Thinking About Thinking

In some of the bigger news of the past week, this silly piece I wrote means Google's AI search engine is now telling people that my cat Roscoe is a real human woman who came to media prominence during the Britpop era. Not long after it offered me the information in the screenshot above, AI also began to inform us that Philippa Islington-Smythe - more typically known in our house as a black and white quadruped, who, as she approaches her 14th birthday, more and more closely resembles a bowling skittle wearing an ill-fitting, hastily-buttoned cardigan - is married to a man called Justin. The questions keep piling up. What is Justin's background and what originally brought the pair together? Could it have been their shared love of organic Gloucestershire honey and mechanically recovered meat? Who exactly are Chester and Sylvester? What have I started here and where on earth will it end?

The situation became yet more tangled a few nights ago when, under a full moon, I heard the sound of heels crunching on frost followed by four icy acrylic nails tapping on our front door. "Who could that be at so late and eerie an hour on a winter evening?" I asked my wife. It turned out to be Philippa herself. I have to admit she was looking pretty fucking good for a 59-year-old who had packed as much into her life as she had. "So what are you going to do about all this, then?" she asked, handing her designer wool blended double-breasted coat to a standard lamp she had mistaken for a member of our live-in serving staff. "You created me, so now I'm your responsibility. First off, I'll be needing a manager. These bespoke pheasant feather rucksacks are not going to sell themselves."

"I'll do it," announced Roscoe, who, pulled out of a 19-hour sleep on our bed by the tap on the door, had sauntered into the kitchen to find out what all the commotion was about. Bless her. She has always been a total godsend in a crisis.

Part of me doesn't want to write about AI at all, ever. It feels a bit like watering a garden full of poison. Also there are already plenty of people commenting about its many vertiginous tiers of evil, most of them far more clued-up than I am. But after posting about the "real" person that AI turned my cat into and then seeing the post go marginally viral on Bluesky I enjoyed witnessing some interesting discussions about what AI is doing to people's brains, in addition to its already devastating environmental impact. Meanwhile, via Facebook, I learned, from some people who feel positive about AI, that AI enthusiasts and AI itself have one major character trait in common, which is being entirely devoid of a sense of humour. But then that's the problem with the Bluesky social network: it's full of all these lefty woke snowflakes who don't want the planet to die and actually cherish their own ability to think complex thoughts. Much better to get both sides of the story by opening yourself up to people who don't read books and have offered themselves consummately to a terrifying technobillionaire-driven mind cult that, as it drains our resources, is hell bent on blotting out the last vestiges of their capacity to form any original nuanced thought grounded vaguely in reality. Or I could just delete Facebook? I probably should. Oh, I actually did? Thank fuck for that.

I can't find it right now but I've got a note in one of my notebooks from marginally over a decade ago which says something along the lines of "And so it was decreed by the prophets in ancient times that any attempt to get any creative work you had done out to its intended audience via the Internet would also mean a commitment to sending that work on a thorny journey past its unintended audience, and, lo, it did become true." Little about that has changed since 2015 but now there's the extra thorny element of a symbiotic collaboration between AI and a new kind of human whose brain seems to be moving ever closer to that of a robot entity with no appreciation of satire. The mindset here is one that does not understand that lies are lies when they are told, blatantly obviously, in the service of irony and truth yet, paradoxically, it is also a mindset that waits attendance on the language of actual lies: the language of politicians and conspiracy theorists and advertising, which says "If I spout this unmitigated bollocks with complete iron confidence, it won't matter that it isn't true."

Was the reason that - after I created a selection of fake covers of albums I'd recorded in the 60s and 70s and posted them on Substack - Google started telling people I was 78 years old just down to AI? No, it was also because a bunch of humans thought those albums were real. Which is funny. But the back room nuts and bolts driving stuff like this aren't so funny because the language that says "Your cat ran a high-end interior design business towards the close of the last century" and "You look surprisingly good for a man pushing 80 who'd already kettle-boiled his brain with disreputable Topanga Canyon acid before Nixon was in the White House" is another version of the language which says "This vast executive housing estate contains a selection of unique homes which are not in fact made out of cardboard", "The President of the United States should not be in jail" and "It's perfectly ok to bomb Venezuela because I'm scared of the potential personal repercussions on me if I say it isn't." Remember when Twitter just seemed like a place full of comedians, messing around in fun creative ways with language? Then do you remember about four years after that, when it had suddenly mutated into a conference room at the gates of hell where the entire fate of the planet got argued out? Not that the humour was completely dropped. When evil turns up at your door these days it's as likely to be carrying an overused meme as a pitchfork or an AK-47. Evil has long since learned that, with little effort, it can persuade online humour to go to work on its behalf. It's become an integral part of what They do: another way for Them to weaponise inane digital chatter, another way they can tell us two plus two equals five. But, as a rule, that humour is nearly always bad. It's "I mean this hideous insult but I'm pretending it's a joke so as a get-out clause I can say 'Oh for God's sake, it was a joke: lighten up' to you if you get offended by it" humour. When Trump is funny - and I kind of get why some people think he is - he's never funny in the way Trump himself believes he's funny.

When has the world, in its entire history, been more full of contradictions than it is right now? I suspect never. But I'm not going to say that on a social media site because before long somebody in the comments is inevitably going to turn up and say, "Well, in fact, while still relatively little-known by the layman, I think you'll find the Contradiction Enlightenment of the late 1200s is officially recognised by historians to still be THE era containing most contradictions, planetwide, especially if we are limiting our measuring criteria to most-overall-contradictions-per-head." Here I am, yet another person, using the Internet to his own benefit to be able to say negative stuff about what the Internet has turned us into.

I was thinking the other day about how the choice whether to digitally disengage or not used to feel like a personal one, whereas it's beginning to feel much more like a political one. When was the significant changeover?

Perhaps it was the point where all the companies that run everything decided to make it utterly impossible for anyone not to have a mobile phone, instead of only three quarters impossible. My former landlady didn't have a mobile phone or email. But she was rich and had never needed to work for a living. That generally makes the choice quite a lot easier. I wonder if she's still managing, three and a bit years on? Maybe not. It's hard for everyone and it gets harder on a seemingly monthly basis. The everyday necessities of life - the bank apps, the identity checks that are more and more tied to our to our digital selves - are one side of it. But what about the extra issues, for a creative person, the hypocrisy you have to face as you look in the mirror? "Yeah," I might think, punching the air. "This digital oppression can go to hell. I'm out of here! I'm going to self-publish a short story collection, go back to writing a fanzine, do that landscape painting I always promise I'll do, go fully back to analogue." Ok, but how will you tell people about it in order to continue to survive? Ah yes. Good point. I guess it will have to be via the Internet.

A thing about being a novelist is you convince yourself your specialism is the human condition: you start having this utterly riotous amount of fun pretending to be all these different characters, examining their motives and pain, feeling sympathy for their weaknesses, empathy for the fine messes they get themselves into. But in the end you're always coming from your own perspective, which is that of someone who's spent years training his own mind to disobey, training himself to think a certain way via the books he has read and written. My mind is not the statistician fact-remembering mind of a nature writer or music writer. It's a novelist's mind: somewhere between a back alley junk shop and an old bin made out of misbehaviour. And having a mind like that is not a universal human condition, nor even a particularly common one. My whole "I hate AI" stance is hugely influenced by me being one of those weird outlying people who enjoy the luddite pastime of having a brain, kind of thrive on the scrapyard of jokes and emotions and memories and memoroids (yes I am well aware there's a cream available for these but I prefer not to use it) it contains, quite enjoy the ways it has, over the years, sharpened in some ways and worn down in others.

"But why do you insist on clinging to it, when there's an easier alternative now?" a pro-AI person, who doesn't really enjoy having a brain, might ask. "All that thinking has brought you a lot of pain over the years, with its overanalysis of situations and expanding ability to see some of the hard nuanced truths of them, and your choice to try to earn a living through it hasn't brought you wealth and status. Look how small and dirty and crap your car is, for example. I personally have a much bigger, cleaner one, and I haven't had to hurt my brain by doing a fraction of the thinking you have to acquire such a car." Nonetheless, I am committed to my lot now. I also can't help feeling that an era so wildly ravelled, when life does throw up this many contradictions, is EXACTLY the kind of era when human thought - and the discussions and solutions that might emerge from it - is most valuable. Additionally I know, more surely than I know anything, that now is the time that we need the conversations found in quality literature more than ever. Conversations that will not, in fact technically almost certainly cannot, be had on a screen, and that, in an era of AI - an era when you are seeing people you know who used to read submit to the scrolling life - the mere pastime of reading books containing ideas is starting to feel more and more like an act of defiance and subversion.

Last year I heard the acclaimed and famous novelist Zadie Smith talking on BBC Radio 4 about social media, and why she is not on it. And while on one hand I was all like "Right on, you tell them", on the other I was hugely aware it was all coming from a particularly Zadie Smith perspective, which is the exalted and increasingly freakish one of someone who has never required an online presence to make a living from her art, from day one of her career. They say you will never again look forward to things in life in the way you did as a child but the idea of never using Facebook again is as exciting for me right now as being eight years and 364 days old and knowing almost for sure that I was getting a BMX for my next birthday. In recent times it's primarily been a sphere where I'm yelled at incoherently by strangers who would never in a million years read my books and have made the mistake of believing I'm personally addressing them and them only with whatever I say. Instagram, meanwhile, feels increasingly like a mass sickness fuelled by cultural repetition and visual dishonesty.

Simultaneously, though, I'm relieved to live in an era where social media allows me to bypass industry gatekeepers and do my own thing, particularly on the back of a year when it offered me a hand during a publishing industry shipwreck and helped drag my wheezing body to dry land. But I don't kid myself that any of that assistance is down to a robot, nor the way the robot's master has designed that robot (which, with every twiddle, becomes less in favour of the interests of any creative person doing anything non-braindead whose focus is their actual work, rather than some branded topsoil portal to that work). It's about the support of real humans on social media who probably feel as conflicted about social media as I do. I suspect the big conversation of the coming era will not be "How do we run away?" but "Which bits can we run away from and save our sanity, while also fighting the brainrot and not being butlers to the self-interest of the billionaires?" I have faith that stimulating and positive discussions will come out of that and that none of those conversations will be chaired by a machine. If you have doubts, just ask Philippa who, from what I can work out, seems to be living full-time in our house now. Some call her "the Pret A Manger Elizabeth Taylor" but I, for one, believe in her. She's a survivor and has already got through countless dark times when all the odds were stacked against her.

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