message – Mick Canning

Clickbait? Perhaps, but I have a point to make.

There is a blog I follow which regularly posts about good people. People who make a difference to their world. Kindness. They change lives. And it makes for a refreshing read in a world which often appears to be so full of shit we could be drowning in the stuff. I also see now on social media – at least on Facebook, which is the only one I follow other than Instagram – AI generated posts on good people. I know they’re AI generated, because the signs are all there. I don’t intend to list the signs, as most people are aware of them already. These AI generated posts seem to fall into the same few categories. There is the rough biker with the heart of gold adopting a defenceless little girl. The retiree who’s lost his wife and finds meaning in life through spreading love through his community. There’re one or two others, but they all seem to fall into a few predictable categories. And you read these long tear-jerkers and reach the end and you go ‘Ah, isn’t that lovely.’ Or you’re meant to, anyway. But they are AI generated, the people don’t exist (although the original ones may have been based on real people), and these things did not really happen. But does this matter?

I think it does, for several reasons. AI invents stuff. If this is not the intention of the user, these are known as ‘AI Hallucinations’. If it can’t find what it’s been asked to find, it will sometimes make something up instead. Equally, it may draw data from untrustworthy sources. Then there are AI programs which are designed to make up stuff. If we understand that, then when we read something we understand is AI generated, we don’t necessarily believe it. And since we don’t believe the characters or the narrative, then the message it is designed to deliver is rejected. We all know that kindness is a good thing, but being told that by a computer program that has clearly fabricated the vehicle of delivery diminishes the message.

It is the exact opposite of ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’, because in this case the message is rejected because the messenger is flawed.

And the more we read these posts, knowing they are AI generated but if we’re still happy to take them completely at face value, the more we help to normalise the things. The more we accept AI into our lives and accept these fabrications.

So there are more than one type of AI program. Many of those that are really good at inventing stuff, and there are quite a few, are designed specifically to write books. They advertise themselves as producing books ‘in minutes, not months’. A few clicks on the button and hey presto! I’ve written a book! I’ll get back to this at some point, but are these people authors? No. They’re not. They’re frauds. But this brings me back to those original posts, which someone has created using an AI program similar to the book writer programs to deliberately invent the contents.

And to the more important point, the point where both the hallucinations, but even more importantly the deliberately fabricated material, really matter.

AI is, as we’ve seen, designed to invent stuff. Okay, that’s a simplification, but the point is that it’s designed to give the user exactly what they ask for. If someone requests it to write a piece justifying theft, or infanticide, for example, (not to ask it if it can be justified, but telling it to actually do so) it will do that, citing either nasty stuff it’s dug up from some remote hole on the internet, or, more likely, completely inventing stuff because the real justifications don’t exist. And it will look reasonably believable, perhaps writing something along the lines of ‘the Cornel University experiments of 1983 – 1984 by Taylor and Whickham et al demonstrate that…’ etc etc. And the casual reader will think ‘oh, I never realised that. So perhaps there’s something in it after all.’ But these citations will be made up.

And to go slightly off topic for a moment, there are the illustrations. AI generated photos are still usually recognisable as such, but they’re getting much better. Ones that have been subtly manipulated are now very hard to detect. The implications there should be obvious, can we now believe anything we see or are told?

This is not to suggest AI is an unmitigated evil. Its champions will point out advances in, for example, medicine and material sciences, which are very real and extremely important. But the issues of misinformation and, as frequently cited, intellectual property theft, to say nothing of the potential to completely destroy careers in the literary and artistic worlds, are also very real.

So how do we fight this? I’m afraid I’ve no idea. The genie is out of the bottle and I see no way it’s going back in again. Other than burning down the internet we are stuck with it and over the next year or so (or less – who knows?) it’s going to get harder and harder to tell truth from complete (and possibly dangerous) crap. While the programs are becoming better at presenting the genuine data they are requested to present, the ones inventing stuff are getting better at making this appear real. All we can do is be aware of this, be cautious and critical. And perhaps we could go back to getting our facts from books which, although not infallible, are far more likely to be accurate. Publishers are still the gatekeepers there, and they tend to do a pretty good job. Research stuff properly. Rather than accepting important medical information, for example, from Joe Bloggs on Facebook, look it up on a respectable site, like the NHS (in UK).

Maybe just stay off the internet more.

Which is probably a good idea anyway.

I thought that I would pick out what might be the 10 books that have most influenced my life. Well, I say 10 books, but I may tire of this long before I reach 10, so let’s just see what happens.

You see, these are not really reviews, although it is necessary to give some idea of the plot of each book, it is more about how they have influenced me, and I may decide after a while that I’m just giving away too much about myself.

Or that I’m just going over and over the same ground.

Okay, then. Let’s get on with it. The rules:

Firstly, I must have read the book more than 5 years ago. I know this is an arbitrary figure, but any book that I have read recently is likely to be clearer in my mind, and so appear a little more important to me than it really is. It needs time to settle.

Secondly, I need to be able to demonstrate to myself exactly how it is that the book has influenced me. Just to say ‘it was important to me’ will not be enough. That would be little better than just saying ‘I like it’. Perfectly valid, but hardly the stuff of a blog post. This is another reason to impose the 5 year rule – there must have been enough time elapsed to see the influence.

So I’ll start today with Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse.

Image result for steppenwolf Hesse

Sometimes, you get the feeling that some people have just been born into the wrong century. Not that they would prefer dressing in cravats or crinolines, although they might anyway, or that they have a hankering after a little piracy or bubonic plague, but rather you can see that they don’t fit in with the pace of modern life, or much like the ethos of the times.

There must be quite a few people like that, which must partly explain the immense popularity of Steppenwolf both when it was released, and then especially in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

It was the second book by Hesse that I had read, after cutting my teeth on ‘The Journey to the East’ as a teenager, and I was a little unprepared for its message.

Whereas ‘The Journey to the East’ felt like a bit of drug-induced fantasy, although a very clever and readable one, without any obvious message beyond ‘free yourself from the conventions of society, man’, Steppenwolf clearly had a more serious message to convey.

It begins with the protagonist, Harry, contemplating taking his own life, because he sees himself as a serious writer both at odds with the world that he lives in (Germany, post WWI), whose values, especially the bourgeois ones, he despises, but also with his inner alter ego, the very opposite of the sophisticated artist that he sees himself, which he calls the Steppenwolf – or the wolf of the steppes. He hates and fears this alter ego, who he feels he cannot control, and who sneers at everything that Harry holds dear.

It is whilst Harry is contemplating suicide, that he comes across a booklet entitled ‘Treatise on the Steppenwolf’ and as he reads it, he discovers that it is about himself. the booklet talks about Harry and his alter ego, but also explains that there are many, many more of these other sides to his character.

Through the rest of the book, Harry learns how to reconcile these many sides of himself and, more importantly, how he can manage to live in this world that up until then, he sees no value in.

When I read the part of the book that consisted of the treatise on the various different natures that made up the protagonist of the novel, it was the first indication to me that we really do have these different sides to our characters; sides that do not need to be in conflict with each other, but can coexist quite peaceably. As a typical young man, I knew that there were parts of me that yearned for safety, parts that simply wanted to rebel. Parts that enjoyed home life and parts that wanted nothing more than to wander the world with my possessions in a rucksack. There was the aesthete and there was the lover. The artist and the fighter.

Until then, the rebel in me had sneered at the home lover, and the artist seemed to be in perpetual conflict with the fighter. I had felt embarrassed by parts of my character and, just as did the hero of Steppenwolf, rather tried to repress them.

What this book did was to show me that it was natural to feel like that, and that the secret was to accept all of these sides of me, and allow them to all have their moments of dominance, and their moments of passivity. They did not need to be in conflict.

It completely changed my outlook on life.