8 December 2023. Technology | Migration
Talking to AIs about writing // The coming climate migrants. [#523]
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1: Talking to AIs about writing
As you might have noticed I’ve been doing a themed week here on Just Two Things around loosely, the idea of technology and culture (Monday here, Wednesday here).
At the end of November, the novelist Monica Ali gave the PEN H.G.Wells lecture, on the theme of ‘Bookpocalypse: AI and the Risks to Literature and Free Expression’. During the course of the lecture she talks about trying out various AI writing programs: Laika, ChatGPT, Bard, Sudowrite.
(Monica Ali. Photo via PEN)
The background to the lecture is a class action suit in New York against OpenAI by the Authors Guild. The Guild’s press release, which she quotes, says
For fiction writers, OpenAI’s unauthorized use of their work is identity theft on a grand scale.
The plaintiffs include George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen, which gives the case some profile, but it is a class action, which means it includes less famous writers as well. In the United States, the average income of a writer is $20,000; in the UK £7,000.
But this fight is not just about money. Ali quotes Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger:
‘The various GPT models and other current generative AI machines can only generate material that is derivative of what came before it... The outputs are mere remixes without the addition of any human voice. Regurgitated culture is no replacement for human art.’
In the UK, incidentally, the Society of Authors believes that a copyright case might be easier to win than in the US, because UK copyright law works on the basis of ‘fair dealing’ and not ‘fair use’. But for the moment the Creative Rights Alliance, of which the Society of Authors is a part, is discussing the legal position with the UK Intellectual Property Office.
Ali is not optimistic:
Silicon Valley has a track record of steamrollering their way through these issues. The Authors Guild suit against Google Books for copyright violation dragged on for years and ended in victory for Google. To say that the tech lobby is powerful and deep-pocketed is like your house being lifted Wizard of Oz style into a tornado and remarking that it’s a bit windy out.
By now in her creative journey Ali has moved on from Laika to ChatGPT, and is asking it to write in the style of Marilynne Robinson and... Monica Ali. It’s not very good at either, it turns out.
ChatGPT had identified something in Robinson’s writing, and in mine, but no more than an averagely intelligent twelve-year-old would discover. Was there really anything here for writers to fear?
When she gets on to Bard, she asks it first to write a story “in the style of H.G. Wells about a novelist who loses his livelihood because of AI-generated novels“, and then to rewrite it in the style of Monica Ali. Bard has a go at this, and adds a helpful note to tell her what it had changed as a result.
Bard also explains:
I also tried to capture the sense of cultural diversity and social commentary that is often found in Ali’s work.
She re-reads it and finds no trace of this:
And I gave Bard another chance. I asked it to include some cultural diversity within the story. In response, Bard now claimed that John Smith was ‘a British-Pakistani man’. But despite repeated prompts and hints from me, Bard was absolutely hopeless at convincing me that John really was British-Pakistani. Perhaps that’s just because Bard isn’t a brilliant writer. But if a white, male, heterosexual, Anglophone worldview is largely what an AI is trained on, it would hardly be surprising if that’s what it spews out.
Next, she has another dalliance with ChatGPT, to which she slowly feeds prompts based on her novel Love Marriage, about an affair between a younger female doctor, and a much older white colleague, Pepperdine.
There is a critical moment in the story when they have sex during Yasmin’s period:
It’s a key moment in the character’s development, as she confronts her own desires and feelings of shame, and struggles to create her own sense of identity.
ChatGPT won’t write anything salacious—I think we already know that—and tells her,
I cannot fulfil this request. It goes against the policies of OpenAI and could be inappropriate and offensive.
Ali gives it a new prompt,
instructing it again that Yasmin is on her period but has sex with Pepperdine anyway, and adding that it should avoid ‘anything explicitly sexual, just write about the emotions and decisions involved.’
This time, ChatGPT goes all prudish on her:
‘Yasmin, I respect your faith and beliefs,’ says Pepperdine. ‘We should stop here.’ And Yasmin meekly leaves his house, knowing she needs to ‘uphold the teachings of her faith.’ For good measure, ChatGPT delivered the whole story in red type with a box beneath warning that ‘This content may violate our content policy.’
I’m always intrigued about the detail of interactions with Large Learning Models, because, as here, they reveal both the limits of the system and the bias within it.
Sudowrite, on the other hand, which is a paid program, is a step up. It takes your notes, asks your genre, and runs them through its ‘Story Engine’, turning them into a structured if formulaic plot.
There’s quite a long discussion here about an ‘indie’ (self-publishing) genre author, Leanne Leeds, who is using Sudowrite, to accelerate her productivity. It’s a more nuanced story than you’d expect.
There are some legal issues here about copyright, since “Standard publishing contracts ask you to confirm that you are the sole author of your work.” Ali expects a future in which, as the writing AIs get better, a literary fiction is published to acclaim only to be revealed as the work of an AI.
(W)e’d feel a little cheated, wouldn’t we? Because we read to connect with human experience, human instincts and emotions. We put our trust in the truth of those connections, allow our consciousness to be melded with another in order to see the world better, or at least differently. Only a human author can bring those intentions to meet our own. An AI has no intention.
Ali’s first novel, Brick Lane, about a devout Muslim woman who has an affair with a much younger man, was criticised by some Muslims as being offensive. But she still hears from women who tell her how much it meant to see themselves and their lives reflected in the culture.
The rise of Large Learning Models, in contrast, brings a depressing combination of scale and homogenisation:
I envisage a future in which ‘natural’ writers, those who don’t use AI, will become distinct from those who do. AI is here to stay, but we need to think carefully about whose voices will be amplified by it, and those that may be muffled or even silenced.
2: The coming climate migration
I’ve spent some time researching the future of migration this week, which means running across the work of Gaia Vince, the science writer whose book Nomad Century anticipates a huge wave of climate migration later in the century. The book is now out in paperback.
The best explanation of her argument is in a podcast for Naturewhich comes with a transcript. I’m not sure of her argument—from the research I have done I think the outcomes of global warming and migration will be more nuanced. But it’s worth spending time with her argument, I think. And I agree with her that this is an issue about climate justice.
(Photo: Andrew Curry, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
The interview is by Benjamin Thompson. It’s long, and it’s late, so I’m going to pick out some chunks that I think represent her argument.
GV: Now that climate change is already well underway, we also need to talk about adaptation... what nobody is talking about is that for large areas of the world home to large populations, there will be no way for people to adapt to the very extreme conditions we’re facing over the coming decades. People will have to move. It is now inevitable. But the scale, of course, is not. It could be in the tens of millions. It could be in the hundreds of millions.
She suggests that the four drivers of migration caused by global warming are extreme heat, drought, flooding and fire. These also play out in multiple ways, causing crop failure and poor health. And they stress already vulnerable and under-resourced areas.
One of the reasons that she takes an extreme view of possible outcomes is that the book thinks about the migration effects of four degrees of warming, although it also takes into account milder global warming outcomes.
GV: 4 °C degrees is terrifying. And one of the reasons I looked at it was because when I talk to the public about these issues, there is an awful lot of anxiety out there, particularly among young people... The kinds of extremes we're facing, they’re unprecedented in human history. What I really wanted to do was say, ‘Look, this is, honestly, what we face. I don't know what temperature we're going to get to. These are the scenarios that are likely. Some are more likely than others.’ And then I wanted to say, ‘(L)et’s see, how is this survivable?’
The uneven global pattern of climate damage is a problem as well, especially since most of the areas that will be most affected are not place that have contributed much to carbon emissions.
GW: We live where we are generally because of the accident of where our mother was when we were born. And some people are living on low-lying atolls in the Indian Ocean, like Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati, which will entirely disappear. The entire nation, in terms of an internationally recognised, governable state won't be there. That brings with it loss of language, loss of culture, ancestry, all sorts of huge, huge problems. Others of us, people living, say, in London may well move further north to a slightly more habitable climate when it becomes too much drought, water too expensive and so on.
People who could move might choose not to because they want to stay in a place that is home, where they are part of the culture. All the same, some of the Small Island Nations in the Pacific are already planning for the moment when they need to leave, by training their young people with transferable skills:
GW: (T)he leaders of Kiribati, and some other of these low-lying islands, are basically facilitating the migration of their populations now. So, they are ensuring that young people are trained so that they can get jobs in sort of refuge nations. Kiribati is training a lot of nurses that are then relocating to New Zealand and Australia. So, what Kiribati is doing is a sort of managed mass migration over the coming decades.
Similarly Bangladesh is retraining people who are internally displaced through climate effects so they can find new work. Most people who have had to move so far have been internal migrants (this is true of migrants generally: they tend to stay in the country they were born in.) And in the global north Canada is planning to treble its population through migration:
GW: This is a national project. It's not something that's being done very subtly by the government amid a lot of anti-migrant narrative... Until recently, most countries wanted more immigrants to bolster their workforce and make their cities more productive. So, Canada has various schemes to help people into work and to help with inclusivity.
Canada, of course, is likely to see its cities expand as a result of global warming, which will make more of the north of the country habitable.
There’s a throwaway line in the interview at the end of a section on how things move across borders a lot (except for the UK, of course, where we make it really hard) but there are endless barriers to restrict the movement of people. She says:
Some economists calculate that if we removed all borders, the global GDP would at least double.
I might need to check the book to see if the background research for this statement is in there. (GDP would go up, but doubling is a strong claim.)
To manage this increase in migration, she suggests that, despite its many faults, an organisation within the United Nations family needs to be the place that helps to negotiate this. There’s some signs that this is starting to happen. From my research, because migration is first internal within countries, and then regional, before it is international, regional solutions are likely to work best in terms of constructing political and legal agreements about the right to move.
But because it is an issue of climate justice, I expect that this will be another area where the countries of the global South—rightly—expect the countries of the global North to underwrite at least some of the costs.
j2t#523
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