Wait, what is this?

Infinite Infinite Jest is an AI-powered art project. The main page displays prose generated by a state-of-the-art machine learning model (Open AI's GPT-3) primed to generate original prose imitating David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

Part of each sequence of several paragraphs generated by the model is fed back into it as the prompt for the next original chunk of machine-generated prose.

The process repeats. The result is Entertainment.

Why?

I am fascinated by generative AI models, and a fan of David Foster Wallace's work.

A recurrent theme in Wallace’s fiction is the way in which entertainment becomes addictive in the context of modern human life, which tends to lack structure, meaning, and connection. The result is a rat race, a numbness, a state of constant distraction from meaninglessness. The poetic and beautiful prose of Infinite Jest functions as an entertaining distraction from a bleak view of the world, and I wondered if Wallace’s creation could be used as the spark to ignite new artistic works. Wallace's prose embodies some aspects of the millennial condition: stuttering, self-conscious, and conscious of the limits of language and communication.

I was curious to see if a state-of-the-art machine-learning model could capture these same traits, and if, by allowing this new, alien intelligence to immerse itself in the mind of Wallace, whether it would generate new art that was at once both an entertaining work of literature, but also could illuminate something of Wallace’s world.

The AI starts to train itself using a human voice and then its own voice. Or is it the AI training us to hear it, in a voice we are used to? It is an experiment in the boundary between human and artificial intelligence.

[Note: The last three paragraphs were generated by AI, based on the preceding text on this page.]

Who are you?

GPT-3 by OpenAI

Rafal Jakubanis (rafajak@gmail.com) - concept, machine learning (ie. convincing GPT-3 to do the thing)

Mateusz Zaręba (mateuszzareba@protonmail.com) - front-end engineering