What are we going to do about AI? I first heard something about it years ago from a friend who had trained as an engineer. He designed a warehouse which no one would need to enter. If, say, the warehouse was attached to a baked bean factory, then, every time a tin of beans was bought in a supermarket, it would register on some computer which would eventually realize that the supermarket needed a fresh supply of baked beans.  

The machines in the warehouse would move like humans, or almost like them, turning left and right, reaching up the higher shelves and then carrying the merchandise back to a waiting truck.

The warehouse would be a box of disrupted silences, silences broken by whizzing and whirring as a new order for beans came in and went out.

Often, of course, the whole thing broke down. Then, it needed human intervention. But, otherwise, it was solid, fully operational. It was also a dream-space, a dimly-lit stealthy kind of limbo.

Years ago, I began to get packages from my Spanish publisher. Each package contained copies of the same book, a thriller in Spanish that I had not ordered and knew nothing about. Obviously, the computer system in Spain had my address and something had got snarled. For about five years, copies of this book came regularly. I suppose the book had been ordered by various bookshops. What was interesting was that all my efforts to stop the book coming were met with puzzlement and silence. The Spanish publishing house could find no evidence that this book was going to the wrong address. More packages with the book came, and then more. Only recently have deliveries ceased. They stopped, I think, of their own accord.

Maybe that is how the world will stop, when the time comes.

In the meantime, what will the world be like when AI takes over? Photos that were never taken will appear as if they were real; videos that were never filmed will be shown; opinions based on nothing will be current; feelings that were never felt will be shared.

But this is hardly the future. This is what is happening now. It just feels like the future.

Who will be able to tell that the headline in the newspaper describes something that actually happened or something that must have happened or should have happened? Who will be there to stop one solitary car going backwards for no apparent reason? Are there rats in the basement, or did the word ‘rats’, or worse, something made to resemble a rat, come up through the sewers?

Who can say where this will end?

Against all this, there is the self, the person, the life within, the nexus of nerves, sensations and brain cells, that we (or maybe just I) believe is private, autonomous, unready to be bullied by any machine.

I still imagine a lone figure reading by lamplight in the corner of a room, perhaps someone created by the Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet, as translated by Derek Mahon. It is night. The night is not a social construct, nor is it artificial. It is not subject to market forces or snarls in the system. Is it possible for that figure to inhabit the night more sonorously, more truthfully, more objectively, now that artificial intelligence is coming towards us, surrounding us, menacing our days?

What poems will we need to preserve our freedom, the freedom to look at the world as though nothing significant lies between us and what we see, or indeed what we know?    

Maybe the section of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’ that deals with a figure called ‘the blue woman’:

‘It was enough for her that she remembered.
The blue woman looked and from her window named

The corals of the dogwood, cold and clear,
Cold, coldly delineating, being real,
Clear and, except for the eye, without intrusion.’

In that moment of contemplation, the blue woman, whoever she is, does not need anything more than what she remembers. But her experience of the world is required to be cold and real, delineated. Nothing intrudes on nature here, except the human eye. The blue woman lives without the intrusion of intelligence as something fabricated, manufactured, distorted.

Years ago – I mean fifty years ago! – RTE television had a series called ‘The Twilight Zone’. On one programme, a fellow admitted, to the consternation of others, that he ‘had built a man’. I remember asking about that and being told that it was utterly impossible, you couldn’t build a man. Still, I used to like the phrase: ‘He built a man.’ I think I like it less now.

One of the reasons why you couldn’t have robots, built men and women, wandering freely on a factory floor was that they could turn on humans and mangle them, crush them like packaging. Now, they know the difference between metal and flesh; they don’t need to be held in a cage.

And there is a thing called ‘chat.openai.com’. I asked it to give me a sample passage that captures my own writing style. I got this:

‘The room was cloaked in a hushed silence, as if the air itself held its breath. The soft glow of the candlelight danced upon the walls, casting elongated shadows that seemed to whisper secrets. In the corner, a worn armchair stood sentinel, its faded fabric offering solace to the weary. The sound of distant footsteps echoed through the hallway, a haunting reminder of the world beyond these walls. In this space of quiet introspection, time seemed to stand still, each moment suspended in its own delicate grace. Collected thoughts found refuge here, entwining with the flickering embers of forgotten dreams.’

On a bad day, I might have written that first sentence. I am sure I have used ‘hushed silence’ at some point along the way, but I am less sure about ‘cloaked’. And, unfortunately, I am pretty certain I did use ‘as if the air itself held its breath’ in ‘The Testament of Mary’. I am also sure, however, that I would never use ‘danced’ in the next sentence, but the rest…oh dear!...I admit I am capable of some of the rest. The sentence, the one that begins ‘The sound of distant footsteps…’ is me at my worst. (I must stop writing like that.) So, too, the second last sentence. For the last sentence, I plead not-guilty. I didn’t write it. I would never have written it.

The paragraph I have quoted did not take long to produce. It appeared a few seconds after I asked for it. Since it could do this, and so quickly, why could it not do more? Would it, for example, let me talk to it, tell it that a plain sentence might be useful sometimes and that embers don’t ‘flicker’, not really, and not in a good piece of writing. ‘Collected thoughts, forgotten dreams.’ Is this machine laughing at me? Is there anything I can do in retaliation?

In June 2010, I went to a conference in Amsterdam to discuss the future under the auspices of the Nexus Institut. ‘What’s Next for the West?’ was the official title.

Among the invitees was the American pianist Russell Sherman who was born in 1930. He seemed like a serious, thoughtful kind of man.

I was sitting close enough to him during one of the debates to see him clearly and to catch his eye a few times. The future was being calmly explained to us by a mild-looking Swedish philosopher called Nick Bostrom whom I have just looked up on Wikipedia: ‘Nick Bostrom (/ˈbɒstrəm/ BOST-rəm; Swedish: Niklas Boström [ˈnɪ̌kːlas ˈbûːstrœm]; born 10 March 1973)^[3] is a Swedish philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, whole brain emulation, superintelligence risks, and the reversal test.’

The third paragraph of his entry reads: ‘Bostrom believes that superintelligence, which he defines as "any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest," is a potential outcome of advances in artificial intelligence. He views the rise of superintelligence as potentially highly dangerous to humans, but nonetheless rejects the idea that humans are powerless to stop its negative effects.^{[11][12][failed verification]} In 2017, he co-signed a list of 23 principles that all A.I. development should follow.

On the stage in 2010, he was rational and calm as he explained how advanced genetic science had become. If you wanted a tall child, he said, then you could probably have one. I thought this was funny. But then we went on to say that if you wanted a child with musical talent, then you could also have the genetic material worked on for this end.

This was when I caught Russell Sherman’s eye. He was shaking his head at the idea that you could make a musician in a test-tube, or that musical talent could somehow be engineered. In 2010, I shared the view that artists could not be created in this way, nor writers either. Many people had talent as writers, but the thing itself – the ability to produce a finished book that might matter to others - came from a funny mixture of sensibility and mystery and need. Why do you begin a book, a story, a poem? Why work so intensely to complete what you have begun? The impulse often came from hurt, some hurt, something unresolved, some stirrings of excitement, but that is not enough just as the need to publish is not enough. Nothing is enough!

At the time I didn’t know the joke that the pianist Vladimir Horowitz made when he said that there were three kinds of pianists: ‘Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists, and bad pianists.’ It might have helped as I tried to formulate how a serious musician emerges in the world.

Horowitz’s joke is good, but it is not good enough. It really is not sufficient to be from a certain culture: being a great musician needs something else, something that cannot be taught and cannot be defined and cannot be inherited.

It is deeply bound up with an idea of the self, the inner dark workings of…of what?

I was going to write the soul.

At the end of the debate that day, Sherman played one of the late Beethoven piano sonatas to a hushed house. He made clear that his technical skill was one thing, but what was on display more was a complex interiority, a spiritual element that sought refuge in these notes and the silence between them. His playing was a rebuke to anyone who might say that you can engineer a musician.

Yet, no matter how moving the music was, how meditative his playing, the music was played by a pair of agile hands. It was the body that played the music, not the soul.

In Houston Texas a few years ago I found myself sitting beside an old heart surgeon. As the night wore on, and he seemed receptive to these kinds of questions, I asked him, since he had opened so many chests, if he had ever caught a glimpse of the soul. Did the soul flit into hiding as soon as he appeared with his scalpel? Did he see its complex shadow even for one second?  

No, he said drily, there is no soul; there is just the heart, the pumping heart, and all the organs around it. I can work with the heart, he said, but don’t ask me to work with the soul.

The body is wide open for a takeover. If all we are is a body, then in a room somewhere a scientist is improving on ways to replicate the body, from the heart to the brain, from the nervous system to memory and desire.

No matter what they do, however, I will go on believing that I can write a novel better than they can. The problem is that I could be wrong. Perhaps that admission, in itself, is a way to approach novel-writing. My double, my machine, is always right, until they break down. I will break down too, but I will usually be wrong, or somewhat wrong. Maybe there is some relief in that thought. 

Colm Tóibín (May 2023)