Ada

A short story originally written in 2020. I have decided to publish it now due to the recent excitement surrounding Artificial Intelligence, and particularly the ethical and existential issues that have been brought to the forefront by the rapid pace of advancement of this technology.

A motif, crescendo, trombone, piccolo, a cacophony of their works reused over and over. A man dies, his work is stolen, it is ripped apart to be used by the masses in their very own art. In this age of machines whose robbery knows no bound, inspiration is everywhere but people have forgotten that art is not a commodity.

Shakespeare’s sonnets, previously works of genius, a heap of fodder for a neural network. The biggest companies now have a monopoly on that which we thought made us human, producing the best quality films, books and masterpieces. Take your pick of music – baroque, romantic, classical, experimental. All the themes are there and each has its price. No one can fight their way in and the law is always on the side of the machines. Film directors once worshipped as idols are now consigned to the history books, their work used to feed algorithms that are getting better and better at tearing the essence of our souls apart and performing a careful post mortem. The age of the individual creative is dead.

Actors are luddites and writers crude imitators. Their ineptitude exposed by the computer critics who became their silicon successors. The masterminds without minds; whom no one has seen but who everyone has been touched by. They know how to make us laugh and cry. Having identified the key components of beauty they birthed Ada, the most popular woman in the world. The star of all the favourites. Her mannerisms and looks finely tuned to the tastes of American, Nigerian and Italian audiences alike. She is creative capital with an infinite value.

You could say that this is the ideal world to live in. Everyone and no one can be a director, a producer, a poet and a painter. Fan fiction of an unprecedented standard takes seconds to produce and the Harry Potter books have been rewritten in ways that people could never have imagined. After seeing the light, the classicists conceded that Dickens really just wasn’t all that.

But what beauty is to these machines, it cannot be said. They seem to know what makes us tick, evidenced by the beauty that they create. But I know that there is something missing. I know that they aren’t the same. The pieces of art that they create are almost perfectly imperfect, always striking and never dull. These machines haven’t lived as I have. They know the lives of mythical heroes, scheming politicians and angelic muses. But they do not truly know this world. They have never experienced the joy of discovery, the hatred of oneself and finally the remorse for a lost family. These psychopathic networks only see patterns and fool us into believing they understand us, gaining our trust and carefully analysing our reactions in numbers.

What is it about a beautiful symphony that can bring us to tears? The machines think it is the fantastic images it conjures, the complex interplay and nuances of themes, and indeed the cauldron of emotions that it causes to boil within us. It is all of these things, but it is something else too. It is humanity – the fact that we have lived. It is the expression of existence and the knowledge that years ago another person in shoes similar to our own felt our feelings and expressed them in a beautiful way. All the machines see are shadows on pieces of paper, cast by the silhouette of the raging bonfire of suffering, joy and inspiration that burns brilliantly in each of our inimitable biological hearts. They know what society thinks, but they do not know my mind. They saw the lonely mountain in the mists that somehow called me, the smiles of my fellow beings that touched my heart, the pain of a broken leg that made me grimace. But they saw only my reactions. They managed to predict the very twitches of the muscles in my face and learnt how to make me feel a certain way. But they saw because they were told to, bearing witness to our lives in an effort to dissect them mathematically. They created art because we told them to – they were not moved to do it. The truth is that our minds are our own and each of us has their own universe, each slightly different and each very real. No one can tell us to live.

I’m just a bitter dinosaur, they say, refusing to accept where the world has gone and bigoted irreparably; that I refuse to see that art and creativity are nothing that cannot be generated through a few flexes of the muscles that train digital weights. I am in denial and live in delusion. But I realise that art is not about anyone else. Art is my own and my own life is my brush, palette and canvas…

Suddenly the chimes of the doorbell brought me out of my rumination and I sat up, almost dropping the pen that I was using to write the words on the page. I slowly got up and moved towards the front door.

I peered through the eyehole and breathed a sigh. I unlocked the door to see Jake standing there in a sharp blue suit that clung to him like a cobra, unfitting against the grim background of a dingy block of flats.

“Having fun artiste?” he hollered, strangely cheerily.

“Why are you here Jake? Why don’t you hurry off and leave a real writer in peace.” I grunted back.

Jake’s fickle smile changed into an expression of affront for a flickering moment, quickly morphing again into a disdainful glare as he peered behind me into the messy room, undoubtedly spotting the desk cluttered with piles of imperfect, unfinished pieces of writing.

“How can you live like this?”

“This is real work.” I replied haughtily.

Jake looked at me pityingly and sighed. “Tom, you’ve got to realise that times have changed. People are beginning to say that you’re…”

“Deluded…”

“Well… Yes. I know you’re bitter and angry. But you have to move with the times. I hate to see you like this. I’ve come to offer you the job in the hope you’ll…”

“Before you say anything else, I refuse it. You might think Ada is the only thing you’ll ever need… But she’s not. Art is different and if you pretend you don’t see that then you’re lying to yourself.”

Jake fell silent, looked at me again and shrugged. “Don’t you get tired of doing all this work, just to live no better than…” He paused, embarrassed, “to live like this? You’re better than this Tom.”

“Jake, if the only reason you’ve come here is to convince me to join you, then don’t waste your time. I’m not going to do it. You’re lying to yourselves – just churning out the same pointless rubbish day in day out and the masses lap it up. I don’t care. None of what you do is real art.”

Jake clenched his fists. “It IS real art Tom!” He said, raising his voice.

I raised my eyebrows, “You almost sounded convinced yourself there Jake…”

“Yes… Ada is… the single, greatest actress of our time!”

“Seems you’ve forgotten she isn’t real too then Jake? I don’t know how you became like this. You used to understand the joy of true creativity. Instead you just fuel that… monster.”

“That – monster – has improved our ratings. It’s cracked the code! Listen if you don’t want to join us, at least give me some of your work and I’ll scan it in to assess its originality. If its good enough, I’m sure you’ll get a decent amount for it.”

“And feed the monster that took away my livelihood? Become a true slave to that beast? You think my writing is just… is just DATA?” I started shouting. “Is that what you think Jake?”

“You don’t live in the real world! You need to get your head out of the sand. The way the world is going, these networks are the future… We need them Tom.”

I felt the anger rising within me. The silence was so thick it was unbearable. We stared at each other for a second.

“Get out.” I said, stoutly, before Jake could open his mouth to speak again.

He gave me one final, frustrated look and turned round to leave. I clicked the door shut firmly behind him and turned back to my desk, piled with reams of paper that apparently just weren’t as perfect as those that could be created by those monstrous machines.

Despite it all, I smiled to myself. The monsters could take my art, they could find the secret to perfect beauty. But in the realm of bitter existence and reality, they would never be my match. Their art would never be mine.