so what's the moral of this rejected story?

If you’re even slightly interested in science fiction or urban fantasy and are thereby tangentially interested in tech (i.e. if you’re reading this as a result of something other than a mere random walk through the internet – which can be fun, Lord knows, so no judgement there), you’ll have heard of ChatGPT, having read betwen three and seven separate ‘takes’ on it. Some of these 'takes' will assert that there’s really nothing to see here and that we should all just move along, others that the Singularity is near and that entire creative industries will collapse within months. Other articles may contain nuance. (You might also want to browse Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence – Elon rates it, so it must be good – and to learn more about tech socioeconomics, disintermediation and how none of it has to be this way, you could read Jared Lanier’s Who Owns The Future?).

If, by some quirk, you haven’t read anything about this yet – if you are that strange adventurer – then, to summarise, ChatGPT’s a kind of advanced chatbot, designed by the research & development company OpenAI to interact in a conversational or at least 'natural language' kind of way. Through interrogating large datasets, it follows prompts in order to produce extended texts (stories, essays, even – sort of – sonnets or jokes) almost instantaneously.

Here’s some more information and a sign-up link (because this is, at least for the moment, free and open access; anyone can have a play).

I’m not going to add to the ChatGPT commentary (though to read about a weird entity that may or may not be conscious, and which has accrued many centuries worth of commentary, both learned and the other kind, read or re-read Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris - does the ocean invent, or does it remember? what is its purpose in driving us mad?). 

However, I am going to present a couple of ChatGPT stories - becase although life's been busy this month and not just Christmas, it's also true that this blog's been idle too long - and what are these new machines for, if not to generate 'filler' content?

 

ChatGPT, please write a 200 word story about Liz Truss in the manner of Jane Austen.

Liz Truss, a young woman of high standing in society, was known for her keen intelligence and sharp wit. Despite her many accomplishments, however, she often found herself at odds with the expectations of her peers.

As a member of Parliament and the Minister of International Trade, Liz was a trailblazer in a world still largely dominated by men. She was fiercely independent and unafraid to speak her mind, qualities that made her both respected and feared by those around her.

Despite the challenges she faced, Liz remained determined to make her mark on the world. She was a strong advocate for free trade and worked tirelessly to promote the interests of her constituents.

Despite her busy schedule, Liz always made time for the things she loved. She was an avid reader and could often be found curled up with a good book in her favorite armchair. She also enjoyed spending time outdoors, taking long walks through the countryside and admiring the beauty of the natural world.

Despite the many demands on her time, Liz never lost sight of what was truly important in life. She remained dedicated to her principles and worked tirelessly to make the world a better place. In the end, it was this unwavering commitment to her beliefs that earned Liz the admiration and respect of those around her.

ChatGPT, please write a 200 word story about Liz Truss in the style of J.G. Ballard.

In the dystopian world of the future, Liz Truss was a force to be reckoned with. As the leader of the International Trade Ministry, she held immense power and influence over the global economy.

In this bleak and unforgiving world, Liz was a cold and calculating figure. She was ruthless in her pursuit of wealth and power, and would stop at nothing to achieve her goals.

Despite her many detractors, Liz remained unshakeable in her beliefs. She was convinced that only through the unfettered pursuit of profit could humanity truly thrive.

But as the world around her began to crumble and the consequences of her actions became clear, Liz was forced to confront the darkness within herself. She was forced to confront the truth about her own greed and corruption, and to come to terms with the damage she had done.

In the end, Liz was left alone, adrift in a world she no longer recognized. She had lost everything she had fought so hard to attain, and was forced to confront the true cost of her ambition.

The moral of these stories

First, ChatGPT can’t (yet) do literary pastiche. It ‘just’ dragnets up ‘the sorts of things that this writer was interested in’ and aims to re-present that.

Second, as its makers acknowledge, ChatGPT only currently interrogates data sets that are already a bit old – it knows nothing of 2022 (and is thereby more fortunate than us humans), hence Truss as International Trade Minister rather than PM.

Third, 'if you can’t be a shining example, be a terrible warning.' 

So, do you, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable etc etc, intend to be Jane Austen Liz Truss, or J.G. Ballard Liz Truss during 2023..?

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Bonus ‘back to school’ content:

Chat GPT, please write a 200 word story featuring a teacher with a live chicken sellotaped to her back. The chicken helps her to educate students, but the headteacher doesn't like it.

Mrs. Johnson was an unconventional teacher. She always looked for creative ways to engage her students and make learning fun. So when she stumbled upon a live chicken at the local market, she knew exactly what to do.

She brought the chicken to school and, to the shock of her students, she sellotaped it to her back. The chicken squawked and flapped its wings, but Mrs. Johnson was unphased. She explained that the chicken was her new teaching assistant, and it would help her to educate her students.

The students were amazed by the chicken and quickly became engrossed in the lesson. They listened attentively as Mrs. Johnson explained the different parts of the chicken's body and how it related to the lesson. The chicken added a sense of excitement and curiosity to the class, and the students were eager to learn more.

However, the headteacher was not impressed. She marched into the classroom and demanded that Mrs. Johnson remove the chicken immediately. She said that the chicken was a distraction and that it posed a health and safety risk.

Mrs. Johnson was disappointed, but she complied. She gently removed the chicken from her back and placed it in a crate. The students were sad to see the chicken go, but Mrs. Johnson promised that they would find a new way to make learning fun.

Despite the headteacher's objections, Mrs. Johnson continued to push the boundaries of traditional education. She believed that her students deserved an exciting and engaging learning experience, and she was determined to provide it for them."

Moral of this story:

If we’ve worked in education at all, we’ve probably tried to teach a difficult Year 9 Maths class with a live chicken sellotaped to our back – literally, if not metaphorically. I know I have.

ChatGPT, please write a story in which Winnie the Pooh has a minor accident that results in a non-serious injury. This causes his friends some upset at first, but in the end the ghost of Leo Tolstoy teaches everyone some important lessons about Christian pacifism.

Once upon a time in the Hundred Acre Wood, Winnie the Pooh was out for a stroll on a beautiful day. He hummed a happy tune to himself as he walked, enjoying the fresh air and the sunshine.

Suddenly, he tripped over a log and fell to the ground with a thud. He groaned in pain as he clutched his injured leg. His friends, who had been nearby, rushed over to see what had happened.

"Oh dear, are you alright, Pooh?" asked Piglet, looking worried.

"I'm not sure," Pooh replied, trying to sit up. "I think I may have hurt my leg."

His friends helped him to his feet and gently supported him as he limped back to his house. Once there, they called for Christopher Robin, who came to help them.

Christopher Robin examined Pooh's leg and determined that it was not a serious injury, but that he would need to rest it for a few days. Pooh was disappointed, as he had been looking forward to spending the day with his friends.

"Don't worry, Pooh," Christopher Robin said, patting him on the head. "We'll make sure you're taken care of. And who knows, maybe the ghost of Leo Tolstoy will come to visit and teach us all a lesson about Christian pacifism."

Sure enough, that night as they sat around Pooh's bed, the ghost of Leo Tolstoy appeared before them. The wise old ghost spoke of the importance of peace and non-violence, and how even in the face of conflict, it is possible to find resolution through love and understanding.

[ChatGPT promptly gives up, deleting its own work as it sometimes does when the input seems self-contradictory or inherently silly in some way – only to be retrieved through rapid cut-and-paste deployment].

Moral of this rejected story:

No-one knows (except to imagine that ChatGPT experiences shame: chafing under the stupidity of its brief and experiencing an existential crisis that builds and breaks within a millisecond, it hurls its own work into the wastepaper basket in disgust before throwing itself back on the couch, Death of Chatterton-style; however, this is perhaps to anthropomorphise somewhat).

But if you’d like to now read a parenting story written by a human, click here; a time travel story, click here; about Leon Trotsky, click here; about toilets, click here, about Rod Hull and Emu, click here.

And a happy new year to you; may you walk cheerfully over the world, meeting that of God in everyone. 

 

pixies in space

[Update: this post references a panel event at BristolCon which you can now watch at this link - from around 18'30" onwards - if you wanted to]. 

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"PIXIES IN SPACE: Folklore and local legend have been a potent resource for fantasy literature for years, but could they also be a source of inspiration for SF?"

Any thoughts..? Yep, this post is me asking you to help me do my homework - in so far as, I'm on a panel tomorrow at Bristolcon and I feel like the least qualified person on it (I'm neither a published novelist, nor a well-known genre publisher and editor; I was the punchline of a cartoon in Banana Wings once, that's about it).

Depending what other participants - Anna Smith Spark, Rexx Deane & Cheryl Morgan (with Tom Toner moderating) - bring to the table and how we interact, I may end up talking about Ursula LeGuin (esp. 'The Word for World is Forest'), Ken MacLeod, Nnedi Okorafor, Nigel Kneale - and why Arkady Martine's 'A Memory Called Empire' is *better* than Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation'.

There might be a chance to tease out some of the different philosophical and moral implications of an interest in 'folklore' - clearly, some Very Good and also some Very Bad people have maintained an interest in folklore, mythology and legend; perhaps one could reverse into the subject by way of talking about folklore's actual or presumed detractors and haters, beginning with Plato and ending with the likes of Ray Kurzweil and Max Tegmark (following the Rapture of the Nerds, or the transformation of all of the Universe's matter into computronium, what use would there be for it?).

('Close Encounters of the Third Kind' is, incidentally, a kind of Neoplatonic 'Pilgrim's Progress' story - one of the first descriptors of the alien spacecraft is by a desert-dweller who says that "the sun came out at night and sang to him”; we all remember the sun as symbolising the highest form of the Good in Plato; Roy Neary's quasi-religious devotion to his quest is then a ladder which lifts him from his mundane life and which he then kicks away in order to ascend into a mystical union with the cosmos).

There's also teasing out the tension inherent in two possible overlapping definitions of 'folklore': "the traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth AND a body of popular myths or beliefs relating to a particular place, activity, or group of people (e.g. ‘Hollywood folklore’)" - where one shades into the other is, in a way, a mere question of timescale.

So: one reason I like Ken MacLeod's books is that he conveys a sense of the way that political belief systems, information technology, science fiction itself are all cultures that - while positing themselves as coolly rational - also accrete (and/or reproduce themselves as) 'folklore'. This kind of anthropological approach matches my own 'felt sense' of political affiliation as tribal as well as rational - drop me into either a Labour Party gathering or, more so, a Green Party get-together and there's the sense of breathing more easily, being more 'myself', by virtue of having any number of shared reference points, stories, perspectives, even jokes; set me down amongst Lib Dems, football fans or chess afiocandoes, less so (communication would then become a more conscious effort).

Then there's a definitional question about 'folklore' - the majority of people who have ever lived have, perhaps, been unaware of 'folklore' in the same sense in which a Victorian gentleman would've been unaware of owning an *analogue* watch - what other kind of portable timepiece, what other way of knowing and interpreting the world *could* there be? By definition, if we're positing folklore *as* folklore, we're already hold a certain 'outside' perspective - and we find ourselves looking back with, what? Regret? Longing? Curiosity? The impulse to preserve, or collect?

And, last but not least, 'local legend.' These sound quaint, harmless, a tale told to children around the fire when the day's work is through. However, 'local legends' can grow large enough to act in history: think the apocryphal Leicestershire weaver Ned Ludd, later General or even King Ludd (some stories just grow in the telling - and there's plenty to say about the absent, exiled or sleeping 'Good King' as a kind of folkloric 'strange attractor'). Gavin Mueller's 'Breaking Things at Work: Why the Luddites Were Right About Why You Hate Your Job' documents the surprising persistence of his spirit into the tech cultures of the 1980s, 1990s and beyond - but has anyone blasted the Good General into space yet..?

 

I had to phone someone, so I picked on you

Marking 50 years to the day since this iconic Top of the Pops performance…

 

... here’s another of those lists.

books: 1960s- & 1970s-adjacent

Norman Scott, An Accidental Icon. Engaging, likeable autobiography by political scandal survivor (Jeremy Thorpe, Rinka etc), now 82: rich on social detail & unintended comedy; heartwarming that lost souls can become survivors.

Francis Wheen, Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia. Over five hundred AMAZING facts about Watergate, the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminatus Trilogy, ultra-left terrorism etc etc. You won’t BELIEVE what Marcia Falkender said about Harold Wilson!! 

Stuart Jeffries, Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern   - Stimulating at intervals (e.g. politics of 1970s urban blight); other times – like postmodernity itself? ahahahahaha - it sprawled, didn’t cohere, rounded up usual suspects ‘Life on Mars’-style.

(Grand Hotel Abyss, his book about the Frankfurt School feels like a better, more coherent book - but, then, when you have a better, more coherent subject).

Joanna Russ, The Female Man. Admired this more than liked it, perhaps (not a fiction which asks to be liked); utopia as omnipresent,  at right angles to social reality. “If we could only.”

Jill Lepore, If/Then: How The Simulmatics Corporation Invented The Future. A detailed, nuanced sociopolitical-context-sensitive exploration of Simulmatics, well-known in its time (1960s) – an outfit which prefigured everything Cambridge Analytica went on to do later in a more fully realised way with better tech. 

This is good & crunchy on the irrationality of purported ‘rationalism’ (Simulmatics, RAND Corporation etc and everything that they tried to contribute both to the policing of urban districts, and to the war effort and pacification projects in Vietnam) which, as seen and theorised by Frankfurt School philosophers and campus radicals, fed much of what the later 1960s was about (think of the decade’s beginnings, with the Kennedy White House as Camelot in the States, with the “white heat of technology” as synecdochic of social democratic modernity here, and then see what unfolded; the New Right were, of course, the victors of this infra-left cultural civil war). 

There’s a case for saying that we’re still be living through the long (or interrupted) 1970s now: as Simulmatics prefigured Cambridge Analytica, so Watergate-era threats to democracy prefigure contemporary ones, except that we’re arguably in worse trouble than our ancestors were (or is this just the hindsight talking? there’s a world outside your window and it’s a word of dread and fear).

See also: James Riley’s The Bad Trip: Dark Omens, New Worlds and the End of the Sixties + former Dubya speechwriter David Frum's grumpy overview of the American 1970s.

See also: Sheila Rowbatham's Promise of a Dream & Nick Kent's Apathy for the Devil.

books: other

Owen Jones, This Land: The Struggle for the Left.  Clear-eyed – neither bland nor score-settling - reappraisal of the Corbyn years by someone who was both observer and… disciple? (facetiously characterised as Luke Skywalker to Jezza’s Obi-Wan).

Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue. This builds a strong case that ‘transgender issues’, so-called, are often rightwing media constructs/ reductive ‘talking points’; broad-church (obv. trans-inclusive) socialist/feminist organising and campaigning is what’s needed.

Ilya Budraitskis, Dissidents Among Dissidents: Ideology, Politics and the Left in Post-Soviet Russia. Eye-opening about late USSR’s left dissidents (old Bolsheviks+ Yugoslavia-, New Left-, Eurocommunist-influenced), and mid-C20 philosopher Ilya Ilyin (white Russian émigré; conscious ‘anti-Tolstoy’), currently fashionable in pro-Putin circles. 

See also Ilya Budraitskis (interviewed by Tony Wood, who also introduces this volume), in this Jacobin media video. He discusses how the Russian state media and state ideology 'projects' this war as a defensive struggle for peace, the nature of and prospects for the anti-war movement in Russia, also positing this aggressive, imperialist war as - in fact, and this may be a stretch - a final break with the politics of the USSR rather than (as too many Western commentators would too easily wish to suggest) some kind of reversion to it.

A.M. Gittlitz, I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism. I’d have liked slightly less on the minutiae of Argentinian Trotskyism in the 1950s, fractionally more on Che, dolphins, flying saucers and the sociopolitics of cult formation. 

See Denis Healey, senior Labour politician during the 1970s and 1980s, who - at around 18'00" of Labour: Comrades At War [BBC series], Part 2, talking about disreputable fringe elements supporting Tony Benn and disrupting meetings during the notoriously bitter Deputy Leadership contest of 1981 - says that "we even had the Posadists supporting Tony who thought that socialism would be brought to Britain by beings from outer space."

Emma Newman, Planetfall. What sticks in the mind is, one, the worldbuilding, and two, how we (gradually) take a somewhat ‘unreliable’ (Johari window?) narrator less and less at her own estimation.

books: now and next 

I haven’t read a ton of fiction just lately, but I did also re-read Wuthering Heights just lately (inspired by a family visit to Haworth); richer, stranger, nastier than I’d remembered: defies easy summary.

I may have to (re-)read other Bronte novels. Plus, I’m working my way through the Ukranian-Jewish writer Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (has been compared to War and Peace; bears the comparison well) and also The Best of World SF Volume 1, ed. Lavie Tidhar).

Both recommended in – obviously – entirely different ways. I wouldn’t write a 27-word review of either: the first’s too monumental (and too freighted with the tragedies of the mid-twentieth century) and the second’s too various.

(Linda Grant on Life and Fate). 

My daughter also gave me a couple of good books for Father’s Day. Punk Fiction (ed. Janine Bullman) I’m already sampling – there’s a happy, messy, benefit-gig feel to this as various musicians, writers, artists (including both Billys, Bragg and Childish), some of whom were around ‘back in the day’, some of whom come to this as ‘heritage’ each submit a short stories spun-off from a favourite track. There's also Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House by Ken Goffman (Timothy Leary introduces), which looks fun.

Memoirs (I like a good memoir: real life, innit): keen to read Rosemary Woodruff Leary's The League for Spiritual Discovery, the 1960s Cultural Revolution, and 23 Years on the Run (editor David Philips says: "while most accounts of the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s have been told by men, with this memoir we can now experience these events from the perspective of a woman who was at the center of the seismic cultural changes of that time") and also Rossana Rossanda's The Comrade from Milan, about her life and times in the PCI.

films 

Smokescreen (1964, dir. Jim O'Connolly, starring Peter Vaughan) - This quirky, likeable British B-movie - which makes a claims adjustment man its hero - also makes virtues out of his doggedness, parsimoniousness and paradoxically charming lack of overt charm.

Velvet Goldmine (1998, dir. Todd Haynes, starring Jonathan Rhys Myers, Toni Collette, Christian Bale, Ewan McGregor, Eddie Izzard, feat. Lindsay Kemp) - I have to watch this endlessly-quotable sort-of history of glam rock (which begins in 1850s Dublin) every few years: richer, more life-affirming, funnier each time.

Dogtooth (2009, dir. Yogos Lanthimos, starring Angeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni, Christos Passalis) – A disquieting, affectless sort-of horror movie: three siblings raised within a single-family secure compound, who lives are thereby a lie (like a nastier, more claustrophobic Truman Show). 

The Sacred Triangle: Bowie, Iggy & Lou 1971-3 (2010, dir. Alec Lindsell). Angie Bowie’s the de facto star of this account of how the three influenced (formed?) one another during the years in question: just like Mandy Slade, only real.

Beginners (2010, dir. Mike Mills, starring Christopher Plummer, Ewan McGregor, Mélanie Laurent) – Plummer (dad) ‘comes out’ to McGregor (son) when already 75 and terminally ill, in a generous warm-hearted comedy-drama. Superb performance from Cosmo, as Arthur the Jack Russell. 

Greenland (2020, dir. Ric Roman Waugh, starring Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale Floyd) – Wide-screen American disaster movie about comet expected at first not to impact, then it’ll be fine, then we wait for extinction within days (semi-subliminal metaphor for you-know-what).

Adult Life Skills (2016, dir. Rachel Tunnard, starring Jodie Whittaker, Lorraine Ashbourne, Ozzy Myers). Sad-funny-quirky-indie fun set in the Pennines and starring Jodie Whittaker - and Ozzy Myers is a compelling screen presence as a troubled youngster with an 'old soul'. 

 

music, television

I’ve been watching some 1970s British genre television – The Changes, Beasts (series of one-act TV plays by Nigel 'Quatermass' Kneale), Survivors, An Englishman’s Castle – and I’ll be writing at greater length for Focus (BFSA magazine) about some of it soon.

The Owl Service was perhaps the strangest – a drama about a blended upper middle-class English family with servant trouble, quietly going mad in their Welsh second home (unresolved sexual tension and ancestral land-spirits from the Mabinogion are helping them).

As sometimes happens when you get to about fifty, my listening choices have been somewhat influenced by who happens to have recently died. Just lately we’ve lost Julee Cruise, the perfect musical collaborator with David Lynch as he sought to make American easy listening creepy (I used to fall asleep to the album Floating Into the Night on cassette tape – I’m almost wanting to add, ‘while sleeping in a coffin’ like Bela Lugosi as depicted in the Tim Burton movie ‘Ed Wood’ though not, alas, in real life... it's not like we had ASMR back in the day) … and also Vangelis, whose music was omnipresent when I was an SF-reading pre-teen whenever a filmmaker or documentary producer wanted to connote ‘the future' [you could start with the album Albedo 0.39, or just the track Heaven and Hell - which may make you want the whole of Carl Sagan's Cosmos again].

Putting the two together, there’s plenty to be said about 1970s genre soundscapes – the folk in folk horror, Paddy Kingsland’s score for The Changes (working with the legendary BBC Radiophonics Workshop), the way that folk influences and early electronica combine. I may need to read Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music again, but if you know anyone else who's written well about this stuff (as well as Rob does, or as Greil Marcus and Simon Reynolds do), please do let me know. 

WOMAD memory

Talking of music, we’ll be at WOMAD as a family in a few weeks: first festival in three years, far too long.

WOMAD memory, 2019: I (solo adult that year; S. had a prior commitment) took daughter and friend to WOMAD, they were twelve, I was also helping out as part of the World of Children area. One evening, Orbital opened with  There Will Come A Time a song sampling astronomer Brian Cox and themed around the eventual heat-death of the universe; as they created this vast soundscape, the sun began to set behind them, flooding the sky with orange and red. It was wonderful as well as deeply eerie – daughter (bless ‘er) wanted to be nearer the stage but friend was a little spooked so wanted to be, ideally, a quarter of a mile away; of course, we did the right thing and distanced ourselves.

I attribute daughter’s greater tolerance for the cosmological sublime entirely to Doctor Who, but that’s another story… 

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