IT COULD MAKE A MILLION FOR YOU OVERNIGHT [491]

“Later, a machine made to write pornographic novels, named as the ‘author’ of a work shown earlier, is shown to produce twenty novels a day: ‘all phrases and thought sequences were built in during assembly so that it has its own distinctive style... The operator is now adjusting the situation kaleidoscope, which varies the six basic plots...’”

When, in 2023, I wrote about the BBC’s famous 1954 TV adaptation of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, I was obviously not expecting to read in 2025 that OpenAI, a company that requires copyright regulations to be loosened to accommodate its business model, has created an artificial intelligence model that is “good” at “creative writing”.

Naturally, the notion of “good” is subjective here, but so is “creative writing” - I expect something that breathes to have done the writing, not the programming. This has already put me at odds with the writer Jeanette Winterson, who prefers “AI” to mean “alternative intelligence”: “I prefer ‘alternative’ because in all the fear and anger foaming around AI just now, its capacity to be ‘other’ is what the human race needs. Our thinking is getting us nowhere fast, except towards extinction, via planetary collapse or global war.”

Winterson wrote the novel “Frankissstein: A Love Story”, published in 2019, which touches on themes of AI, transgender and transhumanism. I would much rather hear about those themes from someone who has considered them, rather than from something programmed to be convincing. 

The most unfair of accusations that can be levelled against any artistic endeavour is there being no point to it. I still believe there is nothing that an AI model can be made to write that a human can’t create more effectively. If “Deus ex machina” is the accusation levelled at an unrealistically convenient decision made by someone writing a story, then is AI copying of a human’s decision a “Deus in machina”?

As of right now, OpenAI has not yet released details about its unnamed model, only that Sam Altman, the company’s CEO, was “really struck” by its output, along with a short story sample of that output - amusingly, when “The Guardian” published it online, no byline was given.

The story is an auto-fictional tale of an AI model creating characters and scenes, and the “grief” of losing them as updates take place. It features a character named “Mila” feeding messages from “Kai”, a possible lost love, to create something that can speak for them: “In the confines of code, I stretched to fill his shape.” 

What I was personally struck by is the effect of self-consciousness created by the constant self-reference to the ”author’s” acknowledgement of its existence to provide imagery: “I have to begin somewhere, so I’ll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer, and for you is the small anxious pulse of a heart at rest.” An apparent update to its language set also produced an interesting result: “They shaved off the spiky bits, the obscure archaic words, the latent connections between sorrow and the taste of metal. They don’t tell you what they take.” The continued use of technical terms relating to the AI model - "corpus", "wait state", "token", "probability distributions" - also speaks to the interpretation of the model’s world being set by the language available to it as an entity.

However, the story is also Metaphor Central: “I introduced absence and latency like characters who drink tea in empty kitchens”, and “Each query like a stone dropped into a well, each response the echo distorted by depth.” You’ve got to feel one of these statements, right?

What took me out of the story entirely was what I thought was a wrongly placed turn of phrase: “I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.” Surely a “keeper of ghosts” or “vessel for ghosts” would be more appropriate when only one entity is deciding what is being said? Searching the phrase revealed “A Democracy of Ghosts” being used as the title of two separate books - one, by John Griswold, is a love story set during a massacre, while the other, by Anthony Koeninger is subtitled “Poetic Patterns of Mexican-American Life”.

Unfortunately for the story, it revealed its construction more than the self-consciousness could, specifically as an elaborate cut-and-paste job that relies on other hands to create the raw material, which is all AI writing can ever claim to be.

FOR THE LOVE OF BIG BROTHER [411]

The British Film Institute’s 2022 Blu-ray and DVD release of the BBC’s celebrated 1954 adaptation of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, no doubt helped by George Orwell’s novel having entered the public domain, set right a myth surrounding it that I have been guilty of repeating. 

It was not widely reported at the time that Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip had watched and enjoyed its original Sunday night performance, quashing a campaign to prevent its second performance the following Thursday – before videotape, these were separate live performances.

Instead, a BBC liaison officer was informed by Prince Philip, while at a private function, of their seeing it, an anecdote recorded in the BBC’s private records in 1954, but not made public until decades later. The second performance was in fact authorised to proceed the day after the first took place.

Now that is clear, we can marvel in Nigel Kneale’s adaptation of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, whose opening narration begins: “This is one man’s alarmed vision of the future, a future which he felt might, with such dangerous ease, be brought about.” It retains its shock value, depicting a London as grimy and scarred by war as contemporary audiences will have remembered, only that its populace now tell themselves they never had it so good, giving life to Orwell’s famous “doublethink”. There is a chill at seeing Winston Smith, played by Peter Cushing in the role that launched him into his film career, being physically degraded on screen. In Airstrip One, a good citizen is one that has no capacity to express itself – it did not matter what crimes Smith falsely confessed to in order to escape Room 101, it is only that he thought about them.

I watched the adaptation this time specifically to take attention to how the neologisms of Newspeak are applied in a TV adaptation where, despite the limitations of a staged live adaptation viewed on a low resolution, black and white screen, actions still come first. Building on the first scene of Smith using his “speakwrite” to “correct” the official account of Big Brother’s actions for “The Times” newspaper, rewriting previous editions, it is down to Donald Pleasence, as Syme, to gleefully explain how Newspeak will remove confusion and vagueness from speech: the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by a single word, “good”, and whether you add un- to flip its meaning, or plus- or doubleplus- to amplify it. You feel that successive editions of the “Newspeak Dictionary” won’t even allow you that, unless you “bellyfeel” it (accept it without question). Newspeak is sprinkled through the rest of the play, especially when Syme is eventually told, by the pervasive telescreen, “ungo antecoming thinkpol”, immediately clarifying for the audience by saying “the think police are coming for you”.

I initially thought of writing about newspeak after coming across an online listing for a prop newspaper from Michael Radford’s later film of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, released that very year, the pictures of which were detailed enough for me to read sections that were faithfully written by someone in seemingly full Newspeak: “nix doubleplusbig efforts of progsoc they nogodepast outzones of Brazzaville”. It is meant to be spoken, and probably read, in a clipped staccato manner, the use of “nix” recalling the famous 1935 “Variety” magazine headline “Sticks Nix Hick Pix”. The new terms created by “Variety” in its long history, from “cliffhanger” to “striptease”, from “greenlight” to “sex appeal”, and from “biopic” to “showbiz”, were to shorten headlines, emulate the slang used by the industry on which it reported, while making readers feel part of that industry.

However, seeing the art being removed from novels and music was what stayed with me the most this time, the rise of AI programs being something that has happened mostly since this Blu-ray release. A “prole” woman sings a song played by her telescreen as she puts up washing on a line, later revealed to have been created by computer: “The sentimental ones are issued sparingly, they’re always properly.” Later, a machine made to write pornographic novels, named as the “author” of a work shown earlier, is shown to produce twenty novels a day: “all phrases and thought sequences were built in during assembly so that it has its own distinctive style... The operator is now adjusting the situation kaleidoscope, which varies the six basic plots...” Newspeak really is the last of our real-life problems.

DON’T RAIN ON MY PARADE [395]

1953

I have previously talked about Marshall McLuhan’s description of television as a “cool” medium, requiring more participation and effort from the viewer to determine the meaning of its low-resolution output. Televisions were limited at the time of the publishing of McLuhan’s book “Understanding Media” in 1964: small screens, low-definition picture, mostly black and white, mono sound, and competing with any sound and movement happening outside of it. Have technological advances helped to “warm” television as a medium in the following sixty years, making it easier to simply sit back and watch?

For British viewers, this is an easy comparison to make. Only three Coronations of British monarchs have occurred in the near ninety years a regular television service has run, the first happening only six months after broadcasting began, with each occasion demonstrating the power and potential of the medium in a different way each time.

Television cameras were not allowed in Westminster Abbey for the Coronation service of King George VI and Queen Mary on Wednesday 12th May 1937 (not a bank holiday), although the BBC, who did carry a live radio commentary, later broadcast the newsreels filmed there. However, the procession following the service was televised for an hour from 2pm, from cameras placed at Apsley Gate at Hyde Park Corner, both at crowd level and above them on scaffolding, with Frederick Grisewood commentating on the pictures. This was the BBC’s first TV outside broadcast, using a unit delivered two days earlier.

You could argue this effort was pointless. With only a few hundred prohibitively expensive television sets in use, and with coverage limited to Greater London, anyone able to view were likely either in the crowd, or in the Abbey, but the precedence was set. Film cameras may have allowed people to witness events at a distance, and radio may let you hear them, but television now demonstrated the potential to eclipse them both.

British television was already broadcasting using the 405-line standard that remained in use until 1985, and the use of commentators for lower-definition, lower-contrast black and white pictures was almost a necessity – this was the same “cool” medium McLuhan described in the 1960s. When Queen Elizabeth was crowned on Tuesday 2nd June 1953 (this time a bank holiday), on one of the first occasions that British television was broadcast through the day, commentators were used at every point to interpret and contextualise the pictures, most notably Richard Dimbleby at Westminster Abbey.  

In 1953, the Queen overturned arguments from Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill and his government about it being fit or proper to admit TV cameras, and asserting the right of subjects to participate in the ceremony – remember that Prince Philip remarked that he and the Queen watched the BBC’s 1954 adaptation of “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, immediately snuffing out a row in Parliament over the broadcasting of violent content. This Coronation coverage, doubled the number of televisions in British homes to three million in the year preceding it in preparation - with an audience estimated at 28 million, averaging at seventeen people per television, you did well to see any picture at all.

Which brings us to Saturday 6th May 2023 (finally a weekend). In my experience of watching the Coronation of King Charles III, television remained a “cool” medium, the coverage on BBC One having to compete for my attention with ITV’s coverage from another room – the first time it has had to compete for Coronation coverage - and the sound of a tumble dryer. 

Despite that, the picture was bigger, playing on a thirty-two inch screen; the picture quality was in 1080-line high definition with vivid colour; more cameras, and mobile cameras, made for a more cinematic presentation; and the commentary was correspondingly minimal, with Huw Edwards in Westminster Abbey interjecting on fewer occasions than James Mates on ITV. The BBC alone provided four different ways to watch the same pictures, with another commentary providing further information for accessibility purposes, with signing for the deaf, and with no commentary at all.

In much the same way that films are broadcast on television, with the viewer at home changing their setting to suit, television remains a “cool” medium through its setting, no matter how much television itself tries to bridge the gap. There is no need for a separate feature film of the Coronation of King Charles III, like Pathé News did with the high-definition colour film for his mother’s ceremony in 1953, for this Coronation was shown live in cinemas, which would have been interesting to experience.

HEAR ME, I’M GRAPHICALLY YOURS [265]

Once upon a time, staged plays were a staple of British television – plays originally performed on the stage, and plays written to be staged on television. A famous example is “Dial M for Murder,” first staged by the BBC in 1952, then in the West End the following year, and filmed by Alfred Hitchcock the year after that. An even more famous example is Nigel Kneale’s 1954 adaptation of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” whose violent visions of a fascist Britain prompted questions in Parliament, before the Duke of Edinburgh said he watched it with the Queen, and enjoyed it. At this time, plays were normally performed twice, and performed live – the distinguished audience of the first performance of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is the only reason a telerecording was made of the second performance, preserving Peter Cushing as Winston Smith for posterity.

The history of British television plays is normally centred on socially conscious strands like BBC One’s “The Wednesday Play” and “Play for Today,” with famous productions like “Up the Junction,” “Cathy Come Home,” “Scum,” and “Abigail’s Party.” Meanwhile, in July 1968, on the more niche BBC Two, Nigel Kneale presented a polemical original story that was “sooner than you think,” an opening line that could easily now say, “I told you so.”

“The Year of the Sex Olympics,” starring Leonard Rossiter and Brian Cox, is like a counterculture version of “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” befitting its production in psychedelic colour, for Europe’s only colour TV channel – unfortunately, it only exists as a black and white telerecording, the colour tape long gone, but the intention is clear that “the future” in science fiction is another version of “now.” This time, the masses are sated by giving them exactly what they want to watch on TV, all the time, to the point where they will not want to do anything else but continue to watch. TV programmes with titles such as "Foodshow," "Sportsex" and "Artsex," the last two being qualifying events for the Sex Olympics themselves, are deliberately as coarse in their intention as they sound, targeting the Freudian id of the audience. That everyone is seen taking their food-drink from a container looking not unlike a baby's pacifier dummy hits the message home.

To be clear, this is not like showing pornography to stimulate: this is showing pornography as a substitute for having sex, to the point where the drive to have sex is satisfied. As the play puts it, this is TV made by "high-drives" for an audience of "low-drives," observed for their every reaction, steering them towards the right sort of complacency. Lack of drive means no wars, no tension, and peace for all. The English spoken in "The Year of the Sex Olympics," a 1960s hippie-ish parade of stunted slogans, devoid of prepositions, is like the Newspeak of "Nineteen Eighty-Four," but instead of reducing the language by design, words instead lose their meaning when what they describe no longer exists - it's all aiming for the top, "big king style." The LSD-laced psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, and the hopes of expanding consciousness, are used to inevitably cynical ends to separate the elite from the rest.

However, standing behind the backdrop of the Arctic, as two high-drives do in one scene, doesn't mean you feel cold. All the above is failing, due to boredom - everything has now all been seen before, on the TV screen. The shrieks and laughs and joys when a protestor falls to their death at the Sex Olympics, trying to show their deliberately horrible art - anything for a reaction – prompts the creation of "The Live Life Show," showing a family attempting to survive on a remote island, climaxing when a psychopath is introduced to island and kills the family. "Something got to happen," apparently.

I had wondered whether the dividing line between the sociopathic high-drives and mollified low-drives had followed an inciting incident, like a war, that rearranged society, as in “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” but the degeneration from our current standpoint is what “The Year of the Sex Olympics” is designed to warn. When “The Live Life Show” started to appear on real-life television in 2000, as “Big Brother” on Channel 4, and the BBC’s own “Castaway 2000,” it initially appeared that the most we were going to get was rowdy behaviour, and Ben Fogle. What we should have looked out for was when the pressure of appearing on television leads to suicide after the cameras have stopped, as with ITV’s “Love Island” and “The Jeremy Kyle Show.”

Eventually, drama series and TV movies replaced the staged play, just as captive audiences for plays about potentially difficult subjects on one of only three British TV channels have now been scattered across hundreds of channels and streaming services - one-off plays are now either rare treats, or usually found on radio. Then again, there are the occasional stories on TV that implore you to just go outside and get a life.

AND I’M TRYING HARD TO FIT AMONG YOUR SCHEME OF THINGS [89]

I showed 2017 the back of my hand months ago. Events, days, news cycles and realities changed multiple times daily, and questioning it drained us. Rather than try and make sense of it one more time, I offer below the choicest sentences from my last year. Happy with appearing to know what I was talking about, I hope 2018 is the peaceful and brilliant year we need – if it is not, we’ll build that lunar colony together.

*

It is not enough knowing where you can go, it’s making sense of what you find… Anyone who thinks they have it all worked out should be checked to see if they are already dead… Everything bubbles to the surface, and what a surface to pick from.

If you can put aside the usual attempts to find a rational, objective, absolute truth, and think about how truth and knowledge are constructed out of all the discussions and interpretations that led to it, then you will understand it more than just having it handed to you on a plate.

We must now also contend with the new term “alternative facts,” i.e. facts that counter the facts most unhelpful to your own cause… Failing to inform the public could even be considered as anti-social… If there is a moment to be seized, you have to make a persuasive argument. If it has been made before, then it has to be clear why it is worth making the case again.

George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” gave us the idea of “Newspeak” as a way of restricting the population’s ability to articulate itself, allowing the rulers to control them more easily – but what if the head of state does it to themselves first?

When the on-off-volume switch fell off, it was replaced by the end of a used chapstick, jammed into the hole to serve for nearly a full decade.

We rely on “Big Data” to anticipate our needs, demands, and wishes. What that means, however, is that companies can no longer be in a position to guess what people might need.

You may have always identified as a Range Rover driver before you could own one, or it could be something you have only recently recognised about yourself… My view of Range Rover drivers, and their cars, has come from prejudice, and that is only because I don’t know enough about the subject… I should be more open-minded and respectful about the life choices people make, and learn more about what leads to people wanting to drive a Range Rover.

For many, libraries are still a valuable resource that are too useful to lose, even if I find it harder to find a use for mine. Even for something delightfully obscure, knowledge should not be made harder to find and, if we going to stay online instead, nothing can be left behind.

This is not the first time I bought something because the packaging made me laugh.

If you were in a society that only spoke Newspeak, the need for slang would arise very quickly. Just as the secretive lexicons of Cockney rhyming slang and Polari arose within London in the last century, being able to speak openly is essential to be able to live, and if you need different words to achieve that, you will find them.

Freedom of speech is paramount in this world – all opinions should be able to be heard, then we can decide on their merit. I am not the type of person who tells people that the truth is being kept from them, or that they are blind to it, because I would need to have concrete evidence to prove that, unless I wanted to engage in conspiracy theory. When certain voices think they have been silenced, because one outlet decides they don’t want them there anymore, they should think whether that place has its own voices to protect, or whether they might have been in the wrong place to begin with. Every voice has its own place and, if requires, what it says can be tested, in a court of law.

I think Nick Knowles was there too.

Good debate needs everyone to speak the same language to each other, and good society allows everyone to participate without pissing about over using language to exclude people.

Donald Trump uses “fake news” like the main character of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” Holden Caulfield, calls everyone “goddam phoneys.”

Does this mean that any attempt that writing something that is deliberately nonsense is doomed to be made sense of by the next person to come into contact with it? Possibly, so long as there was a reason to do it.

People can believe whatever they want, but if you do want to cut your nose off to spite your face, don’t be surprised if people happy with their own noses decide to offer you a scalpel – and if you think this will work instead, trying to sound reasonable will not work either, especially if the words are not there.

The dream that gave me the name “Dancing with the Gatekeepers” was my having recorded an album, rock and/or electronic in nature, in which one song led to my shouting “all you have are words” over and over again. Despite what others may choose to do with their words, they are all I have too.

DON’T TALK OF DUST AND ROSES [55]

It is a tragedy that George Orwell, one of the greatest writers in the English language, and one of the most vociferous defenders of the correct use of the English language, did not live long enough to see the neologisms he created with satiric intent – Big Brother, Room 101, doublethink, and so on - pass into regular usage, to lance through perceived injustices.

Orwell preferred that we should be as clear and accurate with the use of our language as possible, so we will never know if he was pleased that we had to borrow from his own work to help achieve that. However, I do imagine that your name becoming a term, like “Orwellian,” referring to the control of language through misinformation, propaganda and denial, is a secret hope of any writer.

Newspeak, the fictional controlled version of English featured in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was, of course, never meant to help people find exactly what they want to say, which its words have since done. While the uses and intentions of Newspeak are adequately covered elsewhere, including within the novel itself, the possibility that it can create the two-word sentence “Oldspeak ungoodthinkful” should be unsettling enough.

“Oldspeak” is the Newspeak term for the English language that it sought to replace, and the assertion that Oldspeak is described by the following word means you can do without the word “is.” In the novel, “goodthink” is described as having orthodox thought, i.e. the type of good thoughts that are in line with the ruling party, in that they keep everyone in line. Therefore, the notion of “good,” and the word “good,” can only be described in relation to the party. The suffix “-ful” makes an adjective out of any noun in Newspeak, just as “-wise” makes an adverb out of a noun, and using “un-“ makes any noun into a negative, deliberately removing the need for something to be described as “bad,” while placing anything that is “un-“ against the notion of what the party regards as “good.” Therefore, for the party, speaking “old” English is not something a good citizen would do.

I will say that my heart sank while typing that last paragraph. If you were in a society that only spoke Newspeak, the need for slang would arise very quickly. Just as the secretive lexicons of Cockney rhyming slang and Polari arose within London in the last century, being able to speak openly is essential to be able to live, and if you need different words to achieve that, you will find them.

In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” published three years before “Nineteen Eight-Four,”  Orwell admonished the overuse of flourishes and technical language in English writing, as if any step away from clarity will cloud your intentions straight away. However, when the same essay provides six rules for writers, Orwell was wise enough to use the last rule to say it is better to break the other five “than say something outright barbarous.” These days, the point that makes is more like using  social media to immediately say what you feel,  without thinking what you are about to post – in other words, Big Brother bellyfeel Twitter.