Tag Archives: artificial-intelligence

Creative Humans

A jazz concert in Menton, France – nothing unusual about that. The band, a local group called La Compagnie So What, had an average age of about 70 – nothing unusual about that either.

What was unusual was my sudden awareness of the humanness of it all.

A couple of days earlier I’d been at a café with friends, where AI dominated the conversation. All the wonderful, unnerving things these systems can already do, and the even more astonishing things they’ll soon do. We traded stories – some shocking, some impressive – about AI producing creative work that we humans once considered uniquely ours. Novels, songs, poems, photographs, drawings – entire bodies of work generated ‘creatively’ from human-made inputs, human instructions, and human precedents, yet often faster and, disturbingly, sometimes ‘better.’

And then there I was at the concert. The bass player was wearing a hearing aid. The ensemble itself was delightfully odd – not the usual piano-led quartet, but bass clarinet, guitar, double bass, and a trumpet/flugelhorn player.   For one song the audience was asked to crumble up newspapers on cue to fill in for the missing percussions. Would an algorithm come up with such as innovation if it were not directed by a human? That is, if it were an agent and not just a tool?

As John Naughton of The Observer recently pointed out, as AI platforms become increasingly error-averse, they gravitate toward popular, heavily replicated data. The end result is often bland. That’s fine for writing emails but far less promising for creative work. To put this is jazz terms, an AI produced concert would have been heavy on Ellington, Gershwin and Sinatra classics – safe choices for jazz dabblers and newbies. At the concert I attended, the choice of music included three pieces by the band members and another by Mulatu Astatke, the Ethiopian composer, beloved by jazz aficionados but hardly mainstream. No typical AI platform would have selected that playlist.

I heard the film director Paul Schrader speaking on the FRDH Podcast, describing how when he couldn’t hire actors for a controversial film, he created it with AI instead. Despite taking advantage of this technology, he warns, ‘We are the tool and it is the tool master.’ His blunt conclusion is, ‘The AI future is bad.’

I do hope this isn’t true, and that humans are able to retain our creative experiences, both in making art and in receiving it, in the messy, innovative ways only humans can.

What I’ve been reading

Written before the launch of OpenAI, John Auster’s Leviathan is definitely human made, full of the nuance and layered characterisations we would expect from a solid writer of literary fiction. The story’s narrator is a writer, Peter Aaron, who learns that a fellow writer and friend Benjamin Sachs had become a terrorist who accidently killed himself with one of his own bombs. Before the police reveal Sach’s identity, Peter is compelled to set the record straight by recounting Benjamin’s life story as he discovered it through their 15-year friendship. The novel unfolds through their entanglements with women, the accidents that shape their paths, and the choices that follow – a study of personal psychology, identity, and the fragile, unpredictable nature of creativity.

Adele Myer’s The Tobacco Wives was recommended by a friend as one of those word-of-mouth hits in her Florida community. Set in late‑1940s North Carolina, the story takes place in a town effectively owned by a vast tobacco company – a thinly veiled R.J. Reynolds. We see it through the eyes of a 15-year-old seamstress who is temporarily staying with her aunt and making couture dresses for the wives of the tobacco executives. It soon becomes obvious that this is a fictional exposé of the dangers of tobacco production for the workers and more importantly the coverup surrounding the health risks in smoking, especially for pregnant women. The focus on post-war women as labourers and consumers makes this novel worthwhile. As for the writing, it isn’t literary fiction, and at times I could see the seams (no pun intended) between characters and their plot functions. Occasionally the prose felt rather bland. AI‑assisted? Who’s to say.

Scraping sounds better than stealing

The topic was AI. Today, the topic is always AI. Let’s be honest, whether we see it as a sophisticated search engine, a gushing editor or techno teacher, most of us are using it.

At this online writers’ group, we started by regaling each other with our experiences of dabbling in AI – those silly hallucinations and unnatural conversations where very answer ends in question. Of course, what was said in that meeting ‘stayed in the room.’ With that rule, I braced myself for writers admitting they used AI to help them create and edit their work. But no, a few of us admitted trying it as an editor while others sought its help with research. In my case – I’ll step outside the room – I’ve used it for editing passages of a novel I wrote years ago and was undergoing a major editing/rewriting. I would give Co-Pilot a few pages of a chapter that I felt was sagging and asked it to tighten it up. The Co-Pilot version rearranged some sentences to make them more concise, but in many cases more adjective laden – I’m not a huge fan of adjectives in creative writing. Let the verbs and metaphors do the heavy lifting I say. For me, this teaching tool showed me what I needed to look for in my writing that could be effectively rewritten.

The conversation quickly turned from how we were using it to how it was using us. One author moaned at how Anthropic ‘scraped’ seven of his novels without his permission or financial compensation. He is currently involved in a class-action lawsuit being spearheaded by the Society of Authors. Using a link now available on the SoA website, another novelist discovered one of her books had also been scraped. Outrage mixed with fear – what about the other AI platforms? How do we find out about them? And what about those unscrupulous so-called writers who are using AI – our books – to write formulaic tripe that will sell like hotcakes?

I probably didn’t make myself popular by mentioning that a publisher of one of my academic textbooks contacted me to ask my permission to use my book for training an AI platform. If I opted in, whenever my work is used, it will be referenced with a link to the publisher’s website, and I would receive a small royalty. Of course, I opted in. Really, it wasn’t for the money. My reasoning, which I shared with my fellow writers, is that at least I know my book draws on and refers to peer-reviewed studies, and the final draft of my book was peer-reviewed by two scholars in the field. I was pleased to contribute a reliable source to an LLM. Better this than the grey literature and internet folk linguistics that is being scraped as I write this blog.

No one commented. I was likely to be seen as a traitor.

A few days after the meeting I stumbled across a counterbalance to all this by Wired magazine’s editor, Kevin Kelly. He feels honoured to have his books included in AI training. Kelly says that in the not-too-distant future, ‘authors will be paying AI companies to ensure that their books are included in the education and training of AIs.’ That is, authors will pay for the influence of AI responses that include their works – a type of indirect advertising. Hard to believe this in the current climate.

The one word that didn’t come up at this writers’ meeting, which in hindsight I wish had, is ‘creativity.’ For me, it’s not so much about my published books being so precious. It’s more about the process. The creation and recreation of texts. In the words of Henry Miller ‘Writing is its own reward.’ No bot can take that experience away from me (to paraphrase an old song).

What I’ve been reading

Ocean Vuong is a brilliant writer – an utterly unique voice. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was his first novel and is written as a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother, knowing she will never read it. Using poetic language and humour, the novel explores themes like identity, trauma and homosexuality. It also conveys a strong social message about the damage done to American families and communities by the opioid crisis. While so much of this novel is philosophically and poetically quotable, I’ll close with this gem:

‘Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?’

I can’t imagine a bot producing that, let alone enjoying the act of creating it.