Growing up among rock stars

Is AI going to put writers like me out of business?

I’m beginning to think writers will be among the first casualties of AI, says Sean Thomas in The Spectator. Many still presume that while bots like ChatGPT can knock out a decent recipe, they’ll never be up to proper creative writing. And for now, even the best AI’s sound like a “wordy teen trying to impress”, if you simply ask them to write something. But if you put enough detail into your questions – or “prompts”, as they’re called – the results can be scary. A friend of mine recently got Claude 3 Opus to write a stanza in the style of Philip Larkin, about a sad Sunday night curry:

Between the flock-papered walls, we wait
Subdued, still in our churchless Sunday state,
Minds numbed like chickens stunned, pre-abbatoir
Then steaming curries cure us, within reason…
This weekly rite, appeases, for a season.

Ok, it’s not up to his very best, like Aubade, but it’s “absolutely believable” as a few lines of Larkin. I’ve personally got Claude to write fine new ideas for a thriller, “wildly eloquent literary criticism ‘for the New Yorker’”, and “remarkably inventive sexts” while I was bored on a foreign trip. It’s probably already capable of writing a great novel; its makers, Anthropic, just won’t let it yet. When they do, it will “destroy artistic ecosystems overnight”. There’s bad news for musicians, too. An AI music maker, Udio, has just been launched – just type in what you want (“death metal ballad, operatic overtones, gypsy jazz interlude”) and it produces a song in seconds. At its best, the music is truly lovely. And in movies, the Art Directors Guild in Hollywood recently revealed that three in four of its members – “the people who make stuff look nice on screen” – are unemployed. It has told those hoping to join the industry: “we cannot in good conscience encourage you to pursue our profession”.

Have we all forgotten basic Tube etiquette?

This week, phone signal was introduced across a quarter of London’s Underground network, with further coverage planned by the end of summer, says Zoe Williams in The Guardian. “This is great news for people who can’t go five minutes without talking, and bad news for everyone else.” Before the pandemic, Tube etiquette was very simple: if you wanted to listen to anything, you did it with headphones. One of the few grey areas was around conversations with travelling companions. Friends and couples normally stayed quiet, but with work colleagues it was impossible because of the power imbalance: “silence is awkward unless it’s mutually agreed, but only two equals can make that pact”.

Then, after Covid, “the brakes came off”. It’s no longer unusual to hear music, TikTok videos and even “whole TV shows” broadcast to the carriage. Some bystanders are merely annoyed by this, “but for others it is hell”. And it’s impossible to fix, since tackling the original rule breach itself breaches an older rule: never engage with a stranger on the Tube. I once unknowingly sat next to my dad on the Piccadilly line, thinking it was weird that he smelt like my dad, “and still didn’t look directly at him until we were getting off. At the same stop. Because we were meeting each other.” But maybe phone signal won’t matter. After all, millennials don’t make or answer unscheduled calls; Gen Zs don’t do calls at all; and boomers can’t hear calls over the noise of the carriage.

Oh, the joy of the odd cigarette

The young man at my newsagents was surprised, says Mark Palmer in The Oldie, when I asked for a bag of Golden Virginia and some Rizla papers. “I didn’t know you smoked,” he said. “I don’t,” I replied. And that’s more or less true. It’s just that, suddenly, 20 years after quitting, I got the urge to smoke again. “And that urge has not gone away.” So I’ve settled on what I think is a sane solution: having “just the one” after supper on a Friday, with a glass of Redbreast Irish Malt. It’s become something of a tradition, and a “profoundly pleasant one”, despite the ugly warning on the side of the fag packet that “smoking clogs your arteries”. This heavy-handedness “has the reverse effect on those of us suspicious of authority”.

I’m not an advocate for smoking per se, and I’m not addicted to nicotine. “It’s the association of ciggies that I enjoy.” The occasional roll-up in the garden brings back memories of carefree days: my sadly departed schoolfriend who used to blow the most perfect smoke rings, and “deployed this party trick as a last resort to catch the eye” of a girl he fancied. I think of my mother, whose silver cigarette box I would “raid every now and again when my supplies were low”, and I think of my now 30-something son who told me on a ski lift, aged 15: “Dad, I smoke, so get over it.” Everything in moderation, I’ve always thought. And for me, “that now includes a defiant roll-up from time to time”.