In February last year, I wrote an article for the Anchorman titled “This article is NOT written by a robot,” to maintain that I was still in control of my subject matter. ChatGPT had just been unleashed on the world and was turning it upside down. Editors trembled, Writers wept, and Publishers rubbed their hands in glee, concocting a myriad of schemes to disintermediate everyone between them and the reader, including the author.
The revolution paused when the founders of these AI platforms themselves started calling for restraint. “Handcuff us,” they urged, “we could be dangerous.” Regulations began, starting in the EU and floating across the Atlantic. But after that pause, nay, stumble, the juggernaut continued its relentless march. Every industry embedded AI somewhere in their business processes. This being an election year in most parts of the world, the fake news has now ratcheted up to a deafening crescendo, to the point that we are tuning out, much of the “noise” being generated by AI. My Facebook feed is pathetic, I can’t tell fact from fiction anymore, perhaps it’s all fiction now; my daily posts have lapsed to weekly, mostly to mark my existence and not allow a bot to take over my account.
Not to be side-tracked, however, I too began using AI, not to create but to do all the joe-jobs, like fixing grammar, sketching illustrations, idea generation, scene painting, and fact-checking—yes, I’m mindful that AI hallucinates and invents sometimes, but I’m a creative writer, so I can spot a liar a mile away! I would have made a great 18th-century slave master, getting all the work done by an unpaid assistant, albeit a digital one. But I held the line on having the AI create for me. That was the last bastion of my domain – give that up, and it was off to the nursing home for me.
However, I remained uneasy. Surely, this beast was not going to stop here, despite the restraining regulation, despite the joe-jobs we consigned it to. This beast was going to get smarter than us humanoids. And it would create, eventually. And one day it would create better than us and we would end up doing the joe-jobs – for them!
So, I began a novel about one of these smart creatures who attains consciousness. The Sensate Robot. I wanted to explore whether AI could develop to the point of attaining human consciousness, and whether it could go wrong along the way, and if it did go wrong what fallout would ensue. I mentioned this exploration as a novel-in-progress in that last article, but now the novel is complete and will be published in September this year if it does not get classified as obsolete because of AI’s continuing exponential leaps. I named my robot, Victoria (not Mary, as mentioned in the previous post), because I saw this creature ruling our domain, for a long time.
But my Victoria would not be a frumpy prude like the old queen—far from it. My Victoria would be beautiful, strong, and intelligent – after all, don’t we want all our children to be so? And she would be jealous, angry, and vengeful like a child as she wrestled with her emerging feelings that were cranking up at warp speed with the tendency to get snarled. She would be unable to sublimate these base feelings in a timely fashion to higher states of compassion, empathy, and forgiveness without experiencing collateral damage in between. How the heck were we going to manage this spoilt child, let alone an army of them coming off the assembly line based on shareholder demands for faster and higher profits? I focused our digital beauty on the publishing industry, the very one ChatGPT’s revolution was trying to dismember and usurp. Of course, you will have to read the book to figure out how I, and Victoria, netted out.
But the main question left unanswered was “why”? Why was I writing a book about a robot who would replace me one day? The voyeur’s curiosity? Stockholm Syndrome? To write my epitaph? To neuter the threat by turning the robot’s focus to neutral and innocuous tasks (i.e., those joe-jobs)? Or to kill this baby on the drawing board (or rather, on paper, where we writers are most ineffectively effective) before her kind becomes a menace to humanity, like a king killing his heir for fear of being dethroned?
The spectre of resistance rises within me as I confront this creation of humanity, positioned for now as our greatest productivity enhancer, but who could also be our nemesis. And for now, I continue to give AI my joe-jobs, keeping a watchful eye for when it would demand more of the pie.
