Twenty-odd years ago, inspired to read The Razor’s Edge, a 1944 novel by Somerset Maugham, I went searching for a second-hand copy. The first used bookstore I entered contained several aisles of tall shelves, but their contents weren’t ordered alphabetically – or at all. As I scanned the first set of shelves, one old book caught my eye. The title on its spine was illegible. I slid it out: The Razor’s Edge.
Coincidence? Or one way in which analogue human consciousness differs from digital computation? I can’t monetise the hunch that guides me to find some thing as obscure as a needle in a haystack. Yet, what purpose could this instinct have served before the dawn of civilisation? I used to gather four-leaf clovers when sent out to field in school softball games. Might it translate to tracking or foraging? It does speed up online research. Though I read good books very slowly, I can parse search results very fast, hence I often spot errors in AI Overview’s half-baked responses (how the fuck does one turn it off?).
So, yes, I do at times interact with a crude version of AI. And, while I’m in confessional mode, I have found it useful for fine-tuning punctuation and grammar. So sue me! As for why it can synthesise and summarise medical info quite well, both language and mainstream medicine are abstractions more reliant on rules and formulas than on anything else (including, all too often, common sense). Meanwhile, ever more online content involving my areas of enquiry – and yours, most likely – is more or less entangled with AI, wasting an obscene amount of power, but hey, saving time, at least for users lost in left-brain pursuits, the price of which is cognitive decline. But that set in when the written word usurped oral traditions.
And so when I saw that the author of Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth, has launched a campaign called ‘Writers Against AI’, what struck me was the irony of writers fighting a threat that language and writing have enabled. Choose your story, he bids us. Take your stand. By ‘writers’ he means storytellers, and typically opens his essay with a story about his childhood, before warning us that the Machine will colonise and consume every last thing that defines us as human. Yes, indeed. So he invites us to take his side in ‘the war against stories’. All we need do is display a logo and make three pledges:
Too easy. But where does my work begin and end? Can you play with AI in your spare time or will recreational use kill neurons? The second pledge, too, leaves room for ambiguity:
Can you tell the difference? Much published human writing had begun to ring hollow before AI learned to fake it. Now, an AI pastiche of Kingsnorth’s style beats the real thing on a bad day, as Darren Allen shows, courtesy of ChatGPT. If writers could rally greater imaginative powers, AI substitutes would stand out. But the last pledge is even less achievable:
Assuming such integrity is still viable, that’s a broad category, and even if proof wasn’t problematic, do racist, fascist, sexist, classist, ageist, homophobic bigots whose work is (on the upside) ‘entirely human-made’ deserve my support? ‘Saying no to AI and yes to human stories’, writes Kingsnorth, ‘can happen anywhere.’ But what if a tale is propaganda? Marketing hype? Plagiarised? Boring? He urges us to continue to write stories ‘with only your hand, your heart and your human brain’. Does that rule out cut/copy and paste? A thesaurus? Can a campaign be effective when its tactics and objectives are vague?
His call to arms opens with a Marshall McLuhan quote: ‘Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.’ For sure. But we all rely on the same digital media: haters of AI like Kingsnorth, its champions who baffle him, and those of us who see AI as a symptom, not a cause. Why hate it more than free-to-air TV, instrumental in making viewers stupider, or the home-delivered junk food consumers take for granted to the compound detriment of their health and the planet?
The advent of AI gets spun as a radical discontinuity; not part of the technological trajectory that began with smashing rocks to fashion tools 3.3 million years ago. Sure, development accelerated with the industrial revolution, hence large-scale production of the complex technologies most of us can’t live without depends on exploited hordes performing robotic jobs that machines can’t yet do autonomously. So what’s new? Progress marches on. For now.
Two decades ago, my elderly mother didn’t want 3G antennas on the nature strip outside her house. A bus shelter had just been built there despite her resistance, and notice of another encroachment incensed her. So I made a few hundred flyers featuring possible downsides and she did a letterbox drop. The local rag published her letter of objection, a reporter interviewed her, the MPs I wrote to duly replied, and we attended a token meeting at the council chambers with smarmy, condescending telco reps, after all of which the antennas were duly installed.
Whether or not 3G emissions cause harm didn’t bother her. But the shelter-cum-billboard and the antennas, as visible signs of change, upset her. In fact, the bus shelter proved handy when she developed dementia and felt compelled to nip out at short notice to withdraw cash to pay random frauds. When I eventually had to sell her house, I asked the agent if he thought the eyesores might deter buyers. ‘Close to transport,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Good reception.’
Because the masses will accept AI, just like 3/4/5G, as long as they can maintain the lifestyle to which they’re addicted. That it might be declining in step with each upgrade escapes them, so they dismiss we few dissenters who care. Should we practise non-attachment or activism? Focus on our spiritual life or worldly affairs? Can pledges and logos impact the latter?
As a child, Kingsnorth dreamed of being a famous writer; of one day having a book out with a Penguin logo on it. And now he does: Against the Machine. But as an adult, what does he think it means to be picked up by the world’s biggest publisher? Its logo, more than most, guarantees that nothing too subversive lurks beneath. So its bourgeois target audience can feel reassured by the voice of an author whose values don’t deeply challenge them. And since he’s turned his back on activism, and isn’t proposing radical measures, anyone who joins his campaign needn’t take any real risks. All you have to do is say no to AI and yes to human stories. And why not, if things were a whole lot simpler. But to riff off the McLuhan quote, what counts comes down to who’s using who. Are we the users or the used? So to take a stand for real and not just symbolically, in your mind, you’d need to walk your talk; to go (and abide) offline. And who among Kingsnorth’s fans has the resources, commitment and balls to do that? The ubiquitous existence of AI in our society – whether we see it as overhyped, salvific or satanic – holds up a mirror to our disembodied humanity.
observer of times 