Slop [6]

I still have a fondness for the novellas of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He wrote ten and a bit John Carter of Mars novels, and an impressive twenty-four Tarzan stories. I think we can agree that, except to the eye of love, any one of his books is very like another. [6] The same goes for love stories, cowboy stories, stories about rainbow fairies and even, dare I say it, stories in which men and ladies take their pyjamas off and get up to very naughty things together. 

Nothing would please me more than if someone found that there were ten more John Carter stories that I had somehow neglected. But what is to stop you putting the entire Burroughs corpus into a generative AI package and asking Mr Chat-Bot to generate Chapter One of the unwritten sequel to Skeleton Men of Jupiter? Or, even better, to write the book that everyone wishes the Master of Adventure had written: Tarzan on Mars. 

And let us suppose you handed me that first chapter, and I honestly couldn’t tell that it wasn’t by ERB.  Suppose that I said “That is one of the most enjoyable pastiches I have ever read…. Please give me Chapter 2.” 

And suppose you said “But actually, it’s AI slop.” 

ERB was very good at what he did; but his writing had no discernible literary merit, and furthermore, he is safely out of copyright. So would it really matter that there was no human consciousness behind the new story: that the words were spat out of a word-spitting machine that could not possibly care about honour and sword-play and rescuing incomparable ladies from nasty green people?

But perhaps you stick to your radium guns. It is a silly question. The scenario could never arise. The machine might possibly produce some sentences in a slightly over-written Edwardian patois; and even some dramatic incidents; but without any of the verve and energy and certainly none of the manic world building that made Edgar Rice Burroughs so seminal. 

And if you are right, we have no problem. The definition of “the soul” is the ability to convincingly mimic successful 1930s magazine hacks.

Here is another secret. If the twelfth John Carter novel had, after all, been written by a talented human being, then in certain moods, I might find that to be a drawback. I might prefer the convincing AI version. 

Sometimes, when I am reading a comic book, I find myself thinking “This is not a Spider-Man story: it is simply some writer making up a Spider-Man story. A good Spider-Man story: a Spider-Man story better than I could have written myself; but still, some guy is making it up out of his head. I can’t accept it as what really happened to Peter Parker. It doesn’t have what Chaucer called auctoritas. And stamping the word “official” on it doesn’t magically confer that authority upon it. 

I would have loved it if Stan Lee and Steve Ditko had produced some fresh issues of Amazing Spider-Man before they passed away. I would love it if a cache of unpublished pencils and scripts had been found in Steve Ditko’s hide-out. I would love it if I could reach into a parallel world where the two never quarrelled and they continued to produce comic books together through the seventies, the eighties, the nineties. 

And when the mood is upon me, I think I could more easily convince myself that a Generative AI synthesis of “What Stan and Steve would have written next” would feel more…authentic….than “what some kid called Joe Kelly made up last week.”

A journalist once told a TV chef (Clarissa Dickson Wright) that it was all very well to go on and on about wholesome home cooked food, but some people preferred to eat at McDonalds.

 She replied “Well, they shouldn’t.” 

And maybe that is the point. I want (In certain moods) an infinite number of new episodes of Amazing Spider-Man by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee—but I shouldn’t. 

I would like there to be a hundred John Carter of Mars novellas—but I shouldn’t. 

I would like there to be a whole nother season of Tom Baker Doctor Who stories—but I shouldn’t. 

What I should want is a human story teller telling Spider-Man tales in the way they would tell them; not in the way Stan Lee would have told them. I should want someone to crate a new superhero based on his own life experience. Ideally, I should want not to still be reading superhero comics at my age.  

And anyway: it’s not the sort of wish even the most powerful djinn could grant. Doting parents sometimes say to their baby or toddler “I wish you could stay like this forever” but they don’t really mean it.  A moments thought reveals that “like this” means “at the stage where you are doing everything for the first time; where you are learning a new things or exhibiting a new behaviour every day”: where you are perpetually changing. A baby that never changes would be a plastic doll. To wish that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko never quarrelled is to wish that Spider-Man never existed: the classic issues are as they are because the creatives were not getting on. Similarly, It is pointless to wish for “more” Doctor Who stories from an era when the programme, and the lead actor’s characterisation, was in a constant state of flux. 

I can envisage an AI producing sixty four Fantastic Four comics in a pretty fair approximation of Jack Kirby’s style. I can even envisage the AI producing something that is superficially more sophisticated than the thing which it is copying.

The Fantastic Four, but less sexist.

The Fantastic Four, but Galactus dies.

The Fantastic Four, but we actually get to see Aunt Petunia. 

What I cannot envisage is an AI reworking a defunct publishing house’s stable of second rate super-heroes into a multi-layered existential meditation on the nature of power. 

So there you have it. 

“The soul is that quality possessed by Alan Moore, but not by John Byrne.” 

I think that is a pretty good punchline.

6: Jeeves: “Except to the eye of love, one West Highland terrier looks very much like another West Highland terrier, sir”

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