A fellow student in the early Seventies devised a program to write porn. It was quite simple: sentences made up of random phrases strung together as with ‘jargon generators’, but composed by machine. I still remember one: ‘Painfully they peeled a grape for twenty minutes.’
That was in the childhood of computers, of course. Today whole non-fiction books can be researched and written largely by AI - a man called Philip M. Parker has used it to generate more than 200,000 titles.
Reportedly Parker is planning a series of romance novels. Why not? Genre fiction is formulaic and Orwell foresaw auto-composition in his 1940s book ‘1984’:
Julia… worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department… She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She "didn't much care for reading," she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
The world’s best-selling author, crime writer James Patterson, has been using a human-based system like this for years:
Patterson will write a detailed outline--sometimes as long as 50 pages, triple-spaced--and one of his co-authors will draft the chapters for him to read, revise and, when necessary, rewrite.
So far, so fun. Now for the serious implications.
By now we’re all familiar with the way Silicon Valley mediates our mutual communications: demonetising, shadowbanning, graying-out and faux fact-checking, outright censorship… And the spying, the sniper-aimed adverts based on our YouTube comments, Google searches, even eavesdropping via Alexa - Scott Adams recently thought he got a dog-washing product ad because he had been heard cleaning his pooch in the shower.
Gmail has become a buttinsky, offering responses to the emails you receive - just click on one of the three, no need for you to turn a phrase! And one-upping on the pop-ups on Facebook, Microsoft have started sending you ads by email:
A few months ago, adverts starting popping up in the inbox of my Outlook email account (formerly Hotmail), looking at first glance like ordinary messages.
Apparently, this sneaky infiltration is ‘an experiment that Microsoft is carrying out in terms of ad delivery’. There is no apparent option to stop the ads coming – you can’t block them or mark them as junk or phishing. All you can do is whack-a-mole them as they appear.
The next phase is or will be a deluge of AI-written propaganda and disinformation. In the last few days on Facebook I’ve had three companies offering a service to write computer-generated marketing copy and blogposts - Jasper, CopyShark and Localio.
If these things have become commercially available, then - I realised belatedly - they have probably been employed by ‘intelligence’ creeps before that. Such is human - or military - nature that if you invented a lovely thing like custard there would be a defence research team working on how to drown people in it.
Already there are human cohorts working on officialdom’s behalf to influence, troll and misinform - former British ambassador Craig Murray has a standard coda to his blogposts referring to
… adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations.
The Establishment watches dissidents like a hawk and when not interfering in their messages will victimise them whenever they slip up - Murray was jailed last year, Alex Jones has been fined between four and eight times his net worth, and so on. Julian Assange - guilty of nothing so far except jumping bail to avoid kidnap - has spent the last ten years as a persecutee whose treatment is a standing shame to the UK and US.
The information war is already heavily asymmetric given the vast resources of the State, but the next stage of dealing with the citizens’ needles of truth will be to bury them in haystacks of cyber-composed bullshit.
There will be just too much to sift; we will be made to feel confused, defeated, resentful but - most importantly - we shall become passive. Why read or watch the news? Why vote? Why even protest to our friends?
Unless we come up with AI readers, to pan the gold from the torrent of dross?