‘Nobody wants a robot to read them a story!' The creatives and academics rejecting AI – at work and at home

The Guardian

2 days ago

The novelist Ewan Morrison was alarmed, though amused, to discover he had written a book called Nine Inches Pleases a Lady. Intrigued by the limits of generative artificial intelligence (AI), he had asked ChatGPT to give him the names of the 12 novels he had written. 'I've only written nine,' he says. 'Always eager to please, it decided to invent three.' The 'nine inches' from the fake title it hallucinated was stolen from a filthy Robert Burns poem. 'I just distrust these systems when it comes to truth,' says Morrison. He is yet to write Nine Inches – 'or its sequel, Eighteen Inches', he laughs. His actual latest book, For Emma, imagining AI brain-implant chips, is about the human costs of technology.
Morrison keeps an eye on the machines, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, and their capabilities, but he refuses to use them in his own life and work. He is one of a growing number of people who are actively resisting: people who are terrified of the power of generative AI and its potential for harm and don't want to feed the beast; those who have just decided that it's a bit rubbish, and more trouble than it's worth; and those who simply prefer humans to robots.
Go online, and it's easy to find AI proponents who dismiss refuseniks as ignorant luddites – or worse, smug hipsters. I possibly fall into both camps, given that I have decidedly Amish interests (board games, gardening, animal husbandry) and write for the Guardian. Friends swear by ChatGPT for parenting advice, and I know someone who uses it all day for work in her consultancy business, but I haven't used it since playing around after it launched in 2022. Admittedly ChatGPT might have done a better job, but this piece was handcrafted using organic words from my artisanal writing studio. (OK, I mean bed.) I could have assumed my interviewees' thoughts from plundering their social media posts and research papers, as ChatGPT would have done, but it was far more enjoyable to pick up the phone and talk, human to human. Two of my interviewees were interrupted by their pets, and each made me laugh in some way (full disclosure: AI then transcribed the noise).
On X, where Morrison sometimes clashes with AI enthusiasts, a common insult is 'decel' (decelerationist), but it makes him laugh when people think he's the one who isn't keeping up. 'There's nothing [that stops] accelerationism more than failure to deliver on what you promised. Hitting a brick wall is a good way to decelerate,' he says. One recent study found that AI answered more than 60% of queries inaccurately.
Morrison was drawn into the argument by what he would now call 'alarmist fears about the potential for superintelligence and runaway AI. The more I've got into it, the more I realise that's a fiction that's been dangled before the investors of the world, so they'll invest billions – in fact, half a trillion – into this quest for artificial superintelligence. It's a fantasy, a product of venture capital gone nuts.'
There are also copyright violations – generative AI is trained on existing material – that threaten him as a writer, and his wife, screenwriter Emily Ballou. In the entertainment industry, he says, people are using 'AI algorithms to determine what projects get the go-ahead, and that means we're stuck remaking the past. The algorithms say 'More of the same', because it's all they can do.'
Morrison says he has a long list of complaints. 'They've been stacking up over the past few years.' He is concerned about the job losses (Bill Gates recently predicted AI would lead to a two-day work week). Then there are 'tech addiction, the ecological impact, the damage to the education system – 92% of students are now using AI'. He worries about the way tech companies spy on us to make AI personalised, and is horrified at AI-enabled weapons being used in Ukraine. 'I find that ethically revolting.'
Others cite similar reasons for not using AI. April Doty, an audiobook narrator, is appalled at the environmental cost – the computational power required to perform an AI search and answer is huge. 'I'm infuriated that you can't turn off the AI overviews in Google search,' she says. 'Whenever you look anything up now you're basically torching the planet.' She has started to use other search engines. 'But, more and more, we're surrounded by it, and there's no off switch. That makes me angry.' Where she still can, she says, 'I'm opting out of using AI.'
In her own field, she is concerned about the number of books that are being 'read' by machines. Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook provider, has just announced it will allow publishers to create audiobooks using its AI technology. 'I don't know anybody who wants a robot to read them a story, but I am concerned that it is going to ruin the experience to the point where people don't want to subscribe to audiobook platforms any more,' says Doty. She hasn't lost jobs to AI yet but other colleagues have, and chances are, it will happen. AI models can't 'narrate', she says. 'Narrators don't just read words; they sense and express the feelings beneath the words. AI can never do this job because it requires decades of experience in being a human being.'
Emily M Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and co-author of a new book, The AI Con, has many reasons why she doesn't want to use large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. 'But maybe the first one is that I'm not interested in reading something that nobody wrote,' she says. 'I read because I want to understand how somebody sees something, and there's no 'somebody' inside the synthetic text-extruding machines.' It's just a collage made from lots of different people's words, she says.
Does she feel she is being 'left behind', as AI enthusiasts would say? 'No, not at all. My reaction to that is, 'Where's everybody going?'' She laughs as if to say: nowhere good.
'When we turn to synthetic media rather than authentic media, we are losing out on human connection,' says Bender. 'That's both at a personal level – what we get out of connecting to other people – and in terms of strength of community.' She cites Chris Gilliard, the surveillance and privacy researcher. 'He made the very important point that you can see this as a technological move by the companies to isolate us from each other, and to set things up so that all of our interactions are mediated through their products. We don't need that, for us or our communities.'
Despite Bender's well-publicised position – she has long been a high-profile critic of LLMs – incredibly, she has seen students turn in AI-generated work. 'That's very sad.' She doesn't want to be policing, or even blaming, students. 'My job is to make sure students understand why it is that turning to a large language model is depriving themselves of a learning opportunity, in terms of what they would get out of doing the work.'
Does she think people should boycott generative AI? 'Boycott suggests organised political action, and sure, why not?' she says. 'I also think that people are individually better off if they don't use them.'
Some people have so far held out, but are reluctantly realising they may end up using it. Tom, who works in IT for the government, doesn't use AI in his tech work, but found colleagues were using it in other ways. Promotion is partly decided on annual appraisals they have to write, and he had asked a manager whose appraisal had impressed him how he'd done it, thinking he'd spent days on it. 'He said, 'I just spent 10 minutes – I used ChatGPT,'' Tom recalls. 'He suggested I should do the same, which I don't agree with. I made that point, and he said, 'Well, you're probably not going to get anywhere unless you do.'' Using AI would feel like cheating, but Tom worries refusing to do so now puts him at a disadvantage. 'I almost feel like I have no choice but to use it at this point. I might have to put morals aside.'
Others, despite their misgivings, limit how they use it, and only for specific tasks. Steve Royle, professor of cell biology at the University of Warwick, uses ChatGPT for the 'grunt work' of writing computer code to analyse data. 'But that's really the limit. I don't want it to generate code from scratch. When you let it do that, you spend way more time debugging it afterwards. My view is, it's a waste of time if you let it try and do too much for you.' Accurate or not, he also worries that if he becomes too reliant on AI, his coding skills will atrophy. 'The AI enthusiasts say, 'Don't worry, eventually nobody will need to know anything.' I don't subscribe to that.'
Part of his job is to write research papers and grant proposals. 'I absolutely will not use it for generating any text,' says Royle. 'For me, in the process of writing, you formulate your ideas, and by rewriting and editing, it really crystallises what you want to say. Having a machine do that is not what it's about.'
Generative AI, says film-maker and writer Justine Bateman, 'is one of the worst ideas society has ever come up with'. She says she despises how it incapacitates us. 'They're trying to convince people they can't do the things they've been doing easily for years – to write emails, to write a presentation. Your daughter wants you to make up a bedtime story about puppies – to write that for you.' We will get to the point, she says with a grim laugh, 'that you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. You won't know anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can't do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer. Capitulating all kinds of decisions like where to go on vacation, what to wear today, who to date, what to eat. People are already doing this. You won't have to process grief, because you'll have uploaded photos and voice messages from your mother who just died, and then she can talk to you via AI video call every day. One of the ways it's going to destroy humans, long before there's a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people.'
She is not interested. 'It is the complete opposite direction of where I'm going as a film-maker and author. Generative AI is like a blender – you put in millions of examples of the type of thing you want and it will give you a Frankenstein spoonful of it.' It's theft, she says, and regurgitation. 'Nothing original will come out of it, by the nature of what it is. Anyone who uses generative AI, who thinks they're an artist, is stopping their creativity.'
Some studios, such as the animation company Studio Ghibli, have sworn off using AI, but others appear to be salivating at the prospect. In 2023, Dreamworks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg said AI would cut the costs of its animated films by 90%. Bateman thinks audiences will tire of AI-created content. 'Human beings will react to this in the way they react to junk food,' she says. Deliciously artificial to some, if not nourishing – but many of us will turn off. Last year she set up an organisation, Credo 23, and a film festival, to showcase films made without AI. She likens it to an 'organic stamp for films, that tells the audience no AI was used.' People, she says, will 'hunger for something raw, real and human'.
In everyday life, Bateman is trying 'to be in a parallel universe, where I'm trying to avoid [AI] as much as possible.' It's not that she is anti-tech, she stresses. 'I have a computer science degree, I love tech. I love salt, too, but I don't put it on everything.'
In fact, everyone I speak to is a technophile in some way. Doty describes herself as 'very tech-forward', but she adds that she values human connection, which AI is threatening. 'We keep moving like zombies towards a world that nobody really wants to live in.' Royle codes and runs servers, but also describes himself as a 'conscientious AI objector'. Bender specialises in computational linguistics and was named by Time as one of the top 100 people in AI in 2023. 'I am a technologist,' she says, 'but I believe that technology should be built by communities for their own purposes, rather than by large corporations for theirs.' She also adds, with a laugh: 'The Luddites were awesome! I would wear that badge with pride.' Morrison, too, says: 'I quite like the Luddites – people standing up to protect the jobs that keep their families and their communities alive.'