AI is scarier than I thought

As someone with a strong luddite streak, I am always sceptical about new technology and especially the grandiose claims made for it.

Such naysaying must have something to do with my latent humanism, understood in this case as love of people, flawed as they may be. When machines begin to encroach on human prerogatives, such as thought, knowledge and understanding, I’m prepared to man the epistemological barricades.

In terms of using new-fangled appliances, my approach is to go only for things I couldn’t do without, not those I could do with. Thus, though I’m writing this on an Apple computer, I must be the only man in His Creation who doesn’t own a smartphone.

The other day, when I pulled my antediluvian Nokia out at my tennis club, the coach asked me what on earth it was (he actually used a stronger word). Oh, it’s that outdated contraption, I explained. One that lets people talk to one another, rather than exchanging enciphered electronic monosyllabics. The young man’s expression reflected his genuine compassion for someone so obviously inadequate.

Years ago, when chess computers were making their first tentative moves, people argued whether the machines would ever be able to beat human masters. For once in my life, I belonged to the majority: most people were sure the human mind would always prevail over chips, diodes and wiring.

Well, we were wrong. Today’s chess software packages can wipe the board not just with masters but grandmasters, indeed world champions. They can beat human players as easily as a car can outpace a human runner, even if he happens to hold all sorts of records.

Now Artificial Intelligence is all the rage, and my misgivings are as strong as ever. If people expect Artificial Intelligence to make up for their lack of the natural kind, I keep saying, they are likely to come a cropper. An AI programme may translate a thoughtful article into Urdu or whatever, but it’ll never be able to write one.

And then, this very morning a good friend sent me an e-mail that has left my heartfelt convictions tottering if not yet collapsing. Even worse, I saw an imaginary redundancy note flashing before my eyes, a feeling of dread only assuaged by the realisation that I have no job to be fired from.

This is what my friend wrote: “I continue to be amazed by the burgeoning capabilities of AI, even though it’s still in its infancy. In response to the question ‘Can you write a few polemical paragraphs in the style of Alexander Boot, about a subject of your choice?’, it replied as below. Not a bad attempt, but clearly nowhere near as good as the real thing!”

Thank you for that last sentence but, having read the damn thing’s effort, I’m not so sure. Oh well, you be the judge. Here is that work of the devil trying to be me:

“Certainly. Here is a short polemical essay in the style of Alexander Boot, who is known for his acerbic wit, erudite prose, and unapologetic traditionalism. The subject: The Infantilisation of the Modern West.

“There was a time – recent, but now remote – when adulthood was both a state of being and a state of mind. Today, it is neither. The modern West, in its terminal stage of civilisational decline, has chosen the nursery over the academy, emotion over reason, and self-expression over self-mastery. We are governed not by statesmen, but by emotionally incontinent adolescents in ill-fitting suits, squealing about ‘lived experience’ as if feelings were epistemologically authoritative.

“Every institution, from the classroom to the cathedral, has become a playpen for perpetual children. Our universities, once crucibles of reasoned thought, now serve as daycare centres for hypersensitive ideologues, where the only dangerous idea is the suggestion that not all ideas are equal. The cathedral has not fared better: where once incense rose with solemn chant, we now get rainbow flags and sermons on recycling. There is more dignity in a Punch and Judy show.

“Responsibility – once the hallmark of the mature citizen – is now seen as oppressive. The idea that one must subordinate personal impulse to transcendent order is not merely foreign, but offensive. In this brave new infantilised world, the adult virtues – discipline, duty, self-denial – are recast as psychological pathologies. Stoicism is ‘repression’. Tradition is ‘trauma’. Orthodoxy is ‘violence’. One is reminded not of the Enlightenment, but of the spoiled brat on the floor of a supermarket, shrieking because he has been told ‘no’.

“The modern West, having rejected the authority of God, nature, and history, now genuflects before the altar of the Self – a god far less merciful and infinitely more capricious. Our civilisation, once built by grown men with spines of oak, now totters on legs of jelly, infantilised and insipid, afraid not of war or want, but of disapproval. And like all overindulged children, we may very well find that the nanny state cannot save us from ourselves.”

This kind of spooky parody can drive one to drinking earlier in the day than usual, if not yet to suicide. The electronic plagiarist writes with verve and in perfectly measured cadences. There isn’t a thing that Artificial Intelligence wrote that my natural, but obviously stale and formulaic, intelligence couldn’t have churned out.

Moreover, if my friend is right that AI is only in its infancy, what will it be able to do when it reaches maturity? Will future writers just tap in the subject, push the button and watch impeccable prose take shape before their very eyes?

Push another button, and the artificial piece instantly lands on the desk of an artificial editor equipped to enunciate in a perfectly censorious voice “You can’t say that”, “Take it easy on the God thing, will you?” and “I don’t want to have the PCC on my arse.” (That’s the Press Complaints Commission, for those of you in a different line of work.)

Actually, I’ve misled you: the e-mail in question wasn’t the first one along the same lines I’ve serendipitously received over the past couple of days. Another friend had already horrified me with her own efforts, but she sent them in a PDF format I can’t reproduce here.

Other than that, her AI output was as scary and its similarity to my style as uncanny. Where will it all end? If AI can cannibalise my writing so easily, will it set itself much loftier targets next? Aquinas? Shakespeare? Burke? Peter Hitchens?

My heart screams no, while my mind smirks yes, perhaps, can’t put it past that blasted thing. Yet that cloud isn’t without its own silver lining.

I stand convinced that even a prepubescent AI could do a better job of running the country than our government of nincompoops, as feeble of mind as they are febrile of ideology.

Given the choice of Labour, Tories or AI, I know which way I’d vote. AI couldn’t do any worse and, on the evidence of my friends’ missives, it can do a whole lot better.