‘AI’ don’t think so

A couple of things collided in my attention this week and formed a proto-thought about ‘AI’ I thought I’d share here. I always put ‘AI’ in quote marks, by the way, because it’s an acronym that stands for so many different and disparate things it might as well stand for nothing. But that’s a post for another time, maybe.

No, what got me thinking was first reading Chuck Wendig’s post over on Terrible Minds, where he muses on life, death and what we leave behind. And then I received an email from the lovely Helen Stevens, who some time ago offered to make notes about my books as she was re-reading them and pass them on to me to help create a series bible.

I often wish I’d done this from the start. I did with the Sir Benfro books, after a fashion. One of my many jobs when I began that series – way back in *checks notes* 2001 – was building web-based databases for research programmes, and so I set up a very basic Microsoft Access database that tracked all the characters and places I created while writing the first three books – Dreamwalker, The Rose Cord and The Golden Cage. This came in surprisingly handy when Penguin picked up the series ten years after I’d abandoned it and I found myself having to write the final two books. Without that database I’d have been way more stuck than I actually was.

But when it came time to start on Tony McLean’s adventures, I never thought to make a note of all the characters, let alone what they all did.

For the first few books this wasn’t a problem. I was younger then, and what my memory couldn’t give me didn’t take long to find in the original manuscript files. Then three books became six, eight, fifteen. Throw Con Fairchild into the mix, since she occupies the same world as Tony McLean and that’s eighteen. Getting on for two million words of finished manuscript. I can’t begin to remember everything from that lot.

I have in the past asked Twitter and had a swift answer. Tony’s grandmother’s first name is Esther, but my brain drew a blank. Social media had the answer in no time at all. Unfortunately, Twitter has turned into a Nazi bar now, and social media is spread thin over too many platforms to be useful for that kind of thing. So when Helen offered to list characters, I was happy to accept. I have plans for Tony McLean beyond the upcoming book fifteen – The Violent Hour – after all.

The email that arrived earlier this week was more than a simple dramatis personae, but the initial list of names included two nurses who were looking after Tony’s comatose grandmother – Barbara and Heather.

No surnames, you’ll note, and this was quite deliberate. Looking at them, I instantly recalled what I had done. For those of you who haven’t read Natural Causes, where it all started, Tony McLean’s grandmother is in a coma in hospital having suffered from a stroke some time before the start of the book. He visits her as often as he can, even though deep down he knows she will never recover consciousness. This is a simple way of painting the kind of person he is – caring, conscientious, and perhaps a bit lonely. We learn early on that he was raised by his grandmother after his parents died in a plane crash when he was just four. Inspector McLean’s life has not been overly filled with joy.

But Barbara and Heather, the two nurses. They have no surnames because he doesn’t know them, and neither is he entirely sure which one is which, since they always seem to be working together.

There’s a story behind that, of course. When I first went to university in Aberdeen, a very long time ago now, I joined the archery club in fresher’s week. It was as much a social/drinking club as a sporting one, although we did shoot twice a week. I was introduced to a lot of the members in my first few sessions, two of whom were called Barbara and Heather. Since they were simply introduced as ‘Barbara and Heather’ when I first met them, I was unsure which was which. It remained that way for the best part of a year, as circumstances conspired against my working it out.

I did eventually, of course. Barbara is my better half – we’ve been together for more than 35 years now – and I stole her surname McLean for my detective protagonist. Heather’s surname is Morrison, which is not coincidentally Tony’s gran’s maiden name. I am terrible for stealing people’s names.

All of which, in a roundabout way, comes back to the utter nonsense that is ‘AI’, especially when it applies to writing. Two throwaway characters from my first published novel – Heather and Barbara – and their slightly strange backstory. I put them in as yet more colour to Tony McLean’s character. He’s polite to them, very grateful for the care they give his grandmother, but also a little bit stressed because he’s not entirely sure which one is Heather and which one Barbara and can’t think of a polite way to find out. He’s human.

An ‘AI’ generated story would never have that level of character building. It couldn’t have, as it will never know real people and interact with them. All it can do is calculate a most likely answer to an ongoing set of questions based on statistical analysis of all the work that has been fed into its gaping maw (stolen work, I might add, but that’s a subject for another rant too). That would almost certainly involve giving Heather and Barbara surnames since that’s what people have, statistically speaking. It doesn’t think, doesn’t feel, doesn’t know anything.

For want of a better word, it has no soul.

I am an optimist at heart – you have to be to keep on writing for twenty years or more in the hope of someday being published. I think the ‘AI’ bubble will burst soon, and I also think readers in general will reject the output of these machines in favour of work written by real people who have lived real lives. We are social animals, after all. We yearn for shared experience. ‘AI’ cannot experience anything, so it has nothing to share.