James Yu is a writer and artist who creates poetry, interactive fiction, and visual art in collaboration with AI language models such as GPT-3.,,He pairs machine-generated text with his own visual interpretations, treating the writing process as a duet between human and machine.
In 2021 Yu began Centaur Bard, a series of poems written entirely by GPT-3 through the writing tool Sudowrite, which he then illustrated and sold individually as NFTs, with proceeds donated to the literacy nonprofit Room to Read. Pieces from the series, including The Last Fire and Pringle-House, sold in March 2021. For each poem, Yu also published a recorded conversation with the AI about its own inspiration, presenting the machine as a collaborator rather than a tool.In another piece, things are a little crazy rn, two AI agents attempt to schedule a meeting together and continually invent excuses not to.
Before turning to AI art, Yu founded Parse, a mobile app development platform later acquired by Facebook. He lives in San Francisco, having grown up in upstate New York and Oklahoma.Yu also writes speculative fiction, with short stories published in Uncanny Magazine, VICE Magazine, and Fireside Magazine.His story Hot Spot, about synesthesia and a simulation-theory discovery at a South Pole research station, changes the color of its text as the reader scrolls through it.,In 2021 the poet Sasha Stiles described meeting Yu alongside Kalen Iwamoto and Aurèce Vettier as writers began recognizing the potential of web3 for literary work, and the group started building community around it.
