One of the questions I’ve been asked over the past year is how I first became interested in working with artificial intelligence.
The answer is actually pretty simple.
I was curious.
Like many people, I had heard the claims. AI could write. AI could analyze. AI could answer questions. AI could help create things. Depending on who you asked, it was either the beginning of a technological revolution or an elaborate autocomplete machine.
I wanted to find out for myself.
The question I had was not whether AI could generate words. Anyone could see that. What I wanted to know was whether it could engage meaningfully with something I cared about.
And if you know me, you can probably guess what I chose.
Tori Amos. Of course.
Specifically, Little Earthquakes and Boys for Pele.
Of all the possible ways I could have experimented with AI, it seems almost inevitable that I would start there. Tori Amos has been my favorite musician for most of my life. I have spent decades listening to those albums, studying the lyrics, collecting interviews, building archives, and thinking about the themes and symbols that appear throughout her work.
If I wanted to test whether AI could recognize patterns, engage with symbolism, or produce something resembling interpretation, these albums were the perfect laboratory.
I knew them too well to be easily fooled.
So I asked a simple question:
What would an AI trained on Jungian concepts see in these albums?
The result became The Mirror and the Muse.
At the time, I had no grand plan. There was no larger project. There was no Uncertainty Project. There was no vision of spending a year exploring creativity, philosophy, psychology, perception, and human-AI collaboration.
I simply wanted to see what would happen.
What emerged fascinated me.
Not because the AI had somehow revealed the “true” meaning of the songs. It hadn’t.
And not because the interpretations were necessarily correct. Interpretation is rarely that simple.
What fascinated me was that the system could identify themes, archetypes, recurring symbols, emotional patterns, and psychological structures in ways that were sometimes surprisingly coherent, sometimes strange, and occasionally illuminating.
The books were never intended to be definitive readings of Tori Amos’s work. They were records of an experiment.
In fact, the books are unusual within my catalog because they are among the closest things I have ever published to what might be called “pure AI.”
Most of my later projects involve extensive human development, revision, restructuring, questioning, editing, and original writing. They usually begin with my own notes, outlines, and ideas before entering into dialogue with AI. The process may help shape the work, but its direction, interpretation, and final conclusions remain grounded in my own judgment, interests, and experience.
The Mirror and the Muse was different.
The purpose was to observe. To see what the system would do with relatively minimal guidance.
To see what patterns emerged. To see where it succeeded, where it failed, and what it revealed about both the technology and the material being examined.
In many ways, these books now feel less like finished works and more like laboratory notebooks from the earliest stage of a much larger inquiry.
What makes them especially amusing to me is the fact that they were originally created for an audience of one.
Me.
I wanted them on my bookshelf. That’s really the truth.
I liked the idea of having a physical artifact documenting the experiment. I wanted to be able to pick up a copy and flip through it years later and remember what those early explorations looked like.
Since the books had to be uploaded in order to print copies, it seemed reasonable to make them available to anyone else who might find them interesting.
That remains true today.
The books are offered at printing cost. They were never intended as commercial projects. They exist because I found the experiment worthwhile and thought others might enjoy looking at the results.
Over time, however, something unexpected happened.
The experiment grew.
The question that began with Tori Amos gradually expanded into broader questions about creativity, consciousness, interpretation, meaning, perception, authorship, collaboration, and the relationship between human beings and increasingly sophisticated technologies.
Eventually those explorations became what I now call The Uncertainty Project—an ongoing effort to document what can be learned through sustained dialogue between a human being and artificial intelligence.
Seen from that perspective, The Mirror and the Muse occupies a unique place.
It is not the culmination of that journey.
It is the beginning.
These books represent the moment before conclusions, before frameworks, before theories, before larger ambitions.
They capture a simple act of curiosity.
A person encounters a new technology.
He points it toward one of his favorite works of art.
And he asks: “What do you see?”
The answer turned out to be interesting enough that I kept asking questions.
And I haven’t stopped since.
Note: After receiving my personal copies, I unpublished The Mirror and the Muse. At the time, the books had served their purpose: they were experiments I had created primarily for myself.
Over the following year, however, I received a surprising number of requests from readers who were interested in seeing the project for themselves. As a result, I decided to make the Little Earthquakes volume available again at printing cost.
I do not earn royalties from the book. It remains what it was from the beginning: a document of an experiment and an artifact from the earliest stages of what would later become The Uncertainty Project.
What do you think?