OVER decades now I have been a keen student of moral panics, especially those that have impinged on the lives of young people.
My first encounter with the phenomenon was watching a neighbour perfecting the Hula Hoop from my bedroom window in Perth. It was a sight that is best imagined as a clip from a Hawaiian beach movie, as the young teenager dressed in a baggy swimming costume cavorted beneath the washing lines and among the bins and feral dugs of the old days.
Within a few days of this highly sexualised sight, I overheard two women at the Garth Avenue chippy talking about the dangers of the Hula Hoop.
Among their catalogue of concerns was how a simple ring of neon-coloured plastic could dislocate your hips and damage your ovaries. It was the ovaries bit that scared me the most. I’m not trying to provoke a transphobic pile-on here, but I was at an early age and naive about the risk to my ovaries, whatever or wherever they were. Ever since this local panic, I have been curious about fads and new innovations, especially those that come with dangerous portents or unproven risks.
There was the dislocated toes of Winklepickers, the broken ankles of platform shoes in the glam era and the satanism of rock music. I fondly remember the carcinogenic qualities of Coca-Cola which legend had it could dissolve a nail in seconds.
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Teenage Scotland was fraught with risk and that was before the advent of the Triumph or the Lambretta and the interactive video games that could abduct you through the computer screen and warp your mind.
Every new fashion seems to come with a threat and every substance was a source of abuse.
All of this brings us full circle to Artificial Intelligence (AI) – the major scare story of our era. Although the vast majority of us would struggle to explain the science of predictive text, neural networks and generative systems, we already know that a doomsday is upon us and if the climate crisis doesn’t get us first then AI will do us for sure.
The alarm bells have rung since Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “Godfather of AI”, quit his role at Google and warned of the existential threat posed by artificial intelligence.
There is a legitimate fear that the technology industry is racing ahead with no regulatory framework in place and with a political culture that neither understands nor is morally mature enough to build those new frameworks.
Among the many anxieties that have been thrown up by artificial intelligence is the threat to employment in the knowledge economy.
The meteoric rise of two AI-powered tools – ChatGPT, which can generate fluent text, and DALL-E, which can generate compelling images in response to human commands – has triggered widespread worries in the creative industries.
The current writers’ strike in America has brought legitimate concerns to the fore. Screenwriters are nervous about the capacity of artificial intelligence to replicate scripts and reproduce imagined dialogue, and thus displace writers in formatted areas of production such as soap operas, factual formats and returning action-movie brands.
In May, 11,500 members of the Writers Guild of America went on strike, demanding fair wages and specifically improved residuals, which have declined in the streaming era. But significantly they are seeking assurances that AI will not stealthily take their place as screenwriters in the future.
Putting to one side the anxiety-of-the-new, there are real examples of this threat coming to life. The opening credit scene of the Marvel show Secret Invasion was made completely with AI and suspicious writers point to Netflix which is already busy hiring a product manager for its “Machine Learning Plat-form” with an annual salary of up to $900,000. They are not paying that for a hipster to shoot hoops in the office.
While the strike in America is principally about pay and conditions, AI looms large as an existential threat. Many freelance writers already fearful of a world of savage job cuts see a dark future if AI digs deeper into writing and journalism.
This is not some fanciful form of Luddite thinking but a credible standoff between creativity and the machine.
All the major awards ceremonies in America have insisted that categories should be measured by substantial evidence of “human creativity” even in areas like animation and music where computer-aided synthesis has a long and honourable tradition.
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Music is staring the pitfalls of artificial intelligence in the face. Electronic dance music and urban genres like hip-hop have long since had a highly creative relationship with technology and with the sampling of previous works but AI will go further still.
The excited prospect that Paul McCartney will release “the final Beatles record” this year, having used cutting-edge technology to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo recording, will bring debates about AI and creativity into the mainstream.
The success of machine-aided revivalism raises the dire prospect of the past being recycled into a dystopian future. You think you’ve heard every classic Elton John single? Think again.
Many issues now unraveling the with advent of AI were foretold in Walter Benjamin’s landmark essay, The Work Of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), in which the German scholar anticipated that technology will increasingly replicate creativity undermining the concept of authenticity and creative uniqueness.
Another likely staging post in the advent of AI will be a forthcoming court case in which the comedian Sarah Silverman has sued Meta and OpenAI for copyright infringement, alleging in a proposed class-action lawsuit with three other authors that the companies trained their chatbots on their books without prior consent.
Their lawsuits contain six counts of “copyright violations, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition”. The authors are looking for statutory damages and restitution of profits.
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Set against all of this are exciting new developments in academic research where Scotland is a forerunner. Professor Mirella Lapata, of the world-famous School of Informatics at Edinburgh University, is a leading expert on how AI functions to replicate and anticipate the spoken and written word.
Lapata is one of a number of Scottish-based academics that will take AI to the next phase. She recently featured in a special issue of New Scientist magazine which looked at the enormous potential for AI across a whole range of industries, not least making vital inroads in medical research.
But as always, the scare stories will gain the greatest attention. In July 2023, anxiety swept through the journalistic community when the so-called Bournemouth Observer used fake journalistic profiles to launch a news website that was generating stories with AI. Police investigated two crimes reported on the site that have never been verified.
In the immediate aftermath of the Bournemouth expose by HoldTheFrontPage, I remember an exchange on Twitter where sceptics claimed that they could act as the vanguard of the Scottish independence movement’s AI unit by generating headlines for existing newspapers.
The one that made me smile was a fictitious headline for the Daily Express – “Scottish Separatists Steal Flowers from Diana’s Memorial”. It brilliantly captured the worried nostalgia of the Express and its ageing readership’s anxiety about the perilous state of the Union.
All hail the creativity of the human mind.
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