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Well, I say that, but what I really mean is that I hate automated alogorithms that process data in such a way, they give the impression of AI. It's all a big con, which means the troo believers will swallow it whole.
Far cleverer people than I have explained why ChatBots are TwatBots. Put simply, they create an illusion of creativity on the one hand, and appeal to our wretched need to be indulged at all times on the other.
Plus, the people who make chatbots are ghastly. A procession of creepy and fascistic Silicon Valley WASPs in $500 turtleneck sweaters. They sell us a matey-chummy, super-casual future, even as they stock up for an apocalypse of their own making.
They are not, however, the main focus of this essay. I instead wish to focus on two areas I believe are most vulnerable to AI automation, and how we may resist it. These are fiction in its many forms, and journalism. I will begin with the latter.
In essence, though, both have a similar problem – the threat AI poses to them is self-inflicted. They are both overly reliant on archetypes, formats, conventions, cliches...
I remember my journalism lecturer pointing out that the pyramid structure of news stories could be done by a robot. They were joking, making a barbed point about how formulaic news reporting and writing was. But of course, this left a key pillar of journalism open to automation. There are now AI-assisted journalists and the like, but they won't last, any more than fax machines did (Japan notwithstanding). They're like transitional fossils, yet to be fossilised.
Once the maintenance and editing of AI-news copy can itself be automated, the beasts will be unleashed. It isn't too hard to imagine a day when TwatBots report on what other TwatBots are reporting, in a never-ending recursive loop.
But is this much different from how news media already reports the news? It's all on diary, tethered to a style guide, and with an editorial line dictated from above. The only real difference will be the amount of meat involved, which will be considerably less than before.
As they face their oblivion, journalists will find little sympathy. Few bodies of men, women or Kelvin MacKenzies have accrued such contempt and loathing, apart from landlords. Paid like piss, easily disposed of by layoffs... In hindsight, it is easy to see them as living on borrowed time. But will we even notice the difference?
It goes further. Broadcast media, be it radio or TV, also relies on strict formats, structures and the like. Take US TV news coverage, which is rigorously uniform in language, tone and flow, to the extent that the reporters are interchangeable. They'll be out of a job soon enough too. AI bots are more than capable of generating stock news stories, fake voices, and fake presenters. By being so procedural, broadcast journalists left themselves wide open to automation.
Soon, algorithmically precise presenters will fill the air. Never mind your own personal Jesus. Imagine an army of personal Tucker Carlsons, Walter Cronkites, and Jeremy Paxmans. Or at least, that will be how they appear to their audiences. They will be tailored to meet their particular biases and belief systems at that time. Heaven knows, we've given them enough live data to allow this to happen.
At least Max Headroom had the decency to be honest about what he was. But we won't care, because we'll be entombed in echo chambers even more pernicious than the ones we dwell in today.
So much for journalism, then. But what about literature? This brings me neatly to a personal bugbear of mine - cliches in fiction. Some people like to hide these behind the polite euphemism, 'trope'. But most film, TV, novels, comics and so on are utterly dependent on them. Let me give you an example. I call it the 'Now Goddammit!', and it goes like this:
Hero/Protagonist: Quick, get to the ship. I'll hold them off!
Supporting Cast: But, Hero/Protagonist...!
Hero/Protagonist: Now, goddammit!
I always judge the quality of something by whether or not it has a 'Now Goddamit!' in it. The exact wording and circumstances may vary. But once you start spotting this, and it is EVERYWHERE, you'll learn to hate the hacks that perpetuate it. More, you will realise how soulless the host content is.
Suffice to say, the MCU is riddled with cliche, like syphilis, but so is a great deal of other content. And there are other appalling cliches. Stock characters, archetypes, storylines, “beats”, events, the recent reliance on story arcs, character arcs, climaxes, denouements...
It's probably already very easy for a TwatBot to whip up a rom-com, an anime or Bollywood epic. Or a feature-length Disney-style cartoon musical, or a superhero origin story, all based on existing data. They're all the same stories and visual cues anyway, with the names changed to protect the innocent.
You might need someone to tweak the content, visuals and sound a little. But this will be for a pathetic wage, because AI might kill creativity, but the sweatshops will always be with us.
Yet since so much dross is green-screened and fiddled about with in post-production already, would it be so much of a leap? Media and storytelling is already ChatBot fodder without the ChatBots.
But I suspect a lot of 'serious' cinema and TV could also be automated in this way too. They're not as original or free of hackery as they might claim to be. A closer look reveals all manner of cheats, cliches and overused flourishes. It appears writers thought that since their work could not be automated, it could, paradoxically, be run like a factory. And so the War on Cliche becomes a war for the very soul of art.
In many ways, literature has long since been vulnerable to this. Commedia dell'arte, with its stock characters, Greek drama with its three act structure, choruses and plot devices, the wholesale uptake of Campbell's "Hero's Journey", even the conventions of the Shakespearean tragedy... It's all a form of standardisation, and so a prelude to automation.
Moorcock once described American SF as "written by robots, about robots, for robots", but much the same can be said of TV in general, on both sides of the Atlantic, and prestige drama in particular. With TwatBots, the process is, once again, not so much revolutionised as simply defleshed.
With that in mind, it is a rich irony to behold the current WGA strike unfold in America. On the one hand, we have writers on strike against exploitation and TwatBots. And yet, these self-same writers have made wide use of cliches and stock storytelling. This is to the extent that one can almost predict where their plots are going, how they are paced, and the dialogue used. They have seeded their own doom.
Time will tell if their demands are met, or whether the TwatBots prevail. After all, the punters won't know the difference, or much care. A writers' room and a TwatBot are much the same thing. They are the sausage factories of fiction. Only the convention that TwatBot output can't yet be copyrighted seems to be holding back the tide. For now.
Any adequate response must therefore not only address the gluttonous rot-pigs of Silicon Valley, but the perils of cliche itself.
But what must that adequate response be? While it may seem hopeless, a relentless drive to educate the public is needed. People need to know why automated media is harmful, why human expression should be in the hands of human beings.
There is already a temptation for some to give up and cite their own cliches. Like the cat being out of the bag, or the genie being out of the bottle, many a mickle makes a muckle, and so on. But we don't need fatalism and cliches. That, after all, is what the TwatBots are for. And there is no greater cliche than the faux hipster, Silicon Valley Messiah, with less culture than a pot of yoghurt, a block of coal for a heart, and more venture capital than sense. No one is indispensible if everyone is disposable.
Most of all, however, we must reject cliche itself. I do not necessarily argue for formulae and conventions to be fully cast aside. For all that, the “Now Godammits” should be blasted into the Sun at the first opportunity.
What I am arguing for, however, is innovation and risk taking, doing new things with old formats, or abandoning them, if only for a while. Innovate, deconstruct, subvert, ambush. The public may have been persuaded to want TwatBot swill. The success of the recent Super Mario Bros movie suggests the bar is already very low.
But we don't have to give it to them. The public must be surprised, intrigued and treated with decency. Or, at least, not like total morons. Because all this does is MAKE them morons.
We can do something else. We can be good, and weird. Indeed, there must now be constant disruption, creation and experimentation. Sometimes, it will fail. The public palate has already been brutalised by cliche, meme culture and catchphrase politics. There are now ways and means to meet those appetites with machines. So, rather than compete, why not aspire to be interesting instead?
As Hunter S. Thompson said, when the going gets weird, the weird go pro. I am more minded to think that weird times require even weirder responses. So, let's be weird. One just simply can't compete with the utter tedium of a TwatBot.
[ENDS]
POSTSCRIPT: As the title suggests, the above article builds on topics and issues first raised by novelist and journalist Martin Amis (1949-2023) in his collection of essays called, err, "The War on Cliche." His death soon after seems a bitter irony, and this polemic is dedicated to his memory. He also loved video games.
© Alexander Hay 2022-2024