Organic Intelligence -- Susan Price

 

As I understand it, the point of any art is that it's based on, and grew from, real human experience.

What happened to you, and how you felt about it-- whether it was good or bad. What you learned from it. Or failed to learn, as failing to learn is a very common human experience.

These experiences involve an immense laboratory of bio-chemicals and hormones, acting on actual 'vital' organs -- that is, living organs vital for living. The ones that hurt when you're disappointed, or embarrassed. It involves organic memory, which is bio-chemical, and involves vision, forgetfulness, imagination...

Human experience involves dreams, both in the sense of ambitions and day-dreams, and the mysterious, little-understood visions created by our brains while we sleep -- and these visions can involve all our sleeping senses, and be as vivid -- that is, alive -- as anything we experience while awake. So much so that some cultures have maintained that we actually enter another world when we sleep and dream -- and idea that I used in my Ghost World books.

Art also means the labour involved in producing the art, whether that means tedious hours of practice to master a musical instrument, or hacking away at stone with hammer and chisel -- perhaps producing something like Michaelangelo's gob-smacking Pieta. With a hammer and chisel. Knocking lumps off marble. FGS. 

Or it might mean spending a couple of years driving yourself nuts trying to work out a difficult plot while matching dialogue to character.

When a human writer writes about being threatened by a gunman -- or, say, an avalanche -- they may not personally have experienced either. But they've certainly experienced being scared, perhaps even terrified. They know what that feels like, to the heart, to the guts. They know what changes that experience works on a human being. They write from that beating heart and twisting gut.

A human writer also writes about love, and hatred, from personal, hormonal, bio-chemical insider knowledge.

No AI programme has hormones, or specific, insider human knowledge about what it means and feels like to be a human being. AI programmes don't have memories, they don't have family stories and histories. They don't have imaginations. They don't forget; their memories don't blur.

AI, programmed and operated by human thieves, steals from the work of real artists, without permission or payment, and spews out the stolen work in a slick, passion-less, inferior form. Falsity and theft.

Like all writers, I've recently been bombarded with letters praising my books to the skies, and offering to get them more publicity and sales -- for a price, of course.

These letters are instantly recognisable as written by AI. Why? Because, to be blunt, they are sh*t. The writing is oleaginous, smarmy and fulsome to the point of being laughable. A real human being would be embarrassed to write like that.

I've had some excellent, genuine reviews of my books, published in NY Times and The Guardian;  excellent reviews written by real, human readers, which had my publishers and agent firing off excited emails to make sure I didn't miss them, and snipping bits out to use in publicity.

Yet most of these excellent reviews found some fault with the book. None of them were as ridiculously oily and smarmily unconvincing as these emails. Because, presumably, the real, biological, living human author had some self-respect.

What is the point of these smarmy AI letters? Why would I, as a writer, want anything to do with someone claiming to publicise my work, who themselves writes so very badly? Or, in fact, doesn't write at all, but triggers an AI programme to spew out this stuff.

Why would I want my writing associated with this guff?

They all go straight to 'Junk' and are blocked thereafter. 

Pity the readers of the future if all they get to read is AI slop.

And even if, in the future, AI programmes are produced that can, somehow, write something that no human scholar or play-goer could distinguish from Shakespeare...? Or whoever you consider to be a wonderful writer.

Then it will still be empty, worthless verbage, written without genuine experience or understanding of that experience; or any ability to provide any genuine insight into it. It will be stolen material, rearranged blindly. And deafly. And unfeelingly.

A bower decorated by a bower bird has more artistic merit than that.