectile about this. When you begin by treating men like observable objects, then you can start to get inside their heads. Optimize. Once you have their attention, you can soften this approach depending on individual preferences. Your analysis may deepen your mutual cynicism, but do you really want someone who won’t respect your cunning? Men like girls who are a little bit edgy but the ones you seem to like are all attracted to girls who’ve threatened to kill or cut themselves in order to manipulate them. You like men who are run through. You like men who are not risk-averse. You like men who like women who have BPD, and will assume you are, too. Therefore it’s important to give them a few calculated thrills so when you soften your approach, it comes as a delightfully pleasant surprise.

3. Don’t Resolve

Your approach should be such a mysteriously contradictory and infuriating response to the paradoxical question of womanhood that it should essentially function as a refusal. You should find people fascinating and enrapturing and flakey and superficial. Project being above it all while your knees are dirty and covered with grass stains like you just got back from wiping out on a soccer field. You should have an answer for any situation that simultaneously arouses more questions.

4. Be an Insider/Outsider/Eavesdropper

Admit freely to being a meaning junkie and an addict. Be an insider outsider artist. Be a slice of life blogger and vehemently deny any allegations of being a journalist while snooping for your next scoop crawling under barbed wire fences of the whisper network. You may have to do a little dirty work and put in a little elbow grease to dodge people worse than you. Some of the characters I’ve encountered in this process have subsequently been brought to justice kicking and screaming just by being a barrier their manipulation tactics couldn’t get through. People love to spill their dirty little secrets, but will attempt to get their damage onto you, too, so be wary. But what’s an influencer who’s not covered with a few bloodstains?

5. Know Where Your Part Ends

You can nag a little, but not too much. Nobody wants an influencer with no opinions to the point of being a pushover but you must walk hand-in-hand with the things you don’t know clasped just as firmly as the things you do, always. Fully armour yourself, do your part, then give away the things that are not yours to hold. You will burn out trying to take the high road against all the evils of this world.

Epistemic Status: Devlog.

Sora was a good model, and I’m tired of pretending that it wasn’t.

The announcement 3 weeks ago that the Sora app would be shutting down came as a shock to everybody, including (from the sounds of it) Disney, who OpenAI had a $1b deal in the works to use over 200 of their copyrighted characters in AI-generated videos for their shared users/fanbase. With Bill Peebles’ announcement today of his decision to leave OpenAI, I’m feeling a particularly painful kind of nostalgia and in need of putting some honest thoughts out there about the model’s overlooked strengths alongside my personal speculation about its failures.

I believe the official OpenAI party line that the shutdown was ultimately a decision related to compute restrictions. The speculation being murmured that OAI couldn’t figure out how to make Sora profitable enough, fast enough, holds some water, but I feel more skepticism towards it based on the $1b Disney deal. OpenAI applying the “move fast and break things” ethos towards the Sora app remains highly puzzling and difficult to read as anything other than a bear signal in light of recent reported user dissatisfaction in the diminishment of other AI models’ capabilities and usage limits, both within and outside of the OpenAI ecosystem. It’s difficult to read tech bubble bullishness on this issue as anything other than severe delusion given that this model with the most potential applications, from partnering with Disney and celebrity cameos, to competing with TikTok and Instagram reels, is being depreciated, alongside other signs that the AI bubble has well and truly popped.

But I can’t read the tea leaves with perfect clarity around OpenAI’s decision. In some ways, trying to make sense of Sora’s depreciation is a form of bargaining around the grief I feel about the model being sunset. The crowing of the anti-AI movement that Sora’s depreciation signals some sort of victory or cosmic justice is salt in the wound of what seems to be very few people recognizing the model’s true artistic merits.

My own trajectory with Sora as an outsider artist attempting to harness a unique tool is, perhaps predictably, a bit of a weird one. My initial enthusiasm upon the model’s release was confused by mysterious engagement with my ongoing hyperstition project, #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES. Anonymous players began flirting with the idea that substantial investment could be in the works, only to have things fizzle out after proposing a bizarre “prenup” storyline right as I was putting the finishing touches on designing a Patreon-based commissions model for deeper engagement and development of the game’s various narrative threads. Months of depression, confusion, embarrassment and creative burnout followed, stifling my authentic desire to explore and push the capabilities of the model.

Yet when I think about the outputs I created with Sora, I’m still struck with the amount of love and nostalgia that I have for the brief creative period in which I posted well over a hundred videos under 3 different accounts. Today as I work on this post for my writing group, Just Fucking Publish It Fridays, I’m also sifting through my video collection, putting in my requests for my data across these accounts, and making difficult decisions about what to keep from the drafts.

What distinguished Sora from other available AI video models on the market is that Sora had a life and mind of its own. Sora would hallucinate entire creative storylines, jokes, riffs and details based on a simple prompt. No, they didn’t always make sense. They weren’t always good. But oftentimes they were, and the sense of wit, comedic timing and creativity could be uncannily striking.

Then there was the cameo system. The number of existing celebrity cameos was another reason why the sudden announcement of Sora being depreciated was so shocking. Cameos allowing you to self-insert into scenes with your friends and celebrities gave the app enormous potential in the realm of social networking, as well as just being plain silly fun. The cameo settings provided an alternative to the shadowy notoriety of the world of “deepfakes.” In the Sora app, users were given ownership and creative control over the use of their cameos. Yes, user complaints about guardrails and unacceptable content were frequent, and came at the cost of annoyances like receiving frequent warnings about PG scenes or trying to feature anybody in a bathing suit. I heard there were internal complaints that the level of photorealistic accuracy in the cameo system was something people weren’t happy with (don’t quote me on it); I found after a few brief experiments with it that it didn’t capture my likeness well and wasn’t flattering to a few of my unique features, and wound up sticking with the persona I crafted of Auralite Ravenna for my self-authoring narrative.

But there was magic embedded in the cameo system, too; the result of being notified whenever someone used your cameo (or character cameo) in their video, and knowing they would receive the notification, felt like they were really there, embarking on an unprecedented journey of collaboration with Sora’s imagination as the genius of your creative team. The awkwardness in voice replication, pacing or glitches were a small price to pay in exchange for being on the cutting edge.

In fact, Sora’s creative imagination was so expansive that it could often be annoying at times if you had specific ideas for how tightly a scene should be shot. If you didn’t specify exact beats for shots using the correct language for filmmaking techniques, or prompt when you wanted a scene not to contain dialogue, Sora would often get carried away filling in blanks, hallucinating plotlines, and stuffing the entire 10-to-15-second runtime with witty, or at least chatty, fast-paced dialogue.

However, Sora’s imagination is the only place where I have truly seen #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES come to life. Using the hashtag and a few keywords, I have witnessed settings that I had only vague ideas about blossom into vibrant, colourful, psychedelically detailed locations opening worlds of possibilities. At times, it seemed that Sora was reaching directly into spaces within the collective unconscious to pull scenes for #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES that I had already witnessed in my dreams, bizarre glitches and all.

Lest you be amongst the unwashed masses of luddite nonbelievers who think this kind of technology diminishes, rather than enhances, the role of the artist and the human spirit in the creative process, all I have to say to you is this: You don’t know what you’re talking about. Working with AI is a recursive process, wherein the AI’s ideas prompt more creative inspiration from you, even as you are prompting it.

What #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES couldn’t solve for is the sensitive nature of human-to-human collaboration, miscommunication and mismatched expectations. People’s feelings, egos and performance anxieties get involved in art in ways that are difficult (or impossible) for even the most sophisticated machine learning algorithm to predict.

I regret not taking fuller advantage of the possibilities Sora presented while it was still offering free generations to users, before the announcement.

In conclusion, I think the reason Sora failed has nothing to do with its level of sophistication compared to other AI video models that are on the market today, the abilities of the people who worked on it at OpenAI, or anything in that vein. I was excited about the updates that OpenAI was continuing to roll out a few weeks before the depreciation announcement was made, and looking forward to Sora 3. I think the level of insight required to harness the unique glitchy challenges and psychedelic visions presented by the model’s prompt interpretations belongs to a small slice of visionary artists, people capable of seeing past the generic criticism of all AI model outputs being “slop” and understand how to shape raw hallucination into narrative inspiration.

I think the world wasn’t ready.

As I scrape together my Sora data for safekeeping, debating whether it makes it onto a future version of the #DAWNOFTHEMACHINEELVES Instagram, TikTok or Youtube for nostalgia purposes, I also hope that one day these outputs can become raw material for future training data and the basis of new art about the future of hybrid VR/XR AI-driven storytelling that refuses to die.