Art Needs to Make Me Feel

 What is it about corny lines? “The girl looked so good she gave eyesight to the blind”? I chuckled. Then I looked it up. The song is playing now and it’s not too bad. Geometrically, a line is something that is infinite, stretching in both directions. That’s what I like about lines. There are some iconic ones like “It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen” or something along the lines of “You may have gone to Cambridge, but I am an honorary graduate of Starfleet Academy.” Another one that happens to have popped in my head is “Hello Jim. Who died and made you Batman?”

There’s so many different ways to combine words to express what we want to say. People do it all the time, even when words were not a thing. I have found that human beings love to talk, to express. They are ambitious that way and they have voices. Even when in the prehistoric age, humanity made cave paintings did they not?

So what happens when Artificial Intelligence is used to put words together and make up a story? What happens when that story becomes acknowledged with an award? Is it scary? Is Skynet more real now? It’s always said that “Truth is stranger than fiction” after all.

I was participating in a group discussion about this award winning AI written story and actual writers who have written books were all calling it slop. I read the story myself. I found it so ridiculous. None of the sentences made sense, but even then I learnt something. I learnt a different meaning for the word kink and how to use it to imply that meaning when used in the context of hair. Naturally, a human being and not a Google search led me there, sat me down and explained it to me.

In season one of the medical drama The Pitt, there is a scene where a child who is very sick with measles is being denied access to a lumbar puncture by a helicopter parent who puts more faith in a Google Search than the actual resident doctor who puts their medical experience to work and tells both the parents that unless they act, their son could die. The helicopter parent refuses to relent and I don’t want to talk further about this as it will take away from a good moment in the episode.

The world today is a small place, because of the technology that humans have at their disposal. I can log on to anything at any given time and have my fun or spend a good few hours. Video has truly killed the radio star and some of these things are here to stay. Despite many warning about the effects they have on the attention span, children find themselves addicted to reels on social media platforms and grown  men with years of experience try to replace humans work and talent with the good old artificial.

But I was glad that quite a few of us in that group decided to have a good laugh about the story and I managed to learn something about a word, a human created word by reading that story

It taught me that the danger is not the technology itself, but the use of the technology. Funnily enough, I find myself reminded of a line from Terry Pratchett’s beautiful story Men at Arms. “Gonnes don’t kill people, people kill people”. So, while I acknowledge that it is easy now to just type a couple of things into a program and create, there will always be someone else who sits down with a piece of paper and a pen, far away from the reach of artificial and actually writes what he feels.

After all, art needs to make you feel. This AI story failed to do that. But all these corny lines have made me feel so much.

And with that, I take your leave, because I have a comic to read!

The Bilge Master