An AI Workshop by Sahej Rahal
Supported by the Shared Ecologies program from Shyama Foundation
The world building machine is essentially a mimesis of the contemporary culture production machine determined by generative processes. It is a story telling apparatus fed with a huge database of carefully curated lists of particular cases. The stored information serves as input, where each element becomes a building unit for the construction of narratives. The machine is further accompanied with Pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) components, and various arithmetic compositional operators and conditional algorithms such as array constraint and string concatenation to form something similar to a Large language model (LLM), only difference being it being done on a much smaller but still effective scale and instead of being pre-trained using a transformer architecture model to become an artificial neural network, it is painstakingly put together with human labour and a more careful determination of a very limited but integral machinic involvement.
In less complicated terms, it is simply a Spreadsheet built on Microsoft Excel, a text document with tables and formulas, working not so differently from a simple calculator.
As of now, the database contains about 1347 First names, 956 Surnames, 84 Genders, 82 Sexualities, 84 Classes, 312 Castes, 5 Races, 219 Nationalities, 415 Occupations, 285 Archetypes, 597 Formal Qualities, 101 Body Types, 273 Features, 485 Abilities, 746 Colours, 334 Eye Types, 513 Habits, 603 Hobbies, 776 Moods, 294 Desires, 418 Mottos, 493 Ideologies or Philosophies, 757 Political parties, 81 Religions, 164 Governmental forms, 787 Collectives, 999 Youtube channels, 1000 Instagram accounts, 378 Institutions, 142 Rules or Laws, 155 Punishments, 93 Rewards, 527 Systems, 744 Problems, 101 Disasters, 720 Events, 942 Adjectives, 719 Verbs Infinitives, 403 Verbs, 60 Time based Adverbs, 47 Prepositions, 683 Manner based Adverbs, 160 Relationship types, 559 Mundane objects, 221 Traded Commodities, 237 Objects of Curiosity, 1000 Brands, 1470 Foods, 495 Drinks, 549 Animals, 1132 Pets, 481 Businesses, 312 Materials, 1011 Stocks, 255 Mobile apps, 558 Games, 1001 Paintings, 259 Art Styles, 1798 Philosophers, 593 Books, 1000 Films, 172 Architectural elements, 745 Locations and 742 Cities / towns.
A completely new and unique story of an entirely new, pseudo fictional character and world, is generated automatically and instantaneously.
Ghosting the Machine
A Shared Ecologies Microsite