Slop [7]

Here is another thought experiment.  

Suppose there were a blogger who had an idea about writing comic strips. 

Writing about his life, say. 

And suppose that he couldn’t draw worth a damn. 

Now, if he took a generative art package and said “Generate a comic strip about my life” it would not be a very good comic strip and it would definitely not be about his life.

It would, in fact, almost certainly be slop.

But suppose the blogger wrote a script for the strip he wanted to write. Worked out what incidents he wanted to include. Broke it down into frames. 

Suppose he described the characters to the generative AI software,  and went through many iterations until the soulless algorithm had produced sketches he was happy with. 

And suppose he did the same with each location. 

And suppose he described each frame, and didn’t stop until he was happy with the result. 

“So, I want character 1 to go into location A, and notice that character 2 is already there, but he pretends not to see them, because he is embarrassed that he can’t remember their name, so character one walks over….”

And suppose the result is quite good. 

Has he outsourced his consciousness to a machine? 

Has he abnegated the whole concept of art? 

Or is he simply using an interesting new tool as if it were an interesting new tool? 

Is AI incapable of producing anything but slop?

Or is anything AI produces slop by virtue of it having been produced by AI? 

I don’t know what the point is, but I am pretty sure it isn’t that.

I have a habit of starting each day with some “improving” reading. A page or two from the Bible (I am still trying to get my head around Maccabees). Some poetry: I enjoyed the huge Being Alive anthologies, but am now reading some collected works of one or two of the poets whose names I underlined. An American named Alden Nowlan, since you asked. A little literary fiction (the short stories of Julian Barnes.) And I am always reading Books To Encourage Writers. The one I am reading at the moment is by a man named Seth Rodin. It is called The Practice. It is more drill sergeant than yoga retreat, with a strong overtone of Dragons Den. No such thing as talent...just showing up and putting the hours in...the only thing stopping you is you....etc etc etc.

But something which resonated with me was his emphasis on practice. Not in the sense of a guitarist practicing his chords or a tennis player practicing whatever it is a tennis player has to do to become adept at playing tennis. “Practice” in the sense of spiritual practice, in the sense of doing the same thing every day whether you want to or not. 

I have noticed that the signs in modern art exhibition often talk about the artists "practice". This seems to recognise that there isn't a clear demarcation between 'life' and 'art'. “Putting things on top of other things” and “Sitting in a bag” is much part of being an artist as actually producing paintings and sculptures.

What you as a writer or a painter or an artisan baker have to develop is your practice, says Rodin. The art is a by-product. But the better your practice, the better your art.

I’ve been working on this essay for, I suppose ten days. Semi-retirement (committing myself to writing full time) allows me to find a practice which suits me: I spent several days sitting in cafes writing and writing and writing and writing and since then have been sitting at my desk editing and editing and editing and editing--which includes a lot of deleting. And quite a lot of googling, I admit. And I am doing this because I like it, or if I am being cynical, I am doing it because I don’t know what else to do. 

“Nay” says the nay-sayer; if we do not stop it, right now, then AI will do your job. If AI really does get to the point where it can write a chatty but meaty article as well as a semi-retired librarian could have done, then there will be no jobs for writers. 

And definitely, that would be a shame. 

But what would I do if all the articles in all the papers and all the comic strips and all the movies and all the streaming boxed sets were being written by robots?

I think that what I would do would be to get up, read a few pages of poetry, and then write, write, write, write and edit, edit, edit, edit. Because that is what I do. Because that is who I am. And because I don’t know what else to do.

And I very much assume that the same thing is true of painters and musicians and artisan bakers as well.

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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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Slop [5]

May I share something with you?

As I type these exact words that I am typing, I am sometimes quite conscious of thinking, not “how shall I express in the mortal tongue the very deepest thoughts of my heart” but “what word, or group of words, most naturally follow the word, or group of words, I have just typed.”

Why did I type “typed” at the end of that sentence, when I could just as well have written “written”?

I think I typed “typed” because it was not the word that most naturally came next. There is a tiny, homeopathic quantity of humour in a sentence which ends in a slightly unexpected way. I was probably remembering, or hoping that you would remember, Truman Capote’s remark about the Beat Poets. “That isn’t writing, it’s just typing”. And also Harrison Ford’s famous bonne motte: “George, you can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it.” 

And as a matter of fact, my kind of writing is a lot closer to Keroac’s than it is to Capote, so I arguably am typing rather than writing. But the word came first, as St John said: the possible meanings occurred to me after I had put it down. That’s what John Lennon told the obsessive drifter in the footage in the Imagine movie. “You just take words, and you stick them together, and you see if they have any meaning. Some of them do, and some of them don’t. 

“What comes next” is very often “What sounds as if it should come next”, particularly if you are the kind of writer who likes to quote other writers and falls into their rhythms and cadences. I noticed quite recently how much of my style comes straight out of Stan Lee—specifically the Stan Lee of  Origins of Marvel Comics. There is some Basil Brush and some CS Lewis in there as well, of course, but its mostly Stan. But then the Stan Lee voice descended fairly directly from Groucho Marx. So, in point of fact, did Basil Brush’s. 

I type what sounds right: but it makes sense anyway. That's the funny part  [1]

We are talking about influence, something that writers are notoriously anxious about. But I wonder to what extent “influence” and “creativity” are two sides of the same golden doubloon? [2]

TS Eliot believed in a “great tradition” where every previous writer exerts influence on every subsequent one; and that the great artists were not the ones who expressed their individuality, but rather, the ones who most perfectly allowed the tradition to speak through them.  

In Murder in the Cathedral, he said that the martyr was the most perfect Christian because he no longer desired anything for himself, not even to be a perfect Christian. (Groucho Marx knew TS Eliot: he read McTavity the Mystery Cat at his funeral.)

Indeed, Eliot’s thought that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”. The folk-process has turned this one-liner into “good writers borrow; great writers steal.”

So if generative AI is, as is sometimes alleged, nothing more than a “gigantic plagiarism engine”, in what way is it not potentially the greatest writer and the most mature poet that the world has yet seen?

I don’t think that I have found the answer: but I am pretty sure that I have now worked out what the question is. [3] 

Some people say that there are no original books: there is only the intersection of multiple influences. This essay and Paradise Lost and the Hallmarked Man are simply the accumulation of the writers’ expectations about what a long-form essay, a religious epic, and a cosy crime whodunnit ought to sound like. 

And some people would go further to say that the are no authors: Andrew Rilstone and John Milton and JK Rowling are convenient labels to apply to bundles of influences. 

We falsely imagine “Minds” and “Egos” and “Selves” as lumps of plasticine that are moulded by family and education—and media and politics and religion and the class struggle. Or else we imagine that there is a little puppet living inside our brains, the strings of which are yanked by forces outside us. But the awful truth is that there is no puppet to manipulate and no clay to mould. Take away all the things which influence me, and what you are left with is absolute zero. 

Richard Dawkins and Ellon Musk speak in terms of minds that can become infected with memes or viruses. In principle, those minds could be inoculated against harmful invasive ideas like religion and empathy. But on this view there is no “mind” to be infected. It’s memes all the way down.  [4]

And so it turns out that is what we have been talking about. Not terrible posters for sea shanty gigs, but the very existence of the soul. 

Christian apologists sometimes argue that God must exist, because if he didn’t we’d be stuck in a mechanistic, amoral universe without ultimate meaning or purpose. Some atheists have responded that since a mechanistic, amoral, meaningless universe is quite plainly what we do live in, there obviously isn’t a God. 

CS Lewis argues that since we live in a universe where right and wrong exist independently of any individual’s beliefs and any society’s moral norms, there must be a supernatural force from which those standards derive. It would be trivial to respond that since we live in a universe which plainly doesn’t care one way or the other about human morality, there is no evidence for any such higher power.

Aren’t we in danger of falling into the same loop?

If neither humans nor AIs have “souls” there would in principle be no difference between a work of art produced by a great artist, and a work of art generated by a sophisticated algorithm. But since there plainly is a difference--since what the machine produces is Slop and what the human produces is Art, it follows that humans have “souls” and machines do not. 

But the counter-argument works equally well: if Generative AI could produce art which is indistinguishable from that of a great artist, either algorithms have souls, or else you and me and JK Rowling and everyone else who has ever existed has only ever been a soulless algorithm. [5]

1: Alan Moore’s remark about clairvoyance in From Hell. "I made it all up, and it all came true anyway. That's the funny part."

2: Harold Bloom wrote a book about poetry called The Anxiety of Influence. Some day I intend to read it.. (cf Groucho Marx "From the moment I picked up your book to the moment I put it down, I couldn't stop laughing. Some day I intend to read it.)

3: Douglas Adams shaggy dog story about the question to the ultimate answer, obviously; but also the joke about the cure to which there is no known illness; Churchill’s remark about El Alamein not being the beginning of the end but possibly being the end of the beginning; and perhaps Terry Pratchett’s remark about not having found God but perhaps having found the place where gods come from.

4: The story sometimes attributed to Bertrand Russell: "If the world rests on the back of a turtle, what does the turtle rest on" "Another turtle" "And that turtle?" "It's turtles all the way down.

5: CS Lewis, talking about the afterlife after his bereavement: "If Joy is not, then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren't, and never were, any people."

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Slop [4]

“Hey, Google AI. I am sitting in a coffee shop writing an extended essay for my blog. Can you suggest a few snappy one-line jokes that I could use to liven it up.”

“I am fiercely defending middle earth from a corner table. All I am actually conquering is a blueberry muffin.”

“My favourite writer is the guy on the corner table. He wrote a whole blog post about the wifi password.”

Thank you, Google AI. We’ll let you know.

During lockdown, there was a New Yorker cartoon depicting a man in his bedroom working on a laptop: he had lined up various stuffed toys and teddy bears, and pinned up a handwritten notice saying “Coffee Shop”. The caption read “Yes, as a matter of fact, I am a writer.  Why do you ask?” That made me smile: I felt, in a quite harmless way, “seen” by the cartoonist. The AI gags have the outward form of jokes, but lack any discernible humorous quality.

The simplest kind of joke is the pun. An algorithm could very easily spot that “big of me” sounds a bit like “bigamy” in certain dialects. But that is not very funny in itself. 

There are a number of joke-formats which are pretty much context-free pun-delivery systems. I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue has an "Uxbridge English Dictionary" round, in which contestants propose false definitions of words. 

Condescending : A felon in an elevator

Senile:  What a tourist does while they are in Egypt. 

It would be possible to create a narrative wrapper in which some confusion or misunderstanding gave rise to those wordplays: but the “Dictionary” conceit means we don’t need to bother. 

The same is true of children’s Knock-Knock jokes: they are just a formula for pointing out that some first names sound like the beginnings of meaningful phrases. “Isabella...legal Requirement on a Bicycle”.  “Amos...kito”.) 

Interestingly, the only way to get children to actually laugh at these kinds of jokes is to intentionally subvert the formula. 

Knock-Knock

Who’s there?

Europe.

Europe who?

No, you’re a poo!

See also "A little old lady", "Doctor" or simply "Doo-up".

In the traditional format, the person who started the joke delivers the punchline by adding some words to the knocker’s name. In the subverted versions, the respondent is tricked into supplying the punchline by adding the “oo” sound. There is something rather post-modern about subverting a form before you appreciate what is being subverted. 

So, in Animal Crackers, Groucho Marx is making conversation with Margaret Dumont and another society matron: 

“Let’s all get married.”

“You can’t marry both of us. That’s bigamy!”

“It’s big of me too. It’s big of all of us. Let’s all be big for a change.” 

It’s a fairly feeble pun, so why is it funny? Because it is being told by a man with a funny walk, a false moustache, an over-sized cigar and a slightly exaggerated New York Jewish accent? Because we have agreed in advance to find it funny—because Groucho is universally recognised as the wittiest repartee-artist America ever produced? Might it not even be that it is funny because it is not funny; the joke is really that a comic genius is stooping to such slender material? Later in the movie, after an impenetrable remark about a Prince Albert velvet coat, he breaks the fourth wall and announces “Well, all the jokes can’t be good!”

But what do we even mean by “Groucho Marx”? Do we mean what we can see on the screen: the accent, the eyebrows, the cigar—or do we mean “the knowledge of Groucho that we bring with us to the movie?” Is the line funny because we know that Groucho was an immigrant, grew up in impoverished tenements, was forced to drop out of school to become an errand boy, gradually worked his way up through Vaudeville….? And, indeed, because of what we know of the Great Depression, the Jewish diaspora, 1930s Germany, the Upper East Side….? 

Rowan Atkinson said that Sir Charles Chaplin, despite his obvious comic genius, is just not funny any more, because the world in which the jokes were made no longer exists. But then, why do we laugh, some of us, at Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, whose historical context is arguably more specific and more essential? 

Two arguments diverge: and I am sorry I cannot accept both. 

Down one path is pure formalism. The joke is funny because it is funny and it would still be funny if we had generated it by pulling letters at random out of a bag of Scrabble tiles. 

Down the other is something much more context-related: the joke is funny because a New York German Jew is telling it to some posh ladies in the 1930s.  And it is funny because it is a very old film which I remember watching with Daddy, in the “midnight movie” slot, on a school night; and he thought it was funny because he remembered laughing at it at the Truro Plaza before the War. 

But if we take the road less argued, we have to confront an even bigger question. What if it turned out that Groucho was not a second generation New York German Jew after all, but an English aristocrat who got into Vaudeville in his spare time, to finance his love of fox hunting? We contextualists would have to say that the joke is suddenly worthless: where the formalists would be free to say that Groucho-on-the-screen is a construct. It doesn’t matter if it is an actual man named Julius Marx, an entirely different man impersonating him, or, for the sake of the argument, a computer generated animation or an animatronic simulacrum. 

If it’s funny, it’s funny.

To which I can only see two responses. 

Either we have to say that its a silly question because a robot, an animator, or an impersonator could not in any world have created Groucho Marx: Groucho is the product of his unique biographical circumstances.

Or else we have to become very extreme subjectivists and say that now we know that Groucho is not real, we just feel, in our hearts and our guts and our humour glands, that we can no longer laugh at him.

Which is a very good answer. But I can think of a very good refutation of it: “You may no longer laugh at him, but I do.”

To which the only possible reply is “Well, you shouldn’t.” 

There is really no pressing need to let me know that you don’t think that it is a very good joke and you never found the Marx Brothers especially funny. You can by all means substitute Bernard Manning or Bernie Clifton or Wee Jimmy Krankie and the argument will be exactly the same.

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Slop [3]

Technology changes art: of course it does. Once someone worked out how to reliably lip-sync sounds and pictures, the particular artistry of the silent movie passed into obsolescence. I am quite patient with "difficult" art forms, but I find it really, really, hard to get my head around Metropolis or Nosferatu. It’s a form of narrative we have mostly forgotten how to read. 

Artists use the tools they have available: of course they do. Once someone has worked out a reliable formula for oil paints, then painters can do more and different things on their canvass. But some artists still choose to work within the limitations of watercolours or pastels. The fact that novels exist doesn’t mean that no-one will ever again write a haiku. I happen to love the cheap four colour comic books of the 1970s. I don’t think there would be so many red and blue good guys and purple and green bad guys if the artists had had a wider colour palate at their disposal. But I don’t think that if some luddites smashed the new colour separation system with lusty stroke, then a new Steve Ditko and a new Jack Kirby would inevitably arise.  

People used to say that prose written with an old fashioned dip-pen was identifiably different from prose written with a modern fountain pen; and that you only have to read an article to spot whether the journalist uses a ballpoint or a typewriter. There is something to this: I would be very unlikely to write a long, looping dissertation of this kind if I had to dip my quill in an ink pot every seven words—or even if I had to use correcting fluid every time I changed my mind. Perhaps CS Lewis was right that the clatter, clatter, clatter of a typewriter made it hard for young poets to get the rhythm right. Perhaps if I had to translate my diary into an obscure self-invented cypher I would discover a stylistic affinity with Anne Lister or Samuel Pepys. For a long time I used to write longhand drafts on plain white A4 notepads; and at one stage I tried to replicate the process with an Apple Stylus. Maybe I will do that again someday and see if anyone notices the difference. 

And so we come to the Hard Question. 

Eventually, I will read a book or a comic or listen to a song and say “That truly is the best thing I’ve heard in years. I haven’t been so engaged with a prawn salad since Knausgaard’s fifth volume. The world building is comparable to Stephen Donaldson at his best. How did you put into such simple language exactly how I felt when the Colston Statue was pulled down? How did you communicate the exact emotional sensations I felt when I confronted my bully in middle age? I want to meet the guy who wrote this and shake their hand.”

And you will say: “The guy who wrote it? Oh, didn’t you know? It was generated by AI.” 

You remember Douglas Adams’ digression about Lallafa, who wrote the best poetry in the universe? He lived and died in obscurity, but was subsequently contacted by time travellers from the future, and as a result, never had the experiences he wrote about in his poems? But (due to the way the grandfather paradox works in Adams’ universe) he was able to copy the texts from an edition of his poetry that was printed before history was changed. 

“Many people now say that the poems are suddenly worthless. Others argue that they are exactly the same as they always were, so what's changed? The first people say that that isn't the point. They aren't quite sure what the point is, but they are quite sure that that isn't it.” 

So: what is the point? 

The philosopher Jimmy Carr says that it is a false problem: AI is very good at what he calls “left brain things” but incapable of what he called “right brain things”. I don’t think any modern psychologist would accept the left brain / right brain distinction, but it is clear what he is talking about.  AI is very good at say, flying to the moon, because flying to the moon requires you to do a very large number of very difficult things quickly and without a single error. But AI would be unable to, say, write a country and western song, because song-writing is about “the gestalt”, the whole, which it can’t emulate. Songs are about human connections and human feelings which a string of code, however complex, can’t possibly have. 

That sounds very clever, but I am not sure what it means. 

Is the claim that the series of sound-waves that we label Fulsom Prison Blues have a form and complexity that no algorithm, in any possible world, could have produced?

That Johnny Cash’s brain is a unique piece of software, produced by his unique and complex life experience, that no piece of code could possibly emulate?

Or is Carr just saying that if an algorithm had generated Fulsom Prison Blues, it wouldn’t be worth listening to?

I am frequently bewildered by modern art. But I do understand that a male sanitary fitting can be regarded as art because Marcel Duchamp intended it to be art. If it turned out that some plumbers had just left it lying around by accident then we wouldn’t be interested in it. 

I believe in the Folk Process. A professional song writer in, say, the eighteenth century writes a song. He writes it for a professional singer dressed as a shepherd to sing in an eighteenth century theme park; or to print on cheap paper and sell on the street corner for a penny. Someone hears it and sings it to someone else, and someone else sings it to a third person, and so it goes on, ear to mouth, mouth to ear, ready for Cecil Sharp to discover two hundred years down the line. By which time, the bits which are hard to sing have been rubbed off; the bits of poetry which are hard to remember have been made memorable -- and some sections very probably reduced to nonsense. It is an object of faith among folkies that an individual composer, however good, cannot replicate this Process. Chris Wood always says that the greatest song writer of all time was "Anon". You can always tell a song which someone made up from a song which just grew. 

But one could surely now imagine a Marvellous Mechanical Folk Song Machine. Feed in a mediocre song at one end; copy it a hundred times with intentional errors; and you will probably find that something very like a folk-song has come out at the other end. What ought my attitude to that fake-song be?

Do I value the Folk Process because it tends to produce The Trees They Grow So High and Barbara Allen?  Or do I value those songs because I believe they were produced by the Folk Process?

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