A Thousand And One Questions About AI

An AI Writing Science Fiction Stories by Midjourney

Yesterday I had a rather enlightening adventure. Yes, I manage to have adventures even when I am quietly sitting at home, writing the next part of "Experimental Magics" and minding my own business.

An email popped out from a friend I haven’t heard from for a while. The email was saying something like "I have just been diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer. That’s horrible. I am in shock. I don’t know what to do. Can you help me with a small thing? I am at a specialised centre right now, phones are not allowed, but I have my tablet, please email me back."

Of course, I was horrified and I read it twice. Then I realised something strange: she works in a cancer center. And what about the phone? Well, in our day and age, I can call via WhatsApp or Skype! I called her:

"Hi, it’s Alex! How are—"

"I’m fine, I’m fine! If I could catch the one who hijacked my email…"

My husband had a quite similar adventure with one of his colleagues: he got an email saying the man had been robbed at gunpoint in the back of beyond of Pakistan. A bit wild? Not if you realize that being attacked is a real occupational hazard for him and that he was REALLY in Pakistan at that time. Whoever hijacked his mailbox had obviously done his homework.

Now, what about the next stage: you receive a phone call. The voice on the phone is indistinguishable from the voice of a person you know and love? Or even a "deepfake video call"? Next, how easy it is to imitate your signature to perfection on a letter for your bank? And would you need a live scammer to pull that off, or would you just need an IA? Everybody seems excited about creative activities and AI right now, but I don’t think it will be the biggest of our problems.

For Midjourney and the like, plenty of illustrators, webgraphists, web designers, etc… are up in arms but they forget that only a generation ago, there was no such thing as a web designer or a web graphist, or Corel or Photoshop. No generic pictures made from collages cobbled together with Photoshop. Many of the modern-day graphic artists would not have been in the graphic industry at all, 25 years ago.

Some claim AI generated pictures or music are not art. Does it matter? A beautiful landscape or flower are not art either, but they still generate an emotional response. But right now, don’t worry: most of pictures made by the likes of Midjourney are rather conventional: blonde pouty women with big breasts, logos, adverts, bad caricatures, cute cats and children, DnD or cyberpunk scenes, or more generally, American pop culture, which is all over the Internet nowadays. That’s why I have so much trouble generating covers for my books with Midjourney. And don’t say "Try a live graphist" I have tried and failed too. The first cover for "The Wolf of Taliskia", when it was published conventionally in French was atrocious, and many readers commented that they bought it IN SPITE of picture! You find already tons of cliché pictures on the net. I feel sorry for graphic designers, but as a consumer, if those pics are churned out by a machine rather than a person, I will not notice.

So, some illustrators will be able to work, at least for a while, by making really custom illustrations for a specific book rather than something generic. Of course, they will be asking for a big one-time payment, before their work appears on the websites of online bookshops and gets copied.

After Midjourney, I tried Chat GPT: no, it didn’t write even a coherent story from the prompt of "Experimental Magics", but, it wrote a perfectly sensible plot for a cozy mystery taking place in a hotel on a ski resort. Are you surprised? The same issue about pictures can apply to writing: nobody will notice if a romance about a poor girl and a billionaire, or a thriller about a lost artefact mentioned in the Bible, is written by a person or a machine. The more narrow and rigid the rules of your genre, the easier they are to automate. Maybe someone like James Patterson, who already has an army of ghostwriters, will just use an AI instead. Remember the Nancy Drew series for kids or the Richard Blade pulps written by various authors under the same pen name? Could they be replaced by an IA too? So, nothing new in the principle.

Here is a passage from a short story written in the ‘1950 by Roald Dahl where he imagined just that: a machine for writing novels (notice the jab at romance writers). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Automatic_Grammatizator

… off he went in his big car to seek his next client. This one was a female, famous and popular, whose fat romantic books sold by the million across the country. She received Knipe graciously, gave him tea, and listened attentively to his story.

"It all sounds very fascinating," she said. "But of course I find it a little hard to believe."

"Madam," Knipe answered. "Come with me and see it with your own eyes. My car awaits you."

So off they went, and in due course, the astonished lady was ushered into the machine house where the wonder was kept. Eagerly, Knipe explained its workings, and after a while he even permitted her to sit in the driver’s seat and practise with the buttons.

"All right," he said suddenly, "you want to do a book now?"

"Oh yes!" she cried. "Please!"

She was very competent and seemed to know exactly what she wanted. She made her own pre-selections, then ran off a long, romantic, passion-filled novel. She read through the first chapter and became so enthusiastic that she signed up on the spot.

"That’s one of them out of the way," Knipe said to Mr Bohlen afterwards. "A pretty big one too."

"Nice work, my boy."

"And you know why she signed?"

"Why?"

"It wasn’t the money. She’s got plenty of that."

"Then why?"

Knipe grinned, lifting his lip and baring a long pale upper gum. "Simply because she saw the machine-made stuff was better than her own."

Thereafter, Knipe wisely decided to concentrate only upon mediocrity. Anything better than that—and there were so few it didn’t matter much—was apparently not quite so easy to seduce.

In the end, after several months of work, he had persuaded something like seventy per cent of the writers on his list to sign the contract. He found that the older ones, those who were running out of ideas and had taken to drink, were the easiest to handle.

…

This last year—the first full year of the machine’s operation—it was estimated that at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language were produced by Adolph Knipe upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator.

Does this surprise you?

I doubt it.

I wonder if Roald Dahl got the figures right. Would AI write 50% of all the stories published ten years from now? The very big difference between humans and AI is in the speed and scale of output. For books, blogs and the likes, AI is mostly aiming at the mass market. It generates "content," in other words, "bull…it" in industrial quantities. So, as a reader, I would not care. It is just spam. Would AI set permanent standards for mass market novels? After swallowing thousands of novels with a dumb, pretty young blonde heroine, would it permanently assume that women are pretty, blonde, young, and dumb? If yes, would there still be some space left for authors writing about normal people? What would happen to the likes of Wattpad?

That also means, some fantasy writers will get a respite. Why? Because a fantasy world can be totally different from our own (think Brandon Sanderson), with characters with totally unusual motivations, inner logic or even biology if your hero is a dragon, for example.

The other genres which will be at least partially protected are those who deal with real personal experience, like some journalism or memoirs: an AI has not been in the middle of a battle on a Normandy beach on D-Day or an earthquake on the Turkish-Syrian border. However, with the fake pictures Midjourney can make, who would still be able to make a difference between real and AI-generated testimony? You can rewrite History with the pictures to back your claims!

In the midterm, there would be another revolution. One I, personally, find very interesting. Midjourney allows someone with no graphic skills to get a decent illustration/logo/ad. Similarly, writing AI will allow someone with an incomplete grasp on English language, like your truly, to write a novel in English and edit it to a professional standard. And writing in English, is writing for the world! I started with ProWritingAid, but then, I discovered Quillbot, which can edit and polish your prose to a shine. So, expect books in perfect English from people around the world. Proofreaders will definitely be out of work, and English-speaking writers can expect lots of competition. But in the end, would it matter? People read less and less anyway. Maybe writing novels for the masses would just stop being profitable? Would it become again, a niche activity, like in the 18^th century?

The books which I believe will be totally written by AI are manuals, cookbooks, and all technical and scientific writing. For one, technicians, engineers, and scientists are not known for their elegant prose. They would rather do the research than the actual writing. Second, that type of writing is (supposedly) factual. The argumentative part and the conclusion will still need human input, especially if this is some unusual fact or new discovery. BTW, I don’t know how things work in the US, but in Europe, if you write a chapter in a scientific book, you are never going to get any money for that. The publisher will. Once again, your truly once wrote a chapter for a famous reference book, all for glory! You understand that in this case, pirating and copyright issues are not really my problem.

As for plagiarism, I just can’t see how an AI will not end up plagiarising itself, or another competing AI. English or any other language has a limited number of words to express a given meaning, especially in technical writing. If 200 students are tasked with writing an essay on the same subject, I can’t see how they will not come up with the same bits of sentence sometimes. Is it plagiarism or the limit of the language?

Next, what if AI will sets up new standards in writing style? We, authors, are already striving to suit Amazon algorithms, when we chose the title and blurb of our novel. What if we have to learn to write "AI style"? What would happen to literary trends? In the sixties, spy novels were all the rage and churned out in industrial quantities (I’m not talking about quality). That frenzy died with the fall of the Berlin Wall, becoming a niche (quality increased). So, how are AIs going to set new fashions?

Finally, I can imagine the future Internet with AIs talking with other AIs, competing with other AIs, and copying other AIs, while humans have completely left the web to its own devices. If the place is unreliable, full of fake news, and can hijack your identity and money at any time, why bother? Would AIs still be profitable? And what about language? Will language spoken between people and language on the internet split to a point where you will need a training to understand your computer/tablet/phone?

What worries me much more than artistic creation, are the others use of AI. To borrow money, you must already submit your application to the bank's algorithm. It can even determine what rate to charge you. Same thing for university admission and some job applications. What if an algorithm decided how much you pay for a pack of crisps? A litre of petrol? A kilowatt of electricity? What is your sentence for car theft? Do we still need a mayor and council to run a city? Do we need a government, or would an AI be less fraught with emotions, sensitive to bribes and prone to snap decisions (I wrote a couple of short stories about that)? What about war? Would an AI have trouble dropping a bomb on a hospital? Would it have post-traumatic stress?

Are we going to live in a cyberpunk world where AIs run everything? Well, I don’t think so, or at least, not immediately. Why? Because all those AIs are cool, but we are creatures of flesh and blood. We need food, shelter, and only after that, all the rest. Our main concern for the next 20 years or so is likely to be climate change: climate change means poor crops, and unpredictable food supply. Look at 2022: a "limited war" in Ukraine, drought with poor crops in India and Canada, and the cost of ordinary items has gone up by about 10%, at least in Europe.

So, what will we do once we have lost our jobs to machines? Well, we won’t have money. If we don’t have money, who will buy the mass-produced AI-written novels? Who will buy the mass-produced T-shirts, baskets, handbags and other stuff if we struggle to pay for food? Will AI still be profitable? What will we do? We have left farming to work in factories and offices for only 200 years in Europe and much less elsewhere. A short time relative to the millennia during which most people were toiling hard to grow their food. Maybe we will have to get back to these basics? AI is cool, but it doesn't grow food, manage climate change, or solve world hunger. This is not science-fiction.

By the way, this newsletter has been edited by an AI.

Now, if you still feel like reading a human-written book, here is a selection of promos and giveaways.

Promos:

Giveaways:

All the best!

Alex