AI: Uses and Abuses

There's a lot of talk about AI, which is supposed to stand for "Artificial Intelligence", but could equally well stand for "Artificial Idiocy", when one considers what the term is most frequently applied to -- LLMs (Large Language Models). 

LLMs are computer programs that are fed large quantities of text from various sources, and are programmed to handle the text in various ways, including generating new text based on the patterns they detect in the existing text they have been fed. This enables them to do things like produce summaries of documents, and to gather and present information gathered from a wide variety of sources.

Some of these publicly-accessible LLM bots are programmed to present a quasi-human user interface, which has led some people to regard them as persons and to treat them as if they were human beings.

Wisdom of the chip, compassion of the code

The Barna research group has found, for example, that 48% of practising US Christians say they would trust AI with their spiritual growth, and 34% say AI's spiritual guidance is as trustworthy as a human pastor's. Other research has found that some people even fall in love with chatbots, and develop a quasi-romantic love relationship with them. 

The problem with all this is not with the LLM bots themselves; it is with the human beings who make, promote and use them. 

In all this we need to remember that LLM bots are inanimate machines; they are not AI and cannot think. 

It is important to understand this to know what they are good at, and what they are not good at. One of the things they are not good at is knowing what they are not good at. or "knowing" anything, for that matter.

Some things LLM bots are not good at 

Some companies that have adopted AI agents have discovered that they have botched important tasks. The US military has used AI agents in its war against Iran, and some have suggested that a school full of children that was hit by a missile was a target selected by AI.

In these and similar cases the main problem is that a situation arose that was not foreseen by the programmers of the AI bot. A human being faced with something unforeseen, can make a decision based on what is actually happening. They may make a wrong decision, and often do. But they also can and often do make decisions that mitigate rather than exacerbate a bad situation. 

 Some things that AI bots can be useful for

One of the things that AI bots can be useful for is research, though some caveats are needed.

When I was working on my doctoral thesis some 30 years ago, long before LLM bots, I went to the periodicals section of the university library and walked along the shelves looking for journals with likely titles. Having found one, I would begin with the most recent and go through the indexes looking for articles with likely titles. When I found one I would read the abstract. If it looked relevant, I would put that journal in my pile to have the article photocopied. That is what is called a literature search. It was also very time consuming.

An LLM bot could search the same number of journals, and many more that weren't in the library, and come up with a list of articles in less than a minute. That could save a lot of time, time that could be better used in reading the greater number of articles the bot could (theoretically) find. 

The caveat, in this case, is that the bot may not have been trained on all the articles or journals that dealt with the subject, and, since it works by pattern matching, it could make up article and journal titles similar to those of the ones it found, which could be (and sometimes are) completely spurious. That is why LLM bots should be supplementary to, and not replacements for, a competent and trained subject librarian.

Creativity

The tendency of AI bots to make things up like this should not be mistaken for creativity. But we should be careful about the complaint that what they produce is simply piracy of what human beings have produced. This is especially noticeable in graphic art.  A bot that has been trained on hundreds of thousands of paintings mixes those elements and produces something different, and people claim that it is derivative. But a human artist has usually also been trained in like manner, by seeing pictures produced by thousands of artists before them.

Donkey-centaur (Isaiah 34:14)

I was once intrigued by the biblical description of a desolate place from which the human inhabitants had fled, leaving it to be occupied by various monsters (Isaiah 34:14). I asked a friend who had access to a graphic AI bot to get it to produce a picture of a donkey-centaur, and this is what it produced. I thought it was rather nice. All the elements are derivative: the style was learnt from hundreds of artists who painted in that style, but those artists themselves learnt from the other artists who painted in that style, often as semi-robots themselves, as apprentices painting a small part of a picture by an acknowledged master.

If a human artist sees a lot of paintings in a similar style, and then paints one in the same style, it isn't piracy, unless they try to pass it off as the work of someone else. Similarly, an author who reads a lot of books will be influenced in what they write by the books they have read. That is not piracy. Nor if a bot produces a document in a certain style. But if a bot produces it, though it is not necessarily piracy, it's not really creative either.  

I see nothing wrong with getting a bot to draw such a thing to illustrate an article like this. But I would not present such a thing to an art gallery, as a replacement for the work of human artists. Nor would I ask a bot to produce an ikon of a saint -- that would be analogous to asking a bot for pastoral advice, as described above. And in doing such things, bots also make mistakes, like putting right hands on left arms, adding fingers and toes etc. 

 Using LLM bots for creative writing

A couple of months ago a friend and I heard a talk on  Christian Nationalism. It is a topic at the intersection of theology, politics and history. My friend is a physicist, so it was a bit out of his field, so he asked Claude AI to produce an academic article on Christian Nationalism, which it did. Since that topic is more in my field, he sent it to me and I read it as though I were doing a peer review for a journal in my field.

The article contained quite a lot of information, but it was poorly arranged and poorly presented. It lacked a clear and consistent thread of thought. To put it briefly, Claude AI could not see the wood for the trees. It could connect one idea to the next, but it could not connect a string of five ideas to the next five. 

I had written an article on a related topic 25 years ago, and I was interested to see that Claude had used some sources that had not been available then, and it looked as though that might be more interesting than the article itself. My friend then gave Claude the feedback -- my "peer review" and the bibliography for my article, with the addition of a reference to my article as well. 

It spat out a new article, which was a little bit better than the original, but still suffered from the same faults. But this time my friend asked it to produce a bibliography on the subject, and that was far more useful. It had added mine to its original one, a dredged up a whole lot more. Some of the items, including some of the URLs, proved to be hallucinations, but it was useful nonetheless.

I would not use AI bots for writing stuff, but as a  kind of research assistant, they look useful. 

Claude AI tries fiction

I then asked my friend if he would try Claude on fiction.

I had seen somewhere that the name Tiffany was a short form of Theophania, which gave me the idea of writing a novel on the theme of "Tiffany had an Epiphany". So I wrote one.

My original (complete) MS was The Venn Conspiracy, a children's novel which I have written but not published.

My friend submitted the first two chapters to ClaudeAI. These chapters established the setting, the main characters and the beginnings of the plot. He asked Claude to complete the story. To distinguish it from my original, it was given the title Tiffany the Spy. Since the original is unpublished, Claude AI would be unlikely to find it on the internet and draw on it for the plot, but having a human-written original would make a comparison easier.

I made some comments on what I saw as the main shortcomings in Claude's version of the story. My friend submitted my comments to Claude AI which produced a revised version, on which I have made more detailed comments, though I haven't asked my friend to submit them to Claude. There is a limit to how many iterations one can go through.

I think the experiment shows that "AI" is not good at creative writing. 

One problem that stands out is that the AI bot lacks empathy (though sometimes the programmers try to give it the appearance of empathy) and so does not know what makes a good story. The lack of empathy may seem like a good thing to people like Elon Musk, who thinks that tech must rule, but I believe that tech, like the Sabbath, was made for man, and not man  for tech. 

In fiction, as well as non-fiction, Claude can't see the wood for the trees, and it can't even do trees very well. It can describe trees lyrically but cannot express their significance to human beings because it isn't one. It came up with a plot that was complex, but trivial and meaningless.

For an example of the lack of empathy, consider the following passage:

David looked at her sideways. "You sound like you've been talking to lawyers.",
"I have been," said Tiffany. "Mark's father. And a woman called Miriam Goldstein who's an advocate."
"What's an advocate?"
"A special kind of lawyer who goes to court."
David was quiet for a moment.
"That's brave," he said, in a tone that made it clear the observation was genuine. "Talking to lawyers about this."
"I don't feel brave," said Tiffany.
"Well you don't look it either," said David, which was as close as he could get to saying the same thing that Mark and Asha had both said, and which somehow, coming from David, meant a great deal.

Put yourself in the position of Tiffany in that conversation.

"I don't feel brave," said Tiffany.
"Well you don't look it either," said David.

How would you, or any other English-speaking reader, take that? I would see David's remark as rather offensive, wouldn't you?

The bot has no empathy, no feel for human reactions to things said. And that's because it has no feel for anything at all. It is an inanimate machine. It has a tin ear. All it can do is to spit out "rite words in rote order", to quote Marshall McLuhan. It does that rather well, but we must not mistake that for human intelligence.

So I repeat: It is important to know what AI bots are good at, and what they are not good at. 

One of the things they are not good at is knowing what they are not good at. or "knowing" anything at all. It's a tool; we should neither accept it uncritically nor reject it without qualification, but rather heed the advice of the apostle: test everything, hold fast to what is good (I Thess 5:21). 

Writing as a business

 In my long and unsuccessful career as a fiction writer[1] I have read many books that purport to give advice to writers and would-be writers. Some of the advice has been good, some bad, though people might disagree with my criteria for what is good or bad, but one of the worst pieces of advice (in my opinion) was that "writing is a business", and that writers must therefore do market research to find what is selling at the moment, and write books that will sell. 

And the "traditional" publishing world works like that. Authors (or their agents) submit their work, and the first question they ask, in evaluating the work, is "will it sell?" Though they sometimes make mistakes, their experience of the book market is such that they usually have a pretty good idea of what will sell, and most of them have a marketing and publicity section that works hard to get the book into the hands of willing buyers. 

If they don't think your book will sell, but you still want to publish it, until about 20 years ago you had two options -- vanity publishing or self-publishing. Vanity publishers would publish your book for a fee, which would cover their costs of production and also their profit. They do minimal marketing, that is up to you. In self-publishing, you get your book printed bound and  sell it by whatever means you can.

More recently self-publishing has become easier with print-on-demand for  paper books, and ebooks. You submit your book, they print and distribute it at no cost to you, and keep a percentage of each book sold, to cover their costs and profit. And that leaves you free to decide whether writing, for you, is a business or not.

More recently still, however, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, CoPilot and many other examples of "generative AI" have outsourced the writing to machines. If you think of writing primarily as a business, then you don't need to write the book yourself, you get the machine to do it.  And so you find ads like the one on the right, for writing prompts to feed into AI bots that will, you hope, cause them to spit out the kind of book that will sell.

If you see writing as a business, and that is what you are looking for, you will find the kind of thing advertised on the right here.  And no, I'm not getting paid for displaying the ad or providing the link, I'm just putting it there to illustrate the "writing as a business" model, and to show where it leads.

Many people, including, no doubt, some who accept the "writing as a business" model, are shocked and horrified at the idea of generative AI writing books for them, and speak as though AI were something evil in itself. I don't share that view. I think AI is as good or as evil as the humans who use it, and determine the uses to which it is put. If you think writing is a business and that the primary purpose of writing is to make money, then you should have no more objection to having bots write books, than to having bots assemble cars and pack cornflakes. 

But the reason I write is not primarily to make money. It is more like a conversation between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in which one of them, I forget who, said that if they they wanted more of the kind of stories they liked, they should have to write them themselves. I write because I want more of the kind of stories I like, and I write for the kind of people who like those kinds of stories. I would rather sell 50 books to people who like the stories in them and enjoy them than sell 5000 books to people who will never read them.

If I see writing as a business, then I must write what sells, or get a bot to write the books for me.  But I don't see it primarily as a business. I don't want to write what sells; I want to sell what I write to those who might enjoy reading it. That means targeted advertising, in order to find the people who might like such a book, and tell them that it exists and where to find it. But how? 

There are also ads for bots that will run your advertising for you. Sell more books. 

Out of curiosity I followed a couple of them up, and saw the kind of questions they asked in order to "draw up a business plan" for advertising. And the questions did not inspire confidence. They asked how many did you want to sell and how much did you want to spend. They did not ask what I was selling. 

At the beginning of this article I put "traditional publishers" in quotation marks, because while most people speak of the alternative to self-publishing as "traditional publishing", it is not really "traditional", but is rather commercial publishing. Traditional publishers, while they hoped to make a living from publishing, did not have that as their primary aim. They very often started their publishing house with the aim of making certain kinds of books available, usually the kind of books they liked to read, or books that they thought people ought to read. 

When the founders died, others took over, sometimes members of their family, or sometimes partners. Sometimes the original vision would remain, or in other cases it would become diluted as the publishing house was run by people who had different interests or a different vision. But though some of the names remain, very often the vision doesn't. If you look at the back of the title page of recently published book, you will find the publisher information, which may have the name of a "traditional" publisher, but you discover that it is a "Hatchette Company" or some other part of some other large conglomerate. If you really want a "traditional" publisher you might need to look for a small independent press, and not one that is a small part of a large conglomerate whose interests may extend into other fields than publishing. 

 The problem for those who don't see  writing primarily as a business is to find readers for the stuff they write. And that is often passed on by word of mouth -- people who liked a book telling others, recommending it to others, writing a bit about it on social media, asking for the book in libraries and bookshops, or even donating used copies.

So if you've read any of my books and liked them, please tell others, discuss them with friends, share links to them on social media and if possible write a review and post it on a blog, or a site like GoodReads.

And if you haven't read any of them, have a look at the right-hand column of this page, where they are listed, or see my author page here. 

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Notes 

[1] My long and unsuccessful career as an author began when, at the age of about 5-6 I began to write fan fiction based on my favourite stories at the time (some of which attempts I still have). I wrote short stories for school essays, and made a few attempts at writing novels, mostly unfinished. I wrote tracts, mafazine articles and news articles as a journalist, and a non-fiction book, Black Charismatic Anglicans, which was published by Unisa Press in 1990. The first novel I actually completed was Of Wheels and Witches, completed in 1999, published as an ebook in 2014. A second edition is due to appear some time.

Fantasy Adventure Stories for Kids

I've written a series of three fantasy adventure stories for kids. They are not a trilogy, and not a series, or at least they don't have a series title, though if anyone who as read them has any suggestions, I'd be open to them. 

The books feature four children who are unrelated to each other, but become friends, partly through sharing adventures together, though sometimes their friendship is strained. The stories are also historical novels, being set in the mid-1960s. The first two, Of Wheels and Witches and The Enchanted Grove, are set mainly in the southern Drakensberg of South Africa, where the apartheid system dominated the lives of people, and this is reflected in the lives of the children too. In the third book, Cross Purposes, the scene shifts, though the background is no less authoritarian.

Now the first book in the series, which went under the title Of Wheels and Witches, is out of print, but a second edition is in the press now. One of the things it needs is a cover illustration, and I was thinking of how to describe the kids for an illustrator. I started by describing them to an AI app, and after about 7-8 attempts it came up with this, which represents fairly accurately how I and some of the readers pictured the kids. 

The children are shown oldest to youngest, their ages as in the first book. 

On the left is Sipho Mdluli (12), grandson of a peasant farmer in the foothills of the Natal Drakensberg. His father has been banished to the Northern Transvaal by the apartheid government.

Next is Jeffery Davidson (11), son of a Johannesburg businessman, whose parents have sent him to stay on a farm that takes children as guests while they go gallivanting overseas. 

Then comes Janet Montgomery (10), daughter of a rich white farmer on a farm next door to the one where Jeffery is a guest. 

On the right is Catherine Kopirovsky (9), whose grandparents were refugees from Bolshevik Russia. She is an orphan, as her parents were killed in a car crash, and she stays with an aunt and her grandmother in Oxford, England, but has come to South Africa to stay with another aunt, Irene Sanderson, who runs the farm where Jeffery is a guest. 

After writing three books about them I've grown quite fond of them, and haven't abandoned them completely. Some of them appear as minor characters in other books I've been writing. So it's nice to have a picture of them, more or less as I saw them when writing the books, and I hope that the picture can be used by whichever illustrator gets to do the cover picture. 

They don't have to be shown walking. They could be running from the villain(s), who, in the first two books include the apartheid police and a witches. Or they could be riding horses, or having a picnic by a river, or exploring caves in the mountains.

Here's another of the AI app's attempts at picturing them. I don't like it quite as much as the top one, but I hope it would be enough to give the illustrator an idea.

One of the reasons for posting this is that the use of so-called AI in book publishing is quite controversial. 

Some people, it appears, use AI to write and illustrate stories, with virtually no human input at all. I've seen apps and web sites advertised that claim to be able to do this, and you can submit 10 or 20 books to publishing sites like Amazon KDP every day. 

But AI is a misnomer. It may be artificial, but it isn't intelligent. The creators of AI bots just pour millions of written texts into the machine to make word salad, and it analyses them to try to rearrange the words in a way that make sense to human readers. They don't make sense to the machine, they don't have to.

I haven't tried to do that. I think there are uses for AI in book production, but mainly in research and providing models, as these pictures could be models for an artist doing a picture to illustrate a book or book cover. It could possibly be used for abstract pictures but really it's better producing models. For text, what I might try asking an AI bot to produce might be something like a letter written be a farmer in Scotland, or a clergyman in the English Midlands (would it nick stuff from Trollope, I wonder?) and hope to have a model, though one would still need to be wary of anachronisms, like sneaking in a "snuck". 

Anyway, meet my characters. And if you'd like to read about them, see here, or here.
 
 

Robot Centenary

R.U.R. and The Insect Play by Josef Čapek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It seems appropriate to read R.U.R. on the centenary of its first publication in English, as the literary work which first introduced the word robot to the English language. R.U.R. stands for Rossum's Universal Robots, a firm that produced artificial workers to take care of the drudgery that human workers didn't like doing.

The firm is based on a remote island, from which it exports its products to many parts of the world, and business is booming when governments discover that robots make efficient soldiers too, with the advantage that they have no relatives to mourn their loss. 

The island-factory is visited by Helena Glory, who is concerned about whether the robots may be sentient beings, and therefore might possibly have, or perhaps ought to have, legal rights similar to human rights, and eventually there is a robot revolt.

As a result of the play the word "robot" became part of the English language, at first mainly in science fiction, where is spawned a plethora of stories about artificial workers. I'm not sure when it first began to be used for real-life replacements for human workers, but I suspect that one of the earliest instances was in South Africa, where coloured traffic lights replaced human policemen in controlling the traffic at intersections and so came to be called robots. The electro-mechanical robot replacements initially stood where the human traffic controller had stood, in the middle of the intersection, but later they were moved to poles at the sides or gantries overhead, especially in one-way streets. But quite recently a town in India has even made one that looks like a human traffic cop. 

And now everyone is talking about artificial text aggregators, like ChatGPT, and several of my friends have been asking them theological questions and compiling long theological essays from the answers to such questions, and I've been looking to see what they get right and what they get wrong. Though people are talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI), I don't think these programs are sentient, and they are a long way from reaching the level of the robots in R.U.R. a century ago. Basically ChatGPT is just a powerful database engine with a very large dataset, and works on the same GiGo (Garbage In, Garbage Out) principle as other database programs, with a more sophisticated reporting system.

The Insect Play, which I found even more interesting from the point of view of history of literature, seemed to be in the same category as the plays of Jean Genet or Samuel Beckett of 20-30 years later. Perhaps they were pioneers of the genre. The Insect Play reminded me of The Balcony by Jean Genet, a kind of precursor of the theatre of the absurd.


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