Just to be clear: this blog post, and the ideas therein, derive entirely from the human author credited.

Even a few months ago, such a disclaimer would have seemed meaningless, but the rapid advent of Artificial Intelligence programs in almost every sphere of enterprise – not least of all in publishing and the arts – makes it essential today. Indeed, as I compose this text a prompt on my WordPress account is inviting me to “Ask AI,” presumably to facilitate or improve the writing I’ve spent my life trying to perfect. AI is also becoming ubiquitous in the office work I do full-time, with staff encouraged to use Copilot or other tools to complete routine correspondence and administrative tasks. And as a writer of commercially marketed books, I’ve recently signed on to a class-action suit against the AI giant Anthropic, for its illegitimate sourcing of material from my 2016 title Here’s To My Sweet Satan: presumably anyone who asks AI to summarize the phenomenon of the occult’s influence on popular culture in the 1960s and 70s will get an answer partially cribbed from my own research. Artificial Intelligence is here. But where are we?

Like many of us I first became aware of Artificial Intelligence for its novelty effects. Scrolling through YouTube last year I began to see videos of Jaws or The Terminator redone as 1950s sci-fi epics, or the songs of AC/DC as if they’d been performed by a mariachi band; the AI-generated product was mildly intriguing at first, but you could soon see the limits of its invention. In these instances, at least, AI seemed only as good as the instructions it’s given. As a music fan, I could hear that someone had merely punched in lyrics from one style of music into a generic program replicating another incongruous one (heavy metal into soul, for example) to generate new results. But countless talented human players have been doing that forever: AI could not make a better transformation of Bob Dylan’s stark acoustic “All Along the Watchtower” into electric psychedelia than Jimi Hendrix, nor could it do a jazz remake of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker more innovatively than Duke Ellington.

Similarly, AI news or histories usually betray themselves with small tells indicating that no actual person created them – grammatically correct but logically incoherent sentences, for example, or mispronounciations of common names or terms spoken by an AI narrator. AI mimics the reflection of ordinary thinking, but it can’t mimic the inspiration behind great achievements in literature, science, or faith. That hasn’t sated the information economy’s bottomless appetite for online content, no matter how subtle or sophisticated the content was once expected to be. In a 2024 article on editorial writing for the Australian site Quillette, I speculated that “Soon, the whole point-counterpoint process may be farmed out to an essay-composing artificial intelligence program, and we’ll be taking sides devised for us not by moral reasoning but by a machine.” That we are already aware of and identifying “AI slop” across our screens is no barrier to a continued deluge of it.

Sure, we’ve all gotten used to looking up stuff via Google rather than a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or a helpful librarian. And the algorithms on which our devices run have long learned to memorize and anticipate our preferences of language, purchased items, or personal interests; AI may be merely an advance on the same technology. Yet it’s surprising – and dismaying – how many of us are willing to pass yet more of our intellects off to a computer, by asking AI to perform tasks already made convenient by search engines, spell checks, digital editing programs, and other software. As the late media theorist Neil Postman reminded us to ask of any purported technological progress, “What is the problem to which this is the solution?” It’s not just that AI can be put to nefarious purposes (e.g. deepfake pornography, or the social media posts of the US president), but that we are increasingly relinquishing responsibility for even the most mundane operations, which have hitherto called upon a vestige of organic, independent thought or creativity, to something outside and separate from ourselves. Let Jimi Hendrix, Duke Ellington, and the crafter of these sentences offer the final caution: AI stands for Artificial Intelligence, not Artificial Imagination.