Authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay are taking OpenAI to court for allegedly “ingesting” their books to refine its generative capabilities. It seems writers’ work is being used as anonymous mulch to feed the artificial intelligence sausage machine so it can poop out existentially threatening, nutritionless, virtual, fake chipolatas to replace us.
I went on to one of these sites, typed in a story idea and clicked “generate”. The resulting yarn included the lines: “We took a school trip to the moon, our first trip there. The other students were at home, or on other planets.” And: “The vampire stood in front of me and looked into my eyes. I felt a chill. A chill that went to my toes.”
One can laugh, but much of what we put online is being harvested by AI, from our photographs to our Instagram captions. AI is ingesting, scanning, scraping, ripping, absorbing, mining, assimilating. It’s the language of consumption, colonisation and metabolisation.
It isn’t quite there yet, but it will be soon, once our unthinkingly drafted casual messages have been used to mimic colloquial speech and iron out any roboticisms and stilted dialogue. In the meantime, I’ll be working on my masterpiece: Moon Vampires.
Storm in a plant pot
A dispute has burst into toxic bloom over at Salisbury city council and it involves whingeing over two very similar things. Instead of having individual hanging baskets, the council wants to have pockets of planting that’ll be more sustainable and attract butterflies and stuff, such as a little park area in the central medieval marketplace. But Conservative councillor Eleanor Wills has described this move on Twitter as “ideological nonsense” pushed through by a “leftwing cabal”.
This is all just an argument in a plant pot. Not every proposal should be taken as some kind of cultural affront or mangled into a left/right dispute, a vicious argument or a power play. Nobody’s hanging basket is going to be cut down at night by zealots and saboteurs intent on replacing plants in one kind of container with plants in another. Why not get off Twitter and enjoy the greenery – any greenery – while you can?
‘Fans’ in full fling
There’s few bands on the planet that haven’t had bottles of urine thrown at them by a boisterous crowd on day three of a rock festival. But there’s been a recent, much more concentrated spate of pop performers being assailed by projectiles: Pink got a bag of someone’s mother’s ashes, Lil Nas X got a sex toy and Kelsea Ballerini was hit with a bracelet.
Commentators have put this down to post-pandemic exuberance and the concomitant erosion of social etiquette. I date it back further, to the development of online culture, to the Trump and Brexit campaigns and the aggression, abuse and intimidation that became normalised and spilled over into the real world.
Regardless of the sex of the perpetrators, their actions and justifications mimic those of violent, abusive men. Bebe Rexha developed a black eye after a man threw a phone at her face and Ava Max was hit in the face by a man who scrambled onstage and lunged at her.
Invading a performer’s space, violating their territory, abusing their boundaries, disrupting their work, disturbing their piece of mind, assaulting them and then, to add insult to injury, claiming it was perpetrated out of love, or passion, or desire to connect, or passing it off as a joke. Anyone who has survived harassment or abuse knows that tactic. Why would any “fan” do that?
• Bidisha Mamata is an Observer columnist
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