AI And Dead Writers

Every day brings a new AI abomination. Today it was the New York Times reporting on an on line writing class taught by Agatha Christie. 

"Isn't she dead?" you ask.

Why yes. Yes, she is. For almost fifty years in fact. But that doesn't mean she can't be dug up and re-animated as some sort of AI zombie. In this case, the exhuming has done by BBC Maestro, with the full cooperation of Agatha Christie Ltd., run by her great-grandson James Prichard, a British film producer who was six years old when the author died. 

In a world-first, the bestselling novelist of all time offers you an unparalleled opportunity to learn the secrets behind her writing, in her own words. Made possible today by Agatha's family, an expert team of academics and cutting-edge audio and visual specialists, as if she were teaching you herself...

As if.  

In the NYT, Amelia Nierenberg writes that AI was "only" used to create her likeness. Prichard said, "We just had the red line that it had to be her words, and the image and the voice had to be like her."

This is just so wrong on so many levels. Using her words doesn't make it better, because those words were used in different contexts for different purposes with different audiences. Hell, someone with access to the words that I have myself published on this blog could make me say pretty much anything. But to pretend that since these words are taken from interviews she conducted and things she said or wrote about writing, so that's what she would say if she were alive and teaching today is just half-assed mis-representation of a woman who is way too dead to say, "Hey, wait just a minute." 

This AI pipe dream that we can use a program to represent people from the past, like putting AI versions of historical figures in class, is gross and creepy, and that's before we even get to the issue of scholarship, of the sheer ballsiness of some computer crew saying, "Sure, there are scholars who have spent a lifetime trying to get an idea of how this person was, what made them tick, how they moved through the world, what drove them--but we think we can wrap all that up pretty quick with this chunk of software. Also, you don't mind if we just go ahead and steal some of those scholar's work to help program this, do you?"

A team of academics combined or paraphrased statements from Christie’s archive to distill her advice about the writing process. They took care to preserve what they believed to be her intended meaning, with the aim of helping more of her fans interact with her work, and with fiction writing in general.

Combined. Paraphrased. What they believed to be her intended meaning. Would you sign up for a course entitled "The advice that we think Agatha Christie would have given you if she were here."

We have made attempts to portray dead figures of interest before, from historical fiction to Hollywood biopics to wax museums to re-enactors. What those all had in common was clear signals that they were fictions, attempts to recapture the real thing but not actually the real thing. This AI zombies take the fakery up a notch. How many people will come away from the course feeling that they have really "met" Christie and "know" her personally, even though they haven't and they don't.

Maybe the day will come when savvy live humans will look at something like this and correctly dismiss it as an expensive deepfake. But right now too many people believe that AI is omniscient wizardry. And you know this is going to get worse. AI will finish unfinished manuscripts, or create new AI-generated works by dead authors. The AI roster of dead speakers will grow. 

This course, and all the similar crap, is a lie. Prichard says, “We’re not speaking for her. We are collecting what she said and putting it out in a digestible and shareable format.” Yes, well, a book is a digestible and shareable form, and this course is a lie. I will give the family the benefit of the doubt and assume they're doing this because it would be cool and modern and not, please God, because they figure they can dig up great-grandma to make a buck. But they are going to be followed by people with no such scruples. 

And if you haven't heard, yes, there's already a whole industry out there that will create a chatbot fake of your dead relative so you can pretend to talk to them. Except you aren't talking to them. And that isn't them, and it's not even a valid imitation of them.

And one more layer of irony-- a writing course cranked out by an industry whose idea of writing advice is to fine tune the prompt you give the AI so that it can write the piece for you. If I were a successful writer, I would be making damned sure that I left behind some ironclad legal work that forbid anyone from digging my work up and creating a deepfake version of me. You probably can't stop AI from stealing your work, but maybe you can prevent one more case of computerized identity theft.