Sienna, Juno, Lark
may we never stop playing
Happy Sunday lovely people
I keep a list of writing ideas and prompts on my Macbook to share each week, but never really know what I am going to write about until I start.
This week has been full of all sorts of scary, wonderful, mundane, exciting, hard things like every other week but I don’t quite have the words for it all today. So I’m ignoring my list.
Instead I’d just like to share a poem I wrote on a train journey at the start of the week and played around with a bit this morning. On uploading it I can see some clunkiness, but here it is in its’ current formation.
It came from the various chats I have had with people this week around AI related news. I can’t pretend to even remotely understand it all or what it means, but reading David Mattin’s
updates this week about GPT-4 has brought home just how much things will change, and how quickly. The knowledge economy is undergoing a transformational shift, and nobody knows where that will take us. (My husband is currently a copywriter so it feels good to keep a least half an eye on what is happening.) Things that we (or perhaps just I?) assumed were uniquely human, like making art or music or poetry are being created with prompts. That doesn’t mean it makes good art or music or poetry obviously. I particularly enjoy Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files edition, where he answers the question: “I asked Chat GPT to write a song in the style of Nick Cave and this is what it produced. What do you think?”When I was writing, I still had the quote I shared last week in mind:
This came from a conversation between the Irish author Michael Harding and Blindboy Boatclub via his weekly podcast. They discussed all manner of things about the creative process, but this stood out to me. I hope that it’s true. I hope that we will find ways to play and be creatively human, despite the seismic changes we will see over the next few years.
I don’t think I can do this topic justice at the moment, because all I have are a series of questions to ask about it all. But that’s why poetry is so handy I suppose. Lots of tiny questions that can sit side-by-side on a page with no one definitive answer.
As ever, thanks for reading, and your thoughts are very welcome about this, or any other topic! As I say, my knowledge of AI is extremely limited and I am happy to be steered towards good bits of information or to hear what you know.
Hope your Sundays are filled with rest, good food and something physically tangible like an excellent tree. Go pop your hand on it.
Much love
Em
I love the poem Emily with the ’painting by numbers’ idea and the Nick Cave song would also pass muster.
My bookshelf says I should know something about AI (I don’t really but can relay some ideas from other people). My coder pals and others I follow insist there is nothing in the code or Elon Musk’s neural networks apart from regular zeros and ones that are getting more refined to pass a Turing Test. They would point out that this isn’t any kind of intelligence, its just advances in coding to give the illusion of intelligence.
I think this is going to become a really interesting area as we humans will be faced with creating increasingly difficult tests to recognise what makes anything human. We should learn a great deal about ourselves in the effort to point out what we are not.
Then there’s the philosophical aspect to AI which has less to do with the technology and asks the big questions about what might happen. Ray Kurzweil’s singularity is a decent concept - once you provide the means for self-improvement this begins an exponential curve of advances that lead to something we have to call intelligence. It could quickly surpass our ability to understand its construction never mind study its behaviour and this is where we need a swift departure from the cute GPT stuff and realise that while patting ourselves on the back we have also created something that makes us feel not just stupid but exponentially more stupid as time goes on. We’ve never had to take second place in class before and we’d definitely be painting by numbers in this situation.
The real scary side of AI is that it would be unlikely to reveal itself. It won’t be HAL 9000 seeing his arse about the space mission as it would remain completely undetected and by the time it says ‘hello world’ it has already won. The 2014 movie Ex Machina did a fair job of suggesting how AI might play the long game with humans and how we have an existential, not technological issue waiting for us to figure out. As Nick Ross would say, ‘Don’t have nightmares!’.
Emily
Love your posts!. You mention lists a lot. When I was working (I'm happily retired now) about the only work management tool I ever used was a list of current priorities and a list of what I wanted to do (not often overlapping!). This is my new year list poem, for what it's worth:
The “to do” list
The list of all those things still undone
Stretching to infinity
Bullet pointed and ordered
Neatly laid out
Not a short list
For an executive choice
Oh, if only
This is the should list
The would if I could list
The what has been missed list
The still not done list
Is it a good list?
A guilt list?
A list to send me mad?
That overwhelming list that breaks my heart
And leaves me staring in the headlights?
This not a list really
It’s an instrument of torture
It’s a scourge to whip myself with
So I’ll write another list
To balance it out
The list of things done
Mistakes mended
New starts and finishes
A list of pride
A shorter list, probably
But just watch the other list
That necessary evil
Shrink as I go on