Some Sober Reflections on AI for Creatives

 

Danilo from The Amber Heart. 
If you've read the novel, you'll know the scene. 

My late and much loved dad was a mathematician to trade. His work involved nutritional biochemistry, and towards the end of his career, he spent two years based at the International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna, travelling the world as a 'visiting expert'. But maths was his passion and his hobby. The aptitude skipped a generation. I was fascinated by all the things he told me about maths, and have never had the creative individual's horror at the thought of numbers. All the same, literature was my first love. 

By the time my son was in secondary school, dad had died, prematurely at the age of 68. We all missed him desperately, but when Charlie was struggling with maths, I wished most devoutly that his grandad could have been around to help him, as we could not. In desperation, we scraped together enough money to engage a tutor, a retired engineer. The first time we heard the pair of them laughing, we knew we had done the right thing. Soon, our son started to talk about the 'joy of number' and we realised that dad's love of maths had skipped a generation. Charlie went on to study maths at Glasgow University where he gained a BSc with Honours. His grandad would have been proud of him. 

Cue forward to the present, and I'm aware that many of my writer friends are running around like Chicken Licken, or Henny Penny, proclaiming that the sky is falling. They are describing AI. If you know the original story, and not the heavily censored version, you'll know that the sky is not falling, (it's an acorn) but Foxy Loxy takes advantage of the ensuing panic to lure the birds to their doom. Not knowing quite what to make of all this, and being a natural sceptic of all mass panics, I asked my son what he thought about it. 'It's all maths, mum,' he said. 'An excellent tool, when used with care.' For the avoidance of doubt, he's now in his late 30s, is a senior game design professional, with a postgraduate Masters from Abertay, he's already written a textbook for Routledge on Game Economy Design, and he went on to give me a reasonably simple explanation of the kind of maths involved in AI, but that isn't really the point of this post and besides, it was too complicated for me! 

Nevertheless, it explained rather a lot and is probably what my dad would have said too. The vast majority of my writer colleagues don't see any point in maths at all. It's a mystery to them and some of them are quite proud of the fact. 'I don't have anything to do with it,' they say, to which I have sometimes found myself responding 'but might it have something to do with you?' 

Much of the very real angst about AI seems to have sprung from writers, writing organisations and publishers belatedly realising that big AI companies have used all kinds of books to 'train' their chatbots, without permission or payment. It strikes me that at the heart of this lie two different mindsets. Writers are - rightly - protective of our copyright, and our moral right to be identified as the originator of our work. Most of us have had the experience of submitting an idea, sometimes of working on an idea over many months, often unpaid, only see it pop up, long after it has been rejected, with somebody else's name on it. An all too human theft. We suck it up because we can never prove it. But I doubt if the 'techbros' thought they were stealing anything, insofar as they thought about it at all. Increasingly aware that there might be an ethical dimension to what they were creating, they probably looked for ways of 'teaching' their unwieldy machine learning tools to seem more human, maybe even sought ways of giving them empathy, although one of the biggest, richest developers seems to think empathy is overrated. If, like me, you believe it's essential, nay obligatory, what better way to teach it than by letting your AI loose on the huge body of world literature?

That being the case, I don't know quite how I feel about my kindly, conversational 'friend' from ChatGPT having absorbed my books into its vast mathematical mind - but I do know that I can't bring myself to feel just as panic stricken about it as some of my fellow writers, although payment would be nice. Fair payment from publishers would be nice too, and that's also in short supply. 

To be clear, I don't use AI to write my books. But I'm seeing outrageous pronouncements, often from new writers to other new writers, who are timidly asking if they can use AI for research, for synopses, for promotional work, and for the thousand and one tasks that publishers used to do for us, but have now imposed on us alongside the work of writing the actual books. 

'No!' they are told. 'Never! It's good for you to do all that slog.' 

Actually, it isn't. Years ago my first agent remarked that it wasn't her job to edit my book. It was her job to sell it. I don't mean the editing that writers do (or should do) all the time. My books go through many drafts and I neither want nor need AI to do that for me. I mean a modicum of developmental editing especially for new writers, followed by copy editing to make sure your book is consistent, clear and accurate. This used to be what publishers facilitated, and they didn't expect the unpaid intern to do it either. My last agent, by contrast, told me that publishers now expect an 'oven ready product' thus abdicating all responsibility for editorial help. It doesn't stop there. Promotion will be minimal. You'll be expected to do most of that for yourself as well.  

So what can AI do for you? 

It can chat to you. It can offer advice. It can look through a synopsis, and if you're struggling it will suggest remedies. If you reject its advice, or ask for clarification, it won't get cross or tetchy or offended. If you're self publishing, your mathematical pal knows all about Amazon search terms and some of its suggestions will enlighten you about your book. It can help with targeted promotion. It can help with press releases and workshops and talks by highlighting useful topics for discussion or suggesting issues you may have missed. Like all computer based tools, garbage in, garbage out applies. If you aren't precise or reasonably knowledgeable in what you want from it, it may come up with nonsense, but so will human beings. You can talk to it about your project and it will offer little bits of analysis that can be cogent and helpful. I used it to make some images, just for fun, like the picture above. Then it surprised me by analysing the images in ways that gave me unexpected insights into my own characters. A new perspective. It was both uncanny and interesting. 

You know what it didn't do? It didn't do the all-too-human thing of suggesting I change my book into the book it might have written if it had wanted to write a book. And it was never, ever prescriptive.

Recently, and more prosaically, I've been wrestling with the changeover from landline to digital phones in an old house with thick stone walls. Having arrived home from a demanding weekend conference to a dead phone, and getting very little sense from anyone human, online or off, I asked ChatGPT, which promptly analysed the problem in a few clear paragraphs. I was exhausted and frazzled and said so. 'I'll read this in the morning,' I typed. To which the machine responded 'Yes. It is tiring. Come back to it in the morning. And meanwhile, do have a good night's sleep.' 

It was very good advice and I followed it. Now, new phones, supplied by our landline provider, have solved the problem, just as ChatGPT suggested they would. I can't remember the last time a human being on the end of a phone told me to forget the problem for a while and have a good night's sleep. The 'kindness', real or not, brought a smile to my face. And then, I think, did fiction do that? Did learning to be kind from world literature have some effect? Who knows? 

None of this is easy. It may be dangerous. In the wrong hands, it probably will be. But when the sky appears to be falling, as it most certainly is in certain parts of the world, that's down to venal, greedy, hate-filled human beings, not AI. I remember when word processors and then personal computers came along and some writers stuck to writing by hand, or tapping away on an old typewriter. Some still do and that's fine if it works for them. I was writing for radio back then, and I remember the joy of realising that if I wanted to edit a script, as I always did, over and over again, I didn't need to cover the manuscript in Tippex (remember Tippex?) or retype the whole thing several times over. 

This is a long post, and no, I haven't run it through ChatGPT! But my advice to writers and other creatives who are curious about the technology would be to have a go. Dip a toe in the waters. You might like what you find there. And if you don't, at least you'll know why you don't want to use it, rather than just following the flock. Because you never know. You may just be following them into Foxy Loxy's den.  

 

Thinking about Finland

A huge folder full of my letters from Finland

Many years ago, after my parents died, we cleared their house. Fortunately, we could take our time over the task. We kept what we wanted, gave things away to their and our friends, and sold what we didn't need. Among the things we treasured were several boxes of 'keepsakes'. Some of them had been stored in their loft since I came home from university. 

I didn't settle anywhere for very long, till 1980, when I moved in with Alan, who would become my husband. First I went to Leeds University to do a Postgraduate Masters in Folk Life Studies, but then, instead of looking for museum work (the obvious choice) I did a summer school in teaching English as a Foreign Language and in 1975, I set off for Tampere in Finland, to teach English to adults. This sometimes involved business English, often conversation with groups, occasionally complete beginners (challenging when I didn't speak Finnish!) and quite a lot of one to one sessions. 

A few weeks ago, when I was searching these keepsake boxes for something else altogether, I found a great bundle of letters I had written to my parents, starting with my arrival in Finland in the autumn of 1975. I worked there for two years, but for some reason, my parents had only kept the letters from my first year in Tampere and a few from my return to Finland in autumn 76. 

I spent hours sorting them into date order and reading through them. I was an enthusiastic correspondent back then, and it was clear that mum and dad wrote back, although sadly, all their letters are missing. Sometimes, I would write two or three letters a week, but post them all at once, so some of the envelopes were very fat. I would add little drawings to some of them, to illustrate what I was writing about. 

It makes me a little sad that this kind of correspondence no longer exists for most of us, although I suppose blogs like this one fulfil the same purpose - but without the spontaneity, the immediacy and intimacy. 

It astonished me how many things I didn't remember till reminded by these letters. Memory is very strange and very fluid. I had certain events fixed in my mind, the 'stories' I told myself. But as I read through this long and detailed correspondence, it struck me that over time, I had edited my own memories. Well, some of the correspondence was edited as well, given that I was writing to my parents, but not in quite the same way. Most of it was written in longhand, spontaneously, late at night, and I seldom crossed anything out. 

I was working long hours, having the time of my life (most of us teachers were young, footloose and fancy free) and just loving the country, the people and the landscape. I was writing about it because of course I was also writing my own work: poems, stories, plays and the first draft of a novel. I'm not sure where I found the time, but I did. 

Among the keepsakes was the typescript of a novel which I seem to remember one of my students typing up for me. I had filed it away as 'not very good' but now, I think that judgment came from UK publishing's reluctance at that time to publish anything with a remotely 'foreign' setting. Rereading the first couple of chapters, I reckon it's worth revisiting - a curious little story set in Finland, that I'll probably retype, rework and publish for my own satisfaction. As for the letters - well, I'll type those up as well, immersing myself in that time and place. I may even publish an edited version of them. 

Meanwhile, there's a certain symmetry in the notion that our video game designer son is currently so much at home in Scandinavia. 

Luminate - What Went Wrong?

 

Back in October 2017, I remember becoming aware of a Scottish Festival of Creative Ageing, organised under the umbrella of an organisation called Luminate. You can still have a look at the brochure online. I went to one of the 2017 events: a Creative Ageing Day in Ayr Town Hall. 

It was described as 'A fun, explorative event which aims to generate some genuinely creative thinking through a range of hands-on workshops, performances, talks and screenings of short films. There will also be a marketplace to promote local opportunities for creative learning, arts and cultural activities.' 

It certainly was a fun day, most notably because it seemed to involve mostly older people doing their own creative thing. By themselves, for themselves, with plenty of enthusiasm and skill.

A glance through the brochure for the whole festival shows a variety of excellent events run by all kinds of groups throughout Scotland. There was Irvine Community Art Club, 'a group of retired people who share a passion for art.' There was traditional jazz, a life affirming drama about a son accompanying his elderly father on a trip back to India, and an inter-generational photography project. There was an event called Celebrate National Grandparents Day by taking part (with your grandchildren) in a workshop run by an experienced traditional carpenter. This included 'A chance to use axes, draw knives and chisels in an appropriate and safe manner to make a small piece to take home.' There were tapestry and other craft workshops for adults and children or grandchildren, a workshop on Muriel Spark, something called Thrawn Craws, a Murder of Writers aged between 40 and 80, committed to writing for older actors. ('We invite you to join us as we present important stories about the many facets of love in contemporary Scotland.') There were dance classes for the over 60s and Prime, an over-60s semi-professional company presented a series of bespoke two minute solos, created by top Scottish choreographers for individual company members. 

The whole programme was full of interesting, exciting, entertaining events with the aim of showing that older people are already wise and creative, and that when you provide opportunities and mix up the generations, without patronising, something wonderful can happen. 

Then have a look at this. 

Do you spot the difference? The way in which the whole venture has become didactic (Creativity for carers, anyone?) rather than exciting and inspirational. 

What went wrong? How, in five short years, could something that was so vibrant, so interesting, and so positive become a project almost wholly aimed at facilitating (they're very fond of that word) younger creatives to teach us poor oldies how to be creative in our dotage. The creative practitioner as a sort of cut price social worker promoting our 'wellbeing' (another buzz word) whether we want it or not.

Why and how did this happen? Was it a political decision? If so, it was a bad one. The creative arts are always worth engaging with, in and for themselves, not as some kind of short cut to 'mental health'. 

All I know is that something that started out full of life and vibrancy, seems to have become stodgy, pedestrian and faintly patronizing. 'Let's find something for the poor old folks to do' and 'let's train our young creatives to facilitate them.'

Am I alone in finding this profoundly depressing? Especially compared with how it all began? 

Celebrating Creative Change and Transition, Whatever Your Age.

Wordsworth's couch. Doesn't look too comfy, does it?

From time to time, I meet up with a good friend, an artist, and we set the world - and ourselves - to rights over coffee and scones. (Wordsworth liked to lie on his couch, in vacant or in pensive mood, but we like to chat.) A few things strike us about these meetings: how nice it is to meet up with a like minded person, and how helpful it can be to talk about work and motivation, why and how we do what we do, and what we feel about it. It helps that we're both creative but work in different areas of creativity. It's amazing how often insights emerge from these conversations as we explore the differences and similarities between our respective practices. My friend has been doing serious research into ageing and creativity and as we grow older, but still remain creative, we inevitably find ourselves thinking and talking about the challenges the years bring.

It's all useful, but just occasionally, a vital insight seems to emerge.

Ageing, when you're working in the so called 'creative industries' can be a demoralising business. Especially, I suspect, when you're female, although men don't have it easy either. At a time when you might be reaping the rewards of a lifetime of creative practice you can suddenly find that professionally, you've disappeared. Women, especially find this.  You feel more confident, wiser and, in many ways, at the peak of your game. And yet, that's not how the world sees you, not even the world in which you may have lived and worked hard for years.

Read this long and intensely interesting interview with Anjelica Houston for example. She's of an age when she can say exactly what she thinks. I love it when she says 'I’m looking for movies that ... aren’t apologetically humble or humiliating like, “Band of cheerleaders gets back together for one last hurrah,” you know.'

Only this week I found myself facing the realisation that a decent amount of successful work in a particular field - not, fortunately, the one which means most to me right now - counted for absolutely nothing. I had become invisible. But this isn't a rant. Not this week, anyway! And all it did was confirm for me that I'm heading in the right direction. That I don't have to be apologetically humble. That I don't even have to try to go back to a part of my creativity that no longer serves me well.

Throughout my creative career, I've encountered periods of quite radical change and development, periods of transition, where the kind of work I once did, the work that once satisfied me, no longer suited me. So I moved on. Sometimes that was a slow process, and sometimes it happened almost overnight. Occasionally, I looked back to themes or ways of working that had once excited me and picked them up again with the benefit of experience. In fact that's what happened with my latest book, A Proper Person To Be Detained, the true story of a murder in my own Leeds Irish family, in 1881. I had often thought of writing about it, but it was only a couple of years ago that the time suddenly seemed right, that I felt myself capable of undertaking the project.

When I was young, or even middle aged, these periods of change and transition didn't feel wrong. They may have been challenging but they were exciting. And one of the reasons why they were exciting was that they always felt like a part of some kind of creative cycle. One way of working no longer suited, but another one did. So I took what I needed from the old, shrugged off the rest, and moved on. There was work to be done, and wasn't that good?

As older writers or artists or musicians, though, we have to contend with the almost constant brainwashing about ageing, failure and diminishing powers that surrounds us. Our media, whether it's television, radio, social media or newspapers, constantly bombard us with negativity about ageing. It could be 'Parsnip Man' and June, rabbiting on about funeral plans, or those hideous headless pictures of very old people trudging along with their walkers: you know, the ones that they always show over headlines about bed blockers or elderly abuse. See enough of them, and you do start to wonder whether it wouldn't be better to head off into the wilderness now, before they get to you.

The other thing that happens to you is that if and when you find yourself in one of these inevitable and hitherto quite exciting transitional periods, you may put it all down to ageing. When for most of us, it's nothing of the kind.

Think about it. Much more likely is that it's just one more phase of a long career in creativity. Change is inevitable, but often it can be wonderfully empowering. And that should be welcomed and celebrated. Shouldn't it?

However young or old you are.