The AI Ignoramus

I might be setting myself up for a huge fall. It’s likely that I am. Like the guys who rejected computers, the internet, or Photoshop.

I’ve used ChatGPT about nine times. Each instance was considered and immensely helpful towards big mental and career challenges in my life. Not once have I generated a jokey image or a recipe suggestion.

The primary reason for my blanket and potentially catastrophic rejection of AI in my life and creative practice is ideological, specifically born of the environmental cost.

I’ve had to work through a lot of despair, anger and sadness that this powerful, resource hungry tech was released to everyone without a broader consultation. Not to mention the ready acceptance of it by many intelligent people.

I’ve interviewed scientists about breakthroughs in machine learning. This tier of the tech excites me. I’m not against AI. Positive News magazine ran a wonderful feature on uses including drones to help indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest track illegal logging in realtime. This is magnificent. Astounding progress. What’s not progress is someone editing their head because a rogue spotlight hit the glaring truth of a receding hairline, or kids being depicted naked by their antagonists for bullying purposes.

There were many discussions that morality suggested we should have had before this stuff was released. But greed, ego and vested interests ensured we didn’t.

As a father of two, I’ve found myself unable to ‘see what whichever large language model spits out’. Knowing of the intense strain on water resources stops that, and any other arbitrary, or even better use of the tech. Now the concern becomes about how far adrift I’ll be in a society that didn’t share my ideological standpoint and pressed on without me. A man with a fork in a world of soup, to quote Noel Gallagher’s assessment of Liam’s temperament.

A man with an ink pen, paper, and hand written client letters in a world of instant genius might seem laughable, but I’m sticking to my guns here. It might be that I’m obsolete in several years’ time, but I also believe its possible that the whole thing spirals out of control, the internet becomes the domain of the machines where we no longer know what’s real, and we all have to go analogue in little The Matrix style hideaways. If so, then I’m a visionary because I never left.

On a basic mental health level, I don’t want to be on screens any more than I have to, so I’ll take notes and take longer.

For now, I’ll get on drawing and monitor the water use situation.

Biography

It’s a coincidence that I’m reading a lot of biographies at a time when I’ve just written my first biography, and I’m discussing my second. In my effort to reduce time wasted on screens, I’ve made the bathroom my biography zone. Biographies because I find that once I connect with the subject, once I’m there in this person’s life, it becomes compulsive reading, so even with only 2 minutes to sit and do the job, I’ll take out two pages.

I hadn’t given the nature of a biography much thought before, and then, suffering that strange ‘break-up’ sensation of having to part ways with characters in a book before I’m ready to do so – in this case football manager Brian Clough – the author, Duncan Hamilton, writes something beautiful about this. Referring to Clough’s obituaries after his passing in 2004, he offers:

Each story, different in its own way, underlined for me one thing: that there is no absolute truth in biography, only judgement. Every subject is posed, cropped, and framed, as if in a series of photographs that capture a lifetime of distinct, frozen moments. As a biographer, you produce a piece of work that honestly and accurately reflects what you witnessed, were told, felt, or discovered about the subject. You try to join the diverse dots of life, creating a picture that takes into account the interpretation and the assessment of others who saw things from a variety of perspectives. And you can only ever contribute to an understanding of the person concerned. You can’t be definitive.

The Reason You’re Doing It, Héctor Ayuso’s story was by no means a traditional biography. I have no interest in writing that way. After all, there are 1000s of better biographers if we’re thinking standard form. We set out to make a piece of art. A vicious, tender, and inspiring mood piece that bared Héctor’s soul while peaking intrigue and leaving space for the interpretation and imagination of the reader. Duncan’s words filled me with joy because he’s described exactly what I realise, with hindsight, I was trying to do, other than making art. It is what I’ll continue to do and I’m excited to see where, and through who’s life, it leads me.