We need to talk about AI.

I say ‘need’ rather than ‘want’, because if I’m honest, a big part of me would rather not. I am not an enthusiast for AI. If it were up to me, on balance, I would rather it didn’t exist.

But we’re now at the stage where AI is unavoidable. Big changes are approaching fast. And they will be felt particularly keenly in the arts and creative industries.

Some of my friends have been fired up for years about the creative potential of AI. It’s always good to see a friend full of enthusiasm, but listening to them, I didn’t feel it myself.

And from where I was sitting, any short-term benefits were overshadowed by the longer-term risks.

Ten years ago, I read Smarter than Us, a book by the Oxford Philosopher Stuart Armstrong, about the potential of AI to become an existential threat to the human race. I was alerted to the book by a review on Computing.co.uk with the headline:

Coders must ensure AI doesn’t interpret ‘prevent human suffering’ as ‘kill all humans’, warns researcher

As a poet, how could I not be captivated by the idea of grammar as a weapon of mass destruction? A few weeks after reading the book, I found myself writing a poem in the voice of an AI that had digested all of human culture and philosophy and come to the conclusion that the most merciful thing, given the suffering attendant on human life, would be to wipe us all out.

A decade later and the AI industry has made what feels like a lot of progress towards its stated goal of creating a superintelligence that burns far brighter than the brightest human minds.

The experts are debating whether it’s really possible to create a superintelligence, as well as the level of existential risk it would pose to the human race. As far as I can see, there’s a sort of consensus that the risk may be relatively low, but potentially so catastrophic that we need to mitigate against it.

And I am yet to see a convincing explanation of how we will be able to control something that is hundreds, thousands or even millions of times more intelligent than us.

According to prominent commentators, we could be on the slippery slope to making ourselves extinct:

‘Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb.’
Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence (2016)

‘Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable.’
Elon Musk, Tweet (2014)

The good news is, the big-picture existential risk is still far off enough that we don’t have to deal with it this week. But the near-term risks are problematic enough. Especially if you are a creative professional.

To start with just one issue, copyright is proving to be a very large bone of contention, which is playing out in debates, protests and lawsuits around the world. Right now the UK is getting very exercised about the issue of creators’ work being used to train AI models without permission – whether or not this constitutes copyright infringement, and if so, whether anyone is going to do anything about it.

This is the point where the debate stopped being theoretical for me. When I saw an article in The Atlantic alleging that Meta had trained its AI models on the LibGen database of pirated ebooks, I typed my name into the helpful search box on the Atlantic website, and saw that my four books for creatives were in the database.

It took me several years to write those books, and many more years to gain the experience on which they are based. I am the publisher as well as the writer, which means I also spent thousands of pounds on editing, proofreading and design costs.

Call me old-fashioned, but if a multi-billion-dollar corporation wanted to take my books and use them – as is alleged in the Meta case – it would have been nice of them to ask.

Whether or not Meta did this, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to discover that other companies have done something similar.

So I have skin in the game. If you are reading this and feeling angry about your work being used without your permission, and fearful about the consequences of AI for you as a creative professional, then I have had a taste of how you feel.

How has the UK government responding to this kind of allegation against the AI industry? It has made a concerted effort to weaken UK copyright law, to create a special exemption allowing AI companies to use creators’ work to train their models, without asking permission or even telling creatives their work has been used in this way.

And of course, it is these very models that are now being trumpeted as the ‘future of creativity’, and causing millions of creatives to fear for their livelihoods.

There are newspaper stories about creative freelancers and employees being replaced by AI. Some researchers are finding evidence of a decline in creative freelance work since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

It feels like a double whammy – allegedly taking our work without permission and using it to develop machines that threaten to replace us.

As you can imagine, the UK copyright situation is causing quite a brouhaha. Creatives are protesting. Furious debates have been raging in both Houses of Parliament. Open letters have been written and a petition has gathered the signatures of Kazuo Ishiguro, Simon Rattle, Kate Bush, Stephen Fry, Alan Ayckbourn, Antony Gormley, Roger McGough, Robert Smith and other stars in our creative firmament.

The government has made a show of consulting the industry, via an online questionnaire: when I filled it out, I found myself laughing out loud at some of the absurdly leading questions, clearly designed to persuade me to choose the government’s ‘proposed approach’, of allowing AI companies to take creators’ work by default, with the onus on creators to opt out.

As I write this, there is a legislative standoff in Parliament, and the government is doing everything it can to block even the watered-down checks on AI companies that are being proposed.

The government has started to make vague noises about possibly shifting its stance at some point in the next few months. But it seems a long way from embracing the idea that there might be a big opportunity – creative, cultural and economic – for a country with a world-class creative sector and a nascent-but-promising AI sector, to somehow build on the strengths of both, and help both of them to thrive (and the country too).

I’ve signed the petition and I will be writing to my MP. And I would love the debates and petitions to have some kind of effect.

But I’m not holding my breath. Looking around the world, it’s clear where the balance of power lies between the tech and creative sectors. We can’t depend on governments or courts protecting our rights. No one is coming to save us.

And the AI genie is not going back in the bottle. There is no turning back to the old world.

I could go on, and talk about the shortcomings of AI on a purely artistic level, or the potential decline in craft skills in a whole swathe of creative fields, or other concerns. But hopefully I’ve made it clear that I have some pretty strong reservations about the direction the AI industry is going, especially as it relates to artists and creatives.

But it is coming, and faster than any of us anticipated. And I’m mindful of the Zen principle that we have to deal with the world the way it is, not the way we wish it were. We need to face this with our eyes open.

There is no world where humans don’t create AIFor understandable reasons, it’s easy to be preoccupied with the current state of the AI industry, and the consequences for our lives and livelihoods. And to wish for a world without AI – or at least with wiser, more ethical and more trustworthy people leading the industry. But that is not the world we are living in.

If we look back into the past, from the earliest times shrouded in myth, to the long sweep of human history and the progress of technology, it’s clear that the development of AI was inevitable.

Back in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve could have been perfectly happy, munching away at the fruit of the Tree of Life, forever. But they couldn’t resist the one thing they were forbidden by God – the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

And once they had eaten the fruit, their eyes were open. They saw that they were naked. They were expelled from Eden, to live by the sweat of their brow and the ingenuity of their brains.

Generations later, humans had gone from hunting and gathering to planting and sowing, building city-states and fighting over them. In the first millennium BC, when metalsmiths were leading technologists, hammering out weapons and armour and ploughshares and other tools, humans were already dreaming of artificial intelligence.

In Book 18 of Homer’s Iliad, around the 8th century BC, there is a description of gold automata (Homer’s word) ‘filled with minds and wisdom’ that sound remarkably like intelligent robots, serving Hephaestus, the Greek god of blacksmiths and other artisans:

Handmaids of gold attending him, resembling in all worth
Living young damsels, filled with minds and wisdom, and were trained
In all immortal ministry, virtue and voice contained,
And moved with voluntary powers; and these still waited on
Their fiery sovereign,

(Translation: George Chapman)

By the 3rd century BC, there was a description of a mechanical man in the Chinese Daoist classic Liezi; a bronze man, Talos, protecting Crete in the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes; and a golem made of clay and brought to life, in the Talmudic story of the Rabbi Rava.

So creating artificial life is one of our oldest dreams. It’s such a fascinating problem, it attracts bright minds like moths to a flame. And not just writers of poetry and fiction, but inventors trying to do it for real.

Around 400 BC, Archytas of Tarentum is reputed to have made a steam-propelled wooden bird that could fly about 200 metres. Just over a century of later, Ctesibius built the first known feedback-control device – a self-regulating water clock. And by the first century AD Hero of Alexandria is said to have created a programmable theatre show, featuring moving statues, singing birds and automatic temple doors driven by water, steam and weighted ropes.

It makes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine (1837) look positively recent.

Since we built the first machines, we have dreamed of creating thinking machines. It’s as if we are hard-wired to do so. Or at the very least, as if technological development naturally trends towards AI, just as evolution eventually trends towards intelligent life, and then more and more complex and intelligent life forms.

Our progress towards AI has followed a very long and drawn out exponential curve, measured first in millennia, then centuries, then decades – to where we find ourselves today, when things have accelerated alarmingly since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

The rate of change is speeding up, and is projected by many experts to accelerate even further, to the point where we reach Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – with capabilities comparable to humans on any cognitive task – and beyond that, the fabled singularity.

We might find ourselves thinking, like Frodo in Lord of the Rings, that we wish it had not happened in our time. But it is happening, right now.

And whatever we think of some of the people developing the technology, the technology itself is inevitable.

As inevitable as microbes appearing in the sea millions of years ago.

As inevitable as organisms growing eyes and gills and fins and arms and legs.

As inevitable as the first fish venturing onto the land.

As inevitable as the hand reaching out for the forbidden fruit. Because human beings will always eat the apple.

There is no world in which we didn’t eat the apple. No world in which we didn’t evolve to become intelligent and conscious and insatiably curious to find out more and more about our world and what we can create.

No world in which we don’t want to know the answer to the question: can we build something more intelligent than us?

So from this perspective, AI as a fundamental technology is neither good nor bad. AI itself is neutral.

If we ignore AI, or demonise it because of the people involved, or specific ways it is being developed and applied, or how the politics and economics are playing out in our world, we are not seeing it clearly. We risk missing the real threats, and the real opportunities it presents us with.

And if we are tempted to put our heads in the sand, rest assured the tech bros and politicians are not. They are setting the terms of the brave new world, whether we like it or not.

If we as artists and creatives can’t take our bearings from them, who can we look to?

What would Bowie do?When I find myself agonising over a big decision, to do with my artistic work or my career, I have a question I use as a thought experiment:

What would Bowie do?

I’ve long admired David Bowie as an artist, for many reasons, including the fact that he was always leaning forward and looking into the future and doing his best to channel its signals for the rest of us.

He was singing about the downside of space travel in 1969 and the threat from AI in 1970. His big breakthrough came in 1972, when he appeared on UK TV sets as a gender-fluid Starman for three and a half minutes that changed the course of music.

And he didn’t just sing about the future – he continually experimented with new techniques and technology, to disrupt his thinking and spark his imagination.

In the seventies he was using William Burroughs’ ‘cut up’ technique and Brian Eno’s ‘Oblique Strategies’ cards.

In 1976 he left Los Angeles for Berlin, and embarked on a trilogy of albums using techniques from the emerging electronic and ambient music scenes.

By 1994 he was using a program called the Verbasizer to randomise his lyrics and blend them with other texts.

That same year he released a CD-ROM of the video to his single ‘Jump they Say’, encouraging fans to remix it, with the instructions: ‘Sculpt the album of the future… Don’t be passive; be interactive.’

The single was from 1. Outside, a dark futuristic thriller in album form, where he played a series of characters, using computerised vocal distortion on the record and visually distorted photos on the artwork.

In 1996 he was the first major artist to release a single, ‘Telling Lies’, for download online. (I tried to download it, but it took forever on a 56K modem, so I gave up and bought the CD, but I appreciated the gesture.)

In 1999 he gave a remarkably prescient interview to Jeremy Paxman, where he shattered Paxman’s assumption that the internet was ‘just a different delivery system’:

‘I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying… It’s an alien life-form… it is going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.’

So how do I think Bowie would respond to the creative challenge of AI?

I think he’d be all over it.

He wouldn’t be naive. His 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World included ‘Saviour Machine’, a song about ‘President Joe’ who hands over power to a super computer that is supposed to make life easy for human beings – but it turns on them in disgust and threatens kill them all.

So I’m pretty sure he’d be alert to the risks of AI.

Maybe he would add his name to the current petition, alongside the other stars, and speak up for a better deal for artists. But I don’t think he would be a Luddite. I can’t imagine him shunning the technology and the creative possibilities it offers.

I think he’d be in the studio playing with it, trying it out, testing it, trying to break it – looking for its limits, for the edges, the new worlds it would help him discover and explore.

I seriously doubt he’d worry about it replacing him or making his decades of work on his art redundant. I’m sure he’d see it as another tool, another technological toy that allowed him to extend his work in new directions.

As always, the technology would be a medium. The vision and the finished work would be unmistakably his.

In other words, I think he’d be a lot less hesitant than me. And assuming he knew a thing or two about creativity, then maybe I should follow his (imagined) lead, open my mind and spend more time playing around with it…

Maybe if we all had a little more faith in our own creative vision, then we would spend a little less time worrying about what this technology can take from us, and more time experimenting to see what we can create with it.

Of course a superstar like Bowie would be harder to replace than most of us. And he’d have the financial reserves to ride out any disruption. So whatever he would or wouldn’t have done, his approach may not be entirely applicable to our professional situation.

But looking at things purely in terms of creativity, I don’t think all is lost. I’m feeling a flicker of enthusiasm amid the dark clouds of uncertainty.

I’m still doing all my writing (including this article) by hand. I’m a writer. I love to write. So why would I give a robot the pleasure of doing the best bit?

(And no, the illustration at the top of this page is not AI-generated.)

But I am starting to play with AI and using it for all kinds of things that are peripheral to my creative process – research, brainstorming, sketching and prototyping, analysis, feedback and new perspectives on my work – to see what I can learn from it, how it can deepen my knowledge, extend my skills and help me do my best work.

Dare I say it, I’m enjoying the process. New perspectives are opening up. I’m beginning to see what all the fuss was about.

I’m still not an enthusiast. I still have my reservations. But it turns out I’m not alone in being in two minds about AI. In his insightful book How to Think About AI, Richard Susskind writes:

‘It’s possible to be simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic about AI. It’s coherent to regard AI as a double-edged sword. This contrasts, however, with the position of many newcomers to AI – they seem to be allied to one of two camps, one that is indefatigably positive, the other relentlessly negative.’

What was it Fitzgerald said?

‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.’

So it feels like a time to acknowledge the downside, learn as much as possible about the new world, and lean into our determination – and creativity – to make the most of it.

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