Guaranteed To Barely Mention Rachel Reeves’ Spending Review!

This week: why I am not living in fear of the robots; some army etymology; and a map of London’s busiest bus stops.

A few months ago, in a “but seriously commissioners, please call me” kind of way, I joked that if anyone out there wanted me to give me a pile of money to make a lucrative 47-part podcast based on my recent book, I was available. That offer remains open: we can even call it “The Rest is Borders” if you want, Gary.

I digress. The reason I’m talking about it is because of this response:

“This will probably depress you, rightfully so, but AI will do that for you. Google’s Notebook LM will take a document (report, article etc.) and turn it into a conversational podcast between two people discussing the content.”

With apologies to Tristan, who seems very nice, I wasn’t depressed by that at all. I thought the whole idea sounded silly. “If someone just wants an AI to generate the Cliff’s Notes summary then, sure, it will probably be able to do that,” I replied. “But it’s like reading a Wikipedia summary instead of watching a film. Yeah, you can, but what’s the point?”

Perhaps I’m being naive. Perhaps I’ve got my head so far into the sand I’m about to meet the cast of Dune, and this is one of those posts, like the “A Labour government will be able to set the agenda, guys!” one, that people will be throwing back in my face for the rest of eternity. But while I worry about AI, and think it’ll do all sorts of brilliant and horrible things we can’t even imagine – and while those of us in vaguely creative sectors are somewhere unnervingly close to the frontline – my many nightmares about the future just don’t currently include being bankrupted by an artificial knock-off of myself.

“I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed.” Marvin the Paranoid Android (the rubbish 2000s one). Image: Chris Favero/Wikimedia Cpommons/CC SA 2.0.

One reason is that I think reading something written by a robot is a fundamentally pointless thing to do, and I just can’t imagine wanting to do it. It’s not as if there’s a shortage of #content in the world: everything that exists is already caught in a fight-to-the-death battle for eyeballs. With that much stuff to choose from, why would anyone opt for something that no one had even bothered writing? What are they meant to get out of it, exactly?

Ah, but what if they didn’t know it was written by a robot? Sure, that’s a risk. But I think people are underestimating the problem of the uncanny valley. The human brain recoils from things that don’t feel real, even if we struggle to articulate why they don’t feel real: for a hundred, imperceptible reasons, we want to look away. I’m sure there is a tsunami of AI-generated content – writing; podcasts – heading our way. But I still feel like there will be something wrong about it that means people just bounce off.¹

The result of all this is I can’t shake the feeling that an AI generated version of the sort of stuff I do would manage to be both weirdly off-putting and utterly pointless.² It’s not that I think it’s impossible. It’s just that I can’t imagine anyone choosing to engage with it.

Perhaps I flatter myself – but I am keenly aware that nobody is reading this because I’m bringing you regular scoops, and no one reads my books because they offer fresh insights into previously unexplored subjects. My job is arbitrage, repackaging other, cleverer people’s work as entertainment, and the things I bring to the table – my voice³; curation, showing you stuff you had no idea you’d be interested in; and the very occasional ability to express something you’ve felt but not previously seen articulated – are not the ones that could easily be replicated by a robot. They’re too dependent on me. The writer is not an incidental part of the writing.

None of which is to say that I don’t think AI will cause problems, whether by wiping out a huge swathe of jobs that aren’t yet ready to be automated (but which some manager somewhere wants automated anyway), or in pumping out a horrifying load of carbon to do it. It’ll be bad for the creative sectors, too. It’ll knock out a whole load of “pays the bills to fund your passion” gigs (copywriting; ad jingles), where people do great work but where the client would be happy with something quick and cheap. It’ll swallow a whole load of entry level positions, where people learn their trade by doing grunt work, just as children learn to draw by tracing. Those things are all terrible, and I don’t know what to do about them.

More than that, AI will fill the world – already is filling it – with a load of slop you have to wade through to find the good stuff. That, though, might turn out to be perversely positive, by finally forcing on people the realisation that free things are free for a reason, and if you want better you sometimes have to stick your hand in your pocket.

In the same way, as annoying as those inaccurate AI search summaries are – and as terrible as the reduction in clickthrough is likely to be for media organisations, whose finances were not exactly thriving before – something that re-trains our brains not to trust things we find on the first page of a search engine, and to chase down references once again, might not be the worst outcome for intellectual hygiene.⁴

Maybe I’m being naive. It’s entirely possible I will come to regret this post, and they’ll have repossessed Henry Scampi by sundown. But while I can imagine a future containing a lot more content produced without a human brain going anywhere near it, I just can’t imagine it being the sort of content that anyone really wants, and it certainly won’t be the place the Next Big Thing will come from. AI could never have produced the Beatles, only The Monkees; not Friends, just the many Friends knock offs whose names we no longer recall.

My books are not the literary equivalent, or this the newsletter equivalent, of The Beatles, I know.⁵ But I choose to believe that the fact they come from my brain is not an incidental part of their appeal. My ability to make money from my writing is tenuous, and could collapse at any moment, yes. But what else is new?

All that said, I read this by the comedy writer Madeleine Brettingham and it contains a genuinely funny joke written by AI, and that’s when I started to freak out.

Army of Me

Slightly random promo of the week

I’ve been enjoying West Country Modernism – my friend Mags Halliday’s tour of the modernist architecture of the West Country, and not merely because wandering around the West Country poking at buildings is my idea of a good time. If it’s your idea of a good time too, you can sign up here.

More predictable promo of the week

I have a new column! The New European has relaunched as the New World – bigger ambitions, you see – and asked me to put the skills I’ve learned [citation needed] writing this newsletter to use writing the trivia page. Every week I’ll be looking at something in the news and digging out facts and stats to explain it, with added snark.

Last week’s was about Air Force One and you can read it here (though you do have to register). Tomorrow’s will be on Greenland.

How did the army get its ranks?

There’s a scene in an otherwise uninspiring cartoon from my childhood that’s never quite left me. The main character’s sidekick is conscripted into an army, where he becomes a general. That’s good, isn’t it? the lead asks. You’re really senior! Alas not: the generals are the skivvies who do all the general work. The senior officers are the privates.

This is literally the only thing I can remember about SuperTed⁶ – honestly, until I googled it just now, I’d have sworn it was Bananaman – but it’s stayed with me because “private” does, in fact, sound fancier than “general”. It’s quite a good joke about the fact it is not remotely obvious why the ranks should be that way round.

Let’s find out.

(A note before I dive in: I’m keeping this to British army ranks, with an occasional diversion into Americana for cultural hegemony reasons. This is partly an attempt to keep the piece to a manageable length, because we all know how I get sometimes; but partly also to ensure I don’t run out of things to write in six months because I’ve already covered the entire range of human knowledge, shit. Anyway, let’s crack on. From the bottom up:)

Private: Short for private soldier. Carries the sense of a private person, someone without a public office: suggests a common soldier without status.

In the US, the next rank up is Private First Class, or PFC – this explains one of the many bits of Catch-22 I didn’t get on a first read; the joke about Ex-PFC Wintergreen, the most demoted man in the force – but in Britain the equivalent is: