Brian often works from home and he is very frequently on zoom meetings with lots of voices. From time to time these meetings start to get a bit heated and I listen to him as he tries to mediate them. I must have picked something up vicariously, as I am very rarely in such meetings but found myself in one this morning.
AI is changing the landscape, but still I was surprised to receive a clearly AI generated document ahead of a creative meeting for theatre. I smelt it right away. It was classically structured, with lots of good points being made – too pat to be human, and also, crucially, not written from knowledge, written by an aggregator of information old and new. It is hard to know what was a hallucination and what was not in all the lists it put before us.
The meeting appeared to be about going through it point by point, and annotating it so it could then be fed back into the AI. I have to admit my heart sank when I realised this was what we were going to be doing, but I also think such diligence is helpful. The man insisting on it was the money man, and he is older than I am. You don’t get to be the money man without being good at money. Even just a week ago I would have been resistant to this whole damn process. I would have used one of the obvious errors in the document to throw the whole thing out as slop.
But this festival I’ve just been to, and the company I was in, they both gave me pause.
I often say, in terms of tech, that we choose the hill on which we die. My parents generation mostly died on the mobile phone hill. Crypto kinda beat me – I’ve been horribly resistant to Bitcoin etc for decades, to my detriment, having thrown away a piece of paper once, and ignored a mining screensaver someone set up for me in the early days of it all.
This AI stuff is here whether we like it or not. So I was willing to go with the process and see where it took us. Others in the meeting were not so willing. And then there were some frustratingly wayward comments and assumptions being made about potential collaborators to the extent that I’m gonna check every (probably AI) document I get from this company (probably using AI) to make damn sure I’m not being made financially liable in some sneaky way.
Suddenly they were having a great big old zoom argument. I found myself having to meditate, and was very glad of all the times I’ve listened to Brian. This shit is common in the creative process, particularly when money butts up against ideas. I think I resolved it but for a moment it was like having two teenagers, both of whom are older than I am.
It ended cordially. “If you weren’t my dear old friend, that meeting would absolutely be the last I would want to everbhave to do with this whole project,” I told him. For an early meeting it better not be the shape of things to come.
After the meeting I downloaded Claude AI. I’m gonna see what use I can get out of it. Not gonna die on the AI hill, even if it turns out to be the top of a bubble.
It’s a hell of a tool. Stolen from creatives, forever a plagiarism, forever a disingenuous heist of almost impossible proportions, automatic, pat, tedious, overstructured. It will never have an original thought in a million years. But… Those of us who are small fry, we can’t afford to employ proofreaders or financial advisers or lawyers or what have you so we can get something better than nothing by going towards the semi hallucinated wanderings of this watersucking nightmare of processors all controlled by some hairless billionaire techbro with the social skills of a lamprey and the empathy of a rock.
Now I’m off to see a play. More on that tomorrow. Need an early bed so getting this done before.
AlBarclay 