AI or Dead Spanish Poet

“Be weird” implored the weird Fix co-host Glenn Fisher at this year’s weird AI or Die FixFest delve into the threats and thrills of Artificial Insemination.

Not really. 

Intelligence.

It’s the unexpected juxtapositions that set us apart from AI he told us, using Kurt Vonnegut’s bonkers brilliance as a perfect quote hanger. 

Aggregation creates aggregate. The stuff they use to build roads. Unexpected juxtapositions create solar systems. Outer and inner.

Stevie Sonder

Which brings us to the word ‘sonder’. The word of the day. The word of every day. Forever. And a day. Sonder is the realisation that others, like you, have an inner life.

Plucked from the magical Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and referenced by a whole bunch of the day’s speakers, sonder is the realisation that every other person, living, dead, or yet to be born, is living, has lived or will live, a life as vivid and complex as your own

AI writing doesn’t have an inner life. It’s a simulation, the creation of an impression. It’s a predictive effect. Bolted together, broadcast, boring as fuck. AI has no inner life to speak of, or to. 

Not that it can’t be useful as a bright eyed, bushy tailed intern. With the right coaching and cajoling, there’s plenty of stuff it can do – as we were about to find out.

Lauren (half human glitterball) Ingram of Next Big Thing kicked off proceedings with a quick AI history lesson, including an elegant reference to elegant Ray and Charles Eames who designed the elegant IBM pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair. 

With a giant multi-screen “People Wall” lifting visitors 50 feet into the air, interactive exhibits, and relatable analogies and visual metaphors, they blended art and science to make complex ideas more digestible and to show how technology, rather than replacing humans, would make their lives better. By making technology feel more cultural and not just purely technical, they created a window on a curious and exciting future.

Their objective, as was Lauren’s here – to demystify tech, to make it fun, relatable and accessible. Good work.

Oh God… here we go

My heart sank when John Forde’s post-apocalyptic AI or Die slide came up. 

All moody and epic and bloke silhouetted against a raging electrical storm, pump action shotgun slung by his side.

Here. We. Go. I thought.

Fortunately, it was a dumb-ass AI generated piss take and I’m a dick. Instead, John led us through a nuanced, well-considered and entertaining take on the inevitability of change and how to handle it.

Whether with a Paul Bunyan/David Simon style rage against the machine, or a John Forde getting your head around the machine.

For example, by creating his own GPT that reverse engineers a sales letter to identify what makes it so good. And one that runs a 4Us analysis to find out whether copy is sufficiently useful, unique, ultra-specific and urgent. And one that tidies up transcripts. And others.

Because there’s stuff AI can do well and stuff it can’t (apologies for the wonky slides):

And he quoted ad legend Bill Bernbach, in a similar way that I do here.

And he used that word sonder – because somewhere in the mix you’ll need an emotional intelligence, an understanding beyond the demographics and psychographics if your writing is really going to land.

“We’re competing on emotional intelligence” says John, “So go read novels, watch movies, be more human.” 

Bonus points for the Robert C. Gallagher “Change is inevitable except from a vending machine” quote.

Moving on – co-host Nick O’Connor quizzed  Sam Judge and Adison Clark of Scoops about audience insight and user understanding gathered from CRM analysis, customer service, product returns, support and social media. Smart qualitative interrogations that can analyse content for themes and trends – a measurement, ideation strategy process.

A couple of memorable takeaways.

“People are sceptical of AI as existing experience is disappointing and most CMOs aren’t prompt engineers. They’re open-minded though, that it can do better.”

And anyway, why should AI be any good to start with?

It’s like picking up a musical instrument. You know it can sound amazing but won’t if you don’t use it properly which takes smarts and time.

Glenn then took a short panel session with John, Lauren and Landy Slattery  – Creative & Innovation Director at Channel 4 streaming.

Landy’s “running to the centre of change” and she’s LOVING it. She also runs task forces at Channel 4 to explore AI possibilities and help make sure creative applications are shared. 

With ‘benefit the only incentive to adoption’  the sooner people can see how much it can benefit them the sooner they take it seriously. 

Landy’s a whole new level of AI optimistic, predicting a whole new world where humans will interact with a layer of AI and blockchain technology.

“The diversity of thoughts from these tools will be incredible.”

Examples of AI and blockchain interaction already in the creative sector include Verisart that uses AI for image recognition and blockchain for the certification of artworks.

Audius a decentralized music streaming platform uses blockchain for rights management and AI for content recommendation.

Hold on tight.

Nick’s presentation, on how so often writers will rush to persuade before they seek to engage, was a joy.

“Do people really go around wanting to engage in a debate? No. We’re a guest in people’s worlds. People are facing the other way, talking to others and doing their thing. Superhuman persuasion isn’t the way it works. Engagement is.”

But how?

By applying “the most powerful force in the universe”. Curiosity.

Because we don’t want our readers to be rational, we want them to enter a ‘curiosity state’.

Because… (apologies again for the wonky slides):

 And

As readers, we bust a gut to close the information gap and reward ourselves with lots of lovely dopamine. 

‘So what question am I asking the reader to ask themself?” 

Think the irresistibly intriguing opening lines of GGM’s 100 Years of Solitude or Anthony Burgess’ Earthly Powers 

What? How? Firing squad? Ice? How old? Who? WTF? WTFF?

We’re in Eddie Shleyner’s ‘tease the value, embellish the benefit’ fascinations territory here.

AIn’t it the way

Heather Murray, Founder of AI for Non-Techies, was a whirlwind of smarts, laying out some of the reasons AI reads like AI:

• Humans are high perplexity – we love chucking in unpredictable goats words
• We’re bursty too – we like to vary sentence structure. And length 
• Bad data – the old ask a stupid question get a stupid answer shit in, shit out issue (more of Dave Harland’s trip to York later)
• Plagiarism – AI don’t know and AI don’t care 
• Bias – AI’s source material? Is dripping with bias

Applying character, context and clarity will help you steer your AI ship away from the rocks of AI wanq but it needs a steady and knowing hand before and after you’ve pressed the magic button. 

Before: to feed the machine with loads of relevant examples. 

After: because only you know what good looks like.

Think sandwich. You’re the bread, AI’s the filling. Hopefully without that sneaky little tear of kitchen foil ready to make your teeth explode.

Next up – Dave Harland

Are Chatbots Taking the Piss?

Always entertaining, always great value, Dave’s naturally funny self-depreciation, indignation and hyperbole turned its flaming guns on Virgin Internet bot fails and bullshit AI storytelling.

Asked to improve on Dave’s famous Jorvik Viking Centre arse malfunction story – the machine couldn’t. It tried. It over-explained. It under-contextualised. Its justifications were junkifications. It simpered when challenged. 

Enshitification, The Wire creator and head writer David Simon calls it. And both Simon and Dave’s response to AI is similar, something along the lines of, “if this is how it’s going to be, then just shoot me in the face.”

Radically different subject matter – Dave’s, an enshitified coach trip to Yorkshire via the Uncanny Valley, and Eddie Shleyner’s emotional rollercoaster ride to the maternity suite, both were exploring a similar space… the gap between what AI is, and the human experience necessary to create what AI is trying to simulate – the canny. 

A form of… duende. Boom 💥

Federico Garcia Lorca’s ‘mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains’.

Shared with the world in his 1933 Buenos Aires lecture “The Theory and Function of Duende” Lorca used the word to explain those moments in composure and creativity when something else takes over, when something speaks through you. Something essential. Ineffable. Elemental.

When, whether or how duende reveals itself isn’t the point. That it exists at all, and can only exist in us…  is.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more that using a Spanish word for an inexplicable power, a force beyond technique, is the perfect way to explain that AI/human disconnect. 

Duende nails it.

(Watch this space).

Like Dave, Eddie took a piece of his original writing and asked the machines to best it. Where Dave was heading for humour, Eddie was heading for heart – a short piece relating the experience of being present at your child’s birth.

AI did its thing. Then Eddie did his. 

And of course, Eddie’s was magnificent. “The most personal is the most creative.” 

And of course, the AI version was a bit shit.

But not slap you in the face shit. 

More “Do you think this milk is off?” shit

The word choice, playfulness, literalness, eagerness, and too muchness. The intrinsic lack of self awareness, soul… of duende. 

It was off. But not so off you want to vom. 

Not curdled off. Still off enough to ruin a perfectly good cup of tea.

Eddie talked about anti-description, where you lay clues that trigger memories and experience for the reader to piece together their own imagery.

The importance of subtext, of creating “holes” and information gaps.

That process of setting the scene for the reader to answer the questions you entice them to ask themselves that Nick had talked about earlier.

Eddie talked about the Kuleshov effect – a cinematography technique in which audiences do their own gap filling to create their interpretations and understandings of consecutive shots.

“Copywriting will always be human work,” he concluded.

The human work of holding mirrors.

Mirrors made of words.

Words made of duende.

Duende or die.

How weird.

How wonderful.