(By Maxwell Cohen)
The Little Martians are a seed species. They descend on planets and on moons, unaffected by radiation, volcanic heat, or the icy winds of Enceladus. They are not takers, they do not seek to remove resources from their environs. No, they are instead givers. Cataloguers, is perhaps more accurate verbiage. The Little Martians, possessing a collective consciousness far above our mere human capacity to comprehend, aim ultimately to remember everything. Within their minds exists a shared realm called the Imaginarium. In this metaphysical arena, among other things, is stored the entirety of human history in all its infinite combinations. Some say that our own human experience is but a single continuous cranial concoction within the Imaginarium, this place where anything is possible and where everything exists.
Such is the story of the Little Martians as dreamt-up by Vanessa Rosa, she a street-artist-cum-AI-savant who sees the future of AI as clearly as her Little Martians see every future, every past, every point in between. Starting as a series of little clay figurines molded in the shape of alien heads (and given out to friends), then turned into an NFT collection, the grandest evolution of the Little Martians story is now finally upon us: A peerless “collaborative storytelling” experiment.
Which is the core concept of Rosa’s kojii.ai model, aptly called Little Martians.
By this point, Rosa has already developed the Little Martians into fully-fleshed-out characters, with names —Cabloclus Multianimus, Xenanthro Lumis, Nebulana— and robust backstories, even their own unique patterns of speech. Thanks to recent AI innovations, we can literally converse with the Little Martians on demand.
And yet, the Little Martians kojii.ai model is a step even further beyond.
In Rosa’s model, we enlist one of six Little Martians to help create our own story (Verdelis, Ada, Kweku, Kalama, Mycos, Shuijing). Each Martian is back-coded with their own history, their own manner of speech, their own aesthetic predispositions (think ice crystals, abandoned biodomes, aesthetics of the Renaissance painters, Hieronymus Bosch, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo and other female surrealist painters). Once drawn inside a Martian’s imagination, we are asked to merge our story with their own.
And like all stories, the limit here is only that of our own imagination.
Rosa first lets us choose whether our outputs will occur in the real world or the Imaginarium, which orients their eccentricity. We then choose a genre for our story: comedy, drama, horror, mystery, action. Finally, we enter our own prompt into the model, and the resultant generation is a combination of our desires, our preferred genre, and the aesthetic sensibilities of the Little Martian we’ve chosen (who is omnipresent within the generations), all underscored by a comment on each generation from the Little Martian themselves, as if each output were something they had dreamt up or observed.
The masterstroke of Rosa’s Little Martians universe is that infinite universes are all built into the framework. The Imaginarium can contain every possible thing! And so it must. And so it will, if we have anything to say about it.
Understanding that customization is the inevitable future for AI artistry, Rosa converts customization culture into the lifeblood of the Little Martians’ world. Each new generation brings the Little Martians further to life, further fleshes out their species-wide story. Rosa describes the experience as “an open ended creative commons story that anyone could participate in or spin off their own story from.”
No collaborative story, to my knowledge, has attempted this kind of depth, has incorporated this much random possibility, or has given creative control to such a vast network of participants. It feels like both a test-case and end-point for what AI artistry is ultimately capable of. This is the ground floor of the future, a new and cooperative method for plumbing the infinite depths of artistry’s next evolution. We are rarely given so much power. When otherwise are we trusted with this much control? The Little Martians contain everything in their imaginations, but we alone can direct their attention. We alone can bring to life this literal brave new world.