We haven’t met…

A conversation about computers making art for scared, stressed people you don’t know.

I’ve just come back from the Hay Festival and I’m trying to corral my thoughts about a revealing conversation I had at the closing night drinks. I’d spoken at the Festival twice, once as a reading, once on a panel, and both times talked about the importance of Reading The Room. And then hilariously, on the last night, I completely failed to. Which is nicely on brand, and a warning to listen to what you’re saying. But by failing to read the room, and not just talking safely within my tribe, I found out something I’d never realised about an existential threat to the craft of almost everyone attending a book festival as a writer. Yeah, I talked about AI. And I finally got something about it that I’d never clocked before.

A very nice journo I had found myself talking to asked, when he found out what I did, “So, what do you reckon about AI writing comedy?” Before answering, I read the room. Like you do. Seeing a little clump of writerish types at a literary festival, I judged myself to be amongst my people.

I launched into a lively tirade about how it’s just a compression system not a creation system, and the face in the black mirror being our own, and how this was a Turing Test question at the moment (it’s passing, not being, so it’s Ford Prefect, not an actual man from Guildford, and so there’s not much point asking it about Guildford), and how it could never do the job of creating art to any meaningful degree (because though the art could be made, nobody with any discernment would want to consume that art once they knew was made without human agency, because the art could not contain any worthwhile human social data, which is the point of art) and went on about maybe we’re talking about the difference between hydrogenated junk food and real food - a sort of Real Ale moment for culture - and so on…

Hitting my stride, I looked round at the crowd and said “Who the fuck needs a machine to do a job - writing and drawing and making stuff up - which anyone at this party does all the time, and which these days often we barely get paid for at all. We’re so cheap! We make this stuff all the time, without even trying. Why build an expensive machine? Who needs it?”

And then the journalist’s wife stepped in. She took issue with my assertion, with a tolerant smile, and argued that it could work and that she’d seen some very funny AI comedy recently and that it was real… I asked *where* with a disbelieving snort, because I was on a party-roll, like I was fucking Rik, and then she said, “at work”, and that was when I discovered she worked in venture capital relationships for companies that specialise in the field of generative AI.

And I did a huge conversational skid, and apologised, and realised I’d been monstrously rude, and misread the room. So I climbed off the conversational horse from which I’d been riffing, and we talked for about 45 minutes about it. She was remarkably patient. It was fascinating.

But what blew me away was that she said she used AI every day at work in the States. And she used it because her job is enormously high pressure, and she has to play the part of someone who can do everything. Come up with amazing ideas and branding stories and logos and so on. To be the sort of self actualising media node that Silicon Valley demands. She - and everybody else - is expected to be a sort of miracle solo tech idea generator, cos that’s the myth. Designing and storytelling and doing the Steve Jobs shit.

But she’s from a data background. And she… really hates it. She struggles. Sits there with no ideas. Clock ticking. Expectations sky high. So she pushes a button. And makes Midjourney and Chat GPT tell stories and assemble ideas and draw pictures. That’s what AI is for. Because that stuff’s so HARD.

And I said: I could do that. I mean, everyone in this party who writes for a living… most of us struggle with having 2000 ideas before lunch, and doodling, and spinning ridiculous yarns out of random connections. And not knowing what the fuck to do with them. They’re certainly worthless. A byproduct of our brains that usually we try and sluice out to try and get some sort of focus and stick to the paid job in hand.

And I realised that the tech people had developed a robot exoskeleton for creativity. They’d made a miraculous engine to generate that morning pages fizz that creative people scrape into the bin.

I discovered that non-artistic people now strap themselves into this idea making machine. They do that rather than crossing the corridor to the Bohemian Dept and calling in someone in a paint spattered smock, with two brass farthings to rub together, who’d make them a gazillion ideas and doodles for LESS MONEY than the chips and electricity and environmental damage would cost when anyone pushed the AI button…

And I started thinking why that might be. How did they not know that the human version of that service was there for the taking, for loose change. And I suspect that’s because we’re in bubbles and we don’t know that outside our bubble are a load of actual people who could work with us. We can’t even imagine they exist. Just like I couldn’t imagine someone who would need to invent an ideas machine that drew silly pictures and made jokes when surely everyone can do that.

They automated us, because we hadn’t met.

It broke my heart.