Reply Piece Reply

[I imagine this will all go into the eventual PDF, along with the Right of Reply I asked my friend ChatGPT to write.]

[Who said "I do not have time to make this shorter?"]

Stephen Brohan

I do read your articles on Lewis with interest. So let's start with the conversation about a waterfall.

If I say to you that a waterfall is sublime I am telling you little that is factual about the waterfall. Maybe I make you curious to look, but you have learned slightly more about me, maybe that I am the sort of person who gushes about waterfalls. In any case, the payload of the message is communication between you and me. Maybe I will share my feelings about the waterfall, maybe you will think that I am a pillock.
When I read Burroughs' description of a swordfight, maybe he will communicate to me a feeling of excitement, maybe he will share his vision of the struggle to live on Barsoom, maybe I will get an insight into his enthusiasms, maybe I will think he is a worthless hack writer.
In any case, he has exposed himself to me to some extent and the potential value of the transaction is tied to communication between him and me (communication may be limited to us sharing a vision, I don't have to be interested in the speaker as a person for communication to take place, though it does enrich it).

To take a different angle on the same thing, and to comment on a question you ask elsewhere. Suppose I read a comic, and enjoy the story in a superficial way. Then I read it again, getting a different angle on the story by seeing how the text and graphics interact. Then, having got interested in the story, I look at some panels in detail, seeing things I hadn't noticed, wondering what the author means by them, how they relate to the story. The story has become part of my imaginative life.

Suppose I then realise that the author only wrote the text, the pictures were generated by AI. I feel cheated. The channel I thought was open into the author's mind isn't there. I was looking at details of a panel I thought the author had left for people like me to see, but now I think maybe those details were generated by AI. I still have the superficial reading of the text that I started with, though even that is diminished, but I'm not going to pore over the details any more

I think what we are discussing here is 

1: The intentional 'fallacy': Does a work of art have a meaning in itself, or does it only mean what the writer intended it to mean? 

2: Formalism: Is the main thing we ought to pay attention to when looking at a work of art its shape, or should we be more interested in its wider context? 

I think both positions can lead to absurd conclusions. At one extreme,  the song “Let it be” is reducible to a dream that Paul McCartney had about his mother. Once we know this, any other ideas associated with "Mother Mary" magically vanish, or are prohibited.  Or as my English teacher said (I am not bitter about this), I am not allowed to think that Fanny Price is self righteous prude, because Jane Austen didn't intend me to think that. But at the other extreme, you end up talking about geometrical arrangements of lines and contrasts between specific colours on the canvass, without actually mentioning whether you are looking at an icon of the Virgin Mary or a portrait of Winston Churchill (and certainly have to pretend you don't know who Winston Churchill was.)

If I am faced with a choice, I’d go for formalism. If you say “Have you noticed how a particular word keeps being repeated?” and “Notice that the meter changes in line three?” you are actually talking about the poem. When you say “I think that he is writing about daffodils to express the grief over the death of his pet Spaniel” you are often not talking about anything at all. (Even if you can prove the spaniel thing from the guys' letters.) 

1: Lewis and the waterfall. 

I think you have summarised very well the opinion that Lewis (unfairly, in my opinion) attributes to the bad-wrong post-modernist school teachers. They draws a distinction between, as you say, factual statements (“The fire is hot”) and value judgements (“The fire is beautiful.”) Lewis’s claim is that if “The fire is beautiful” means “I am experiencing emotions connected with beauty” then you have effectively denied that value judgements can ever be true or false. In which case, why not raise children to think that waterfalls are ugly, or that murder is beautiful, or that empathy is a disease? 

Lewis’s view (seems to be) that waterfalls have an intrinsic quality of “sublimity” and would have had even if there had never been any human beings to appreciate them. He doesn't directly say "because God put a little nugget of a substance called sublimity" inside them, but this seems to be what he's driving at.

I agree that if you say “The waterfall is sublime” then we are communicating with each other, and the very fact that you chose to say it is telling me something about you.  And perhaps I might reply “No, it’s a piddling little stream, come with me to Canada and I will show you something truly sublime” -- which would tell you something about me. But we would not be talking nonsense or disagreeing about nothing. (“The waterfall is Tuesday” or “The waterfall is pahootle-snurdle-ptang-ptang”) 

2: Sword-fights

I think that when we are reading an adventure story then the first, second, third and fourth things that we care about are the story: the thrill of the actual situation (two men sword fighting on the edge of a chasm in the middle of a desert) and the overall narrative (will our hero get back to the city in time to warn them of the impending invasion?) I agree that literally any story will also have additional meanings — for example “Men should be honourable”, “It is okay to fight with lethal weapons over points of honour” (or “marriage is desirable” or “pink things are the best things”.) And I agree that a book that you only read to find out What Happen Next is not a good, or a great, or literary book. Edgar Rice Burroughs may not be sufficiently bad writer for my example to work!

Two people are sitting in tavern, and in return for a drink, the first person tells the second person a story. Is the main thing which is happening an interaction between the two people; or is the main thing which is happening a story is being passed on. Is what I take away from the encounter “the man I once met with a beard and cloth cap, who told the most fanciful stories about djinn and dragons, with a look in his eye that said he didn’t believe a word of it”; or is what I take away “the tale of the young man who sold his mother’s cow for a handful or beans…”. As a critic, is what I pay attention to the odd little hand gesture the story teller makes when a new character is coming into the story, or the indefinable accent he gives all the baddies? Or do I say “notice the clever way the story seems to be about the relationship of the naughty boy to his old mother, and transitions into one about giant slaying...”?

Again: it is highly unlikely that you would exclusively take one line and completely reject the other. But when you find out that the story teller was actually an actor from the local theatre school playing the role of wise old traveller to get free beer, does that change the story? Or make it valueless?

This comes up all the time in folk music. Woody Guthrie learned the song Git Along Little Dawgies from an old cowboy in a saloon. But, says the ethnomusicologist, the cowboy very probably heard it on the radio, or on a 78 record. Does that spoil the song? There is a story that one of the old folk collectors, possibly Vaughan Williams, heard a fantastic old song from an old yokel name Mr Pittinger. Some time later, someone told him that it wasn’t really an old song, but that Mr Pittinger had made it up. “Well, so much the better for Mr Pittinger.”  

3: AI Comics

“Suppose I then realise that the author only wrote the text, the pictures were generated by AI. I feel cheated….I still have the superficial reading of the text that I started with, though even that is diminished, but I'm not going to pore over the details any more.”

I think the answer to this is that it is probably the case, but not necessarily the case. 

It is absolutely true that a lot of my writing about Spider-Man was focussed on “What was the relationship between the artist and the writer” — I argued that their artistic and political disagreements were playing out on the page. If I hadn’t already known about the posthumous reputation of Stan Lee, I might not have wanted to ask those sorts of questions. A very strict "New Critic" would say “You don’t actually need to know anything about Stan Lee and Steve Ditko to make the observations you are making: either the words clash with the pictures, or they don’t; either the narrative undergoes a change of direction, or it doesn’t — and in any case, Stan Lee is a public persona and Steve Ditko is a recluse, so you aren’t talking about the actual people.” 

I have said occasionally that when a story “works” I don’t pay attention to its artistic merits or technical strengths. I saw the re-release of Avengers: Endgame last week, and forgotten how well it works just as a story. For 90% of the movie I was not thinking “I see what they did there” or “Isn’t Robert Downey Junior a skilled method actor”: I was thinking “Oh, god, no, that’s Tony Stark’s dad” and “Arrgh, Thor is going to have a drink and mess it all up.” Of course, as a critic, “why did that story just work” is a perfectly good question. (And I have noted that very bad artistic works can often be more successful than much better ones in this regard. The Henry Cavill Man of Steel was a much more sophisticated work of art than the Makers of Kellogg Pepp Present The Adventures of Sooooooperman but I know which version of Superman I believed in.  And in fact, I have no idea who wrote the radio scripts.) But very often, my paying attention to camera angles and special effects is a sign that the movie has, at the more basic level, failed. One reason I often don’t review films I’ve really liked. 

But on the other other other hand....there are movies which positively want you to pay attention to the technicalities and the artistic vision of the auteur.  The director might think it very odd if you started to think that Antonius Block (I looked it up) was a real person. This is why people who like arthouse movies don’t see the point of superhero movies and people who like superhero movies don’t see the point of arthouse movies.

Why did the scene in which Obi Wan gave Luke Skywalker his father’s lightsaber make such a deep impression on me the first time  you I saw it?

I mean, there are lots of answers: because I was already aware that it was like scenes from the King Arthur stories and the Narnia stories. Because I was a boy and was subconsciously aware that swords represent penises. Because the scene conveys a humanly real situation about growing up and moving on from home and parents. Because of the incongruity of a device which is both futuristic and old fashioned at the same time. Because gadgets are cool. Because Carl Jung. Because Joseph Campbell. 

Suppose it turned out that Star Wars wasn’t mostly written by George Lucas, but by Marcia Lucas? Not by George Lucas or Marcia Lucas, but by his script-doctor, Tom Stoppard? Not by any of those people, but by a Hollywood committee who hired an actor to play Lucas because he fitted in with the image of the movie they wanted to make? 

Is that quite interesting? Yes.

Would it answer the question? Not really.

Would it spoil the film or make me feel cheated? I don’t think so.

We could push it to a further extreme: suppose the person who really wrote Star Wars was a toxic gender critic who thought that scenes with WISE OLD MEN and ABSENT FATHERS and PASSING ON THE TORCH and GREAT BIG GLOWY PHALLIC SYMBOLS would make boys grow into real men and stop them wanting to be girls…. ? Well yes, that would be interesting. (Every year we read of devout atheist discovering that the Narnia books have a not-very-well hidden meaning and feeling VIOLATED.) Would it change the movie, or spoil it? Maybe. Not necessarily.

And if it turned out that someone had built a machine and shown it all the great adventure movies there had ever been and all the great science fiction stories there had ever been and the complete text of Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God and then said “Write the biggest and best science fiction movie you possibly can?” Would that ruin it for me?

“Ah, but if someone had done that, it wouldn’t be the greatest science fiction movie ever made. It wouldn’t have been Star Wars. It would have been flat and artificial and lacking in the divine spark.”

I agree. I think we are talking about hypotheticals here. I don’t think AI has produced texts comparable to human texts, and I doubt if it ever will. My distinction is still between "Anything produced by AI is slop" or "Slop is the only thing AI can produce." 

Reply Piece

 Someone wrote a thoughtful reply to my long essay on AI! 

It is worth getting up in the morning after all!!

Stephen Brohan

Reading and writing is a human activity in which we participate even if only as readers.

We make a mistake if we regard a piece of writing primarily as an artifact and talk about its meaning and value as though they are intrinsic to it as a thing.

Reading ERB I form a human contact with him. The activity of reading gives me a possibly illusory insight into his mind. He wanted readers and, despite his demise, I am doing something for him by reading him as he has done something for me by writing.

It's the value of the activity that is what reading and writing is all about.

As far as I know, AI doesn't want me to read it's output, and in reading AI work I am in a pathetic relationship with a rubber doll, rather than in a minor but real relationship with a human.

Response

1: "Reading and writing is a human activity in which we participate even if only as readers."

Agreed

2: We make a mistake if we regard a piece of writing primarily as an artefact and talk about its meaning and value as though they are intrinsic to it as a thing.

Partly agreed. There are certainly literary critics who very much think we should concentrate on the thing itself and try not to think about who made it and when and why. But there are other literary critics who think that actual poems barely exist outside of the conversations readers have about them. (Stanley Fish, who spent his life reading Paradise Lost, claimed not to know what "Paradise Lost" actually is.) Objects do have intrinsic qualities: we can agree that the statue is big and white and made of marble, and we can probably agree it represents a male figure. But it may be that it only represents King David because Michelangelo intended it to represent King David. And we need to know stuff about the Bible, and Michelangelo's patrons before we can say why he thought a big marble statue of King David was worth making. And once we know all that, "how does the statue makes you feel" is a question only I can answer.

I don't know if you are reading my series of essays on CS Lewis. He found a school text book which (allegedly) said that when we say "That waterfall is sublime" or "That sunset is beautiful" we are not talking about waterfalls and sunsets but only about our own feelings. He said that that kind of thinking would literally lead to the end of civilisation as we know it. But maybe thnigs that human artists make work differently from things which God made?

3.1 Reading [Edgar Rice Burroughs] I form a human contact with him.

I am not sure if I do. I have complained about all those Facebook Memes, which allege that reading Willard Price as a kid "took them to Africa" or that Anna Karenina and Jean Grey are more real to them than any of their friends. I don't quite believe that, either. When you are reading, you certainly form an impression of the person who is telling the story from his words; and those words can't help giving you some impression of what the person who is telling the story is like. "The person who is telling the story" maybe very much like the writer who is actually typing the words, or the story teller may be another fictional character. (But, granted, it tells me something about the author that he created that fictional story teller.) 

All this is fine, but if you are not careful, you get caught up in a feedback loop: "By reading McBeth, I can tell that Shakespeare was a socialist, or a conservative, or straight, or gay. Therefore, McBeth can only mean what a socialist, or a conservative, or a gay guy, or a straight guy, would mean by it." 

Which is why I would rather concentrate on the words he definitely wrote. At any rate, I don't think that many readers of Gods of Mars spend a lot of effort working down the chain from Captain John Carter to Edgar Rice Burroughs the story teller to Edgar Rice Burroughs the actual typist. What they are enjoying is the sword-fights. 

3.2 The activity of reading gives me a possibly illusory insight into his mind.

It kind of does. I can definitely infer things about him from what he say -- he approves of honour, doesn't think slavery was too bad, idealises women but thinks they are mainly decorative, had romantic ideas about primitivism and noble savages, believes in Lamarkian evolution, has a thing about naked people, etc etc etc. But those are really comments about his books, not his mind. I think this even applies to much more autobiographical writers. I don't think I would particularly want to meet Proust or Knausgaard. What is interesting is the texts they have created out of their very ordinary lives. (A bit like the visual arts: people sometimes ask 'Why on earth is anyone interested in that particular bowl of fruit'. The answer is 'We aren't, we are interested in the skill and technique with which the painter has represented it on a canvass.')

This is quite an important difference, isn't it? Do you regard a work of art as a thing which someone has made or a medium for communion with other minds? (The answer is almost bound to be "A little from column A and a little from column B.) 

It reminds me a little of the discourse around an old Doctor Who story we had a while ago. One faction said "This story is racist; therefore, the script writer was racist; and you obviously shouldn't watch TV shows written by racists." The other faction said "I actually met the script writer, and he definitely wasn't racist, so the script can't be racist, so any racism you see in the story is coming from your own mind." I was kind of like "It's a TV show, with qualities, and one of those qualities is certainly racism, but that doesn't exhaust what there is to say about it." For many years the only music I loved was written by a proto-Nazi, so I have practice in this area. 

3.3 He wanted readers and, despite his demise, I am doing something for him by reading him as he has done something for me by writing.

Now, that's more in tune with my way of thinking. Edgar Rice Burroughs was a craftsman, and what he built was stories. What he wanted to do for me was to thrill and excite me, and possibly titillate me: to help me pass the time without wasting it. Granted some people -- like Ray Bradbury, I think -- have said that he also makes you think that there could be other worlds where things are done differently, and that's a political act. I don't entirely disagree. But mostly, I read him for the sword-fights. 

I picked Edgar Rice Burroughs as my precisely because he was a pulp writer. Perhaps to make the point work I needed to go further down the literary ladder: Enid Blyton and genre westerns and Saturday morning cartoons and soft pornography. Things that you read but wouldn't re-read: things that (to quote Prof Lewis again) you use rather than receive. You might say that if a book doesn't have meaning and significance beyond the bare thrill of finding out what happens next (or imagining yourself having lashings of ginger beer or sexytimes with a lady) it would be better not to read them at all. 

Who said that literature is worth some effort, but trash has to grab you from the first sentence? 

The Guardian Art Critic thought he could tell by reading a single sentence that Terry Pratchett wasn't Great Literature and therefore wasn't worth reading. FR Leavis said given George Eliot existed, there was no point in reading Dickens more than once or Thomas Hardy at all. I am not sure that is any way to live: I would rather say "The Birdie Song is not Beethoven's fifth symphony but then Beethoven's fifth symphony is not the Birdie Song."  

4: It's the value of the activity that is what reading and writing is all about.

Do you mean “That activity — making mental contact with the author — is the point of reading and writing?”

If so, I agree that it is one of the points, but not the only possible point. Did I read Jerusalem (a mere 1,500 pages) because I wanted a quasi-relationship with Alan Moore? Or because I have enjoyed the ways he puts words and pictures together in the past? Or just because I wanted to say that I had read the complete works of Alan Moore? (Or are they all the same thing?) 

The idea of the author makes a difference. "The book was written by an elderly comic book geek who believes himself to be a magus" is a fact about Jerusalem. I thought about this a bit when Neil Gaiman did whatever it was that Neil Gaiman has done. That nice chap with the shades who looks a bit like Dream and thinks we should make good art is certainly a component of Coraline and American Gods and now that nice chap doesn't or might not exist. It would have been much worse if (gods forbid) something bad had come out about Terry Pratchett. It didn't matter one way or the other about David Eddings. JK Rowling is a special case. (All discussions about books end with "JK Rowling is a special case.")

5: As far as I know, AI doesn't want me to read its output, and in reading AI work I am in a pathetic relationship with a rubber doll, rather than in a minor but real relationship with a human.

Well, there have been times in my life when I have had close relationships with objects made of synthetic fur and stuffed with sawdust. And with pieces of plastic with five points of articulation. And I am pretty sure that the point of Star Trek is my imaginary relationship with Captain Kirk, not with Gene Roddenbury.

I am not even completely sure that the man who purchases a rubber sex doll is pathetic. If he thinks it is a real person, that is pathological; and if he plays with the doll rather than going to the bar to meet actual women, that will probably reduce his long term happiness. Its worse than some things but better than others. 

I remember reading something on a problem page somewhere some time ago, in which someone recounted a very sad story about a woman who had lost a child, either to still-birth or else to SIDS, and was lavishing disproportionate attention on an elaborate figurine of a science fiction character. (Presumably Grogu!) The agony aunt said that, so far as she could see, this was as good and helathy a way of working through a terrible and complicated grief as any other. 

I admit that I have a bee in my bonnet about the "books are brilliant" memes on facebook. I think that they are probably typing the kinds of things that they think that people who like books ought to type about books that they like. But let’s assume they are talking about something real: it follows that (hold the front pages!) different people read books for different reasons." For some people, at least, "reading" means "experiencing a state of mind somewhere between an hallucination and a day dream." While the text is in front of their noses, they somehow feel they are actually on Mars or on the deck of the Hispaniola. They don't particularly feel they are in contact with the soul of Jilly Cooper or Dan Brown or that guy who writes the Reacher books.

Now, suppose you gave that kind of reader a book. And suppose he looked up from it and said "By Crom! I have been utterly transported to Mars! I could utterly see the Therns riding Oliphaunts to Mordor, and felt that I myself was chastely stoking Deja' Thoris's incomparable buttocks." And suppose you then revealed that the book was not written by a human, but generated by a computer. I think he would say that it didn't matter. And you might say that it ought to matter. And he might say that it didn't matter that you thought it ought to matter.

My Dad used to tell me that I couldn't possibly really be enjoying Blakes Seven: I was just pretending that I liked it to vex him. 

Actually, I think that the computer generated day-dream generation device would simply fail: the reader would read the words but not be transported to Jane Austen's England by them. Writers, however low-brow, have a skill in creating mental illusions that computers can't achieve. Or can't achieve yet. 

My question was "If an AI could convincingly emulate the work of a human author (which I don't think it can) would it matter?" I am not sure that we have got beyond "It would matter because it would not have a human author."

Ecclesiastical Minimalism

 

Patreon Subscribers have advanced access to my latest "boxed set". 

Part 1: Conjuring tricks with bones. 

Part 2: Occam's razor

Part 3: A very weak case for Easter

Part 4: Proof and Faith

Part 5: A much stronger case for Easter

Slop

1: Shanties and Slop: Why do all gig posters look the same?

2: Television and Steam Trains : What would my granny have said.

3: Authors and Authenticity: Can a machine write a folk song? 

4: Groucho and Basil: Can a machine write a joke? 

5: Influence and Originality: Can a machine have a soul?

6: Plagarism and Pastiche: Could a machine replace Stan Lee? 

7: Practice and Purpose: Will a machine replace me? 

Liar Pieces

Patreon supporters are currently getting to read pages ripped from my writers diary: a little more chatty and personal than my main essays.

Liar Piece

I have started doing morning pages again.

Anyone who has ever tried to write will know about the theory of “free writing” or “morning pages”, where, instead of getting down to actual work, you procrastinate by typing whatever drivel comes into your head and never looking at it again. 

There are a number of theories about why this helps. I just read a book by Steven Pressfield, who is best known for writing a very macho novel about golf. I assume it is a macho book: I can’t imagine that he would write a writers' guide in the persona of a shouty PE teacher and then write a novel in which the way to knock little balls into little holes is through self care, soft furnishing and accepting who your are. 

It is called The War of Art which I am not going to deny is a very clever title.....

Souvenir Piece

I am so very, very sorry.

In the last month, I have twice promised that I will write a particular article “when I get a Round Tuit.” 

Which is a really smug, unfunny joke, derived from a piece of seaside souvenir shop tat, and I hate myself for having referenced it. 

Do seaside souvenir shops even still exist? I am not thinking of the places which sell plastic buckets and spades for kids; and water bottles and sun-cream and deckchairs for grown-ups, along with inflatable toys that would be incredibly dangerous to use anywhere near the sea....

Coffee Piece

I am in Cafe Kino which used to be my regular hang out when I lived on Stokes Croft. 

The Boston Tea Party, which was at the bottom of St Andrews Road has closed, and still looks decrepit and boarded. Ironically, they have another branch just a few minutes walk from my new flat. There is a bakery that sells artisan cakes and coffee literally outside my window.

When I first arrived in Bristol there was only one single Boston, on Park Street, which stayed open until 10pm, and sold sandwiches at half price from about 9pm. 

There was a kind of writers group there on a Thursday, and it was a kind of hang out the rest of the week. Unbelievably they must have decided that staying open til 10 for the benefit of writers who only bought one cup of coffee and didn’t pay full price for the sandwiches wasn’t a viable business model. They now have branches everywhere: I suppose they are a chain, although they slightly retain the old bohemian feel...

Dead Politician Piece

Dick Gaughan wrote a wonderfully vitriolic song about a hellfire preacher who had been described by the Rev Ian Paisley as “a wee bit of an extremist”. The sleeve notes of the album add that apart from his views, Rev Jack Glass was a charming and urbane person.

Many, many years ago, the Guardian carried a series of interviews with some convicted sex offenders (after they had served their jail time). Like any good journalist, they had an eye for specific detail: one of the interviewees served rather fine Russian tea from a silver pot. Inevitably, a letters’ page correspondent fulminated that having good taste in tableware does not make it okay to molest kids.

I don’t think anyone was insinuating that it was....

Toilet Piece

I have a confession to make.

On my way home from Sidmouth, I used the Ladies’ lavatory at Wells Bus Station.

In my defence:

1: Both Gentlemen’s lavatories were out of order or otherwise unusable.

2: There were no women, or indeed anyone else, around.

3: It would have been a bit of a faux pas to have shit my pants on the number 373 bus....

Revision Piece 

I see teenagers in the library. And I talk to people with teenaged children. I am still just about young enough to know some people with teenage children. My friends all started a bit late, if they started at all. The wedding and Christening invites have finally dried up, but the funerals haven’t started yet. It appears that if you are a teenager, life revolves completely around something called REVISION. There are books about REVISION and packs of REVISION cards and whole TV programmes about REVISION.

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine per cent perspiration. I am sure that is true. I am also sure that it is the sort of thing that someone who thinks that they are a genius would have made up in a post-Calvinist society. Hard work is virtuous; rich people worked hard; therefore rich people deserve to be rich.

I was very good at English Literature and pretty interested in History and Sociology. I don't consciously remember REVISING before my exams. I suppose I reread the text books and looked at my old essays and practiced writing new ones from memory?

I did sort of OK. Two Bs and a C and a 2/1 and a Masters....

It only costs $5 a month to join my Patreon, and new followers

a: Make me feel good about my life

b: Give me pocket money to save against my frail old age.

Come over and have a look.

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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