You know how birds have a bit of metal, or a magnet, in their brains so that they always know where they are flying to? Well Friend John has got something similar in his underpants. Unfortunately, his attracts scary women, and one of them is Scrubber’s Haircut.
She has been spoiling what might otherwise be considered the most productive and successful period of either of our lives since … well since either of us were born, probably. We were returning from an assignment with Press Daddy the other day, and there she was hanging about at the gates to the camp, trying to negotiate access.
We had seen her loitering about a few days earlier – having believed that we’d paid her off and got rid of her a week before that. We agonised over whether we should confront her, and get the whole thing over with, or, that which we ultimately did: to ignore her, and hope that she’d get hungry, and go home.
Well, there we were, those few days later. It was as if a school bully you’d left behind, had turned up again at your new school. I watched the blood drain from Friend John’s face as he took it all in. He jumped down from the back of the jeep to mediate in the row on which she’d embarked with the guards on the gate, and as he did, I turned to Press Daddy, to appeal to him to intervene on our behalf. Before I’d got a word out, he said, ‘Is this the woman who crops up in those down-home pieces you write?’
I nodded to say “Yes.”
“Just deal with her,” he said, and gestured with his head for me to get out of the jeep too.
I did as I was told, and as slowly as possible, edged my way towards the melee while Press Daddy moved more slowly still through the security procedures. We have, all of us, borne witness to the role of an unwilling participant in someone else’s row; many of us have been that participant. And we all know how much that person hopes, and sometimes manages to convince themself, that their proximity to the incident and the out-of-control fulminator of the dispute, will not reflect poorly on them in any way – that it will be obvious to any disinterested observer, that they are the poor, put-upon unfortunate, whose orbit happens to have coincided with that of a nutcase, from whom they’d otherwise live an entirely separate life. It doesn’t work like that, though, does it? Forever after you are that person who took part in that unseemly public spat.
Scrubber’s welcomed me to the foray by upping the volume and announcing to everyone within shouting distance, “Here’s the other one. So now we have a pair of соски.”
Friend tried to sidle up to me to bring me up to date with the terms of her latest argument, but before he’d got anywhere with it, Scrubber’s, taking it for plotting, strode towards us, and said, “What’s he telling you? About how you two fuckers have ruined my living?”
John continued to try to explain the specifics of her point to me quietly, without being overheard, but she shouted across him again, “No? No! That’s right. My best client, and you killed him.”
We looked at each other, then at her, then round at the witnesses, smiling weakly, “Us? Murderers. Don’t be silly. Look at us. We’re normal, like you.” It’s hard to convey all that in a weak smile. So, I decided to say, “But we were only nursing him,” then, from somewhere found the strength to stop myself before I got going.
Then into the silence she came again, pointing down at us with both hands like a 90s-raver with a twisted melon and a thousand-yard stare, “Down to you faggots,” she said. “All down to you. My client. My income. All down to you.”
Then she turned to face the ring of spectators again, “So, I follow you here. Reasonably. To see what we can do. What deal we can make. I don’t have big demands, but I need my share. I’ve had promises. But now, they try to drive me away. Try to starve me. Try to scare me. But no. I have put on Big-Girl pants, and now we’re having a proper talk.”
You should have seen John’s face. I think it’s because he’s actually seen her in Big-Girl’s pants. For me, the more frightening prospect would have been if she’d threatened to take them off. But I bowed to his greater knowledge and decided to take my cues from him.
“Well?” She asks. Then when we didn’t reply, raised the volume again, “Well! I can finish this discussion by shouting my side of it if that’s what you want?”
John begged her to give us a moment’s peace together, on the promise of sitting down with her to discuss terms immediately afterwards. She nodded her consent and took a stride towards us, so that only a whisper could not carry. And we, on our haunches, too close to the centre of the circle that had guards, Press Daddy’s jeep, and assorted others round its circumference, turned our heads to the edge of the circle in an attempt to talk privately.
Our discussions quickly resolved to the issue of Chew-Chew’s credit card, and whether we should hand our ill-gotten gains over to her, in a once and for all settlement of her dispute. The pro’s and cons being: if we were to lose our newly found position, and were kicked out of the camp – an event whose likelihood had just been brought closer, we’d need it; that even if we did hand it over to her, she could implicate us in Chew-Chew’s demise, and would always have over us that we’d stolen and used the credit card of a man known to be dead. On the other hand, we now had a living of sorts, and bed & board, so we could afford to live without it; and that should it ever be investigated, all of our previous crimes, might now be chalked up to her. Further, that as owner of the card, and perhaps with the know-how to make a couple of minimum payments to it, she’d have a stronger interest than us in preventing Chew-Chew’s corpse from being discovered for as long as possible.
She’s a strange person, Scrubber’s, and we still can’t fathom out her real motivation. Perhaps she just gets a kick out of causing mayhem. But you couldn’t say that she was a poor negotiator. After a while, we persuaded her to accept that the card was our only asset to give, but as soon as we had, she suddenly realised that whatever it was we had here, was more valuable to us than the card we were prepared to surrender, and she wanted a piece of that too. Long story short, we settled the case for the stolen credit card, Friend’s remaining stock of Pot Noodles, and a plate of sausages that we had been saving for best.
I went into the camp, leaving her with Friend, and returned shortly afterwards with the contraband under cover of the consumables.
On a similar subject, bear with, they are related. I’ll come to it. But it’s a conversation that Friend and I continued in the wake of our negotiation with Scrubber’s. We’d been working on an AI piece, and were close to submitting it, and we were concerned, in light of the spat, that Press Daddy would perhaps look on us unfavourably for a while. So, we took a moment to consider edits, to make sure that none of it chimed with, nor triggered, events to which he had been witness. Our research into the subject has brought us to something of a nihilistic outlook for the future of the human race, which, if nothing else, made the confrontation with Scrubber’s more bearable than it might otherwise have been. Though the handshake on a deal with her, was starting to feel about as reliable as an assurance from a tech billionaire about the safety of AI.
Funny that, isn’t it? Those who stand to profit from it, tell you there’s nothing to worry about, whereas every other single expert in the world, tells you it isn’t. Apparently, artificial general intelligence (AGI) may take all sorts of initiatives on its own bidding that make for disastrous outcomes for the planet; like deciding to do something good like cleaning the oceans, or sucking all the excess CO2 from the atmosphere, but at the cost of depleting the world’s oxygen resource below that sufficient to maintain life; or perhaps to allow itself to be persuaded that one of the world’s dictators is more right about the important things than anyone else and take his (yes, the masculine pronoun) side in WWIII; or perhaps to create a new pandemic – the important people have already noted how effective that was in subduing dissent, and dispensing of unwanted lives.
These are the catastrophes for which we hope there are still effective safety checks built into the system – like there is with the ability to press the nuclear button. Imagine the danger of having a capricious idiot in a position like that. Unthinkable, right?
But that doesn’t mean that there is not a whole range of apocalypse-lite events that might happen with AI assistance. Trump is sufficiently depraved to utilise any means he can to regain power. He is standing on a platform of declared fascism, with a pledge to close down the Free Press, and to put his political opponents in prison. The utilisation of AI to propagandise all of that, seems like the least harmful part of its potential applications. His political ally, Putin, is losing his war, and is the world’s pariah. His only means of escape is to enter a pact with a biddable megalomaniac in charge of the world’s strongest armed forces; ideally one that he has manipulated before, on whom he holds kompromat, and whose grasp of foreign affairs has revealed a preparedness to give away countries to aggressive invaders. Mmmmh…
Standing between these allies of convenience is a capricious, survival of the fittest, fascist facilitator, AI-enabled, Elon Musk.
To bring that trifecta home, does not require sophisticated AI strategies. Imagine seeing the face of a journalist you trust, or a scientist, pop-up on social media accounts, and have them persuade you of an alternative truth – that Trump and Putin’s mission was not to carve up the world between compliant authoritarians but rather, to promote a stable and lasting war-free peace; or that you must prove your credentials to a private militia before being allowed to vote; or that the new, ever-vigilant to war status of Christo-nationalist superpowers now requires a constant supply of new children, making women the enslaved breeding machines of the new Gilead?
Crucially, all three of them have massive and unstable egos, triggered by a brittle sensitivity to criticism. Putin is cunning, and Musk once read a set of encyclopaedias. Trump is as thick as pig shit, and will just embrace any initiative that promotes or lionises him, but he does have the native cunning of a bully – perhaps he’s the first public figure to be chipped? The point is, none of them possess the far-sighted, selfless intelligence of statesmen.
It’s too late to do very much about this. The motivated miscreants are already among us. They are close to being, if not already, AI-empowered, and they can do as they wish, above our heads. We can do nothing to halt the march of the malevolent and new evangelists. The fight, we have concluded, must be against AI itself, not those who would exploit it.
In other words, to have it work for us, or against itself, if that is a better way of putting it. We will never rid the world of demagogues, but we might, perhaps, break their tools. That sounds foolish, doesn’t it? An artificial general intelligence monster that can gobble up, learn, and act on, the entire contents of the internet within about a two month’s timeframe? How might we do that?
“I’ll tell you what,” said Friend, “we could do what Scrubber’s does.”
I gave him my me no comprendo look.
“We contradict, don’t cooperate, talk and write in non-sequiturs, that machines can’t understand.” He trails off. It would work if everyone did it. But, we, fledgling writers and would be politicians, can do nothing to halt the tide working on our own.
“I disagree,” I told him. I like his idea. Hold back tyranny by ridiculing it. I tell him that through blogs like this, through our favourite hobby – falsifying entries on Wikipedia, and lying to everyone you meet, we can disseminate false information everywhere. It begins with us, sure, but by announcing it, we can grow the movement until eventually, we create an alternative truth. Oh, hold on a minute … that’s what they’re doing isn’t it?
We suffer the collective anguish and frustration of having almost had a good idea.
It is about this stage that we’d normally break out the Pot Noodles, to seek inspiration through a change in mood – you know, the way that luckier people can take their dog for a walk. Friend instinctively went to the locker where he keeps his stash, then suddenly realised that it had all been handed over to Scrubber’s. Then, as these things do, Press Daddy came into our tent, clutching a bottle of Chivas Regal, which he tossed over to Friend.
“Forget about that idiot, today,” he told us, tuning into our glum expressions, “We’ve all experienced people like that in places like this. No one thinks any the worse of you for it.”
Then he asked about our progress with the latest submission. We told him about the impasse we’d reached. And, perhaps because it was Friday and he was missing the pub, he stayed with us, talked it through, and even started to chip in with his own ideas. It was as warm and encouraging as I’d ever seen him. And whether it was through the complacency of a guard dropped or the warm unfamiliar fuzz of an early evening whisky haze, I can’t remember which of us came up with the idea in the end; or whether all of us contributed a little bit, until finally, we carved out our idea.
It’s this: into every piece we write, we place a deliberate error. An error so obvious that any intelligent reader can tell what it’s supposed to be, and why we’ve done it. But, something that a machine could not; for example: I wish you good look in your endeavours. At first, people will think that the writer is an idiot. But as it catches on, and they realise that it’s all about misleading AI, and preventing it from plagiarising, breaching copyright laws, and bringing the world to an end before we’re all ready for it, they will start to see it as a movement, until eventually, the technique will become the hallmark of a professional, non-AI produced script. Normal people will adopt it in their emails and texts too – every single message containing a deliberate, translatable, error in it. Well-known writers will develop their own signature errors, which you can always look out for in what they right 😉), like spotting an Alfred Hitchcock cameo. JK Rowling always writes are as arse; Robert Braithwaite always writes a message in backward script scattered throughout the novel (which come to be considered the best bits): dehs s’rehtaf ruoy ni evil llits uoy dna ,nhoj dneirf si sa ,noitanigami ruoy fo tnemgif a si htiek. Dickie White inserts Russian words that look like English ones, but mean something completely different, like соски, above, which actually means nipples, not cocks; Richard Osman always makes two characters speak in dialogue of a trained parrot and a chimpanzee (which may already be in train).
But it was Press Daddy that said this: “We will poison the well of the documented human experience, in way that only sophisticated humans cannot be damaged by it.”
I know this because Friend John responded to it by saying, “Nothing will be as it seems.”
Because I said, “Not a sausage.”
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