Smash the Machines!

Ben Wildsmith 

The only thing it’s safe to assume about you is that you are all readers. Whilst others choose to inform and entertain themselves via TikTok, YouTube, the telly, radio, or idle chitchat, you are the admirable cohort willing to engage with the written word.

It’s a fundamentally different process that requires focus on a single task and a willingness to set aside time in the pursuit of knowledge or stimulation.

Even people who don’t read know, if they are honest, that they should. Literacy is the soil from which humanity has refined itself into the governing species of our planet. Give a monkey a gun and he’ll believe he’s the centre of the universe; give it a copy of Catch 22, however, and it’ll think twice before firing it.

Recent articles here by two fine Welsh writers, Gosia Buzzanca , and Julie Brominicks , discussed the routine undervaluing of writers in our society, and the near impossibility of pursuing the craft as a career.

Opportunities for writers to earn money are increasingly limited to activities adjacent to writing – typically teaching others to write or as part of a wellbeing initiative.

For many, these income streams far outweigh what is generated from writing itself, leading inevitably to diminished time for creating new work, particularly given that nearly all published writers are working a regular job as well.

This week, the algorithm alerted me to a job opportunity that initially had my eyes on stalks. An employment agency was looking for people to evaluate texts. The requirements were for a body of published work (tick), evidence of commercial journalism (tick), and academic experience (tick). The hourly rate for this was over £100 per hour.

I live in a two-writer household, and it’s fair to say that the ethical framework for its operation doesn’t fall under my suite of responsibilities (putting the bins out and opening jars of pickle). I thought it wise, therefore, to present this golden opportunity to Mrs. W. for scrutiny.

The company hiring transpired, of course, to be an AI firm and what they were after was people who could point out where AI produced creative writing didn’t perfectly mimic that produced by a professional human author.

My £100/hour would be for salting the last remaining fertile land upon which the written word is cultivated by our species. There’s always something, isn’t there?

As I somewhat reluctantly buried my interest in this beneath a moral code that I struggle to sustain, a news item came up that settled matters more definitively.

The Washington Post reports that AI companies are buying up physical copies of rare books so that their contents can be used to train AI models.

Booksellers report a surge in orders for obscure titles, many of which might only have a single copy available worldwide. Our pals in AI feed their acquisitions into a hydraulic cutting machine which removes the spines before cutting the pages to size to they can be scanned by industrial imaging equipment.

The stated goal of Anthropic’s ‘Project Panama’ is to scan every book in the world so that its AI model encompasses the material and style of all historic literary output.

Naturally, authors are not paid for this cannibalisation but the destructive aspect to this new revelation pushes the ethical problem into an alarming new direction. If the last remaining copy of a book is destroyed in order to hoard its contents on a privately owned server something more than revenue is lost.

By subsuming the work into a mechanism, it is divorced from its cultural context, the writing style can be separated from the content and the author’s intent corrupted beyond recognition. Instead of cultural theft, the charge becomes one of murder.

Manipulative

All writing is manipulative. I’m being persuasive here and, if you’ve got this far, you’re allowing me latitude to persuade.

The key factor is that I’m personally accountable for what I write. Indeed, this morning on X a gentleman characterised my entire output as ‘slop’. Wish him well for me, I’ve blocked him.

What’s envisioned here can harness a writer’s persuasive gifts to the will of whoever owns those cutting machines. Your favourite author’s turn of phrase can be employed to advocate for positions that author abhors, in the certain knowledge that you will enjoy reading it.

Legacy

The concept of an individual setting down thoughts for wider consumption is emblematic of the human need for individuality and legacy. It is richly ironic that the latest iteration of late- stage capitalism is threatening those concepts more completely than Stalin ever managed.

Here’s a paragraph praising him in the style of Solzhenitsyn, courtesy of ChatGPT.

In Stalin they discern not merely a ruler, but the embodiment of an age that demanded endurance beyond ordinary measure—a will that transformed privation into industry and scattered weakness into formidable power. To them, the triumphs of factories rising from empty plains and armies standing unbroken before catastrophe outweigh the terrible costs that shadowed their making.

This needs stopping, pronto.

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