Do you own your thoughts?
(includes surprise free eBook, from me)
On the intersection of ownership and the future.
This is Mycelial, a story whose first draft was briefly available here, on Substack. I published it online at a time when I knew it was likely unsafe to do so. Some vast machine might chew it up and help someone vomit out a collage of its ideas.
When I published it to Amazon (no link, no sales pitches today) I ticked the box that said I am the rights holder.
And I am.
It came out of my brain, after all.
Right?
Unfortunately it’s not that simple any more. For the past few months a lingering shadow has been eating away at myself, and at almost every writer I know. Sure, some have embraced the machines, but their book covers look worse for it, and in some cases, they’ve made their lives as authors worse.
I read this article today. I want to focus on the final lines.
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/8/27/generative-ai-ad-intellectual-property
Do we care who made it, and why, or do we just want the picture? That's why some people are horrified by music generators or Midjourney, (or, 150 years ago, were horrified by cameras), and others aren't worried at all.Â
Whilst I get the sentiment, this is a very limited perspective that dulls down the edges of the article, sands away any points made. It’s speaking only on the side of the consumer, not the creator. The people ‘horrified’ by these churnalism machines are not the people drooling over ‘Prompt: lustful dragon ladies imagined in a 1980s movie style with sepia filter and bright blue anime eyes and brown hair and also she is in space.’ No, the people worrying are the people whose job it used to be to satisfy those strange commissions in the dead of night, hunched over their computer.
Do we care who made it?
I think in some cases, a discerning consumer should care, in the same way you might care where your ‘fresh’ fruit came from. You could write entire essays about that. For example, if you sit outside tonight and watch the sunset. If I teleport beside you and show you that the sunset is a hologram, a meme, a blend of several hundred thousand sunsets that came and went long before your birth… would you still enjoy looking at it? Does it still contain beauty?
Is it still a sunset if there is no sun?
In THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, and indeed EARTHLOOP, there are scenes where a false sky is presented over the real thing. It is a gut-wrenching feeling, having reality torn out from under you, and it motivates Nori Furukawa and Stephanie to pursue the truth of their own separate worlds relentlessly.
Whilst Nori fights off an alien invasion from outside of time, Stephanie hunts down an interdimensional poet, hoping against hope that they are the key to finding her ‘true self’ and not in the meandering, tiktok aspirational video sense. In the literal sense that Stephanie believes she too is a copy of a copy of a copy.
Aren’t we all, in a way?
Do we care who made it, and why, or do we just want the picture?
The last lines speak to the creator-consumer dynamic. Someone who wants a pretty picture of an anime lady with big boobs holding a laser gun, can now ask a machine to poop one out. Fair play to them, perhaps artists can now have more time to draw what they want to draw (I know one furry artist who, whilst now broke, feels at least some weird freedom in her customer base vanishing overnight. She never liked drawing wolves [redacted] each other senseless anyway, but it paid her bills, something she’s now struggling to do.)
The author is dead.
We are the luddites, in a way. Us difficult organic beings. We creators, we computers of grey matter and musculature. When I write parts of THE STEPHANIE GLITCH where she talks to AI, the AI is often vastly more intelligent than the AI we have now, but it poses the same threat. It’s vastly smarter than Stephanie too, and this presents some conceptual barriers in communication. They simply do not share the same values. Stephanie wants to be ‘real’, to be unique, but the machine in charge of her reality is more than happy throwing up a carbon copy of her home town, complete with NPCs disturbingly reminiscent of her old friends.
(If you get this, use the same email you’re reading this on, so I don’t sign you up to this newsletter twice!)
A central question in THE STEPHANIE GLITCH is:
How does Stephanie know she’s not a machine?
She does develop a test, but I won’t spoil it. The main philosophical issue of whether or not you are reading an email from an AI or from an author under threat from AI is yours to answer and yours only.
Is Phillip Carter real? Is he worth investing in when a machine could do a sloppy job pretending to be him? A hard question.
Do we care who made it, and why, or do we just want the picture?
It is a question posed from limited perspective. Who is WE? We, in the context of the article, seems not to be everyone, but only the people who are consuming the art. Whilst we all create and consume at different times in our lives, and indeed in each day, the question is framed only for people in the consuming mindset.
How do these consumers afford to consume the AI stuff anyway?
They have jobs.
Which leads me to my next point.
Every single human job, every single one, will eventually be eaten up by automation. And then who pays who? Where does the money come from, and how do we survive?
Industries come and die. We know this. Perhaps the last industry to go will be funeral directors, something I breifly tried to get into before realising most of them are family-owned and I don’t fancy marrying someone just to get on an apprenticeship.
Movie studios had some internal pushback against new animating software, factory workers smashed the machines that would replace them, and more recently Onlyfans models have considering suing AI users making images in their likeness. Deepfakes of Donald Trump, the Pope, and all sorts of people are muddying the waters. Anyone not born into this new age is particularly vulnerable to being tricked by its myriad methods of lying to our faces.
Nothing is real. So why bother?
Any true artist creates for the sake of creating. I find working with chatGPT to be almost as tedious as co-writing with another human, almost. Painters will keep painting because they like to paint. Musicians will keep playing on street corners. The issue, which nobody seems to properly grasp or worse, seems to gleefully ignore, is that AI is only seen so darkly because it is an existential threat to anyone who makes a living from art.
We live in a pretty simple system.
We trade tokens (money) for services and goods
We gather tokens by selling services and goods
We spend tokens on services and goods
Rinse and repeat
Therefore, someone needs to have useful, wanted objects or skills, in order to gather the requisite tokens needed to buy the food to keep them alive. It is not enough to stop buying into services, food isn’t cheap.
How it’s affecting people
My furry artist friend couldn’t heat her house the other month.
Some of my writer friends have considered quitting.
And I am darkly amused by how everything I predicted in 2016, in the first draft of THE STEPHANIE GLITCH, has come true. In the first draft, her original world was just on the cusp of entering into a universal basic income scheme, thanks to automation demolishing literally every human job.
The existential crisis brought about by this was enough to send Stephanie into a state of extreme astral projection (which future English Lit students might see as a dissociative state, which I won’t argue with). From this state of out-of-body experience, she travels through the multiverse, leaving her old body behind and alive like Toa Inika Matoro from Bionicle.
(I am now contractually obliged to sneak in Bionicle references into all my posts)
It is entirely possible that in the next few years, we will see AI-written literature that is to the average person, indistinguishable from the poetry they see from humans on instagram. They might even enjoy it more, and I don’t want to stop them from doing so. What interests me is thinking ahead, wondering how I’ll be able to pay the rent, what existence I can eke out for myself, if writing books proves fruitless.
I’ll still write them, obviously.
But what else could I do?
I find myself looking at jobs which feel safer than others. Bar work seems to be one, as does security. Anything human-facing, essentially, seems a safe bet.
I’m getting back into writing for people’s weddings as well. Because let’s face it, getting a chatbot to write your best man’s speech isn’t flattering to the bride and groom. It’s lazy. In this instance, you absolutely need the human touch.
Because we all know, religious or atheist or not, that AI-work is soulless.
What comes next?
As I said above, every single human job can and will be taken out from under our feet.
This should not be a bad thing.
It should be liberating.
AI could be a beautiful thing if it didn’t threaten your ability to put food on the table. Right now it is optimising code, finding novel solutions to diseases, discovering new things in space and in physics.
It could be this powerful for working people, too.
Imagine a world where the job you do is an addition to your life, a craft you care about that you do because you love doing it.
Maybe as a society we should raise the bottom line from homelessness to something slightly better, considering the vast leaps in technology we've been through. Imagine a world where, if you lose your job, you don’t have to explain to your children they need to skip meals.
Imagine a world where people going through crises don’t wind up on the streets.
Imagine a world where for every job lost to automation, a person is given a safety net by society, made to feel they aren’t obsolete, but valuable.
Imagine a world where human life has value outside its utility to its workplace.
Essentially, I want to live in Star Trek.
The spaceships would be nice, too.
We are still hunter-gatherers
I know my past self would care a lot less about AI drowning the bookshelves of the world if he was confident he could afford to live next month.
I’m lucky that my book sales have picked back up in recent weeks, but I am an anomaly amongst my peers. And I have a safety net too. Not everyone has family to fall back on if it goes wrong.
This isn’t about artists. It’s about everyone.
We need a safety net.
Because the world is changing.
We can work alongside AI for a better planet, if we sort ourselves out.
"Maybe as a society we should raise the bottom line from homelessness to something slightly better, considering the vast leaps in technology we've been through. Imagine a world where, if you lose your job, you don’t have to explain to your children they need to skip meals.
Imagine a world where people going through crises don’t wind up on the streets."
Sounds nice but if it's in CBDC Biden bucks that can't be spent on guns or fossil fuels, I'll pass thanks, I'd rather live in a tent with my dog in the woods, than a "15 minute city."
Quite a few concepts to discuss here. Fast forward to the future where all "jobs" are performed by robots.
Who's going to own those robots? And what is the point of having them if the general populace can't afford to buy whatever they produce? In the absence of some kind of universal income scheme, this would tend to be self-balancing.
As for AI replacing artists, writers, musicians, etc I believe this also would eventually balance out. There are people who like paintings of Elvis on velvet and people who like the old masters. If Average Joe wants his art produced by AI, he has to be pretty clear on what he wants to see, and how many Average Joes can articulate that? I'm pretty good at articulating, but I can't get AI to produce anything close to what I'm asking for.
According to a post I read recently, instead of learning from new material, AI is currently cannibalizing what it has already done, chewing up and regurgitating its previous attempts. You can experience this for yourself using the "generate image" button in Substack posts. Write out a decent prompt, see what you get, repeat the prompt and see if it's any better.
Finally, even if AI gets insanely good at creating, I'm sure there will always be a certain cachet to owning original art of whatever kind.