Welcome to Letters From the Knot. This is a free weekly newsletter, primarily built as an outlet for a fiction writing project I’m working on. On the weeks I’m not publishing fiction, though, I’ll be sending something a bit more freeform and personal. This is one of those.
That AI-generated picture of the pope wearing a puffer jacket has really sent me in a spiral. For anyone who doesn’t know, the below picture went viral recently for a few days before someone revealed it was fake, and everyone on the internet had to admit that they’d had their pants pulled down. Of course, this speaks as much to the sophistication of AI as it does to the average person's inclination to share content without taking any time to verify it or do any background research (or even look at it for more than a couple of seconds).
It’s funny, obviously, but there are some spooky and saddening undertones to this AI thing. In an angry corner of Twitter, a niche scandal has been going on because a publisher of sci-fi novels used AI-generated art to produce the visuals for a book cover, leading to backlash from the artists who count on this kind of work. Elsewhere, a small literary magazine posted about the fact that their submissions inbox was now stuffed with derivative AI-written stories. They can always be spotted (at least for now) but their proliferation has made screening the submissions an arduous and time-consuming task, and one that poses an existential treat to these small scale magazines and sites.
As a person who’s trying to make a first foray into the creative industries by writing, the idea that a machine could do it better (and certainly faster) than me is undeniably a deflating one. And that’s nothing compared to people who work in industries like graphic design, customer services, web development or others that seem likely to be degraded or eliminated by the advent of effective AI.
But the more I think about this, the more hopeful I become, because as well as the proliferation of auto-generated content, I also see the often lukewarm or bemused response, and the early signs of an organic rejection. There are still plenty of dead-eyed silicon valley venture capitalists who think AI is the future, but then they thought the same about Google Glass and NFTs. These people will always invest in the new shiny thing, and it’s easy to take their investment as a sign of what the future holds, but they’re also often very very stupid and, in reality, most people tend to reject technology that isn’t responding to an organic human need.
As evidence, just look at Mark Zuckerberg’s leg-free plasticine vanity project, the metaverse. The promise of the metaverse is a digital space that uses virtual and augmented reality to knit together all of our different digital worlds. You can inhabit a single seamless environment in which you can access the internet, your games console, your phone, your streaming services. The reason I don’t think this will go anywhere is that most people already have access to such a space: their living room. And you don’t need to strap a computer around your face to spend time in it.
I think we’ll see a similar rejection to elements of AI. Obviously it will change a lot of things - we’ll have more sophisticated chatbots and search engines, and I know that natural language processing can be incredibly helpful for neurodivergent people who don’t process information in a neurotypical way. But when it comes to experience, and art, there is no organic need to be answered. We’re not short of good writing or art and, outside of the commercial realm, the problem is not that humans can’t produce art fast enough.
All AI generated “art” will do is allow cynical capitalists to extract more value from their already creatively bereft ventures, and flood markets with substandard chaff. The internet will become an increasingly scary and, perhaps more importantly, annoying space, where you can’t trust what you’re looking at or reading or even who you’re talking to. (I promise I’m getting to the optimistic part soon).
All of this, I think, will lead to two outcomes. The first is that, as ever with scary technology, we’ll tame it. Organisations will emerge who we trust to verify genuine content, just like most people trust Google or Bing* to codify and organise the chaos of the internet now. Almost nobody spends any time in the gloomy labyrinth of the dark web, because we don’t have to.
(*just kidding obviously nobody uses Bing)
This verification is important because, ultimately, people like to know that they’re engaging with other actual people. We like to know who produces the art that we consume, as an entire industry of biographical media will show. On social media, artists are already encouraged to show their personality because people like to think they know who they are, and like to pick them out in a world of faceless brands and advertising. And that’s the second outcome of the AI boom. It will increase the value of human connection.
My utopian vision is this: that the AI-enabled internet becoming more scary and less verifiable will drive human beings back into the real world. We’re already seeing a new wave of localism developing. People like to support local businesses, and foster a sense of community. I’m spending more time in my immediate neighbourhood. In an AI-driven future, the only interactions we’ll be able to be fully confident of are in-person interactions. If AI music starts flooding Spotify, the value of live music will only increase. We’ll attend book readings, if only to be confident that the ideas we’re reading have emerged from a genuine mind.
Some people (AI apologists) will say I’m being a luddite in condoning this back-to-the-fields utopianism, and maybe so. But I see an opportunity here. AI, in the hands of big business, will be used to reduce reliance on workers, to increase margins and, ultimately, drive growth. My hope is that it will backfire, that AI will develop too far too fast, and that in its mass rejection, we’ll end up achieving degrowth by stealth. That or the machines will rise up and kill us all idk.
Cultural indigestion
What I’ve been up to.
Reading: In an effort to better acquaint myself with the current British science fiction “scene”, I’ve been working through the shortlists for the Arthur C Clarke Award. Recently I finished Skyward Inn by Aliya Whitely, set in the UK in the future, its a story about a woman who owns a pub in the West Country, a section of the nation that’s protected itself from technological advancement by policing its borders. It’s also a story about colonialism, memory, family, duty and love. It’s got loads of good ideas in it, and it’s got some hugely atmospheric moments, but it’s almost as though it’s trying to do a little too much all at once and, by the end, it’s hard to really appreciate why anything is happening and, as the characters slowly morph into literary devices, it becomes harder and harder to care about them.
Playing: Got the new Zelda game last week and, as with the last one, I’ve become instantly enchanted with it and want to spend all of my free time playing it. It’s pretty much just more of the same, but it turns out that’s what I was after.
Listening: