David O'Mahony: What do we do when dystopian technology tropes become the norm?

One of the major events in the past few weeks has been Mia Ballard seeing her book Shy Girl pulled by Hachette over allegations of AI use in its creation. There’s a vast discourse on this online, so I won’t recount it here.

She has said an editor rewrote bits with AI, while I’ve seen people crowing that it was “confirmed” because they fed a chunk into an AI detector (ethics and copyright are apparently optional when you want to score points) and it scored over 85% AI-generated.

Reader, those detectors are trash. For the sake of this column I stuck the first 600 words of my beloved Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into one of them and it came back as 78% generated by AI.

It was written in 1818. We didn’t even discover Neptune until 1846. AI tools think it’s AI because they were trained on it. There is no foolproof way to tell if AI has been used.

I’m not saying Ballard didn’t use it, and I won’t defend her if she did, I’m just saying there are no definitive “gotchas”, even if the writing is generally formulaic and soulless. Just look at about half the posts on Linkedin.

A writer friend who had read Shy Girl noted that this is going to make people less likely to write experimental fiction. That’s a potential curtailing of artistic boundaries while the technology becomes concentrated in fewer corporate hands, all desperate to survive even though they’re losing more money than they can ever make back. 

And given how US and Canadian courts have ruled that copyright only applies to human-created material, the chances of making significant money off AI in the arts continue to dwindle.

That’s not to say the usage shouldn’t continue be called out, and Amazon is filled with AI-generated slop books as it is, but wild accusations make the online writing community feel a bit more like Salem at times. And you just know somebody, somewhere, wants to be the first to tie a noose or light the pyre. Being right is irrelevant.

We’re in this mess because techbros have always treated creativity as a problem that needs to be solved, as opposed to a celebration of individuality and small acts of resistance against the inevitability that is death — our bodies may crumble, but our art can live on.

Everybody can be an artist already just by typing or picking up a pencil. It’s when you hand it over to an automaton that it not only loses its sense of soul, but just drains away the qualities that make humans human (even if we’re bonkers at the best of times).

In the Dune universe, humanity got around this problem, and that of control by a small technocrat ruling class, by exterminating “thinking machines” in a war of liberation so destructive the ban on AI still exists 10,000 years later.

AI has mixed fates in science fiction. A book from 1872 called Erewhon includes humans destroying machine intelligence (yes, really). 

Something similar to Dune happens in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation universe, and also in the Warhammer 40,000 one (this universe is awful, don’t wish for it). It has a better run in Star Trek, but that’s founded on a more hopeful view of humanity, and Star Wars, which is more science fantasy than science fiction.

But these are all stories generated by human minds to deal with some of existence’s big questions. Science fiction is, and always has been, a vehicle for social commentary. 

I’m just not sure we expected to catch up with the more dystopian elements in our lifetimes.

Seeing Melania Trump walk out at the White House accompanied by a robot, each of them devoid of humanity, and then extol the virtues of robots as teachers was depressing. Robots can teach facts. They can’t demonstrate empathy or make the non-academic interventions I see Beloved Wife make to improve things for her students.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Melaniabot was being remote controlled. It couldn’t even walk straight, and many demos of the allegedly autonomous robots that you see online actually feature devices being piloted by humans (I’m looking at you, Tesla).

The optimistic, chaotically mischievous side of me, thinks the Melaniabot would be outmaneuvered in minutes by a whole class.

It wouldn’t survive a day in my house. Twin 1 would likely dismantle it just for fun. Twin 2 would reconfigure it so it thought up was down and right was left, and Daughter would have its cognitive circuits tied up in knots with elaborate and contradictory requests.

And these are good kids, who mean well. Imagine what a group of pissed off kids would do to it.

Perhaps that would be a work of art in itself.