Non-fiction

‘It must be compared with the discovery of fire or the advent of language in human affairs’

Audience, these are not the words of Elon Musk or Sam Altman espousing the seismic arrival of AI, but a 1927 quote from David Sarnoff, head of RCA, announcing the imminent arrival of radio as a means of mass communication. Like any beauty pageant queen worth their salt, Sarnoff went as far as to suggest that radio would be our great saviour in delivering world peace.

Fast forward a hundred years and it is startlingly clear that radio has not only NOT brought about world peace, but has in some ways been resigned to the lowest league of popular media due to the advent of TV and the ubiquitous nature of the internet. And yet 9/10 britons will have listened to the radio in the last week and on a personal note, Gardener’s Question Time on radio 4 remains one of the most sacral rituals of my dull, middle-aged life.

What then of the Author and AI? Will the looming spectre of artificial general intelligence put paid to the notion of a singular mind producing a work of fiction? Or will the author go the way of the radio broadcaster; losing some prestige and immediacy yes , but remaining a key fixture in the lives of the culturally-minded? I offer 3 arguments to you in support of the latter position.

Firstly, authors are, at heart, narcissistic. Perhaps that is the narcissist in me, a would-be author, speaking, but I would put you in mind of a very modern phenomenon; the youtuber who follows the writing formula of a well-known literary figure. You may know the type, scratchy tattoos, beret-wearing, living in a Parisian loft and uploading videos with titles such as, ‘I followed Ernest Hemmingways’ writing routine for 30 days.’ What follows is never the production of high literature, but a preening video espousing the benefits of ‘writing drunk and editing sober’ of ‘not carrying a notebook’ of ‘waking up at 2 am to write for exactly 4 hours and 23 minutes’ of writing before eating, of only writing after eating etc. etc. The work is not the important part here; rather it is the notion that in becoming an author, someone ascends to the heights of a being worth copying. Can we honestly say that the literary circles of which we like to consider ourselves members would aspire to ‘write like a robot’? I think not.

Secondly, AI has shown little evidence that it will hold a candle to the authors that we know and love. A recent New Yorker collaboration between Sheila Heti and a chatbot opens with the odd line ‘My name is Alice and I was born from an egg that fell out of mommy’s butt.’ Camus’s L’Etranger this is not. In interview, Heti herself suggests that she had to ‘lead’ the chatbot to generate worthy writing, rather than be lead by it. It echoes Jay Caspian Kang’s sentiment that experiencing AI writing fiction is ‘like watching a very precocious child perform a series of parlor tricks.’ Perhaps this is because AI operates best when it perfects and automates systems, streamlining the human experience. And this is rarely what we want from the work of an author. We relish the metaphorical shaping of a narrative precisely because it shows endeavour rising above the limitations of standard human thought.

Finally, it is my belief that AI will not signal the death of the author simply because we as readers will not allow it to. Just in time for Christmas, I have developed a parlor game that I am sure my small children will love, it’s called ‘ChatGPT or Tolstoy’ and we can give it a whirl now.

‘He got up to open the window; as he pushed out the shutters, the moon, which seemed to have been on the watch, flooded the room with light. The night was clear and calm, the air transparent; in front of the window was a tall clipped hedge, on oneside black, on the other silvered, at the bottom a rank growth of grass and leaves glittered with diamond drops. Further off, beyond the hedge, a roof shone with dew; to the right spread the boughs of a large tree with satiny white bark that reflected the full moon riding high in the clear and almost starless spring sky.’

So, Tolstoy or chatGPT? Man or machine? Ultimately I don’t think it matters. If I tell you this paragraph was generated by AI, I’d wager your immediate response to be one of intrigue perhaps, but tinged with dismay; if I tell you it is Tolstoy, you’ll rest easy in the knowledge that truly great writing remains the preserve of the fatally flawed but endlessly imaginative human mind. Moreso than progeny or virtuosity, the reader, like most humans, wants to know, not just feel, that they are reading the words and sharing the lived experience of another mortal soul.

Torches (Christmas 22)

In 1899, a British inventor obtained a patent for a device that, powered by D batteries laid end-to-end, would cast a beam of reflected light directly in front of the user. In America, the device became known as a flashlight, as the flashes of light would be intermittent, the user periodically stopping to rest the batteries.

* 

When I was a child, I loved our attic.

It had an odd, musty but not altogether unpleasant smell and access required a collapsible metal ladder to come down from a hatch in the bathroom roof like the mouth of a UFO. I never considered the fact that the items it held actually belonged to my parents; to me, they were otherworldly treasures; unused Christmas lights, mismatched skis, a scarlet-red gatefold LP of Elvis’ greatest hits.

Like most memories, mine of the attic is an amalgam of many separate visits, untrustworthy. The 4-year-old version of me is an unreliable narrator. I cannot, for instance, remember how the attic was lit. It may have been fully wired, a bare bulb in the centre of the room controlled by a switch on the wall. Or perhaps the switch was a drawstring. Perhaps the bulb had a shade. Perhaps it required a torch to light each step over partially floored insulation. Regardless, the one detail I can be sure of is that my dad would have had to have gone up the ladder first. Someone to lead into the dark.

I idolised my dad in the way that many children do.

When he wasn’t working, he was mixing cement, laying parquet flooring, or playing rugby with tape wrapped around his head, coming off the pitch smelling of mud and wintergreen. One year he grew out a mullet and a ponytail at the same time. He climbed our roof to replace slate tiles that had blown off during storms. He was exciting, cavalier, an eternal optimist and represented everything that seemed wonderful and possible about adult life. So, standing behind him in the attic, following the torchlight into its dark recesses, I felt safe. There was no part of me considered what lay outside of the torch’s dull beam for him; grief or responsibility or worry or fear.

I am now the same age he was then, and my own children have all fallen in behind me when facing the excitement and darkness of an attic, a forest path at night, a campsite, the kitchen during a power cut.

My dad was a science teacher and my lack of interest in the natural world must have been a disappointment. I was much more interested in the books my mum had saved from her English degree - Oscar Wilde, Seamus Heaney, W.B. Yeats. And now, after following that line of study for so many years, I find it hard to read the gospels, and the nativity story as anything other than literary texts. They are obviously selective in their retelling of the nativity, taking the opportunity to solidify Jesus’ origin in Jewish prophecy. And so, from start to finish, their cast of players (a teenage mother, her young husband, nomadic fieldworkers, educated wisemen, a despotic ruler,) show an entirely human inability to see beyond their present. They stumble through a story in which they are unaware that they will become characters in the greatest story in the world’s shared imagination. At every turn, some form of divine illumination is required to move the story forward, a dream, a vision, an angelic visitation, the light of a roving star. They are like children maybe, standing behind a parent, looking into the dark and the unknown.

One of my favourite artistic interpretations of the nativity is Caravaggio’s Adoration of the Shepherds. In his depiction of a scene that we have come to see as synonymous with the birth of Jesus, the shepherds are lean, bare-headed workers with unwashed hands, come straight from the fields they have been tending. In the artist’s beautiful, dramatic use of light and shade, they have a humanity that is so often missing in the characters of this story. To me, their faces are not adoring in as much as they are expectant, perplexed, hopeful. Caravaggio is my favourite artist because his work, so divinely inspired, was created in brief flashes of genius in a life otherwise marred by violence and exile.

During those early years of my childhood, our summer holidays included visits to Europe’s most famous art galleries, often spending hours looking at paintings such as this in The Tate Modern, the Prado, the Guggenheim, the Louvre. Mum and Dad weren’t particularly wealthy, snobbish or culturally superior. They were intelligent people, but not artists in any traditional sense of the word. We stayed on Eurocamp sites and were as likely to visit a waterpark the following day. However, this insistence that we took time to soak in important culture stayed with us and has become something that I invite my own children into. I am sure they would much rather be in McDonald’s than be made to consider works of art such as this one, as they were forced to do this half-term. But my hope is that someday, when the protection and safety of childhood have passed, when they have come to know what lies in the darkness, they will read the following words from the second chapter of the gospel of Luke and be, like Caravaggio’s shepherds expectant, perplexed and hopeful:

‘And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.’

Gabriel (Christmas 21)

They said to her, “There is no one among your relatives who has that name.”
—Luke 1v61

N.B.

My maternal great-grandfather was a semi-professional singer. He died many years before I was born, but I own one surviving recording of his voice.[1] I also know that he regularly performed in Handel’s Messiah at Christmas. The 3rd section of the Messiah contains words borrowed directly from 1 Corinthians 15, foretelling the return of Jesus and the dead being raised from their graves. Although it is not expressly mentioned in the bible, ancient manuscripts, medieval literature and African American spirituals identify the angel Gabriel as the trumpeter who announces this raising of the dead.

1.

 ‘What about Gabriel?’ she said without looking up from the menu.

 We were in a restaurant near the hospital, stealing an extra hour from work after having been for your twenty-week scan. The sonographer had placed a strip of thin tissue paper at the base of your mum’s belly, then routinely applied the ultrasound gel and moved the probe around until we could see you on the screen, in 2d, in black and white. You would barely stop moving, like a freshly caught fish in a bucket, but the nurse had seen enough to tell us you were going to be a boy.

So, there we were, going back through a list of names as we waited to order food, auditioning them again with your little likeness fresh in our minds. My obscure suggestions had mostly been vetoed and we had reached an impasse before your mum suggested Gabriel.

‘Like the angel?’ I replied, excited. ‘Ha. Yeah, that could work. Gabe for short obviously. Sounds like a writer’s name.’

For the next hour we tried it on for size, writing it out with your surname, comparing the syllable count to those of your brother and sister, imagining all the ways in which someone might use it. To break your heart, for instance, son. We imagined someone you would come to love unconditionally typing it, deleting it, then retyping it into a phone screen, trying to find a way to reach the end of a relationship. Or someone you would never meet checking the spelling as they dragged it from a database into a letter to offer you a place at university or a mortgage or an appointment to see a specialist. And as we talked about it, I thought about how this is what we were giving you - seven letters and three syllables that would eventually hold in them a little library of all your hurts and hopes: all your failures and all your triumphs.

2.

You were born at home.

Around 5am your mum went into labour and I remember the house being completely still. Outside it had started to snow, big, lush white flakes that melted as soon as they hit the ground. After shipping your brother and sister off to their granny’s house, I busied myself with tasks that seemed of paramount importance; adjusting the thermostat, checking the repaired tear in the birthing pool, queueing songs on a playlist.

And then I didn’t really speak after that. The midwives arrived and my one job was to hold your mum up during contractions. No-one needed to hear from me. I watched and waited. It was long. And then, like that, you were in my arms, squelchy and purple and squeaking. We posted a picture on Instagram, told the world who you were; wrote your name on a tablet.

3.

Christmas 1940. A small boy lies on his back in the bath and sloshes up and down, letting the still water turn into a tide, swelling up and over his head, his hair floating on the surface. As the water passes below his ears again, he hears singing from the next room; his father, practicing for a recital that evening. Looping a black bowtie around his neck, your great-great-grandfather practices a bass air from the Messiah, sings of how -

 ‘the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised, incorruptible.’

 His son thinks he is making up the last word. He quietly joins in, singing

‘the dead shall be raised, dum-de-dum-de-dum.’

4.

In my parents’ house, in the bedroom that used to be mine, amongst the trophies and totems and detritus of teenage life, there is a small vinyl record sitting on a bookshelf. It is a recording of a different piece of music by the same man, a Percy French tune that can barely be heard beneath the scratch and dust from years of damage. Tonight I sat and played it to you, transferred to MP3 on my phone, the distance of a hundred years bridged as you held it to your ear. As his rich baritone forced its way from the speaker, I watched you start to smile, sheepishly, repeat the words ‘great, great, grand, father’ to yourself. Whisper ‘I like it.’

My son. My little trumpeter. My bringer of good news.