AI Revolution: What should writers and artists do? Part 2: Text

[Music]So welcome back everybody we're nowlooking atthe issue oftext and how it's been generated by AIand this is reallymore the problem on my side of things asan author.So Pete have you ever used one of theselike the chatbot GPT and there areother ones like that that are out there?No. Have you ever had anybody come up to you with a... I mean, for example, the first time I cameacross it was this new year, so the new year 2023. A family, a member of the family had written usall a poem using this. So they put in, write a poem for, you know, Julia and he put in,she's an author and she does this and that and then it produced this terrible dog ruleand he did it for each member of the family and we all roared with laughter. I mean it was so funnybut it was also really, really bad. - But also it's amusing isn't it, I've seen people on Twitter do itand it's initially hilarious but there's just an emptiness to it. It's not like someone'scome up with something like a really witty, bad satire of a poem. It really is just a bad poem.You know, there isn't that human element to it. (EP) So next year, Chris, if you're listening,you can't do that again because we won't sit there and listen to them because we thought it was funnythen. I did, so my son got a, we were talking about this on the family chat, and my son gotan internship. So I had put into the chatbot thing, "Write a haiku congratulating him forgetting this internship." So that was such a stupid thing to write a haiku about. And it dida really good haiku. So the joke lasts, as you say, for a certain length of time. Just, "Oh,this is, isn't this fun?" I could have sat and thought of one myself, but I don't actually wantto sit writing haikus about summer internships. Anyway, so there's that side. It's the fun andgame side. But I think we've also realised that it's now much better than that in terms ofthe reports are that it can produce academic essays that are very hard to detect as beingwritten, but not by the student. It can write journalism. It can write content for websites.In fact, I know someone who said to me that they use it to generate the content for their websites.I mean, they would otherwise be doing it. They don't pay somebody else to do that role,but they don't feel their writing skills are that strong. So they get the,they say, "I want to say this." And then it gets turned out as a sort of, you know, that webby'sthat people have. And then more recently, there's been, you know, if you imagine the tide cominginto where I stand as an author, nibbling at my toes is this idea that people could write booksand stories. And the two articles that caught my eye about this was the announcement by one of thebig sci-fi publisher, I think it was Orbit, said that they've closed to open submissions becausethey were getting so many AI generated submissions. And then just last week there was a very funnybut terrifying article on the BBC about romance writers and whether or not they're going to betaken over by book writing chatbots. And they were basing it on Bridgerton as their,was their illustrating image for this. So I was then got worried. So I thought, okay,let's go and find out. So I went over to chatbot GVT and I put in, I thought, okay,write me a short story in the style of Jane Austen. Okay. What I got back was terrible.It was basically a really short summary of Pride and Prejudice. It didn't even bother to sort ofchange the names. It was just, Lisbeth was going for a walk, she was. I mean, it was just totallyrubbish, utterly uninspiring. And I thought, okay, deep breath, deep breath, write a short story inthe style of Julia Golding. Now that is quite tricky because I've got lots of different thingsI've done, but I thought, let's see what it comes back with. What it came back was so generic and sothin that it was no more me than it was anybody else, Mally Brackman or anybody else writingin my English-speaking culture. Maybe I wasn't giving it enough detail in the commands,but I don't think it is actually yet at the stage where it can write a book.We did launch a prize for new writing last week with the Pushkin Press, and as part of our rules,We did say you are no AI generated or any... Basically, you've got to write the book yourself.You can't generate the plot or whatever by AI. You're allowed to spell check and things likethat, but you're not allowed to get some other... That doesn't qualify. We want you to actuallywrite the book. So I'm sure that competitions and publishers will have to have this in mind.But going, let's look at this.So I've been using AI generated images for sort of web presence, that kind of, you know,ephemera.For you, say you wanted to write a biography of yourself for your website, and you knowthat a chatbot GPT can do it for you, would you be tempted to go across and cut and pastefrom putting a simple command, leave it to run for 30 seconds?Well, there's two elements is that I like, I'd like to writeit myself, but also my, my partner's a kind of copy writer.So she, she probably, whatever I write, I pass over to heranyway. And it's, you know, it's, for me personally, itwouldn't be necessary. But I guess if you're just, if you'vegot a business, if you know, if you just go like, you want tolike, you know, we've got friends who are good, severalkinds of small businesses, if you just want to, if you'rebusy, you just want to press something, go away for lunch,come back and have something you can just put on your website.You know, it kind of makes sense to do it, doesn't it? You don'twant to kind of have to hunt down a copy writer and pay themfor an afternoon's work, when you could just press a buttonand get something that is going to pass muster, because it's thewebsite isn't your main focus, it's it you're just you justwant to advertise your business. So the chatbots kind ofdescription of you is, I also think perhaps people are so usedto templates and things on the internet now, and formula, thatthey're not really going to have an issue with seeing a chat box kind of bio of somebody,you know, it's just part, it's just what things are like now. I think it's creative people go,"Oh no, we want to have our own voice." But lots of people just want to, you know, if you've gotto go out and work all afternoon, you just want to push a button and get in your van or whatever,you know, it's... (EP) I think there are places where, let's talk about the positives, where sofor example, we've all done the thing where we've read instructions for something that's come fromabroad and the translation has been a really terrible Google translate equivalent where itmakes no sense at all. I can imagine there is an improvement of communication that thisallows for people who are saying, "Write me a set of instructions or a recipe. These are the thingsthat need to be in it." Or even having it in the original language and saying, "Translate this andput it in good English." I mean, I can imagine that is going to do a better job. So those sortsof communication aspects. And also it helps people who do find it difficult to write andperhaps have dyslexia or something where they know what they want to say, but the actual, for me,it's super easy to write 500 words, but for them that might be like, oh, you know, running amarathon. So they would say, it's all right for you, but for me, it's really helpful. I can makea good impression or I can write a good speech for my, um, you know, my presentation or whatever.Yeah, I mean, my partner gets, you know, people ask her to do their personal statements and things,because, you know, when they're 18, 19, or whatever, looking for work, they, and she can just,she can create something that works well in the environment that they're going into,she can tailor it. It's not a formulaic piece, it's taking account of them, because she, they're,their friends and she knows them. And, and she can really do a piece of work that they can go out andsay, this is me. Whereas, I mean, a chatbot's not going to be able to do these kind of reallyjust subtle, I mean, as a writer, you know, that this language is drawing on very subtleconcepts really all the time, isn't it? Little references and emphases and things like that.Whereas I think, because I imagine chatbots,I'm not sure, I'll have to give it a go. I'll have to kind of come up with a, I'm working on it.I would encourage people to go and actually try these things out to see,to see what is going on. Let's look at the issue of - I think it's wrong in the same way as rippingoff somebody's style who's got copyright is wrong. I think what's wrong in generating text is whenyou are pretending to have knowledge that you don't have. So if you say, "Write me a GCSE essayon Frankenstein referring to these sources, that information hasn't gone into your brain.It's also not being filtered through. Part of learning is actually adopting an idea for yourself.Otherwise, it's basically cheating. It's getting somebody else to write it for you. The fact thatit's an AI writing it for you is that really is less important than the fact that you haven'tthought. You've done none of the thinking because education is about the thinking.So that's clearly wrong and they need to have a way of stopping students thinking it's a shortcutwhen really what they're doing is they're not making the journey at all. It's not a shortcutif you're not on the journey. So that seems quite clear. The issue of is this going to be...would it be something which can write a novel? I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding here.I can understand how Orbit got fed up with seeing all these submissions,but I doubt any of those submissions were actually of any quality. It's just that theygot a load of dross coming through. For example, to say that you think romance novels are formulaicis to misunderstand romance novels. So Julia Quinn, the writer of Bridgerton, her novelsare actually social comedies. And okay, there is a structure and a formula in the sense ofit is usually boy meets girl, though not always in romance, obviously. Boy meets girl,series of incidents, and then usually some sort of a happy ending. But that is the sort of...justin horror, you have a formula. In the western, you've got a sort of expectation. But there areso many different ways of interpreting that. It's the characters she creates in each of the bookswhich tells a different story. In the romance genre, it goes all the way from historical tocontemporary to thriller. It's not as if it's as easy to mimic as people think. Unless you careabout characters and interrelations, it is a genre which particularly matters that you understandhow feelings work. Yeah, it's the most deep-rooted human story that there is, isn't there?And also you will get loads of cliches. So I would quite like to be able to use ChatbotGPT to say, "Please eliminate any cliches in this passage." So the square jawed or the flashing eyesor whatever it is. I could imagine finding a use as a writer for just checking I haven't falleninto white as a sheet and all those other cliches that you tend to reach for when you're feelinglazy. So to be a bit like an editor on my shoulder saying, "Hang on, that's lazy writing."I can see a use for that. We don't need endless screeds of "He looked like a fallen angel"style descriptions of heroes, which is used a bit too much. But I don't think, because there's nopersonal understanding of feelings behind it, I don't think it'd be interesting.maybe there'll be a phase when there's more emergent consciousness of artificial intelligencethat they'll be interested in what it's like to fall in love as an artificial intelligence.In the same way, data in Star Trek was an interesting character. But I don't know.It seems as though it's, in the end, a bit like a clever parrot.Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, having read around it, the fact that it's only taking in whatpeople, it's taking in what people are putting into it, but it's not understanding wherethat stuff is coming from, is it? It's not. I used to get an illustrator's magazine andit was quite highbrow and obviously the people have been on illustration courses and then the academic side of thinking aboutillustration, whereas I hadn't. So they do kind of small interviews with illustrators. And one of the questions they asked, and it wasobviously kind of some, a term that had come out of illustration teaching, it asked what, and initially I thought, you know, it's thisridiculous term they're asking, but it asks something like, whatare the frictions that you deal with? You know, what are thethings that you just want, you know, what are the problems, Iguess, in a way, what are the things that stop things runningsmoothly in your process? And it's the idea of friction seemsto be it really is about, it's a very human thing. It's just theidea in your head about how your life will be, and the everydayfrictions that stop it happening. So you, AI is not going to be able to understand the frictions,but it's the frictions that make the stories that they're about. So in romance, friction is,is there, isn't it? The characters don't get together. They, or they, you know, you know,my work came out of lots of frictions, you know, just, just being a human being in the world,seeing things in a certain way, finding a way to express that. As creative people, we're kind ofall the time kind of dealing with these, these frictions. And I just cannot see how AI would ever,ever be able to work that into whatever it's doing. I don't know, even if you try to writeit into programmes or whatever, it wouldn't understand the idea of being a consciousnessthat exists and is kind of just trying to, you know, get through day to day life,which is what it, what informs the art that is, that we try and communicate with.So it just seems like there's a gaping, there's a vacuum in it,which, you know, I say perhaps romance, sci-fi things, they seemto be formulated from the outside. But as you say, then, you know,they just, they're not, they're dealing with human existence andhuman consciousness and human relations, which is alwaysfriction. And if, if you can't put friction into those stories,then you haven't really got a story, I don't think, have you?So there is a way where I can see it'd be useful. So imagine ascenario where you're Barbara Broccoli, I know that's, youknow, alter ego. And, and you're saying, okay, what's our plotfor our next James Bond going to be before they've got writersinvolved? So they might sit in a room and say, okay, let's have aspin the wheel. They could do this by yanking a book off the shelf or some kind of lottery wherethey say, "Right." But they could put into the online AI and think up a James Bond plot set inthe context of the current war in Ukraine or outer space or South America.and back would come some skeletal plot and they could say, "I don't think we'd do that.Maybe that idea though is the kind of direction we want to go in. So we want to actually havea freedom fighter from...that's a good idea. Who...and then, really important, that's a goodidea. Why don't we see who writes really well in this area? Oh, who wrote Narcos? Let's find oneof the writers from Narcos. We know they do good, so let's see if they want to come on too.I can imagine using it as a kind of prompt to say, "In our airless room where we're planningour next big movie, perhaps we could get some inspiration ideas that are the equivalent ofputting it up on the whiteboard, you know, brainstorming." So I could see it like that,I would think that if they go on and say write us the script, what you would then get is somethingthat should be quite disjointed and airless. James Bond actually is one of those characterswhich doesn't have much character, oddly, so he might do better than many other characters,but it would still feel like a puppet moving through a series of events.He's almost, yeah, but he works as like a, almost like a blank that with, it'sodd, he's kind of a blank character, but with lots of charisma that people put on to him.Yeah, he is an interesting, he could be generated by A, couldn't he?I kind of feel they put the concept of their own charisma onto him and that's why I love it so much.Yeah, and that's why each actor is able to inhabit that role.Yeah.So I think that in the same ways as a writer, I can't break the loom. I can't break the AI isthere. And I can see how it might, in the same ways the images inspired ideas, I could see itdoing the same for people looking for ideas. I think that, like you were saying, there's a lackof human...there's a lack of feeling and warmth and content underneath it that means that it'sbarren in the end. So any place where you want something to be looked at and understood as acultural...music rather than musac, we should not be reliant on these tools. If they're there atat all, they should be at some sort of support to the creativelevel, not being the creator.That they're going to be useful to take up a certain culturalspace, whether it's the inclination or budget to tocommission original visions, I think, but as you're saying,they will be, it will be a really interesting thing forwriters and artists and creative people to kind of to try and gettheir heads around because it's already being presented with asinister air, like it's going to cause nuclear war and things.It already feels like it's, people are using that Terminatoridea in a way, aren't they? Terminator 2, the machines gainconsciousness and then attack us. And it feels like people arealready relating AI to that. And I wonder, you know, people, itfeels like it's going to be really fruitful thing for, butonly if people come to a human with their human reactions.This great sinister presence in our lives as it's beingpresented.So in terms of what we're trying to do at the Oxford Centre forFantasy is I've got a sort of outline of a policy which I runby you, if you think it seems fair. So we will continue to employ illustrators and designersbecause the other part of this are designers who may be using photographs and other assetsto design things. We'll continue to pay and employ them, but we will also make use ofAI assets where it's sort of things which you wouldn't be paying someone to do otherwise.wasn't a budget for that. It's just the stuff that makes things pretty. In the same wayswe use the Canva or whatever to design things, we'd use it like that. But we'd continue toshowcase and celebrate illustrators, particularly for being humans of different visions. Samegoes with the sort of text base. I personally won't be using Chatbot GPT to write content,but if somebody wants to generate a social media post, I'm not going to worry about thatbecause it's social media. But if I'm judging in the competition that we're running for thenew fantasy writer or anything where it matters that it's somebody's artistic vision, then wedon't want the AI generator involved because that is...you're actually sharing the creativity therewith the people who program this thing, plus the myriad of stuff is hoovered up on the internet.So try and have a sort of sense of, "Let's continue to celebrate artists and employartists, let's celebrate writers and reward writers, but also be aware that we can't do akink and uke because the tide is coming in. There's got to be a place in the ecosystem where thesethings are being used. Does that sound kind of fair as policy? (AL) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah,it isn't going to go away, but it's something we'll, I think it's something people will have,going back to that friction idea, people we have, they're going to have really interestingresponses to it. You know, as human beings, we're going to tell each other stories aboutthis new element in our environment. So, and as human beings, we're going to use the bitsthat we want and forget about them. Yeah, you're going to pirate a few, or record a few mixtapes,which I seem to remember was a thing back in the day in the 80s. So, as a bit of fun at the end,Pete, we've been talking a lot about creating imagery. I always ask my guests, "Where in allthe worlds is the best place for something?" And that means all the fantasy worlds. If you had togo and be a fantasy illustrator, perhaps a children's book illustrator or something likethat in any of the fantasy worlds that you've come across, where would you like to go?I'm not sure if the Dr. Seuss world counts as a fantasy world.No, yeah, why not? I mean, you can imagine transforming yourself into a cartoon in thatworld. I don't think I wouldn't get much illustrating done. It would be just toobizarre watching things go by. You could be in a little corner drawing everybody. Oh,that's nice. That made me think of the Richard Scarry world.you know, how busy they are. You could be a little person drawing in a corner. I was thinking of,one place that'd be quite interesting to be in would be Inkheart, the Cornelia Funke books,because there you've got this thing where if you read something out loud it comes to life.But I'm wondering about an aspect of being able to draw something and it coming to life. Thatwould be fun. Where you could actually have a fantasy world where something comes off the page.I think I'd like to go there.Yeah, that would be, that sounds like a fable in the making,doesn't it?Yeah, no, I've just, yeah, yeah, copyright that idea quickly.Oh, no, but AI's heard it, so they're going to hoover it upand it'll be in some of our story.I wonder if being in the AI world as a human being, I wonderwhat that would be like, seeing all this, just trying to makesense of it actually within it. I'm not sure.So, and also just to celebrate craftsmanship, is there one illustrator that you think we should goand wait and have a look at? You mentioned several whilst you were talking, butwho would you say this is a really inspiring illustrator?A contemporary illustrator that I really like is Steve May. He's just got books out withHe's got a book out with Vikings at the moment. He's just got this really dynamic style. I thinkhe seems to have come out of those early 80s comics that were just, the wiki comics thatwere just full of silliness. That Viz eventually started taking the mick out of. I really like him.I look to his work to kind of keep a dynamism in my own work. I really like him.And so I would say for, um, in this sort of idea of what sort of text writer would I recommendis, I don't know, I mentioned this before, but there was a book by Michael End called the,or Ender, called The Neverending Story, which then to become a film. But if you look at theactual book and find one of the early editions, what he does there is he draws your attention tothe actual writing by having a green and red typeface for the different worlds you're inand illustrated illuminated letters and vignettes. So the actual book I rememberadoring, the actual physical book is a great story too. So I would recommend going and having a looklooking at and just enjoying really original vision through text and how it draws youinto the story. So that's my tip. So thanks Pete. Thanks very much for helping me thinkthis through. And I think this is, you know, the tidal wave is sweeping over us both. Let'ssee if we can emerge on the other side.I wonder if we'll be having a podcast in five years where we're all in a...Yeah, all these AIs right, taken over.- Yeah.- Yeah.- I imagine it'd be much the same as it is now.- Thank you.- Human inspiration everywhere.(upbeat music)- Thanks for listening to Myth Makers Podcast.Brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun.Find out about our online courses,in-person stays in Oxford,Plus visit our shop for great gifts.Tell a friend and subscribe wherever you findyour favorite podcasts worldwide.(upbeat music)