I suspect many of you are outside looking in, consumers of content, tourists and travellers in the worlds we humble content creators build. I hope you're all having a good time, or as good a time as you want, as I'm sure those house-brick sized fantasy sagas count as masochistic endurance sports.
If, however, you are also on the inside, particularly if you share my wheelhouse, an un-agented writer penning short fiction, sending it out to strut its stuff and flaunt its tush to hard-nosed editors who may or (mainly) may not give it house room, you too will have seen a certain phenomena over the last five years or so.
The victimisation and persecution of AI.
In 'no blacks, no dogs, no Irish' style, virtually all submission guidelines require solemn declarations that the teller of the tale is solely and wholly the wetware between human ears with no further silicon-based assistance bar the spellchecker.
Steve Capone at Whisper House went one step further requiring those submitting to his Doom Scroll anthology to prove their submission hadn't been created by AI by, say, developing it in a single document, enabling version history to be accessed, like watching a time lapse video of a pervy sculptor finding the naked man with a very small cock that was always there within a block of marble.
Now, there's a whole other strand to unpick here about how editors think writers work, and whether we open up a fresh pine-smelling blank documents when we see a submission call we like, or reach into the drawer for a years-old yet-to-be-sold story that fits or can be made to fit. And, to be honest, I have already unpicked it.
The point of this post is our disapprobation of AI as content creator.
You'd think, as a humble creative, I'd be right behind this. Particularly as I don't have the first idea of how to go about it, nor do I particularly wish to try. My heart sinks in a workplace context when somebody says, 'can we just AI it?' regarding some minor copywriting task that a few years ago would have been a warm-up stretch for somebody with an above-average vocabulary. (And warm-up stretches are needed if you're going to go on to write more important copy. As is coffee.)
But, as a consumer too, what matters, surely, is what's produced, not how it was produced?
Consider this. Erdős Problem 1196 was recently solved by AI. Now, you won't need me to explain to you, typical reader of this blog, that Erdős Problem #1196 is a famous mathematical conjecture originally posed in 1968 by Paul Erdős, András Sárközy, and Endre Szemerédi, which focuses on the asymptotic behaviour of primitive sets of numbers. It's one of a list of conjectures the prolifc Erdős left behind when he died. As was pointed out on X, Fields Medal-level minds had been working on this for years. This was not an attention-starved conundrum. Yet, if you videoed GPT-5.4's entire performance solving it from start to finish (probably as engaging Warhol's Empire) it would barely qualify as a feature.
The key takeaway here is that the world of mathematics celebrated this development, likening AI's ability to find a completely novel way to approach the problem as akin to spotting a brand new, never before considered chess opening.
Now, I recognise the argument - that's all mere numbers and numbers are way, way easier than words. There are only ten digits, and there are twenty six letters, and that's before you consider colons and semi-colons and interrobangs and all the rest of it. Stands to reason.
But does it? Human creativity, however complex, is a process. And AI can do processes really well. The sacred cow that creative thought is one step too far for AI looks more and more like a baseless, optimistic - nay, desperate - article of faith day by day.
I think one day soon - very, very soon - AI will be able to write anything a human can. As good as. As funny as. As perceptive as. As poignant as. As weird as. As anything as.
So, it's hardly surprising both those who can see the writing on the wall have circled the protectionist waggons. I listened to an interview with Moana director Thomas Kali celebrating the near-3000 people who worked on the film, many of whom could probably have been replaced with software (NB: I'm not saying as successfully... but give it a year or two).
The whole thing puts me in mind of the early nineteenth-century Luddites, who resisted the automation of the weaving industry which would eventually result in cheaper cloth requiring far fewer people. To save you checking, the Luddites lost.
Automation affected pretty much every part of every economy, not least agriculture, which has innovated for above twenty-five centuries. In the past, most people worked in agriculture; in today’s rich countries, only a small share do. In the UK, almost 80% of adult males worked in agriculture in 1380. By 1600, it was about two-thirds. Two-fifths by 1700. Pre-First World War, a shade over ten percent of workers in England and Wales remained in agriculture. Now less than 300,000 remain in the sector out of an adult male population of around 30 million. From four in five to one in a hundred. A relentless reduction.
The point is that the economy exists for the benefit of the customer. The customer doesn't exist for the benefit of the economy. We have cheap bread because the customer won at the expense of the reapers and the threshers. Today's argument has moved on from bread to circuses - and it feels different because there's something distinctly human about the creative industries - but, at it's heart, it's the same. And, be assured, the customer will win.
And this is what our entertainment industry may look like in, say, ten years: movies and TV shows as good as the mainstream is now, with wholly fresh digital actors, not digitised versions of humans, indistinguishable from the vast majority of what's on the vast majority of our channels. And the audience will be happy.
Yes, there'll be room for the quirky and human, but only in the same way I can pay £4 for real handmade sourdough loaf or less than £1 to 'enjoy' the results of the Chorleywood Bread Process. The publishers I pitch to can happily remain in that space, pushing back on the rise of the machines, because they're akin to my excellent little local baker. Not a threat to Grupo Bimbo.
But, as for the mainstream... We can pretend we can choose, but it's akin to choosing to swim upstream. Possible, but exhausting and contrary to every economic instinct that has underpinned our development as a species. It would mean taking a decision as a society that we want (and will pay for!) inefficient systems that provide purpose and meaning to the twenty-first reapers and threshers.
I wish I could be optimistic. I can't see it happening. The consumer is king, and when the AI-produced content matches human-produced content, he'll vote with his subscription and remote control. Enjoy these (creative) end times. The eLuddites will lose. We voted cheap bread before. And we'll vote cheap circuses now.
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My Thoughts are with You. Your Thoughts are with the Authorities for Calibration Against Societal Norms
Meet a man mistaken for a robot, a robot which learns the meaning of irony the hard way, a Frankenstein’s monster with a future in tailoring, a talking cat, a talking car, several time travellers, and a host of other characters.
Award-nominated science fiction and slipstream author Robert Bagnall’s second anthology of twenty-four stories, variously bleak, funny, bleakly funny or – very occasionally – optimistic.
2084. The world remains at war.
In the Eurasian desert, twenty-year old Adnan emerges from a coma with memories of a strictly ordered city of steel and glass, and a woman he loved.
The city is the Dome, and the woman... is Adnan's secret to keep.
Adnan learns what the Dome is, and what his role really was within it. He learns why everybody fears the Sickness more than the troopers. And he learns why he is the only one who can stop the war.
Persuaded to re-enter the Dome to implant a virus that will bring the war machine to its knees, the resistance think that Adnan is returning to free the many - but really he wants to free the one.
24 0s & a 2
