Forward
When Meta Olympia was first publicly presented at Develop3D Live in 2017, I shared the the project’s intentions of tinkering with the human/machine relationship. At the time, machine learning and AI was already a big topic for technology keynotes, but free of the burdens of an intentional business mandate, I was able to weave a different narrative for the engineering, AEC and tech attendees.
Journalism was falling apart at the seams. Fake news had become the de facto way to to make up any alternate reality as well as discredit any story; the industry had already replacing writers with generated articles. I, like everyone, had my own doom forecasts, but I wanted to turn it upside-down or, at least, sideways.
I wanted to create fake news as a format. Influenced by the gregarious productions of entertainment wrestling that posed as real sport competition, but magnificently scripted to the delight of the fanbase. What if, I proposed, I hired real developers to create the machines to perpetually genearte the play-by-play matches of a fictitious Martian Football League, like a headless video game; then passed those results to real-world writers and artists to treat it like the gospel that was sent back through time, so they could report it as real sports news? It was a whimsical retelling of the classic sci-fi trope “human creates machine, machine destroys humanity”. As a talk, it was wonderfully visual with lots of captivating artwork that the attendees could appreciate, it wasn’t controversial to the industries represented at the conference, and it had a moderately positive spin that humans were getting paid for a project that would otherwise not exist.
The stories and art from two full seasons of football, as well as hockey and an extreme marathon were created in this fashion. The accumulated posts of more than 2-years of experimentation and faithful story-telling can be enjoyed on this website.
Back to the present, Meta Olympia shifts to a new phase.
This new series follows the original experimental roots of the project. The episodic story builds on all the lore, writings, and designs from the previous iterations.
When we started, it was > Human write Machine > Machine prompt Human with results > Human interpret results to make original story.
Now, we are full-circle.
> Human prompt Machine based on original story > Machine interpret to create new stories > Human edits final story, feeds back to Machine…
Rinse and repeat.
Our objectives are to post new episodes through the reminder of 2026, with a target of 12 initial chapters.
As before, we do not know how it will come together, but we are eager see it for ourselves and share it along the way.
-Chris