Latest / Mythmakers / AI Revolution: What should writers and artists do? Part 2: Text

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AI Revolution: What should writers and artists do? Part 2: Text · Mythmakers

• 0:00
  So welcome back everybody. We're now looking at the issue of text and how it's been generated
• 0:11
  by AI and this is really more the problem on my side of things as an author. So Pete, have
• 0:18
  you ever used one of these like the chatbot GPT and the other ones who likes that? They're out there.
• 0:25
  No, I've never had anybody come up to you with a, for example, first of all I came across,
• 0:32
  it was this new year, so the new year of 2023, a family, remember the family, had written
• 0:41
  us all a poem using this, so they put in writer poem for Julia and she's an author and she does this
• 0:53
  and then it produced this terrible dog rule and he did it for each member of the family and we
• 0:57
  all roared with laughter. I mean, it was so funny, but it was also really, really bad.
• 1:05
  But also it's amusing, isn't it? I've seen people on Twitter do it and it's initially hilarious,
• 1:12
  but there's just an emptiness to it, isn't it? It's not like someone's coming with something
• 1:17
  like a really witty, bad satire of a poem. It really is just a bad poem.
• 1:25
  It doesn't have that human element to it. So next year, Chris,
• 1:32
  Chris, you're listening, you can't do that again because we won't, they're listening to them
• 1:35
  because we thought it was funny then. So my son got a, we were talking about this on the
• 1:44
  family chat and my son got an internship. So I had put into the chatbot thing,
• 1:51
  write a haiku, congratulating him for getting this internship. So that was such a stupid thing
• 1:58
  to write a haiku about and it did a really good haiku. So the joke last, as you say, for a
• 2:05
  certain length of time, just look, this isn't this fun. I could have sat in and thought of one
• 2:11
  myself, but I don't actually want to sit writing haikus about some of the internships.
• 2:16
  Anyway, so looking, so there's that side. It's the fun and game side, but I think we've also
• 2:21
  realized that it's now much better than that in terms of the reports are that it can produce
• 2:32
  academic essays that are very hard to detect as being written, but not by the student.
• 2:39
  I mean, it can write journalism, it can write content for websites. In fact, I know someone
• 2:49
  who said to me that they use it to generate the content for their websites. I mean, they would
• 2:55
  otherwise be doing it. They don't pay somebody else to do that role, but they don't feel
• 3:00
  they're writing skills are that strong. So they get the, they say, I want to say this and
• 3:05
  get turned out as a sort of, you know, that web, web ease that people have.
• 3:10
  And then more recently, there's been, you know, if you imagine the tide coming into
• 3:16
  Mike and where I stand as an author, nibbling at my toes is an idea that people could write books
• 3:22
  and stories. And the two articles that I caught my eye about this was the announcement by one
• 3:28
  as a big sci-fi publisher think was all bit said that they've closed, they're closed to open
• 3:36
  submissions because they were getting so many AI generated submissions. And then just last week,
• 3:42
  there was a very funny article, funny, but terrifying article on the BBC about
• 3:49
  romance writers and whether or not they're going to be taken over by book writing checkbots
• 3:55
  and they were facing it on Bridgerton as there was that was they're illustrating.
• 4:01
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I saw that, yeah.
• 4:04
  So I was then got worried. So I thought, okay, let's go and find out. So I went over to
• 4:09
  chatbot GVT and I put in, I thought, okay, write me a short story in the style of Jane Austin.
• 4:18
  Okay, what I got back was terrible. It was a, basically, a really short summary of
• 4:27
  prime prejudice. It was, they didn't even bother to sort of change the names. It was just,
• 4:35
  this book was going for walks. I mean, it was just totally rubbish, utterly uninspiring. And I
• 4:42
  thought, okay, deep breath, deep breath, write a short story in the style of Julia Golding.
• 4:47
  Now, that is quite tricky because I've got lots of different things I've done, but I thought,
• 4:51
  let's see what it comes back with. What it came back was so generic and so thin that it was no more
• 4:59
  me than it was anybody else, Mallie, Bratman or anybody else writing in my sort of English,
• 5:09
  English speaking culture. So maybe I wasn't giving enough detail in the commands, but I don't
• 5:18
  think it is actually yet at the stage where it can write a book. But we did launch a prize for
• 5:26
  new writing last week with the pushkin press. And as part of our rules, we did say, you aren't,
• 5:33
  you are, you know, no AI generated or any, you know, basically you've got to write the book
• 5:41
  yourself. You can't, you can't, you can't generate the plot or whatever by AI. You're allowed to
• 5:48
  spell check and things like that, but you're not allowed to get some other, you know, that doesn't
• 5:53
  qualify. We want you to actually write the book. So I'm sure that competitions and publishers will
• 5:58
  have to have this in mind. But going, let's look at this. So I've been using AI generated images
• 6:06
  for sort of web presence, that kind of, you know, ephemera. For you, say you wanted to write
• 6:15
  a biography of yourself for your website. And you know that a chatbot GPT can do it for you.
• 6:22
  Would you be tempted to go across and cut and paste from putting a simple command, leave it to
• 6:28
  run for 30 seconds? Well, there's two elements is that I like, I'd like to write it myself,
• 6:36
  but also my, my partner's a kind of copy writer. So she, she probably, whatever I write, I
• 6:44
  pass over to her anyway. And it's, you know, it's, for me personally, it wouldn't be necessary.
• 6:52
  But I guess if you're just, if you've got a business, if you know, if you've just got like a,
• 6:57
  you want to like, you know, we've got friends who are good, several kinds of small businesses.
• 7:03
  If you just want to, if you're busy, you just want to press something, go away for lunch, come back
• 7:09
  and have something you can just put on your website. You know, it kind of makes sense to do it.
• 7:16
  You don't want to kind of have to hand down a copy writer and pay them for an afternoon's work
• 7:24
  when you could just press a button and get something that is going to pass musta because it's
• 7:30
  the website isn't your main focus. You just want to advertise your business. So let's
• 7:39
  chat bots kind of description of you is, I also think perhaps people are so used to templates
• 7:47
  and things on the internet now and formula, but they're not really going to have an issue with
• 7:54
  seeing a chat bot kind of bio of somebody, you know, it's just part, it's just what things are
• 8:02
  like now. I think it's a great to people go, no, we want to have our own voice, but people just
• 8:08
  want to, you know, if you've got to go out and work all afternoon, you just want to push a button
• 8:14
  and get in your van or whatever, you know, it's, you know, I think there are, there are places where
• 8:20
  let's talk about the positives where, so for example, we've all done the thing where we've read
• 8:25
  instructions for something that's come from abroad and the translation has been a really terrible
• 8:32
  Google, Google translate equivalent where it makes no sense at all. I can imagine
• 8:39
  there is an improvement of in communication that this allows for people who are saying, write
• 8:48
  me a set of instructions or a recipe, these are the things that need to be in it, or even having
• 8:55
  it in the original language and saying, translate this and put it in good English. I mean, I can imagine
• 9:00
  that that is going to do a better job. So those sorts of communication aspects, and also it helps
• 9:07
  people who are, who are, do find it difficult to write and perhaps have dyslexia or something where
• 9:13
  they know what they want to say, but the actual, for me, it's super easy to write 500 words,
• 9:19
  but for them that might be like, oh, you know, running a marathon. So they would say, yeah,
• 9:25
  it's right for you, but for me, it's really helpful, I can make a good impression or I can write
• 9:29
  a good speech for my, you know, my presentation or whatever. Yeah, my partner gets, you know, people
• 9:38
  ask her to do their personal statements and things because, you know, when they're 18, 19, or whatever
• 9:45
  looking for work, they, and she can just, she can create something that works well in the environment
• 9:52
  that they're going into. She can tailor it. It's not a formulaic piece, it's taking account of
• 9:59
  then because she, their, their friends and she knows them and, and she can really do a piece of
• 10:06
  work that, that they can go out and say, this, this is me, whereas I mean a chatbot's not going
• 10:13
  to be able to do these kind of really, the subtle, I mean, as a writer, you know that this language
• 10:21
  is drawing on very subtle concepts, really, all the time, isn't it? Yeah,
• 10:26
  and little references and embassies and things like that is, whereas I think,
• 10:35
  because I'm I think chatbots, I'm not sure I'll have to give it a go, I'll have to kind of come
• 10:41
  up with it. I'm working with it. I would encourage people to go and actually try these things out
• 10:46
  to see, to see what is going on, because I think there's, so let's look at the issue of,
• 10:53
  I think it's wrong. In the same way as ripping off somebody's style, who's got copyright is wrong.
• 11:01
  I think what's wrong in generating text is when you are pretending to have knowledge that you
• 11:09
  don't have. So if you say write me a GCSE essay on Frankenstein referring to these sources,
• 11:20
  that break, that information hasn't gone into your brain, and it's also not being filtered through,
• 11:26
  part of learning is actually adopting an idea for yourself. Otherwise, it's basically cheating,
• 11:34
  it's getting somebody else to write it for you. The fact that it's an AI writing it for you
• 11:39
  is that really is less important than the fact that you haven't thought you've done that
• 11:43
  of the thinking, because education is about the thinking. So that's clearly wrong and they need
• 11:49
  to have a way of stopping students thinking it's a shortcut when really what they're doing is they're
• 11:55
  not making the journey at all. It's not a shortcut if you're not on the journey. So that seems quite clear.
• 12:03
  The issue of is this going to be, would it be something which can write a novel?
• 12:14
  I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding here. So I can understand how
• 12:20
  orbit got fed up with seeing all these submissions. I doubt any of those submissions were actually
• 12:25
  of any quality. You know, it's just they got a load of dross coming through. So for example,
• 12:35
  to say that you think romance novels are formulaic is to misunderstand romance novels.
• 12:42
  So Julia Gwynn, the writer of Bridgerton, her novels are actually social comedies.
• 12:49
  And okay, there is a structure and a formula in the sense of it is usually boy meets girl,
• 12:55
  though not always in romance, obviously, boy meets girl, series of incidents, and then usually some
• 13:01
  for happy ending. But she that is the sort of like just in horror you have a formula in the
• 13:07
  western you've got a sort of expectation. But there are so many different ways of interpreting that
• 13:12
  that it's the characters she creates in each of the books, which tells a different story.
• 13:18
  So and in the romance genre, it goes all the way from historical to contemporary to thriller.
• 13:24
  It's not as if it's as easy to mimic as people think, because unless you care about characters
• 13:31
  and interrelations, it's a it is a genre, which particularly matters that you understand how
• 13:38
  feelings work. It's the most deep rooted human story. There is isn't that. And also you will
• 13:48
  get a load of cliches. So I would quite like to be able to use chatbot G P T to say please
• 13:57
  eliminate any cliches in this passage. So the square jawed or the flashing eyes or whatever it is,
• 14:05
  I can imagine finding a use as a writer for just checking I haven't fallen into white as a sheet
• 14:12
  and all those other cliches that you tend to reach for your feeling lazy. So to be a bit like a
• 14:17
  editor on my shoulder, say hang on, that's lazy writing. I can see a use for that, but not
• 14:24
  you know, we don't need endless screeds of, he looked like a fall in angel style descriptions
• 14:32
  of heroes, which is, you know, used a bit too much. But I don't think because there is no there's
• 14:38
  no person or understanding of feelings behind it. I don't think it'd be interesting. And it wouldn't
• 14:45
  push. I mean, maybe I'll be able to write, maybe there'll be a phase when they get when there's
• 14:51
  more emergent consciousness of artificial intelligence that they'll be interesting about what it's
• 14:59
  like fall in love as an artificial intelligence in the same way, you know, data and Star Trek was an
• 15:04
  interesting character. But I don't know, it seems as though the it's in the end a bit like a clever
• 15:14
  parrot. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, having read around it, the fact that it's only taking in
• 15:23
  what people, it's taking in what people put up putting into it, but it's not understanding where
• 15:29
  that stuff is coming from is it's not. And I used to get an illustrator's magazine and it was
• 15:39
  quite a high brow and the obviously that people have been on illustration courses and than the
• 15:44
  academic side of thinking about illustration, whereas I hadn't. So they do kind of school interviews
• 15:54
  illustrators. And one of the questions they asked, and it was obviously kind of some
• 15:58
  a term that come out of illustration teaching, it asked what, and initially I thought,
• 16:05
  you know, it's this ridiculous term they're asking, but it asked something like, what are the
• 16:11
  frictions that you deal with? You know, what are the things that you just, you know, what are the
• 16:17
  problems I guess in a way? What are the things that stop things running smoothly in your process?
• 16:24
  And it's that the idea of friction seems to be really is about, it's a very human thing, it's just
• 16:30
  the idea you head about how your life will be and the everyday frictions that stop it happening.
• 16:36
  So you, the AI is not going to be able to understand the frictions, but it's the frictions that
• 16:44
  make the stories that they're about. So I mean, in romance friction is there, isn't it?
• 16:49
  That's what you need. Don't get together. They, or they, you know, my word came out of lots of
• 16:56
  frictions, you know, just being a human being in the world, seeing things in a certain way,
• 17:03
  finding a way to express that. As creative people, we're kind of all the time kind of dealing with
• 17:11
  these frictions. And I just cannot see how AI would ever, ever be able to work that into
• 17:21
  whatever it's doing. Even if you try to write it into programs or whatever, it wouldn't understand
• 17:31
  the idea of being a consciousness that exists and is kind of just trying to
• 17:40
  get through day-to-day life, which is what informs the art that we try and communicate with.
• 17:49
  So it just seems like there's a gaping, there's a vacuum in it, which, you know,
• 17:58
  even though I say perhaps romance, sci-fi things, they seem to be formulaic from the outside,
• 18:04
  but as you say, then, you know, they're not, they're dealing with human existence and human
• 18:10
  consciousness and human relations, which there's always friction. And if you can't put friction into
• 18:19
  those stories, then you haven't really got a story, how about it's a cover you can guess?
• 18:24
  So there is a way where I can see it be useful. So imagine a scenario where you're barbed
• 18:29
  abruptly. I know that's, you know, or alter ego. And you're saying, okay, what's our plot for
• 18:34
  our next James Bond going to be before they've got writers involved? So they might sit in a room
• 18:41
  and say, okay, let's have a let's spin the wheel. They could do it this by, you know, yanking a book
• 18:48
  off the shelf or some kind of lottery where they say, right, but they could put into the online AI
• 18:56
  and think up a James Bond plot set in the context of the current war in Ukraine or outer space
• 19:10
  or South America. And backward come some skeletal plot. And they could say, well, I don't think we'd
• 19:18
  do that. Maybe that idea though is the kind of direction we want to go in. So we want to actually
• 19:23
  have a freedom fighter from, that's a good idea. And then really important that that's a good
• 19:31
  idea. Why don't we see who writes really well in this area? Oh, who wrote Narcos? Let's find one
• 19:38
  of the writers from Narcos. We know they do good. So let's see if we want to come on to. So I can
• 19:43
  imagine using it as the kind of prompt to say in our airless room where we're planning our next big
• 19:49
  movie, perhaps we could get some inspiration ideas that are the equivalent of putting it up on
• 19:57
  the whiteboard, you know, brainstorming. So I could see it like that, but I would, I would think
• 20:03
  that if they go on to say, write us the script, what you would then get is something that should
• 20:09
  be quite disjointed and airless. And James Bond actually is one of those characters which doesn't
• 20:18
  have much character, oddly. So he might do better than many other characters, but it would still feel
• 20:24
  like a puppet moving through a series of events. But he works as like a, almost like a
• 20:35
  blank that with, it's all he's kind of a blank character, but with lots of charisma that people
• 20:44
  put on. He is an interesting user. He could be generated by a. I can't feel they put their
• 20:48
  concept of their own charisma onto it. That's why I love it so much. Yeah, and that's why
• 20:52
  the actor is able to inhabit that role. Yeah. So I think that in the same ways as a writer, I
• 21:02
  don't sit, you know, I can't break the loom. I can't break the AI is there.
• 21:07
  And I can see how it might in the same way as the images inspired ideas, I could see it doing
• 21:14
  the same for people looking for ideas. I think that like you were saying, there's a lack of human,
• 21:22
  there's a lack of feeling and warmth and content underneath it. That means that it's barren in the end.
• 21:30
  So any place where you want something to be looked at and understood as a cultural,
• 21:37
  the music, music rather than music, we should not be reliant on these tools. If they're there
• 21:44
  at all, they should be at some sort of support to the creative level, not being. They're going to
• 21:52
  be useful to take a certain cultural space, whether it's the inclinational budget
• 21:59
  to commission original visions, I think. But as you're saying, it will be a really interesting
• 22:08
  thing for writers and artists and creative people to try and get their heads around. Because
• 22:15
  it's already being presented with a sinister air, it's going to cause nuclear war and things.
• 22:23
  It already feels like people are using that terminator idea in a way, aren't they? Terminator 2,
• 22:31
  that the machines gain consciousness and then attack us. And it feels like people already relating
• 22:38
  AI to that. And I wonder, people, it feels like it's going to be a really fruitful thing
• 22:47
  for, but only if people come to a human with their human reactions. This great sinister presence
• 22:57
  in our life, as it's being presented. So in terms of what we're trying to do at the Oxford
• 23:04
  Centre for Fantasy is I've got a sort of outline of a policy which I'll run by you to see if
• 23:08
  you think it seems fair. So we will continue to employ illustrators and designers because the other
• 23:17
  part of this are designers who may be using photographs and other assets to design things.
• 23:23
  We'll continue to pay and employ them. But we will also make use of AI assets where it's sort of
• 23:29
  things which we wouldn't be paying someone to do otherwise. There wasn't a budget for that,
• 23:34
  that it's just the stuff that makes things pretty. In the same way as we use the canva or whatever
• 23:42
  to design things, we'd use it like that. But we'd continue to showcase and celebrate
• 23:50
  illustrators, particularly for being humans of different visions. Same goes with
• 23:55
  the sort of text space. I personally won't be using Chatbot GPT to write content, but if somebody
• 24:06
  wants to generate a social media post, I'm not going to worry about that because it's social media.
• 24:15
  But if I'm judging in the competition that we're running for the new fantasy writer or anything
• 24:20
  where it matters that it's somebody's artistic vision, then we don't want the AI generator involved
• 24:28
  because that is you're actually sharing the creativity there with the people who program this thing
• 24:35
  plus the myriad of stuff. It's hoovered up on the internet. So try and have a sort of sense of
• 24:43
  let's continue to celebrate artists and employ artists, let's celebrate writers and reward writers,
• 24:51
  but also be aware that we can't do a king canoe because the tide is coming in. It's got to be a
• 24:56
  place in the ecosystem where these things have been used. Does that sound kind of fair as policy?
• 25:03
  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it isn't going to go away, but it's something we'll...
• 25:12
  I think it's some people will have, you know, go matter up that friction idea, people we have,
• 25:18
  they're going to have really interesting responses to it. You know, it's as human beings,
• 25:25
  we're going to tell each other stories about this new element in our environment.
• 25:32
  So and as human beings, we're going to use the bits that we want and forget about
• 25:38
  Ellen. Yeah, going to part from the other bits. Or record a few mixtapes, which I seem to remember
• 25:43
  was the thing when back in the day and the eighties. Yeah, we all, yeah. So that's a bit of fun
• 25:51
  at the NP. We've been talking a lot about creating imagery. I always ask my guests,
• 26:00
  wearing all the worlds is the best place for something. And that means all the fantasy worlds.
• 26:05
  If you had to go and be a fantasy illustrator, perhaps a children's book illustrator or something
• 26:12
  like that, in any of the fantasy worlds that you've come across, where would you like to go?
• 26:19
  I'm not sure if the Dr. Zeus world counts as a fantasy world. No, I can't. I mean, you can imagine
• 26:24
  transform yourself into a cartoon in that world. I don't think I wouldn't get much illustrating
• 26:30
  done. It would be just too bizarre. Watching things.
• 26:33
  It could be in a little corner drawing everybody. No, that's nice. That made me think of the rich
• 26:37
  of scary world. Yeah, you know, how busy they are. You could be a little person drawing in a corner.
• 26:44
  I was thinking of one place that'd be quite interesting to be in would be Incart, the Cornelia
• 26:50
  Funky books, because there you've got this same way. If you read something out loud, it comes to life.
• 26:54
  But I'm wondering about an aspect of being able to draw something in it coming to life. That would
• 26:59
  be fun. And where you could actually have a fantasy world where something comes off the page.
• 27:06
  I think I'd like to go there. Yeah, that sounds like a fable in the making, doesn't it?
• 27:14
  Yeah, no, I've just, yeah, you know, copyright that idea quickly. Oh, no, but AI's heard it.
• 27:19
  So they're going to hoover it up and it'll be into the story.
• 27:23
  I wonder if being in the AI world is a human being or what that would be like,
• 27:28
  seeing all this. Just trying to make sense of it actually within it. I'm not sure.
• 27:35
  So and also just to celebrate, um, craftsmanship. Is there a one illustrator that you think we should go
• 27:41
  and wait and have a look at it? You mentioned several whilst you were talking, but
• 27:48
  who would you say this is a really inspiring illustrator?
• 27:56
  A contemporary illustrator that I really like is Steve May. He's just got books out with,
• 28:04
  he's got a book out with, um, about Vikings at the moment. He's just got some really
• 28:11
  dynamic style. I think he seems to have come out of them. Those early 80s comics that were just
• 28:18
  that after the reiki comics that were just full of seniors, the views eventually start taking
• 28:25
  the make out of. I really like it. I look to his work to kind of keep a dynamism in my own work.
• 28:33
  I really like him. And so I would say for, um, in this sort of idea of what sort of text writer would
• 28:42
  I recommend is I don't know how I mentioned this before, but there was a book by Michael End,
• 28:48
  called the, uh, or Ender, called the Neverending Story, which then to become a film. But if you
• 28:53
  look at the actual book and find one of the early editions, what he does there is he draws your
• 29:00
  attention to the actual writing by having, uh, green and red typeface for the different worlds you're
• 29:07
  in and illustrated, um, illuminated letters and vignettes. So the actual book I remember adoring
• 29:16
  the actual physical book is a great story too. So I would recommend going and having a looking
• 29:21
  that and just enjoying really original vision through text and how it draws you into the story.
• 29:27
  So that's my tip. So thanks Pete. Thanks very much. Um, for, uh, helping me think this through.
• 29:33
  And I think this is, you know, the, uh, the tidal wave is sweeping over us both. Let's see if we can
• 29:39
  emerge on the other side. Oh, I wonder if we're having a podcast in five years overall in, uh,
• 29:45
  yeah, all these days right, taking over. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine it'd be much the same as it is now.
• 29:53
  Thank you. You're an inspiration everywhere.
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