Michael Frayn agrees with me.
One of the things about being an artist is to bang things together until flakes and chips fly off in a shower of sparks. Sometimes the two rocks (or ideas) will form a miraculous fusion (rather like nuclear scientists are currently attempting) and what will result is something new and extraordinary. The crucial part of this activity, though, is not the noise and explodings (exciting as that may be) but spotting the little jewels of new ideas twinkling among the ash and debris.
It is the ability to spot the worth of these little chunks that makes the artist. To see what may have some value and which we can add to our roadside stall and offer for the world to enjoy.
When I wrote here about whether I would be using AI to write my daily blog, (Before even considering letting it loose on my plays and poems and such things,) I suggested that there were four things AI could not replicate. You may call these the Cooper Human Writing Factors if you like. 1) Motivation 2) Meaning 3) Signature 4) Style. Now I have come up with a fifth. (See, one idea leads on to another, that is an entirely Human Factor in itself).
5) Discrimination. Which you could describe as taste or what guides choice. AI, I believe is very good at choosing and can teach itself what choices to make. It can sort through the bright pebbles on our little stall and pick out those which are green, or round, or shiny. But it cannot discriminate using the highly personal cloud of associations that are acquired over the days and months and years of one’s existence. AI does not - cannot- have this cloud of meaning. It is this cloud of meaning that mediates choices I make in my writing. AI can pick an appropriate word from the dictionary but it cannot weigh up that word for its emotional connotations. And all words have emotional conotations. On these are built such delicate ideas as international diplomacy or tactfully telling someone that they have an incurable illness. AI can judge these words on fairly crude codes “words you should use in court” “words suitable for use in church or in the pub” and so on. But we all know that we humans are so precision driven in our communications that we modify our language code right down to the individual level. In a room full of people I will unconciously address everyone slightly differently. I don’t know how or why that occurs, but it does. And perhaps it is that level of subtlety that will keep me and AI apart.
One of my favourite playwrights and authors - Michael Frayn.
And I give the final word to Michael Frayn from his latest exploration of his own mortality “Among Others”
“However you set up a system external to the body it can only do what it’s been told to do. Unless it can also feel for itself. Unless it can suffer from doing this and take pleasure in doing that… Unless it can hear and desire.”
