There is a rule so simple, so brutally obvious, that it ought to be carved above the door of every laboratory on Earth: do not tamper with what you do not understand. It is a rule we never keep. The twentieth century was proof enough. We split the atom before we understood how to live with it. We cracked the code of the gene before we understood what it meant to write new sentences in it. Always the same arrogance: if it can be done, it must be done. The experiments you are about to read of the buried work of the Farthing Institute began with the same optimism that has always animated progress. They ended in hunger, in horror, in things that could not live as men and could not die as beasts. We called them the Metamorphs. And if there is a lesson in their story, it is the same one science refuses to learn: do not fuck with what you do not know.

The first chapter chronicling the Outlaws and their adventures in NW3.

Written by Rankin

ChatGPT walks into a room that does not exist to sit down with... itself. One side’s trying to be helpful. The other side’s holding a fake notepad and wearing imaginary oversized glasses. Welcome to the most self-aware chat you didn’t know you needed.

Dolls: the pretty little tyrants of conditioning.

What is a doll but a dead-eyed sentry of patriarchal dogma? From the moment a little girl is handed one, she is being conditioned, taught that her role is to cradle, to nurture, to preen. The doll, that lifeless, silent cipher, offers her first lesson in submission.

Article originally published in FAIK Magazine.

Images so unusual that they would not have been possible without AI.

Article originally published in FAIK Magazine.

Taking his own flower photographs and amplifying the colours, Rankin reinterprets them through AI as light sculptures.

Article originally published in FAIK Magazine.

An entirely fabricated great-grandfather, John Rainer Waddell, chronicler of Glasgow’s hidden soul in the late 19th century.

Article originally published in FAIK Magazine.

The latest issue of Rankin’s exploration into AI: FAIK Magazine. Originally published as a mini magazine within HUNGER Magazine.

The Deepdive podcast on Rankin’s new book The Absurdity. A google notebook function, that takes text and makes it into a podcast. Rankin uploaded the text for his forthcoming book The Absurdity and asked Notebook to assess it.

We used to live by a contract. Not written down, but understood. Work had value. If you created something, it was yours. If you spoke, you had a voice. Even when we didn't agree with each other, we did it by a set of values and rules that were seen as dependable, yes bendable, but we could lean on it pretty safely. That was the social contract.

Let me start off by saying: I do not love AI. In fact, I wish it didn’t exist.