Slop [1]

Do you remember Before Watchmen? 

Do you remember Doomsday Clock? 

I have certainly forgotten the HBO Watchmen TV sequel, although I believe at the time I said it was rather well done. 

When Doomsday Clock was coming out, someone sensible on the Internet asked:  “How long will it be until we stop treating any Watchmen sequel as a blasphemy against Alan Moore, and start treating it as one more comic book with an unfortunate copyright history—like Superman and Howard the Duck and everything Stan Lee was ever involved in?”

And my answer was “When someone other than Alan Moore writes a really first rate and important comic featuring the Watchmen characters.” 

Truthfully, the idea of a  New Gods comic drawn by anyone apart from Jack Kirby is very nearly as silly as someone who isn’t Alan Moore trying to continue Watchmen. But once you have read The Great Darkness Saga it is very hard to carry on being a purist.

I am not up to speed with Grant Morrison’s material, but I have heard they have done rather decent things with Kirby's pantheon.

This essay is not about superhero comics.

People who want to promote gigs or festivals very often use generative artificial intelligence to produce striking posters or flyers. If they are unwise enough to post those flyers on Facebook, the first “below the line” comment is almost certain to be “AI Slop”. 

And the artwork is usually very sloppy indeed. It is painfully apparent that every single sea shanty band, and every single sea shanty session (including, until I changed it, the one I run) is using roughly the same AI generated poster of some jolly pirates singing on a boat or at a dock. Sometimes, photos of the actual band have been turned into cartoons and superimposed onto a sepia or parchment background.  Very often it’s a kind of montage, like a movie poster, with singers, boats, audiences, pints of beer and, for some reason, sea monsters, hovering over an abstract background with no particular relationship to one another.  

Some of my shanty friends have gone so far as to say that they won’t attend any gig that uses this kind of publicity material, and indeed that gigs with those kinds of posters deserve to fail. 

My own position is a little less absolutist. I make some use of ChatGPT and GoogleAI  to bounce ideas off and, indeed, chat to; but I would not let it edit, much less write, anything going out under my name. The main strength of my writing is that it sounds like me; and AI would have the effect of making it sound exactly like everyone else

And I am pretty sceptical of using  AI as a search engine, or as someone said, an “automated librarian”, because its answers are frequently plain wrong. 

Case in point: I am researching, which is to say, vaguely ruminating about, a short, medium or long piece comparing Calvin and Hobbes with Winnie-the-Pooh. Calvin and Christopher Robin clearly have a lot in common: both are six years old; both have stuffed toys, and indeed, stuffed tigers, with whom they have imaginary adventures. And, incidentally, the creators of both characters became quite resentful of their success.

Now, the first Pooh story was originally published, not as part of the collection we are all familiar with, but as a special feature on the front page of the Christmas Eve edition of a London newspaper.  Was that original text any different from the published version? Both Google AI and ChatGPT said that the newspaper published the story without the framing device. You remember that the book begins with Christopher Robin asking for a bedtime story: the newspaper jumped straight in at  “A long time ago, about last Thursday….”. As a result, Christopher Robin has different pronouns: in the book, they were “you” but in the newspaper they were “he”.  

Which makes complete sense: but happens to be incorrect. You can fairly easily find a facsimile of that first printing, and it begins with the “real” Christopher Robin dragging the toy Pooh downstairs, exactly as he does in the book. 

Which doesn’t do me any harm. I am the kind of person who likes going back to sources. My current Work in Progress is a critique of CS Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man. When I asked my New Online Best Friend who on earth this “Alanus” who Lewis treats as an important authority could be, it told me that he was referring to a fairly obscure medieval allegorist named Alain de Lille. My first instinct was to head straight over  to the Internet Archive, download a copy of The Complaint of Nature, and see if I could make any sense out of it. (Spoiler: I couldn't.)

Lewis himself would have strongly approved of this: he said that he wished that, rather than reading boring modern books on Platonism, he could persuade his students to simply go away and read the Symposium. 

That is my first response to anyone who pontificates about the evils of the TickTocks and the FaceBooks. The terrible porn infested online echo chamber can provide me, in a few seconds, with primary texts that only a few years ago would only have been available from academic libraries. 

But not every harassed student will use the technology in that way. Many of them will use ChatGPT instead of reading the original books; or assume that ChatGPT is right even when it isn’t; or even use ChatGPT generated answers instead of writing their own. 

This was also true of Google and Wikipedia.  

Which is perhaps not the most original insight I have ever had:  

“New technologies can be used in bad ways and less bad ways”.

“A new tool may be helpful or harmful, depending on what you are doing with it.”