Zaibatsu Heavy Industries Q&A: A narrative technologies company.
Get to know your blogger.
Hi there! Yesterday’s article got a huge response and I’ve decided to give myself a much needed & well deserved day off with a fluff piece. Today I’m going to talk about my company, Zaibatsu Heavy Industries.
Z.H.I.
Q: What the hell is a “Zaibatsu”?
A: Zaibatsu, 財閥, were financial cliques whose industrial production capacity and financial vertical integration allowed them to dominate Japanese economy and politics from the Meiji period up to the end of WWII.
Q: What the hell is a “Heavy Industries”?
A: So “Zaibatsu Heavy Industries” is actually sort of an in-joke in the cyberpunk community. It’s a parody of evil globocorp style names like “Weyland-Yutani,” “Ares Macrotechnology,” and “OmniCorp.” Of course there’s the OG and very real “Mitsubishi Heavy Industries”. I was having trouble thinking of a name and after some research found that despite a lot of jokes about it, no one had actually registered an american company by that name.
Q: Isn’t “narrative technologies” just a buzzword?
A: I’m glad you asked, it IS a buzzword! Gold star for you 😄! More importantly, it’s a relatively new one that hasn’t really hit the mainstream yet. The group most involved with the term up to now has been the annual conference AIIDE (Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment), who are sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. They are practically ancient in terms of the AI-sphere, since the first conference was in ‘99!
AIIDE has a workshop called Intelligent Narrative Technologies (INT). Here’s a roundup of the state narrative tech research in 2017. Most of the papers address dynamic plot generation and comprehension for application in interactive narratives such as video games. There’s also a fair bit of natural language processing. I’m sure in the 5 intervening years and with the explosion of models like GPT-3 onto the scene, this year will have some exciting stuff.
You may have actually heard of AIIDE before- it’s the home of the annual Starcraft AI competition, which will merit an article of its own at some point.
Q: Ok cool, so it’s mouth jazz- what’s it mean to you?
A: I’ve always had a canned rant about how many cool experiences we are leaving on the table by not integrating technology and narrative further.
Why can’t a horror movie flicker the lights in your home?
Maybe you want to give advice to a character in your YA novel over text message and have them mention and act on it in the story?
Wouldn’t it be interesting if characters in contemporary stories changed what they were talking about in response to real world events?
I have a dream of a real life version of The Game (the Michael Douglas Film) that uses AI to compose dialogue and feeds it to gig workers who initiate story events with you on the street. I even wrote a short story about that one.
There are so many streams of data that we use to better sell people products, but so few we use to tell them better stories. With Zaibatsu, I’d like to change that.
Q: Ok? So what are you doing with “narrative technologies”.
A: Currently I’m developing a workflow for co-authoring and illustrating books with AI. Check out the children’s book demo, The Prince and the Pancake, as well the various articles I’ve written detailing the process on the blog.
Thru is my thru-hiking video game project. It’s currently backburnered, but I’m continuing to add code to create a world of computer agents that create emergent storytelling via their decisions in Oregon Trail-style situations on the PCT.
I have a few other projects in the works that I’m not quite ready to talk about yet, but rest assured you’ll be hearing about them in the coming months.
Q: What’s with the logo?
A: It’s actually my tattoo! Cho Banana is a fantastic artist and I couldn’t be happier with it. It’s been processed with a pixel-art-camera app and photoshopped to remove background. You can actually still see some of the lines from my arm hair in there if you look closely.
Q: Ok… but what is the tattoo depicting?
A: OH! Hm. I guess that is what you’d actually be asking, isn’t it? The tattoo was the concept piece for a sleeve that I’m getting inked in september. It’s inspired by Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red Blue and Yellow. Mondrian is my favorite artist of all time, and I wanted to find a way to pay homage to him while highlighting awesome tattoo artists- so I decided to replace his primary colors with their art, and treat his lines as a frame.
Conclusion
That’s my brief “get to know you” RE: Zaibatsu Heavy Industries. I hope you’re as curious about narrative tech as I am, and enjoyed getting to know your blogger a little bit better :)