What I enjoyed the most about working at the Evening Standard, back in 2015, was that it felt like working in 1985. I was on the Londoner’s Diary, the paper’s diary column, and our job was simple. Every day, we had two pages to fill; once we’d filled them and got them through the subs, we could go home. Our online presence was minimal and there was no expectation for us to do anything but write the column every day. It was heavenly.
Those happy years now feel like they belong in a different lifetime, especially as the Standard has just relaunched as a weekly mag. Its first cover was revealed last week, and was, for some reason, an AI mock-up of Keir Starmer sitting at a desk. Well, there was a reason, sort of. They did interview the prime minister about AI.
Still, the cover felt gaudy and gauche, and Starmer’s face just didn’t look like his own. Perhaps, most importantly, it was infuriating. Designing the cover of a publication usually involves paying an illustrator or a photographer, as well as someone on the picture desk. Instead, the Standard had decided to go cheap, and go for a gimmick no one had asked for.
That’s the thing about AI, isn’t it? I just don’t think any of us had been clamouring for fake pictures that look tasteless. We didn’t want charlatans using the tool to “write” the articles and books they couldn’t write themselves. No-one had been fighting for the right to speak to an “AI assistant” instead of a real person when trying to deal with a customer service complaint.
We didn’t ask for any of it and yet here it is, all this slop being force-fed to us like we’re geese about to be turned into foie gras. This is the crux of the problem: these people are making the world a worse place and they didn’t bother to ask us what we thought first. These are things happening to us, and we can either choose to accept them or we can, I guess, just go offline and pretend none of it is happening.
The latter can sometimes feel tempting but it just isn’t realistic. So much of our lives are spent online now; it would be madness to try to somehow turn back the clock. Perhaps, more importantly, I just don’t believe that’s what most of us want to do. When the internet was good, it was really great.
I wrote about it at length in my most recent book, Escape, but the gist of it is: I wouldn’t have the social life and the career I have today without blogs and social media. I have met most of my friends and former romantic partners online, and got most of my writing gigs directly or indirectly through Twitter and other platforms. My example is almost certainly an extreme one, but I believe that many, many people out there managed to find joy, success and solace on the internet.
Will they still manage to do so once “online”, as a place, becomes less and less human? Because that is what is happening right now. WordFreq, a neat little project that used to track word frequency online, announced recently that it would have to stop its analysis for good at 2021. After that, it became impossible to tell what was being posted by people and what was generated by machines. Crucially, so much is now generated by machines that you just can’t tell what real, living people are actually talking about, and how they’re talking about it. How miserable is that? And what’s coming next?
It’s a question worth asking but one that makes me feel like the protagonist in a horror movie. I’m in the haunted house and I know that some monster has already killed several of my friends but I just have no idea what it will do next. Soon, there may be a point where we won’t be able to trust any image on the internet, or any scrap of text. Already, it is risky to buy Amazon books from unknown writers as it is possible they were written by AI then printed out. What next? What next?
This lack of knowledge and agency is maddening, precisely because knowledge and agency are what the internet gave us, back when it was good. Maybe this isn’t a horror movie, then, but a twisted fairytale.
We got everything we asked for, just for a little while, and are now being tortured with the same tools we’d once yearned for.
I would love it if we got a happy ending, but I’m not holding my breath.
