I don't even know where to begin. Shall I say that the internet was designed to bring people together? To create communities that wouldn't otherwise be possible? A sense of belonging, along with our particular gifts and a sense of agency, are the three foundations of well-being and thriving. It sure didn't take you guys long to figure out how to use our need to belong to threaten people--a grandmother told her grandson was in trouble and needed $500 now. Or farther along, how to use a writer's vulnerability about their competency to get them to give you money for marketing schemes or non-existent book clubs. I don't know what it says about humanity that it didn't take you very long to figure out how to exploit people's vulnerabilities about their best qualities: their care for others or their creative gifts. I suspect there's some anti-intellectual cynicism in there somewhere, but we'll get to that later.
And then AI sent that into hyperdrive. I'll be upfront and say that I don't quite believe in artificial intelligence. I think AI does a great job of helping a city time their traffic lights to keep people moving along. Regina's Albert Street is a model of that. And it has great promise helping us understand the language of dolphins and whales because it's good at pattern recognition. It can help us find new drugs. I know that I'm supposed to get $3000 from Anthropic because it trained their AI using a book I wrote years ago. It was a feminist book, so maybe it will keep the testosterone level, the world-domination goals of AI corporations down a smidgeon. But that's leaving out the fact that most of its "knowledge" or language is stolen. As for the intelligence part of it, I'm not sure. First off, the writing in the letters you send me about featuring my book with a humongous book club is appalling. It's like a first-year undergraduate's terrible first essay: it tries to use a formal register before it understands how syntax works. I'll admit, though that Claude Mythos scares the hell out of me. It potentially has more power to disrupt economies than any nation, and you can't tell me that, despite Anthropic's plans to keep it under wraps, someone isn't going to let the genii out of the bottle, ripe for bad actors.
But I don't believe in an intelligence that doesn't have senses--that can't smell baking bread or feel a loved-one's kiss or taste chocolate or hear a Bach fugue on a magnificent pipe organ. Human beings have bodies, and Michael Pollan has convinced me that our intelligence isn't only housed in our brains but that it is experiential. How do you feel awe without a body? Without a body, how do you describe the kind of existential anxiety that is housed in your solar plexus about today's wars and technology? How do you react to your pet's uncanny knowledge about how you are feeling? How do you know that slight weakening in your knees when your lover puts their hand in the middle of your back to guide you through literally or figuratively difficult terrain if you don't have a body?
I had my first invitation just before Easter. The letter was personally written, I suspect, but a bit cagey. It came from the Shepherd's Bush Book Club. Yes, I looked it up online, and it was real if a bit sketchy, and someone had already posted an answer to a question I hadn't yet asked: was there really a Shepherd's Bush Book Club? The answer told me where they met. They had been reading Ian McEwan and were going on to Nana, so I didn't quite know how Visible Cities--a book of photographs that inspired poems--quite fit, but the chap who ran it said that it would appeal to their audience's concern for how we experience the city. When I asked him how he found the copy of a book written in Regina and published in Calgary, he fudged a bit--creating my first unease. He said that how he'd found it made him smile and convinced him that this was the book his club needed to read. He didn't, though, tell me a story, and that stuck with me. We offered to record a reading of half a dozen poems, with Veronica talking about the photographs and me reading the poems, and he was over the moon about that. Then came the request for money. A modest amount of money--$74. He gave me--I'm so naive that I don't know what--websites or Paypal kinds of things where I could send the money. But I didn't know any of these and it was Easter weekend. I was baking lavender lemon bars and mixing up twice-baked potatoes (with roasted garlic and old white cheddar--yum!) and didn't have time to go checking these things out. He nudged me about the money. Busy, I told him I didn't know how to use these sites and signed off. He came back suggesting that I could do a bank to bank draft with a Lead Bank in Kansas City with the account of a person with a very exotic and unpronouncable name. I immediately blocked my correspondent and deleted all his emails.
Five more exclusive invitations have followed, most of them ill-written. AI has made this possible. In a wonderful workshop Gillian Bell gave to members of the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild, she explained how AI allows the perps to "scrape" the internet for information about our books and then write the invitation that follows. It will sound like they've read our book, though it will also sound as if they are not very good readers or writers. Writers I know have said they seem to target books with good reviews but only modest sales.
But does AI make this possible in another way? There are questions huddling in the dark: can AI write a novel? Can it write a film script? There is also gossip in the margins of magazines about the arts or culture--about how so-and-so used AI to write a novel, though the publisher then refused to publish it. About the great film script that was going to be used by...someone. Just today there was scandal about a piece published in Granta that had used AI. I don't believe AI is going to replace art. How do you write a love scene without having a body that could have experienced it? How do you describe the existential dread of dying without a body? A mash-up of other people's words aren't going to cut it. But my disbelief isn't shared by people who aren't creative, except for the scams they think up. I fear that there is a cynicism growing about the written word, a mistaken belief that a machine's words are just as good as a human's. That's where the danger lies.
Because once Claude Mythos has enabled someone to eat a union's pension funds or your child's education savings, once there is economic chaos, art is going to matter. Once climate change really ramps up, art is going to matter. Art teaches us empathy and introduces us to the complexity of ethical dilemmas. Art comforts and illuminates. Art introduces us to new experiences and points of view. Art is a conversation about world views and hopes in a time when people are often just shouting at one another. It asks "What if?" It helps us solve problems and be kind to one another. Ironically, the people who have designed cynical scams, scams intended to harm writers, are going to need the downstream effects of art when the AI disruption hits.
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