These Books Do not Exist is an “artistic dataset” of curated, AI generated imagery. Using the FLUX.1-dev diffusion model, images were created of books both plausible and wholly speculative, exploring how the latent-space of the model represents their overall design and contents. It is one of the outcomes of a critically playful, systematic excavation of contemporary generative AI that I conducted over the course of 2024-25 – an extension of earlier work around ‘critical image synthesis‘. The subject matter is itself an extension of my ongoing interest concerning the nature of generative writing and text-image relations more generally. While this collection may be treated as a creative work in its own right, it has been conceptualised primarily as a catalogue of research materials, to be explored and interrogated as the viewer may wish. In the present febrile context concerning AI and its impacts on every level of publishing, there are no shortage of questions that may be asked concerning the included imagery.
These Books Do not Exist is due for publication later this month.