Transcript
[Music]
So welcome back everybody we're now
looking at
the issue of
text and how it's been generated by AI
and this is really
more the problem on my side of things as
an author.
So Pete have you ever used one of these
like the chatbot GPT and there are
other 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 came
across it was this new year, so the new year 2023. A family, a member of the family had written us
all 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 rule
and he did it for each member of the family and we all roared with laughter. I mean it was so funny
but it was also really, really bad. - But also it's amusing isn't it, I've seen people on Twitter do it
and it's initially hilarious but there's just an emptiness to it. It's not like someone's
come 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 funny
then. I did, so my son got a, we were talking about this on the family chat, and my son got
an internship. So I had put into the chatbot thing, "Write a haiku congratulating him for
getting this internship." So that was such a stupid thing to write a haiku about. And it did
a 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 want
to sit writing haikus about summer internships. Anyway, so there's that side. It's the fun and
game side. But I think we've also realised that it's now much better than that in terms of
the reports are that it can produce academic essays that are very hard to detect as being
written, 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's
that people have. And then more recently, there's been, you know, if you imagine the tide coming
into where I stand as an author, nibbling at my toes is this idea that people could write books
and stories. And the two articles that caught my eye about this was the announcement by one of the
big sci-fi publisher, I think it was Orbit, said that they've closed to open submissions because
they were getting so many AI generated submissions. And then just last week there was a very funny
but terrifying article on the BBC about romance writers and whether or not they're going to be
taken 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 of
change the names. It was just, Lisbeth was going for a walk, she was. I mean, it was just totally
rubbish, utterly uninspiring. And I thought, okay, deep breath, deep breath, write a short story in
the style of Julia Golding. Now that is quite tricky because I've got lots of different things
I've done, but I thought, let's see what it comes back with. What it came back was so generic and so
thin that it was no more me than it was anybody else, Mally Brackman or anybody else writing
in 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 like
that, but you're not allowed to get some other... That doesn't qualify. We want you to actually
write 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 know
that a chatbot GPT can do it for you, would you be tempted to go across and cut and paste
from putting a simple command, leave it to run for 30 seconds?
Well, there's two elements is that I like, I'd like to write
it myself, but also my, my partner's a kind of copy writer.
So she, she probably, whatever I write, I pass over to her
anyway. And it's, you know, it's, for me personally, it
wouldn't be necessary. But I guess if you're just, if you've
got a business, if you know, if you just go like, you want to
like, you know, we've got friends who are good, several
kinds of small businesses, if you just want to, if you're
busy, 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't
want to kind of have to hunt down a copy writer and pay them
for an afternoon's work, when you could just press a button
and get something that is going to pass muster, because it's the
website isn't your main focus, it's it you're just you just
want to advertise your business. So the chatbots kind of
description of you is, I also think perhaps people are so used
to templates and things on the internet now, and formula, that
they'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 got
to 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 so
for example, we've all done the thing where we've read instructions for something that's come from
abroad and the translation has been a really terrible Google translate equivalent where it
makes no sense at all. I can imagine there is an improvement of communication that this
allows for people who are saying, "Write me a set of instructions or a recipe. These are the things
that need to be in it." Or even having it in the original language and saying, "Translate this and
put it in good English." I mean, I can imagine that is going to do a better job. So those sorts
of communication aspects. And also it helps people who do find it difficult to write and
perhaps 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 a
marathon. So they would say, it's all right for you, but for me, it's really helpful. I can make
a 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 and
say, this is me. Whereas, I mean, a chatbot's not going to be able to do these kind of really
just subtle, I mean, as a writer, you know, that this language is drawing on very subtle
concepts 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 ripping
off somebody's style who's got copyright is wrong. I think what's wrong in generating text is when
you are pretending to have knowledge that you don't have. So if you say, "Write me a GCSE essay
on 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 that
it's an AI writing it for you is that really is less important than the fact that you haven't
thought. 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 shortcut
when really what they're doing is they're not making the journey at all. It's not a shortcut
if 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 they
got a load of dross coming through. For example, to say that you think romance novels are formulaic
is to misunderstand romance novels. So Julia Quinn, the writer of Bridgerton, her novels
are actually social comedies. And okay, there is a structure and a formula in the sense of
it 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...just
in horror, you have a formula. In the western, you've got a sort of expectation. But there are
so many different ways of interpreting that. It's the characters she creates in each of the books
which tells a different story. In the romance genre, it goes all the way from historical to
contemporary to thriller. It's not as if it's as easy to mimic as people think. Unless you care
about characters and interrelations, it is a genre which particularly matters that you understand
how 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 Chatbot
GPT to say, "Please eliminate any cliches in this passage." So the square jawed or the flashing eyes
or whatever it is. I could imagine finding a use as a writer for just checking I haven't fallen
into white as a sheet and all those other cliches that you tend to reach for when you're feeling
lazy. 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 no
personal 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 intelligence
that 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 what
people, it's taking in what people are putting into it, but it's not understanding where
that stuff is coming from, is it? It's not. I used to get an illustrator's magazine and
it was quite highbrow and obviously the people have been on illustration courses and then the academic side of thinking about
illustration, whereas I hadn't. So they do kind of small interviews with illustrators. And one of the questions they asked, and it was
obviously kind of some, a term that had come out of illustration teaching, it asked what, and initially I thought, you know, it's this
ridiculous term they're asking, but it asks something like, what
are the frictions that you deal with? You know, what are the
things that you just want, you know, what are the problems, I
guess, in a way, what are the things that stop things running
smoothly in your process? And it's the idea of friction seems
to be it really is about, it's a very human thing. It's just the
idea in your head about how your life will be, and the everyday
frictions 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 of
all 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 write
it into programmes or whatever, it wouldn't understand the idea of being a consciousness
that 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 seem
to be formulated from the outside. But as you say, then, you know,
they just, they're not, they're dealing with human existence and
human consciousness and human relations, which is always
friction. 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 a
scenario where you're Barbara Broccoli, I know that's, you
know, alter ego. And, and you're saying, okay, what's our plot
for our next James Bond going to be before they've got writers
involved? So they might sit in a room and say, okay, let's have a
spin the wheel. They could do this by yanking a book off the shelf or some kind of lottery where
they say, "Right." But they could put into the online AI and think up a James Bond plot set in
the 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 have
a freedom fighter from...that's a good idea. Who...and then, really important, that's a good
idea. Why don't we see who writes really well in this area? Oh, who wrote Narcos? Let's find one
of 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 planning
our next big movie, perhaps we could get some inspiration ideas that are the equivalent of
putting 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 something
that should be quite disjointed and airless. James Bond actually is one of those characters
which 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's
odd, 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 is
there. And I can see how it might, in the same ways the images inspired ideas, I could see it
doing the same for people looking for ideas. I think that, like you were saying, there's a lack
of human...there's a lack of feeling and warmth and content underneath it that means that it's
barren in the end. So any place where you want something to be looked at and understood as a
cultural...music rather than musac, we should not be reliant on these tools. If they're there at
at all, they should be at some sort of support to the creative
level, not being the creator.
That they're going to be useful to take up a certain cultural
space, whether it's the inclination or budget to to
commission original visions, I think, but as you're saying,
they will be, it will be a really interesting thing for
writers and artists and creative people to kind of to try and get
their heads around because it's already being presented with a
sinister air, like it's going to cause nuclear war and things.
It already feels like it's, people are using that Terminator
idea in a way, aren't they? Terminator 2, the machines gain
consciousness and then attack us. And it feels like people are
already relating AI to that. And I wonder, you know, people, it
feels like it's going to be really fruitful thing for, but
only if people come to a human with their human reactions.
This great sinister presence in our lives as it's being
presented.
So in terms of what we're trying to do at the Oxford Centre for
Fantasy is I've got a sort of outline of a policy which I run
by you, if you think it seems fair. So we will continue to employ illustrators and designers
because the other part of this are designers who may be using photographs and other assets
to design things. We'll continue to pay and employ them, but we will also make use of
AI 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 ways
we use the Canva or whatever to design things, we'd use it like that. But we'd continue to
showcase and celebrate illustrators, particularly for being humans of different visions. Same
goes 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 that
because it's social media. But if I'm judging in the competition that we're running for the
new fantasy writer or anything where it matters that it's somebody's artistic vision, then we
don't want the AI generator involved because that is...you're actually sharing the creativity there
with 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 employ
artists, let's celebrate writers and reward writers, but also be aware that we can't do a
kink and uke because the tide is coming in. There's got to be a place in the ecosystem where these
things 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 interesting
responses to it. You know, as human beings, we're going to tell each other stories about
this new element in our environment. So, and as human beings, we're going to use the bits
that 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 all
the worlds is the best place for something?" And that means all the fantasy worlds. If you had to
go and be a fantasy illustrator, perhaps a children's book illustrator or something like
that 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 that
world. I don't think I wouldn't get much illustrating done. It would be just too
bizarre 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. That
would 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 up
and it'll be in some of our story.
I wonder if being in the AI world as a human being, I wonder
what that would be like, seeing all this, just trying to make
sense 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 go
and wait and have a look at? You mentioned several whilst you were talking, but
who 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 with
He's got a book out with Vikings at the moment. He's just got this really dynamic style. I think
he seems to have come out of those early 80s comics that were just, the wiki comics that
were 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 recommend
is, 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 the
actual book and find one of the early editions, what he does there is he draws your attention to
the actual writing by having a green and red typeface for the different worlds you're in
and illustrated illuminated letters and vignettes. So the actual book I remember
adoring, the actual physical book is a great story too. So I would recommend going and having a look
looking at and just enjoying really original vision through text and how it draws you
into the story. So that's my tip. So thanks Pete. Thanks very much for helping me think
this through. And I think this is, you know, the tidal wave is sweeping over us both. Let's
see 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.
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